Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism - Hardcover

Lewy, Guenter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802836402 ISBN 13: 9780802836403

Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988

Synopsis

Looks at how four pacifist organizations, the AFSC, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, have given up the ideals of nonviolence to support leftist dictatorships and liberation fronts

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Reviews

Charging that American pacifism since the Vietnam War has lost its conscience by abandoning the principle of nonviolence, Lewy, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, critiques four leading pacifist organizations: the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. He contends that these groups are experiencing the same basic conflict between the ideal of nonviolence and that of liberating the oppressed, especially in the Third World. He accuses them of supporting Communist-dominated movements in Vietnam and Central and South America to the exclusion of such struggles as the Afghans' revolt against the Soviet Union. Lewy (America in Vietnam) further warns that the alliance of pacifists with New Left and antiwar groups gives them political and religious clout"peace at any price"that could endanger American interests.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lewy is highly critical of American pacifism from 1965 to the present, arguing that it has lost the philosophical consistency and moral integrity it once possessed. Examining four prominent pacifist groupsthe Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resister League, Women's International League of Peace and Freedom, and American Friends Service Committeehe concludes that they have abandoned their commitment to nonviolence because of hostility to American democracy and infatuation with Third World revolutions. Lewy points up serious moral and political questions about contemporary pacifism, but his prosecutorial tone and hard-line Cold War ideology make this less the sober, penetrating analysis the subject deserves and more a narrowly political polemic. Mel Piehl, Valparaiso Univ., Ind.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802836402
• ISBN 13: 9780802836403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296