Setting the question

Firstly, posing the question when Poland has already been invaded, after the annexation of the Sudetenland and once Hitler’s eyes are on France and Britain, does instil a sense of dramatic emergency. However, like asking the gladiator how they propose to act when the starved lions enter the ring and have just killed a couple of their fellows, the question comes rather late if pitched in 1939 or later.

The broader historical context cannot be ignored: the recent First World War (WWI), the harshness of the Versailles Treaty for Germany, the post-1929 economic crisis and ensuing tide of nationalist protectionism, as well as the wider but ongoing and hungry expansionist imperialism of Europe’s Great Powers.Footnote ¹⁵ The Hitler question is set in an already tense and militarised scenario. This delivers a sense of urgency and crisis, but the extent to which militarism and organised violence produce crises like 1939 in the first place should not be overlooked.Footnote ¹⁶ The question confronting Paris and London by then is serious indeed, but the French and British governments were already implicated in multiple ways in the escalating tensions upstream.

A more wholistic pacifist approach might have led to different circumstances by 1939 to begin with. This points to the wider set of priorities that pacifists tend to advance around ‘positive peace’, treating all parties with dignity, and working together to sink the foundations of a stable and just peace.Footnote ¹⁷ Concretely, the traumas of WWI might have been addressed more collectively and with a less vindictive victors’ treaty; the economic crisis might have been used less to whip up international tensions and more to develop greater international solidarities; and the violent engines of imperialism might have been reigned in. One could furthermore ask how Hitler might have been resisted differently and more effectively before 1939, including both up to 1933 and thereafter.

Pitching the question in what had become the context in 1939, however, helps stage WWII as an unavoidable ‘tragedy’,Footnote ¹⁸ obscuring the foreseeable adverse effects of antecedent policies (Versailles, militarism, imperialism), presenting Allied leaders as lacking agency and options to respond any differently, and thus excusing the surrender to the war.

War to stop Hitler

Secondly, if organised violence proved part of the solution to ultimately defeating the Nazis, the threat of it did not prevent Hitler’s rise to power in the first place, nor did it protect Jews from genocide.Footnote ¹⁹ Military force also failed to prevent Hitler from taking almost all of Europe and North Africa for the first few years of the war, which could have become a more permanent outcome had the Nazis mastered the atomic bomb first.Footnote ²⁰ Either way, violence and military strategy did eventually bring Hitler down, but only after a colossally devastating global war and the Holocaust. ‘It is also worth remembering’, Brian Martin notes, that the industrial-scale ‘extermination of the Jews and other stigmatised groups did not begin until after the war began’, the war having provided ‘a brutalising environment’ as well as ‘a cover’ to implement the ‘Final Solution’.Footnote ²¹

Furthermore, the dominant memory of war against the Nazis has generated plenty of moral posturing that deserves questioning. The USA, UK, and USSR did not deploy their military might to slow down the genocide by, for instance, striking the rail network, as they could have done, in light of their growing awareness of it.Footnote ²² Indeed, it was not to stop the genocide that the Allies did intervene, even if effectively putting an end to it has helped remember WWII as a just war. For that matter, the states that defeated the Nazis have turned a blind eye to plenty of other genocides, such as of Armenians in 1919, by Stalin in the 1930s, or in Cambodia in the 1970s, without launching military interventions.Footnote ²³

Moreover, the war that defeated Hitler was ‘not against the ruthless system of fascism per se’, but ‘against German military and political expansion’.Footnote ²⁴ Plenty of other fascist and sub-fascist regimes have been left unthreatened or even propped up by those who defeated Hitler.Footnote ²⁵ Also notable is that ‘the Allies systematically returned Nazis and ruling class collaborators to positions of power in post-war Western Germany’.Footnote ²⁶ Some pacifists furthermore observe that although war did defeat Hitler on the battlefield, (neo)fascism is back now.Footnote ²⁷ Besides, among the biggest supporters of fascism today, and indeed during WWII in both Germany and occupied territories, are those ‘who [laud] military methods’.Footnote ²⁸ That is of course not to say that all advocates of military action are fascists, but that what Cady calls ‘warism’Footnote ²⁹ is not particularly primed to prevent the emergence of fascism. Rather, warism and fascism tend to thrive alongside each other.

Inspired by Peck, Lindqvist, and others, Naomi Klein argues that although the Nazis are remembered as exceptionally evil, their regime was in several ways only a continuation of European practices in the colonies, just on a new scale, more industrialised, and unleashed onto fellow Europeans. Defeating Hitler was righteous indeed, but what should not be ignored (however convenient) is the extent to which he was inspired, in the methods of repression and in his militarism, by American, British, and other European colonial projects. Hence the lack of surprise at the Holocaust by those familiar with colonialism, such as Du Bois and Césaire. The rise of Hitler happened in a broader militaristic and violent colonial context in which the Allies were actively complicit.Footnote ³⁰

Again, therefore, one might ponder what could have been, had a different approach been adopted in the inter-war years to resist the rise of fascism. Allied militarism did not prevent it. Nonviolence, widely coordinated as a method of resistance (including within Germany) and in the full sense of also working towards positive peace and common emancipation, might have charted a path different to the one that brought the Nazis to power, and Europe to war.Footnote ³¹

Non-violent resistance against the Nazis

Thirdly, it is in fact misleading to remember the successful defeat of the Nazis as down only to military force, because there were in fact plenty of examples of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis whose role should not be underplayed. Perhaps the most exhaustive study of these, by Jacques Semelin,Footnote ³² recounts the wide repertoire of methods of civil resistance that were used through the war.Footnote ³³

Across the territories occupied by the Nazis or governed by their sympathisers, numerous Nazi policies and initiatives were thwarted by public institutions and state administrators from low-ranking civil servants to magistrates and royalty; by dissenting churches and clergy; by industrial strikes, sabotage, and go-slows; and by particular sectors such as doctors (the Netherlands), miners (Belgium, France), school teachers (and parents – Norway), or the entire education sector (Poland). Popular initiatives from the ground up also established solidarity networks that protected Jews and helped them escape (Bulgaria, Denmark, France). National commemorations became vectors of public defiance. Clandestine newspapers were organised and circulated. Plenty of nonviolent resistance happened and contributed to ultimately defeating the Nazis and resisting the Holocaust. Even within Germany, wives and relatives of Jewish men managed to get them liberated (the Rosenstrasse protest), and churches successfully stopped the systematic extermination of the ‘mentally ill’.

Most of these actions, however, were improvised, and rarely reached a large scale. Despite that, they met some successes. Where they failed, such failures might have resulted from ‘deficiencies in the way the campaigns were waged’, not the ‘intrinsic nature of nonviolent resistance’ necessarily,Footnote ³⁴ nor the ruthlessness of the Nazis in repressing resistance.Footnote ³⁵ And just because the Nazis did implement many brutal policies does not mean the cause was an antecedent failure to resist violently.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, just as effective military responses require coordinated training and investment, so too do nonviolent strategies.Footnote ³⁷ ‘Skilful use of physical violence’ might be more effective than ‘poorly executed’ nonviolence, but the converse is also true (and discussed further below): well-planned nonviolence, including with sufficient training, can be more effective than poorly executed violence.Footnote ³⁸ Better coordinated nonviolent resistance on an even larger scale might have had an even bigger impact.

Nonviolent methods work differently than violent ones. Instead of physically overpowering or killing opponents, they address them as human beings, looking to sap their will to exact violence by eroding their rationalisations for the violence they help inflict. Meeting German soldiers nonviolently could have affected conflict dynamics. They would no longer feel physically threatened. Some might have still killed with zeal regardless, but to assume all occupying soldiers would continue killing unarmed resisters would be to assume ‘that most German soldiers had a special penchant for inhumanity’.Footnote ³⁹ Either way, how nonviolent resistance works when it does is unpacked and discussed further below. Here, what should be noted is firstly that there were plenty of examples of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis, but secondly that they were largely piecemeal, reactive, and neither planned nor coordinated and funded anywhere near as much as violent resistance was.

Besides, Hitler was expecting violent military encounters and was prepared for them. Resisting differently could have outmanoeuvred him. There are indeed reports that Nazi generals preferred violent resistance and were relieved whenever any nonviolent resistance, which they were frustrated by, turned violent: they now knew what to do.Footnote ⁴⁰ The war machine – the training, the propaganda, the military strategy, etc. – prepared them for it. Therefore, those who engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience were often ruthlessly repressed, but so were those resisting violently. Violence was how the Nazis confronted most resistance. The question is whether violence was the only or the most effective method to respond to theirs.

As for nonviolent resistance to the Holocaust specifically, the obvious challenge here is that the policy was expressly to eradicate Jews. Resisting a genocide through nonviolent sacrifices can come across as insane complicity in mass suicide. But the responsibility for potential nonviolent resistance should not be assumed to fall on Jewish shoulders alone. Plenty of non-Jews could, and did, join in on efforts to resist, disrupt, and denounce the genocide. It is nonetheless worth noting that the policy ‘was carefully designed to thwart resistance of all kinds’.Footnote ⁴¹ One cynical ingredient was to let at least some Jews hold hopes of survival, allowing some to remain in denial to some degree and until it was too late.Footnote ⁴² Another was to ensure that every cog of the Holocaust machinery was ‘isolated from full responsibility’.Footnote ⁴³ The Nazi regime also made efforts to seclude the mass killing from the wider population.Footnote ⁴⁴

Public opinion

Fourthly, therefore, even in the context of Nazi Germany, public opinion played a non-negligible role. The Nazis were mindful of it,Footnote ⁴⁵ not least since they had never secured an electoral majority in the first place.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hitler was well aware of the dependency of dictators on some degree of popular support.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Nazis knew also that executing a policy as large-scale as the extermination of millions of Jews made them dependent on third party cooperation, including from non-Nazi elites, administrators, and a substantial proportion of the wider population.Footnote ⁴⁸ This seems to have restrained them to some degree until the start of the war, which, when it came, generated dynamics that provided a markedly more genocide-enabling context.Footnote ⁴⁹

There are several examples in the 1930s when antisemitic Nazi policies were backtracked when they alienated the public for varying reasons, just like the systematic extermination of the ‘mentally ill’ had to stop in the face of growing public outrage.Footnote ⁵⁰ Kristallnacht, the very public orgy of violence ignited by the Nazis against Jews for one terrifying night, did not happen until 1938, and Hitler quickly realised that such public violence had to be a ‘final fling’.Footnote ⁵¹ Thereafter, Jewish policy was executed mainly through organs of state, and German people were exposed to as little as possible of the Holocaust – as if proceeding more visibly might risk hindering it.

Independently of the Nazis’ cold-blooded planning, however, a significant factor in explaining the Holocaust is also the ubiquity of the Jews’ marginalisation across Europe at the time. Antisemitism has a long history and was particularly widespread in the leadup to WWII. Jews were thus marginalised in the sense both that they were discriminated against and often reviled, and that (partly as a result) their collective life was often relatively detached from that of other demographic groups. This made it easier to look away or be unaware of or indifferent to their plight. Where Jews were less marginalised (Denmark, Bulgaria, Rosenstrasse), more survived.Footnote ⁵² Where the Nazis depended on the collaboration of people who felt genuinely concerned for Jews, nonviolent resistance was more effective.Footnote ⁵³

In short, public opinion played a substantial role even in the Nazi context. Among the reasons this is worth noting is that public opinion is theorised as important in campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance, as discussed further below.

Non-Nazi Germans

Before turning to a wider set of pacifist rejoinders, a fifth and final observation needs to be made about the specific historical framing of the Hitler question. Put simply, pitting the fight as ‘against the Nazis’ obscures the many non-Nazi Germans who were victims of Nazism, too – both direct victims, and victims of the war that consumed them. Hitler and his fellow Nazis might have been responsible and thus deserving of retaliatory violence, but what of, say, the German conscript, or indeed of the dissident in Dresden?Footnote ⁵⁴ ‘Fighting the Nazis’ turned to fighting ‘the Germans’, ‘busting dams and drowning large numbers’, and carpet-bombing urban populations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Conscripts and civilians thus found themselves lumped in with ‘the Nazis’ and targeted accordingly.

War does that. It dehumanises. It thrives on, and then reproduces, binary identities that get cemented in blood and trauma. Yet there are humans on all sides, which nonviolence is better equipped to treat with dignity. ‘Most of the German soldiers in WWII’, Holmes observes, ‘probably were no worse as persons than their American, British, and Russian counterparts’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Allies portrayed ‘an entire population as evil’ because of the actions of a substantial (and powerful) minority.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is a form of ‘collective punishment’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pacifists have long decried dynamics like these, and how they are galvanised by war.

Many pacifisms

Firstly, the Hitler question often comes with an assumption that pacifism stands for an absolute rejection of violence in all scenarios. It does not take much research into the pacifist tradition to realise this is a misunderstanding, and that this characterisation applies to some pacifists only. Like any other ideological tradition, pacifism comes in many varieties. Nuclear pacifists, for example, agree that war against the Nazis was justified, but oppose war in the nuclear age because of the unfathomably catastrophic yet predictable consequences of nuclear war (which, as Pelopidas shows, was averted on several occasions during the Cold War more out of sheer luck rather than careful strategic oversight).Footnote ⁵⁹ Along these lines, Holmes insists that there is ‘no inconsistency in holding’ that WWII might have been just but that other wars have not met the threshold since.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ryan furthermore notes that out of thousands of wars that can be considered, there is consensus only on WWII as being a truly just war – and even this consideration does not include the millions of Bangladeshis that died from Churchill’s famine, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the failure to prevent the Holocaust.Footnote ⁶¹

Either way, some pacifists oppose organised violence because they see war as immoral, others on more pragmatic grounds because they consider it ultimately ineffective or strategically counterproductive. Contingent pacifists are close to the just war tradition but reckon that hardly any war has truly met all the necessary criteria articulated by that tradition. Environmental pacifists frame their concerns about war especially on its ecological consequences. More broadly, pacifists also articulate concerns about the wider war system, the military–industrial complex, arms races, and the dynamics of militarism (including the constitutive element of war discussed below). There are, in short, many pacifisms, and pacifism amounts to much more than just stubborn principled objection to this and every possible war.Footnote ⁶²

Pacifism is also sometimes confused with, sometimes deliberately pictured and dismissed as, passivity or even cowardice. Critics sometimes denounce pacifism as simply letting war happen, ignoring the sober reality of the challenge posed. A classic WWII equivalent of this move is the retrospective ridiculing of British ‘appeasement’ policy – again, setting the question rather late and leaving the historical context unquestioned and oversimplified. It anyway does not take much digging into pacifism to realise that caricaturing it as passivity or cowardice is inaccurate.Footnote ⁶³ Pacifists are very much concerned about organised violence, committed to understanding its drivers, and working to reduce it. They are just not convinced that the best way to do so is by confronting it with more violence. Nor do they necessarily lack courage in confronting it. Numerous pacifists have put their bodies on the line, facing persecution and even death. But ‘believing something is worth dying for’ is not the same as ‘believing something is worth killing for’,Footnote ⁶⁴ and there are some forms of resistance that brave pacifists would rather die than commit.

Nor is advocating for nonviolence the same as defaulting to ‘conventional politics’, even if the latter ‘is usually nonviolent in this limited sense’. Nonviolence ‘typically lies outside […] regularised patterns of political behaviour’. It is often ‘novel’ in some way, sometimes illegal, usually ‘carries with it an element of risk’, and it is ‘often exercised’ precisely ‘where the standard response might widely be expected to be the use or threat of physical force’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pacifism does not necessarily stand for some deluded insistence to keep using established democratic institutions and practices of diplomacy. Rather, it usually involves a search for creative, perhaps unconventional, often disruptive responses to the sedimented paths that so often lead to war.

Pacifism therefore has much more to offer than the stubborn and moralising refusal to respond to violence that the Hitler question tends to assume. The problem of collective violence is one that pacifists approach with eyes wide open, but also with a willingness to review typical responses to it, to question dominant assumptions about it, and to consider seemingly counter-intuitive yet potentially effective and innovative methods to reduce it.

Effectiveness of non-violent resistance

Secondly, it is indeed worth reflecting on how nonviolence operates, and whether and how it can be effective especially against particularly ruthless foes. Discussions about the relative effectiveness of violence and nonviolence can be frustrating. Martin, for instance, complained in 1987 that ‘the use of different criteria to judge nonviolence and violence is a regular feature of debates on these issues’, and that ‘a single failure’ is often ‘used to reject nonviolence’, but ‘repeated failures’ of violence, of which there are many, ‘are never enough to reject’ it.Footnote ⁶⁶ To be fair, sometimes it is advocates of nonviolence who are accused of bias with their own choices of case studies.Footnote ⁶⁷ More generally, historical examples can always be found when one’s preferred method worked, and when the alternative one failed.

Since Martin expressed these frustrations, however, a growing volume of scholarship has been rigorously examining this question. Perhaps the most groundbreaking contribution was the publication of Chenoweth and Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works.Footnote ⁶⁸ Surveying 323 cases of violent and nonviolent resistance across the world from 1900 to 2006, they found that, although (importantly) neither method guarantees success, nonviolent resistance was successful two times more frequently than violent resistance, including when the opponent is a ruthless autocratic regime. Moreover, when it does succeed, nonviolent resistance tends to beget societies more respectful of democratic values and human rights than when violence succeeds. And while nonviolence does not guarantee that no violence or death will be suffered by the resistance, there is evidence to show that nonviolence reduces the number of civilian casualties.Footnote ⁶⁹

Chenoweth and Stephan’s work has attracted some criticisms and generated considerable scholarship building on it and its associated dataset. On the whole, the empirical finding that nonviolence is effective, and apparently substantially more than violence, appears to hold.Footnote ⁷⁰ There is ongoing debate on whether nonviolent resistance campaigns are more or less effective when accompanied by a more ‘radical’ or violent ‘flank’, but, taken as a whole, the scholarship on this remains inconclusive.Footnote ⁷¹ There is also considerable and ongoing debate over the potentially noteworthy effectiveness of methods that are somewhere near the middle of the spectrum (often referred to as ‘unarmed collective violence’), such as property destruction and street rioting.Footnote ⁷² But this debate, too, is overall inconclusive to date, and anyway the kind of ‘violence’ that this amounts to falls a long way short of intentional killing, let alone on an industrial scale as in war.

Either way, this expanding research on civil resistance tends to focus on domestic opposition, not inter-state war, which is what the Hitler question evokes. Emerging during the Cold War, however, has also been literature making a case for the latter. Often termed ‘civilian-based defence’ (otherwise ‘social’ or ‘nonviolent’ defence), its proponents have called for governments to invest, en masse, in training entire populations in the methods of nonviolent dissent to prepare to resist, and possibly deter, international aggression and invasion.Footnote ⁷³ Without committing to such training (which would anyway, but notably, cost a fraction of typical defence spending), it might be unreasonable to expect nonviolent resistance to an invading army to be more effective than untrained, unequipped civilians taking up arms, let alone a fully-equipped standing army.Footnote ⁷⁴ Just as organised violence requires mass training, so does nonviolent defence.Footnote ⁷⁵

No country yet has faced potential invasion fully prepared to resist it primarily, or even solely, with nonviolent defence. Among the examples that come closest and are often mentioned in the literature is Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which nearly succeeded but ultimately did not, and which happened without upstream mass training and preparation. Also mentioned in the literature is Lithuania as the Soviet regime was collapsing: Moscow did try to send troops, Lithuanians resisted nonviolently (again, largely improvised), and in this case, ultimately the foreign troops retreated. More broadly, most of the autocratic communist regimes that collapsed in 1989 – regimes that were installed following Soviet military occupations during WWII – did so in the face of relatively improvised, large-scale, mostly nonviolent civil resistance. Nonviolence has also been deployed since, sometimes successfully, to resist repeated attempts by the Kremlin to capture, not by invasion but by multiple other means short of kinetic warfare, the political leadership of former Soviet satellite states, with mixed results. And actually, there were dozens of examples of nonviolent resistance to Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but – importantly – these happened only alongside a full-scale military response, and the latter quickly absorbed all the attention, efforts, and investments.Footnote ⁷⁶

While there is thus no clean empirical example of nonviolent defence alone against an invading army, what these cases do illustrate is how civilian-based defence would be an extension of domestic civil disobedience. At the same time, two overlapping but somewhat distinct phases would need to be projected to resist potential invasion nonviolently: resisting the actual invasion, and then, should that fail, resisting the occupation. Indeed, should coordinated and large-scale nonviolent resistance not stop an invasion, it can still make an occupied population ungovernableFootnote ⁷⁷ – and the threat of that could have a deterrent effect in the first place.Footnote ⁷⁸

How would it work? After all, nonviolent methods do at first appear counter-intuitive, which is one reason why its critics have accused it of being foolish, even suicidal. How then has nonviolence been effective when it has, and how would it work against an invading army? Although historical examples of the latter are limited, there are plenty of examples of nonviolent resistance against occupations and generally unwanted and unscrupulous regimes, including against the Nazis, that have been reflected upon by the scholarship. In turn, these examples can help understand how nonviolent defence could play out against not just the second but also the first phase of an invasion, even if for the moment this can only consist of (at best) informed projections and counter-factual speculation.Footnote ⁷⁹

It is worth recalling first that the repertoire of nonviolent methods is actually very broad. Gene Sharp famously listed 198 methods ranging from symbolic protests (speeches, petitions, posters, leaflets, marches, picketing, teach-ins) to non-cooperation (consumer boycotts, refusals to pay, industrial or general strikes, boycotting elections, slow compliance) to more confrontational intervention (civil disobedience, hunger strikes, sit-ins, nonviolent occupations).Footnote ⁸⁰ Others have been tried since Sharp produced his classification,Footnote ⁸¹ and the internet has opened even more possibilities.Footnote ⁸² This broad variety means that the methods chosen to resist can be adapted to circumstances for greater effectiveness: pressure can be escalated; less risky methods can be preferred when more appropriate; new tactics can be creatively devised in different contexts. One of the reasons systematic training enhances the effectiveness of nonviolence is that it exposes those being trained to plenty of historical examples, successful and not, for inspiration and reflection.

As for why such tactics can be effective, nonviolence theory since Gene Sharp has stressed that every ruler needs consent or compliance from a sizeable or critical section of its population. To that extent, power is granted not by, but to the ruler. By the same token, that consent or compliance can also be withdrawn, and that is what nonviolent resistance can target. Ruling regimes depend on some degree of popular support and on various agents to administer their policies.Footnote ⁸³

From the Nuremberg trials, Holmes for instance notes, ‘we should know that the key to understanding the horrors nations perpetrate isn’t the evil of the occasional Hitlers of this world’, but ‘rather the dedication of functionaries who serve them, and of the millions of ordinary persons like ourselves whose cooperation is essential to the success of their enterprise’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nonviolence speaks directly to such people, bidding them to withdraw their consent and agency. In turn, every time a cog of the machinery of oppression or occupation stops turning, it further illustrates the dependence of the ruler(s) on these cogs.

As for wider popular opinion, as mentioned above, even Hitler was mindful of his dependency on some degree of popular support. Even in a ruthless regime, that support can be withdrawn, and that withdrawal expressed. Indeed, those who have lived through totalitarian regimes, including Nazi occupations, have noted how empowering it was for them to liberate themselves from the oppressive regime mindset they had internalised, to live the truth and no longer in fear, and to express this even through symbolic action.Footnote ⁸⁵ An oppressive regime becomes vulnerable to collapse when people lose fear.

Nonviolence does not seek to overpower with military force. It addresses opponents as human beings, without threatening their physical integrity, but nonetheless insistently resisting the violence and repression those opponents are playing a part in. To the extent that nonviolence expects violence from the oppressor, it uses it for ‘moral’ or ‘political jiujitsu’ (or ‘backfire effect’), turning it against the oppressor by making a spectacle of the further injustice thereby inflicted.Footnote ⁸⁶

Confronting a violent opponent nonviolently is always risky (hence courageous). Remaining nonviolent in the face of violence requires substantial self-control (another reason why training is important), not least since there is (just like violence) no guarantee it will work. But when it works, it does so in part because it troubles the oppressors and those on whose support they depend – if not the Hitler at the top, at least perhaps the conscript instructed to continue to repress violently despite the strict nonviolence of the resistance, as well as the wider population observing the spectacle. As such, precisely what is counter-intuitive about nonviolent resistance is partly why it can be effective. When dehumanised opponents address agents of oppression with human dignity, without physically threatening those deployed to repress them (often violently), without seeking to physically overpower them, yet insisting nonetheless with their resistance despite the violence, this disturbs the reasoning with which those agents of oppression hitherto justified their role.

Violent dissenters are easy to dehumanise. It is much harder when opponents remain nonviolent. Whereas violent resistance pulls the pillars of a regime more firmly together and provides it with evidence with which to scare the broader public, nonviolent resistance pulls these pillars apart, sowing doubt among those on whom the regime is dependent, and eroding its arguments that the resistance is a threat to their life.Footnote ⁸⁷

This is also partly why Gandhi’s campaign against British colonial rule succeeded. In fact, from the Amritsar massacre to the Bengali famine, the colonial regime was not particularly clement.Footnote ⁸⁸ But the nonviolent resistance orchestrated by Gandhi steadily eroded British support for colonial rule. It exposed its violence and illegitimacy. Gandhi’s political jiujitsu pulled apart the pillars of colonial rule.

In any case, and in short, no method is ever guaranteed to succeed or fail, but the empirical evidence is increasingly demonstrating that nonviolent resistance can be effective, including against unscrupulous foes. Therefore, enough accumulating research suggests that it is not a foregone conclusion that a coordinated campaign of nonviolent resistance by entire populations trained in nonviolent defence and resistance would have failed against Hitler. Plenty of spontaneous nonviolent resistance played a role already, as discussed above, so what if entire populations had been fully trained upstream? Even if such an observation can only be counter-factual speculation, such speculation does help critically re-examine ‘claims of past impossibility’Footnote ⁸⁹ such as that WWII was the only way in which Hitler could have been stopped.

War’s constitutiveness

Thirdly, often (at best) overlooked (and at worst consciously embraced) by advocates of military methods is the constitutive impact of organised violence.Footnote ⁹⁰ War transforms its agents in the process. It gives renewed vitality and ultimately further embeds what some have called the ‘military–industrial complex’ or the ‘war system’.Footnote ⁹¹ It entrenches a militarised political economy and a warist political culture that in turn make war more tempting as a policy option (because prepared and able) and more likely (because it threatens others who will be tempted to join in risky arms races).Footnote ⁹² War also tends to generate pressures towards stricter hierarchies.Footnote ⁹³ Then there is the social and psychological effect of training masses of (primarily) men to kill.Footnote ⁹⁴ Wars brutalise and traumatise the many people they absorb, leaving many of them prone to default to violent responses and mindsets not just during wars, but also long after they have ended. Focusing only on the act of war occludes all these ways in which war-building corrodes and transforms the societies investing in it.

Ahead of WWII, pacifist Bart de Ligt was worried that the prospect of war with Germany was already causing ‘a kind of Prussification of the universe’ and the degradation of ‘civilizing values’ such as ‘liberty’, ‘toleration’, and ‘the respect for human dignity’.Footnote ⁹⁵ At the end of the war, Muste deplored how ‘the Western world’ was ‘sick’ with an ‘illness’ that is ‘mental and spiritual’, a combination of expansionism, militarism, and civilising hubris.Footnote ⁹⁶ The war certainly did entrench a ‘permanent war economy’ with high military spending and, now, the new looming threat of nuclear war.Footnote ⁹⁷ WWII transformed the countries it consumed into terrifying war machines.

Moreover, the industrial base needed to wage war, even if partly justified so that ‘we’ can better fight ‘them’, will rarely find itself bound by any such loyalties. Industrial heavyweights based in Allied countries, for example, did not appear particularly phased by geopolitical allegiances. American corporations were for instance happy to trade with the Nazis and profit from German industry and militarism deep into the war.Footnote ⁹⁸ Defence industries justified as essential to repel enemies have a long history of openness to trading with whoever is interested in their products, whatever their human rights record or whichever side of any geopolitical fence they sit on. Therefore, not only is warism corrosive and constitutive for the societies investing in it, it also does not stop at national boundaries or allegiances, but will spread contagiously.

The sums expended globally on the defence industry are colossal.Footnote ⁹⁹ Spending even just a fraction of these on nonviolent defence methods instead would have a very different constitutive impact on the societies concerned. As Martin puts it, instead of only asking which of violent or nonviolent methods can be effective against a ruthless opponent, a ‘better question’ might be: ‘What “defence system” – violent or nonviolent – stimulates the creation of ruthless regimes?’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When deciding what defence method to invest in, therefore, the constitutive impact of that decision ought to be borne in mind, too.

Controllability of violence

Fourthly and relatedly, those addressing pacifists with the Hitler question tend to assume that the application of retaliatory violence can be controlled, perhaps like a well-managed ‘police raid’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Military planning, including nuclear strategy, similarly rests on the assumption that military operations can be commanded and controlled.Footnote ¹⁰² But as Ryan argues, war ‘is less like a police action than an urban riot’, absorbing its actors in its momentum.Footnote ¹⁰³ Sheer luck, rather than genuine ‘command’ or ‘control’, has played a determining role in more military outcomes than might be comfortable to recall.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In any case, how effective the application of organised violence proves to be depends less on the capacity to inflict it than on how those to whom it is applied respond. They might respond with compliance, or resistance.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Their response cannot be stage-managed or planned. Indeed, in reality, violence often triggers counter-violence, generating a cycle of violence that is prone to spin out of control.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Pacifists also often return to arguments about the continuity of means and ends.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For many pacifists, it is foolhardy to accept unquestioningly that (to put it simply) ‘good ends justify bad means’. Rather, when violent means are adopted for a laudable end, means often come to dominate and take a life of their own. If a just peace really is the aim, then just and peaceful means – nonviolent means – might be more appropriate than organised violence to reach it.

Moreover, war has multiple impacts beyond whether it leads to the achievement of its original strategic aims. Civilians die. Entire populations are dehumanised (as with the non-Nazi Germans above). Cities are destroyed. Deep traumas are generated that victims and perpetrators will carry for the rest of their lives. It is expensive, thus coming at a substantial opportunity cost.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The focus on the battlefield often comes to the detriment of other challenges, such as socio-economic priorities, for example. Often overlooked and underestimated too are the widespread, multifaceted, and profound damages caused by late modern warfare on our planet and the life it sustains.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ All that is a lot of ‘collateral’ damage for a method ostensibly deployed for much more limited aims.

It is tempting to imagine that organised violence can remain limited and contained, that like a tool it can be applied to a discreet task and then stopped. The frequent reality, as indeed proved to be the case with WWII, is that its application tends to ripple out and bleed enduringly onto multiple other dynamics, and before long generates a widening cluster of challenges that can no longer be managed from a military command centre.

Romantic views of violence

Fifthly and finally, it is worth asking who tends to invoke the Hitler objection in the first place. Just war theory, for example, does like to mobilise WWII as a favourite example to justify the virtue of violence in certain geopolitical contexts, pitching just war thinking as a more realistic and pragmatic position between pacifist utopianism and dog-eat-dog realism.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But the analysis of the realities of geopolitics that it articulates tends to be located in a particular context and for particular audiences – namely the USA, the UK, and the wider West. The Hitler example, in other words, is a go-to case study in a literature produced by scholars primarily socialised in the north Atlantic alliance that emerged on the winning side of WWII. Similarly to the ‘trolley problem’ and the ‘ticking bomb problem’,Footnote ¹¹¹ the Hitler question produces a scenario with which those who can otherwise portray their intentions as peace-preferring can go on to argue that nonetheless, unfortunately, sometimes, cold realism must take precedence and violence is simply the only option. It just happens that the Hitler example does in reality get mobilised rather frequently alongside such seemingly theoretical arguments about rare and extreme cases to justify recurring and ongoing Western military adventures, and that it helps present such ventures as reluctant but necessary interventions. War propaganda can be counted on to soon enough explicitly compare the enemy leader as ‘another Hitler’.Footnote ¹¹² Put differently, the Hitler question often helps present and remember Western wars past and present as just – whether in Kosovo,Footnote ¹¹³ Iraq,Footnote ¹¹⁴ Afghanistan,Footnote ¹¹⁵ Syria,Footnote ¹¹⁶ or Ukraine.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Reproduced in the process are rather partial memories of WWII. The war is remembered through the war rooms, the strategies, the men who operated the war machine, and the heroic soldiers on the battlefield. Often overlooked is how that violence and its aftermath are remembered by other constituencies – the traumatised or mutilated conscripts on all sides, their families and relatives, those who starved away from the front, the conscientious objectors, the colonised populations swept into this White European civil war. Overlooked too are some of the wider repercussions of WWII that affect international politics and cause industrial-scale suffering and insecurity to this day, such as the turbocharged entrenchment of multiple military–industrial complexes, the nuclear arms race, and the fertilisation of militant settler colonial Zionism. Also cast aside are potential introspections that might expose wider responsibilities and complicities in for example racism, antisemitism, colonialism, and militarism. The Hollywoodesque lesson widely drawn from WWII is that, when a specific cabal of people who embody some kind of ultimate evil (e.g., Hitler, the Nazis) becomes too threatening, the forces of good need to be prepared and ready to fight and kill. WWII thus gets remembered as a hypermasculine struggle where good men fought valiantly for a few dramatic years to protect their motherland, their families, and their values. The Hitler question emerges from and reproduces such romanticised, partial, patriarchal, and militaristic memories and imaginaries.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The other main but different setting where the Hitler question is mobilised against pacifism is among dissidents debating the relative merits of violence and nonviolence.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Although the focus of such discussions is not on inter-state war as such but on tactics for domestic dissent, the Nazi case, in those contexts, usually sits alongside examples of unsuccessful nonviolent dissent as a seemingly particularly telling illustration of pacifist folly. The relative merits of violence and nonviolence in domestic resistance are discussed above already and indeed elsewhere,Footnote ¹²⁰ and questions of revolutionary violence are not the primary focus of this article, but worth noting here is that advocates of both violent dissent and just war share these questionable assumptions that violence is effective and can be controlled, as well as similarly romanticised memories of historical examples of violent victories.

What is also common among many advocates of violence is a claim that violence, if only in the cases they put forward, is or was simply ‘the only option’. Such a conclusion, however, seems no less absolutist than the alleged pacifist refusal to countenance it. As discussed above, the research into the theory and practice of nonviolence suggests other options are often available. Also questionable, however, is the assumption that violence is actually an option that, even if only as a last resort, is effective. This overlooks a messy empirical record. Violence, in reality, often fails.Footnote ¹²¹ For one, if in war one party can win and the other lose, then loss is a potential outcome half the time.Footnote ¹²² Few wars in the past century actually ended in a decisive military victory.Footnote ¹²³ What all wars do guarantee to leave behind, however, is a trail of damage – to bodies, nature, societies, and infrastructure. To approach violence as a viable option is therefore to indulge in romanticised assumptions about it. In o ther words, it would seem that what the ‘empirical evidence demonstrates’ is that it is ‘the practitioners of violence’, not the pacifists, who are ‘more often the tragic idealists’.Footnote ¹²⁴

In any case, nonviolence also leaves more room for humility and error. Analyses can be mistaken, targets chosen erroneously, causes misjudged. But violent mistakes cannot be undone, nor victims unkilled. Mistakes in nonviolent campaigns leave no similar damage. They can more easily be remedied. Inflicting violence, by contrast, requires not just faith in the effectiveness of violence, but also often a hubristic conviction in one’s righteousness. Both romanticised ingredients in turn get cemented and reproduced in future commemorations of said violence.