"When one man kills another, we call it murder; when millions are killed, we call it war." These were the words of Joan Mascaró Fornés, an exile from the Franco regime, professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, and translator of Bhagavad Gita and other great texts of Hinduism (the Upanishad, he Dhammapada) into English (and later, with the help of Elisabet Abeyà and Francesc de Borja Moll, into Catalan). Mascaró Fornés was a committed pacifist who dedicated his life to the study of languages and religions as tools for knowledge, and also as tools for humankind's civilizing capacity. The pinnacle of this civilizing capacity, its highest level, would be the absence of war.
Why was Mascaró Fornés a pacifist? Because he was a victim of war (he had to go into exile during the Spanish Civil War, and his family, who emigrated to Algeria, lost everything in the colonial war), and because he possessed an intelligence that allowed him to understand that peace, as a political strategy, is far more powerful and productive than war. War is about immediate gain and easy profit; peace is about long-term vision and the ability to mobilize significant resources, but with the common good in mind: his admired Gandhi led much of India's independence process using peace as a political weapon. Gandhi was neither naive nor enlightened: he was a strategist.
Pacifism has nothing to do with cowardice or weakness: on the contrary, it is the fruit of a more intelligent, more evolved form of courage and strength. Warmongering, the fascination with armies, weapons, and violence, corresponds to a childish and perverse stage of the human mind, a primitive and stagnant intelligence from which many are unwilling or unable to emerge. Instead, they think they can look down on pacifism condescendingly: "What will you do when the enemy bombs you?" they insolently ask pacifists, thinking that this will end the discussion. They fail to realize that the first ones who should answer these kinds of questions are themselves: "What will you do when the missiles of your admired warmongering leaders fall on your house? Will you applaud their audacity?"
Mascaró Fornés admitted one exception to his pacifism, and that was tyrannicide. Indeed, he considered it legitimate to eliminate the tyrant, given that this act of violence benefits the common good. And as we all know, what must be protected and defended is not the homeland, which is another perverse infantilism, but the common good. Espriu also said it: "Sometimes it is necessary and unavoidable / that a man die for a people, / but an entire people should never die / for a single man." Tyrants are those who dispose of the life and death of citizens to maintain and increase their power: let them die, then, and not the citizens. The question this newspaper posed on Sunday ("Can one be a pacifist today?") has this answer: since it cannot be done, it is more necessary than ever to be so. On the fourth anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is a good time to remember this.
