#pacifism

In answer to 'But violence hasn't solved anything!' The hell it hasn't. The application of violence - of killing and a willingness to be killed - on a massive scale is responsible for a lot of solutions. The most recent mass application of violence liberated Kuwait. The most recent mass application of violence on a global scale alone cleansed the world of the Third Reich. Nonviolence and passive resistance did less than nothing to stop Hitler and his henchmen. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't stopped by 'dialogue' or 'passive resistance' or conferences, but by the opened gunports of the Royal Navy; Dachau and Chang-I weren't liberated with pamphlets. ↗

— Markham Shaw Pyle

#violence #war #change

Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil! Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business. ↗

— Aristophanes

#feminism #gender-roles #greek-literature #pacifism #war

The idea that war can ever bring freedom is quite possibly the greatest deception that mankind has ever forced upon himself. ↗

— Michel Templet

#philosophy #war #freedom

I will never buy a fish tank, because I don't believe in supporting the funding of aquatic war machines. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#fish-tank #funny #nonsense #pacifism #funny

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. ↗

— George Orwell

#labour #pacifism #peace #war #intelligence

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#christianity #pacifism #religion #christianity

There is no such thing as a “war hero”, because there is nothing about war that is heroic. ↗

— Michel Templet

#pacifism #war #heroism

There has never been a time in my life when I felt that I could take a gun and shoot down a fellow-being. In this respect I am a Quaker. ↗

— D.L. Moody

#religous #life

I didn't know what exhausted me emotionally until that moment, and I realized that the experience of being a soldier, with unlimited license for excess, excessive violence, excessive sex, was a blueprint for self-destruction. Because then I began to wake up to the idea that manhood, as passed onto me by my father, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor, my army sergeant, that vision of manhood was a blueprint for self-destruction and a lie, and that was a burden that I was no longer able to carry. It was too difficult for me to be that hard. I said, "OK, Ammon, I will try that." He said, "You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you're not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed. ↗

— Utah Phillips

#manhood #pacifism #experience

If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. ↗

— George Orwell

#pacifism #world-war- #imagination