Pacifism is impossible in the face of great evil

In Nicholson Baker's disturbing new book, Human Smoke, which questions whether World War II could have been avoided, he quotes approvingly a pacifist speech Albert Einstein gave in New York in 1930: "If only two per cent of the men liable for war service were to refuse," Einstein said, "there would not be enough jails in the world to take care of them."

But after Hitler came to power in Germany, Einstein was asked to speak on behalf of two conscientious objectors awaiting trial in Belgium. He declined, saying "were I a Belgian I should not, in the present circumstances, refuse military service; rather I should enter service cheerfully in the belief that I would hereby be helping to save European civilisation."

Hitler is undoubtedly the ultimate test of a pacifist. His arrival on the scene caused many of those who had pledged themselves to peace in the 1930s to melt away "like an early morning mist on a hot June day". For example, AA Milne wrote the pacifist Peace with Honour in 1934, but six years later he had come full circle, arguing for the use of force: "If anybody reads Peace with Honour now, he must read it with the one word 'Hitler' scrawled across every page." Even Bertrand Russell wrote: "If I were young enough to fight myself I should do so."

In an afterword, Baker dedicates his book to American and British pacifists, noting that "They failed, but they were right". But this is to ignore the nature of evil. It was all very well for Gandhi to write an open letter to the people of England saying: "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." But, at least until the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, that was what the Jews were doing and it brought them no further than the death camps.

And the idea that pacifism could influence a regime that murdered anyone who dissented is absurd. In Britain there were 62,000 conscientious objectors in WWII, and although 6,500 of them spent some time in prison they all lived to tell the tale. In Germany, conscientious objectors were shot.

In writing about COs in World War I, I could not help but admire their determination to stick to their belief amid an unthinking orgy of patriotism. But they had absolutely no effect on the war. Their lasting achievement was to ensure that in a democracy men would have the right to refuse to fight.

I am very glad to live in a country where men have the right to abide by their conscience; but unhappily pacifism has never worked. Depressingly it remains now, as in Hitler's day, a brave ideal powerless in the face of man's unfathomable capacity for evil.

‘Human Smoke’, Simon & Schuster, £20. Will Ellsworth-Jones is author of ‘We Will Not Fight, The Untold Story of World War One’s Conscientious Objectors’, Aurum Press ·