Peacemaking: an aspiration not an achievement

an interview with Alfred Hassler

Alfred Hassler (1910-1991) was one of the major figures in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In prison during World War II as a conscientious objector, he joined the FOR staff and went on to serve as editor of the Fellowship magazine and later as FOR executive secretary and general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was interviewed by Jim Forest and Diane Leonetti on the occasion of his retirement in 1974.

Al Hassler with grandson Daniel

Leonetti: Al, perhaps you could start by trying to remember how you became a pacifist?

It was during the Depression. Everybody was aware of that war was coming. In the summer of 1939 I was teaching a course on Christianity and peace at a Baptist conference in Pennsylvania. The war was so imminent I recall telling the class that we might not ever see one another again.

Somewhere in that period, my thinking returned from antiwar to pacifist. I can’t recall just when. It just evolved. I never read anything that did it. No one converted me. It was no flash of light on the road to Damascus. But suddenly I was a pacifist. And then I became president of the Baptist Pacifist Fellowship before I even heard of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Forest: Many people think of themselves as post-World War II pacifists. They imagine that, had they been of military age before Hiroshima, they might have been volunteers in the war against Hitler. World War II, in their minds, was the last just war. Yet you became a pacifist before the war and you remained a pacifist throughout. Wasn’t that difficult?

Being a pacifist during World War II was difficult, and it has been ever since. Unquestionably the things that Hitler and the Nazis were doing were evil, unqualifiedly evil. It is still difficult to respond of the question, “What would you do about Hitler?”

But we pacifists were talking about the reasons World War II would happen well before it began — out of Versailles, out of all the inequities, out of the ringing of Germany with steel by the Allies, out of the refusal of the Allies to live up to their treaty agreements, out of the refusal to disarm — out of all that we saw a national paranoia being created in Germany that inevitably would produce a Hitler-like leader.

We didn’t know any way to prevent the war once Hitler was in power. But the pragmatic evidence is that we pacifists saved more Jews from Hitler than was saved by any army. Remember the Holocaust began after the war started. Jews were being persecuted and driven out of the country. Their property was being taken. But the mass murder didn’t begin until the war was underway. Even then pacifists in Europe continued to be at the core of efforts to hide Jews and smuggle them to safety.

The analysis that pacifists made about the factors driving us toward war proved quite accurate, but we were powerless to put into effect the recommendation which might have prevented war.

You know in some ways it was easier being a pacifist than then it has been during the Vietnam War. In World War II we knew we were powerless. We never thought we could end the war once it began. All we could do was argue for a war without victory rather than the unconditional surrender the governments demanded. We were supporting conscientious objectors. We were rescuing the victims of the Nazis. In this country we were bringing in as many Jews as the government would allow — which tragically weren’t very many. We were never under the delusion that we have the political power to stop the war. But during the Vietnam War the peace movement thought it did have that power, and people in it became infinitely more frustrating.

Forest: Are you glad you went to prison?

Sure. I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I’m glad they sent me where they did. Conscientious objectors were mainly sent to Danbury or Sandstone federal prisons. But I was appalled at the thought of being locked up for years with a bunch of conscientious objectors! (laughter) So when they went sent me to Lewisburg, a maximum-security prison with only thirty conscientious injectors among a prison population of thirteen hundred, I was delighted as well as a little frightened. But it was an experience I had practically lusted after and I was very glad to go. I learned a great deal.

I was naïve about going to prison. You know my family were all law-and-order people. They weren’t the kind that wanted to see cops attacking people, but they took it for granted that no good person ever went to prison. It was very contradictory because we were always going on about St. Paul and St. Peter and all those early Christians who were always in prison. But not in the United States! Their idea was, I think, that had Jesus been in America, he wouldn’t have gone to prison and wouldn’t have been crucified.

Forest: You remind me of a postcard message I received from Thich Nhat Hanh while I was in prison, something very brief: “Do you remember the tangerine we ate when we were together? Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more.” It gave me encouragement and helped me approach prison in a nonconfrontational way — to take the experience bite by bite.

And day by day.

I hadn’t thought about it before but one of the reasons for wanting to be in a maximum-security prison rather than with a lot of conscientious objectors was my own aversion to sitting around talking with people who were doing time for the same reason. In a maximum-security prison, where you are surrounded by conventional prisoners, you would findw a conscientious objector out in the playing field surrounded by twenty or thirty non-conscientious objectors just talking.

We got so involved in other people’s problems that we didn’t have time to brood on our own problems. And that was a good thing.

Forest: What made you decide to join the FOR staff after you left prison?

I decided I would work in the peace movement for five years and then go back to advertising and journalism and make a good living from family. But I never did.

What I really wanted to be was a writer. I didn’t want to be a peace executive. There were times when I thought I was the only one in the on the FOR staff who didn’t want to be executive secretary. (laughter)

Leonetti: I was wondering how the shape of the pacifist movement has changed since you’ve been in it?

In some ways it hasn’t changed at all and other ways it is changed drastically. Both bother me.

It hasn’t changed much in its individualism. We lack discipline. We won’t focus our collective efforts are one or two or three things at a time. Our members employ a few program people and support staff and saddle them with the expectation that they can do twenty or thirty major efforts and have some effect. Our efforts are too diffuse. There is a touching faith on the part of our members that their staff can do anything — and an almost reprehensible feeling on the staff’s part that they should do everything. There is, as yet, no sense of a coherent program on which we pacifists can unite in the interest of accomplishing a few things, even if not in the order each of us might privately prefer.

The other change in the peace movement is that there is now a great deal more sophistication regarding the complexities that are involved in the search for peace. We no longer assume history is made only in the United States and Europe. We know, in fact, that it is more likely to be made in the poverty-stricken countries which are the breeding ground of conflict. We know that peace isn’t to be achieved with declarations and treaties — it runs much deeper than that.

There is still a good many people who want simplified answers, who went to find a magic button that will make everything okay again. We get the feeling that if only we did the right thing, worked a little bit harder, we would achieve what is needed.

There is more sophistication now, by and large — but more despair as well.

Forest: What about the FOR’s name? “Fellowship” seems to be an archaic religious term and “reconciliation” an archaic political goal. If you could, would you change the FOR’s name, or any part of it?

No, though I detested the name myself when I first joined the staff. I came out of a religious setting in which “fellowship” was used as a verb. There was always talk about “fellowshipping together.”  For me it was like running your fingernails down a blackboard. And “reconciliation” seemed a weak word. But the words don’t bother me anymore. I’ve become very attached to them.

It seems to me the essence of the pacifist position is not the refusal to kill or to be part of any army but the very positive concept of a human society that is familial in nature. The human family. We are all interrelated. We humans are a fellowship.

And “reconciliation” has become, for me, very strong word. It doesn’t mean tolerating justice or the status quo. It does mean finding a common denominator between and among people of vastly different backgrounds and natures and possessions and all the rest.

Forest: Perhaps nothing has been more important than your work these past eight or ten years than the Vietnamese Buddhists and the nonviolent movements that has come out of their faith and suffering. I’ve heard you call yourself a “Baptist Buddhist.” Do you mean it?

There are two things crucial to me about the Buddhists, or perhaps I should say Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of Buddhism, which is been my main source of learning. One is the rejection of an arbitrary claim to knowledge of total truth.

I vividly recall what Thich Nhat Hanh said to a young woman in Santa Barbara who asked him what it meant to seek the Buddha and what happens when you find him. Nhat Hanh answered, “I am a Zen master — and, as you know, Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, ‘kill’ it, and go on in the search for truth.”

This is quite different from the idea that many Christians cling to — that they have a revealed truth, final and eternal, that you can’t deviate from.

The thing about such Buddhists as Thich Nhat Hanh is their openness to ideas and insights of other people, other faiths, whether religious, political, or whatever. They don’t think they have a monopoly on truth. It is this sort of openness that draws me. In the past they took things from Confucianism and Taoism. They took what seemed good into their own faith, as they are now taking things from Christianity.

Forest: Earlier you mentioned that there is more sophistication in the peace movement now about the complexity of the problems we face. You added that there is also more despair. I know I sense this very much in this society. We know that certain things are wrong. We know the consequences will be disastrous. We wish to resist. We want to help form constructive alternatives. But we haven’t got the hope that makes response and resistance possible.

I agree. I’m tempted to say it was always that way, but that’s not adequate. When I was chairman of the housing cooperative in which we still live, I used to say, “During the day I work at writing tracts about how atomic bombs are about to destroy the world — and then I come home and talk with people about thirty-year mortgages!”

The problem of despair, I think, hits Americans harder than other people because we have been conditioned by two centuries of overcoming physical obstacles and enriching ourselves in the process, never encountering insoluble problems. Now we encounter problems that can’t be solved.

Our situation is vastly different from that of people in Europe and Indochina, people who have experienced defeat upon defeat in recent memory and have developed what some Europeans call a “theology of despair,” which is just another way of saying a theology of the cross.

One FOR member in Europe used to say, “You Americans think that the kingdom of God is coming on earth  through your work. We know that it is not. We have been through Hitler and the war.”

Personally, I can’t accept despair as some sort of basis. Despair may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get so despairing about the human prospect that you have no energy find solutions.

The reason there is so much despair, I think, is because of our inability to find handles for the various problems we face — ways of grabbing hold of the things in order to solve them. They’re so complex, so interrelated, so massive. People don’t see much relevance in doing small things. Why set up a day care center — or try to improve housing — or even have a child — if the world is about to blow itself up? Each person has to find a personal solution to that

A.J. Muste used to say, “All the really great things in history came as a surprise. Nobody predicted them.”

The grounds for hope are there but are terribly hard to see.

Do you remember FOR’s China campaign in 1954 and ’55? There’s a story we haven’t told very often because it was told to us in great confidence. But that was nearly twenty years ago.

There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged people to send President Eisenhower small sacks of grain provided by the FOR with a message, “If your enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.” The surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface our project was an utter failure. But then quite by accident we learned from someone on Eisenhower’s press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. [Quemoy and Matsu, islands off the east coast of China still occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese forces after the 1949 civil war on the mainland, were the site of a major confrontation between the Republic of China and Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Republic of China.] At the third meeting the president turn to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, “How many of those grain bags have come in?” The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters. Eisenhower’s response was that if that many Americans were trying to find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t the time to bomb China. This proposal was vetoed.

Leonetti: And you learn that only by pure chance?

Pure chance! That’s the point. You do something and seem to fail —but in the process of failure you sometimes accomplish something else quite unexpected, something of greater importance.

History is full of esoteric little groups that live by themselves and, regardless of whatever happens outside, carry on with that particular witness and commitment. Pacifist do that in one sense. FOR members are a minute portion of the world’s population. We strengthen and reinforce each other as best we can. But there’s another element to it. We really do have massive world problems and by our very best judgment they can wipe out civilization and the human race.

Perhaps this is exaggerated. They say others have said this before all through history. I reply that particular civilizations have been wiped out before, that ours is the first period in in history in which a global civilization has existed as well as the means of global destruction. When this civilization is wiped out, there won’t be another to take its place. Not on this planet.

Now we have a handful of people motivated to go on working despite hopelessness. But if we want to motivate a constituency large enough to effect the things that are necessary, then there has to be hope there, something to see and work toward, a belief that it can be achieved.

Forest: How do you inspire that?

I wish I knew.

Forest: At the recent FOR national conference in Wisconsin, you talked about the word “love” — a discredited word to many people. How do you locate that word in the vocabulary of peacemaking?

For a long time we tried to point out that there were different kinds of love — agape, eros, etcetera — but that really doesn’t come across to most people. When you talk about love, people think of a very intimate sort of relationship, but that’s manifestly impossible with each of the billions of people alive today  — or even the one person who is doing something extraordinary destructive in your view.

It seems to me that the three elements that are essential to an understanding of love are compassion, humility and understanding. Compassion in the sense of awareness, sensitivity and understanding of other persons and their weaknesses, even the ones you think are very strong — their mortality, their limitations, the fact that they suffer in ways we don’t know about or understand — and humility in understanding just have narrow is the gap between people we regard as morally good — ourselves! — and the people whom we regard as morally bad — the ones who oppose us.

Milton Mayer has written about a Quaker meeting for worship at which A.J. Muste stood up and said, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all.” This statement became almost an obsession with Milton as he dug deeper and deeper into it. You can’t get anywhere with it unless you realize that love means understanding and compassion — then it opens up. Compassion, not in the sense of lessening your opposition to Hitler and what he is doing, but compassion for a man who clearly had suffered terribly, who was terribly distorted, who had so little real happiness and joy.

The equivalent for us would be to say, “If I can I love Richard Nixon, I cannot love at all.”

Again, love means understanding and compassion. You only have to look at one of the hundreds of recent pictures of Nixon to see the suffering that he’s going through, a suffering that he probably doesn’t yet understand — a man who doesn’t understand himself, his personality, or the reaction of people to him; a man who really feels that he was right, that he is being persecuted. You can only feel sorry for him. You can only feel compassion.

That’s the essence of pacifism for me. The realization that we are, as it’s put in the New Testament, all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. We have no right to be self-righteous, but only to be pitying, compassionate, helpful.

Of course we fail at this all the time. Pacifism is an aspiration, not an achievement. As one of the best pacifists I know — Cao Ngoc Phuong — put it, when asked if she were a pacifist: “Not yet.”

* * *

Somewhere in that period, my thinking returned from antiwar to pacifist. I can’t recall just when. It just evolved. I never read anything that did it. No one converted me. It was no flash of light on the road to Damascus. But suddenly I was a pacifist. And then I became president of the Baptist Pacifist Fellowship before I even heard of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Forest: Many people think of themselves as post-World War II pacifists. They imagine that, had they been of military age before Hiroshima, they might have been volunteers in the war against Hitler. World War II, in their minds, was the last just war. Yet you became a pacifist before the war and you remained a pacifist throughout. Wasn’t that difficult?

Been a pacifist during World War II was difficult, and it has been ever since. Unquestionably the things that Hitler and the Nazis were doing were evil, unqualifiedly evil. It is still difficult to respond of the question, “What would you do about Hitler?”

But we pacifists were talking about the reasons World War II would happen well before it began. Out of Versailles, out of all the inequities, out of the ringing of Germany with steel by the Allies, out of the refusal of the Allies to live up to their treaty agreements, out of the refusal to disarm — out of all that we saw a national paranoia being created in Germany that inevitably would produce a Hitler-like leader.

We didn’t know any way to prevent the war once Hitler was in power. But the pragmatic evidence is that we pacifists saved more Jews from Hitler than was saved by any army. Remember the Holocaust began after the war started. Jews were being persecuted and driven out of the country. Their property was being taken. But the mass murder didn’t begin until the war was underway. Even then pacifists in Europe continued to be at the core of efforts to hide Jews and smuggle them to safety.

The analysis that pacifists made about the factors driving us toward war proved quite accurate, but we were powerless to put into effect the recommendation which might have prevented war.

You know in some ways it was easier being a pacifist than then it has been during the Vietnam War. In World War II we knew we were powerless. We never thought we could end the war once it began. All we could do was argue for a war without victory rather than the unconditional surrender the governments demanded. We were supporting conscientious objectors. We were rescuing the victims of the Nazis. In this country we were bringing in as many Jews as the government would allow — which tragically weren’t very many. We were never under the delusion that we have the political power to stop the war. But during the Vietnam War the peace movement thought it did have that power, and people in it became infinitely more frustrating.

Forest: Are you glad you went to prison?

Sure. I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I’m glad they sent me where they did. Conscientious objectors were mainly sent to Danbury or Sandstone federal prisons. But I was appalled at the thought of being locked up for years with a bunch of conscientious objectors! (laughter) So when they went sent me to Lewisburg, a maximum security prison with only 30 conscientious injectors among a prison population of 1300, I was delighted as well as a little frightened. But it was an experience I had practically lusted after and I was very glad to go. I learned a great deal.

I was naïve about going to prison. You know my family were all law-and-order people. They weren’t the kind that wanted to see cops attacking people, but they took it for granted that no good person ever went to prison. It was very contradictory because we were always going on about St. Paul in St. Peter and all those early Christians who were always in prison. But not in the United States! The idea was, I think, that had Jesus been in America, he wouldn’t have gone to prison and wouldn’t have been crucified.

Forest: You remind me of a postcard message I received from Thich Nhat Hanh while I was in prison, something very brief: “Do you remember the tangerine we ate when we were together? Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more.” It helped me immensely to find some encouragement and approach prison in a nonconfrontational way — to take the experience bite by bite.

And day by day.

I hadn’t thought about it before but one of the reasons for wanting to be in a maximum security prison rather than with a lot of conscientious objectors was my own aversion to sitting around talking with people doing time for the same reason. In a maximum security prison, where you are surrounded by conventional defenders, you can see a conscientious objector out in the playing field surrounded by 20 or 30 non-conscientious objectives just talking.

We got so involved in other people’s problems that we didn’t have time do brewed on our own problems. And that was a good thing.

Forest: What made you decide to join the FOR staff after you left prison?

I decided I would work in the peace movement for five years and then go back to advertising and journalism and make a good living from family. But I never did.

What I really wanted to be was a writer. I didn’t want to be a peace executive. There were times when I thought I was the only one in the on the FRO staff who didn’t want to be executive secretary. (laughter)

Leonetti: I was wondering how the shape of the pacifist movement has changed since you’ve been in it?

In some ways it hasn’t changed at all, and other ways it is changed drastically. Both bother me.

It hasn’t changed much in its individualism. We lack discipline. We won’t focus our collective efforts are one or two or three things at a time. Our members employ a few program people and support staff and saddle them with the expectation that they can do 20 or 30 major efforts and have some effect. Our efforts are too diffuse. There is a touching faith on the part of our members that their staff can do anything — and an almost reprehensible feeling on the staff’s part that they should do everything. There is, as yet, no sense of a coherent program on which we pacifists can unite in the interest of accomplishing a few things, even if not in the order each of us might privately prefer.

The other change in the peace movement is that there is now a great deal more sophistication regarding the complexities that are involved in the search for peace. We no longer assume history is made only in the United States and Europe. We know, in fact, that it is more likely to be made in the poverty-stricken countries which are the breeding ground of conflict. We know that peace isn’t to be achieved with declarations and treaties — it runs much deeper than that.

There is still a good many people who want simplified answers, who went to find a magic button that will make everything okay again. We get the feeling that if only we did the right thing, worked a little bit harder, we would achieve what is needed.

There is more sophistication now, by and large — but more despair as well.

Forest: What about the FOR’s name? “Fellowship” seems to be an archaic religious term and “reconciliation” an archaic political goal. If you could, would you change the FOR’s name, or any part of it?

No, though I detested the name myself when I first joined the staff. I came out of a religious setting in which “fellowship” was used as a verb. There was always talk about “fellowshipping together.”  For me it was like running your fingernails down a blackboard. And “reconciliation” seemed a weak word. But the words don’t bother me anymore. I’ve become very attached to them.

It seems to me the essence of the pacifist position is not the refusal to kill or to be part of any army but the very positive concept of a human society that is familial in nature. The human family. We are all interrelated. We humans are a fellowship.

And reconciliation has become, for me, very strong word. It doesn’t mean tolerating justice or the status quo. It does mean finding a common denominator between and among people of vastly different backgrounds and natures and possessions and all the rest.

Forest: Perhaps nothing has been more important than your work these past eight or ten years than the Vietnamese Buddhists and the nonviolent movements that has come out of their faith and suffering. I’ve heard you call yourself a “Baptist Buddhist” every now and then. Do you mean it?

There are two things crucial to me about the Buddhists, or perhaps I should say Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of Buddhism, which is been my main source of learning. One is the rejection of an arbitrary claim to knowledge of total truth.

I vividly recall what Thich Nhat Hanh said to a young woman in Santa Barbara who asked him what it meant to seek the Buddha and what happens when you find him. Nhat Hanh answered, “I am a Zen master — and, as you know, Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, ‘kill’ it, and go on in the search for truth.”

This is quite different from the idea that many Christians cling to — that they have a revealed truth, final and eternal, that you can’t deviate from.

The thing about such Buddhists as Thich Nhat Hanh is their openness to ideas and insights of other people, other faiths, whether religious, political, or whatever. They don’t think they have a monopoly on truth.

It is this sort of openness that draws me. In the past they took things from Confucianism and Taoism. They took what seemed good into their own faith, as they are now taking things from Christianity.

Forest: Earlier you mentioned that there is more sophistication in the peace movement now about the complexity of the problems we face. You added that there is also more despair. I know I sense this very much in this society. We know that certain things are wrong. We know the consequences will be disastrous. We wish to resist. We want to help form constructive alternatives. But we haven’t got the hope that makes response and resistance possible.

I agree. I’m tempted to say it was always that way, but that’s not adequate. When I was chairman of the housing cooperative in which we still live, how used to say, “During the day I work at writing tracts about how atomic bombs are about to in the world — and then I come home and talk with people about thirty-year mortgages!”

The problem of despair, I think, hits Americans harder than other people because we have been conditioned by two centuries of overcoming physical obstacles and enriching ourselves in the process, never encountering insoluble problems. Now we encounter problems that can’t be solved.

Our situation is vastly different from that of people in Europe and Indochina, people who have experienced defeat upon defeat in recent memory and have developed what some Europeans call a “theology of despair,” which is just another way of saying a theology of the cross.

One FOR member in Europe used to say, “You Americans think that the kingdom of God is coming on earth  through your work. We know that it is not. Have been through Hitler and the war.”

Personally, I can’t accept despair as some sort of basis. Despair may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get so despairing about the human prospect that you have no energy find solutions.

The reason there is so much despair, I think, is because of our inability to find handles for the various problems we face — ways of grabbing hold of the things in order to solve them. They’re so complex, so interrelated, so massive. People don’t see much relevance in doing small things.

Why set up a day care center — or try to improve housing — or even have a child — if the world is about to blow itself up?

Each person has to find a personal solution to that

A.J. Muste used to say, “All the really great things in history came as a surprise. Nobody predicted them.”

The grounds for hope are there but are terribly hard to see.

Do you remember FOR’s China campaign in 1954 and ’55? There’s a story we haven’t told very often because it was told to us in great confidence. But that was nearly twenty years ago.

There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged people to send Pres. Eisenhower small sacks of grain provided by the FOR with a message, “If your enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.” The surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface the project was an utter failure.

But then quite by accident we learned from someone staff on Eisenhower’s press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. [Quemoy and Matsu, islands off the east coast of China still occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese forces after the 1949 civil war on the mainland, were the site of a major confrontation between the Republic of China and Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Republic of China.] At the third meeting the president turn to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, “How many people do those grain bags had come in?” The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters. Eisenhower’s response was that if that many Americans were trying to find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t the time to bomb China. This proposal was vetoed.

Leonetti: And you learn that only by pure chance?

Pure chance! That’s the point. You do something and seem to fail —but in the process of failure you sometimes accomplish something else quite unexpected, something of greater importance.

History is full of esoteric little groups that live by themselves and, regardless of whatever happens outside, carry on with that particular witness and commitment. Pacifist do that in one sense. FOR members are a minute portion of the world’s population, and we strengthen and reinforce each other as best we can. But there’s another element to it. We really do have massive world problems and by our very best judgment they can wipe out civilization and the human race.

Perhaps this is exaggerated. They say others have said this before all through history. I reply that particular civilizations have been wiped out before, that ours is the first period in in history in which a global civilization has existed as well as the means of global destruction. When this civilization is wiped out, there won’t be another to take its place. Not on this planet.

Now we have a handful of people motivated to go on working despite hopelessness. But if we want to motivate a constituency large enough to affect the things that are necessary, then there has to be hope there, something to see and work toward, a belief that it can be achieved.

Forest: How do you inspire that?

I wish I knew.

Forest: At the recent FOR national conference in Wisconsin, you talked about the word “love” — a discredited word to many people. How do you locate that word in the vocabulary of peacemaking?

For a long time we tried to point out that there were different kinds of love — agape, eros, etc. — but that really doesn’t come across to most people. When you talk about love, people think of a very intimate sort of relationship, but that’s manifestly impossible with each of the billions of people alive today  — or even the one person who doing something extraordinary destructive in your view.

It seems to me that the three elements that are essential to an understanding of love, as we talk about it, are compassion, humility and understanding. Compassion in the sense of awareness, sensitivity and understanding of other persons and their weaknesses, even the ones you think are very strong. Their mortality, their limitations — the fact that they suffer in ways we don’t know about or understand. And humility in understanding just how narrow is the gap between people we regard as morally good — ourselves! — and the people whom we regard as morally bad — the ones who oppose us.

Milton Mayer has written about a Quaker meeting for worship in which A.J. Muste stood up and said, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all.” This statement became almost an obsession with Milton as he dug deeper and deeper into it.

You can’t get anywhere with it unless you realize that love means understanding and compassion — then it opens up. Compassion, not in the sense of lessening your opposition to Hitler and what he is doing, but compassion for a man who clearly had suffered terribly, who was terribly distorted, who had so little real happiness and joy.

The equivalent for us would be to say, “If I can I love Richard Nixon, I cannot love at all.”

Again, love means understanding  and compassion. You only have to look at one of the hundreds of recent pictures of the man to see the suffering that he’s going through, a suffering that he probably doesn’t yet understand — a man who doesn’t understand himself, his personality, or the reaction of people to him; a man who really feels that he was right, that he is being persecuted. You can only feel sorry for him. You can only feel compassion.

That’s the essence of pacifism for me. The realization that we are, as it’s put in the New Testament, all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. We have no right to be self-righteous, but only to be pitying, compassionate, helpful.

Of course we fail at this all the time. Pacifism is an aspiration, not an achievement. As one of the best pacifists I know — Cao Ngoc Phuong — put it, when asked if she were a pacifist: “Not yet.”

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