Monday, March 05, 2007

pacifist does not mean passive

A while back a friend was ribbing me about not being a pacifist as I claim. He sited my not so passive manner of being as evidence.
Passive is what is expected. To a certain extent we have lived up to the label the mainstream has given us—we are passive. We are not the upsetters of the culture of violence. I ran across an article written by Albert Einstein on Pacifism. In it he calls himself a militant pacifist. And he calls others to initiate an aggressive campaign against violence.
The full article is here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for the link.

Michael Westmoreland-White, Ph.D. said...

That's why I more often say that I am committed to gospel nonviolence than say that I am pacifist. But the word never meant passive--it came from the Latin pax facere, to make peace.

Ariah said...

great link. I was just looking for this article after reading a book about Non-violence that referenced it.