1/6/2024 0 Comments Free Pacifist![]() ![]() But by failing to distance themselves from fascism, anti-war movements during World War II badly hurt their own cause. The 1930s were a time when “antiwar sentiment attained unprecedented popular scope,” according to the historian Hans Schmidt. Hitler hated Remarque in part because his book was a massive worldwide hit on its release in 1929. People who opposed the war ended up soaked in Nazi ideology and Nazi talking points, even if they didn’t start there.Īfter World War I, pacifism gained many adherents. The anti-war movement in the United States before World War II was thoroughly infiltrated with fascist sympathizers and fascist anti-Semitic propaganda. Lindbergh was not exactly a committed Nazi following Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Lindbergh claimed that Jewish people were pushing the United States into war, arguing: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” The stereotype of Jewish people as conspiratorial warmongering profiteers still has currency today in 2006, the actor Mel Gibson infamously claimed that “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Most infamously, the hero aviator Charles Lindbergh, the de facto leader of the anti-war movement in the United States during World War II, gave a virulently anti-Semitic speech in 1941. The anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald Winrod broadcast fiery speeches denouncing communists and warning, “ War never pays.” Homegrown fascists also used the language of pacifism. Ernest Lundeen to insert into the Congressional Record in 1937-1939. The German agent George Sylvester Viereck actually wrote speeches for anti-war Minnesota Sen. Pacifist religious denominations like Jehovah’s Witnesses were often sent to concentration camps.īut while they attacked domestic pacifism, Nazi propagandists encouraged it abroad, especially in the United States. The Nazis burned copies of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front and made owning it a crime. ![]() Anti-war activists and thinkers need to be consciously anti-fascist if they want to avoid being co-opted to the cause of violence, hatred, and war by both bad actors close to hand and authoritarian regimes abroad.Īdolf Hitler and his Nazi regime famously glorified militarism and hated pacifists-at home. But his original article, and the debate about it, has served to obscure the fact that unprincipled people, and leaders, sometimes do use pacifist and anti-war rhetoric as a shield. Orwell was right to reconsider: Principled pacifists aren’t fascists. Meanwhile, anti-war partisans have pointed out that Orwell recanted his use of the phrase and admitted that it was wrong to lump principled pacifists and fascists together. His with-me-or-against-me formulation has been wheeled out to argue for intervention ever since. “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist,” George Orwell famously wrote in his 1942 essay “ Pacifism and the War.” Orwell’s argument was straightforward anyone not helping the war effort against fascism was hindering it and therefore helping the Nazis. ![]()
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