A Speech at the Cathedral of the Pines, New Hampshire
September 20, 2009
Michael Ferber
Ten years ago, as you know, in the spring of 1999, the New Hampshire legislators finally agreed to make Martin Luther King Day an official state holiday, the last in the Union to do so. Sometimes I wish they had not done it. Before then, a lot of people made a lot of noise about it every January, and as they scolded our conservative legislature for refusing to honor him they talked about Martin Luther King and his commitment to nonviolence. They held protests rather like those King himself had led. But now that the Day is official the noise is muted and the ceremonies are more routine and humdrum; it has lost the edge that was sharpened in controversy. Nonviolence is now a piety promoted in the schools, and it may soon join the ranks of all those other boring maxims we agree with and seldom think about: be nice to your neighbor, live free or die, don’t drink and drive, eat your vegetables, recycle your trash, and, oh yes, be nonviolent.
So we have made Martin Luther King a saint. But the truth is, though they may now give lip service to nonviolence as a good thing, most Americans still don’t believe in it. Of course they agree that ordinary politics, such as voting, running for office, lobbying, sending money to PACs, must be nonviolent (I would prefer to say “unviolent”), for that’s the way we do things in a democracy. But they also routinely say things like “Muslims only understand force”; they believe in revenge for violent acts “to teach them a lesson”; they train their sons, if not their daughters, to fight back in playgrounds; they celebrate the American Revolution with “the shot heard round the world” and George Washington’s bloody victory at Trenton; they take for granted that America needs a strong military. Many Americans think the Second Amendment is the centerpiece of the Bill of Rights.
Let me dwell on vengeance for a moment. Do you remember the big newspaper headlines on October 8, 2001? At least one of them said “Revenge”; several said “US Fighting Back” or something similar. Over 80% of the American people supported the US invasion of Afghanistan because we were simply striking back at those who attacked us a month earlier. It was simple justice, tit for tat. Never mind that hundreds of innocent civilians were killed in those first few weeks, and that most of those who planned the attack in September easily eluded capture (as they have for eight years now), and that America was likely to get bogged down in an endless guerrilla war (as it has). It seemed simple to most of us, and we supported it.
To think clearly about nonviolence, then, demands that we think against the grain of American culture and history, despite the presence in our midst not long ago of the great civil rights movement. To help us do that, I would suggest that we look at the history of nonviolence as falling into three phases.
Christian Pacifism
The first of these is individual Christian pacifism. In America we know about the Quaker or Mennonite who refuses to harm others under any circumstances and upholds “passive resistance,” or “nonresistance,” to the government. There may be older forms of pacifism, within the Buddhist tradition, for instance, and there is the great example of Socrates, who argued that it is better to suffer evil than to inflict it. But it is to Jesus Christ in the Gospels that we owe the continuous if narrow tradition of pacifism which, in its turn, has inspired the more recent phases of nonviolence that are quite different from it.
We know almost nothing about Jesus of Nazareth outside the Gospels, so it is the Gospel Jesus—a literary character, if you like—that we must be concerned with, and that character, in almost everything he said, preached nonviolence. “Resist not evil,” he said. “Turn the other cheek.” “Put up your sword.” He died on the cross forgiving those who crucified him. And he made that most extraordinary and impossible moral demand on his followers: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. / But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5.43-44). We are so familiar with these words that we forget how astonishing they are, but there they are, thank heaven. They are a standing reproach to the Bible-thumpers who clamor for a war of vengeance against Islam.
Many early Christians took those words seriously, however, and for nearly three centuries they chose to be put to torture and death rather than serve in the Roman army. The calendar of saints and martyrs is filled with these heroic souls, and we could do worse than tiptoe into a Catholic or Anglican church now and then and light a candle to them.
But all that changed when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the year 312. After that, most Christians dropped their objections to serving in the Roman army or police, and the pacifist stream dried up to a trickle. Eventually the Catholic Church came up with the standards for a “just war,” a set of rules strict enough in theory but infinitely malleable in practice, and then the crusade, which is French or Spanish for jihad. During the Reformation the little trickle of pacifism expanded slightly, but the Quakers and Brethren and Dukhobors and Socinians remained small sects, often persecuted by Catholics and established Protestants alike, and for that reason they were among the first groups to emigrate to North America. These people, bless their hearts, remain active in peace movements and often inspire us with their example; they are irritants in the social order, and, like grains of sand in oysters, some have become pearls.
Gandhian Nonviolence
The second phase of nonviolence is quite different. This is the “classic” phase that we associate with Mohandas Gandhi in India. It is no longer the solitary acts of moral witness made by religious pacifists, but political and economic action carried out by masses of people, who plan and organize with well-defined goals in view, such as the end of the tax on salt, the end of importation of English cotton goods made of Indian cotton, or home rule for India. It is no longer “passive resistance” or simple refusal to obey orders, but active, or “pro-active,” intervention to bring a change to the social order. Of course there were many examples of this sort of thing well before Gandhi–labor strikes, boycotts, social ostracism, and so on; one of my favorites is the mass emigration of the plebeians from ancient Rome to the Sacred Mount in about 400 BCE, where they waited for delegates from the patricians, who soon got tired of cooking their own meals and carrying out their own garbage. But it was Gandhi more than anyone else who not only instigated the massive campaigns in India and South Africa but who thought deeply and long about what it takes to create a successful nonviolent movement.
Now Gandhi was religious, and he became a kind of ascetic monk, living a life of poverty, celibacy, and vegetarianism. In all his campaigns of satyagraha he prayed and fasted and required his closest followers to do the same. In prison he went on hunger strikes. For inspiration he drew not only from his own Hindu tradition, but even more, at least at first, from the example of Christ and the early Christians, and especially from the writings of the Christian pacifist Leo Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded. Our own Henry Thoreau was also an inspiration.
Religious though he was, Gandhi was also a shrewd and worldly organizer, with a hard-nosed strategic sense. He was very interested in the events in Russia just a century ago this year, the general strike of 1905, and he carefully followed events around the world. It is this combination of religious faith and discipline on the one hand with worldly strategizing on the other that made Gandhi so powerful, at times, and makes him so fascinating an example to us today. Martin Luther King shows something of the same mixture: a Baptist minister, a leader of a movement of black churchgoers, though he was not celibate or ascetic, he too prayed and fasted, and drew on the vision of justice in the Old Testament and the vision of love in the New.
The New Nonviolence
These two phases of nonviolence are well known to us, and both types are still with us. The third phase, which I am calling “the new nonviolence,” has revealed itself in spectacular fashion in recent years, but it has been harder to identify and recognize as distinctly different from its “classic” form. People have been doing things like this for thousands of years, as I said, but only recently has it turned self-conscious. We might begin with the resistance of the Czechs and Slovaks to the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, which put an end to the hopeful “Prague Spring,” but not until the invading troops were stymied and demoralized by spontaneous and creative nonviolent tactics wherever they turned (such as the removal or switching of street signs so tanks would take wrong turns and get lost or stuck). Or the organizing of Solidarnosc or Solidarity, the unofficial labor union of Poland, in the 1970s, and the workers’ decision not to attack the local Communist Party headquarters, as they had done in the past, but to turn their backs on it and create their own “civil society.” Or the “Vote No” campaign in the 1980s against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Or the successful campaign of “People Power” to oust Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines in 1986. Or the “self-limiting revolutions” that swept across Eastern Europe in 1989, such as the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia. Or the demonstrations we saw just a few weeks ago in Iran, though so far, on the face of it, it has been defeated by violence.
What makes these new and different? For one thing, the Gandhian kind of spirituality is not much to be found in them. Some of the leaders are religious in varying degrees, and often the Catholic Church played an important role, as in Poland, Chile, Argentina, and the Philippines, by offering a sheltering wing and an established network of communication. But others have been resolutely secular and humanist, some even Marxist in a nondogmatic mode. As Gene Sharp has written, what is needed to launch and sustain a nonviolent movement is not extraordinary saintliness but ordinary human stubbornness. True, it also takes courage, but courage may be nurtured as much by anger as by prayer. It takes discipline, but discipline may grow as much out of common sense as out of mortifying the flesh through fasting and sexual abstinence. In fact, Gene Sharp, who is the leading historian and theorist of nonviolent struggle in the world, has argued that religious pacifists are not always helpful in a nonviolent campaign, as their purity of manner seems proud and off-putting, and they may demand unnecessarily rigid tactics. In a country as multi-cultural as ours, a successful nonviolent movement may well depend on large numbers of people who are not Christian, and who are not even religious.
Another difference is the increasing self-consciousness of the new nonviolence, the understanding of its own growing worldwide tradition. Gandhi was well aware of certain precedents for his campaigns, such as the general strike in Russia in 1905, as I mentioned just now. Martin Luther King read Gandhi, and had expert advice from others who had been to India and studied his campaigns closely. At West German rallies for nuclear disarmament in the early 1980s marchers sang “We Shall Overcome” in English. Organizers of the Vote No campaign in Chile had seen the movie Gandhi in 1983 and compared its hero to Lech Walensa of Poland. Since the 1960s at least, scholars such as Gene Sharp in Boston and many others throughout world have been trying to gather all the instances of nonviolent political action ever attempted, classify them, and analyze them to discover what tactics work under what circumstances. Enough has now been gleaned so that useful pamphlets and handbooks are now in circulation in many languages. Indeed Gene Sharp himself has been traveling everywhere to give seminars on nonviolent strategy–to guerrillas in the jungles of Burma, to the Russian Parliament, even to the students in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. In 1999 a group in Belgrade translated one of his pamphlets, called From Dictatorship to Democracy, into Serbian; it became the Bible of the movement that defeated Milosevic a year later. In 2004 a group in Kiev translated the same pamphlet into Ukrainian, instigated a campaign modeled on the one in Serbia, and reversed a fraudulent election. That same year it was translated into Farsi, or Persian, and has been circulating among citizens in Iran.
Nonviolent “Warfare”
One way to understand the evolution of nonviolence from its Christian beginnings to the twenty-first century is to watch how it regards violence, and in particular the organized violence of warfare. For Jesus, and especially for St. Paul, the relationship is metaphorical: Christians practice “spiritual warfare” and dress in spiritual armor. Here is what St. Paul said:
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
. . . . .
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
And taking the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
(Ephesians 6.11-17)
When St. Martin of Tours refused orders in the Roman army he said, “I am a soldier of Christ; I cannot fight.” The church father Origen said Christians were “a special army of piety.” Perhaps the greatest expression of this metaphor is William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem,” set to music in 1916 by Charles Parry:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
These metaphors are still alive in Gandhi’s way of speaking, who often described satyagrahis as an army wielding the weapon of truth, and in that of Martin Luther King, who spoke of lieutenants who would lead and train a nonviolent army. But in both cases the language is not entirely metaphorical. For one thing, sheer numbers are often decisive in nonviolent campaigns just as they are in military campaigns, and we might remember that the word “campaign” itself is originally a military term. Both kinds of campaigns require discipline and courage, and strategy and tactics; in both we may have prisoners (on one side only), negotiations, propaganda, truces, and the search for allies. Gene Sharp studies Clausewitz and Liddell Hart and other classic military theorists for ideas that are transferable to nonviolent struggles, and he has lectured to military academies in several countries about the advantages of civilian resistance in the event of an invasion.
Let me dwell on this theme for a moment. To some people nonviolent campaigns are attractive because they don’t kill people, but they forget that the nonviolent campaigners themselves may get killed. Quite a few blacks and even a few whites were murdered during the civil rights movement in the American South, and in many other countries the death toll has been much worse. The fact that one side plays by civilized rules does not guarantee that the other side will do so; indeed some governments react quickly by arresting their opponents, beating them up, torturing them, and putting them to death. Such reactive violence must be anticipated, planned on, and faced up to by those organizing a campaign.
It may well turn out that when a government cracks down violently on nonviolent protestors it has lost the first round; it may seem to have put a stop to the protest, but it will have forfeited some of its legitimacy and the support of the larger population. This seepage of legitimacy is often the goal of nonviolent campaigns. They take on the character of a “war of attrition,” where what is worn away is not men and material, as in a guerrilla war or Fabian strategy, but the power of the state to command the energies of its people. Bit by bit, outraged over the government’s treatment of the opposition, impressed by the opposition’s tenacity, resourcefulness, and flair, large numbers of people withdraw their allegiance from the government and offer it to the nonviolent campaigners. But for that to happen the campaigners need courage, they may need to be ready to die. We take it for granted that a soldier or marine must be prepared to die, and much of his training is meant to make him obey orders no matter what danger they lead him into. To some people it is more comforting to imagine getting killed if they are also killing people themselves, exchanging fire, filled with fighting fury. It seems intolerable to die while sitting down peaceably in the middle of a street. But then that is just what good nonviolent training and tactical thinking must deal with. At the very least, those people who would rather die with a gun their hands make a large concession: that nonviolent campaigns are not the last resort of the cowardly, but the first resort of the brave.
Nonviolent campaigns cannot do everything. Here is where I disagree with my pacifist friends. If an enemy is bent on genocide, if he is happy to kill everyone who stands in his way, then nonviolent techniques will almost certainly not work. An invader, or a despotic government, ordinarily wants people to continue at their jobs producing wealth and running the trains and trucks and power grid. Even the Nazis, at least in Western Europe, could not afford to kill many people, and as a result the resistance movements, such as the one in Denmark, had some leverage. There is one thing that violence cannot do, at least not if it is prolonged and widespread: it cannot bring about freedom and democracy, either at home or abroad. Democratic politics requires a civil society, and a civil society requires public spaces free of fear, whether they are town squares, radio and television, or church basements for group meetings. Military conflicts create authoritarian societies, and that is so not only because massive violence makes people too fearful to take part in the ordinary social networks that keep democracy going, from churches to PTAs to sports leagues, but also because military forces themselves are highly centralized authoritarian structures. The generals, safely behind the lines, have absolute command over the troops through an iron chain of command; soldiers in the trenches or guerillas in their cells don’t get to vote on whether to obey the latest order. But in a nonviolent campaign the structure is almost the reverse: there are leaders, but, if the enemy cracks down, the leaders are often the first ones to be arrested. That means everyone must know the strategy and how to carry it out without waiting for orders from the top. And even if orders are still coming from the top, there is no way to enforce them beyond persuasion; Gandhi could not send disobedient satyagrahis to the firing squad. So the usual outcome of a successful nonviolent struggle is more democracy, while the usual outcome of a violent one, say a guerrilla struggle against an imperialist occupier, is less democracy. Here surely we have a close relationship between means and ends. Violent means may bring about some of the ends of a movement, such as independence or home rule, but it will also bring about other consequences, “side-effects” if you will, but no less real for being unintended. These consequences include hatred and lust for revenge, grief and despair, the shattering of social bonds, and the destruction of democracy and freedom.
Publicity
One of the keys to the success of a nonviolent campaign is publicity. Nonviolent struggle is conducted in the open, and it wants everyone to know what it is doing, both its opponents and its potential supporters. Its opponents need to learn that they will not be attacked violently, that they could negotiate or even “surrender” power without personal fears of going to jail. More important, its potential supporters must be reachable, both to recruit them into the movement and to shame or embarrass the opponents. In 1968 the young people being clubbed and teargassed outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago chanted “The Whole World is Watching” before a hundred television cameras. Of course, governments know how important publicity is, and they do their best to suppress it. In 1989 during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which had been well covered by Western media and by fax machines in China, the Chinese government cleared out all reporters before the final slaughter began. The Burmese government last year tried to confiscate all cell phones and computers, and the Iranian government a few weeks ago tried to disable Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps the best thing we could do for nonviolent social change, in fact, is to multiply the number of electronic devices in every country and create more and more satellite and other channels so that it will be harder and harder for repressive regimes to stifle all communication.
In this need for publicity nonviolent campaigns are different from military campaigns. Sometimes, of course, an enemy will use massive bombing on the population in order to induce terror; that’s a kind of publicity. We saw that during World War II, when Germans thought, erroneously, that bombing British cities would demoralize the British; the British made the same mistake when they firebombed German cities. We saw it too in the opening days of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 when terror was deliberately used; we quite candidly named it “Shock and Awe,” which together make a good synonym for “terror.” But more often than not secrecy is crucial for military warfare, not only in the planning but for as long as possible in the execution. Clandestine special operations are routine. No doubt nonviolent campaigns would like a certain amount of secrecy in the planning stages, but they cannot count on it, as it is difficult to detect spies, so they should not depend on it. The vast effort in 1944 to fool the Germans into thinking the invasion of France would happen somewhere other than the Normandy beaches was necessary for the success of D-Day; there is nothing comparable for nonviolent movements.
Well, there is something comparable: “the element of surprise.” But usually what surprises tyrannical regimes is the very existence of nonviolent protest, and the wide extent of it. And sometimes Gandhi, for one, would surprise the British government in India by calling off a demonstration or campaign. Humor and creative expression provide surprises, too.
But how do nonviolent movements get started under despotic regimes? With the police, the army, paramilitary groups, the press, the schools, and sometimes even the churches under the control of the regime, how can a movement find itself?
Here again publicity is crucial, but not so much to attract support from outside. It is a matter of showing the movement to itself, to reveal that in fact it has a public, that it is a public, and not just a little committee of idealists. And as soon as an incipient movement sees that it has a lot of public support, its activists take courage, they do more things that garner more shows of support, and soon the incipient movement really is a movement. When the Germans easily conquered Denmark in 1940, many Danes, naturally, were unsure about where they stood and to what degree they were expected to collaborate with their occupiers. But things soon clarified when, among other things, the regular community song festivals throughout the country attracted larger numbers than usual (nearly a million that first summer), and among the songs the people sang were hymns about the war with Germany in 1864.
In May 1983 under the military junta of Chile, about eight o’clock one evening, a little metallic tinkle and clanking could be heard. It soon spread: women and men everywhere in Santiago opened their windows and banged on their pots and pans. The cars started honking, and people went into the streets and started bonfires. Of course the government reacted, there were hundreds of arrests and beatings, two were killed on the streets. But the movement discovered itself that night, and from then on the tide began to turn. General Pinochet might have had the disturbing thought: “Send not to know for whom the pot clanks: it clanks for thee.”
What Might Have Been
One of the intellectual pleasures of learning about the theory and practice of nonviolence, especially the “new nonviolence,” is to ponder counter-factual history. Was it necessary, for example, for the American colonists to take up arms against the British? I have been thinking of writing an essay for the op-ed page of The New York Times for July 4 called “Cancel the Fireworks: It was All a Mistake.” America was almost entirely independent already in 1775. The Royal Governors were powerless unless the legislatures voted them money, which they did not always do. The boycotts, the strikes, and the committees of correspondence were causing the British fits and costing the British plenty. The only contentious issue was the tax on tea, which was largely symbolic. People boycotted tea! If the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord had stayed in bed a few more minutes, we might not have had six bloody years of war, which was a civil war as well as a foreign invasion, leading to mass emigration, not to mention an expensive Continental Army that left us indebted to the banks and beholden to the French, and an army commanded by a bunch of Virginia slave-owners. I believe we could have won complete autonomy without firing a shot; at worst we would have ended up like Canada, with its own parliament and a titular British monarch. But there would be no fireworks on July fourth!
A harder case is the American Civil War. Could the slaves have been freed without the horrible bloodshed of our worst war? Could the Union have been preserved? Should it have been preserved? World War II is an even harder case. Could Germany and Japan have been stopped? I don’t have the answers, but I have found that merely to pose the questions opens one’s mind to a flood of revelations about history, politics, and the possibility of social change. We don’t have to refight these wars, thankfully, but we can try to think in a new way about the next war–or the current one. Was there, is there, an effective nonviolent response to the attacks on September 11? Certainly the invasion of Iraq was based on a total fraud, for Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. But was it necessary to invade Afghanistan? Was “vengeance” a sensible strategy?
Let me conclude with a few words about the culture of violence and the attitude of so-called “realists” toward nonviolent political action. There is a stupefying style of “Washington tough-talk” even among Congressional staffers, but among Pentagon and State Department officials there is a culture of cocksure bloody-mindedness beneath a sanitized technical vocabulary (such as “collateral damage”) that makes them seem a cross between bright little boys and the droids of the Evil Empire. Some of them (I’m thinking of Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld) play strategic games with barely concealed glee over their grasp of Realpolitik and military power. How feeble and utopian we are made to feel if we oppose their latest hard-nosed plan. The fact that nonviolence is the subject of a speech by an English professor in the Cathedral of the Pines would only confirm them in their scorn of our innocent and sentimental fecklessness.
But in truth they are the utopians, they are ones with a sentimental belief that their methods will bring about what they want. They are the ones who are innocent of the empirical evidence that refutes their theories. They fail, they always fail, to consider all the consequences of warfare, and that means they are lazy, like students who fail to do their homework. First of all, these tough-minded war-planners always assume they will win the war they are planning. But in fact the US has not won a war, except laughable little ones like the invasion of Grenada, in 64 years. Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam a defeat, Lebanon a defeat, Iraq is still ambiguous, Afghanistan looks very doubtful. Possibly the US and NATO attack on Serbia prevented a worse bloodbath in Kosovo, but that’s about the only case I can think of. I suppose we won the Cold War, in that the Soviet Union no longer exists, but suddenly the world has become far more complicated, violent, and intractable without the order imposed by two superpowers. And it is sheer luck, I believe, that the amateurs in the White House (and the Kremlin) did not manage to annihilate the human race in a nuclear war.
Secondly, these supposed realists fail to think about the costs of winning, even if they do win. Every war leaves a legacy of death, disease, psychological trauma, and economic ruin, even among the victors. Long major wars create centralized governmental power and secret institutions, such as the CIA and the huge “black budget” that even Congress cannot see. What Pentagon planners take account, in advance, of the long-term suffering of our soldiers? They calculate casualty rates, I’m sure, but do they figure in the rate of mental illness, domestic violence, and suicide of the veterans who come home with their bodies intact but their minds in pieces? We are still seeing Vietnam veterans explode or break down after more than forty years. Iraq War veterans are now joining them. Who among the Pentagon staff has even tried to put a price on this slow human catastrophe? Instead we see contempt for unmanly human weakness, great efforts to deny there is such a thing as PTSD, and so on.
This is faith-based violence, no less a matter of faith than that of the suicide-bombers clutching their Korans. Their toolbox has only one tool in it, a hammer, so all the problems of the world look like nails. But we have more tools, and they are designed to work on the thousand different problems of the world. They are tools for grown-ups, and the day must come when the hammer-obsessed day-dreamers in Washington—and London and Moscow and Beijing—must step aside so we can repair the world that they have damaged.