Pacifist Read online

  Pacifist

  Or, My War And Louis Lepke

  Donald Wetzel

  New York

  PACIFIST

  Or, My War And Louis Lepke

  … being an account of the experiences of a conscientious objector in World War Two, and kindred matters.

  … being as well some observations on murder generally, my authority in the matter being one Louis Lepke Buchalter, now deceased, once titular head of something called, Murder, Incorporated … himself murdered by Tom Dewey, at one time district attorney for the state of New York and subsequent Republican party candidate for president … who was defeated by Harry Truman, he being the single man, when murder went big, who could say it yes or say it no, and he said it yes; and, sure enough, more people were murdered at one time then than had ever been murdered at one time anywhere before …

  … being also a malediction …

  INTRODUCTION

  by William Eastlake

  As a warrior in the Second World War, I recommend heartily this book which is an attack on all soldiers. I recommend this book because it is the clearest argument on the side of absolute pacifism that I have ever read. My disagreement with Wetzel—and I argued this with him many times before I read this book—is that the absolute pacifist has much in common with the absolute warrior. The ideal man in my argument is a pacifist, a pacifist who puts the burden of proof on those who want the war, those who must prove that genocide is taking place—as it was in Nazi Germany when I risked my life to halt the mass murder—or that the southern states have attacked Fort Sumter to continue slavery. This non-absolute pacifist stand would have stopped most of America’s wars dead in their tracks. We periodically invade our Latin neighbors to maintain dictatorships. The list of our small wars to kill a Commie for Mommie would fill this page.

  The absolute pacifist in Nicaragua would not resist Ronald Reagan’s war to re-establish United Fruit and the torture chambers of the right-wing dictators. Absolute pacifism worked in India’s triumph against the British, but Adolf Hitler delighted in every pacifist in the Allied ranks and calmly cut off the heads of every pacifist in Germany with no one to stop him until we showed up to rescue the pacifists and the Jews who were left.

  I was a warrior, but not an absolute warrior. I am a pacifist, but not an absolute pacifist. But don’t settle for my argument. Read this book. Read this book and find a clear, concise, well-written protest not only as an argument for absolute pacifism but also for what it was like for those few like Wetzel who had the courage of their beliefs to not only suffer public ostracism but also to suffer the hell of prison which was full of flag-waving patriots, some of whom would delight in shoving a knife into an un-American draft-dodger.

  It was easy for those of us who marched off to war to the plaudits of the mob; it was tough on those who marched off to prison to the hiss of the crowd.

  What Wetzel doesn’t realize—and it was certainly a surprise to me—was that we had conscientious objectors in the army—perhaps late bloomers. When I got in the army the military minds did not know what to do with me and put me in the military police. There I was finally put in charge of a stockade in Camp White, Oregon. One of my duties was to supervise the firing of the cannon and lowering the headquarters flag at sunset. We did this with prisoners, but there was always the risk of my prisoners escaping. We had six or seven Quakers or Seventh-Day Adventists in the stockade. How they got in the army I don’t know. They were supposed to be sent off to some kind of work camp or prison like Wetzel’s early camp, but somehow they were in the army. I tried to get them to do the flag ceremony because I knew they would not try to escape, but like Wetzel—who refused at first to take any prison orders and refused to sweep out his cell—my prisoners refused to lower the flag and fire the cannon. I told them it was a blank cartridge, that they weren’t killing anybody, but they still refused to take part in any war ceremony. I never did convince them, but one day one of the objectors came up to me and said they would do as I requested, but only as a favor to me because I had taken their side when they were attacked by the patriotic prisoners.

  In the infantry we kill out of fear and become heroes out of despair. Army life is 99% boredom and one percent terror. Wetzel’s prison life seems also to have been 99% boredom, and that one percent terror must have come from the sadistic guard or the psychopathic inmate. All in all, I think that Wetzel would have been surprised at the similarity between prison and the army. Some of us were occasionally shot at by the enemy, the Nazis, and some of the men in prison were occasionally shot at by their enemy, the guards.

  But the prime value of Wetzel’s book is the writing. Many go to prison, but few can write. In a sense, prison was a boon to Wetzel, much like the aristocrat under Louis the Fourteenth who asked for the ambassadorship to Spain. “If,” Louis replied, “you learn Spanish.” When the aristocrat, studying hard, finally learned Spanish, Louis told him France was at war with Spain and no ambassador would be sent. “But rejoice, because now you will have the great privilege of being able to read Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the original.” Wetzel discovered William Faulkner in prison. Wetzel, too, was from the South. If Faulkner could write so well and beautifully about the South, Wetzel would give it a try. If Wetzel had gone into the army instead of to prison, he might have discovered a bullet instead of Faulkner, or if he had gone in the army he might today be a big bag of wind heading an American Legion post in Mobile, Alabama. Instead, Wetzel is one of our better writers with many excellent books behind him, written about Faulkner’s South but with Wetzel’s unique style. I want to particularly recommend his novel, The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God.

  I do not know how this book will be received by the public. If we are in a war mood and about to invade Central America after our great victory in Grenada with everyone hanging out more flags, then the publication date will have been poorly timed. No matter. It is a publisher’s responsibility to print those books that he feels have both literary and meaningful content despite the protests of the morally retarded Moral Majority. Despite the caveat of those like myself who are not absolute pacifists.

  Again—this book will be read and appreciated not only for what Wetzel says, but how he says it. There will be thousands of prison books, as there will be thousands of war books, but only a few will be around a hundred years from now, and that is the only test of any book. I believe this book of Wetzel’s will make it into the next century and the next. Into the next if there is a next.

  Wetzel was in prison before the atom bomb. Once we could have a big war with big profits and big death and then have another. But without some form of pacifism sweeping the White House and the Kremlin, the next war will be the last. Wetzel’s book, which has the courage to say so, may have some small influence in arresting our inexorable drift to that final war. So this book can be read for its moral value as well as a surrogate opportunity to experience what it’s like to serve hard time in a tough federal prison and meet the head of Murder Incorporated who was one of Wetzel’s intimates, and follow Wetzel in the deadly routine of prison—not life, but existence.

  Now Wetzel has signed up for the cross-America pro-peace march to stop the arms build-up. This punishing march will take eight and a half months. Wetzel will sacrifice another chunk of his life for what he believes. This book gives us the first part of the life of a very brave and highly literate man. Whether we agree or disagree with this book, we will be more understanding and wiser for having read it.

  1

  Here at the Florida beach resort where I work—a place lovely in blazing full summer with its variously naked young boys and girls variously burning—here, soon, in a cooler season, the Four Hundredth Engineers will gather to hold a reunion. Veterans of World War Two. My contemporaries. Men an
d their wives; no kids. Here to remember the war.

  I do not look forward to it.

  Their local representative comes by the desk now almost daily. It’s beginning to seem that our one hundred and twenty rooms won’t be enough, and he’s concerned. I’m concerned. I’m concerned about a motel full of drunks. Tactfully I mention this to him, and he’s hurt. “We’re most of us too old for that sort of nonsense,” he tells me.

  Okay. If he says so. Too old for burning, too, I suppose. Just here to remember the war. Jesus.

  A large table is to be set up where war mementos can be displayed. Mementos; his word, not mine. Memory aids. I can’t quite imagine them. Blasted brains and guts in formaldehyde? Unlikely. Old cannon? Gas Masks? Rusty bayonets? Why not, simply, the jawbone of an ass?

  That table bugs me.

  When World War Two ended I was still a young man.

  Now, I find it difficult to remember that large numbers of adults with whom I come into daily contact, those thirty-six or younger, were not yet born when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Simply that they are adults, I suppose, it is my stubborn error to assume that a haunting memory of those years must be as much theirs as it is mine, no matter that I lived then, and they did not.

  Those of my generation—who became adults as our world became entrapped in violence, committed everywhere to war—those at all of my anti-war persuasion, will understand the persistence of my error in this regard. The global convulsion of which we were a part had to do, indeed, with the whole human tribe, with time and generations yet to come; and it seemed that we knew it.

  And perhaps it is for this reason that often, even yet, foolishly I will assume that members of a generation that can look back no further than to the Beatles or to Viet Nam still must know what I know.

  I lived when Hitler lived.

  I saw him on the theater Movie Tone News; I heard him speak. It seemed clear to me that the man was mad. Even so, when first told about the death camps in Germany, I did not believe it could be true.

  But it was true that at that time in America, a restricted notice on a real estate sign more often than not meant simply, No Jews. I remember asking my uncle—I was seventeen or eighteen and should not have had to ask—about the meaning of such signs as they began appearing in our neighborhood. We were driving somewhere, and I was in the rear seat of my uncle’s Packard. I addressed my question to the back of his head. It was as though the answer issued from a rock; nothing about the man moved, so rigorous, so rigid was his approval; “It means,” he said, “no Jews.”

  This was in the early days of World War Two, before America was a part of it. It was then that in the eastern village where I lived, increasingly I heard among my contemporaries and even more among our elders the telling of ugly racial anecdotes having to do with Hitler and the Jews; a refugee Jew was, “A kike on the hike from the Reich.” There were jokes even about crematoriums.

  So it was that in the end, well before America entered the war, I had come to believe that the German death camps quite likely were real at that.

  Actually, the people of our village, good middle class Christians by and large, were not half so worried about Hitler and Mussolini—who was said to have made the trains in Italy run on time—as they were about Stalin and the communists, as though the Russian hordes were practically at our shores.

  In the circles in which I moved I saw no real concern about the fate of Europe’s Jews at all.

  In no way then was the situation analogous to pre-Viet Nam war days. Patriotism was in vogue. The flag was in. At the start, it was said by our leaders that it was Europe’s war and not America’s; but all the same the national pulse rate quickened; the voices of old men grew strident.

  Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, came forward to affirm that there was nothing wrong with America that Hitler could make right. This was considered laudably white of him.

  Ernest Hemingway armed the Pilar and went fishing for German submarines off the coast of Cuba, maintaining that never before in modern history had there been a more justifiable war.

  The American clergy, also—to a man, it seemed—knew a just war when they saw one.

  Among the intellectuals, only the pro-Russian left protested our drift toward involvement in the war, and this only until Russia, also, became at war with Germany.

  Such genuine dissent as there was came from groups considered more pro-German than anti-war—isolationists, America Firsters, with Charles Lindberg being one of their more prominent spokesmen, to the almost total denigration of his status as an American folk hero—but such dissent faded quickly once America was at war.

  The voice of the pacifist remained, but we were heard, it seems, mostly among ourselves.

  In our village I argued—as though with trees and stones—that the enemy was war itself.

  I had read Tolstoy, Emerson, Thoreau; Shaw’s Arms and the Man; I was familiar with Randolph Bourne’s chilling hypothesis that war was the health of the state. I knew of Gandhi and Nehru.

  At that time, however, I was not a member of either the War Resister’s League or the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I was not aware that an organized pacifist movement existed in the United States. I most definitely was not a political activist. My interests lay elsewhere.

  Still I argued publicly and with mounting conviction that modern war was an insanity. I began to be heard. In the village that had been my home since birth, great cold spaces opened up around me. I was considered to be unnatural, treasonably strange; surely a coward.

  My cousin hurried off and joined the Marines, beating the draft. He spent the war in a control tower of a military airfield somewhere in the south, in Mississippi, I think. He came home on Christmas leave in his Marine dress uniform, an American fascist. He spoke admiringly of the Germans, contemptuously of ‘niggers’; called Jews kikes and cowards.

  I raged at him.

  He said nothing.

  He was afraid I might become violent.

  Certainly I must have seemed strange to my cousin.

  I registered for the draft as a conscientious objector.

  There were not too many of us then.

  2

  By my late teens, I was more into poetry than politics, but to the extent that I was political at all, I considered myself a New Deal Democrat. (I am—an anachronism, perhaps—a New Deal Democrat still.) The New Deal was new then, the great depression still a vivid memory. It was, in fact, a time, long overdue, of a genuine and necessary economic and social new deal for America’s poor and underprivileged, embodying legislatively many economic and social reforms long advocated by Norman Thomas and the American Socialists.

  That Franklin Delano Roosevelt was largely responsible for the enactment of most of the New Deal legislation is an irony, in that no American president ever spoke more literally in the true and innate accents of America’s most wealthy and privileged social class, by whose members, indeed, Roosevelt—“that insane cripple”—came bitterly to be considered a traitor. When he died there were wild celebrations on Wall Street.

  For myself, through all of Roosevelt’s years as an American president, I kept waiting for him to talk like an American, but he never did. He talked like a gay upper-class Englishman. War, as he said the word, became “waugh”. Which he professed to hate. But which he did not appear to hate at all. I don’t know if other of my contemporaries have remarked on it, but it seemed obvious to me that, increasingly, Roosevelt got off, as they say, on the war.

  If war may sometimes be considered—as it has been—capable of calling forth the best in a man, this was not the case, in my opinion, with Franklin Roosevelt. More and more as the war continued it seemed to me that he spoke and behaved as a man with his eye out most of all for his place in history; that less and less was the here-and-now of a world at war, and of its dead and dying, real to him. Born to wealth and privilege, war-time commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military forces, three times the presidential choice of th
e American voter, I suspect that toward the end when still again he addressed—by radio and at figurative fireside—his national constituency, familiarly, as, “My friends …” he meant in truth, “You peasants; you simple tools; you clods.”

  Which, if it seems unfair conjecture, harsh judgment, was still the way I understood it then, hearing as the war raged on, his voice, so civil, so damned prep-school proper, speaking of a monstrous war in progress as though of a war already done and won and safe in history.

  Whatever; I was a young man then and for better or worse not to be numbered among those persuaded of the wisdom of our leaders, or as to the deadly nature of one’s duty in such a time.

  As a writer—or as one who thought to be a writer—neither was I blown away by the content of Winston Churchill’s wartime rhetoric, even as I granted its eloquence. I had heard, recorded—and more than once—his famous call to courage to the British people in which, gravely, he promised them only, “… blood, sweat and tears …,” a promise which seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, a most modest and unreal assessment of the carnage to follow.

  It can be said as well, I believe, that Churchill also got off—quite considerably—on the war.

  It seems obvious that he did; as witness the staggering length and breadth of his memoirs.

  Which is not to dispute his talents as politicians, orator, man of letters. No question but that he could make the English language serve his will as could no one else in public life at that time. He was a master of the carefully crafted phrase, as well as at speaking extemporaneously, although in this last his way with the bottle sometimes was apparent.

  But I felt then, and I argue now, that Churchill in fact had a proclivity for speaking noble-sounding nonsense, such stuff as can make the memory even of a war all too soon seem pleasant, warm, uplifting; as today there are those who speak, in Churchillian hype, of “Britain’s finest hour …,” as though the wartime slaughter of London’s poor—bombed, disembowelled, dismembered like cattle—can, with one drunken phrase, become indeed a part of something fine.