Non-conformity, Holy Disobedience, becomes a virtue and indeed a
necessary and indispensable measure of spiritual self-preservation,
in a day when the impulse to conform, to acquiesce, to go along, is
the instrument which is used to subject men to totalitarian rule and
involve them in permanent war. To create the impression at least of
outward unanimity, the impression that there is no “real” opposition,
is something for which all dictators and military leaders strive
assiduously. The more it seems that there is no opposition, the less
worthwhile it seems to an ever larger number of people to cherish even
the thought of opposition. Surely, in such a situation it is important
not to place the pinch of incense before Caesar’s image, not to make
the gesture of conformity which is involved, let us say, in registering
under a military conscription law. When the object is so plainly to
create a situation where the individual no longer has a choice except
total conformity or else the concentration camp or death; when reliable
people tell us seriously that experiments are being conducted with drugs
which will paralyze the wills of opponents within a nation or in an
enemy country, it is surely neither right nor wise to wait until the
“system” has driven us into a corner where we cannot retain a vestige of
self-respect unless we say No. It does not seem wise or right to wait
until this evil catches up with us, but rather to go out to meet it—to
_resist_—before it has gone any further.
As Bernanos reminds us, “things are moving fast, dear reader, they are
moving very fast.” He recalls that he “lived at a time when passport
formalities seemed to have vanished forever.” A man could “travel around
the world with nothing in his wallet but his visiting card.” He recalls
that “twenty years ago, Frenchmen of the middle class refused to have
their fingerprints taken; fingerprints were the concern of convicts.”
But the word “criminal” has “swollen to such prodigious proportions that
it now includes every citizen who dislikes the Regime, the System, the
Party, or the man who represents them.... The moment, perhaps, is not
far off when it will seem natural for us to leave the front-door key in
the lock at night so that the police may enter at any hour of the day or
night, _as it is to open our pocket-books to every official demand_. And
when the State decides that it would be a practical measure ... to put
some outward sign on us, why should we hesitate to have ourselves branded
on the cheek or on the buttock, with a hot iron, like cattle? The purges
of ‘wrong-thinkers,’ so dear to the totalitarian regimes, would thus
become infinitely easier.”
To me it seems that submitting to conscription even for civilian service
is permitting oneself thus to be branded by the State. It makes the work
of the State in preparing for war and in securing the desired impression
of unanimity much easier. It seems, therefore, that pacifists should
refuse to be thus branded.
In the introductory chapter to Kay Boyle’s volume of short stories about
occupied Germany, _The Smoking Mountain_, there is an episode which seems
to me to emphasize the need of Resistance and of not waiting until it
is indeed too late. She tells about a woman, professor of philology in
a Hessian university who said of the German experience with Nazism: “It
was a gradual process.” When the first _Jews Not Wanted_ signs went up,
“there was never any protest made about them, and, after a few months,
not only we, but even the Jews who lived in that town, walked past
without noticing any more that they were there. Does it seem impossible
to you that this should have happened to civilized people anywhere?”
The philology professor went on to say that after a while she put up a
picture of Hitler in her class-room. After twice refusing to take the
oath of allegiance to Hitler, she was persuaded by her students to take
it. “They argued that in taking this oath, which so many anti-Nazis had
taken before me, _I was committing myself to nothing, and that I could
exert more influence as a professor than as an outcast in the town_.”
She concluded by saying that she now had a picture of a Jew, Spinoza,
where Hitler’s picture used to hang, and added: “Perhaps you will think
that I did this ten years too late, and perhaps you are right in thinking
this. _Perhaps there was something else we could all of us have done,
but we never seemed to find a way to do it, either as individuals or as
a group, we never seemed to find a way._” A decision by the pacifist
movement in this country to break completely with conscription, to give
up the idea that we can “exert more influence” if we conform in some
measure, do not resist to the uttermost—this might awaken our countrymen
to a realization of the precipice on the edge of which we stand. It might
be the making of our movement.