“Nonviolence invites us to tear down walls…”

Tearing Down Walls and Building Bridges

By Jean-Marie Muller *

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a war pilot in May of 1940 when he wrote these lines: “The drama retreating is that it removes all meaning from one’s acts. Whoever tears down a bridge can only tear it down with disgust. This soldier is not slowing the enemy down: he is leaving a bridge in ruin. He destroys his country in order to fulfill the caricature of war!” It is always so. Always, war, whatever cause it claims to serve–and this can be just–, leaves bridges in ruin. War will forever leave houses, villages, and cities in ruin. And these ruins are the ruin of man’s humanity.

Violent means do not only pervert the most noble of causes, but it erases and substitutes that cause for itself. “It is this reversal of roles between means and ends, writes Simone Weil, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for everything foolish and bloody throughout history.” Violence is thus sought after for itself. It becomes a blind mechanism of destruction, demolition, devastation and death.

Each evening, we are tele-voyeurs who watch men play the mechanized game of war from the four corners of the earth. And one cannot but help to note that we are fascinated by these images of iron, fire, blood and death. However, in each one of these conflicts, violence is not the solution, it is the problem. The error lies in deeming that violence is human. Facing the tragedy of violence, facing its inhumanity, its absurdity, its ineffectiveness, has not the moment arrived, out of realism if not wisdom, to become aware of the need for nonviolence?

Violence can only destroy bridges and build walls. Nonviolence invites us to tear down walls and to build bridges. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to build bridges than walls. The architecture of walls demands nothing of the imagination: it has only to mind gravity. The architecture of bridges demands an infinite greater amount of intelligence: one must defeat gravity’s pull.

The most visible of walls separating men are the concrete walls that martyrize geography and divide the earth we should be sharing. As was the Berlin wall, so is the Wall of Jerusalem. For posterity’s sake, the Berlin wall was not destroyed by the massive arms of destruction from the West. Neither did it crumble by itself under its own weight. The Berlin Wall fell under the pressure of the non-violent resistance of women and men from civil societies from countries in the East who took the greatest risks in order to take back their dignity and freedom.

Yet there also exists walls in the hearts and minds of men. These are walls of ideologies, prejudices, insults, stigmatization, bitterness, resentment, fear. The most dramatic consequence of violence is that it constructs walls of hate. Only those who, on whichever side they find themselves, have the lucidity, intelligence and courage to tear down these walls and build bridges that allow individuals, communities, and people to meet one another, to know one another, to talk with and begin to understand one another, they alone keep the hope alive that gives meaning to the future of humanity.

The fatality of violence is built entirely by the hands of men. This means that men, with their own hands, can tear it down.

*Writer and Philosopher, Jean-Marie Muller is the national spokesman of “Mouvement pour une Alternative Non-violente” (MAN:www.nonviolence.fr).

translated from the French by Stephanie Nichole Van Hook