The Revolutionary Pacifism of Will Self posted by Richard Seymour

I never thought I'd encounter anything like this in Will Self, but it strikes me as an excellent argument as far as it goes. Chris Hall, interviewing Self about his book "Feeding Frenzy", gets this response on pacifism and war:

"CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They wanted to know why this position is marginalised by the media?

WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of armed force - they depend upon the notion of coercion at some level and it's very hard to find a state that hasn't had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To paraphrase Dubya, "anyone who isn't with us is against us", so if you're against all armed force you're going to be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won't even be conscious, there will be people who simply cannot hear what you're saying because it's so inimical to their idea of state authority.

I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I've got pacifistic inclination but I'm not a pacifist because what I couldn't find in my own mind was the answer to that perennial question: 'Ah, yes, but what would you have done when the Nazis were coming?' And as someone with Jewish blood I've always found that difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which makes it so wrong in so many different ways is.that it exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered with a similar kind of conditional question: 'But hang on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914 then the Nazis would never have come to power.'

So that to me pushes up the argument to let's just be pacifists now. Maybe that's the adequate moral response to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms - I get really angry in the street like we all do. I've now taken to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get absolutely furious because it's so dangerous. I'm a big guy and I'm a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don't do it. It seems to me that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in society where you decide that violence is not the solution to car incidents so there can be the same kind of decision at a macro level."


"Do You Want Some?" Will Self.

Like I say, as far as it goes it is a fine argument. But supposing we accept a different conditional. I am a pacifist and you aren't. Presumably, if you begin to bash my skull in, I wouldn't be out of my moral depth to send a shattering kick to your shins and, say, ruffle your hair up a bit. Hitler, who had few impressions of political and moral realities that were not offensive or merely banal, did understand the reality of political power:

"Only one thing would have stopped our movement--if our adversaries had understood its principle and, from the first day, had smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement."

Where did I put my Kalashnikov...?