COLUMN ONE : No Cheers From the Pacifists : Celebrations of victory in the Gulf have left the peace advocates feeling lonely, but not without hope. What, they ask, has war achieved?

A soldier of Christian conscience in the Roman army had only two releases from military service: desertion or martyrdom.

In Germany, 14,000 pacifists protested World War II, and all died in Nazi death camps.

Gandhi was the mahatma of nonviolence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was his disciple. Neither humanist believed peace or social change would come from the barrel of a gun. Both were shot to death.

War and peace, clearly, have been brutal to the pacifists.

Now the United States is celebrating another war, another peace through military victory. Operation Desert Storm was a just cause, most Americans believe: Saddam Hussein needed to be stopped, and only military force could stop him.

With the war’s end, many have concluded that war can be noble, necessary and effective.

Pacifism, apparently, is passe.

Except among the pacifists.

In an America where 9 in 10 adults supported President Bush’s military action in the Persian Gulf, pacifists often are dismissed as unrealistic, incapable of dealing with the world’s Hitlers and Husseins.

In disagreement with the majority--even with those opposed to this war but not any war--America’s pacifists, however, are still not without hope.

Victory celebrations, they believe, will give way to disenchantment with the war’s effects and rejection of war as policy. Once news reports are supplanted by more sober historical accounts, pacifists argue, Desert Storm will be recast as an unjust war motivated by oil interests, not as a just war of national liberation.

Representatives of the Quakers, Mennonites and other religious bastions of pacifism say Desert Storm gave young Americans their first glimpse of war and its consequences. From them, it is argued, will come the next generation of pacifists believing, as Gandhi said, that a nonviolent society “may seem an unpractical utopia but is not in the least unobtainable.”

“Yesterday, I read that there could be 200,000 casualties, military and civilian, of Desert Storm,” says Glenn Smiley, 81, a retired Los Angeles minister and a doyen of pacifism. “If true, I think the first (public) reaction will be one of disillusionment, with people saying: ‘We’ve been lied to again.’ ”

Elise Boulding, sociologist, author and Quaker, sees pacifism surviving Desert Storm without serious wounds. “Its task is made harder by a war, but it is not devalued by any means. It just becomes more needed,” says the 70-year-old co-founder of the International Peace Research Assn. in Boulder, Colo.

Despite the outward optimism, pacifists are not without their frustrations; amid the victory cheers, many feel isolated--and feel like the minority they really are.

“We had a board meeting recently, and one of the big themes was . . . that a lot of our people felt lonely, some within their churches, some within their communities,” says Stephen Penner of Reedley, Calif., director of the 18,000-member West Coast region of the Mennonite Central Committee.

Purists of pacifism--principled or witness pacifists, as they are called--are distinct from anti-war protesters who set aside their pickets between conflicts. Nor do the purists believe in “just wars” accepted by some as the logical, if regrettable, last resort when diplomacy falters.

They preach the pacifism of Bertrand Russell, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Albert Schweitzer. It was Schweitzer, in speaking his reverence for peace and life, who once noted: “To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward and to exalt the will to live.”

Not simply “anti-war,” pure pacifists are “anti-violence.” A few teach a moral jujitsu that suggests a British-style disarming of police officers. Some pursue animal rights to the point of vegetarianism.

Deep believers say they respect the sanctity of God’s creatures, to the point of giving up their own life before taking the life of another. It is a biblical prohibition. Thou shalt not kill. The commandment is non-negotiable.

Robin Crews, executive secretary of the Peace Studies Assn. of Boulder, says his is an intellectual, ethical and spiritual opposition to all wars. “Anybody who has an understanding of the illogic of violence and the logic of nonviolence,” he says, “can’t really find too many examples of where war makes a lot of sense.”

Or as others argue: The question is not what pacifism has achieved throughout history, but what has war achieved?

To devout pacifists, there were nonviolent alternatives to Desert Storm: Economic sanctions should have been continued; the United Nations could have been pressured into longer negotiations, not deadlines.

“The sanctions were weakening Iraq,” said Gordon Zahn, of Cambridge, Mass., a co-founder of Pax Christi, the American branch of the International Catholic Peace Movement. “Yet we refused to even allow the Soviets to begin some kind of negotiations to see if that (war) could be avoided.”

American Roots

The roots of principled pacifism were set in 1656 America when the Religious Society of Friends (also called Quakers) arrived from England and began preaching in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A Christian group, they believe that God’s presence is the guiding force within the hearts of all people. The Brethren, a German peace church founded on brotherhood and temperance, organized in Pennsylvania in 1719. A year later, the Amish Mennonites, best known for their plain dress and obedience to biblical strictures, arrived.

The Brethren built colleges and seminaries, including the University of La Verne in California in 1891. The Quakers--whose William Penn founded the Pennsylvania colony in 1682 as an experiment in a government of pacifism and religious tolerance--built Earlham College in Indiana, and Haverford and Swarthmore colleges in Pennsylvania.

The Society of Friends also founded Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Cornell University in New York and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, as well as the California city of Whittier and eventually Whittier College.

Prior to World War II, many pacifists supported Charles Lindbergh’s stand for U.S. isolation from international alliances. Others were conscientious objectors, choosing jail over any form of government service. Many accepted alternative service and went into government-approved farm, forestry and hospital work.

There is no accurate count of principled pacifists in America. Unlike the Hutterians of New York or the Amish of Pennsylvania, few remain clustered in the communities of their ancestral faiths.

And time has turned the very word pacifist into a blur.

An old guard has been disturbed to find younger, self-described pacifists condoning armed, revolutionary struggle in Central America even as they deplore American military action in the Persian Gulf.

Guenter Lewy, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, believes many pacifists, influenced by Third World suffering, find merit in liberation movements. “They have moved from a commitment to nonviolence to a selective endorsement of certain kinds of struggles,” Lewy says.

Such tacit accommodation of some armed struggles marks a shift toward what is described as “political pacifism.”

While witness or principled pacifism practices obedience to the higher authority of God before the state and opposes resolving any conflict by violence, political pacifism aims to support policies that will eventually result in less human suffering and less war. Allowance is made for just wars.

The political pacifist, believe some, is in closer touch with 20th-Century realities.

“Whether it is Hitler or Hussein . . . (traditional pacifists) just have not been able to measure up to the level of evil that international politics can provide,” says Robert Pickus, a self-declared pacifist and president of the World Without War Council he founded at Berkeley in 1958.

Even traditional pacifist organizations haven’t been able to maintain a united membership. Spokesmen for the Mennonite Central Committee and the Church of the Brethren acknowledge that some of their members have served in the military and in the Persian Gulf.

David Radcliff, peace consultant for the 160,000-member Church of the Brethren, based in Elgin, Ill., said that during immersion baptisms, opposition to war is still every adult member’s vow. “But as the Brethren have become more mainstream, many of our values have, too,” he said. “It is difficult (today) to maintain strict standards and teachings of the church.”

‘Selective Objectors’

In the mid-1960s, the 2,000-member Episcopal Pacifist Fellowship softened its name to the Episcopal Peace Fellowship.

The change, said executive secretary Mary Miller, reflected “mixed feelings among clumps of people,” including “selective conscientious objectors” in opposition to the Vietnam War but not to all military conflicts.

Today, the Washington, D.C., group--formed 51 years ago along Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence--walks the fuzzy line of pacifism, particularly on Central American issues.

“What we have done is chastise the United States government for funding military oppression,” said Miller. “But without saying that the folks we really back, if we’re honest, the revolutionaries . . . that their violence is justified. Although we do deplore that (violence).”

Such selective objections to war have long concerned scholars of pacifism. Is the opposition to the execution of war, they ask, or to the exercise of American power?

In his 1988 book “Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism,” educator Lewy singles out several prominent groups as “apologists for violence and repression” who developed friendly ties “to movements and regimes that are anything but humanitarian.”

Lewy reported instances of Quaker support for communists in the Vietnam War and that the Fellowship of Reconciliation, formed in England in 1915 to promote nonviolence as the means of reconciling international tensions, was doing “everything possible to aid . . . Marxist-Leninist movements in Latin America.”

A Quaker spokesman said Lewy’s book was “severely confined” and reflected opinions of a “non-cooperationist” who does not believe organizations can work with groups they might oppose on some issues.

Lewy, who fought in the British army in World War II, says he has “a great intellectual respect for pacifism, anyone who in conscience is opposed to taking human life, even though I do not share their views at all.

“Surely an Albert Schweitzer or a Gandhi makes a very compelling and eloquent case for the value of human life. In this sense, it is a pity that we no longer have such figures.”

Fame aside, pacifists claim to have leaders of equivalent stature and conviction. They point often to Glenn Smiley.

A devotee of the late civil rights pioneer, Quaker, philosopher and pacifist Bayard Rustin, Smiley resigned his Methodist pastorates for pacifism in 1942.

He went to prison rather than serve as a chaplain or even a medic in World War II, “because the job of a stretcher bearer is to pick people up so they can be healed and sent back to fight again.”

In six decades of rigid dedication, Smiley has served as an associate general secretary with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and has taught pacifism in jails and classrooms from Tokyo to London. Now, at 81, he is defying retirement and the lingering losses of a stroke to build the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolence in Los Angeles.

Its message--to be directed through tapes, lectures, essay contests and seminars at prisons, schools and police departments--will be Smiley’s old litany: “That nonviolence is the most effective way of achieving change because in the process it does not rip countries apart. It builds, it does not destroy. And it is something that can be learned.”

Defining Moment

Now, the Persian Gulf War has become a defining moment for pacifism as it was for President Bush.

Ched Myers, director of programs for the Pasadena-based Pacific Southwest Region of the American Friends Service Committee, believes that the war will separate die-hard pacifists from less dedicated anti-war protesters. The result will be a smaller, wiser and much chastened peace movement.

“I think we’re going to lose--and already did lose in the first week of the war--people who were kind of vague and naive about peace, and they wanted peace because war was too much trouble,” he says. “But then they saw that war could be fun, that war could be manic, that war could satisfy their need for a strong father figure. . . . “

Now the superficial have departed. Those remaining, Myers said, are working harder with a clear view of their convictions--and the public’s opposition.

A sixth-generation Californian, Myers, 36, became involved with peacemaking while a student at UC Berkeley in 1976. With degrees in philosophy and biblical studies, he is an Episcopalian who works for Quakers “out of respect for the traditions of engaged peacemaking.”

He recognizes that his movement is a minority on a perennial crusade. “But failing the upstream swim is all part of the vocation,” he says. “The transformation of human beings is not something that takes place in a generation.”

He said American Friends will not be frustrated by blows apparently dealt pacifism by Desert Storm. “Success in this line of work is very different to success in Wall Street,” he says.

Achievement to Friends, he notes, is bringing social changes to migrant farm workers in California, monitoring immigration reforms and restoring water rights to Latinos in New Mexico.

During the 40 weeks of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he says, the American Friends’ presence was everywhere. Myers attended candlelight vigils and supervised workshops held for reservists and their relatives.

Other Friends counseled a Navy chaplain who went AWOL to avoid Gulf duties, and a Marine helicopter pilot who jumped ship in Hawaii.

For the Brethren, says Radcliff, Desert Storm was a teaching moment. It confronted young church members who, in the light of perestroika and European reunification, presumed international conflict was a thing of the past.

But, try as they might, pacifists still face skepticism. Their peacemaking, it is noted by authors and scholars, has never ended war.

Three dozen countries currently have fighting within their borders. In this century, 300 million people have died in recorded wars, and nations spend a trillion dollars a year on military weaponry.

Since 1600 BC, the world has known only 292 years of freedom from war. And no war was ended because people refused to go to war.

In her 1987 book “Troublesome People: The Warriors of Pacifism,” British author Caroline Moorehead notes the “almost pure failure” of the movement’s efforts to halt militarism in this century.

But Myers, having already lived through two major American wars, loses no faith that pacifism might work.

“It is true that war is continuing,” he says. “But what we’re clear about is that the military resolution of conflicts is not resolution at all.

“It just solidifies enmity, puts it underground and on the vanquished . . . which can rise again. And we saw that between World War I and World War II.”

Yet because of pacifism, he continues, there have been advances in the United States.

Quakers had female preachers in the 18th-Century colonies and were the first to voluntarily free their slaves. They reworked America’s early penal system, pioneering segregation of male from female prisoners and hardened criminals from minor ones as basic steps toward rehabilitation.

Others point to pacifist influence elsewhere in modern America: corporations bringing conflict resolution seminars into the workplace, colleges offering peace studies programs, the resolute opposition of many churches to military action in the Persian Gulf.

“I would say war is the most persistent, obstinate institution of all,” Myers continues. Does that mean we can never beat it? “I don’t want to say yes, we can. Because that’s glib. But I don’t want to say we can’t either. . . .

“I think it is a bit like the Gospel. You put leaven in the loaf and over a long time, it will leaven the whole loaf.”