Askold Melnyczuk: I Was a Pacificist—And Then They Came to Kill My Family
I've finally come to understand some of the evils my parents lived through.
By Askold Melnyczuk
As a Buddhist practitioner for decades, I’ve had the privilege of studying with many remarkable teachers, including the Dalai Lama, as well as with monks who’d been imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese military. Their gentleness, always deeply moving, was an essential part of their teaching. One monk said that what worried him most as he was being tortured was the possibility that he might feel anger toward his torturers.
Could you live with yourself if, hearing family and friends pleading for help, you chose to walk away? Their voices would haunt you forever.
This is indeed what pure pacificism looks like. His is a credible and appropriate stance . . . for a monk—that is, for someone for whom “detachment” is a primary virtue. A monk, after all, is someone who forswears family ties and “intimate” physical relationships. He commits to treating every being with equal sympathy and compassion. Across infinite rebirths we have all, at one time or another, been each other’s mothers. The attitude extends to a Hitler, a Stalin, and, presumably, a Putin. This practice of universal love isn’t pursued out of some egotistic clinging to purity. Monks who have taken bodhisattva vows desire only to guide all living beings to enlightenment.
But it’s a slow process.
There is, however, a difference between caring for someone’s spiritual welfare and the commitment one makes to maintaining another person’s physical well-being, as one does with a spouse, a partner, a parent, a child. We have the right to choose to become martyrs ourselves. That doesn’t mean we must be willing to sacrifice friends and loved ones to our ideology or faith. For a monk committed to detachment, a purely pacifist position sounds plausible (though history has a record of warrior monks as well). I wonder, though, how many monks would stand by chanting Om Mani Padme Hum while seeing their mothers raped, their fathers beaten, their little sisters and brothers murdered? Could you live with yourself if, hearing family and friends pleading for help, you chose to walk away? Their voices would haunt you forever.
My parents were Ukrainian refugees who fled Eastern Europe under the threat of death in 1944. They spent five years in a refugee camp before finding a sponsor who enabled them to come to the United States. A war doesn’t end when treaties are signed. In my family the effects of war trauma have played out across several generations. A heightened awareness of the evils of war led me to attend antiwar marches every time the U.S. pursued another miscalculated foreign mission—in Vietnam, in Central America, in Iraq. U.S. interventions in those countries were aggressive and often uninvited. The situation in Ukraine, which has been invaded by a neighbor with a history of attempting genocide against it, is entirely different. Those urging Ukraine to cede territory to Russia either have no idea of the fate to which they are consigning those trapped by Russian occupiers—rape, abduction, Siberian exile, torture and, of course, execution—or they don’t care about the consequences of their ignorant advocacy.
Pacificism in the face of tyranny doesn’t work unless you are willing not merely to exchange liberty for slavery, freedom of thought and expression for a soul-withering silence, and suppression of all natural human responses to brutality: You also consent to the destruction of your culture.
In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik observed that Japan was pushed into a militarist posture by a minority of nationalist extremists because of “the universal inability of decent people to respond to violence when subjected to it.” Pacifism in the face of tyranny will only encourage, not halt its spread. Pacificism in the face of tyranny doesn’t work unless you are willing not merely to exchange liberty for slavery, freedom of thought and expression for a soul-withering silence, and suppression of all natural human responses to brutality: You also consent to the destruction of your culture.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, detachment wasn’t what I felt and it’s not what I feel nearly a year later. Rather the opposite. I’ve never experienced a deeper attachment to my Ukrainian roots. If I were in Ukraine, would I take up arms, or would I do anti-war work in a non-military capacity? I don’t know—I don’t believe anyone really does until they face the situation themselves. Pundits swathed in theories have very little credibility pontificating on the matter. I’ve finally understood something of what my parents lived through. Watching the same evil forces raining terror down on a new generation has only hardened my commitment to seeing that justice be done.
Askold Melnyczuk is a Ukrainian-American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the collection of short stories The Man Who Would Not Bow (2021) and the novels Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature (2016), The House of Widows (2008), Ambassador of the Dead (2001), and What Is Told (1994). His work has been translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Founder of the journal AGNI and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Harvard University, Bennington, and Boston University. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.