Philosophy of Nonviolence, By David McReynolds

These notes - which will stretch over several issues of [Nonviolence Web Upfront], and take the place of the usual "Op Ed" pieces - are an effort to summarize the basic philosophy of nonviolence.  We write and talk about nonviolence as if it were simply a technique. I believe it is much more, that it is a "one-edged philosphy" which cannot easily be used to defend or advance injustice, and which is of value only if tested in the real world.  When I came into the pacifist movement in 1948 the concept of nonviolence as a method of change was new to the United States, the direct result of Gandhi's teachings and actions in India. Historically nonviolence had been seen either as an expression of the Gospels, or as a variant on the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. But neither the Christian nor the stoic teachings gave us a method to deal with injustice except through endurance. This was fine if I was the one suffering, but it did not provide a way to stop you from inflicting injustice on a third party. The Christian could choose to endure great injustice - but what of the non-Christian who had done nothing to merit the suffering, and sought relief from it?

THE PROBLEM OF DEALING WITH EVIL

Particularly after World War II with the horror of the mass killing, there was a sense that pacifism alone - the refusal to kill - was not good enough. Communism offered one answer but, as expressed by Lenin and Trotsky, it was an answer in which the end justified the means and by 1945 it was clear that, at best, Communism was a "lesser evil" than Fascism. Into this vacuum, this "historic place" where we found ourselves confronted by the reality that men such as Hitler and Stalin existed, that the atom bomb was possibly a final step in human history, the pacifist movement embraced what we call today "Nonviolence" as opposed to the earlier word "pacifism".

And it was here that I entered the pacifist movement, as old ideas and new ones were explored and tested. It was one of the twists of history that when nonviolence did re-enter American life, it was returning home. Henry David Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience had been read by Tolstoy, Tolstoy had been read by Gandhi, and Gandhi had been read by Martin Luther King Jr. It was an ideology which had been around the world, affecting and being affected by all it encountered.

THERE IS NO IDEOLOGY WITHOUT HOLES

In trying to understand the philosophy of nonviolence, it is important to keep in mind there is no living, vital philosphy which does not have "holes" in it. Let me give two examples. Marxism (and I am heavily indebted to Marx) has an inherent contradiction in that it argued "history is on our side, socialism is inevitable, the result of contradictions which will lead to the collapse of capitalism". Fine, if socialism is inevitable, then why not sit back and wait for it? Why risk one's life - as so many courageous socialists and communists did - in a struggle, the end of which was already certain?

Buddhism, to which I am also personally indebted, tells us that Buddha sat under a tree, meditated, and discovered the truth, a large part of which was non-attachment. Why then did he bother to teach it? If Buddha had gained the answer, why was he still so "attached to the world" that he taught at all? In both cases I have heard the answers - they do not persuade me. Philosophies, those which can change the course of lives, and alter history, are marked by contradictions. Only minor ideologies have all the answers.

Nonviolence does not answer all questions. It is filled with contradictions. My own grasp of nonviolence is a blend of things I have read in Gandhi, heard from Bayard Rustin and A. J. Muste, from reading Eastern philosophy, the gospels, Karl Marx, etc. This is an effort to outline what I have learned, knowing there is not a single idea here which is original with me.

A BASIC ASSUMPTION OF NONVIOLENCE

Let's begin with a basic assumption of nonviolence. There is an absolute reality, but none of us are absolutely certain what it is. Each of us sees part of it, none of us can grasp all of it. Let's think of reality - the "real world" - as the earth itself. If we ask a handful of widely scattered people what the "reality of the earth is", the man who lives on a small island in the Pacific will say it is almost entirely water, except for the patch of land on which he and his family live. A woman in Kansas will say it is flat, dry except when it rains, and is covered by wheat. The nomad in the Sahara desert will say the earth is dry, sandy, constantly moving with the wind, and there is little vegetation. The hunter in the Brazilian rain forest will insist the earth is wet with water, the air is thick with moisture, the day is filled with the sounds of birds and insects, and the vegetation so dense that it is hard to move.

Each statement is true - as a part of the truth. None of the statements is true of the whole. Yet we often believe the partial truth we perceive is the full truth. Put it another way - each human being perceives "reality" in different ways. For most of us that difference is so slight we don't notice it. But the matter is important when a person is color blind and cannot distinguish between red and green - which is why STOP signs say STOP and do not just flash red (it is also why the red is the top color of traffic lights, and green the bottom one - a person who is color blind can still tell the difference by their position). Someone who, from birth, is deaf or blind lives in a world as "real" as the one you live in, but their "reality" will be profoundly different.

We are, each of us, finite beings in a universe which, so far as we can know, is infinite. Whether the universe had a beginning and an end we are not sure - but we are certain we had a beginning and we all know we will have an end. There is a limit to the time during which we can learn things - and there are far too many things to learn for any of us ever to be sure we are an authority except - at best - in small and limited ways.

We may be absolutely certain - as I am - that behind the illusions of a solid world (an illusion, because the solid world is made up of impossibly small ticks of energy bound together in such a way as to give the illusion of being chairs, tables, people, etc.) there is some "reality." But I am absolutlely certain, because I am finite and the true reality is infinite, that I can never be absolutely certain of anything being absolutely true. I believe there is truth, but I do not believe I will ever be certain of it.

WHERE DOES THIS NONSENSE LEAD US?

This all seems terribly convoluted but let's look at Gandhi, who said "Truth is God, God is Truth". His Autobiography was titled "My Experiments with Truth". It is easy to miss the edge of what Gandhi was saying, because it was so obvious. Asked by a Westerner if he believed in God, Ghandi replied "God is even in these stones", tapping a stone. This is part of a Hindu belief that God is not, as in the West, separted and apart from us, personal and yet distant - rather, God is impersonal and pervades everything. The line between this belief and a kind of religious athiesm is hard to draw. In the Hindu sense "God is all things". So that when Gandhi said "God is Truth" it was a statement a scientist might understand with greater immediacy than the rest of us.

For me there has always been a link between this and Marx's thought, in which the entire body of Marxism was built up by observation of the material world, by a search for the facts, by a determination that theories had to reflect the "material reality". Both Karl Marx and Mohandas Gandhi spent a great deal of time trying to find out what the concrete facts were about situations.

Marx did his work among stacks of books in the British Museum. Gandhi looked over reports, read statistics, listened to peasants, sought the truth before reaching a conclusion. Neither man sat alone, meditated, and waited for truth to arrive on the wings of pure logic. No - truth was determined by observation. There is to Gandhi something of the pure scientist, the physicist, willing to test his observations.

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AS COMMON GROUND

And if Gandhi's search for truth saw "God as Truth", then it is possible for the "non-believer" to approach Gandhi, with the search for truth as a common ground. But - and we will return to this again and again - because Gandhi was aware that he could not be certain that he was right, he was not willing to destroy others in his test of truth. Himself, yes, but not others. He was aware (and Marxists tend not to be) that his perception of reality was always, and by the nature of things, "partial and incomplete". And he knew that his opponent also saw a part of the true reality. This is terribly hard for us to admit or recognize. The General sees a part of reality? Nixon saw a part of reality? Yes.

Let me close this first "chapter" by noting that one of the things which most deeply impressed me about the late A.J. Muste was his ability to listen with respect to those with whom he deeply disagreed, not as a tactic but because he hoped to catch in their remarks some truth he himself had missed. Most of us, in arguing, can hardly wait for our "opponent" to finish so that we can "correct" him (or her).

A.J. was in no hurry to "correct" his opponent, nor was Gandhi. Nonviolence is many things, but if it is not a search for truth - a search that is never ended - it will fail.

THE INEVITABILITY OF CONFLICT

Nonviolence assumes conflict is inevitable because change is inevitable, and with change comes conflict. If there has been a traditional view of seeing pacifists as "peaceful" (overlooking the fact we usually cause a good deal of trouble, being non-conformists by nature), Gandhian philosophy assumes that the "reality" we see is transitory, that change and struggle is the rule, not the exception.

This view of the world is very old - Heraclitus, (the Greek philosopher who lived about 535-475 B.C.) taught there was no permanent reality except the reality of change - illustrated by his maxim "You cannot step twice in the same river". This is also, in many ways, the essence of Marxism - everything we observe is in a state of change. It may help if we think of the world "of reality" as if it were water in the process of becoming either steam or ice - no change seems to be taking place until, suddenly, there is a great change. (Remember how the institution of Jim Crow suddenly cracked beginning in December, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama).

For Gandhi, as a Hindu, this was an easy assumption, since for Hinduism all the reality we see is an illusion, covering a deeper, changeless, unknowable reality. In thinking of Gandhi we should understand the role of the Bhagavad-Gita (meaning "Song of God") in his life and thinking. The Gita is very old - perhaps the 5th to 2nd century B.C. It is relatively short - the paperback copy I have is just 140 pages. (Printed in 1954, a "Mentor Book by the New American Library" its pages brown and fragile, proof of the instability of matter!). The most poplar work in Hindu religious scripture, it was as well known to Gandhi as the Gospels would be to a devout Christian.

I want to quote one passage which concerns a great battle in which Arunja, the warrior, is about to take part. As he looks on the scene of what is to become a bloody battlefield he turns to Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, and says:

"HOW COULD I HARM THEM?"

Krishna, Krishna, / Now as I look on / These my kinsmen / Arrayed for battle, / My limbs are weakened, / My mouth is parching, / My body trembles, / My hair stands upright, / My skin seems burning, / The bow Gandiva / Slips from my hand, / My brain is whirling / Round and round, / I can stand no longer: / Krishna, I see such / Omens of evil! / What can we hope from / This killing of kinsmen? / What do I want with / Victory, empire, / Or their enjoyment? / O [Krishna], / How can I care for / Power or pleasure, / My own life, even, / When all these others, / Teachers, fathers, / Grandfathers, uncles, / Sons and brothers, / Husbands of sisters, / Grandsons and cousins, / For whose sake only / I could enjoy them / Stand here ready / To risk blood and wealth / In war against us?

"Knower of all things, / Though they should slay me / How could I harm them? / I cannot wish it: / Never, never, / Not though it won me / The throne of the three worlds / How much the less for / Earthly lordship! / Krishna, hearing / The prayers of all men, / Tell me how can / We hope to be happy / Slaying the sons / of Dhritarashtra? / Evil they may be, / Worst of the wicked, / Yet if we kill them / Our sin is greater, / How could we dare spill / The blood that unites us? / Where is joy in / The killing of kinsmen? / What is this crime / I am planning, O Krishna? / Murder most hateful, / Murder of brothers! / Am I indeed / So greedy for greatness? / Rather than this / Let the evil children / of Dhritarashtra / Come with their weapons / Against me in battle: / I shall not struggle, / I shall not strike them. / Now let them kill me, / That will be better."

Khrisna responds, explaining that since Arunja is a warrior the battle is his duty - "If you refuse to fight this righteous war, you will be turning aside from your duty. You will be a sinner and disgraced. . . . The warrior-chiefs will believe it was fear that drove you from the battle."

GANDHI AND KARMA YOGA

Krishna goes on to spell out for Arunja the path of "Karma Yoga" which is the "yoga of action". (We are familiar with yoga as a form of exercise - in Hinduism there are various forms of the discipline of yoga - one is "Karma Yoga", which is seeking unity with God through good actions, rather than meditation. Gandhi, if we are to understand him, must be seen as a Hindu who took the path of Karma Yoga).

For orthodox Hindus, the text of the Gita is hardly an invocation to nonviolence. On the contrary it seems an apologia for doing one's military duty. But Gandhi, unorthodox in so many ways, was unorthodox here, as well, and saw nonviolence - the path of loving resistance, of "soul force" or Satygraha - as the way out of the pain of engaging in the slaughter of his brothers. Yes, he would accept his duty as if he were in the warrior caste, but he would transform the very nature of battle itself.

I have drastically condensed what should be read whole - if the translation by Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood is still available, it is much worth reading [Eds. Note: It is and you can buy it here via Amazon.Com]. One can't grasp the philosophy of nonviolence as Gandhi developed it without looking at this source.

For Gandhi, the hope was that if each conflict could be resolved through nonviolence, the next conflict would occur at a "higher level" - an echo, arrived at by a Hindu, of Marx's thought that the dialectic would lead to positive change. In practical terms there is not much difference between Marx's "material dialectic" and Gandhi's thought, though one was rooted in the rejection of religion and other rooted in it. For Marx, all history was the process of a "material dialectic" between the human race in conflict with its environment, with the cultures that emerged from that conflict reflecting it - thus, the "Gods" of nomadic tribes were different from the "Gods" of early city life. The concept of God evolves from that of the Torah, in which the God of the Jews was one of many Gods - but the only one the Jews should worship - to the God spoken of by Jesus, who was one, and universal. Of course, primary to Marx's thought was that social structures reflected the power of those who owned the means of production.

THE UNIQUENESS OF BEING

There is one remarkable line from the Gita that is central to nonviolence: "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? . . . That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die."

Death is a given. Our own life is supremely important to us - our only experience of consciousness - yet we must come to terms with its inevitable end. At least for those of us who are atheists, there is no afterlife. Part of what makes nonviolence so powerful is its respect for the unique nature of every person. Not one of us has existed before, or will exist again. Each of us contains a kind of "private universe" of experience. It is good to live, good to experience life, good to enjoy that experience, good to rejoice in the wonders of life. All the more urgent, if we are here but once, and briefly, to feel entitled to experience the delights.

It is this extraordinary uniqueness of being that makes the pacifist so absolutely unwilling to destroy another person, for with each death a universe ends, and can never be replaced. How wonderfully we are made, how different from one another. To respect and understand the uniqueness of each person may make it possible also to sense what we have in common, even if what we have in common is only the certainty of our own end. Yet we must be reconciled with the fact that we must die. What we do not have to do is kill - that alone is our choice.

We come in different sizes, shapes, sexes, colors, each of us bearing different cultural and family memories. Nonviolence is about a society in which, far from having people conform to some standard, each person is able to realize, during his or her life, their greatest potential.

DEATH AS A DIMENSION

Yet . . . it is certain that at some point our life must end. To enjoy life it is, oddly, necessary to realize the dimension death gives it. If we were to live forever, each day would be of less value - our days being endless. (Just as a person with only a single ten dollar bill values it far more highly than the person who has a room jammed full of them ). It is precisely the "finite nature" of our chance to experience life that makes it so wonderful. And it is our willingness not to be "attached" to the material world, to realize death will take from us all we have, that gives daily life its savor. The popular saying "He who dies with the most toys wins" sums up the wrong position - what can a dead man do with his toys? How much more joyous if we say "The one who has given away his toys before the deadline wins". I remember Bayard Rustin once remarking that whatever clothes you had in your closet that you had not worn in the past year no longer belong to you - clearly you didn't need them, and must give them to someone who did. The Christian Gospels contain a parable about the rich man who had gathered great wealth to insure his security and God says "You fool! Tonight you will die - what good will your riches do you?".

So . . . nonviolence is a philosophy based on the assumption of change, and on the realization that change will cause pain and injustice. It is an effort to deal with that one certainty of existence - nothing remains stable. (Think of Gimbels, Woolworth's and the Soviet Union!).

More seriously think of the Industrial Revolution, with its monstrous suffering (if you compare the horror of Stalin's short time in power and the millions who died under him as Russia industrialized with the agony of the century and more of the Industrial Revolution, the suffering is not so different - only the time frame). The struggle against racism in which good people find themselves trapped by old concepts. Think of the struggles of labor, where union organizing often divided families - the old union song "Which side are you on?". Nonviolence means an effort "to do battle with injustice" without risking the destruction of our opponents, both because we cannot be absolutely certain we are right (dealt with in Part One), and because those we oppose are as unique as we ourselves.

Part of the philosophy of nonviolence has to confront the issue of "non-attachment" to materialism and also even to life - a paradox, because we place so high a value on life. And, in the next issue, I want to take up the paradox of how, to achieve justice we have to accept injustice.

THE INJUSTICE OF THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE

First the bad news". The slogan "No justice, no Peace" is popular. But it is a risky slogan. It could well be turned around to read "No peace, no justice". Too much of the discussion of social change is conducted by people who are not, themselves, oppressed, and who think life should be fair. Life isn't fair. The process of social change is flawed and profoundly unjust.

The good news is that justice can be won - but at a very unfair cost. This is the beginning of wisdom for all revolutionaries, violent or nonviolent. The whole concept of "deep social change" rests on the reality that only the oppressed will do a damn thing to change society - only they have an interest. Men won't liberate women. Straights won't liberate gays and lesbians. Whites won't liberate blacks. Capitalists won't organized trade unions. Militarists won't lead the disarmament movement.

This isn't to say that some men, or some whites, etc., won't be involved in struggles for liberation. But collectively, the British didn't liberate India - the Indians did. The whites in the South didn't end Jim Crow - the blacks did. Where there is injustice, God does not come down, wave her hands, and create justice. We do it or it doesn't get done.

No fair, you say! And right, it isn't. Why should Southern blacks, who had suffered so deeply and so long from racism, have to carry the main burden of social change? The only reason is that no one else really has an interest.

CREATING JUSTICE

If you followed the first two parts of this exploration of nonviolent philosophy, you remember that society is always in the process of change, and that change always involves suffering. The creation of the capitalist system - which we hope some day to replace with something better - brought enormous suffering to the vast majority of people. (Though fair is fair, we have to admit that life before capitalism was no picnic - few would trade "where we are now" for "where we were then").
The institution of slavery created, in this country, an enduring set of injustices with which, in some ways, we are only beginning to grapple.

If we want to change this situation - the militarism, racism, economic exploitation of our present - we must accept the fact that such a change will also bring pain. If workers organize strong trade unions, that will diminish the profits of the employers. To avoid that pain they will use the full power of the State and the media (and often the church) to discredit the trade union movement.

Since we have grown up in a society that sees trade unions as legitimate, it is easy to forget how recently there were violent battles, not only in the coal fields, but in the factories in the North, between workers and employers. Closer to our time - but increasingly distant - is the history of the Civil Rights movement. Still closer was the Vietnam movement. In every case the record is clear - those who sought justice had to pay the highest price. Unfair, but that is life.

Martin Luther King Jr. is dead. One of a long line of resisters, including NAACP leaders, students, church leaders, who were gunned down, lynched, vanished in the night. Very few Southern sheriffs were killed (I can't recall one). If life were fair, those who died would be alive, and their killers would be dead.

Those of us who, for whatever reason, have chosen to try to change society must accept the fact that (a) change means suffering and (b) we will get more than our fair share of it. We have our choice between "getting revenge or getting change" - we can't have both.

This is true whether we are pacifists or believe in violence. Look at Vietnam, where on the scales of justice the cause of the Vietnamese are monumentally more just than that of the Americans. Yet we suffered 55,000 some dead , while the Vietnamese suffered over a million dead. And those who led us into this war have either died natural deaths or, like Robert MacNamara, have visited Vietnam.

The revolutionist knows the goal is deep change, not settling old scores. Thus the Vietnamese welcome Americans who fought against them. Like them, our goal is a new society, and that must include those who were yesterday our enemies. The goal of a successful revolution is a reconciliation after the social change. (The South Africans are giving us a startling lesson in this, as they handle those who had committed crimes under the old regime - amnesty is being granted).

For pacifists all of this is not abstract. It means that, because we know our opponent is also a member of our family - often, in civil conflict, literally a member of our family - we are more willing to suffer than to inflict suffering.

I am not trying to make a fetish out of suffering, I am not a masochist. Life is good, we want to keep the pain as contained as possible, and enjoy the best in life. (My God! That is why we are working for social change in the first place!!). What I am suggesting is that the effort to avoid that pain - the determination to carry a gun so that "if push comes to shove, I'd rather shoot him than be shot" - is not the answer. In Vietnam where the gun was used, society was laid waste. In our own country, where the division between black and white was so deep, but nonviolence was chosen, the society was not laid waste. We have enough wounds from slavery and racism - we hardly needed to compound them with a new civil war. (Our Civil War is an excellent lesson in the dreadful effect of violence as an agent of change - it delayed beginning to deal with the reality of racism until the middle of this century, and it brought appalling suffering to both Southern whites and blacks - suffering and starvation not recorded in the history books).

THE AGENTS OF INJUSTICE - REACHING THEM

One of the issues that keeps surfacing is how to deal with the issue of police brutality. We can make the same mistake here that a handful of middle class "leftists" made at the start of the Vietnam War when they targeted our own troops as the enemy, or we can learn from history.

If you want to change, you have to cope with things as they are. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution, and no pacifist, didn't encourage his people to call the Czarist troops names - no, he encouraged a political dialogue with them, knowing that the armed forces of the old Russian regime were only "agents" employed by the ruling class. If you wanted to make sure the Czar could hold power, then you threw rocks at the troops, which made them hate you. If you wanted to overthrow the Czar, then you did what Lenin's people did - you took every chance to have political dialogue with the police and troops so that, finally, at a moment of crisis the police refused to obey the orders of the Czar.

Shift forward in time to the great demonstrations in Washington D.C. against the Vietnam War, and the day the Vietnam Veterans came to throw their medals of honor over the fence of the White House to show their contempt for the war.
They were very careful, several days before that action, to leaflet the police stations in Washington D.C. with "A letter to our Brothers in Blue" explaining what they war was about, and why they would be risking arrest. This diminished the ability of the police to brutalize the demonstrators.

My own experience was that most of those who called the cops "pigs" during the Vietnam period were either police agents trying to provoke confrontations, or were new in the movement.

These arguments have not been put forward because they are "nonviolent" but because they work, they are practical. And that, of course, is what nonviolence should be about - a practical, workable way to change society, not an abstract set of theories.

The injustice of all movements for social change is that they require those of us committed to change to endure the pain of the change rather than to try imposing it on the oppressed. There is a profound psychological lesson here. If those who are oppressing you see you as someone throwing rocks and slogans, treating them as objects of hate, this confirms in them their belief you merit every bit of pain they can inflict on you. Every blow, every prison term, if necessary every bullet.

But it is when we stand our ground, suffering without retaliation, accepting blows but not inflicting them, that the way is open for the opponent to see us as human, and to question their own behavior.

UNITE YOUR FRIENDS, DIVIDE YOUR ENEMIES

The "trick" to nonviolence is to find a way to divide your opposition , while keeping our side united. Had Martin Luther King Jr. used violence, it would have divided the black community in different ways - between those fearful of using it, those too weak to use it, etc. - and it would have united the white community against him. But nonviolence was something every Southern black could do, no matter how weak, how old, how ill. It took courage, but it didn't take military training.

And it divided the white community. It divided the nation.

If the Southern Black movement had been violent (which they had every moral right to be) the nation as a whole would have panicked. Because they were nonviolent, they created a massive national pressure on the White House to intervene. The "trick" is, of course, not a trick at all. Where your opposition had expected anger and hatred you offer love (or as close to it as you can get). Where the opposition insists on seeing you as an object, you insist on treating the opposition as consisting of unique individuals who merit compassion. In short, we can change the terms of the struggle, can transform it - and in the process, while we must often "unjustly suffer", out of that comes the hope of justice. There is no justice in history except as we create it. And the creation of justice demands we accept a large part of the pain of conflict and change. Why would we do this? Because, by the grace of God or accident, we have stumbled on a truth which has taught us that our opposition is our brother, our sister, and we will pay a very high price, if necessary, before inflicting the pain on others which history has inflicted on us. Our goal is transformation and reconciliation, and that is what a revolution is about.

YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT HITLER?

At some point all pacifists face this classic question, stated in many different ways. "Yes, but what about Hitler" can also be "Yes, but what about Arafat . . . Netanyahu . . . Criminals . . . Fascists . . . Racists . . . Serbs . . . Croatians . . . Muslims".

At first glance nothing is stranger than the notion that a people without weapons could take defeat an occupying force (India), or an oppressive and unjust racial structure (the U.S.). But then some dismiss these triumphs by saying the same tactics wouldn't work against Hitler - that "nonviolence really needs a humane, Christian, decent, democratic opponent . . . such as the white Southerner or the British . . . or it won't work".

Part of the problem here is myth. There was very little "nice" about the British. I will come back to that in a moment. But first there is a "terrible truth" we all have to face, whether we are pacifists or the most dedicated of violent terrorists - not all battles can be won. There are times when nothing will work. (This does not mean we shouldn't try - we never know when the tide of history is about the change). Racism was not less evil in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began than in 1915. Nor was this the first resistance. Blacks had risked their lives and lost their lives during their entire "American experience".

SOMETIMES NOTHING WILL SUCCEED

In South Africa, decades ago there had been nonviolent campaigns led by Gandhi's son, Manilal - they failed. So far - let's be blunt - we have failed in this country at the task of "turning America around". In some ways our job is harder than Gandhi's - the Indians knew they were militarily weak compared to the British and were willing to examine alternatives, while Americans think they are strong because of the weapons they possess - and are reluctant to consider alternatives.

But back to the British and those "nice Christian Southerners". The British were imperial rulers, repressive, violent when necessary, and if there were paradoxes to their rule in India, they were less from some decency inherent in British Imperialism than from self interest. The tropical climate of India did not attract large numbers of English. To rule the vastness of India, the colonizers relied on "natives" trained to manage the courts, police, transportation, postal services, etc. From a Marxist point of view there were contradictions built in. The British trained the Indians in the skills of running India. But the result was to create precisely that educated elite which led the independence movement.

Gandhi studied for the law in London, went on to South Africa, one of the many lawyers, and civil servants the British had trained to run their Empire. There was nothing about the English that was uniquely nicer than the Germans. Germany was the most civilized nation in Europe in the 1930's. Hitler was a monster, yes, but not an alien. Second, because the Holocaust was documented, and happened in the midst of Europe (and because "our side" won) we know a great deal about it - and may think it was unique. Unhappily it was not. Records of the slave trade suggest far higher numbers of Africans died during that trade, and the evidence of Belgian rule in the Congo is shocking - in a short period after the Belgians took over in the last century, they killed several million more Africans than the Germans did the Jews. Evil in human affairs is universal, the Nazis had no monopoly on it.

EVIL IN HUMAN AFFAIRS

Americans need to pay attention to our own history. I am not trying to downgrade the Holocaust. I hope WRL Locals take note of April 22nd, Yom HaShoah, and arrange an observance in your community. No pacifist should be in the business of arguing "my pain is greater than your pain". But we are charged to be honest about what we ourselves, or our nation, has been complicit in. The pain of 400 years of slavery is of the same level of evil as the Holocaust. In reading a New York Times Magazine piece about the Vietnam War (8.10.97), the figure accepted for Vietnamese deaths was 3.6 million. Their sole crime was defending their nation against a foreign invader - us. (As the Times noted, that many dead is equivalent, on the basis of the relative populations, to 27 million Americans). When someone says "pacifism is fine but it wouldn't have worked against Hitler" they should consider that to the Vietnamese, Lyndon Johnson was Hitler, and to Black America Jim Crow was Hitler.

We will never know if nonviolence would have worked against Hitler (or if it might have worked against the Americans in Vietnam if the Vietnamese had chosen that method). The history of the Holocaust shows little resistance of any kind to Hitler from the Jews ( this is not surprising - they could not believe anything as terrible as the "final solution" was contemplated. Historically the Jews survived anti-Semitism by keeping a low profile). Some have said "The Jews were pacifists and look what it got them!" Sorry, they were passive - there is a world of difference. There is no way of knowing if active pacifism would have had any chance of working - we only know it was not tried. I remember the chilling deduction of Hannah Arendt in her book on Eichmann, in which she concluded it was the passive cooperation of the Jews of Europe with the Nazis which helped make the Holocaust possible. If you think about this for a moment it is, unhappily, true. To track down, arrest, transport and kill six million people who are resisting - even by not showing up when ordered, would, at the very least, have caused massive public disorder. (Nothing is easier than saying "I would have resisted" - a cheap sentiment expressed by people who weren't there. Documents show some resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Violent or nonviolent, radicals honor resistance).

SOME ISOLATED VICTORIES AGAINST HITLER

But within Occupied Europe there were well documented victories for nonviolence. In Norway there was a successful teachers' strike against being forced to teach Nazi ideology. In Denmark the opposition to the Nazis was led by the King, who said that if the Jews had to put on the "Yellow Star of David", then he, the King, would be the first man in Denmark to put one on. When the Nazis moved to arrest the Danish Jews, members of the Gestapo leaked this news to the Danish authorities and in 48 hours virtually all the Jews in Denmark were gotten to safety in Sweden. In Bulgaria, which had no history of anti-Semitism, spontaneous civil resistance (including crowds sitting on train tracks) prevented the Nazis from shipping any Jews out of the country.

"THOSE NICE CHRISTIAN SOUTHERNERS"

Of all the places Americans thought resistance to Jim Crow would begin, Montgomery, Alabama, heart of the Confederacy , was the last. I remember a bus ride through the Deep South in 1951, coming back from my first trip to Europe (a pacifist youth conference in Denmark). Inspired by Bayard Rustin and the Journey of Reconciliation I took the Greyhound bus's Southern route back from New York to Los Angeles. My challenges to Jim Crow were timid - I was alone and not very brave even in a crowd. But I had a good chance to see and feel what it was like to move through the Deep South in the early 1950's. So much time has now passed - nearly a half century - that Alabama is as far removed from us as Nazi Germany. But the incredible mass opposition to racism began there, in the Deep South, where the greatest danger a civil rights worker faced was not from the Klan but from the Sheriff, where there was no appeal to law, where Blacks could not vote, where night was a time of terror, not rest. Don't tell older Black Southerners about how safe nonviolence was then!

Nonviolence cannot win every struggle - there are defeats. This is no more reason to abandon nonviolence than the military would give up its weapons if it lost a battle. (Philosophic note: it ever y military struggle there is a winner and a loser, so half the time violence fails, and half the time it wins. But in nonviolent struggle the objective is not to have a victor but to change the situation itself - a radically different concept).

WHY DOES NONVIOLENCE WORK?

Having admitted our approach cannot win all battles, why does it work at all? Why did it work against the Nazis in Norway and Denmark, or against the power structure in the American South? Or against the British in India?

Let us concede that all human events have "plural explanations". It takes nothing from the Vietnam Peace movement in our country to see that while our nonviolence was effective, so, too, was the pain of the body bags coming home as a result of the military struggle the Vietnamese waged against our troops. Let us concede that while the British in India weren't terribly nice, Britain had a democratic society which permitted an anti-colonial politics to develop. Let us admit that the violence of Southern racists was limited by fear of federal intervention, due to strong Northern support for Martin Luther King Jr.

Looking farther back in history, to times before any "civil society", there are two examples of movements which spread in the face of great oppression. Buddhism is a totally non- violent philosophy which, despite hardship and persecution, spread throughout Asia, finally subduing the Mongols, who had so savaged Europe and China. Christianity, which did not make an alliance with the State until three hundred years after the death of Jesus, became the dominant religious force in the West, triumphing over the total power of Roman Emperors.

Neither Christianity nor Buddhism was a philosophy of social change - that awaited the teachings of Gandhi in this century.

But the fact remains like a stubborn rock - both Western and Eastern civilization are founded on the basis of ideologies that were nonviolent, and which for some time in their early period faced extreme persecution. Thus, when Gandhi began "to experiment with truth" in this century, and see if nonviolence could be used to challenge social injustice, he was working on a foundation that was not entirely new. Nonviolence is older than the Christian era.

WHY NONVIOLENCE WORKS
Having tried to give some of the background of nonviolence - and I am just going to have to assume you have read the four earlier installments - how is it possible that unarmed people can hope to liberate themselves?

First, there is no guarantee nonviolence will work in every case.

This puts nonviolence in precisely the same place as violence. No one picks up a gun to liberate their country - as the Vietnamese did - with a guarantee of victory. History is a bleak record of countless valiant battles for justice - ending in defeat. One case worth mentioning was the struggle in South Africa led by Gandhi's son, Manilal Gandhi, in the 1950's in an effort to force a change in policy by the regime. The struggle ended in violence and defeat. In our own country there are thousands of cases where oppressed people have tried to deal with injustice peacefully and have lost.

The first instinct of every sane person is to find a "safe" way to resolve a conflict. The closer you are to a serious conflict - racial, labor, human rights - the more aware you become that people who are already hurting would prefer not to get hurt still more. So a peaceful - nonviolent - solution is almost always the first way chosen. People turn to violence when they feel the oppressor "only understands violence." As this is being written there is a tragic situation unfolding in Kosovo, where a long and remarkably nonviolent struggle by the Albanian ethnic majority (about 90% of the population of Kosovo, which is a province under Serbian control in former Yugoslavia) is turning violent because a handful of courageous, angry young Albanians started killing Serbian police, the Serbs in turn have killed a number of them, and hopes for a nonviolent resolution may be fading as both sides in this conflict take the position "they only understand violence."

SOCIAL DISLOCATION

Pacifists try to create conditions under which the opponent is "free to try different behavior". There are three examples that can be used (and a lot more waiting for the history student, all the way from Finland to Cambodia). One is India. A second is the Montgomery Bus Boycott which began the Civil Rights Revolution in this country. The third is the Farm Workers under Chavez.

CREATING NEW REALITIES

Mahatma Gandhi did two things which were crucial to victory. The first was to give the Indians a pride in themselves, a sense that they were not weaker than the British. (It is common when you are in an oppressed group to feel that perhaps the reason you are oppressed is because you deserve it - the old pattern of self- hatred or a lack of self-respect common to the oppressed, whether black, gay, women, etc.). When Gandhi led the famous Salt March to the sea (to protest the British tax on salt). This simple act - so simple it would have made the British look foolish to try to stop it - let all of India see this man with a handful of followers walk from his "Ashram" across India to the sea. With every step he took all India began to feel a new pride. When he reached the sea and began the process of collecting the salt (which could be had at low tide when the salty sea water had evaporated and left deposits of "raw salt"), he was arrested and jailed. But not before some of his followers had begun to send the collected salt across India where it was auctioned for money for the Congress Party.

At every auction new arrests were made until thousands were in jail. A foreign correspondent talking to a high caste Indian asked if he didn't find it embarrassing that someone of his social standing faced prison, to which he responded "Oh no, all the best people are in prison." That was the first step - an open, public defiance of the law. A proof that Gandhi and his followers were not afraid of the British prisons.

The second step - both in this campaign and in the many others Gandhi led - was to create such disorder that the British were forced to negotiate. One of the actions Gandhi urged on his followers was the weaving of their own cloth, so that they would not depend on the British for imported cotton. (Up to that point the British bought the Indian cotton at a low price, then milled it and made garments in England, which were sold back to the Indians at a much higher price).

THE SPINNING WHEEL AND REVOLUTION

For Gandhi, it was important to have a "Constructive Program" which would involve all Indians in the movement. His use of the spinning wheel was a symbol of "self reliance". Gradually the British mills began to face bankruptcy as their exports to India fell. As we will see in looking at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Gandhi was creating a new reality, was "changing the political facts" so that the British either had to engage in massive violent repression, or negotiate. There were many ways in which Gandhi created such facts - massive sitdowns in front of trains, general strikes, the famous "passive resistance" which so fascinated the West in the 1930's. Here was a little man in a loin cloth, unarmed, and yet able to bring the British Empire in India to a standstill. He could, simply by issuing the call, stop trains from running. (There is an interesting, little known bit of history from the early Bolshevik Revolution, when the Revolution was saved not by force of arms - in the early days after October 25 the Bolsheviks had no armed forces - but by a "battle of the trains". The White Russians were trying to move their troops to Petrograd, the center of the Revolution, but because the Bolsheviks had the support of the workers running the railroads, the trains carrying the White Russian troops kept having mysterious delays, or were shunted down the wrong tracks. Hannah Arendt documents similar actions by the Italians when, late in World War II, Hitler tried to deport all the Jews from Italy to make sure they were killed - he had lost confidence in the Italians to do the job properly. It was, again, a battle of trains, with the Jews never arriving at the same place as the Nazi transport. (It would have been funny - if the whole event had not been so horribly tragic).

MONTGOMERY 1955

When the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December of 1955 it seemed hopeless, but it was all the black community could risk. They had no support from the Federal government at that point, and they faced the armed force of the local (and state) police. No one had successfully defied the white power structure in the South - resistance was suicidal. But the black community felt the police would have a hard time coping with something as simple as . . . NOT riding the bus. What could the police do if people chose to walk instead of ride? And in Montgomery that winter, and that spring, black folks walked. They walked if they were young, they walked if they were old. They walked if they were tired and they walked if they were sick. If they couldn't walk, the Montgomery Improvement Association arranged for some transport by car.

At first the whites laughed. They weren't threatened by black people walking!! But King and his co-workers were creating new facts. One of the first facts was that blacks were learning that, even if they were still afraid, they could act. Every step they took was seen as a step forward to a new goal. One of the white women asked her maid, who was arriving at work by walking a great distance, if she weren't tired to which the maid said "my feet are tired, but my soul is rested". A change began to occur within the white community, similar to the change Gandhi had been able to achieve in the British community - people who had looked on the Indians or the blacks as barely human, suddenly saw them emerge as people with dignity. With each passing day, the white community grew more restless and uneasy. No bullets had been fired by King's people. Yet the community in the heart of the capital of the Confederacy sensed something was changing forever. One of the changes was that the bus company said it was losing so much money it would have to go bankrupt - and this meant that no one, black or white, would have public transportation. Faced with this fact, the white community negotiated a a settlement. Long weeks after it had begun, blacks and whites were no longer segregated on the buses. Glenn Smiley (an old friend and mentor, who ran the Fellowship of Recon-ciliation office in Los Angeles when I was a student at UCLA), was the first white man to board the buses arm in arm with Dr. King, as they sat together on a day of victory.

FARMWORKERS AND CHAVEZ

In 1962 Cesar Chavez, himself a migrant worker, began organizing largely Mexican farm workers in California. As with Gandhi and King, Chavez was struggling with the sense of defeat the farm workers had. Migratory, many unable to speak English and illiterate in Spanish, some illegal aliens, the Mexican community in California was considered impossible to organize - a source of cheap, compliant labor. Chavez did what the powerful AFL-CIO had failed to do - he gave the farm workers a sense of dignity and showed them it was possible to struggle and win. At great cost, and against the prejudice of the police and the public, he made the grape boycott into such a powerful symbol that he forced the growers to the bargaining table. In the face of beatings and shootings, he responded with fasts, boycotts, and peaceful marches.

THE KEY IS SOCIAL DISLOCATION

This will have to go to a sixth and perhaps seventh "chapter", so I will close this "why it works" by emphasizing that nonviolence succeeds because through organized disruption of the existing social structure (sit downs, sit ins, boycotts, etc.) the old order cannot continue to function. It must choose between violent repression and negotiation. Nonviolence doesn't work because it appeals to the "best in the enemy", (though it certainly always does make that appeal). It works because the "enemy" is not only treated as a brother or sister, but also because our tactics absorb the pain and suffering even as we create social disorder so great that something must yield. By behaving, always, with dignity we compel our opponent to see us in new ways, making it hard for him to use violence (though violence will be used - nonviolent social changes does not mean no violence - it means we will not use violence but it is certain it will be used against us).

And it works because it changes how the oppressed think of themselves - it gives them pride and confidence. And nonviolence empowers the whole community - it can be used by old and young, weak and strong, professors and those still illiterate. This is in contrast to armed struggle which is usually limited to the young and healthy.

THE BASIC RULES OF NONVIOLENCE

Perhaps one more instalment and we will have this finished. In Part Five I laid out how non-violence works. By creating social dislocation, it creates "new facts" that permit your opponent to change. There is an art to this kind of politics. It is not enough to say to your opponent, "I am a pacifist, I will not shoot you, but I sure as hell will make your life so difficult that, miserable bastard that you are, you will be forced to behave decently even though the whole world knows you are a sorry excuse for a human being".

It is our job not to make it harder than necessary for our opponent to change. Yes, Cesar Chavez forced the farm owners to bargain because the boycott of their produce hit them in the pocket book. Without that, the negotiations wouldn't begin. But it is hard to negotiate with a man you despise and distrust, and much easier to negotiate with an opponent whom you respect, whom you feel "fought fair". They respected Chavez.

Years ago in Greenwich Village, in the long-lost days when radicals sometimes spoke from "soap boxes", I was about to start a speech in Sheridan Square late one afternoon when a cop came up and told me to stop. I didn't say "Look, you wretched running dog of the imperialist state, I know the Constitution, I have a right to speak, and I defy you to arrest me". Instead I said "I think I have a right to speak, However I'll get down while you check with your captain. After fifteen minutes, when you've had a chance to check it, I'll get back up and speak - if your captain thinks it is legal to arrest me, then you can". The cop walked off, fifteen minutes later I got up and kept on talking - the cop never returned.

THE BASICS

The person using Nonviolence will seek to be absolutely open, honest and truthful.

The person using Nonviolence will seek to overcome fear, so as to act not out of weakness, but from strength.

The person using Nonviolence will never defame the character of the opponent, but always seek to find what the Quakers call "that of God" in those with whom we struggle.

We shall do our best to love those with whom we are in conflict.

All of these are much easier to say than to do. How can one love the employer who orders goons to beat up strikers? Or a govern- ment such as ours which murders people in distant lands?

How can we act without fear when we are terrified?

How can we be honest when admitting an error may make us look foolish?

NO EASY ANSWERS / ABSOLUTES IN CONFLICT

There aren't tidy answers. During WW II in places such as Holland, which were occupied by the Nazis, what was the "honest, truthful answer" when the Gestapo came to the door and asked if you were hiding Jews, and you knew you had Jews in the attic? I hope you said "No, we aren't hiding Jews". Because the "absolute value" we place on each human life was in conflict with the "absolute value" of truth. And human life won out. There are times when "absolutes are in conflict".

However, there are times when honesty does mean being willing to look very foolish. (Christians can appreciate St. Paul's statement that he was "willing to be a fool for Christ"). In the early 1950's tensions between the Socialist Party and the Communist Party were extremely bitter - one could write a book just on that topic. The Communists had a tactic of infiltrating our groups and trying to take them over. All of us who had been in radical politics at UCLA (where this occured) were only too familar with the problem. In the course of fighting against McCarthyism, the Socialist Party's youth group and the youth section of the Fellowship of Reconciliation had joined forces to sponsor a state-wide conference on civil liberties, held at a Church in Los Angeles. My experiences with the Communists led me to paronoia - I thought I recognized an effort by the Communists to stall the conference and possibly take it over. I got up and announced that Communists were present, that we would have a short break to organize our forces, and then reconvene. We did a quick caucus on the sidewalk, came back in, and rammed through the agenda, cutting off debate.

Soon after, I learned that while one Communist had been present, he was the only one. The disruption was entirely in my imagination. I was horrified. I had slandered the Communists, who were already under legal attack. To the dismay of my friends in the Socialist Party - who put up with my pacifism but thought I was a bit of a nut - I wrote a letter to everyone that had been at the conference offering my apologies, saying that I had been wrong. I believe I hand-delivered the letter to the members of the Communist Party on campus. (They also felt I was a nut). This willingness to admit an error, even though it can be painful and deeply embarrassing, gives you credibility. It does, at times, also make you look a fool. Take the risk.

Our movement must be one that never lies.

And it must be a movement which never demonizes our opposition. This is very hard. We all fail at it. I think Henry Kissinger is a war criminal who should be tried by an international court of law (he is not the only American in this category, but he is the one who leaps to mind). Yet if I argue that common criminals are human beings, how can I deny that to Kissinger? If I argue that prisons do very little good, then how can I be so eager to see him in one? Those of us who went through the Vietnam War, who had friends who committed suicide, died of drug overdoses, spent the best years of their youth in prison, etc., have a hard time forgiving - but if forgiveness was easy, it wouldn't be necessary. (And if I have a problem - think how blacks feel in this society).

For us, cops are never pigs. They may violate the law, and should be subject to arrest and trial for brutality - but they remain human beings. No human being - no matter whether they are Kissinger or Stalin, a bad cop or a serial killer - should ever be called a dog, a pig, a rat, partly because this is unfair to dogs, pigs and rats. But mainly because there is not one of you reading this who could not have been - given the background and circumstances - a guard at a Nazi death camp. When we look on the person we find it easiest to hate, we usually are looking at some trait within ourselves.

I don't have good advice to offer on how to overcome fear - I know that I have failed. The only advice I can offer from personal experience is that you should do only those things you feel just barely able to do. Don't try to do things you know you can't do. I can't walk along the edge of a building that is more than two stories high - so I don't try. But I was - just barely - able to walk into Red Square in 1978 for a WRL protest, along with Norma Becker, Jerry Coffin, Pat Lacefield, Steve Sumerford, Scott Herrick, and Craig Simpson. Of all the things I ever did, maybe that took the most courage. I found that just putting one foot in front of the other would carry me forward, into the Square.

But for real courage, what about Vicki Rovere, who, in 1968, volunteered for the teams that War Resisters International sent to Moscow and several East European capitals to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia? Vicki couldn't find her English partner who was to join her in Moscow. (He was there but got mixed up on directions). Vicki, completely alone, unfurled her banner! And stood her ground until taken into custody. In each case, do what you can do, not what you can't. With luck you may find that next time, you can do what you couldn't do the first time.

THE MOVEMENT NEEDS COWARDS

The radical movement - socialist, pacifist, anarchist - needs cowards. It needs them because there are very few brave people around - not nearly enough to make a revolution. The non- violent movement, like any strong movement, must make room for those of us who just aren't very brave. One of the values of nonviolence is that you can be young or old, weak, sick or frightened, and still find a way to fit in - which helps make it a democratic movement. (Let me toss in something we sometimes forget, as we "measure our number of arrests" - it takes more courage, (or foolishness), to bring a child into this world, care for it, love it, than it does to get arrested. The people with the most guts are parents.

If we remember that we must try to be honest, and act with courage, we won't do things in the dark which we wouldn't do by day. We won't do things we aren't willing to be caught doing. Again, there are paradoxes - does this mean that there are times when we might not act in secret? Weren't the Moscow demonstrations planned in secret? Yes, and I've tried to stress that there are always contradictions. If you try to make a set of rules for nonviolence you've already violated the spirit. Nonviolence is to dance in the midst of chaos. And do so with joy.

WHAT ABOUT LOVE?

One of the things the late Igal Roodenko used to say was "I have to love everyone - thank God I don't have to like everyone." There are people we rejoice at seeing - and people we really wish hadn't phoned us. Love is tricky. There are all kinds of love, from the love we have for someone we are in love with, to the children we have and love, to the dogs and cats who may share their lives with us, to a few friends we truly do love. But there is, under this, a sense of compassion, a realization we are all headed for the grave, that we all grow hungry and thirsty and weary, and this realization helps us, even when we "despise" someone, to behave toward him or her with a sense of love that permits us to see past the surface to the pain and suffering within.

Not everyone can do this. But the movement will collapse if at least some of the leadership is not able to do it. A. J. Muste had it, Dorothy Day had it, Rosa Luxemburg had it, Martin Luther King Jr. had it. Debs had it. Che had it. Gandhi had it. I think Malcom X was moving toward it when he was killed. I don't have it - but you might. And with work, maybe we can all get it.

THE LAW AND THE COMMUNITY

Nonviolence does not set itself against the basic concept of law. I agree with the Marxists that the "State is the Executive Committee of the ruling class", but there is, as I've tried to note before, a difference between our quarrels with the abstract "State," and that sense of community all of us seek.

If we violate the laws of the State, it is on behalf of a deeper sense of law, one that more fully embraces the whole of community. Yes, many laws are arbitrary - we stop at red lights and go at green lights because that was, however we came by it, the original decision. It could as easily have been the reverse. In Great Britain cars drive on the left-hand side of the road, so what it illegal here becomes legal there. There is no inherently "correct and moral" side of the road on which to drive. But it is desperately important, in order to avoid accidents, that all of us abide by the consensus - in this country, we drive on the right-hand side of the road.

THE ROVING MINK

A few months ago some animal liberationists in Great Britain set at liberty a number of caged Mink, which were being held to make mink coats. This was a foolish act because the mink were likely, as they sought food, to feast upon pet cats, and cause havoc to the natural chain of wild life in the area into which they were released. The act was "nonviolent" only in the sense no human got killed . It was typical of those acts which seem to be non-violent but are missing a key element. There was no one willing to stand trial, to say "I felt called by conscience to set your mink loose and here I am - arrest me". Rather, so certain of the "rightness" of their cause were those who loosed the mink that they took none of the steps nonviolence would call for. They did not meet and negotiate with the "mink ranchers", they did not explain their intent to act if the mink continued to be bred and killed, and of course, they were nowhere to be found after they released the animals.

Nonviolence does not mean that, so long as we don't shoot the person we disagree with, we can break laws with moral impunity.

SOCRATES AND THE LAW

Socrates remains an example of an individual who loved the community, understood the importance of the rule of law, and understood also that there were times when the conscience of the individual must be set against that of the State, and that, when such a conflict happened, the "wholeness" of the community required not only the violation of an unjust law, but also the willingness to accept the punishment. (In his case the fatal drinking of hemlock - it should be noted that Socrates could have fled, that those who sentenced him assumed he would flee, but by his refusal to flee he forced those who judged him to live with the results of their decision. He refused to accept their laws, and refused to flee the punishment.

Jesus also met this test. He set himself against the rigid orthodoxies of his community, was brought to trial, refused to deny or evade the charges, and was executed.

We are neither Socrates nor Jesus. We would be quite human if we sought to do good (as we understood it) and also to evade the penalty. My point is not to preach sainthood to a community of mortals, but to remind us that we cannot simply act as if the community had no meaning. There are those, and they will be found in every group, whether it calls itself Marxist, Anarchist, or Pacifist, who insist their truth is so perfect they can ignore the most basic elements of community. The most tragic example of this is among a handful in the "Right to Life" movement who feel they are justified in murdering doctors who provide abortions.

Whenever your "truth" is seen as so "profound" that it exempts you from the sense of community, and of nonviolence toward others in your community, you are on the wrong path. Actions are not nonviolent simply because no guns are in play. Nonviolence is much deeper than "not violent". The loving mother who spanks her child when it has broken away and run into a heavily trafficked street, is far less "violent" than the mother who coldly withholds love to punish the same child for the same act. Nonviolence is much more than the refusal to hit - it is a reaching out to the opponent. That, of course, is the very hard part. It is enormously easier for us to demonize the opponent. For us that might be Newt Gingrich, or Kenneth Starr. For others, at various times, it has been abortionists, Jews, Blacks, Communists, gays and lesbians.

THE HARDEST PART

Let me just underline this point. The hardest part of nonviolence isn't breaking a law, or going to jail - it is insisting on the humanity of our opposition. Nonviolence means both seeing the full truth of what racism does, or what American capitalism does (or what Soviet Communism did), and still seeing our opponent as part of our own family. Nonviolence is an effort to restore a sense of "the beloved community". If it was easy to do this, then it would be no big deal. It is very hard to do it, and much harder in our atomized society where we encounter one another not as living beings, but as bits and pieces transmitted by the media or the Internet. Do we have to love Pinochet? Yes. We don't have to like him, but we must not hate him. We should be delighted he has been arrested and faces trial (and we can wish someone would extradite Kissinger) but we still need to think how his children feel, and realize that he, himself, charged with such dark and terrible crimes, has shown the darkness which hides in each of us.

To illustrate this last point, when we wonder what is behind the crimes of violence against gays we will find the attackers almost always have a fear of being, themselves, homosexual, and have often had homosexual relationships. The more angry a man is about "queers", the more likely he is struggling against this aspect of himself.

The more certain you are that Pinochet is unique, and you'd like to get in line to hit him with a club, the more certain it is that there is "a little Pinochet" in you.

One of the things which the American pacifist movement has not inherited from Gandhi - and needs to! - was Gandhi's conviction that the main work of his movement was not the nonviolent resistance campaigns, but his "Constructive Program". In our country - and generally in the West - there has developed an unhappy split between nonviolent resistance, and a positive program.

Gandhi, in his struggle to defeat the British, counted the various non- resistance campaigns as being of very secondary value. An essential tool, but not his main focus. Without trying to recapitulate the history of the Gandhian movement let's note some of the key factors. Gandhi was dealing with peasants who lacked basic education, and lacked skills in sanitation. They also lacked a history of acting on their own, for their own interests.

Gandhi stressed education, literacy, sanitation, health measures - all at the village level. (If we examine the success of the Communists in Vietnam we find very much the same pattern - the military struggle was as secondary as, for Gandhi, the satygraha campaigns were. The Communists went to the village level in Vietnam, taught literacy, gave medical care, and gave the villagers a sense of "empowerment". The method of struggle - violent or nonviolent - was quite different, but not the consistent stress on a "Constructive Program".

What is our constructive program? We are good, certainly, at saying no, at protesting, but where is the pacifist program that would provide an alternative sense of community?

The socialist movement, both in Europe and here, during the time it was a mass movement, did much the kind of thing which Gandhi did in India. There were youth organizations, cultural programs, credit unions, trade unions, programs for the elderly - in short, the socialists were not waiting for their triumph at the ballot box but had already begun to establish some of the key elements of the "new society". (Including their own media - something which was also true in India).

It is impossible to expect one organization, the War Resisters League, to develop and project such a positive program. But it is not impossible to realize the need for it.

CREATING THE NEW SOCIETY HERE AND NOW

One task for the next century might well be a serious effort for the pacifist movement to examine how to build a program for youth (YouthPeace is one example of such an outreach), or how to build a true alternative media, so that we are not at the mercy of the talking heads on the networks.

Too much of our work is "anti" - anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-death penalty, anti-sexist, anti-ageist, that I think a lot of folks take one look and say "Hey, life is far too short for this. I'm looking for some fun".

It was easier for Gandhi to develop a constructive program because in his struggle against British rule he sought to create an "alternative society" so that gradually, and deliberately, the framework of a new society could begin to grow inside the shell of the old. Gandhi's movement organized a system of education that was an alternative to that offered (to a few) by the British. There was an effort by Gandhi to set up Indian courts through the Congress Party, so that Indians that felt they needed legal remedies in some dispute could take their cases to these courts, ignoring the British ones.

In our own time very much this pattern had been developed by the Albanian population in Kosova - until an outbreak of violence (for which both sides share blame) broke down the authority of this "alternative" framework. In Vietnam, also, the Vietnamese Communists did much more than wage guerilla battles (or provide health and educational aid). They collected taxes, arbitrated disputes, and in every way possible "displaced" the authority of the US-backed government operating out of Saigon. Much more than Americans understood at the time, a very large part of South Vietnam was governed by the Communists even though the maps showed it as controlled by Saigon and US military forces.

WHY OUT JOB IS MUCH TOUGHER THAN INDIA'S

It is very difficult, if you live in a society where there is no foreign occupation, where control is accepted as legitimate, to organize a Constructive Program which can operate in the way Gandhi's did (or the Communists in Vietnam). Where the general public can see, clearly, that they are ruled by an invader (India) or by a puppet army created and trained by a foreign power (Vietnam) it is relatively easy to organize an opposition. Where "we" are already in control, where the domination is harder to pin down, then organizing a parallel government is much harder. (The Black Panthers tried this in some areas but for a variety of reasons this failed - and the issue of whether the resolution of the problem of racism can be solved by integration or by separatism is one I am leaving aside for reason for space. I personally come down for integration - but the argument is long, complex, and needing more space).

This problem of organizing an opposition where the people seem in control was true in Europe during the Nazi period - in Germany, the people, while deprived of all real freedom, accepted Hitler as more or less legitimate. But in those countries which had been militarily defeated by the Nazis and occupied by them, it was much easier to organize some kind of resistance, and the various "Quisling" or collaborationist governments the Nazis imposed never acquired legitimacy.

To create a real "Constructive Program" here will mean a fascinating engagement in "real politics", in building coalitions of different groups. I do not think the solution will rest in trying to create communities outside of the existing society - though the drive toward communal living was appealing during the 1960's and has, in fact, a long and honorable history in this country. But such communes, while they may provide an alternative to the people living in them, do not transform the society as a whole.

BRINGING THINGS TO A CLOSE

Let me try in the few paragraphs that remain to bring these notes to a close.

I hope those who have followed these essays will realize that nonviolence does NOT have an answer to all problems. It is, in the words of Barbara Deming, an experiment that has just begun.

Nonviolence is not an academic exercise - it is a matter of testing theories in practice, asking what went wrong and trying again.

Nonviolence is a theory of managing social conflict in order to achieve social change. It is not a theory of generating social chaos, except in brief periods. It is an effort to bring the full community within the framework of compassion.

Nonviolence is a search for truth - not a search for ways to prove your opponent wrong. If you are not ready, as you examine the facts, to realize you may be wrong and your opponent right, you aren't ready for nonviolence.

You must not be attached to your theories, but only to the method. The method is the theory. We create the path by walking. The ends will be determined by the means - they do not exist separate and apart from the means.

TWO FINAL POINTS

Nonviolence certainly needs men and women with courage, but if it must count only on the courageous, it will lose. Nonviolent actions are not a test to see how many times you can be arrested, how often you can be beaten up, or how long a jail term you can serve. Any of those things may happen (they can happen if you are violent, also).

But our goal is a good life, it is happiness. It is not the glorification of suffering. We need a movement of ordinary people who, sometimes, can behave in extraordinary ways. We need to honor those whose nonviolence may be the most effective and challenging of all - the nonviolence, the love, the compassion, of the parent who risks everything to give life to a child, and to nurture it. The nonviolence of the teacher, who may never be arrested, but whose life as a teacher can transform so many children. Dorothy Day should not be remembered for her various arrests - which were relatively easy to bear. She should be remembered for housing the homeless and feeding the hungry - her own "Constructive Program".

I have been hesitant throughout these essays because my own life is not a long and heroic record, and I am aware of that. While I've been arrested more than a dozen times, I've never been beaten by the cops. My times in jail have been brief - not the long prison terms many have undergone. And as a "peace bureaucrat" it is much easier to be "outspoken" than if I held a job where being outspoken could also mean being out of work. So let what I've written stand on its own merits, not on mine.

There is always about nonviolence the need to see ourselves in those we hate. In 1951 I took my first trip to Europe, to a pacifist conference in Denmark. I traveled through Germany to get there and saw the destruction left by the war. In Hamburg whole blocks in the center of the city had been leveled, the gravel neatly swept so no trace of buildings remained. ( I thought "how strange that in the center of such old cities there are vacant lots" - and then I realized they had once been filled with buildings). At first all my views were traditional - that this destruction had been caused by the righteous struggle between the Nazis and the West. Then, in Bremen, the damage was more overwhelming, not yet tidy. A church, broken by bombs, its roof gone, a tree growing in its very center among what had been the pews. I remembered in High School my intense interest in current events. The headlines have never left my mind: ONE THOUSAND BOMBERS MAKE HAMBURGER OF HAMBURG and SIX HUNDRED BOMBERS BLAST BREMEN (in the Bremen attack 60 bombers were lost to anti-aircraft fire). I had rejoiced reading those headlines, sitting in High School, my father in the Army Air Force in India.

And now I was here, in Bremen, in the ruins which so recently I had rejoiced to read of. In one of two genuine religious experiences in my life I suddenly realized that I was a bomber of Bremen, that nothing the civilians there had done justified the horror of the fire and blast so randomly scattered on their homes . . . that their killing of the Jews could not be undone or made right by our killing of the Germans. It is when we realize that we can will the act of murder, that we at last can begin to choose the alternative. So long as we think we are exempt, that we could never have been a death camp guard, we have not yet begun our journey.

David McReynolds worked with the War Resisters League.
He writes: "There is not a single original idea in this material. Some of the ideas may be new to you, or may be arranged in ways that seem novel. They lack the power to kill, but contain the power to change. Read with caution. They have not been approved by any government authority. You are free to reprint, giving the source."

http://web.archive.org/web/20070216104910/http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php - no longer available

Revised: December 07, 2012 .