Nonviolence (24 page)
Authors: Mark Kurlansky
The miracle is that despite films, books, television, toys, plaques on buildings and monuments in parks, lessons in school, and the
encouragement of parents, most human beings enter the military with a strong disposition against killing. It turns out that we are not built for killing other people. The purpose of basic training is to brainwash out this inhibition and turn the recruit into an efficient killer.
Military training teaches survival, it teaches loyalty to the group—“your buddies.” Sometimes training techniques become bizarre. Ken Hruby, a retired colonel who served in both Korea and Vietnam, said that when he was a West Point cadet, he and his classmates were given ballroom dancing instruction with attractive young women brought up from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in New York City. Often after the dance class the cadets would be ordered into fatigues and sent out for bayonet drill. He observed that dance and bayoneting used “the same circular choreographic notation,” that the steps to a waltz and “the vertical butt stroke series” were remarkably similar.
The training usually works well enough so that the soldier does what he has to do to survive, though he not infrequently, if unobserved, will fail to kill.
In 1947 Samuel Marshall, popularly known as “Slam,” upset the entire U.S. military establishment with a small book titled
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command on Future War.
Marshall served as the chief U.S. Army combat historian during both World War II and the Korean War. In his 1947 book, he claimed that at best one in four U.S. combat soldiers in World War II ever fired their weapon and in most combat units only 15 percent of the available fire power was used. Basic training had failed to turn most recruits into killers.
In 1946, after the end of World War II, calling for an end to war, Albert Einstein said, “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.” Victor Hugo's dream of a United States of Europe is now unfolding and Europe for the first time in history is the most antiwar of continents. But it still remains to be seen if the new Europe will be a force for peace, the new kind of entity that Hugo wrote of, or merely the emergence of another superpower playing the power politics that lead to war. The appearance
of a European flag and a European national anthem, and discussions on European armed forces, all the trappings of the old warring nation-state, are among the more troubling signs.
There have been few wars in history that have had as many opponents as the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. That opposition rose up far more quickly than the opposition to the Vietnam War had. And it is getting more difficult to find people to fight wars. Most of those who join the military do so in search of economic opportunities and hope that they never have to go to war. Every time a voice is heard of the privileged, a politician, a business leader, Major League Baseball, Hollywood, one of the millionaires who present television news, saluting “the courage of our fighting men and women,” who they claim—often against all logic—are “defending our freedom,” listen closely and you will hear a familiar strain from that old-time tune pointed out by Petr ChelCicky in the fifteenth-century Czech lands: the rich bamboozling the poor.
One of the few lessons the U.S. government seems to have retained from the Vietnam experience is to avoid a military draft and keep college campuses quiet. The U.S. all-volunteer army is nothing more than a draft of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the unemployed. Recruiters are unscrupulous in avoiding the subject of war, instead promising education and job training. In November 2002, Clifford Cornell of Arkansas, three years out of high school and jobless, walked into an army recruitment office in a shopping mall. Interviewed in Toronto in 2005, he said, “I didn't know anything about Afghanistan or the possibility of going to Iraq. I guess that's what I get for not following the news.”
The army recruiter had promised that he would never be sent overseas. “His job is to lie,” said Cornell. “I have learned through two years in the military that most of what they tell you is a lie. They have to lie to get people to sign up…. All I heard is ‘If you sign up for this you get a $9,000 bonus.’”
In the summer of 2004, when Cornell learned he was being shipped out to Iraq, he went to his sergeant and said, “I'm not supposed to be shipped overseas. The recruiter said so.” The sergeant just laughed. To Cornell the problem was clear. As he put it, “One:
I don't believe in war. Two: I don't agree with thousands of innocent people being killed.” He drove to Toronto and deserted. “It was not an easy choice,” he said. “You are trained in the military to have loyalty to your buddies.”
Jeremy Hinzman, a volunteer from Rapid City, South Dakota, enjoyed the military. “I loved every part of it,” he said. “Except the big picture. I mean, shooting a $5,000 rocket that can only be fired once—it doesn't get any better than that.” When he applied for conscientious-objector status, he was asked if he would defend his family against a violent intruder. He said that he would, and his application was denied.
“I would like to get to a state where I could say no to this, too,” said Hinzman. “But isn't saying no to war of value in itself ? Do you have to be a perfect human being to reject war?” After a tour of duty in Afghanistan and shortly before being sent to Iraq, Hinzman deserted and moved with his Vietnamese-American wife to Toronto. He said, “If you are shot in the head you don't know the difference, but if you kill a bunch of people, you have to live with it. When you put someone in your sights and pull the trigger, you cross a line.” He wondered why there was not wholesale desertion. “Am I in a paradigm that is only mine?”
The early-twentieth-century French novelist Anatole France wrote: “War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.” And as William Penn said in the seventeenth century, “Somebody must begin it.”
One of the greatest lessons of history is that somebody already has.
There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
A rebel can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
All debate momentarily ends with an “enforced silence” once the first shots are fired.
A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
People motivated by fear do not act well.
While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
Once you start the business of killing, you just get “deeper and deeper,” without limits.
Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation—which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
The miracle is that despite all of society's promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.
Acknowledgments
I have to thank those who said no, and those whose brave examples taught me about nonviolence when I was young and most needed the guidance; most particularly Dave Dellinger and the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the “Mobe,” which first gave me and so many other people a voice. Also thanks to Mark Rudd; to Matt Meyer; to Ralph Digia, who has been an example to people for almost a century; to Alastair Upton, for his help in the archives of Charleston in Sussex, England; and to Tom Hayden, who took the time to disagree with me.
Thanks to my editor, Nancy Miller, for her careful, thoughtful work, and my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, for her constant support. Thanks to Susan Birnbaum for a thousand things I could not have gotten done without her help. Most especially thanks to Marian for standing, even on occasion marching, with me, and for helping to teach our child what a bumper sticker should say: NO FIGHTING!
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