Pacifist: Or, My War and Louis Lepke - Hardcover

Professional pacifists and professional soldiers share many of the same mind sets. Not least is a mutual compulSion to explain and justify commitments appearing aberrant to societies preferring a less principled approach either to rejecting wars or to fighting them. Pacifist is Donald Wetzel's elegantly-written counterpart to William Man chester's Goodbye Darkness or Ernst Vunger's Storm of Steel. Federal work camps and prisons during World War II play the role of Okinawa, Gettysburg, or the Somme: the arena where beliefs and attitudes previously held by instinct are tested and refined. For Wetzel, the state at war has no higher moral standing then convicted murderer Lepke Buchalter, one of his prison acquaintances. But this line of argument is peripheral to his sense of outrage at being challenged for his beliefs, let alone called to account for them. It represents no disrespect to Wetzel's convictions 'to suggest that his particular brand of pacificism is distinctively American-an anarchistic small-town cantankerousness. Gandhi and Thoreau are mere embellishments. To a solipsistic rejection of authority, Wetzel is irritatingly quick to don the prophet's mantle. He seems to believe that the fact of dissent itself involves the dissenter in what Socrates called support at public expense. His pride that incarceration did not break him is ironic. This memoir only highlights the relatively gentle toleration with which the U.S. treated dissidents in what was, whether or not Wetzel accepts the idea, a war for national existence. His experiences, while hardly a rest cure, might have been a welcome alternative to many a front-line infantryman, and more to survivors of Auschwitz or the Gulag Archipelago. The comparison is incomplete. More than a few U.S. veterans of World War II underwent serious physical discomfort to say nothing of serious physical risk. Yet the comparison is not unfair. Ultimate evil is not always embodied in one's own government, even if that is a convenient target -and a safe one. -- From Independent Publisher

Wetzel, who declared himself a conscientious objector before Pearl Harbor, spent the WW II years in prison. In this thin volume, he defines his pacifist belief with considerable passion, describing people he met and his struggle to maintain equilibrium especially during his time in a psycho ward. Louis Lepke of "Murder, Incorporated" befriended him briefly, possibly, suggests the author, because he mistook Wetzel for a fellow Jew. In writing about Lepke's death in the electric chair, Wetzel fetches far to draw a parallel with Hiroshima. The weakness of the book is the author's tendency to oversimplify. The war years are an era when it was "morally correct for a man to blow other men, women and children to bits . . ."; the average citizen believes that "America is good and Russia is bad and the bomb is necessary to our happiness." Although Wetzel's thinking is sometimes fuzzy, his writing is pungent. Lepke "was considered by many to be the leading murderer, in the private sector, of his day." A fourth of July parade is "a kind of rain dance for war."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.