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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.

Anonymous

Against War and Pacifist Bliss

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.