Pacifism.
It's admirable. I think we all have to agree.
I have to disagree. Pacifism at its best is an amoral philosophy which sometimes crosses the line (often) and becomes immoral and evil.
First, pacifists tend to suffer from a common malady of any extremist ideologues. They see the world in black and white, with no shades of gray in which the world often operates. Violence and war is bad, so it is
always bad. There are times when war in unquestionably justified. In WWII we were attacked by the Japanese and on the European front we were fighting a clearly evil enemy in the Nazis. Letting the Japanese and Nazis control Asia in the case of the Japanese and Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the case of the Germans (while murdering the majority of Jews in the world) would have been a much greater wrong than fighting a war. Any war in which a country is attacked in an unprovoked attack, the attacked nation is justified in defending itself.
Second, the tendency to see things in such strong terms, "war and violence are evil" often results in a further tendency to see anyone who disagrees as evil. It definately results in a tendency to see the military and those who choose to serve as evil. I spent my first two years of high school in a Quaker school. I've seen this first hand when I joined the Army. I had kept up with some of my friends from the Friends School when I transferred out, after graduating from high school and returning there to speak with some friends in the next year (they were having a night dance or drama program) I was discussing future plans with a young lady I was very close with. When I told her I was leaving for Basic Training in a month, she turned on her heal and walked off mid-sentence. She also told some other friends nearby who then refused to even acknowlege my presence.
Pacifism if put into practice requires that we ignore evil. That we don't respond when attacked and provoked. That we let great evils go unchecked, and eventually, that we allow our society to be destroyed when a less "enlightened" nation decides to take advantage of our self-imposed weakness.
Heck, even the poster boy for pacifism so often "sainted" by most people, Mohatma Ghandi's own words can put the lie to pacifism as a moral philosophy. His first reaction when he heard about the Nazi's genocide of the Jews was that the Jews should simply peacefully demand their rights, then he changed his tune to they should all commit mass suicide and offer themselves willingly and peacefully to their murderers. About the only way one could be a less moral man is to outright join with the Nazis.
