Peace (28 page)

As Sandi Cooper recounts in
Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914
, peace organizations thus transformed from Anglo-American initiatives to pan-European projects to worldwide movements including hundreds of local, regional and global groups. Once dominated by white, upper-class men, women and minorities of all classes began to play an ever-larger role in the organized peace movement. As Cooper relates, they

traveled lecture circuits, published and catalogued libraries of books and brochures, raised money from governments and private donors, confronted politicians, challenged military budgets, criticized history curricula, combated chauvinist and establishment media, lobbied diplomats, questioned candidates for office, telegraphed congress resolutions to foreign ministries.
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Members of peace organizations often worked with other activist groups advocating human, women's and workers' rights, among others, leveraging
their networks and resources but perhaps also diluting peace causes. Contemporary conflicts, such as the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War, made clear the horrors modern war machines could wreak, invigorating rather than disheartening peace activists. An international arms-reduction campaign led by Britain's Henry Richard began in 1869 and, as a result, resolutions were proposed in the parliaments of France, Prussia, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands, though not passed. To coordinate such efforts in different though all peace-oriented directions, a Universal Peace Congress was held yearly from 1889 to 1939 except during the First World War, and to present a unified pacifist front, the International Peace Bureau was established at Berne in 1892. Similar coordinating bodies were created at national levels, like the Permanent Delegation of French Peace Societies in 1897 and the British National Peace Council in 1905. In 1908, an American peace conference delegate exclaimed: “If you had been told, ten years ago, that we should have an international tribunal, an international Parliament assured, sixty treaties of arbitration, and an international prize court, I say that the boldest of dreamers would not have believed it.”
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In the effectiveness, such disbelief was not misguided.

A driving force behind these successes was that peace organizations at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries received unprecedented endowments from private sources and support from public officials. Belgian King Leopold II hosted the 1894 Universal Peace Congress in Antwerp, indicating his support for the cause. Alexander Millerand, the first French socialist to hold a parliamentary post, opened the Paris Congress of 1900. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had just brokered peace between Russian and Japan after their war of 1904, invited Inter-Parliamentarians to the White House to hold high-level peace talks. The self-made railroad baron Ivan Bloch, who wrote an influential critique of modern warfare, founded a Museum of War and Peace at Lucerne and left large sums to the Berne Bureau and other groups for scholarly and educational purposes. Steel magnate and arbitration advocate Andrew Carnegie gave away almost all of his self-made millions to peace-oriented and philanthropic organizations, funding constructions of the Pan-American Union Building in Washington, the Peace Palace at Hague, and the Central American Court of Justice in Costa Rica, and creating a trust that has ever since sponsored major studies and conferences on the past, present and future of peace: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Yet the best-known bequest to the promotion of peace and peacemaking is that of the Swedish inventor of dynamite and hundreds of other products who came to own an arms manufacturing plant. In his will, he designated a sizeable donation to be distributed annually as prizes recognizing individuals who have made significant contributions to scientific, medical and literary fields, but also to one who “shall have done the most
or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses.”
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There are hundreds of peace prizes in the world today, but none has a higher profile than that named after Alfred Nobel. His narrow definition of peace exhibits the limited scope of the word for most similarly situated Europeans of his day, due in no small way to the organized peace movement. In the end, however, historically unamtched financial and political backing fuelled rather than resolved ongoing ideological and logistical disputes among peace factions, fragmentations that proved to be the organized peace movement's greatest single internal impediment to achieving its aims, then but hopefully not today.

The question most proposals for intra- and international peace left unanswered is what individuals acting alone can do when nation-states abuse their powers against their own people and go to war against their wishes. Answers American Transcendentalists and the Russian Leo Tolstoy put forth not only provided ways for individuals to contest and change nation-states non-violently but also to find inner peace in doing so. Although not a Transcendentalist, Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was
par excellence
. Sermonizing, he proposed that there “can be no peace without but through peace within,” allowing for war if individual consciences believed it was just.
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However, just because governments go to war does not mean they are justified, requiring that individuals decide for themselves whether they should participate, “bound to withhold” if “conscience condemns the cause.”
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Emerson (1803–82), a Harvard graduate and schoolmaster, travelled in Europe before returning to Boston. Adopting Channing's perspective, in the belief that what is good for one is good for all he made it universal, a hallmark of his Transcendentalism. Because we are united in one “over-soul” encompassing humans and nature alike, he claimed, “he who kills his brother commits suicide.”
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In a lecture to the American Peace Society on “War” (1838), he compared it to epidemics that must be contained first and eliminated second. Failing this, in “Self-Reliance” (1841), “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
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During the Mexican-American War (1846–48), he criticized Abolitionists who did not act on their principles by resisting and going to prison “on their known and described disagreements from the state.”
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The example he had in mind was a former housemate who actually did, as well as eloquently argued for doing, exactly that.

Henry David Thoreau (1802–62), also a Harvard graduate, lived most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, working odd jobs while reading, writing and taking nature walks. For two years starting in 1845, he lived in a cabin on Walden Pond, receiving visitors and running errands in town
but otherwise withdrawing from society to practice self-reliance and develop intuition. A year into the project, he was stopped by the local tax collector in town who reminded him that he had not paid his taxes in years. When Thoreau said he had not done so on purpose, he was taken into custody, grudgingly released when someone paid them for him. After inadequate response to inquiries as to why he was arrested, he gave a lecture entitled “Resistance to Civil Government,” published as “Civil Disobedience” in 1866. In it he explained he refused to support a state that supported slavery, which he saw as a motive for the Mexican-American War. If the law “requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,” he contended, then “break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
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He goes on: “If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.”
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Although he remained unrenowned in his lifetime, soon after his death Thoreau's works somehow reached and influenced one of the most famous living writers in the world, who gave book royalties to a group of persecuted, civilly disobedient conscientious objectors to relocate to Canada.

The son of a prominent nobleman, Tolstoy (1828–1910) was raised on his family's estate south of Moscow. He attended the University of Kazan at age sixteen, studying languages and law and considered a diplomatic career. After enlisting in the army and finding combat immoral and degrading, he split his time between managing his estate and leading a profligate intellectual's life, later regretting the latter. Bringing him literary fame was his graphic depiction of the Siege of Sevastopol (1854), in which he participated, exposing the terrors of war rather than glorifying it, the preferred literary treatment at the time. He then contrasted the benefits and drawbacks of progressive materialism with natural simplicity in
The Cossacks
(1862) before contrasting two other states of humanity,
War and Peace
, written 1862–9. Arguably the most famous novel ever written on the topics, it is also probably the least read due to its length and reduced here at great loss. Napoleon's disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia, described by Tolstoy as “opposed to human reason and to human nature,” is the backdrop for a panorama of characters whose lives are affected by it in various ways. “Millions of men,” he continues, “perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes. . . but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.”
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Yet his critique conflicts with the novel's core historical determinism, by which individual action “performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.”
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Pierre Bezukhov, the story's focal point, shares Tolstoy's own biography and articulates views he would later assert in the first person. Also a reformed noble-born dilettante who fails in emancipating his serfs, Pierre is attracted to philosophies
of Freemasons who tell him “Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.”
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Horrified by a battle he witnesses, Pierre decides to kill Napoleon himself. Captured and freed after the siege of Moscow, he finally finds love as the city is rebuilt.

Tolstoy's late-life spiritual crisis led him to channel his work evermore towards peace. In
What is Art?
(1897) he posited artists as peacemakers, arguing the “task for art to accomplish is to make the feeling of brotherhood and love of one's neighbor. . . the customary feeling and instinct of all men.”
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He put forth his philosophy of non-resistance in
The Kingdom of God is Within You
three years earlier, and that of non-cooperation in his last book,
The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
(1908). The point of
The Kingdom
is that “To offend another, because he offended us, for the specious reason of removing an evil, means to repeat an evil deed, both against him and against ourselves.”
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Non-resistance
, the radical form of pacifism practiced by Jesus, breaks cycles of violence by liberating and empowering both inflictors and inflicted: “by this very relation to violence he not only frees himself, but also the world from external power.”
The Law of Love and Violence
espouses a more activist approach. Nonresistance can end cycles of violence, but only non-violence can prevent it:
non-cooperation
with militarism by defection, objection and civil disobedience can bring about “the complete transformationof the existing order of things . . . among all the peoples of the globe.”
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With the same historical determinism permeating
War and Peace
, he holds that the law of love will triumph over the law of violence or else all laws will lose validity and with this loss, all our lives. A month before he died, Tolstoy responded to letters from Gandhi, praising “However insignificant may be the number of your people who practice non-resistance and of our people in Russia who refuse military service,” they are cosmically significant.
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Weeks later, he gave up all worldly concerns and embarked on what turned out to be a pilgrimage to nowhere, dying of pneumonia in train station.

A renewed religiosity was also at the heart of the final peace movement to be covered in this chapter, one based on the belief that humanity can still be spiritually united despite the geo-political borders of nation-states by which we are now divided. “The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens,” is the most famous statement of Baha Ullah (1817–92), founder of the Baha'i faith.
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But it begins, “It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world.” He declared himself the Promised One prophesied by the Persian Ali Muhammad, known as the Bab (“living door”), originally a Shiite who split with the tradition in 1840, for which he was imprisoned and martyred. During his incarceration, the Bab's disciples gathered in Khurasan, for centuries a hotbed of religious integrations. After his
execution, some made an attempt at the Persian Shah's life, for which all were imprisoned. Amongst them was Baha Ullah, who had always practiced and preached non-violence and which he continued to do in Baghdad and Kurdistan upon release, cleared of wrongdoing. His books, emphasizing gender equality, universal higher education, the unity of all religions and personal empowerment attracted many followers of all faiths, including Jews, Muslims, Christians and Zoroastrians. Fearful of his growing sect, the Persian authorities requested that the Ottomans extradite him. He was restricted from travelling out of the environs of Acre, Palestine, where he lived the rest of his life, sought out by scholars and spiritualists alike.

It was during this time that he wrote to the secular and religious rulers of Europe, urging them to “Be reconciled among yourselves that ye may need no more armaments. . . for thereby will the tempest of discord be stilled amongst you, and your people find rest.”
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They scoffed at his warnings about catastrophes that would occur if they did not. In his will, he reaffirmed his overarching principle, that “The religion of God is to create love and unity; do not make it the cause of enmity and discord,” and named his son successor as the Baha'i leader to expound the teachings he had only begun to reveal.
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Abdul Baha (1844–1921) was released from the captivity he shared with his father on harsher terms after the Young Turks seized power from the Ottoman Sultan in 1908. He then began a speaking tour in Europe and North America to promulgate his father's non-nationalistic, inter-religious peace. In Paris, he preached: “It is the outward practices of religion that are so different, and it is they that cause disputes and enmity – while the reality is always the same, and one.”
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In California, he warned that “The European continent is like an arsenal, a storehouse of explosives ready for ignition,” writing elsewhere that