Sometimes, Violence Does Solve Things
Such as World War II and Slavery
It’s often said that “Violence has never solved anything.” This is the sort of nice-sounding cliché which sounds like a moral sentiment, but has no basis in reality. To start, it ignores the vast historical evidence of all the times when violence did solve problems, many of which would not have been solved without violence.
We can start with the Second World War. It is notable that Gandhi did not believe that his strategy of nonviolence would work against a man like Hitler, but only against a civilized and humane opponent such as the British Empire. He did believe that the British should surrender to Hitler, but he had no illusion that this would do anything other than subject the entire European continent to the horror of Nazism, resulting in the deaths of additional millions of Jews. We can leave his problematic advice to the Jews of Europe about what to do in the face of the Holocaust (i.e., commit mass suicide before Hitler had a chance to murder them) for another time. But it is worth noting that he believed his strategy of nonviolence would work against the British because he believed them to be an enlightened people for whom appeals to their better nature would prove convincing.1
Well, if nonviolence wouldn’t have stopped Hitler, what did? We all know the answer, of course. A massive campaign of destruction the likes of which the world has never seen before or since, which resulted in tens of millions of deaths, but ultimately liberated Europe and saved the lives of millions of Jews. It is difficult to overstate how much better Europe and the world are for this outcome, nor how much worse the world could have become had the Nazis prevailed.
Violence was also required to end American slavery. The United States of America fought a brutal war against the Confederate States of America which claimed the lives of more Americans than any war before or since. Throughout this war, the United States had only one goal, the same goal as the Americans had against the Nazis. The unconditional surrender of their adversaries. Any truce less than unconditional surrender would not be considered.2