Muste that his life’s work can be measured by such standards as these. Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved. The task of the revolutionary pacifist is spelled out more fully in the final paragraph of the essay. So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.” Never in American history have these thoughts been so tragically appropriate as today. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force.” Muste was insistent that pacifists “get our thinking focussed.” Their foremost task “is to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil - material and spiritual - this entails for the masses of men throughout the world…. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions they rebel far too little and too seldom. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to ‘social peace,’ though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. “In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.” “There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Muste explained the concept of revolutionary nonviolence that was the guiding principle of an extraordinary life. In a crucial essay written forty years ago, 1 A. I am sure that it would be more clear if it advocated a particular “political line.” After exploring these themes, I can suggest nothing more than the tentative remarks of the final paragraph. No doubt the essay would be more coherent were it limited to one or two of these themes. This essay touches on all of these questions: on Muste’s revolutionary pacifism and his interpretation of it in connection with the Second World War on the backgrounds of Japan’s imperial ventures on the Western reaction and responsibility and, by implication, on the relevance of these matters to the problems of contemporary imperialism in Asia. Worse still, there are very striking, quite distressing similarities between Japan’s escapades and our own - both in character and in rationalization - with the fundamental difference that Japan’s appeal to national interest, which was not totally without merit, becomes merely ludicrous when translated into a justification for American conquests in Asia. The American reaction to Japan’s aggressiveness was, in a substantial measure, quite hypocritical. There are several points that seem to me fairly clear, however. I still feel quite ambivalent about the matter. Does it survive this test? When I began working on this article I was not at all sure. The circumstances of the antifascist war subjected it to the most severe of tests. struggled.” I think that Muste’s revolutionary pacifism was, and is, a profoundly important doctrine, both in the political analysis and the moral conviction that it expresses. The essay was written for a memorial number of Liberation which, as the editor expressed it, “gathered together a series of articles that deal with some of the problems with which A. The title and subtitle of this essay may seem unrelated hence a word of explanation may be useful. On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War Noam Chomsky Liberation, September-October, 1967
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