The pacifists of the 1930s deserve greater understanding

As I’ve occasionally come to think is the case with The Spectator, this book is perhaps best begun at the back. Otherwise it might be taken for niche history – applied historical moral philosophy, say, or an aspect of ‘the people’s war’ usually overshadowed by the manifest imperative to defeat the unparalleled evil of Nazism.

That evil, concludes Tobias Kelly, professor of political and legal anthropology at Edinburgh, has indeed ‘become the frame through which we seem to assess all evils’; but ‘the spectre of appeasement has also reared its head too often’. As a result, ‘we have been quick to get carried away with the virtue of war when confronted with wrongdoing and too ready to believe that a just measure of violence can solve the world’s problems’.

Kelly maintains that although the conscientious objectors of the second world war could sometimes be blinkered and self-important, and that we might be tempted to think of them as unable to come to terms with a cynical and brutal world, ‘they could also become passionate and committed to the ideal that violence is not inevitable’. At their best, ‘they confronted the world head on, taking it as it was, but not resigned to its fate, imagining in both hope and sorrow that things could be otherwise’.

But was their best really good enough? I recall a long conversation about his wartime pacifism with my Anglican confessor, Father Anthony Perry SSM, in the days before I crossed the Tiber. (Once on the far bank, pacifism seemed less of an issue: as Kelly reminds us, the Pope has his Swiss Guard.) As a 19-year-old, Perry had served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in China, no cushy number.