Nonviolence (17 page)

When, following an unsuccessful coup d'état attempt in 1936, Fascists attempted to take over Spain by force, with military assistance from Hitler and Mussolini, neither the British nor the Americans, nor even the Socialist government of France, was prepared to go to war to save the Spanish Republic. But many idealistic volunteers,
even some antiwar activists, went. Among them was David Dellinger, a student from an affluent old-line Boston family who had been impressed by Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs's stand against World War I, for which Debs had gone to prison. Dellinger graduated from Yale in 1936 and won a graduate fellowship at Oxford. Before going to Oxford he toured Fascist Europe, traveling to Spain, Italy, and Germany. In Spain he was very moved by what he saw as “the people's struggle” against fascism and even considered fighting for the Republic. But he saw the Communists shooting at the Trotskyites and the anarchists shooting at everybody, including at him as he rode in a car in Barcelona. “I knew,” he wrote, “that I had to find a better way of fighting, a nonviolent way.”

It was on the German leg of his trip that his convictions solidified. What he found in Germany was American corporations. “General Motors, ITT, and Ford come most readily to mind as having plants protected by Hitler, but there were others.” Nazis would cite these investments when arguing to Dellinger that he should support them. Anti-Nazis would cite the plants and U.S. support when complaining of their difficulties in opposing the Nazis. He would go to bookstores and ask for works by the nineteenth-century lyric poet Heinrich Heine. He knew that Heine had been banned because he was Jewish, and Dellinger, fond of bookstores and their owners, thought this would begin a dialogue. Sometimes it did; many were anti-Nazi and complained about U.S support for the Nazis. Dellinger remembered the words German writer Thomas Mann had written in his diary two years earlier, in 1934:

Russian socialism has a powerful opponent in the West. Hitler, and this is more important to Britain's ruling class than the moral … climate of the continent…. While horror of Hitler's methods is great … the governor of the Bank of England was sent to the United States to obtain credits for raw materials for Germany, i.e. armaments credits.

To the captains of banking and industry in the United States, Britain, and France, and to the political leaders who supported them, the enemy was not fascism, it was communism. When Dellinger
got to Oxford, he met a German Rhodes scholar, a dedicated anti-Nazi who somehow had gotten through Nazi screening. Del-linger was surprised to discover that this German student was far more anti-Nazi than many of the upper-class teachers and students at Oxford. Through this student he met an entire network of anti-Nazi Germans who complained bitterly that no one would help them and that, in fact, the Americans and the British were helping the Nazis. These opponents of Nazism were strongly opposed to another international war and wanted to see the Nazis overthrown from within by a German movement. Dellinger made his last trip to Germany with his Boston Brahmin parents. At the border, a uniformed guard gave the Nazi salute as he stuck a swastika on their car. In plain view of the guards, Dellinger angrily removed the sticker. Though the guards said nothing, his parents were upset. They pointed out that none of the other American tourists objected to swastikas on their cars.

In 1937, Neville Chamberlain had been installed as prime minister at the head of a Conservative British government. He believed, and few today would argue with this, that Germany had been ill treated by the punitive terms imposed upon it at the end of World War I. Chamberlain thought this could be the basis of negotiations. But the British had other common ground with the Nazis. Chamberlain's foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, wrote in his diary that he had told Hitler, “Although there was much in the Nazi system that profoundly offended British opinion, I was not blind to what he [Hitler] had done for Germany, and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping Communism out of his country.” Hitler had accomplished this by murdering or placing in concentration camps every leftist he could find.

In 1938 Hitler violated the World War I peace agreement by annexing Austria. In September the Chamberlain government, along with the French government of Édouard Daladier and Mussolini's Italian government, signed the Munich Agreement, which gave the ethnically German region of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, to Germany in exchange for an agreement that this would end Germany's
plan for German ethnic unification. The Czech government had not even been invited to the conference.

The Munich pact proved an infamous failure, and “appeasement,” the name given to the Chamberlain policy, has become a curse word. The Western policy of constant aggressive hostility toward the Soviet Union—the postwar Cold War—was fueled by leaders who wanted to be certain that they did not commit the sin of appeasement. Robert McNamara, who as Secretary of Defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was one of the central architects of the Vietnam War, cited the memory of the Munich Agreement as one of the reasons behind American involvement in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson even used the word
appeasement
to reject peace terms with North Vietnam. Lost in this collective memory is the fact that the Munich Agreement was extremely popular at the time of its signing because it held the promise of peace. Daladier returned to France deeply disturbed by a sense that he had failed not only Czechoslovakia but the interests of France. Yet to his astonishment, his return was met by crowds of cheering Frenchmen. The irony is that while most of the world was cheering the policy of appeasement, some of Chamberlain's harshest critics, along with the prowar lobby of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, were peace activists who understood that appeasement only served Churchill's argument for war. In 1938, Oswald Garrison Villard, an outspoken pacifist writing in
The Nation,
characterized Chamberlain's approach as “his shameful and stupid policy of keeping peace in Europe by wholesale surrenders to the dictators.”

Once war broke out it became fashionable to say, as it is still said today, that World War II was caused by the policy of appeasement— that by not taking a firm stance against Hitler's seizure of Austria, the Sudentenland, and Czechoslovakia, Nazi Germany had been allowed to grow into an uncontrollable monster. What is seldom mentioned is the decade of support and acquiescence by political and business leaders prior to Munich. This was despite the fact that Hitler had made clear in the 1920s his intention to invade France,
take Austria and Czechoslovakia, and destroy “inferior races,” which he called
Untermenschen.

In 1939, when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in an attempt to keep the Nazis expanding westward rather than eastward, the preponderance of Western thinking started turning anti-fascist. Antifascism was a temporary condition that only lasted through World War II. After the war, the Allies administered Germany with a policy called de-Nazification that was discontinued in the late 1940s because as the Cold War intensified, the Allies wanted to make use of the strong anti-Communist leanings of Nazis. Numerous former high-ranking Nazis were left to assume important roles in the rebuilding of what became West Germany.

A 1935 poll indicated that 75 percent of Americans were in favor of requiring a national referendum before going to war. When the same question was asked in 1939, only 59 percent were in favor of the referendum. In 1940, the officers at Fort Lewis, California, nicknamed General Dwight Eisenhower “Alarmist Ike” for insisting that the United States was going to war. Americans no longer wanted any part of European wars.

But three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a poll showed 96 percent approval for the congressional declaration of war. Jeanette Rankin, one of fifty Representatives who voted against the 1917 House declaration of war, was the only House member to vote against the 1941 declaration of war.

During the war a poll taken in the United States showed that 87 percent of Americans found the expression of pacifist ideas objectionable. Nevertheless, some held firm. Three times as many men had conscientious-objector status and four times as many went to prison rather than serve in the military in the United States during World War II as had during World War I. In the United States 42,973 men refused to fight in World War II.

Among them was Ralph DiGia, born in New York to Italian immigrants in 1914. His father considered himself “a radical anti-fascist.” Starting at the age of ten, the year Mussolini secured control
of Italy, Ralph was taken by his father to antifascist meetings. At thirteen he marched in his first demonstration.

In 1940 Ralph registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. “My father said, ‘You are a college graduate. You can get an easy job in the Army and you can still keep your ideas …. Don't ruin your life,’” recalled DiGia, interviewed in his office at the War Resisters League at the age of ninety-one. “I never expected to stop the war,” he said. “But you have to stand up for what you believe in or nothing ever changes.” The Selective Service gave him a hearing and rejected his CO claim because he belonged to no church and had no religious background.

During World War II, one in every six inmates in federal prisons was a conscientious objector. While the fighting Allies remained silent about the Holocaust, some of the few who had been out-spoken about the barbarism of the Fascists were languishing in American prison for refusing to fight the war. They took on the cause of prison racial integration, and their strikes to integrate prison mess halls were among the first acts of the twentieth-century American civil rights movement.

In India in November 1938 Mohandas Gandhi wrote of European Jewry: “I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in nonviolent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope.” But the Jews of Europe, like the Indians and the black slaves in America, were not able to find an effective means of resistance. They met their fate either passively or with violent resistance, either of which responses resulted fairly quickly in their deaths. The Nazis are often cited as an example of an enemy against whom nonviolence would be futile. This is said despite the success of several nonviolent campaigns. Amid some of the greatest violence the world has ever seen, it was little noted that more Jews were saved by nonviolence than by violence.

Denmark was a neutral country trying to stay out of the war when the Germans, claiming the Allies were planning to force
them out of neutrality, demanded Denmark's capitulation, and in return for not resisting they promised that Danish independence would be respected. Denmark, regarding armed resistance as suicidal, submitted passively to German occupation. It became a point of national honor to work slowly, delay transportation, destroy equipment, and, above all, to protect anyone the Germans pursued. Youths openly demonstrated against German policies. Underground groups sabotaged trains and other infrastructure. Workers went out on strike around the nation. Only one strike turned violent, in Odense, where the Germans fired into an angry crowd, wounding four, including a child, and the surging crowd beat to death the German soldier who had fired.

The Danish government had refused to enact any anti-Semitic measures, and on October 1, 1943, when the Germans announced their decision to deport Jews from Denmark, the Danes hid almost the entire Jewish population of 6,500, including about 1,500 refugees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The hidden Jews were then taken by boat to neutral Sweden. The Germans only succeeded in deporting four hundred to Theresienstadt. The Danish government relentlessly inquired on their behalf and at one point managed to send representatives to visit them. Because of this close attention by their government, no Danes were in the transports sent to Auschwitz. Fifty-one died of sickness. The rest of the Jewish population of Denmark survived. Compare this to France, which had one of the better records, where there was well-organized armed resistance but 26 percent of 350,000 Jews were lost; or the Netherlands, where three-quarters of a Jewish population of 140,000 were killed despite armed resistance; or Poland, where 90 percent of 3.3 million Jews were killed despite an armed Polish resistance and armed Jewish uprisings.

Of the Jews who were saved from deportation to concentration camps, very few were saved through violence. The government of Bulgaria, a German ally, saved their Jewish population by refusing to cooperate. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman saved an estimated 100,000 Hungarian Jews while serving as his country's ambassador to Hungary by either issuing Swedish passports or moving
Jews to secret locations. André and Magda Trocmé, a Protestant minister and his wife, who in the 1930s had established a school to study nonviolence in southeastern France, during the occupation organized most of the village of Le Chambon-surLignon to hide Jewish children and transport them across the Swiss border. They saved several thousand children. World War II abounds with such tales of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were saved by individuals who risked their entire family to hide a Jew or a Jewish family.

Dictatorships are prepared to crush armed resistance; it is non-cooperation that confounds them. “What could he [the dictator] do to you,” Montaigne's good friend Étienne de la Boétie asked in a 1548 essay on dictators, which was pointedly republished in the United States in 1942, “if you yourself did not connive with the thief who plunders you.”

There was something odd about the war propaganda machine. Since hatred of the enemy is a cornerstone of selling a war, in World War I the British and American presses, in collusion with their governments, made up the most outlandish lies about German atrocities. The Kaiser was portrayed as monstrous, “a lunatic.” German soldiers were said to rape nuns and mutilate children. H. G. Wells, who invented the phrase “the war that will end war,” also invented the myth of “Frankenstein Germany,” the monster state. A story broken by the
Times
of London, that Germany had a factory that turned corpses into munitions, was widely believed, though completely fabricated.