  One of the ways that pacifists can reply to this objection is to emphasize the difference between personal nonviolence and war. Pacifists may accept that personal self-defense is acceptable; and they may accept the idea of using violence in defense of the innocent in concrete personal encounters. (Of course, absolute pacifists who emphasized complete nonresistance will not accept such violence at all). But pacifism as anti-warism will argue that the violence of war is of a different kind. War is dehumanizing violence that kills masses of persons without any concern for them as persons. Along these lines, Thomas Nagel claims that we should be able to justify to the victim what is being done to them, in light of morally relevant facts about them. At the level of personal violence, it is possible to say that an aggressor deserves the violence that is inflicted upon him. But at the level of war, this personal element is lost and instead we have killing en masse, which is an assault on human dignity.