Pacifist Program in Time of War, Threatened War, or Facism

by Richard B. Gregg

Overview

This discussion is based on two related assumptions. The first is that pacifism must be an effort to create by non-violent methods a new and better civilization. Pacifism is not just an attempt to postpone any threatened war, nor merely to create a permanent condition of non-war, leaving the rest of our institutions and customs just as they are. We must build a new order. All of the ways and institutions of such a new order would be very different from what we are accustomed to. They would be different not merely because that new civilization would be free from war, its accompaniments and results, but because it would necessarily embody much more respect for personality, interest in people, justice, tolerance, freedom, and love than we now have.

Our second assumption is the reason for this enlarged task of pacifism. War is an important and necessary institution of our present civilization. War is not just an ugly excrescence, or superficial illness, or occasional maladjustment, or temporary personal mistake of a few leaders of an otherwise fair and healthy society; war is an inherent, inevitable, essential element of the kind of civilization in which we live.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940161930724
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	07/16/2018
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	253 KB

About the Author

Born in 1891, Richard B. Gregg was a Harvard trained lawyer who practiced law for three years before moving on to work with trade unions. He gathered statistics and assisted with arbitration and publicity for the railroad workers’ union following the First World War. Laid off in the beginning of the nineteen-twenties he stumbled across an article on the work of Mohandas Gandhi. This chance encounter inspired a four-year journey through India where he studied the culture of nonviolence. In this period he wrote The Economics of Khaddar, a book that tried to explain economics in terms an average Indian citizen would understand.

On his return from India, he wrote The Power of Nonviolence (1934), a book that Martin Luther King listed as one of the five most influential books he had read. His work described nonviolence as a method for changing the character of the world. In 1935–36, he served as the acting director of Pendle Hill, moving from there to live in Putney, Vermont in an intentional community. The Power of Nonviolence became a foundational text for the political activists who coalesced into the New Left during the fifties and sixties. Gregg worried that these activists were losing sight of the larger potential for social change in his texts.