By Michael Nagler

Reprinted from Waging Nonviolence, Sept. 6, 2011

Between Libya, which has endured more than 2,000 NATO bombings, and Syria, where more than 2,000 civilians have been killed by their own government so far, we see the two traditional responses to a perceived need for intervention by the international community in regimes gone wrong. It’s a grim picture—invaded Libya and abandoned Syria—and a sad comment on the paucity of human imagination, at least when that imagination is squeezed into the narrow confines of “realism.”

Fortunately this Hobson’s choice, and the comment it delivers on the creativity of our concern, is not, in fact, all humanity can come up with.

In the 1922, when Hindu-Muslim tensions were threatening to tear down everything Gandhi was building in India, he proposed that volunteers could go to villages in insecure districts and live there as a kind of resident third party to proffer good offices, abate rumors (a frequent escalator of conflict there and everywhere), and in extreme cases interpose themselves between parties in open conflict. He called an important meeting to put this institution, which he called the Shanti Sena (Peace Army), into practice for February, 1948 but, as we know, was assassinated days before it could take place.

Shanti Sena did nonetheless come into being. Despite various problems, it served creditably well in a variety of districts and the 1962 Chinese border incursion. More to the point, the idea spread throughout the world, where it was picked up by organizations as diverse as the World Peace Brigade, Peace Brigades International, India’s Swaraj Peeth, the colorfully named Rainbow Family of Living Light and even the Guardian Angels, known for riding the subways of New York to prevent crime. It also deepened into a force that could intervene across borders: not just in local communities but around the world.

The unheralded growth of this idea and its on-the-ground institutions is probably typical of how the best ideas in the modern world have to grow: from the bottom up. The movement for “protective accompaniment,” for example, which became the main focus of groups like Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International (the former being explicitly a religiously based organization, the latter explicitly not) was carried out by remarkably few individuals, negligible financing and even less coverage by the press. Nonetheless, it saved lives from death squads in Central America and equivalent forms or terror in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In one case, that of Guatemala, it seems to have created space for a real peace process to unfold when it saved individuals in a key human rights group from systematic assassination simply by being with them day in and out, so that anyone who did them harm would have to do so before the eyes of the world.

The improbable hope represented by protective accompaniment and other functions of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (as it’s now called, or UCP) did eventually percolate upwards to the attention of more official bodies: an international norm (not yet a law) called the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) has come into play after the shame of passivity in Rwanda, stating that “If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.” While not nonviolence, this does open the door for more UCP activities even as it breaks down the wall of absolute state sovereignty. More to the point, the UNICEF has made a grant of one million dollars to the most ambitious of the UCP organizations, Nonviolent Peaceforce, to do training for child protection in South Sudan and the Philippines.

In the penetrating light of Gandhi’s vision, passivity and violence are really two sides of the same coin. On the spiritual plane, they emerge respectively from fear and anger—both drives of the private, separate self. The only really different coin is that of nonviolence, or selfless love in action (to paraphrase Martin Luther King). The only meaningful choice, then, is not between intervening (with blind force) or not intervening, but between violence and nonviolence as a guiding principle.

As I write these lines, black Africans are being harshly persecuted in “free” Libya, usually for no reason. We should not be surprised. This is what violence does: it cannot but grope blindly after victims, as history so often shows. And it also shows, if we know where to look, that nonviolence does the opposite: it spreads hope and toleration, preventing enemies from oppressing if not actually converting them into friends. And now, as institutions emerging from this principle slowly find themselves and reach across borders into realms that formerly were reachable only by force—or by neglect—we get to choose.

Dear Community,

We recently sent out this notice on our email list. If you want to register to receive METTA emails, please do so at this page. For the links below, you can access them below:

a. Hope Tank Page (plus Hope Tank for Teachers’ Retreat)

b. Love Your Enemy: A Campaign to Reclaim Human Dignity Through Nonviolence

C. Hope or Terror? Gandhi and the Other 9/11

Let us know when you start your local Hope Tank.

By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

Reprinted from Waging Nonviolence, August 30, 2011

Most people remember Pandora’s box as a source of all the troubles in the world. In the original version, however, there’s an intriguing element: one thing remains in the box, for which the Greek word is elpis meaning “expectation” or “hope.” With the presidential elections of 2012 already heating up, many of us may well be asking ourselves, what happened to the high hopes that floated our spirits after the last one. In the words of Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?”

The myth may give us a partial answer: hope is still there, but we’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’s not to be found in a politician elected to high office, for however good a person he (or she—God forbid!) may be. That person will be constrained by an extremely corrupt and even vicious system. It is hidden inside the box of human potentials where we have not been able to see it through the crowd of troubles fluttering around the lid.

In other words, there is no dearth of hope, even in this benighted world, if you know where to look for it—not a hope that things will come together by themselves, to be sure, but hope that if we put our hands to the plough, we can restore some sanity and humane direction to human endeavors. We have learned one lesson: hope is not in a leader, it is the spark of leadership inside each of us. Each of us has an instinct for what Kenneth Boulding called “integrative power.” In the Philippine revolution of 1986 it was dubbed “people power”: the flame inside of individuals that cannot be extinguished by either politicians or the corporate usurpation of humanity. In the form of Arab Spring, hope is now passing through the phase where individuals are awakening from inertia to restless action that can be perfected to greater degrees of effective nonviolence.

As a friend of ours from Damascus recently shared, “One of the main characteristics of the Syrian revolution is that we are all working openly. The wall of fear has disappeared.” That is a taste of hope.

Albeit unnoticed by the mainstream and its media, nonviolence did not rest on its laurels since the heyday of Gandhi and King. We have an international institution now called the “right to protect” (R2P) which puts in play what is otherwise an abstract notion: the unity of life. We have an International Criminal Court which, for all that it perpetuates in a retributive model of justice, does, again, signalize the underlying unity of all people. In the words of Francois Fenelon (1651-1715), which have somehow become buried under the rubble of our industrial civilization, “all wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.”  These are signs of hope, as is the fact that insurrectionary groups are learning to share their “best practices” with others around the world—witness, for instance, the Serbian Otpor presence in Tahrir Square.

At the start of this week, in Delhi, Anna Hazare broke his fast for the right reason. It had done its work: Indian parliament agreed to the demand of Hazare and his supporters, “Team Anna” joined by some several hundred thousand Indians, that a commission of disinterested individuals be established to control the country’s rampant corruption.

What’s hopeful there is threefold: Hazare is orginally not “people” but person, so sparks of nonviolent energy are potentially everywhere—six plus billion of them. Secondly, Hazare has explicitly located himself in the Gandhian tradition, showing that “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” When something very positive about human nature is brought to the surface it is likely to stay there if and when individuals are imaginative and daring enough to seize on it. Thirdly, there are methods in nonviolence that awaken one’s adversaries to act against their self-will in favor of the well-being of something greater than themselves and their personal self-interest. We can even dare to hope that some of the people who went along with Hazare’s ultimatum sensed as they did so that their personal well-being was part of the whole and not in opposition to it. If that idea were to catch on, self-interested competition at the expense of others would be on the way out. The consequences are inspiring to contemplate.

What is preventing these hopeful developments and others we have not mentioned from becoming a whole new frame of reference? At the Metta Center, and elsewhere, we think the answer is to be sought by looking to ourselves. Gandhi called it svadeshi, or localism. Some years ago, when we told a young friend we wanted to start a new think-tank to develop an overview that would help these hopeful developments become a movement, Katie shot back: “We don’t need a new think-tank, we need a hope tank.” So we started one.

Each Friday after meditation and a potluck breakfast, we have discussions that are open but focused, namely on the theory of nonviolence, which we consider the essence of that spark. We invite you to host your own in your local community. Bring two or three friends, or strangers, together in a coffee shop, your living room, a community center, and have the audacity to explore possibilities, learn, discuss and create strategy for nonviolent change in all of its dimensions. Learn everything you can about nonviolence. Have full faith in the conclusion that Gandhi reached after fifty years’ ceaseless experiments: “nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of Mankind. It is the supreme law. By it alone can mankind be saved.”

Edited and published at Waging Nonviolence 8/23/11 as “Coming home from killing”

By Michael Nagler

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties. Apparently not much has changed since Coming Home, the Jane Fonda film of 1978.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

McCord, though he is understandably tense, does not seem to be completely  unnerved by the trauma. Instead, it forced him to wake up from the lies that had put him in a uniform to kill other people’s children halfway across the globe, and he took it upon himself to try waking up others. Among people who have lost loved ones to gun violence—like, for example, Azim Khamisa, who now works to dissuade school children from joining gangs after his son was mindlessly killed by one—some have discovered that turning grief and guilt to reconstructive work can be psychologically restorative. But their number is not legion. Many, many more have gone, and are now going, the way of Suzy from In Our Name.According to a covered-up story that is about to be released by Project Censored, a Northern California-based media watchdog service, the number of active-duty soldiers or veterans who have committed suicide has just surpassed the number of those killed in combat.

We are facing a social problem of massive proportions, as our already-grim experience with returning veterans from Vietnam should have warned us. Psychologist Rachel McNair developed the concept of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) to bring home to us the fact—now dramatically supported by neuroscientists—that you cannot send people out to kill and maim without expecting them to suffer enduring torments themselves, no matter how thoroughly you try to desensitize them beforehand. Thank God! Where would we be if this capacity to respond to the joys and sufferings of others could really be squelched?

There have been admirable attempts to get needed help to these spiritually wounded men and women; but the real answer, the only sane and compassionate answer, is prevention. And that means only one thing: to stop glorifying violence in our social culture and national policy—in other words, renounce war. It won’t be easy. Colonel Harry Holloway, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, told journalist Dan Baum recently, “As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we’re causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we’re accomplishing is worth the harm we’re causing … if we get into this business of talking about killing people we’re going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience.”

But what is the alternative? Those children who opened Ethan McCord’s eyes were killed by a machine in the sky a mile and a half away with 30mm cannon rounds—ordinance tipped with depleted uranium and meant for penetrating armor, not tearing apart human beings. If truth is the first victim in war, humanity is a close second. Thus, if we do not “pathologize” what is truly sick, we end up pathologizing what isn’t: peace. (Remember the “Vietnam syndrome?”) If we do not fear our own bestiality we end up producing a climate that, as none other than General Douglas Macarthur said, “renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.”

Perhaps those who still believe that war is an “absolutely necessary experience” would reflect with us on the following story. It was Poland, in 1942. The Gestapo was raiding the apartment of the Kshenskys, who had participated in the Jewish underground. Finding the “incriminating” evidence, they were about to take the mother, who was home alone with their two-year-old son, out to the courtyard and shoot her when she saw, with horror, that her toddler was playing with the shiny buttons on the Gestapo captain’s uniform. He, too, noticed, and stared down at the child.  After what must have seemed an eternity he looked up, his face totally changed, and said,“I have a son at home just his age, and I miss him very much.” Then he added, “Your son has saved your life,” and ordered his men out of the apartment. The child did not survive the war, but the Kshenskys miraculously did; their daughter, Lili Kshensky Baxter, is a former Chair of the National Council of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation.

There is a way out of this dehumanizing dilemma, and that is to rise up and say, “No!” War is not a necessary evil, nor indispensable activity. It is a horror and a travesty on human nature. We have international courts now; we have nonviolent intervention teams. There is, as there has always been, the possibility of conversation among civilized people—provided we elect them. And there are the arts of nonviolence, of which a Kurdish gentleman in Kirkuk said recently, “It may be slow, but you don’t lose your humanity.” Journalist Marshall Frady has given a beautiful description of how this kind of struggle not only preserves, instead of surrendering, our humanity but makes it into a spreading force:

In the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, … an oppressor can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience toward compassion and justice.