Free Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky

wars.
    During all these conflicts there were small numbers of Americans, not all of them religious, who refused to fight. In 1675 a few men refused to participate in preparations to defend against an Indian assault on Boston. In the early eighteenth century the Massachusetts colony found it necessary to pass a law establishing prison sentences for those who refused to bear arms. Indian attacks were said by some to be God's punishment for the colony allowing the presence of Quakers.
    Historians commonly suggest that the acts of political leaders are the result of the slow dissemination of—and society's osmotic absorption of—the ideas of intellectuals. While it is true that political leaders absorb ideas from the academy, they also requisition ideas, embracing those thinkers who provide them with the intellectual underpinnings for what they want to do. In seventeenth-century Europe, as policies of warfare, colonialism, and slavery were expanded, a great deal of thought went into rationalizing these acts. No nation of the period was as successful at providing intellectual justifications for these policies as England. Richard Tuck, a professor of government at Harvard University, has stated that the reason England was the most successful European colonizer is that it had the best intellectual underpinnings for this role.
    Alberico Gentili, an Italian who in the late sixteenth century became an Oxford professor of civil law, expanded the concept of defensive warfare and established the principle, recently touted by the George W. Bush presidency to justify invading Iraq, of the preemptive strike. “No one ought to wait to be struck unless he is a fool,” Gentili wrote. The argument was not new. The Romans justified attacking Carthage by claiming that Carthage would at some point in the future attack them. But given the state of intra-European relations in Gentili's time, there was not a moment in the next few centuries when some European power could not reasonably fear the military of another and unleash a preemptive strike, which is why that era saw scarcely a moment without warfare. “For certainly,” in Gentili's words, “as long as men are men, the sons of Prometheus and not Epimetheus, and as long as reason is reason, a just fear will be a just cause of a preventative war.”
    Gentili went even further in his Oxford lectures, stating that being the aggressor was also justified in the defense of property and holdings. He specifically justified the Spanish conquests in the New World, neatly piecing together references to the Romans spreading liberty with references to Augustine's just war to preserve the values of society and Urban's demonization of the infidel. Not surprising for a new age of imperialism, the original imperialists, the Romans, were being cited more and more. The Indians, like the Gauls, deserved to be conquered.
The cause of the Spaniards is just when they make war upon the Indians, who practiced abominable lewdness, even with beasts, and who ate human flesh, slaying men for that purpose. For such sins are contrary to human nature….
    Gentili employed a similar logic to justify slavery, underscoring the justness of enslaving the “wicked.” This was an ancient argument. Aristotle wrote about those who deserved to be enslaved. But here it was applied to wicked races, races that deserved to be conquered and deserved to be enslaved. The slavery of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries was necessarily racist because itargued that Africans should be enslaved because of their inherent moral inferiority. Thomas Jefferson, who professed to be opposed to slavery as a “political and moral evil” even while owning slaves, believed that while all men were created equal, black men were less equal. In his Notes on Virginia, he amply discusses the inherent inferiority of African people. Since the inherent inferiority of other people could be invoked to justify both warfare and slavery, it was not a