Former American diplomat Philip Marshall Brown complained in 1915 in the prestigious magazine The North American Review about pacifism. Brown wanted to denounce the dangers of pacifism, essentially its naivety and lack of realism when it came to analyzing the reasons for the Great War.

History repeated itself during World War II, the Vietnam War, and other more recent conflicts and again today, in a Europe that several political leaders define as "pre-war." Those who raise the need to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine are no longer described as naive, but as being in favor of the enemy, in this case the Russian Government. Similarly, in many countries those who have demonstrated for peace in Gaza have been perceived as complicit in Hamas terrorism. The efforts of the numerous pacifist societies and newspapers founded in the previous decades by freethinkers and businessmen were of little use. The "glorification" of war, "the only hygiene of the world," that declared the futurist avant-garde at the dawn of the First World War, were of little use. It is a mistake to think that Gandhi was a pacifist. He was not.