Anti-War Protest, Negative Peace, and Existential Threats

Photo by Candice Seplow on Unsplash

When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the United States adopted a policy of isolationism. Most Americans were anti-war, but two distinct anti-war attitudes emerged: the conditional view and the absolute view. While the conditional anti-war viewpoint condemned armed action, it did support defensive wars. The absolute anti-war position maintained that human life was so valuable that war should never be conducted, not even in self-defense.

Then, on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Four days later, on December 11th, Nazi Germany declared war against the United States. The majority of Americans abandoned their anti-war stance and rallied behind the war effort against Japan and Nazi Germany.

Those who were devoted to the absolute anti-war position continued to condemn war, but many found their opposition to war against Hitler reprehensible. The absolute anti-war activists saw no justification for war due to the moral equivalence they made between America’s flawed republic and Hitler’s fascist state. Making no distinction between the United States and Nazi Germany, or even the lesser of the two evils, was a moral failure, placing those anti-war activists on the wrong side of history.

Anti-war activists recently assembled in Washington, DC, to oppose Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to…