Great powers paid price for `peace': history shows that the pacifist movement of the 1930s ultimately helped to usher in the horror of World War II by allowing rogue nations to rise to power unabated

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 | by Stephen Goode

Once again, nothing was done. Said Hitler at the time, no doubt smugly, accurately having read the pusillanimity of the West: "If the French had marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs."

It's an assessment with which many historians agree. Similarly, many historians believe that Japan might have been stopped in 1932 if Britain and the United States together had stood up against her aggression. And many argue Mussolini could have been nipped in the bud had France and Great Britain joined in combination to say "no" to the conquest of Abyssinia.

Why the failure to say "no"? Why the inability to act together for common defense? In part the war-weariness engendered by World War I was to blame. In part it was the the economic problems caused by the Great Depression. But a major player was the pacifist movement of the 1930s, and the havoc it created cannot be overestimated. Hitler, Mussolini and the military leaders of Japan took comfort in the pacifism of the Western nations and made cynical use of it to advance their own causes. Instead of bowing before the moral superiority the pacifists claimed for themselves, the aggressor nations interpreted pacifism as weakness and exploited it.

In February 1933 the venerable debating group known as the Oxford Union famously voted 275-153 in favor of a motion that declared that, "This House refuses to fight for King and country." Coming from students at a great university, noted Churchill, it was likely to plant "the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain" in Germany, Italy, Japan and with anyone else who wished Britain ill.

It wasn't just students who were pacifists. Writing to a party member running for office in early 1933, British Labour Party leader George Lansbury described what he would do if he held power: "I would close every recruiting station, disband the army and disarm the air force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world: `Do your worst."' Clement Attlee, who replaced Lansbury as head of Labour later that year, agreed: "We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament."

Prominent English clerics joined in. During the Manchurian crisis, three pastors--the Revs. Herbert Grey, Maude Royden and Dick Sheppard--offered to go to Manchuria and place themselves unarmed between the opposing forces.

William Temple, the Anglican archbishop of York, observed that in his opinion Hitler was making "a great contribution to the secure establishment of peace." The Methodist Rev. Donald Soper averred that "pacifism contains a spiritual force strong enough to repel an invader," a message that perhaps the Manchurians and Abyssinians might have made use of had they known it before the Japanese and Italian invasion of their countries. Sheppard, who had wanted to be a human shield in Manchuria, later founded the Peace Pledge Union, a group that collected signatures from well-known literary figures who had concluded that peace should be given a chance. Among those who signed were Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain.