Lets see what George Orwell wrote about that. Try to read all of it, especially the last paragraph. It isnt about being against pacifism, it’s about how pacifism can be used by authoritarian regimes on liberal countries and how that societal asymmetry defines the end result.
Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’.
The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.
Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with.
In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
Not all wars are good. I was against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. But this war is one of the few occasions where american interests mostly align with the moral thing, helping an invaded country defend against an imperial invader. This is one of the least controversial and relatively clean cut wars in history.
Awesome quote and context.
The First Iraqi War passed the test. Iraq invaded Kuwait. We went in to give them a little taste of that #1 Military Spending and remind them that we’re the big kid on the block, and in the moment, we were the big kid who beat up bullies and gave the little boy his lunch money back. Ukraine is much the same way, and we’d be justified in setting down troops in Ukraine and driving the Russians right back to the agreed upon borders and then stopping and hardening borders up there.
We’re not always perfect. The Second Iraq War showed that. And while we entered Afghanistan with good intentions (Bin Laden sleeping with the fishes was a net good for the world), we got bogged down in the sort of stuff that turned Vietnam bad. But we can’t throw the good wars (World War 2 and beating the Nazis being the biggest example of these) away just because we’ve done wrong in war. We just need to be cognizant of what we’re doing in EACH war and be willing to draw our lines in the sand, much like Bush-41 did with the first Iraq war.
When it comes to military action, it is all about proportionality. Obviously Israel has the right to defend itself but killing(and starving) tens of thousands of people and flattening Gaza is not proportional. Obviously the US has the right to defend itself but invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, suspending human rights(Guantanamo/cia black sites/patriot act) is not proportional.
And the Iraq invasion was straight up imperialistic, literally what Russia is doing now to Ukraine, which is why tankies use that invasion as a “gotcha”. Which is why everyone in the EU opposed, even most EU governments. There were a lot of protests in EU in opposition of that invasion.
