NEVER A JUST WAR.

PositionFURTHER COMMENT by THE PROGRESSIVE

Much of the world has united in opposition to the death and destruction that Russian President Vladimir Putin began raining down on the people of Ukraine in late February. Even in Russia itself, tens of thousands of protesters in dozens of cities have taken to the streets, facing brutal repression. There are calls from all over to end the aggression.

There are also calls for ammunition, weapons, military hardware, and tactical support to help the people of Ukraine kill the enemy more effectively. Military escalation will lead inevitably to the slaughter of more innocents, as all wars do. We need voices calling for de-escalating this conflict, using nonviolent means to bring the war to an end.

Our magazine's founder, Wisconsin Senator Robert M. "Fighting Bob" La Follette, was one of just six U.S. Senators opposing the United States' entry into World War I, for which he was vilified in the press, branded by many as a traitor, burned in effigy, and threatened with expulsion from the U.S. Senate. Yet he remained clear-eyed in his opposition, declaring in an April 4, 1917, speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate: "[L]et us throw pretense to the winds, let us be honest, let us admit that this is a ruthless war against not only Germany's Army and her Navy but against her civilian population as well

Pacifists are often challenged with questions like "What about Hitler?" The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave a very clear response to this when speaking to the American Jewish Committee in a New York hotel on May 20, 1965. "If Protestants and Catholics had engaged in nonviolent direct action," he said, "and had made the oppression of the Jews their very own oppression and had come into the streets beside the Jew[s] to scrub the sidewalks, and had Gentiles worn the stigmatizing yellow arm bands by the millions, a unique form of mass resistance to the Nazi regime might have developed."

King was very clear: nonviolent direct action, when seriously and thoughtfully applied, can be used to confront all forms of violence. Guns and bombs are not the...

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