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Title: Against War and Pacifist Bliss Author: Anonymous Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: Killing King Abacus, war Source: Retrieved on April 6th, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/pacifistbliss.htm Notes: Translated from: Neither their war nor their peace, June 1999.
The pacifist abhors war and blesses the state. In times of peace, he has
been taught — and he has believed — that society is a vast system of
communication where all controls itself by means of dialogue, in a
nonviolent manner. It follows from this that only one who, living on the
periphery of these communicating vessels, mocks the hopeless cornerstone
of vain democratic chattering with blows is candidate to suffer brute
force.
Though he implicitly recognizes in this way that this society is not
only dialogue but also violence, the pacifist citizen is not excessively
worried by this: the violence is destined for others, for the new
savages who have not yet acquired a proper communicative humanity and
who deduce from this that society is much more violent from the sweet
force of words that support a round table. The pacifist elevates the
nonviolent image to a supreme principle — in which the peaceful course
of capitalist affairs reflects itself — which mediated society gives
itself.
When a state starts a war, the pacifist citizen orders it, “in the name
of the people”, to conform to this idealized representation of daily
life. Imbued with that idea of Rights which the state imposes for
worship, he refuses to recognize how the state monopoly on violence,
that by which countries guarantee the respect manu militari of the law
corresponds, with armies in state to state relations; and when two
powers collide it is war that has the final word. Thus, as she glances
with nonchalance on the police reduction of democratic dialogue in the
affairs of internal politics, the pacifist citizen insists upon the
exclusive use of words in foreign affairs: upon negotiation. He wants
one without the other, as if one could be able to have Rights without
violence, the state without war, the principle without the consequences
that derive from it. Far from recovering from seeing these murderous
consequences and from allowing the principle from which they emanate to
be put into doubt, the pacifist invokes the principle of Rights against
violence — which is the reverse side of it — and draws from this
irrational process the moral superiority which he decorates himself
with: “What stupidity, war!”
Thus, questioning his own rulers and accusing them of unawareness and
irresponsibility, the pacifist would be candid as advisor to the prince
with the purpose of shedding light upon the real interests of the
nation. And the less he is listened to, the more satisfied he is to have
accomplished the proper duty of the citizen: to tell the government what
he thinks of public affairs — and so much the worse for the head of
state, if he finds himself condemned by moral conscience. As long as the
citizen, addressing herself to government, recognizes the legitimacy of
the state, the state is able to act more as it pleases because, unlike
the pacifist citizen, it does not deny the possibility of compensating
for the gaps in its discourse, when necessary, by putting forth its own
potential for destruction, flying squad included.
It is in this way that the pacifist has drawn up a separate peace with
capitalist society, in which he denounces the “drivel” without ever
putting it forth for discussion. To this secret complicity corresponds a
purely symbolic activity. With his feverish activity, lighting candles,
signing call after call, petition after petition, taking his own
opinions for a walk on the city sidewalk, the pacifist accomplishes
absolutely nothing. The pseudo-activity of the pacifist and of the other
propagandists of the “right to...” imitates, more or less consciously,
advertising techniques: it assumes that the incessant repetitions of
symbolic acts and of reduced slogans able to create an opposition to war
and to “ mobilize the citizens”. Notoriously, gratuitous morality sells
well in times of war.
The pacifist practice is an extension, by other means, of the Live Aid
Concert against world hunger. Placed outside of the production centers
of capitalist society, opposition sets itself up in the sphere of
entertainment, and of “political pastimes”, where the citizen believes
in acting as a responsible and autonomous individual, raised from
capitalist contrition to earn a living. This kind of opposition is not
able to get a grasp on social reality because the encounter unfolds
itself in a mediated unreality which pretends to be the only reality:
while the pacifists produce the images of opposition to war, the mass
media reduces this same war to a technological operation, covered with
base sentimentality. There are two interpretations, two images of the
clash; war and capitalist society, which in the meantime, are left alone
and proceed. The curious ease with which the pacifist is transformed
once again the next day into simple labor power that must carry out
determined tasks results from these images. Moralizers abstain: there’s
work going on here.
Thus, the atomized individual — who doesn’t have any occupation of her
own except that of staying aware of the balance of their own pecuniary
and emotional bookkeeping — wears the mask of the pacifist citizen from
time to time. There, on the public square — or rather on the square of
publicity — he proclaims his own high morality against the softness of
daily life that she continues to reproduce simultaneously in private and
at work. The pacifist is a moralizer in the sphere of mediated unreality
and acts without any moral considerations when she is in the production
centers of a state, whose warlike defects she denies. This double
character of the pacifist is called impotence in the best of cases, in
the worst, hypocrisy.