The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

the iniquities

practiced upon them; all citizens have become their own

oppressors.

 

Universal military service was an inevitable logical necessity, to

which we were bound to come. But it is also the last expression

of the inconsistency inherent in the social conception of life,

when violence is needed to maintain it. This inconsistency has

become obvious in universal military service. In fact, the whole

significance of the social conception of life consists in man’s

recognition of the barbarity of strife between individuals, and

the transitoriness of personal life itself, and the transference

of the aim of life to groups of persons. But with universal

military service it comes to pass that men, after making every

sacrifice to get rid of the cruelty of strife and the insecurity

of existence, are called upon to face all the perils they had

meant to avoid. And in addition to this the state, for whose sake

individuals renounced their personal advantages, is exposed again

to the same risks of insecurity and lack of permanence as the

individual himself was in previous times.

 

Governments were to give men freedom from the cruelty of personal

strife and security in the permanence of the state order of

existence. But instead of doing that they expose the individuals

to the same necessity of strife, substituting strife with

individuals of other states for strife with neighbors. And the

danger of destruction for the individual, and the state too, they

leave just as it was.

 

Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man

to prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with

props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to

keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in

it.

 

In the same way universal military service destroys all the

benefits of the social order of life which it is employed to

maintain.

 

The advantages of social organization are security of property and

labor and associated action for the improvement of existence—

universal military service destroys all this.

 

The taxes raised from the people for war preparations absorb the

greater part of the produce of labor which the army ought to

defend.

 

The withdrawing of all men from the ordinary course of life

destroys the possibility of labor itself. The danger of war, ever

ready to break out, renders all reforms of life social life vain

and fruitless.

 

In former days if a man were told that if he did not acknowledge

the authority of the state, he would be exposed to attack from

enemies domestic and foreign, that he would have to resist them

alone, and would be liable to be killed, and that therefore it

would be to his advantage to put up with some hardships to secure

himself from these calamities, he might well believe it, seeing

that the sacrifices he made to the state were only partial and

gave him the hope of a tranquil existence in a permanent state.

But now, when the sacrifices have been increased tenfold and

the promised advantages are disappearing, it would be a natural

reflection that submission to authority is absolutely useless.

 

But the fatal significance of universal military service, as the

manifestation of the contradiction inherent in the social

conception of life, is not only apparent in that. The greatest

manifestation of this contradiction consists in the fact that

every citizen in being made a soldier becomes a prop of the

government organization, and shares the responsibility of

everything the government does, even though he may not admit its

legitimacy.

 

Governments assert that armies are needed above all for external

defense, but that is not true. They are needed principally

against their subjects, and every man, under universal military

service, becomes an accomplice in all the acts of violence of the

government against the citizens without any choice of his own.

 

To convince oneself of this one need only remember what things are

done in every state, in the name of order and the public welfare,

of which the execution always falls to the army. All civil

outbreaks for dynastic or other party reasons, all the executions

that follow on such disturbances, all repression of insurrections,

and military intervention to break up meetings and to suppress

strikes, all forced extortion of taxes, all the iniquitous

distributions of land, all the restrictions on labor—are either

carried out directly by the military or by the police with the

army at their back. Anyone who serves his time in the army shares

the responsibility of all these things, about which he is, in some

cases, dubious, while very often they are directly opposed to his

conscience. People are unwilling to be turned out of the land

they have cultivated for generations, or they are unwilling to

disperse when the government authority orders them, or they are

unwilling to pay the taxes required of them, or to recognize laws

as binding on them when they have had no hand in making them, or

to be deprived of their nationality—and I, in the fulfillment of

my military duty, must go and shoot them for it. How can I help

asking myself when I take part in such punishments, whether they

are just, and whether I ought to assist in carrying them out?

 

Universal service is the extreme limit of violence necessary for

the support of the whole state organization, and it is the extreme

limit to which submission on the part of the subjects can go. It

is the keystone of the whole edifice, and its fall will bring it

all down.

 

The time has come when the ever-growing abuse of power by

governments and their struggles with one another has led to their

demanding such material and even moral sacrifices from their

subjects that everyone is forced to reflect and ask himself, “Can

I make these sacrifices? And for the sake of what am I making

them? I am expected for the sake of the state to make these

sacrifices, to renounce everything that can be precious to man—

peace, family, security, and human dignity.” What is this state,

for whose sake such terrible sacrifices have to be made? And why

is it so indispensably necessary? “The state,” they tell us, “is

indispensably needed, in the first place, because without it we

should not be protected against the attacks of evil-disposed

persons; and secondly, except for the state we should be savages

and should have neither religion, culture, education, nor

commerce, nor means of communication, nor other social

institutions; and thirdly, without the state to defend us we

should be liable to be conquered and enslaved by neighboring

peoples.”

 

“Except for the state,” they say, “we should be exposed to the

attacks of evil-disposed persons in our own country.”

 

But who are these evil-disposed persons in our midst from whose

attacks we are preserved by the state and its army? Even if,

three or four centuries ago, when men prided themselves on their

warlike prowess, when killing men was considered an heroic

achievement, there were such persons; we know very well that there

are no such persons now, that we do not nowadays carry or use

firearms, but everyone professes humane principles and feels

sympathy for his fellows, and wants nothing more than we all do—

that is, to be left in peace to enjoy his existence undisturbed.

So that nowadays there are no special malefactors from whom the

state could defend us. If by these evil disposed persons is meant

the men who are punished as criminals, we know very well that they

are not a different kind of being like wild beasts among sheep,

but are men just like ourselves, and no more naturally inclined to

crimes than those against whom they commit them. We know now that

threats and punishments cannot diminish their number; that that

can only be done by change of environment and moral influence. So

that the justification of state violence on the ground of the

protection it gives us from evil-disposed persons, even if it had

some foundation three or four centuries ago, has none whatever

now. At present one would rather say on the contrary that the

action of the state with its cruel methods of punishment, behind

the general moral standard of the age, such as prisons, galleys,

gibbets, and guillotines, tends rather to brutalize the people

than to civilize them, and consequently rather to increase than

diminish the number of malefactors.

 

“Except for the state,” they tell us, “we should not have any

religion, education, culture, means of communication, and so on.

Without the state men would not have been able to form the social

institutions needed for doing any thing.” This argument too was

well founded only some centuries ago.

 

If there was a time when people were so disunited, when they had

so little means of communication and interchange of ideas, that

they could not co-operate and agree together in any common action

in commerce, economics, or education without the state as a

center, this want of common action exists no longer. The great

extension of means of communication and interchange of ideas has

made men completely able to dispense with state aid in forming

societies, associations, corporations, and congresses for

scientific, economic, and political objects. Indeed government is

more often an obstacle than an assistance in attaining these aims.

 

From the end of last century there has hardly been a single

progressive movement of humanity which has not been retarded by

the government. So it has been with abolition of corporal

punishment, of trial by torture, and of slavery, as well as with

the establishment of the liberty of the press and the right of

public meeting. In our day governments not only fail to

encourage, but directly hinder every movement by which people try

to work out new forms of life for themselves. Every attempt at

the solution of the problems of labor, land, politics, and

religion meets with direct opposition on the part of government.

 

“Without governments nations would be enslaved by their

neighbors.” It is scarcely necessary to refute this last

argument. It carries its refutation on the face of it. The

government, they tell us, with its army, is necessary to defend us

from neighboring states who might enslave us. But we know this is

what all governments say of one another, and yet we know that all

the European nations profess the same principles of liberty and

fraternity, and therefore stand in no need of protection against

one another. And if defense against barbarous nations is meant,

one-thousandth part of the troops now under arms would be amply

sufficient for that purpose. We see that it is really the very

opposite of what we have been told. The power of the state, far

from being a security against the attacks of our neighbors,

exposes us, on the contrary, to much greater danger of such

attacks. So that every man who is led, through his compulsory

service in the army, to reflect on the value of the state for

whose sake he is expected to be ready to sacrifice his peace,

security, and life, cannot fail to perceive that there is no kind

of justification in modern times for such a sacrifice.

 

And it is not only from the theoretical standpoint that every man

must see that the sacrifices demanded by the state have no

justification. Even looking at it practically, weighing, that is

to say, all the burdens laid on him by the state, no man can fail

to see that for him personally to comply with state demands and

serve in the army, would, in the majority of cases, be more

disadvantageous than to refuse to do so.

 

If the majority of men choose to submit rather than to refuse, it

is not the result of sober balancing