George Orwell is the pen name of the English socialist Eric Blair (1903-1950). He fought as a foreign volunteer supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. See Orwell's HOMAGE TO CATALONIA. Having observed at first hand the machinations of the Communists who came to dominate the doomed Republican struggle, Orwell became as vehement an anti-communist as he was an anti-fascist. His novels 1984 and ANIMAL FARM express his fear of, and rage against, Soviet Communism.    

In Orwell's lifetime English gun control was in its infancy, but ever-increasing. Orwell viewed this as intrusive, unnecessary over-regulation and possibly a precursor of totalitarianism.  

And, notwithstanding his long and painful experience with war, Orwell was deeply antagonistic to pacifism. He dismissed pacifists as people who live in society and enjoy all its benefits in blithe disregard of the fact that these benefits only exist because others are at all times doing lawful violence on society's behalf. The fact is that society IS violence (lawful violence), both overt and implicit. It is only through society's superior capacity to engage in violence that we control the Charles Mansons, Ted Bundys, Ted Kazinskis and Andrew Cunanans of this world instead of vice versa.     

The point is not simply that police may (quite rarely) have occasion to use overt lawful violence to subdue criminals. Far more often, overt violence is not necessary to arrest even the most violent criminals because the implicit threat of violence suffices. Unless a criminal really is determined not to be taken alive, he surrenders to the coordinated implicit (lawful) violence of police armed with deadly weapons and able to call upon overwhelming back up force.     

Though less obviously than the police, ALL our institutions of criminal justice depend on overt lawful violence, and the resultant implicit threat thereof, to protect us from wrong-doers. Courts, for instance, only exist and operate through overt violence, and-or the implicit threat thereof: First, by implicit or overt violence the police bring criminals involuntarily before the courts. Second, only the lawful implicit or overt violence of marshals and bailiffs keeps order in the courts; and, third, that same violence delivers criminals to the prisons to which the courts sentence them.

And prisons are violence inchoate. Their walls are internal fortifications protecting society from its internal enemies exactly as border fortresses have from time immemorial protected nations against external enemies. The walls of prisons and fortresses are inchoate violence in that each are fortifications manned by armed guardians and are only effective as long as their walls are so manned. It is a truism of military analysis that such walls allow the area they abut to be controlled by a lesser number of armed guardians than would be necessary if there were no fortification.

So what George Orwell is saying then is that pacifists are hypocrites and parasites. Though they pretend superiority to those who engage in lawful violence, the truth is that that violence is perpetrated on their behalf and inures to their benefit as members of the society it protects. Even as they affect to denounce it, they are basking in the peacefulness which exists only because criminals are subdued by lawful violence overtly done or implicitly threatened by others including the criminal justice system and ordinary individuals defending themselves.  

THE WAGES OF PACIFISM ARE DEATH     

While pacifists unquestionably are parasites living off the lawful violence they decry, perhaps I go too far in calling them hypocrites. Though, generally speaking, pacifists hypocritically choose to live in organized society, thereby reaping the benefits of its organized violence, historically some pacifists have had and taken the opportunity to live outside of those benefits either individually or in communities of like-minded people. Such examples are little known, because such individual pacifists and communities have inevitably been destroyed as a result of their basic error of eschewing the option of self-defense which is, ultimately, the only and final resort of those threatened by violence.     

The unsettled conditions of 17th Century colonial America gave pacifists and pacifist communities an opportunity to exist outside of the protections of society. Consider Anne Hutchinson who, if she is remembered today at all, is remembered as a genuine heroine of religious liberty. Initially she lived among the Massachusetts Puritans. They had fled England, setting up their colony not out of any desire to establish freedom of worship. Rather, as one wag has put it, they only wanted to be free to persecute persons with other beliefs. Their fanaticism is epitomized by how a Massachusetts minister who had taken part persecuting Hutchinson reacted on hearing of her subsequent death: He gleefully reported her murder back to co-religionists in England, writing: "'Thus the Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from this great and sore affliction.'" (The quotes in this and the next two paragraphs come from Willard Sterne Randall's 1998 book, FORGOTTEN AMERICANS: FOOTNOTE FIGURES WHO CHANGED AMERICAN HISTORY)     

Having first been expelled from the Massachusetts colony for her dissenting religious views and preaching of religious liberty, Hutchinson took refuge in Rhode Island which Roger Williams had set up as a haven of religious toleration. But, she "did not believe in war or firearms" and, so, was unwilling to stay and fight when it appeared Massachusetts would seize Rhode Island. Instead, she fled once again, taking her family to the wilds of New York's western frontier. There "she steadfastly refused to defend herself as a new war against the native tribes broke out in 1643. When she opened her gate one day to a group of young braves who asked her for cold water from her well, they rushed in and killed her and all of her [seven children] except [a daughter] who was taken into captivity."     

A similar fate befell a community of German Moravian pacifist settlers a century later. Because their doctrine forbade self-defense, their guns were kept only for hunting. So a hundred or so unarmed women, children and a few men were slaughtered by Indians while the men, with the guns, were mostly away on a winter hunt. By way of contrast consider how Benjamin Franklin's wife and children survived at about the same time. He was then in England negotiating on behalf of the colony's interests. As a result of adverse rumors public sentiment turned very bitter against Franklin during an especially tumultuous period of PA politics. Mobs threatened to destroy his house but departed when they found that Franklin's wife Deborah and her daughter Sarah "had armed and barricaded themselves [in the house] along with friends against the menacing mobs."

The lesson these stories illustrate was summarized by Col. Jeff Cooper, a towering figure in teaching the philosophy as well as the techniques of armed self-defense: "Weapons compound man's power to achieve; they amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus, we must regard them as servants, not masters -- and good servants to good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."