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Nonviolent resistance means
much more than the absence of violence-as war historian Jonathan Schell
makes clear in his latest book The Unconquerable World.
It includes making immediate improvements in the quality of local life,
not cooperating with oppressive officialdom, being prepared for retaliation,
and working out alternative philosophies and organisations.
It also means not cooperating with trades which kill people, like the
drug and weapons markets.
In 1962 American spy planes spotted Soviet Union nuclear-missile sites
being constructed in Cuba to deter the United States from invading the
island. US President John F Kennedy demanded the removal of the sites,
or threatened a "full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union".
While a scared world waited to see if the two super-powers would nuke
each other-and perhaps everyone else-into oblivion, Soviet Chairman Nikita
S Krushchev secretly wrote a personal letter to Kennedy to say regardless
of their public disagreements he was not prepared to use nuclear weapons.
Only lunatics and suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy
the whole world before they die would start a nuclear war, he wrote. Later,
in his memoirs, he recalled he had speculated whether nuclear war would
result in the death of 500 million human beings and noted: "What good
would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that, though
our great nation and the United States were in complete ruin, the national
honour of the Soviet Union was intact?"
Kennedy, who was also agonising about the possibility of "making a mistake
which could result in 200 million dead', replied privately to Krushchev
in like terms, also without revealing his thoughts to his administration
colleagues. The two leaders made a confidential deal-Krushchev would remove
missiles from Cuba, Kennedy would not invade Cuba and would remove US
missiles in Turkey threatening the Soviet Union.
Schell comments this episode, containing the possibility of wiping out
the human race, 'rendered the [traditional] global war system unworkable
beyond any hope of repair' although he notes current US President George
W. Bush has reverted to old thinking.
Of all the 20th century's revolutionary leaders, the man they called 'Mahatma'-
meaning 'great soul'-was arguably the most committed to nonviolence and
to equality, both publicly and privately.
He negotiated high stakes with some of the world's most powerful people
while living a simple personal life, owning little and doing his share
of household tasks such as cleaning toilets. One of his few possessions
was the spinning wheel he worked every day, for symbolic reasons and as
an economic contribution.
US historian William Shirer was a newspaper reporter following the struggles
for an independent India in 1931 and gives revealing snapshots of Gandhi's
style. At a ceremonial knees-up on a change of India's Viceroy, "all the
lords, ladies, knights, dames, maharajas, rajas, nawabs, and other potentates
and notables who managed to wax so fat off this sweltering land of starving
millions had assembled
to say farewell to Lord Irwin
[in] glittering
parties at some of the great houses in Bombay [now Mumbai] and in
the
Taj Mahal Hotel
offering up toasts with champagne and
dancing the
night through". Irwin arrived from Delhi in his special white-and-gold
train, and then drove in a coach-and-four to Government House where the
notables had gathered.
Meanwhile, invited to the do as an important Indian political leader,
Gandhi (then in his sixties) "arrived at about the same time, climbing
out of his shabby third-class [railway train] compartment at a suburban
stop and trudging a couple of miles through the broiling sun to the Vol1no8 Winter2004 Contents
of a friend". When Shirer called on him that evening, he was "spinning
away and in high spirits", even though, according to a doctor, he was
running a fever and close to total exhaustion. But he was pleased because
he'd had a productive hour with Lord Irwin during the afternoon discussing
the textile trade, important to both the Indian and British economies.
Later that year, Gandhi was
in London to attend a conference on Indian independence, staying in a
community centre in the poorer East End of London. He made the time to
go to Lancashire to visit cotton mill workers who had been adversely affected
by an Indian boycott of their goods, made to protect Indian cotton workers.
Indian officials warned Gandhi he might get 'mobbed' (attacked) by workers
resentful at being thrown out of work by the boycott. However, "As it
turned out he was mobbed by them, but as an object of their affection
and admiration
The cotton mill hands, many of them barely surviving
with their families on the pittance of the dole, knew a man who was devoting
his life to helping the poor
They gave him a tumultuous welcome".
It was in his mid-thirties in South Africa, where he'd gone to take a
legal case, that Gandhi's sense of injustice was ignited. Because he was
Indian a white man forced him out of the first-class railway compartment
he'd paid for, then when he complained he was dumped on a station platform.
In 1906 the Transvaal government passed a law requiring all Indians over
eight years to be registered with ten fingerprints and carry a residency
permit-or be fined, sent to prison, deported. Angry at being reduced to
the category of criminals, Indians held protest meetings, refused to accept
the law and several hundred landed in jail.
Gandhi decided to stay in South Africa where "a new principle had come
into being". It was first seen as 'passive resistance' then
Gandhi coined the term 'satyagraha', a word combining the Sanskrit word
sat, meaning 'being' or 'truth', and graha, which means 'holding firm
to', thus satyagraha became known as 'truth force' or 'soul force'. In
practice it meant direct action without violence in support of the person's
beliefs, accompanied by a willingness to suffer the consequences.
Gandhi, a Hindu, was a religious man for whom 'God' was 'Truth' in each
person-not unlike the Quaker notion of the 'Christ within'. God "was only
seen in action", he said, and Jesus was a 'religious activist'. Gandhi
made vows of poverty and celibacy although remaining married. For him
there was no difference between personal beliefs and political philosophy.
He took his ideas on non-violent non-cooperation back to India in 1915,
and fasted in protest for the first time in 1917. He had admired aspects
of the British Empire but on reflecting about its effects on Indian people
he came to see it as an 'unmitigated evil'. The 'larger villain' was not
England itself but its technical materialist civilisation, defended by
military violence, which he saw as opposed to Indian civilisation's spiritual
culture.
In 1918, the infamous Rowlett Act (the Anarchical and Revolution Crimes
Act) was imposed after British authorities investigated the possibilities
of terrorism and 'sedition' (encouraging rebellion). Gandhi was reminded
of the laws passed against Indians in South African, so the new legislation
was resisted by full-scale campaigns of non-cooperation, including hartals
or strikes, a mode of resistance to last for three decades.
Almost immediately Gandhi was arrested and imprisoned, causing his followers
to riot and several policemen were killed. This departure from nonviolence
was a "matter of the deepest humiliation and regret" to Gandhi who went
on a three-day fast to protest against his own people, fasting again when
a police station was burned down.
In 1920, in response to the Amritsar massacre, the Congress Party, at
Gandhi's urging, launched a campaign which included the boycotting of
colonial institutions, non-participation in elections, non-attendance
at British schools, refusal to consume British products, and passive acceptance
of the legal consequences. The movement spread nationwide at all levels.
Another major campaign was started in 1930 to oppose the salt monopoly
by which the British made the vital mineral out of Indian sea water then
sold it back to Indians. Gandhi wrote to Viceroy Irwin announcing his
intention of breaking the monopoly at the conclusion of a long people's
march to the sea-the Salt March-when ordinary citizens would collect sea
water and make their own salt.
For the first time the British
saw women flocking to demonstrations, protesters were ruthlessly clubbed,
jails overflowed with prisoners who did not resist arrest and an immense
problem was posed to the colonial authorities.
Gandhi again landed in jail, but he was then invited to represent India
at the 1931 constitutional conference in London. The Quit India campaign
was launched in 1942, and although it was, again, violently repressed,
it was becoming impossible not to negotiate with Gandhi. After World War
II the British were left with no option but to grant independence in 1947.
Schell comments "It is not certain it was satyagraha that broke England's
grip on India [as] the English weathered all the individual satyagraha
campaigns". Other factors were a decline in the importance of British
trade with India, and England was weakened by the 1930s economic depression
and two world wars, forcing it to yield global preeminence to the US.
However, "satyagraha unquestionably succeeded in winning the battle for
the hearts and minds of the people of India".
Post-war Viceroy Lord Wavell said "while the British are still legally
and morally responsible for what happens in India, we have lost nearly
all power to control events", and acknowledged technical victories against
nonviolent opponents were in the long run useless.
In addition to nonviolence and civil disobedience there was a third arm
in Gandhi's social activism which he regarded as the most important of
all. Called 'the constructive program' or 'social work' its aim was to
provide adequate food, shelter, and sanitation for India's millions, self-government
in the 700 thousand villages, ending the Hindu system of untouchability,
raising the status of women, and keeping peace between Hindus and Muslims.
These tasks could not wait until colonial rule was overthrown. Gandhi's
attitude was: if the goal is the renovation of India, why not proceed
to it directly? Why not pick up a broom and sweep now? If one concentrates
too much on seizing the means of betterment one might forget the ultimate
goal. Also, "Whereas non-cooperation drained power away from the oppressors,
the constructive program generated it in the hands of the resisters".
Never a man to act differently from his words, when Gandhi attended his
first Congress Party meeting in 1915 he helped clean the toilets.
In a lesson that has wide application, Gandhi believed Britain's domination
of its Indian colony for two hundred years happened because Indians allowed
it to happen. "The English have not taken India", he said, "we have given
it to them
Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought
their goods?
we all did this. In order to become rich all at once we
welcomed the [East India] Company's officers with open arms. We assisted
them".
After India gained its independence in 1947, Pakistan was created as a
separate state-against Gandhi's wishes-and the two countries started a
series of wars. Less than a year later Gandhi was gunned down by another
Hindu.
Some 40 years after the death of Gandhi, Vaclav Havel-a playwright in
Czechoslovakia-was part of an underground resistance movement hoping to
remove the oppressive communist dictatorship.
East European nations Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia became parts of the Soviet empire
after 1917.
But during the 1980s the communist empire began to unravel, brought about
not by bloodshed but by quiet revolutionary activity from its East European
edge to the Soviet centre, and from the people at the bottom of the social
scale. According to Schell "In the first stage of the collapse, the Solidarity
movement in Poland
dissolved the local communist system from within,
demonstrating
weakness of the entire structure of Soviet power
the
progress of the revolution from the edges of the empire to its heart caught
almost everyone by surprise".
Three writer-activists were
instrumental in the East European stage of the anti-Soviet revolution-Adam
Michnik of Poland, Gyorgy Konrad of Hungary, and Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovalia.
Havel became founding spokesman of Czech human rights organisation Charter
77, described as "a nonviolent opposition to the totalitarian regime"
and "a positive influence on the course of our anti-totalitarian revolution
in 1989". Havel wrote samizdat (secret) articles sent to colleagues to
copy and distribute further in the dissident network, and for his pains
was sent to prison for four years in 1979.
Later he was to become Czechoslovakia's first post-communist president,
then first president of the new Czech Republic, and winner of many international
humanitarian awards.
Havel regarded it as
a mistake to try to overthrow a totalitarian dictatorship by military
means-first because it was unlikely to be effective, but more importantly
because nonviolence was a basic truth to live by.
"A future secured by violence might actually be worse than what exists
now
[It] creates a certain kind of society
violence harms the doer
as well as his victims
[and] generates counter-violence
[which] starts
a train of events likely to bring general ruin", he wrote.
But Havel's philosophy was much more active than merely avoiding violence.
He, Konrad and Michnik "lowered their field glasses from the remote heights
of state power and turned their gazes to the life immediately around them".
Activism "should be directed at achieving immediate changes in daily life"-modest,
concrete goals on the local level, which "aim at the very essence of things".
Konrad referred to the "iceberg of power [being] melted from within".
In a similar expression to that used by Gandhi, Havel called his philosophy
'living in truth' as opposed to 'living in the lie' of obedience to a
repressive regime. He thought it unwise to get involved in general ideological
argument in which "concrete causes are always being sacrificed".
Living in truth meant doing what needs doing in your immediate surroundings,
saying what you think is true, acting the way you think people should
act. All this is a form of protest by not confirming the system, creating
an alternative society. Havel gave the example of a brewer who, putting
aside official specifications for making beer, set about making the best
beer he could by his own recipe, and thus 'living in truth'.
This apparently simple prescription had rapid effects, Havel noted-"Everything
suddenly appears in another light, and the whole crust seems then to be
made of tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably".
Schell comments the kind of power that flows upward from activity of the
people shows that the seemingly weak can defeat the seemingly strong.
"[I]t is a frequent mistake of the powers that be to imagine that they
can accomplish or prevent by force what a Luther, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther
King, or a Havel can inspire by example. The prosperous and mighty of
our day still live at dizzying heights above the wretched of the earth,
yet the latter have made their will felt in ways that have already changed
history".
When African Americans weren't allowed to sit at certain lunch counters
in their own towns because of racial prejudice, large groups of them sat
there anyway. When removed by the police, others took their place, repeatedly,
until the ban was removed.
They were allowed to buy goods in a department store but not to be employed
there, so the black population boycotted the store, profits disappeared
and employment practices changed.
The black rights movement in USA led by Martin Luther King and others
was a guerrilla army taking nonviolent direct action, leading to significant
lessening of discrimination on grounds of cultural background, although
the job is not yet finished.
This essay, based largely on Schell's comprehensive book, would not be
complete without acknowledging that world peace has recently taken a backward
step.
Schell dates it from the attacks on American sites on 11 September 2001,
after which President Bush, heading a posse of neo-conservatives, "embarked
on a full-scale revolution in its foreign policy that
adopted goals
and means that extended far beyond the war on terror. The policy's foundation
was an assertion of absolute, enduring American military supremacy over
all other countries in the world". This will be achieved by "the overthrow
of governments (regime change) in preemptive, or preventive attacks
The
optimism and hope of the immediate post-Cold War years gave way to war
fever and war".
USA invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and almost immediately other nations
also went to war: Palestinians and Israelis stepped up their campaigns
against each other, Russia intensified its war in Chechnya, nuclear-armed
India and nuclear-armed Pakistan embarked on further confrontations.
One of the problems of democracy is that people vote in elections, then
tend to leave decisions to politicians, officials, police, the military.
But the strongest message to come out of the above reflections on nonviolent
change is the power of the general public, the 'ordinary' citizen.
Sources
Mary Oliver, Wage peace, Read by Peace Professor Kevin Clements,
Queensland Univ., opening Quaker exhibition 18.5.04, Brisbane, Australia.
Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World, Allen Lane, 2003.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-violent resistance, Phoenix Press 1949.
William L. Shirer, Gandhi, a memoir, Abacus, 1979.
New Internationalist, World Guide, 2003/4.
Vaclav Havel, The art of the impossible, Knopf, 1997.
Eugen Weber, A modern history of Europe, Norton, 1971.
Peter Ackerman & Jack Duvall, A force more powerful, Palgrave 2000.
email the author: harold@austarmetro.com.au
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