Georg Duckwitz - I had never heard of him until last week, but he is worth remembering. He once did one small thing and as a result many lives were saved. I suppose it was not particularly courageous, but had there been a few more Georgs, history might read differently today.

Duckwitz was a fully paid-up Nazi. In 1943, he had what must have seemed like a pretty cushy job in the Third Reich. He was naval attache at the German embassy in Copenhagen.

Duckwitz was told by his superior that orders had come from Berlin to start rounding up Danish Jews for deportation. Duckwitz relayed the information to his contacts in the Danish Government and, over the next few nights, 6000 Danish Jews were spirited away to Sweden. When the SS came to round them up, they were all gone.

Georg Duckwitz didn't do much. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't make any great speeches. He didn't suffer for his treachery. But you have to say that what Georg did was exactly the right thing - just what needed to be done in that time and place. I wish I had known him.

Georg is on my mind as I read a piece in Thursday's Age by Michael Kelly, editor-in-chief of the US National Journal. Mr Kelly's thesis is summed up in the headline, 'Why the pacifist view is evil'. By a piece of weird and twisted logic, Mr Kelly proposes that pacifism equals fascism.

Kelly is all the way with President George W. Bush. We are either with him, without reservation or qualification, in his fantasy of a war on terrorism, or we are terrorists; or at least apologists for terrorists.

As a wishy-washy pacifist, let me say a word for the morality of non-violence.

First, I do not know of any person who, while dissenting from the military response to terrorism, does not wish most fervently that the murderers of September 11 be found, arrested, brought to trial and punished. Kelly's characterisation of pacifists as moral relativists or naive purists is absurd and offensive.

Second, pacifists (for want of a better word) are people who say of a situation such as we are in, "There are two ways we can deal with this. We can go to war. Or we can do the other. On the whole, we would rather do the other".

The other is not acquiescence. It is looking for a course of action that achieves justice and limits violence as far as possible and improves outcomes for the maximum number of people. The great exemplar for pacifists everywhere is Mahatma Gandhi. He was not in favor of doing nothing; he was for doing the most constructive thing in the circumstances. His disciple, Martin Luther King, was not a cowardly non-resister of evil; he was a non-violent resister because he believed that, in the end, more would be achieved by appealing to his foes' better nature than by trying to kill them.

The inspiring example of Nelson Mandela should make us very sceptical indeed about the efficacy of violence over what Gandhi called satyagraha (truth force).

What right-thinking person, observing the tragedy of the Middle East, does not think that the worst enemies of the Palestinians are not the Israelis, but Hamas and Hezbollah? Did ever a people stand in such dire need of a Gandhi or Mandela as the Palestinians do?

A catastrophic war was fought against Hitler. But you would be hard-pressed to name a single bellicose general who made as much difference as Georg Duckwitz, whose philosophy seems to have been, "Try to do good. And, if you can't do good, then at least don't do bad".

Martin Luther King once said: "The end is pre-existent in the means." When Messrs Bush, Kelly, and John Howard have had their great military adventure, the number of terrorists in the world will have increased, not decreased. Pacifists are pessimists where violence is concerned.