Non-Violence |
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NonViolence is not passivity; it is not simply abstaining from violent actions. It is active resistance against violence. To stand in front of the tanks, or to face down the guns of the police or the military-in the West Bank, Bosnia, Tianamen Square, Manila, Moscow, Kurdistan, or North America is not passivity. To resist war is not simply to abstain from violent actions. It is active resistance, a determination to prevent others from engaging in violent action or from perpetuating a violent system. Nonviolence derives its strength not from a sense of being right, but from love. It is an expression of the core understanding that we are connected with each other, and that all our actions touch every one of us. It is like the child on banners and t-shirts of a few years ago who embraces the globe and proclaims, "Not with my planet you don't," nonviolence is defiant and tender, determined, and clear, though not necessarily certain of the outcome.
Non-violence is a weapon of the strong. With the weak, it might easily be hypocrisy. Fear and love are contradictory terms. Love is reckless in giving away, oblivious as to what it gets in return. Love wrestles with the world as with itself and ultimately gains a mastery over all other feelings. My daily experience, as of those who are working with me, is that every problem would lend itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and non-violence the law of life. For truth and non-violence are, to me, faces of the same coin. Mohandas K. Gandhi
Three Forms of Violence
Structural Violence
Twelve million children die for lack of food and clean water every year in a world that produces a food surplus. As the 'terrorist' pariah Fidel Castro commented so articulately at a WHO conference in 1998:
Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet. Know that those children die in a world where there is still a surplus of food but where market forces and governmental and corporate interests control its distribution.
Three Forms of Violence
Cultural Violence
Discrimination based on race, gender, cultural affiliation, class and sexual orientation supports the status quo and perpetuates inequity. The dominant culture promotes the view that it alone embodies the norm, and that its own cultural and social expression is superior to any other. It despises, oppresses, and humiliates those who are not seen as belonging to it. Consciously and unconsciously, on every scale, the dominant culture, which is also the culture of mass media, co-opts, ignores, undermines, and tyrannizes anything that it sees as different, or that does not fit its current agenda, or that it perceives as a threat. It does so systematically, randomly, accidentally, and is also usually so absorbed in its own sense of entitlement that it is blind to its own actions. Examples proliferate:
- After Chinese-American Michelle Kwan failed to win a gold medal at the recent Winter Olympics a newspaper headline announced, "American Beats Michelle Kwan." We are reminded that, for some, 'American' means white American.
- Non-western countries, hurrying to adopt western standards, may be even more overt in expressing their prejudices. During the 1980s in Sarawak, forest dwelling Dayaks had no civil or legal rights until they left their forest long houses and moved into shacks on the outskirts of town. In the non-Western world indigenous people are seen as an embarrassment and an obstacle in securing loans. Post colonial governments, mimicking their colonial predecessors, systematically marginalize and massacre indigenous peoples.
- In Mauritania and Sudan black Africans are still enslaved by the Arab minority.
- In the U.S. 72% of drug users are white, yet 80% of those in prison on drug charges are people of color. The incarceration rates for most major western European countries are around 1 per 1000 or lower. In the US the average rate is seven times higher, except that, for African-American males, the rate is 1 in 20-that is, fifty times higher.
- In parts of Africa and Asia it is not uncommon for a sister or daughter who is suspected of having engaged in pre-marital sex to be murdered to protect family honor, while her murderer goes unpunished.
- Economic justice is continually denied to indigenous and non-white men, women, and children as the industrialized base of the 'developed' world moves south where labor is plentiful and labor rights minimal. In the process a new global class of working poor is forced to abandon cultural identity and traditional ways.
- The trivializing power of Coca-Cola and McDonalds proliferates through the mass media, promoting an oversimplified view of history and of cultures. Those identified with anything other than the dominant culture become invisible, while ethnic chic is marketed to the masses.
- Education is increasingly used to serve nationalistic and corporate interest. Revisionist history systematically ignores the narratives of centuries of labor struggle and economic exploitation in the U.S. and elsewhere
- Christian missionaries, similar to the Taliban perhaps, often with tacit government approval, systematically dispossess indigenous people of their heritage with bribes of medicine, food, and trinkets.
Three Forms of Violence
Direct Violence
After the First World War, hoping to increase military zeal in new generations of soldiers, the governments of the U.S. and Great Britain strongly encouraged corporations to market more war toys. These toys, which were intended to inure children to violence, have transmuted into the estimated 200,000 violent acts the average person will have already seen on TV by the time he or she is eighteen. In the face of what appears a deliberate plan to program generations of children we can hardly be surprised at the ensuing violence.
- Wars that would now include civilians to a degree rarely seen before. From Spain and Abyssinia in the 1930s to East Timor and Bosnia in the 1990's. Brutal post-colonial liberation struggles-Congo, Algeria, Vietnam, Central America. . . .
- The struggles for cultural, political and economic autonomy that continue today, misrepresented or unreported in the western press-Colombia, Chechnya, Burma, the Philippines.
- The daily victims of homophobia and racism, of domestic violence, and of violence against women and children.
- Mathew Sheppard beaten and left to die beside a Wyoming highway.
- Palestinian and Israeli women, children and men, bystanders murdered in the realization of George Santayana's caution, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In a macabre reversal, a manifestation perhaps of collective post-traumatic shock, militant right-wing Israelis, systematically harass, torture and murder civilians in a manner that is uncannily reminiscent of events in Europe during the 1930s and 40s.
- Those who died on September 11th, 2002. and . . . those who died, or who subsequently disappeared, after September 11th 1972 in the U.S. sponsored coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile. The Afghan victims of military violence from 1979 until now. The estimated three-quarters of a million dead children of Iraq, victims of ten years of sanctions. . .
- The young men in the U.S. military who, it is said, are becoming increasingly disaffected. They are victims of both the violence they perpetrate, which is inexorably internalized, and the violence of the propagandistic deceptions that are perpetrated on them so that their loyalties might remain unquestioned.
- The estimated eighty million people in slavery worldwide, in every part of the world.
- The continuing denial of the holocausts of the past: slavery, the massacres of indigenous people in the Americas, the massacre of Jews, Armenians, Kurds.
Violence demeans and brutalizes us. It also numbs us and dehumanizes us so that we become less able to resist it. Violence in the media and on the streets, the violence of sexism, homophobia, and racism, the violence of U.S. foreign policy, go hand in hand with the violence of poverty and environmental degradation.
"Don't imagine that the practice makes things easier, it makes them harder." Thich Nhat Hanh
If you are cultivating awareness, if you are practicing mindfulness of breathing, for example, you are also aware of the destruction of forests, of phyto-plankton, of the cycle of carbon and oxygen, of the emission of carbon-dioxide, and of the changes in the atmosphere.
Cultivating awareness is not a process of sedation, buffering oneself from what is difficult, hard to resolve, hard to look at.
This does not mean that we look at difficult things for the sake of it. It means that we look at everything, and remain open to everything, including our own grief and rage.
We seek balance. To focus only on suffering and injustice is toxic. To avoid doing so is also toxic, destructive, and demeaning of our true capacities.
Avoiding conflict is not necessarily non-violence, we must not be afraid to enter situations where is conflict. Our work is to do so with love and a fierce determination not to fall into the view that the 'other' is separate from us.
Aware of the violence in the world
and of the power of non-violent resistance
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations
and vow to cultivate
the compassion that seeks to protect each living being.
First Buddhist precept, from the Manzanita Village Precepts Ceremony.
We have never before seriously faced the question whether the entire development of Western civilization, that one-sided and overactive process of expansion outward, might not ultimately be an attempt using unsuitable means-if we lose sight of the complementary art of inner self-control over our entire underdeveloped and otherwise involuntary psychological life, an art of meditation, search of soul, and forbearance. We must learn anew to envisage the great, invisible solidarity of all living beings in universal life, of all minds in the eternal spirit-and at the same time the mutual solidarity of the world process and the destiny of its supreme principle, and we must not just accept this world unity as a mere doctrine, but practice and promote it in our inner and outer lives.
Max Sceler 1924
Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Institute for Non-Violence Programs
Quotations from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.