The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (192 page)

 
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PAC
(Pan-Africanist Congress)

The Pan-Africanist Congress was created in 1959 with the departure from the
ANC
of a militant Africanist faction led by Robert Sobukwe . The PAC rejected collaboration across racial lines and disapproved of the multiracial, liberal emphasis of the 1955 Freedom Charter. It was banned in 1960, but operated a military wing, Poqo, until 1963. Unbanned in 1990, the PAC continued to support the armed struggle, through its military wing, the APLA. Its radical, socialist line attracted support in the townships and in impoverished rural areas, but it scored only 1.25 per cent of the vote, winning five seats, in the 1994 election.
IC 

 
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See
Public Accounts Committee
.

 
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Political action committees, or PACs, are organizations in the United States that obtain contributions from individuals and distribute donations to candidates for political office. In 1989–90, PACs reported receipts of $372.4 million. Most of that income was used to support congressional candidates. PACs may contribute no more than $5,000 per candidate per election, but may contribute larger sums for so-called party-building activities. The rapid growth in the number of PACs, the amounts of money involved, and the danger of their supplanting parties have been the subject of concern.
DM 

 
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Rejection of war as a means of settling disputes. Associated with various schools of thought, for example Gandhiism, Quakerism. Some writers have reintroduced the word ‘pacificism’ (rejection of violent solutions to the particular question in dispute) to distinguish it from pacifism. Thus, most of those who opposed Britain's going to war with Hitler in the 1930s were pacificists; few were pacifists.

 
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(1737–1809)
Thomas (Tom) Paine , English deist and radical, born in Thetford, is best remembered in England for his outspoken republicanism, chiefly expressed in
Rights of Man
(1791–2), a vindication of the French Revolution written in reply to Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France
. Paine had already achieved fame in the American colonies, where his journalism and the anti-monarchical pamphlet
Common Sense
are credited with having advanced the independence cause.
In England, Paine associated with reformers such as
Godwin
, and then fled to France in 1792, following a Royal Proclamation against seditious writings. He was subsequently outlawed
in absentia
. Initially honoured in France, where he mixed with
Condorcet
and Girondin moderates, he fell out of favour as the Jacobins gained the ascendancy, and was briefly imprisoned. He expounded a deist theology in
The Age of Reason
Parts I and II, and the rudimentary outlines of a welfare state in
Agrarian Justice
(1797).
Paine, a self-educated man, was more a propagandist than an original thinker. He contributed to the dissemination of important ideas such as natural rights, equality, majority rule, and a written constitution, in a way that was easily accessible. He said his country was the world and his religion to do good. He died in relative obscurity in America in 1809, but not before his friend Thomas
Jefferson
provided a fitting epitaph: ‘it will be your glory to have steadily laboured, and with as much effect as any man living.’
PBI 

 
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