THIRD WORLD WAR  第三次世界大战  ТРЕТЬЯ МИРОВАЯ ВОЙНА 

Home » 2026 » October » 26 » Harder to Reject War than to Participate in It

---

9:00 AM Harder to Reject War than to Participate in It

Luxemburg voted 'no' in 1914 and was killed. Owen wrote poems about the horror of trenches and died a week before the armistice. Why anti-war stance requires more courage than participating in war and what makes refusal possible.<p class="ql-align-justify"><img src="https://zrekbnlccsfkrvxfdews.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/article-images/articles/1791767393222-83386cf0-7e29-4fe9-89e2-b1dc0a2d837d.png"></p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">In August 1914, when the German Reichstag voted for military credits, Karl Liebknecht was one of the few who voted against. A few months later, he took to the streets with a placard reading "Down with the war" — in a country gripped by military enthusiasm, where such an act was not just politically dangerous but also socially devastating. He was arrested. Then imprisoned. In 1919, he was killed.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">At the same time in Britain, artist and poet Wilfred Owen was writing poetry in the trenches of the Western Front. Not anti-war pamphlets — poems about what death from a gas attack looks like up close, what the body of a person dying next to you smells like, what happens to a person's face at the moment of death. He was killed a week before the armistice — in November 1918. His mother received a telegram about his death on the day when bells rang throughout Britain in honor of the end of the war.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Liebknecht and Owen represent two different types of anti-war positions. One is political refusal, public and immediate. The other is testimony from within, transforming personal experience of horror into universal knowledge. Both risked everything. Both paid with their lives.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">This speaks to something important: an anti-war position is not cowardice or a comfortable choice. In wartime, it requires more courage than compliance — because it goes against the most powerful social mechanisms: fear, group belonging, collective pressure, the threat of punishment. It requires the ability to see a person in what everyone around calls the enemy. This is one of the most difficult acts a human being is capable of.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Why this is so difficult — and what makes it possible — is the question this essay is dedicated to.</p> <h2 class="ql-align-justify">The Psychology of Military Enthusiasm</h2><p class="ql-align-justify">To understand anti-war thought, one must first understand what it opposes: the mechanism that makes war not only tolerable but also appealing to a significant portion of people.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">August 1914 is one of the most studied cases of mass military enthusiasm in history. In all the warring countries — Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia — a similar picture was observed: crowds in the streets, volunteers lining up at recruitment centers, newspapers overflowing with patriotism, intellectuals supporting "their" war. Socialists, who had declared international solidarity for years, voted for military credits. Pacifists fell silent. Those who did not remain silent found themselves isolated.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">What produced this enthusiasm? Several mechanisms operating simultaneously.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The first is belonging. War is a powerful producer of group identity. It clearly divides the world into friends and enemies — and strengthens the bonds within the group of friends. This is a biologically deep mechanism: in a situation of threat, the group unites, individual differences diminish, collective identity strengthens. People who feel lonely and insignificant in peacetime find themselves part of something greater and important in war.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">Sebastian Junger is an American journalist and documentarian who has spent significant time in combat zones - in "Tribe" of 2016 he described this as a response to a fundamental human deficit: the need for belonging, meaning, and interdependence, which modern peaceful societies do not satisfy intensely enough. War meets these needs in a pathological way - through destruction. But it meets them, and that is why many veterans long for the military experience - not for killing, but for the intensity of connection and meaning.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The second mechanism is the dehumanization of the enemy. I wrote about this in detail in an essay on war: to kill, one must stop seeing the opponent as a human being. Propaganda produces this systematically - through nicknames, caricatures, rhetoric that turns the opponent into a threat, into a non-human, into an obstacle. This is not just political rhetoric - it is a psychological necessity for sustaining the military effort.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The third mechanism is authority and obedience. Milgram's and Zimbardo's experiments, which I have written about in other contexts, show: ordinary people do unusual things under the influence of authority and structure. Military hierarchy is exactly such a structure - maximally authoritarian, maximally clear, with maximum sanctions for disobedience. In such a structure, resistance requires not just individual courage, but also the ability to withstand systemic pressure.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">The fourth mechanism is the narrative of justice. People do not go to war just because they are ordered to. They go because they believe – or are convinced to believe – that their war is just, that they are defending something valuable, that the enemy is a real threat. This belief can be sincere – and often is. The problem is not that people believe in the justice of their war – but that both sides in any conflict believe in the justice of their side simultaneously.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">An anti-war position requires confronting all four mechanisms at once: renouncing belonging to the military group, continuing to see the person in the opponent, resisting authority and structure, and questioning the narrative of justice. This is a colossal psychological effort – especially in conditions where the entire social environment moves in the opposite direction.</p><h2 class="ql-align-justify">The tradition of refusal – people who said no</h2><p class="ql-align-justify">The history of anti-war thought and action is the history of a minority – people who in every era and in every culture found ways to say "no" where the majority said "yes." Their stories rarely find their way into the center of history textbooks – precisely because history is written by the victors, and those who refuse war are not victors in a military sense.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">But their influence on how humanity thinks about war is disproportionately large compared to their numbers.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">Leo Tolstoy in the last decades of his life — from the 1880s until his death in 1910 — developed the most consistent and radical anti-war philosophy in the Russian tradition. His position was based on Christian nonviolence in its absolute form: the commandment "thou shalt not kill" is unconditional. The state that demands a person to kill is illegal. Military service is complicity in murder. Refusal of military service is not only a right but also a moral duty.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">This was not an abstract philosophy. Tolstoy corresponded with thousands of people around the world who were seeking grounds for refusing military service. His ideas influenced Gandhi — who explicitly called Tolstoy one of his teachers and corresponded with him shortly before his death. Through Gandhi, they influenced Martin Luther King Jr. The chain of influence is direct and documented.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Quakers — a religious movement that emerged in England in the seventeenth century — are perhaps the most consistent anti-war tradition in Western history. From their very inception, they have refused military service based on the belief that "there is something of God in every person" — and that this makes murder impossible. During World War I, British Quakers who refused military service were subjected to imprisonment and forced labor. Some were sentenced to execution — sentences were commuted at the last moment. They continued to refuse.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Mennonites, Amish, Jehovah's Witnesses — different religious traditions arrived at similar conclusions through different paths. They were united by the belief that there is something that stands above the state's demand to kill.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">The secular anti-war tradition developed in parallel. Bertha von Suttner — an Austrian writer and pacifist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1905 — wrote the novel "Lay Down Your Arms!" in 1889, which became one of the first mass anti-war works. She founded the Austrian Peace Society and persuaded Alfred Nobel to establish the Nobel Peace Prize.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Henri Dunant — a Swiss entrepreneur — accidentally witnessed the Battle of Solferino in 1859, where around forty thousand people died, and the wounded perished without medical assistance. Shocked by what he saw, he organized aid for the wounded on both sides — and subsequently founded the Red Cross and initiated the adoption of the Geneva Conventions. This was not pacifism in the absolute sense — Dunant did not call for the abolition of war. But he created an international legal framework that limited its brutality: rules for the treatment of the wounded and prisoners of war, a ban on certain types of weapons, protection of civilians.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">This is an important distinction within the anti-war tradition: between absolute pacifism, which rejects war under any circumstances, and humanitarian limitation of war — recognizing its existence while simultaneously striving to minimize its consequences.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">World War I produced a wave of anti-war thought of unprecedented scale — precisely because the gap between the official narrative of heroic war and the reality of trench destruction was so apparent to the survivors. Erich Maria Remarque, in "All Quiet on the Western Front" of 1929, wrote perhaps the most readable anti-war novel in history — a story of how war destroys not only bodies but also the very ability to live afterward. The novel was burned by the Nazis in 1933 — along with the books of Hemingway, Brecht, Freud, and many others.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">The burning of books is always a recognition of their power. Regimes confident in their military correctness do not burn anti-war novels — they ignore them. Burning signifies fear.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Bertrand Russell — a British philosopher, mathematician, and Nobel laureate in literature — lost his academic position at Cambridge for anti-war activities during World War I and was imprisoned for agitating against military service. During World War II, he changed his position: the Nazi threat was, in his view, an evil so specific that resistance to it with arms in hand was justified. This is an honest example of a position that is not absolute — and which acknowledges that different wars require different responses.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">After World War II and Hiroshima, anti-war thought took on a new dimension: nuclear weapons made "victory" in war conceptually problematic. Nuclear war has no winners in the traditional sense — it has only varying degrees of destruction. This changed the very language of anti-war argumentation: from moral to strategic arguments. "War is evil" morphed into "nuclear war is suicide" — and this second statement is true regardless of moral beliefs.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in 1955 — shortly before both of their deaths — signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, calling for peaceful resolution of international conflicts in the face of nuclear threat. This was a rare instance where an anti-war position was formulated not through pacifism, but through elementary logic of survival: with nuclear weapons, war is the suicide of civilization.</p><h2 class="ql-align-justify">What Makes an Anti-War Position Possible</h2> <p class="ql-align-justify">The question arises: what exactly enables certain people — in certain circumstances, under certain conditions — to resist the mechanisms that make war attractive or mandatory for the majority?</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Research on draft dodgers, pacifists, and those who saved victims of genocides in various countries and eras points to several factors.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The first and most enduring: the presence of a stable value system, independent of group pressure. This may be a religious belief — like that of Quakers and Mennonites. It may be philosophical — like that of Tolstoy or Russell. It may simply be a deeply rooted personal conviction, formed within a family or through experience. What is common is the presence of a value anchor that is not washed away by the wave of social pressure.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Christian Hacke and Samuel Oliner in "The Altruistic Personality" (1988) studied people who saved Jews in occupied Europe — risking their lives. Their observation: the rescuers were not distinguished by exceptional courage or strength of character in the general sense — they were distinguished by an expanded definition of "us." They did not draw a clear line between their group and Jews — they saw the victims as people, not outsiders. This expansion of the moral horizon was decisive.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The second factor: the presence of at least one community or person who shares the refusal. Asch's experiments showed: having even one ally significantly reduces conformity. This also works in the context of military refusal: Quakers withstood pressure partly because they had a community that supported their position. A lone refuser is significantly more vulnerable than a refuser belonging to a tradition or group.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">The third factor: the ability to take perspective — to see the situation through the eyes of another. This is a cognitive skill associated with empathy, but not identical to it. Empathy is emotional resonance. Perspective-taking is the ability to intellectually model another person's experience. It is what allows you to see a person in the "opponent" — not because you feel warm feelings towards them, but because you can imagine what it is like to be them.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Paul Bloom — a Canadian-American psychologist — in "Against Empathy" published in 2016 made a provocative argument: empathy in a strict sense is a poor guide for moral decisions — because it is selective, biased towards those close and similar, and produces "burnout" when confronted with mass suffering. Rational compassion — a conscious concern for the well-being of others, based not on emotional resonance but on principle — is a more sustainable foundation for an anti-war position.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">This explains why the most consistent pacifists and anti-war activists often describe their position not through feeling, but through principle: "I cannot participate in this — not because I am afraid or because I feel pity, but because it contradicts what I consider fundamentally right." Principle is more resilient than feeling — because it does not depend on the emotional state of the moment.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The fourth factor: knowledge of history. People who know the history of previous wars in sufficient detail — not as abstract events but as detailed descriptions of human experience — are more likely to resist new military narratives. Wilfred Owen and other poets of World War I created just such knowledge: not statistics of losses, but concrete, bodily, inescapable experiences of what it means to die from gas in a trench.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">That is why anti-war literature and art are not an embellishment of the anti-war movement — they are its core. They produce knowledge that cannot be created through arguments — knowledge of what it is really like. And this knowledge is an immunization against narratives that turn war into a heroic adventure.</p><h2 class="ql-align-justify">It's harder to refuse war than to participate in it</h2><p class="ql-align-justify">Returning to the title — and to Liebknecht and Owen.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Participation in war is difficult both physically and psychologically. This is not an exaggeration — it is a reality that should not be romanticized in the other direction. War is awful for those who participate in it.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">But refusing to go to war is difficult in a different way. It requires confronting not a physical threat, but social pressure — which, as social psychology has shown, is no less powerful for a person. It requires seeing a person where everyone else sees an enemy. It requires maintaining principle in conditions where doing so is socially destructive and personally dangerous. It requires saying "no" when "yes" is the path of least resistance.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Karl Liebknecht was killed. Wilfred Owen was killed. Bertrand Russell was imprisoned. Remarque was exiled from the country. Tolstoy was excommunicated. Gandhi was killed. King was killed.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">This is not a random pattern. It is a demonstration of how seriously power systems take the anti-war stance — and how much they fear it. Regimes confident in their legitimacy do not kill pacifists. Regimes that need war for their existence do kill.</p> <p class="ql-align-justify">But the anti-war position survives — not because it wins in every specific conflict. But because it produces knowledge that accumulates. Owen died — but his poems live on and continue to immunize people against the romanticism of war. Remarque (books) was burned by the Nazis — but his novel continues to be read. Gandhi was killed — but his method changed how humanity thinks about political resistance.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Anti-war thought is not a naive belief that wars can be completely excluded from human history. It is a more sober position: a conviction that each specific war is a choice — not inevitability — and that this choice can be challenged. A conviction that the cost of war is always higher than declared — and that this cost is borne by those who do not declare it. A conviction that the person on the other side of the front line is a human being — and that this fact matters.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">This is a simple conviction. It is difficult to dispute logically. And yet each generation must defend it anew — because each generation forgets it again under the pressure of new military narratives.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">That is why anti-war thought is not an archive of the past, but a living necessity of the present.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Luxemburg voted "no" in 1914. One of the few. It changed nothing immediately.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">But his voice remained in the record.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">And the next time there were more such voices.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">© lesnoy, 12.10.2026</p><p class="ql-align-justify">translation © lesnoy</p><p>© lesnoy, LifeArmy.org</p><p>Original: <a href="https://lifearmy.org/articles/reject-war-participation">https://lifearmy.org/articles/reject-war-participation</a></p>

1 2 3 4 5 Views: 3 | Added by: lesnoy | Rating: 0.0/0

Total comments: 0