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Being abnormal in normal: meeting the novel challenge of global terrorism requires reconsideration of long-standing views, including our knee-jerk dismissal of pacifism.

Article Excerpt
On a crisp autumn morning nearly two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, less than two dozen students, faculty and community members calling themselves the 'Peace and Justice Coalition' gathered on the campus of Illinois State University (ISU) in Normal, Illinois. They were about to do what pacifists around the world have done for centuries: publicly announce their moral opposition to war and express their desire that people work for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

Set to commence a 48-hour 'peace fast' in opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the demonstrators shouted slogans in favour of peace and non-violence vaguely reminiscent of those indelible chants that had once rallied much larger crowds during the Vietnam conflict.

The general mood in the country, however, was not exactly pacifistic. In the weeks and months following the al-Qaeda strikes, politicians, media pundits and even some left-leaning intellectuals openly expressed their contempt for pacifists, sometimes going so far as to accuse them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. In the pages of the Washington Post, for example, syndicated columnist Michael Kelly characterised the position of 'American pacifists' as 'objectively pro-terrorist'--a terse phrase he appropriated from George Orwell's famous assessment of World War II pacifists as being 'objectively pro-Nazi'.

While simplistic in its argumentation, Kelly's anti-pacifist diatribe had nonetheless the virtue of refusing to beat around the bush. A war had been declared, he reminded his readers, which meant that one was either for doing what was necessary to capture and kill those who control and fund and harbour terrorists, or one was not for doing this. If one was against it, one allowed the terrorists to continue their attacks on America. 'That is the pacifists' position', Kelly concluded curtly, 'and it is evil'.

Many political leaders in the US, too, seemed to enjoy giving pacifists a healthy verbal thrashing. Asked for his opinion on the escalating protests against the looming war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quipped that those 'unpatriotic ghouls' on America's streets should consider themselves lucky to live in an open and tolerant society. Playing on deeply ingrained stereotypes, President George W. Bush assured the American people that he had no intention of listening to the peaceniks and appeasing 'history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power'. Vowing to 'act decisively' in the face of injustice and evil, Bush insisted that America could not afford to stand by and 'do nothing while dangers gather'.

As daisy-cutter bombs slammed into Osama bin Laden's cave complex at Tora Bora and a series of anthrax-laced letters disrupted business-as-usual in New Jersey post offices and on Capitol Hill, pacifism indeed appeared to most Americans an even more outlandish and unpatriotic doctrine than during less turbulent times. What was the use of pacifism, they wondered, in our age of global terror? Surely, if there ever was a moment in history when it had become necessary to resort to arms for legitimate reasons of national self-defense and the just punishment of the wicked, this was it.

Yet, the motley crew of campus pacifists in Normal refused to be swayed by the passionate pro-war sentiments gripping the conservative heartland. For two long days and nights, these activists--many of them inexperienced--engaged a few sympathetic passers-by, throngs of pro-war students and occasional hecklers in heated debates about the morality of war and the role of violence in society.

In the middle of the second night, a small contingent of Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) students dressed in their combat fatigues and equipped with bullhorns made a raucous appearance....

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