Box 77, Item 2: Pacifism p.4

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Box 77, Item 2: Pacifism p.4

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Paper from floppy disk containing 21 files. Directory and file name: war and peace I V\pacifism.pdf

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The University of Queensland's Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291, Box 77, Item 2

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This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, Dr. N.A.J. Taylor.

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For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.

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[3] leaves. 99.11 KB.

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Manuscript

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PACIFISM P.4
Those who would abolish war, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods
and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much subrational abuse but with plenty of
criticism and some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the
opportunity costs and enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Do so cannot be uncomplished without violence, i.e. in effect given the types of violence
involved without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process
of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not
succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot
be abolished.1
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not continue far. This paradox does not involve
self-referented features, and is easily broken. For let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war.
Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress,
given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitar.
However, while the outcome is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the second premiss.
Outlining the deep-green case against war.
The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimerous: social and moral. Wars are highly
disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last
resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. As there was little evidence of the
decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily.
But there was always a rival positive perspective in wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It
also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war
against nature (but the short-term accesses are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsucessful war against poverty, and
so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as

1

Brian Mullin who forcefully prpounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles
alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially
atternative, though. An other puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of
capitalism, revolved around the following immitent trivial:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetrial to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty to the repressive but liberating solvation overthrowing
capitalism.

the supreme testing ground of men. These picture of war, finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to
tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars, though no larger in assendency, have by no means vanished. The
notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by
integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially
military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much
more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted. The opposition to war has
likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence.
Deep-green theory accepts the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against
unjust wars, as out and out inmoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modern wars cannot be fully just wars.
There should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of
course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives
from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be
excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional”
wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemperary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a jsut defensive war, is seriously out of date.
The reasons for this stretch wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern
civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the
justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other
creatures or to the Earth. Two troubles are really intentioned here: conceptual difficulaties with too narrow a nation of justice, and
ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the
environmental dimension.

It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities.

Earlier, of course,

environments were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a do-trines
of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly deeloped doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep
ecological war. Unless any such war were literaly different from modern wars, that is contemporary technicological wars, it would
overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened Military people, desensitized by a
rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound.
There should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the informative accumulating on what ward do to

natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments on what was
left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for
instance, war also supplied to mechanism of a technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bull dozers from
tanks, etc.
There is little Tao linking war and ecology. (But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made using neo-Duoism, an updating
Taoism in conformity with deep ecology, which however also includes but little on war: see UT.)
APPENDIX
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. Prime
Minister hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the0 war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – riteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order
of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle
p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely
pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable
logic?

President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of
peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must
be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it
achieved comparatively little that other efforts may have have yielded, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have
we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world
order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved unless backed by the the other is
not explained. Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the
most part, only the rhetoric has changed.

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Citation

Richard Sylvan, “Box 77, Item 2: Pacifism p.4,” Antipodean Antinuclearism, accessed March 28, 2024, https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/show/135.

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