Will democracy prevail? Not if pacifism is the answer

The German Book Trade’s Peace Prize was awarded to Anne Applebaum. Here is her acceptance lecture (abridged) along with passages from letters and statements by Sri Aurobindo from the 1940s.

This year, the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize was awarded to Anne Applebaum for her “indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy.” Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, as well as a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her most recent books include the New York Times best sellers Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a member of the editorial board. She has also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in many other publications as well.

Anne Applebaum (Eibner-Pressefoto / Florian Wiegan / Reuters)

Today’s posting contains a slightly abridged version of Anne Applebaum’s article “The Case Against Pessimism: The West has to believe that democracy will prevail,” which appeared in The Atlantic, and which is adapted from the acceptance lecture she delivered in Frankfurt on October 20, 2024. You can listen to the entire lecture here. This post concludes with a few passages from letters written or statements made by Sri Aurobindo in the 1940s.

No historian of tragedy ever wants to look up, turn on the television, and find that their work has come to life. When, in the 1990s, I was researching the history of the Gulag in the Soviet archives, I assumed that the story belonged to the distant past. When, a few years later, I wrote about the Soviet assault on Eastern Europe, I also thought that I was describing an era that had ended. And when I studied the history of the Ukrainian famine, the tragedy at the center of Stalin’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine as a nation, I did not imagine that this same kind of story could repeat itself in my lifetime.

But in 2014, old plans were taken out of the same Soviet archives, dusted off, and put to use once again. The Russian soldiers who spread out across Crimea traveled in unmarked vehicles, wearing uniforms without insignia. They took over government buildings, removed the local leaders, barred them from their offices. For several days afterward, the world was confused. Were these “separatists” who were staging an uprising? Were they “pro-Russian” Ukrainians?

I was not confused. I knew that this was a Russian invasion of Crimea, because it looked exactly like the Soviet invasion of Poland 70 years earlier. In 1944, the invasion featured Soviet soldiers wearing Polish uniforms, a Soviet-backed Communist Party pretending to speak for all Poles, a manipulated referendum, and other acts of political fakery that were designed to confuse not only the people of Poland but also Poland’s allies in London and Washington.

After 2014, and then again after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, cruelly familiar patterns repeated themselves. Russian soldiers treated ordinary Ukrainians as enemies and spies. They used random violence to terrorize people. They imprisoned civilians for minor offenses—the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle, for example—or sometimes for no reason at all. They built torture chambers as well as filtration camps, which we could also call concentration camps. They transformed cultural institutions, schools, and universities to suit the nationalist, imperialist ideology of the new regime. They kidnapped children, took them to Russia, and changed their identities. They stripped Ukrainians of everything that made them human, that made them vital, that made them unique.

In different languages, at different times, this kind of assault has had different names. We used to talk about Sovietization. Now we speak of Russification. There is a German word too: Gleichschaltung. But whatever word you use, the process is the same. It means the imposition of arbitrary autocratic rule: a state without the rule of law, without guaranteed rights, without accountability, without checks and balances. It means the destruction of all stirrings or survivals or signs of the liberal democratic order. It means the construction of a totalitarian regime: In Mussolini’s famous words, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

In 2014, Russia was already on the way to becoming a totalitarian society, having launched two brutal wars in Chechnya, having murdered journalists and arrested critics. But after 2014, that process accelerated. The Russian experience of occupation in Ukraine paved the way for harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further; independent institutions were completely banned.

This deep connection between autocracy and imperial wars of conquest has a logic to it. If you truly believe that you and your regime have the right to control all institutions, all information, all organizations—that you can strip people not just of rights but of identity, language, property, life—then of course you also believe that you have the right to inflict violence on whomever you please. Nor will you object to the human costs of such a war: If ordinary people have no rights, no power, no voice, then why should it matter whether they live or die?...

Russian schools now train small children to be soldiers. Russian television encourages Russians to hate Ukrainians, to consider them subhuman. The Russian economy has been militarized: Some 40 percent of the national budget will now be spent on weapons. To obtain missiles and ammunition, Russia now makes deals with Iran and North Korea, two of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet. The constant talk of war in Ukraine also normalized the idea of war in Russia, making other wars more likely. Russian leaders now speak casually of using nuclear weapons against their other neighbors and regularly threaten to invade them….

Since 2018, more than 116,000 Russians have faced criminal or administrative punishment for speaking their mind. Thousands of them have been punished specifically for objecting to the war in Ukraine. Their heroic battle is mostly carried out in silence. Because the regime has imposed total control on information in Russia, their voices cannot be heard.

But what about us in the rest of the democratic world? Our voices are not restrained or restricted. We are not jailed or poisoned for speaking our mind. How should we react to the revival of a form of government that we thought had disappeared from Europe forever? In the early, emotional days of the war in Ukraine, many did join the chorus of support. In 2022, as in 2014, Europeans again turned on their televisions to see scenes of a kind they knew only from history books: women and children huddled at train stations, tanks rolling across fields, bombed-out cities. In that moment, many things suddenly felt clear. Words quickly became actions. More than 50 countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed. In Kyiv, Odesa, and Kherson, I witnessed the effect of food aid, military aid, and other European support. It felt miraculous.

But as the war has continued, doubt has crept in. Since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically, in both Europe and America. Maybe our indifference to the invasion of Crimea played a larger role in this decline than we usually think. The decision to accelerate economic cooperation with Russia after the invasion certainly created both moral and financial corruption as well as cynicism. That cynicism was then amplified by a Russian disinformation campaign that we dismissed or ignored.

Now, faced with the greatest challenge to our values and our interests in our time, the democratic world is starting to wobble. Many wish the fighting in Ukraine would somehow, magically, stop. Others want to change the subject to the Middle East—another horrific, tragic conflict, but one where Europeans have almost no ability to shape events. A Hobbesian world makes many claims upon our resources of solidarity. A deeper engagement with one tragedy does not denote indifference to other tragedies. We must do what we can where our actions will make a difference.

Slowly, another group is gaining traction, too, especially in Germany. these are the people who do not support or condemn Vladimir Putin’s aggression but rather pretend to stand above the argument and declare “I want peace.” Some even call for peace by referring solemnly to the lessons of German history. But “I want peace” is not always a moral argument. This is also the right moment to say that the lesson of German history is not that Germans should be pacifists. On the contrary, we have known for nearly a century that a demand for pacifism in the face of an aggressive, advancing dictatorship can simply represent the appeasement and acceptance of that dictatorship.

In 1938, the German writer Thomas Mann, then already in exile, horrified by the situation in his country and by the complacency of the liberal democracies, denounced the “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.” During World War II, George Orwell condemned his compatriots who called upon Britain to stop fighting. “Pacifism,” he wrote, “is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary commonsense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.” …

Many of those in Germany, and in Europe, who now call for pacifism in the face of the Russian onslaught are indeed “objectively pro-Russian,” to borrow Orwell’s phrase. Their arguments, if followed to the logical conclusion, mean that we should acquiesce to the military conquest of Ukraine, to the cultural destruction of Ukraine, to the construction of concentration camps in Ukraine, to the kidnapping of children in Ukraine. We are nearly three years into this war. What would it have meant to plead for peace in Nazi-dominated Europe in early 1942?

Let me say it more clearly: Those who advocate pacifism, and those who would surrender not just territory but people and principles to Russia, have learned nothing at all from the history of the 20th century. The magic of the phrase never again has blinded us to reality before. In the weeks before the invasion in February 2022, Germany, like many other European nations, found war so impossible to imagine that the German government refused to supply Ukraine with weapons. And yet here is the irony: Had Germany, and the rest of NATO, supplied Ukraine with those weapons well in advance, maybe we could have deterred the invasion. Maybe it would never have happened. Perhaps the West’s failure was, in Thomas Mann’s words again, “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.“ …

To prevent the Russians from spreading their autocratic political system further, we must help the Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine. If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it. The impact will be felt on our continent and around the world—not just in Ukraine but in Ukraine’s neighbors, in Georgia, in Moldova, in Belarus. And not just in Russia but among Russia’s allies: China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea.

The challenge is not only military. This is also a battle against hopelessness, against pessimism, and even against the creeping appeal of autocratic rule, which is also sometimes disguised beneath the false language of “peace.” The idea that autocracy is safe and stable, that democracies cause war; that autocracies protect some form of traditional values while democracies are degenerate—this language is also coming from Russia and the broader autocratic world, as well as from those inside our own societies who are prepared to accept as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state. Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders.

The temptation of pessimism is real. In the face of what feels like an endless war and an onslaught of propaganda, it is easier just to accept the idea of decline. But let’s remember what’s at stake, what the Ukrainians are fighting for: a society, like ours, where independent courts protect people from arbitrary violence; where the rights to thought, speech, and assembly are guaranteed; where citizens are free to engage in public life and are not frightened of the consequences; where security is guaranteed by a broad alliance of democracies and prosperity is anchored by the European Union.

Autocrats like the Russian president hate all of these principles because they threaten their power. Independent judges can hold rulers to account. A free press can expose high-level corruption. A political system that empowers citizens allows them to change their leaders. International organizations can enforce the rule of law. That is why the propagandists of autocratic regimes will do what they can to undermine the language of liberalism and the institutions that guard our freedoms, to mock them and to belittle them, inside their own countries and in ours as well.

Supporters of Ukraine are now asking Germany to provide weapons to be used against Russia, an aggressive military power. The true lesson of German history is not that Germans should never fight but that Germans have a special responsibility to stand up and take risks for freedom. All of us in the democratic world, not just Germans, have been trained to be critical and skeptical of our own leaders and of our own societies, so it can feel awkward when we are asked to defend our most fundamental principles. But we can’t let skepticism decline into nihilism.

In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship in Europe, we in the democratic world are natural comrades. Our principles and ideals, and the alliances we have built around them, are our most powerful weapons. We must act upon our shared beliefs—that the future can be better; the war can be won; that authoritarianism can be defeated once again; that freedom is possible; and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world.

What follows are passages from letters written or statements made by Sri Aurobindo in the 1940s. They put the challenges and dangers outlined by Anne Applebaum in an even broader perspective. Today’s confrontation between democracies and autocracies (“Autocracy, Inc.”) is the recrudescence of the very struggle of which Sri Aurobindo spoke.

The struggle that is going on ... is in fact a clash between two world-forces which are contending for the control of the whole future of humanity. One force seeks to destroy the past civilisation and substitute a new one; but this new civilisation is in substance a reversion to the old principles of dominant Force and … denies the established values…. The new ethics contemn and reject all the principles that can be summed up in the word “humanitarianism”; all that is to it a falsehood and a weakness. The only ethical values admitted are those of dominant Force on the one side and, on the other, of blind obedience and submission, self-effacement and labour in the service of the State. Wherever this new idea conquers or can make its power felt, it is this order of things that it seeks to establish; it is not satisfied with setting itself up in one country or another, it is pushing for world conquest, for the enforcement of the new order everywhere….

The other Force is that of the evolutionary tendencies which have been directing the course of humanity for some time past…. Its workings had their good and bad sides, but among the greater values it had developed stood the very things against which the new Force is most aggressive, the liberty of the individual, national liberty, freedom of thought, political and social freedom with an increasing bent towards equality, complete religious liberty, the humanitarian principle with all its consequences....

Nations which tried to isolate themselves in a self-regarding neutrality have paid the penalty of their blindness and the others who still maintain that attitude are likely sooner or later to share the same fate....

There remains the objection that all War is evil and no war can be supported…. The question then arises whether a nation can be asked to undergo voluntarily the menace of a foreign invasion or the scourge of a foreign occupation without using whatever material means of resistance are available....

The Canal (or Novyi) district of Chasiv Yar, July 2024. Photo: https://t.me/official24ombr

War is physically an evil, a calamity; morally it has been like most human institutions a mixture, in most but not all cases a mixture of some good and much evil. But it is sometimes necessary to face it rather than invite or undergo a worse evil, a greater calamity…. No doubt, in a spiritualised life of humanity or in a perfect civilisation there would be no room for war or violence,—it is clear that this is the highest ideal state. But mankind is psychologically and materially still far from this ideal state. To bring it to that state needs either an immediate spiritual change of which there is no present evidence or a change of mentality and habits which the victory of the totalitarian idea and its system would render impossible; for it would impose quite the opposite mentality, the mentality and habits on one side of a dominant brute force and violence and on the other a servile and prostrate non-resistance. [1940, Autobiographical Notes, pp. 455–62]

It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance…. It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country [India] do not dream of and cannot yet at all realise. [July 29, 1942, Autobiographical Notes, pp. 463–64]

What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions which are common to human nature and all human collectivities. The victory of one side would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished. That is the whole question and all other considerations are either irrelevant or of a minor importance. [September 2, 1943, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, pp. 215‒16]