Will a pacifist topple his government?
If you look down the list of articles on my LinkedIn web page, and if you had looked at the posts I posted on Facebook in the past, one thing will strike you: many of them end in a question mark, just like this one. There’s a reason for that. My aim is not to provide answers. For answers, I lack a lot of knowledge, I lack power and position, I lack influence and I lack an ability to lie. I may get things wrong, but I never knowingly lie. I am naive, and I am ignorant, I am ill-read and jump to conclusions, but I am not mendacious. My aim, therefore, is to provoke. Not to pester or to annoy, though pester and annoy I may well do, in order to provoke, but they’re not the aim. I hope that someone somewhere may find answers to issues and questions and problems. It’s the fact that they don’t or the fact that they think they do and that the solutions they believe they have found don’t sit properly with me that makes me provoke. It’s a family trait.
It’s a trait that was instilled in my great-uncle David. He could play the violin like David Oistrach, he could paint like Monet; he copied a Caravaggio once and you could barely tell them apart. He worked in men’s tailoring at a large Edinburgh department store and had two Siamese cats, called Acacia and Aphalandra. He liked Staffordshire porcelain mantle dogs and Victorian crystal drops. He dressed in a suit of tweed and wore a tie every day of his life, which was long. His paintings hang in my home, as do those of my artistic Canadian uncle, Bill. Artistry is also a family trait, in some of our family. Mine is expressed in acting, on the stage and playing the fool a bit in life and, I like to think, in my writing. But I don’t lie, and nor did uncle Bill and nor did great-uncle David. But we all held to one thing: to seek our minds and to speak our minds.
My great-uncle David was a pacifist and he went through hell to be it. He was interrogated and questioned and put through the mill in the Second World War for his firm, staunch belief that it was wrong to go onto a battlefield and kill other men. He was eventually excused national service in the war, and that cost the country a man in a uniform; and it cost him the respect of many; and it cost him a lot of pain; but it did not cost him his self-respect or his conscience, and that is something a man should never readily give up for anyone; nor is it something other men should ask him to render up to the altar of their ideals. But they do. And many are doing so now, both in Russia and in Ukraine. Men are being conscripted on both sides of this conflict to fight battles they feel in their hearts are simply wrong, for goals that have been decided in halls of power and subscribed to by masses of population of which they are part, but of which they feel they are no part.
I have wondered over the past 7 months or so how many pacifists in Ukraine donned their nation’s uniform to go onto their nation’s battlefields and kill other men in a spirit of solidarity, a fight for survival. A fight that may well see the survival of a nation, but at the cost of their souls. I wonder how many pacifists have been conscripted into the Russian army as well, and how many of them also battle with their souls in the name of patriotism: mad, blind, caring (for “us”), uncaring (for “them”) patriotism. I sometimes think that the general public has more understanding for paedophiles than it does for pacifists. But then, which, between the pacifist and the patriot, is which when one of them is keeping his head as all around are losing theirs?
I would fight, I think. I owe allegiance to two nations, by dint of their having offered me protection in the form of nationality. To one I owe allegiance by birth; to the other by naturalisation, in the course of requesting which I considered at great length and over much time the duty incumbent on me to bear arms, should it ask me, in its defence. Many Brits took Belgian nationality so that, to be honest, they could retire to the Algarve or the Sorrento coast. Perhaps I too will make it to Sorrento, but that is a moot question at the present time. Moot, too, is the question of whether I could ultimately ever take up a weapon and direct it at another person in order to shoot them dead with it. Till that moment comes, I will not be able to answer that question definitively. You can never answer a crunch question until the crunch comes.
Many across the world are fighting the Russian invasion of Ukraine (we do need to stipulate “Ukraine” - there have been Russian invasions of many other places), not with arms or bullets but with words, some of which have been emitted by me. Some of mine have been designed to provoke, to get people thinking, for no better reason than that they have provoked me to do some thinking. About whether a young Russian who flees his country when called up to serve is a coward or a hero, a turncoat or a conscientious objector, a fifth columnist or an ardent opponent of Putin, shunned or welcome wherever he goes.
“The world,” says Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, “must construe according to its wits; a court must construe according to the law.” Yet, there are courts that have not the wit to construe according to the law, and one of those was the very court that judged Thomas More. He was a man for all seasons bar one: the fall - of his head from his body. And yet we cite principle as were it law, and say to the world, whose courts can lack even the wit to construe according to law, that it should construe according to its wits, guided by the principles that fail so many. Hence, there remain many problems and, for all I may or may not lack or be replete with principles and knowledge of laws, it is knowledge of the world that leaves me absent solutions, and impelled to provoke.