Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons It must come up in every sin­gle argu­ment, from sophis­ti­cat­ed to sopho­moric, about the prac­ti­ca­bil­i­ty of non-vio­lent paci­fism. “Look what Gand­hi and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. were able to achieve!” “Yes, but what about Hitler? What do you do about the Nazis?” The rebut­tal implies future Nazi-like enti­ties loom­ing on the hori­zon, and though this reduc­tio ad Hitlerum gen­er­al­ly has the effect of nul­li­fy­ing any con­tin­ued ratio­nal dis­cus­sion, it’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a sat­is­fy­ing paci­fist answer to the prob­lem of naked, implaca­ble hatred and aggres­sion on such a scale as that of the Third Reich. Even Gand­hi’s own pro­pos­al sounds like a joke: in 1940, Adolf Hitler aban­dons his plans to claim Leben­sraum for the Ger­man peo­ple and to dis­place, enslave, or erad­i­cate Ger­many’s neigh­bors and unde­sir­able cit­i­zens. He adopts a pos­ture of non-vio­lence and “uni­ver­sal friend­ship,” and Ger­man forces with­draw from Czecho­slo­va­kia, Poland, Den­mark, France, agree­ing to resolve dif­fer­ences through inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence and com­mit­tee. Hitler may have been a veg­e­tar­i­an, but that’s like­ly where any sym­pa­thy between him and Gand­hi …