Nonviolence (23 page)

Gorbachev, faced with such nonviolent parallel movements, and having learned the lesson of the disastrous invasion of 1968, had no choice but to compete by creating his own reforms. Not surprisingly, after years of struggle, people found his less appealing than those of the homegrown dissident movement. As Michnik put it in his paraphrase of Marx, “A nation, like a woman, cannot be forgiven for one moment of oblivion when she allows a villain to take possession of her.”

The Soviet Union and Mexico were only two of numerous infamously ruthless regimes that were overthrown by the tactics of nonviolence toward the end of the blood-besotted twentieth century.

In 1977 a small group of women—only fourteen originally— took on one of the most ruthless and brutal dictatorships in the world, the Argentine military junta. The women, dressed in comfortable flat shoes so that they could run for their lives if they had to, had originally gathered at Buenos Aires's Plaza de Mayo, in front of the government building, the Casa Rosada. They were the mothers of just a few of the thirty thousand Argentines who “disappeared” into the blue Ford Falcons of the military government, never to be heard from again. What could be done in the face of this kind of ruthlessness—a regime that even kidnaped pregnant
women, waited for the babies to be brought to term, then murdered the mothers and gave the children to friends of the regime? By the end of the year there were weekly demonstrations by 150 women who called themselves “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” They placed ads in newspapers and circulated petitions. When the military started making arrests, even more turned out. Other dissident organizations started to connect with Las Madres. Soon there was a network of them. In February 1978 the police beat them in the plaza. After that, they turned up every Thursday by the hundreds. Many factors led to the collapse of the Argentine regime in 1982, just as there would be many factors involved in the fall of Marcos in the Philippines, and of the Soviet Union. But these women were one of the important catalysts for change.

In the mid-1980s, when the world looked at the Philippines, it saw the corrupt regime of Ferdinand Marcos engaged in warfare with the Marxist New People's Army in the north and the Muslim separatists of Mindinao in the south. Few even noticed in 1985 when Bishop Francisco Claver declared, “We choose nonviolence merely as a strategy for the attaining of the ends of justice, casting it aside if it does not work.” Since violence had failed to topple the regime in years of fighting, most observers assumed nonviolence would not go far. Eight months later, Marcos had been overthrown by “people power.”

The history of the struggle to emancipate people of color in South Africa is one of shifting tactics between violence and nonviolence. Gandhi's campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century was nonviolent. The African National Congress, modeled on Gandhi's Indian National Congress, was also nonviolent and focused on fighting legal battles. After 1948, when an openly racist National Party won elections, a new generation of militants, led by Nelson Mandela, energized the old movement, while remaining committed to nonviolence. They went to jail for deliberately defying laws of segregation. But by 1953 some demonstrations turned into riots and the government passed laws approving such practices as whipping protesters.

In 1960, to protest the requirement of black people to carry official
passes, thousands showed up at once in police stations to be arrested for not having them. At an industrial city in the Transvaal, Sharpeville, the police responded by opening fire, killing almost seventy. Nonviolence was getting more difficult to believe in, and Mandela formed an armed wing of the ANC and began a bombing campaign, which led to the banning of the ANC and other organizations as well as the imprisonment of their leaders. Placed on trial in 1964, Mandela said that the nonviolent policies of the ANC over the past fifty years had been an utter failure. He said, “As violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force.”

Nonviolence seemed over for South Africa. Even Kenneth Kuanda, the Rhodesian-born president of Zambia and the most prominent voice for nonviolence on the continent, changed his mind. “It is impossible,” Kuanda concluded, “to be nonviolent in an unjust society.” Kuanda hastened to add that Africans must not consider the fight to end apartheid a “Holy War,” that instead it was a “messy, brutal, degrading business.” He did not wish to decorate this violence with the bogus notion of a “just war,” which he likened to trying “to disinfect violence by pouring over it a balm of sweet scented theology.”

Kuanda had not lost his conviction that violence was wrong, only his faith that nonviolence could work. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that violence wouldn't work either. The white government had all the guns. In pitched street battles, the blacks always sustained the bulk of the casualties. At the height of the violence a new voice emerged, the Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu. Delivering to an angry black audience the funeral oration for Steven Biko, a black leader murdered in prison, Tutu said: “Pray for the leaders of this land, for the police—especially the security police and those in prison service—that they may realize that they are human beings too. I bid you pray for whites in South Africa.”

Black resistance was changing. A new generation of leaders, such as Mkhuseli Jack, believed violence alienated too many people from the movement. They thought they would never win by
fighting the police in the black townships: they instead had to reach the whites “where they lived,” and the way to do that was with an economic boycott. When white store owners lost a third of their business, the white merchant class began to withdraw its support of the apartheid regime. In December 1989, South African president F. N. de Klerk began negotiating with the still imprisoned Mandela. Two months later Mandela was released; four years later he was elected president of South Africa.

Throughout the 1980s, the ANC had increased its violent attacks, from 13 in 1979 to 281 in 1989, so it can still be argued that violence played a role in the overthrow of apartheid. Given such events as the Sharpesville massacre, it is impossible to say whether more people died in violence than would have in nonviolence. One campaign of several months in 1976 resulted in 1,149 deaths, all but 5 black. Even most ANC members agree that their actions were not nearly as effective as boycotts and economic sanctions, and that what finally brought de Klerk to negotiations with Mandela was the understanding of both men that they could not achieve their goals through violence.

One place in which violence has been a complete and enduring failure is the Middle East. Ami Ayalon, a small, fit-looking man who was a former commander of the Israeli navy and former director of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, said, “If you sat on another planet and watched the world your conclusion would be that violence is not working. That is not the conclusion people come to in the Middle East.” In a 2005 interview he said, “Violence doesn't work but it is very difficult to prove it. A poll six weeks ago showed that most Palestinians, about 75 percent, believe that the intifada succeeded. They believe that we understand only the language of force. Most Israelis believe that we won because Palestinians understand only the language of force.”

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, force is credited for everything. When the Palestinians said they were willing to recognize the right of Israel to exist, many Israelis assumed they had been forced into the concession by the presence of Jewish settlements.
When the Israelis removed Jewish settlements from Gaza, many Palestinians said that it was because of the intifada, the Palestinian campaign of confronting Israeli forces with rock-throwing youths, and the suicide bombers. Some pacifists like to point to the intifada as an example of nonviolence working. This is problematic for two reasons, the first being that rock-throwing is not nonviolence, it is simply low-technology. The other is that the Israelis over the years have not become a kinder, more understanding people but a more embittered, hard-line, and militaristic one. Being attacked has done nothing to improve them. Once more the ideals of a religion have been tossed away for the demands of a state. A good number of the leading figures in Israeli politics during the country's second twenty-five years would have been deemed completely unacceptable right-wing militarists during the country's first twenty-five years. Israeli and Palestinian leadership has become like an old marriage where both parties are starting to look like each other.

The state of Israel, the “Constantine” of Judaism, shoves aside traditional Jewish values for traditional statist values, while the Palestinian leadership perverts the meaning of Islam, the concept of
jihad,
and, most especially, the concept of martyrdom. Mohammed had detailed specific criteria for martyrdom, the true
jihad
that was a gateway to heaven. He preached that those who enriched themselves or pleased their vanity would not be recognized by God. And suicide was simply cheating, trying to fake your way into heaven.

There are Islamic specialists who have spoken out against these abuses. And people like Ami Ayalon, both Israelis and Palestinians, have become frustrated with political leadership. Ayalon believes that most Israelis and Palestinians are ready to make the necessary concessions for peace and that political leadership is the only obstacle. This is one of several Israeli-Palestinian peace movements that are much talked about but are still far from gaining prominence in the Middle East.

It is difficult to look at the Middle East and believe that the world is making much progress. It was hard to listen to the violent Palestinian group Hamas, or to the violent Islamist group Al-Qaeda,
which spoke the doctrine of the thirteenth-century Ibn Taymiyah, or to George W. Bush, who spoke of a crusade and a permanent “war against terrorism,” steeped in the rhetoric and logic of Urban II, and believe that the world has made much progress since the eleventh century. As the Polish poet Czes/law Mi/losz pointed out, “The terrorism of revolutionaries and the terrorism of the state seem to be two faces of the same coin.” Both sides claim that God is on their side, but the god cited is a god of killing not found in the religions of either side. “The issue,” said Kenneth Kuanda, “is not whether God is on our side, but if we are on God's side.” Still, in light of modern history, it is getting ever more difficult to argue that nonviolence cannot work.

In October 2002, by a vote of 77 to 23 in the Senate and 296 to 133 in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Congress voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to attack Iraq because it was building “weapons of mass destruction.” It is a peculiarly accepted notion that the United States, the only country ruthless enough ever to have used atomic weapons—and used them against a civilian population—should be trusted with a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction. But worse, the claim of Iraqi weapons was a blatant lie contradicted by the United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, among many other reliable sources. But that isn't to say that the world isn't making progress. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went to Congress with another blatant lie—what war doesn't have its founding lies?—about an alleged attack by the North Vietnamese, and Congress gave him the authority to attack Vietnam, the House voting unanimously in favor and the Senate concurring with only two dissenting votes.

Every war produces a fresh crop of peace activists with a desire to change the world and a fresh determination to do it without violence. And for them every new war is a setback. But the advocates of peace and nonviolence come back stronger and more numerous each time. Given this formula, with enough wars the world may yet find peace. But that seems a long way off. John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century British philosopher, wrote in his 1859 masterpiece
On Liberty:
“But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs against persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.” But Mill added, “the real advantage which truth has” is that successive generations keep re-discovering it, until “from favorable circumstance it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.”

The great success of the anti–Vietnam War movement was its ability to get the Vietnam War officially recognized as an unpopular war. The War of 1812 and World War I were probably equally unpopular, but this was covered up once those wars ended. One result of Vietnam's status as an unpopular war was that its veterans were not forced to play heroes. They were, in fact, largely ignored. Psychiatrists believe that the worst thing for a combat veteran is for him not to be allowed to talk about what is bothering him. The hero's welcome of 1945 and the silence of 1973 both had that effect. But because the Vietnam veteran was not celebrated, he had nothing to hide. The hero of World War II was not permitted to acknowledge guilt and shame and cold sweats as he reenacted combat in his mind every night. The Vietnam veteran could be open about it. And because of this the trauma of Vietnam veterans has informed the Korean War and World War II veterans and also helped Gulf War and Iraq War veterans. What became widely publicized as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, it was discovered, is not unique to Vietnam veterans. A Boston psychiatrist specializing in PTSD in Vietnam veterans, Jonathan Shay, wrote a book titled
Achilles in Vietnam
in which he observes that most of the issues he treated in his patients were mentioned by Homer in the
Iliad.
Shay wrote of the Greek concept of
thémis
—“what's right.” He noted, “The specific content of the Homeric warriors'
thémis
was often quite different from that of American soldiers in Vietnam, but what has not changed in three millennia are violent rage and social withdrawal when deep assumptions of ‘what's right' are violated.”