Nonviolence (10 page)

In 1867, with the territory almost entirely under British control, and only about 40,000 Maori still alive in a land of half a million Europeans, a visionary Maori leader named Te Whiti emerged on the southern coast of New Zealand's northern island, in a place called Parihaka. As government troops hunted down the last of the resisters, some fled to Parihaka, where they were allowed to stay, on condition that their weapons were destroyed. The population of Parihaka was growing. In 1869 Te Whiti declared that this was to be “the Year of Trampling Underfoot.” The whites took this to mean their final victory, but Te Whiti was actually saying that 1869 was to be the year in which the people of power were to be humbled. He gave the
pakeha,
as the Maori called white people, the bad news: without using violence or force, it was his intention to negotiate a separate treaty between the
pakeha
and the Maori of his district, a treaty between equals. He said that lion and lamb, hawk and wren, cat and mouse, and the
pakeha
and the Maori would lie down together in peace. But the management of the land would remain in the hands of its owners, the Maori. White settlers could remain on the land they occupied and more could come if they wanted. But the Maori would remain the proprietors and no parcels were to be sold off.

His intention in claiming the land peacefully was for the Maori fighters to give up their armed struggle. Many did, flocking to Parihaka
and turning in their arms. White people came, too, and Te Whiti received them graciously. They marveled at the elegance and refinement of this broad-shouldered man with strong features and a premature white beard. Paying him what they considered the ultimate compliment, some said that he seemed like a white man.

Like the American colonial revolutionaries before him and Gandhi after him, Te Whiti urged his people to make or grow everything they used and not buy British goods. The Maoris who came from all over New Zealand to hear Te Whiti stayed to grow food. They came with ploughs—more and more ploughs. For years white townspeople noticed Maori headed to Parihaka with ploughs.

Finally, on May 26, 1879, ten years after Te Whiti's announcement, white farmers looked out their windows and saw why the Maori had been collecting ploughs. All over the district, white-held land—land that had not been disputed for decades since its Maori inhabitants had been killed or driven out—was being ploughed by Maori. When the white farmers would run up to them and shout, the Maori ploughmen, always unarmed, would remain calm and polite, and would continue ploughing acre after acre from sunrise to sunset every day. Sir Hercules Robinson, the governor, rode out to see and, according to witnesses, “almost exploded with indignation.”

While the government hesitated, a group of angry white settlers declared an independent republic and pledged to kill the ploughmen. Te Whiti instructed the ploughmen: “Go put your hands to the plough. Look not back. If any come with guns or with swords, be not afraid. If they smite you, smite not in return. If they rend you, be not discouraged. Another will take up the good work.”

The settlers strangely panicked in the face of this nonresistance. Some built fortresses around their homes. Some dug trenches. The local newspaper called for a “war of extermination.” Te Whiti told his followers not to disturb the property of fleeing whites. “If any man molests me,” he said, “I will talk with my weapon—the tongue.”

The government began arresting the ploughmen, who did not resist. Te Whiti sent out five each day. Hundreds were being arrested and shipped to the South Island, where they were held without trial. Some died from the poor conditions. Still, more and more white-held land was being marked by the furrows of Maori ploughs. The army moved in, building blockhouses and digging trenches as though preparing for a major battle. The ploughing continued. The Maori warriors, who had defeated armed columns twelve years earlier, met the invaders and gave them gifts.

By 1880 the government estimated that it had already spent close to £1 million trying to put down the nonviolent uprising. The Parihakas, identifying themselves by the wearing of a white feather, were becoming an obsession of the press. There was, however, almost no coverage of the fate of some four hundred Parihaka prisoners until a few of them were released. Once their stories were told, their treatment fast became a national scandal and all four hundred prisoners were released.

Hundreds of Maori were out working their reclaimed fields every day. But the local constabulary had raised an army of 2,500. When they attacked Parihakas they were met by young girls singing songs. Though cursed at and threatened with swords and charging horses, they continued singing and playing. When the army finally made its way to the center of town, the entire village was seated on the ground waiting for them. The commander gave them one hour to disperse, but several hours later the entire village was still ignoring their presence. Finally Te Whiti was arrested and taken away. The chief smiled as he walked away under guard. Even with Te Whiti in prison, and later in exile in the south, with troops destroying their homes, the Parihakas still continued to find means of non-violent protest, such as refusing to pay taxes. In 1897 they began another ploughing campaign.

Te Whiti died in November 1907 and was buried with a cloud of white feathers. The Maori did not take back the land, and the half-million Maori today are only 20 percent of New Zealand's population. But Te Whiti and his movement in Parihaka are credited with stopping a war of genocide that would have meant the end of the
Maori people. What might have been the fate of the Maori with more Te Whitis? What might the Spanish and French have done in the face of nonviolent resistance on Hispaniola? What if there had been a Te Whiti among the Cherokee or the Iroquois? But such leaders are rare, and, as the Quakers said, there has to be someone to begin it.

VI

We abhor fighting for Freedom. Freedom gotten by the sword is an established bondage to some part or other of the creation. Victory that is gotten by the sword is a victory that slaves get one over another.

—GERRARD WINSTANLEY,

leader of the Diggers, 1650

S
omeone who had not studied history might have imagined this war-torn world welcoming one peaceful state. But an age-old lesson was seen once again in colonial Pennsylvania. The new Americans could not conceive of power without force. Pennsylvania, they believed, would not be significant, would not have a role to play in the shaping of the New World, if it could not engage in warfare. Many Pennsylvanians who wanted to see their colony at the center of events, among them Benjamin Franklin, actively campaigned to stop support for the Quakers. Franklin's 1747 pamphlet
The Plain Truth
argued against the Quaker policy of refusing to support the British wars against the French and Indians.

The revolutionary movement of the 1770s was well aware that there were those in their midst who were anti-British but opposed a shooting war. In fact, 80,000 Americans belonged to nonviolent sects that would not accept warfare, far more people than the number of troops Washington ever had under his command at any one time. On July 18, 1775, the Continental Congress, meeting in Pennsylvania, called on religious pacifists to contribute in nonviolent ways. The Congress was inundated with petitions from religious conscientious-objector groups as well as from those who denounced these groups as “enemies of Liberty.” Both sides finally agreed that those whose religion opposed violence would not be penalized for refusing service as long as they paid taxes to support the war, including an annual fine of two pounds and ten shillings.

The majority of the Pennsylvania Assembly was anti-British but viewed going to war as an unnecessary extreme. They believed that their differences with the British could be negotiated. It was this attitude that made the revolutionaries greatly distrust the Assembly. The revolutionaries also remembered that in the past, Quakers had in some cases successfully converted soldiers to nonviolence and these individuals would no longer fight. The spreading of nonviolence
outside the religious sects was reason enough to regard these people as a threat, and they were persecuted in most of the colonies.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the radical revolutionaries, those who wanted to break away from Britain and were prepared to go to war, were a minority, but they were the most vocal and articulate and the best organized faction. Proponents of nonviolence know that it is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails. It is not clear that the decision to go to war against the British was the majority opinion in most of the revolting colonies, but the radicals proceeded and made it a fait accompli.

Another enduring lesson of history is that it is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable. Once the first shots are fired, those who oppose the war are simply branded as traitors. All debate ends once the first shots are fired, so firing shots is always an effective way to end the debate. The silence may not last for long, as the War of 1812, World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, all unpopular wars, demonstrate, but there is always a moment of enforced silence when debate and criticism are banished and this moment gives the war boosters at least a temporary advantage.

In February 1775 the British sent 240 soldiers to Salem, Massachusetts, to seize ammunition and weapons that the rebels were amassing. Though the nonviolent defense of a weapons cache does not truly qualify as nonviolence, the townspeople's plan averted violence and prevented the opening of a shooting war. They simply pulled up the drawbridge into town and made the British negotiate entry, which the British did by giving assurances that they would not disturb the town. Apparently the colonists at the drawbridge were less concerned about the fate of the weapons than the principle that the British army had to ask permission before entering their town. According to Hobbesian logic, such happy solutions only put off the inevitable, which came on April 19, when another British column attempted to seize another rebel arms cache, this time in Concord. Whether or not this qualified as what Hobbes termed Natural Law, the reality was that elements among the rebel movement had decided
that they wanted a shooting war, and once that kind of decision is made, it is, as a rule, almost impossible to avoid it. American revolutionaries intercepted the British column in Lexington. The rebels only exchanged a few shots and a number of them were killed. Each side claimed the other side had fired first, though all the casualties of this brief first engagement were on the rebel side. The British marched on to the supply depot in Concord. But the shots had been fired, the war begun, and the debate ended.

Curiously, up until those few shots were fired in Lexington, the rebels, even while arguing for war, had been spectacularly successful at what could be considered nonviolent resistance. Both demonstrating and rioting for a wide range of causes were commonplace in eighteenth-century America. One historian, Paul A. Gilje, counted 150 riots and street actions in the thirteen colonies just between 1765 and 1769. Though rules of class conduct were not rigid, generally the upper classes wrote pamphlets and negotiated, while the lower classes took to the street. The lower classes would cart around effigies of officials at their demonstrations before hanging, burning, or beheading them. Even before television there was a belief that effective nonviolence needed to be visual, needed a sense of theater to attract an audience. When the British passed the Stamp Act in 1765, the colonists staged a series of demonstrations throughout the colonies. In Charleston, South Carolina, two thousand demonstrators protested taxes by burning effigies and then staging a mock funeral for the death of “American Liberty.” The stamp officials were forced to resign in every colony but Georgia. The demonstrations were accompanied by a boycott of British goods. The result of all this was that within a year the act was repealed. But the following year the British attempted another taxation scheme, the Townsend Acts, which, because they only taxed imports indirectly, the British hoped would be more palatable.

The working poor were angry about their economic plight and they were not always nonviolent. They attacked and destroyed homes of officials, and looting was not uncommon. The intellectual leaders, being largely men of property, opposed these acts of destruction and tried to keep the street protests orderly. There was
clearly a class division, and the upper-class leaders had to negotiate with the street leaders. The former tried to keep elements that they thought of as rowdy out of demonstrations. They sometimes banned black people from participating in demonstrations, convinced that they were an inherently unruly race.

In 1768 the Massachusetts Assembly dissolved rather than collect the Townsend duties. Not entirely nonviolent, the revolutionaries formed mobs to harass customs officials. On March 5, 1770, boys began throwing snowballs at British troops in Boston. The troops began pushing. Men came to the aid of boys. When one British soldier was struck with a club, he responded by firing into the crowd. Other soldiers also fired and five colonists were killed. When the British soldiers were brought to trial, John Adams, a moderate, defended them and noted in defense of the troops that black people were in the crowd. As a matter of fact, a mulatto man, Crispus Attucks, was among the victims. The British were acquitted.