George Orwell wrote in "Reflections on Gahdhi":
***** In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not -- indeed, since his whole political life centered round a struggle for national independence, he could not -- take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's _Ghandhi and Stalin_. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirerer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths. *****
A moral or religious pacifist view may be, at bottom, more resolutely anti-humanist than non-pacifists', and in this sense, Orwell may be correct in the above. However, it must be said that being a pacifist may be better than taking a wrong side (as Orwell did, in his snitching). Then again, it can be also said that pacifism obscures what is really at stake in political struggles, thus disarming the masses not just literally but also morally, as Russell argues.
Yoshie