  Absolute pacifism is an ideal.  Some versions of absolute pacifism go so far as to abjure the idea of personal self-defense. Other absolute pacifists may allow for personal self-defense while rejecting the impersonal and political violence of war. Almost every defender of absolute pacifism recognizes the difficulty of attaining to the absolute idea. Gandhi writes the following in his autobiography: “Man cannot for a moment live without consciously or unconsciously committing outward himsa (violence)… A votary of ahimsa (nonviolence) therefore remains true to this faith if the spring of all his actions is compassion, if he shuns to the best of his ability the destruction of the tiniest creature, tries to save it, and thus incessantly strives to be free from the deadly coil of himsa. He will be constantly growing in self-restraint and compassion, but he can never become entirely free from outward himsa” (Gandhi 1993, 439). The absolute ideal is nearly impossible to achieve because we must harm other beings in order to survive: we must kill in order to eat. And the world often presents us with difficult “kill or be killed” choices as in the question of self-defense or war. Absolute pacifists may hold that it is better to be killed than to kill. But such a choice may be impossible for many of us to make. Pacifists will often argue that this way of describing a situation—as one where the choice is “kill or be killed”—usually presents us with a false dilemma: often there are other nonviolent alternatives to either killing or being killed. But when presented with such a stark choice, absolute pacifism may require self-sacrifice.