Metta’s Opinion

Gandhi’s Prayer (on Syria)

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By Stephanie Van Hook

 

“I am praying for the light that will dispel the darkness; let all those with a living faith in nonviolence join me in the prayer.” M.K. Gandhi

 

 

Gandhi was once given a seemingly impossible scenario: what would he do if a plane were flying over his ashram to bomb him? He rose to the challenge with an equally challenging answer: he would pray for the pilot. Some may take Gandhi’s response as preposterous. I argue, however, that his call to prayer was consistent with his vision of nonviolent strategy, for at least three reasons.

 

Reason 1: It meets the escalation of physical force with soul force.

Nonviolence requires strategic thinking; in other words, it requires a knowing of how to switch from one mode of operation to another in response to how the conflict is progressing. When a conflict escalates, a strategic response should also be prepared to escalate, not just with new tactics, but in the depth of the nonviolence itself. Dr. King echoes this idea in his Dream speech, that the freedom struggle would meet “physical force with soul force.”

It is important to grasp that Gandhi did not think that nonviolence was just of body alone. He called that the “nonviolence of the weak.”  In his view, it was a practice of the soul, a quality of God, that could be cultivated in thought and word as well as deed, especially because thought is so tightly woven into deed. Even the word he coined for active nonviolent resistance shed light on this principle: Satyagraha, from sat meaning truth, the good, as well as that which is; and a-graha meaning to cling to. Would he discard the principle of clinging to reality, to Truth that was to him God, at the time of his imminent death? He was certainly put to the test when assassinated by the bullets of a fanatic, he passed that test, repeating the name of God as he lay dying.

Further, we should be wary of taking Gandhi’s statement out of the context of conflict escalation. He was not asked what he might have done to resist this events leading to this moment –he responded to what he would do in an “impossible” situation, when it seems one has no nonviolent choices left.

 

Reason 2: It overcomes the tendency toward fear and flight.

Coming from the perspective that nonviolence is a quality of spirit, of the soul, we see that it is something very different from a force limited to the physical dimension alone. In a world of violence, our resources and options are limited (in the present context, “bomb or do nothing”). We have little patience to draw from and it quickly dries up; any optimistic thoughts we had are quickly replaced by pessimism and cynical thinking and we think we are obligated to follow our fight or flight reactions because, when we look around us in this limited vision, this is all we have available. When we strive to cultivate nonviolence in word, thought and deed, however, we begin to explore and benefit from our inner resources, which Gandhi would tell us are infinite.

David Dellinger recounts the story of marchers in the African American freedom struggle in the early 1960s in Birmingham. When marchers were unexpectedly confronted by a line of police officers and firemen with dogs and hoses, the activists knelt down on the ground and began praying. One protester said that the group then felt “spiritually intoxicated,” without fear. As they got up and continued to walk on, the men behind the fire hoses found themselves somehow unable to respond, despite frantic calls from the police commissioner to “turn on the hoses.”

There is always a nonviolent response in our tool-kit; it is really only a matter of whether we feel empowered to use those tools. For those who were watching those marchers, it might have looked as though they had no choice but to flee or fight back, but they knew where to go within themselves to find another way.

Gandhi’s response to the questioner, in only a few short words, gives us a window into this wellspring of potential within us. He was encouraging us to have confidence. With infinite, renewable resources at our disposal, we need not worry about running out of choices; we need only to worry about our own courage to make the right ones.  It is very subtle, but what out of context could look like passivity is actually a statement of immense inner strength and daring: a refusal to be corrupted by an impulse toward fear and hatred.

 

Reason 3: It is constructive as well as a form of resistance.

Nonviolence is a power: a form of energy that can be harnessed, redirected and transformed. At the Metta Center for Nonviolence, our definition, based on Gandhi’s experiments is that it is the conversion of a negative drive, such as anger, fear, or greed, into a positive one.  The work to channel strong energy as it moves through our words, thoughts and deeds is the practice itself, the hard, lifelong work of the nonviolent actor to perfect her skill. It goes to reinforce that nonviolence is as much an interior process as an exterior strategy and that these two aspects– outer struggle and inner work– complete each other. Gandhi’s prayer is an expression of this unity of action between the inner and the outer realms. It was a form of resistance against the corruption of his heart on one hand, and a call to those in his movement to maintain personal strength, even when all seems hopeless– because a movement convinced of its inferiority is a movement that has already lost. Prayer can empower in a way that galvanizes the spirit of a movement by building up the human being from the inside out. It is the ultimate grassroots power. It is gaining access to, as Gandhi once wrote, a force in oneself that “no power on earth can subdue.”

There is a true story that illustrates this idea. A Jewish woman during the Holocaust confides in a friend about the agony in her mind. She cannot sleep; she cannot eat; she cannot think. Her friend suggests that she should pray for Hitler. “Pray for Hitler? How could I? Why should I?” was her response. “Not that he should succeed,” the friend added: “but that God might awaken his heart.” When she saw her friend later and was asked if she tried it, she said she did, and added, “I don’t know if it did him any good; but it helped me.”

Prayer is powerful. Let no one still unconvinced say that it is only sentimental or irrelevant to movements. One of the most arresting images from the Egyptian popular uprising in Tahrir Square in in the 2011 “Arab Spring” was that of the protesters in prayer with the military. Five times a day, people united whether man or woman, military or protester. As we know, the military defected and joined the popular resistance movement; a few days later, Mubarak was on his way out. This is why we will find one of the world’s most respected nonviolent strategists Gene Sharp listing prayer and public worship in his famous list of 198 tactics of nonviolent action–plain and simple, because it works.

 

The Challenge and Promise of Prayer

Gandhi’s view of prayer, it should be noted, was actually quite specific. According to Michael Nagler, Gandhi had three conditions for prayer to be effective:

  1. One needs to be deeply concentrated.
  2. The prayer must be selfless.
  3. There must be some recognition that the power to which one prays is within, not outside, of oneself.

He thought it should be a “thing of the heart, not a thing of outward show,” nevertheless a thing that helps us to overcome our greatest fears and feelings of inadequacy. Moreover, Gandhi maintained that prayer honors our human capacity. In his words,

“A merely intellectual conception of the things of life is not enough. It is the spiritual conception that eludes the intellect, and which alone can give one satisfaction.”

As the United States prepares to harm people in Syria and exacerbate the conflict by dropping bombs on Syrian people, and as we struggle to intellectualize and rationalize our response, we need this neglected power of prayer.

How often I have wished or tried to pray so that others might change and I would not have to do anything. From the right people at the right time, that might work. But in the case of inflicting violence on others, as the U.S. is prepared to do once again, we might think differently about prayer. Gandhi felt that prayer works when asking for support in changing oneself: help me to overcome the fear of doing what is right; guide me to the path of service; help me to understand what I can do at times when I feel I am out of choices; nurture in me an ability to perceive the humanity in even the most ruthless among us; guide me to do what is right in tough situations and not lose my humanity in the process. We can pray for each other, that our prayers are heard by our inmost selves, that we are transformed from oppressor to healers; from fearful to fearless; from unimaginatively violent to creatively nonviolent.

Prayer should not lead us into passivity or complacency, but should propel us into creative action. Look up photos of Gandhi and prayer. You might find some images of him at his prayer meetings with eyes closed or hands in prayer position, but in the rest we see him hard at work, hands praying on the spinning wheel; hands praying with a pen; hands building a movement.  He actually did spinning at the prayer meetings–the inner and outer work at the heart of the resistance movement. This should be a clue to us.  Our nonviolent actions as a collective might—and should, I would argue—look different from one person to the next: we will all meet the challenge from the communities we inhabit and the skills we have cultivated; our diversity would be our strength. Nonetheless, action matters to prayer–this is the form our prayers must eventually embody if we take them seriously.

Borrowing some language from Rabbi Michael Lerner, may we cultivate  “an ethos of love, generosity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe,” as we join together to pray with our hearts as well as our words and hands in the struggle to expose and remove our complicity from the violence of empire.

 

Three Short Videos about Nonviolence

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These videos were created as a supplement for trainings in nonviolence, with an emphasis on the formation of peace teams and unarmed civilian intervention work.  These videos were originally prepared for UNITAR and the Nonviolent Peaceforce.

If you would like to translate these videos to help share them with a wider audience. Please contact the Metta Center.

Video 1: The basics of Nonviolence

(Transcript here)

Video 2: Degrees of Nonviolence

(Transcript Here) 

 

Video 3: Peace Teams

(Transcript Here)

What would it take to start a Peace Army?

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Reverend Barber of the NC NAACP calls those joining the mass protests of Moral Mondays at the NC state capitol, “a nonviolent volunteer army of love.”

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The Freedom Rides of 1961 saw some of the most iconic moments of the United States’ Civil Rights movement. Courageous, idealistic young people boarded busses to the segregated South to stand up for their ideals of freedom, equality and justice. Like our most fearless armed servicemen/women, they knew that they were risking their lives for their beliefs. What made them different, however, was that they were unarmed and trained in nonviolence.  Referring to his participation in the rides, Georgia Congressperson John Lewis said, “I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army.” Myriad images, questions and ideas capture our imagination: what would a nonviolent army do? How would it be organized? Would it ever be practical? What would it take to build one?

Nonviolent Army: to many, this would seem like an unnatural contradiction.  Armies are by definition violent; nonviolence is too passive and weak to be of any use in societal defense. But those are two great misconceptions. Soldiers are onlyconditioned to use violence and threat power as a form of defense (that’s “basic training”), and nonviolence does not mean passivity; it means active, creative courage that goes beyond refraining from consciously harming others toward building a community where everyone belongs–where no one is “other.” If the millions of men and women in our militaries can be conditioned and prepared to kill in the name of “national security,” with the same amount of discipline, training and skills learning could they not become just as skilled in nonviolence? Both take courage and a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others. Both require training. And more and more research is showing that nonviolence is more effective as a defense, not to mention there are no suicides due to training or practice of nonviolence!

A Peace Army would also require physical training.

The stumbling block to a transitioning to nonviolent defense is likely not the lack of servicemen/women’s openness to the idea. I am convinced that there are many acts of nonviolence taking place within the military that we never hear about, excepting of course cases of conscientious objection or whistleblowing. Instead, it is likely a question of vested interests–of profit. There is too much money to be made in selling weapons and exporting war. But if we can’t reform the military itself, it does not mean that there’s no other way. Remember, nonviolence means creativity; it means resistance as much as it means constructive action, building what we want while resisting what is no longer serving our highest interests. With reform largely, but not entirely out of the question, a nonviolent army would come about as a grassroots parallel institution: a creative alternative to an institution that’s becoming increasingly dysfunctional—there are the suicides, the resource consumption, the pollution, the insane expense, and most high-ranking military officials agree that with our violence-based approach “we’re making terrorists faster than we can kill them.”

The world has yet to see a parallel institution of the magnitude it would require to challenge the monopoly the military seems to hold over the idea of national security in the 21st century; but smaller versions are already in existence. Take an example of the Michigan based Meta-Peace Team (MPT, formerly Michigan Peace Team). They do unarmed civilian peacekeeping in areas around the world along with their highly successful domestic projects. MPTers Mary Hanna and Sheri Wander were working at the annual Pride Day parade in Lansing. The police were of course on hand to step in if any violence erupts (as it frequently did), but with MPT showing up for several years at the event, the police began to understand and much appreciate their effectiveness; when a new officer began to head toward an altercation, a more experienced officer told him, “That’s all right, let the Peace Team handle it.”  This small example shows what could happen at a much larger scale if a Peace Army were organized to parallel the military.  What a day it would be when an army commander might stand back, with dignity, and say,  “Let’s see the Peace Army handle it.”

Elliott Adams, former President of Veterans for Peace, trains with Meta Peace Team.

Seem far-fetched?  The Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), an international body who has been sending unarmed peacekeepers into tense and unstable situations, including severe examples of interethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and South Sudan. Tiffany Easthom, Canadian country director of NP’s South Sudan project, mentioned that at times of high violence alert, when all other aid communities had to leave, NP was one of the only organizations that remained. How did they do it? They listened to local people. What did they do? They helped to organize communities around the country to provide their own strategies for nonviolent defense. This is to reinforce what Gandhi once said about nonviolence: that it works in every area of life. It is not enough to use nonviolence only in our communication or only in our personal relationships. If it works there, it can be built upon to work in any area, including domestic and international defense. And if it is good enough to work elsewhere, it can work here, too.

Martin Luther King said that in the early Civil Rights Movement, they “roused anger under discipline for maximum effect.” Today there are various movements around the world with thousands – maybe millions — of people working, largely in isolation, with just this kind of energy. What if we joined together to build this Peace Army?  This is a revolution in values that has room for, and needs participation from, everyone.

Since a Peace Army requires cultural as well as physical and technical training, let the first step be a greater understanding of nonviolence. Commit to a disciplined, deepened and systematic study of this power for one year, including attending a nonviolence training, either online or in your community. You might also “draft” a friend or family member into the Peace Army to join you in your study. The Metta Center for Nonviolence can offer resources and support. Let’s make this more than just a good idea—let’s make it real.

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Stephanie Van Hook writes for PeaceVoice and is the Executive Director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence (www.mettacenter.org). She also serves as Director of Conflict Resolution Services in the Green Shadow Cabinet. Contact her atStephanie@mettacenter.org.

 

Trayvon Martin: The Neglected Story that Implicates Us All

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After World War II, US Navy personnel carried out an experiment in germ warfare. They spent several days spraying lethal bacteria into the fog around San Francisco Bay. The “experiment” killed at least one person, whose grandchildren sued the government years later when the facts became public under the Freedom of Information Act. Norman Cousins was at that time the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. His liberal credentials were unimpeachable. It was the more arresting when he argued, then, that while the “experiment” was deplorable and deserving of legal action and while the indignation of the victim’s relatives – and of the general public – was understandable, there was in that indignation, he was afraid to say, an element of hypocrisy.

It was not the first time that point had been made. In the film The Battle of Algiers – which dealt with the indignation of the French public on discovering that the forces they had dispatched to Algiers to crush the popular uprising of 1957 were practicing torture (is this beginning to sound familiar?) – when Gen. Massu is confronted with this outrage at a news conference, he said, “Look, you have sent me here to do this job, and vous en devez accepter toutes les conséquences (you have to accept all the consequences).”

People join hands during a rally for Trayvon Martin near Police Plaza in New York, July 20, 2013. (Photo: Chang W. Lee / The New York Times)

People join hands during a rally for Trayvon Martin near Police Plaza in New York, July 20, 2013. (Photo: Chang W. Lee / The New York Times)

This is exactly the point I have to raise about the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin on the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. Please don’t misunderstand: I am not saying that racism is not, still, a scourge we must cleanse. I am not saying that elite privilege (the killing took place in a gated community) should not be confronted. I am not saying that the “stand your ground” law that allows persons to use lethal force to defend their home or a person has not become a license to kill that should be reconsidered. I am saying that to isolate one person or one law is to mislead ourselves and distract us from taking note of a much deeper lesson that we cannot avoid if we want to live in peace and security.

The lesson is that we cannot go on relying on violence to defend us from violence. There is no such thing as a clean, sanitized military that can take over the job of protecting us. People have to protect themselves with the robustness of their institutions and integrity of their values. And there is no such thing as a “civil” violence that can shield us from criminal depredations. George Zimmerman was the neighborhood watch coordinator for his community. That kind of institution might be an answer to the increasing militarization of our police forces. Or it might be a regression to vigilantism, which makes violence much worse. In either case, it’s no solution. There is no way out until we face the fact that we have a violent culture. The hope that we can contain violence and expect it to be released only in ways we approve of is vain; to cling to it in the face of mounting contrary evidence is hypocritical.

The real solution – and I’m fully aware that this is a tall order and far from easy to implement – is to address the causes of the high levels of crime in all our communities, some more than others. And address them with means that do not replicate the problem. What would a nonviolent solution look like? I see it rolling out in several dimensions:

  • Curtailment of violence in the mass media, first of all by people simply turning it off, rather than restrictive legislation.
  • Similar curtailment of the playing up of greed as a way to happiness.
  • Replacement of the present retributive system with “restorative justice” for dealing with the offenses that still occur.
  • Implementation of nonviolent approaches to international conflicts.

Perhaps you’re saying it would take a different kind of human being than we think we are to do things like this. But the fact is, we are a different kind of human being than we think we are. The very misconception of ourselves as separate, helpless, responding only to force is the worst aspect of the prevailing culture. Everything science is telling us (and wisdom traditions have always told us) shows that we are far more interconnected than we realize – and far less helpless. Changes like this are doable. If we get inspired to do them, we would be able to say with honesty that the tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death was not entirely in vain. How do you see yourself fitting in?

 

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

 

You may also like “Stand your ground” by Stephanie Van Hook

 

 

Stand your ground

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by  STEPHANIE VAN HOOK

 

Poet Maya Angelou once said that courage is “the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” It takes courage to “stand your ground” and I am not talking about the law in Florida (or others like it around the country) which cruelly allows a person to commit murder without meaningful legal accountability. Standing your real ground is a powerful act; we can find that ground by refusing to be guided by our fear and refusing to lose sight of the other’s humanity.

One of the main misconceptions that surround laws like Stand Your Ground is that somehow violence is an adequate, effective response to a threat; that violence is the only form of power that the individual can exercise. However, peace researcher and economist Kenneth Boulding believed that power had more than one face. He acknowledges that there is ‘threat power’, the kind of power released in when one party says to the other, “do what I want or else.” He also notes that there is ‘exchange power’ where one party will say to the other, “you give me what I want and I’ll give you what you want.” The third face of power is ‘integrative power,’ the kind of power released in a nonviolent interaction. In this dialogue a person will say, “I will not shrink out of fear from you, but I will not harm you, either, and this will bring us closer together.” When we draw upon integrative power, we offer our authenticity, our supposed vulnerability of not striking back, and we hold ourselves up in dignity in the face of a threat, injury or insult. This actually has transformative results.

Fear is often a product of our imaginations, while case studies of nonviolence show us, time and again, the power of nonviolence is quite real, even if we are conditioned by the mass-media not to believe it. I am thinking of David Hartsough. During the Civil Rights Movement he participated in a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia. He had been sitting for a while, quietly praying, when a segregationist walked up to him, placed a knife at his throat and threatened to harm him if he did not leave. David stood his ground, however, and said, “You do what you feel you have to, brother, and I will try to love you anyway.” The man’s hand began to visibly shake; he dropped the knife and walked out of the restaurant with his eyes tearing up. David did not submit to a threat and he was not moved to respond to his fear in an irrational manner. Yes, it was dangerous; yes it was a risk, but imagine what might have transpired if David chose to respond with violence.

Another, more recent example of a nonviolent response to a threat happened in a Walmart parking lot in Tennessee. 92 years old at the time, Pauline Jacobi put her groceries in her car and was ready to leave the premises when a man opened up her passenger-side door, entered the car and pointed a gun at her. He demanded that she give him her money or he would shoot her. She refused outright. She instead told him that she was not afraid of death because she “would go straight to heaven.” Pauline then calmly spoke to him for 10 minutes about what she cared about the most before the man broke down in tears and said he wanted to change his life. Before getting out of the car, he was startled when she voluntarily gave him all the money she had–10 dollars. Pauline refused to be coerced by a severe threat and clung to her innate sense of dignity, power and yes, faith. Her act not only saved her life, it brought her closer to her would-be-attacker and transformed his life, not to mention inspiring countless others who hear her story, perhaps even to act with similar courage in the face of such contingencies.

Let’s not forget to mention the extraordinary–though still not isolated– case of 16 year old Malala Yousafzai who was shot in the head by gun-carrying extremists in Pakistan. In her recent address at the United Nations she firmly maintained that violence did not diminish her determination or scare her into passivity:

“They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they failed. And then, out of that silence came, thousands of voices. The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.  I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. My dreams are the same. (…) This is the philosophy of nonviolence (…).”

David, Pauline, Malala: three faces to innumerable daily acts of courage, faces of ordinary people like you and me. They do not possess some exceptional power that is the luck of the draw among human beings. They do not experience less fear than you and I would. No, they have every natural capacity that we have for both violence and nonviolence; for either bitterness and hatred or detachment and creative action as we do.

What their stories show us, if we are willing to hear it, is that the nonviolent response is the only solid ground we have. It creates acommon ground where we are all invited to inhabit and move beyond the shaky ground of our violent institutions, laws and systems that tend to allow, if not encourage, people to act on their fears and insecurities. Think about it–has there been a time in your life when you responded to a threat with a threat or with violent force in kind? Ask yourself:  Did it lead to the long-term results you expected? Did it make you feel safer? Did it increase your independence?  And what about the other person: Did it add to their safety and security, leading to better and more secure community? Ask yourself the same questions about a time when you or someone you know accessed the power of nonviolence.

Let our stories be heard. Security is not a zero-sum, winner-take-all, game. We cannot make others insecure in search of our own safety without consequences. When we realize that we will evolve the kinds of institutions worthy of a human being, institutions that draw upon our natural ability to convert fear into what Gandhi calls “a power that can move the world.” We are called now to stand our ground for one another in the face of “realists” who say that a less violent world is not realistic. In the words of Rabbi Michael Lerner, we have to be the new realists. Let us draw upon our courage and not be disheartened in our struggle toward beloved community.

 

This piece was syndicated by PeaceVoice.

Who was Badshah Khan?

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 Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan came to be known, over his objections, as the “Frontier Gandhi.” (Wikimedia)

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan came to be known, over his objections, as the “Frontier Gandhi.” (Wikimedia)

If you watched Malala Yousafzai’s much discussed and inspiring speech to the United Nations last week, you may have heard this courageous teenager — who was shot by the Taliban for promoting girls’ education — refer to Badshah Khan as a great inspiration for her determined commitment to nonviolence. You may have also wondered, “Who is this man?” After all, his name is not instantly recognizable like Gandhi or Mother Theresa — the other two luminaries Yousafzai cited.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, later known as Badshah, or King, was born in 1890 in the town of Utmanzai — not far from Peshawar, in what was then the Northwest Frontier Province of India. His father was a khan, or village headman, widely respected for his honesty and more grudgingly, perhaps, for his somewhat independent approach to the Islam of the Mullahs of his day — as well as his coldness toward the code of badal, or revenge, that was a prominent cultural feature among the Pashtuns.

Ghaffar Khan’s early years ran a roughly parallel course to Gandhi’s: He was passionately devoted to the uplift of his people, had a deeply spiritual bent and, at first, accepted British rule as a matter of course, but saw the light when he was deeply offended by certain insults that are the inevitable concomitant of domination. Inevitably, too, his village work, which mostly took the form of establishing schools, put him on a collision course with both the mullahs and the British authorities for similar reasons: educated people are harder to oppress. He came to realize that his educational work, like Gandhi’s constructive program, was “not just service, but rebellion” — a point that must have gone home powerfully with Malala Yousafzai.

 

The Khudai Khidmatgars or “Servants of God” were the world’s first “army of peace.” (Wikiemdia)

The Khudai Khidmatgars or “Servants of God” were the world’s first “army of peace.” (Wikimedia)

Shortly after meeting Gandhi in 1919 — to make a very long story short — Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgars or “Servants of God” to expand his revolutionary work. Their dedication to him and to nonviolence flummoxed the British, who responded in the only way they knew how at that time: with brutal repression. But Khan was not easily repressed. After perpetrating a terrible massacre in 1930 in Peshawar, the British saw the ranks of the Servants swell from several hundred to 80,000 — an improbable fact if you are not familiar with nonviolent dynamics.

The Servants and their adored leader — who had come to be known, over his objections, as the “Frontier Gandhi” — were shot, tortured, humiliated and (in his case) jailed; but not before they had played a signal role in liberating their country and helping Gandhi give “an ocular demonstration” to the world of the power of nonviolence.

Khan’s incredible life is one of the great untold stories of our time. His “ocular demonstration” went beyond Gandhi’s in evaporating five myths that are commonly held about nonviolence, even today:

  • that it is a recourse of the weak: The British never brought the Pashtuns territories under subjection in a hundred years of violence. When Khan once asked Gandhi why his Pashtuns were staying the course when many Hindus lost their nerve and fell back on violence, the Mahatma said, “We Hindus have always been nonviolent, but we haven’t always been brave.”
  • that it only works against a ‘polite’ opponent: The British were terrified of and therefore ruthless toward the Pashtuns, whom they regarded as “brutes, to be ruled brutally by brutes.” In the Northwest Frontier, as in Kenya, the empire showed its true colors.
  • that it has no place in war: 80,000 uniformed, trained and indomitable Pashtuns were the world’s first “army of peace.”
  • that it has no place in Islam: Malala, in his footsteps, pointedly referred to the tradition of peace and nonviolence that is in Islam, as in all world religions.
  • that nonviolence means protest and non-cooperation: It includes that wing, but, as with Gandhi’s constructive program, it often gains even more traction with self-reliance, constructive work and “cooperating with good,” where possible.

Yet, outside of Eknath Easwaran’s great biography, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam and a few other resources (including a documentary) there is scant material widely available on Khan and he remains little known in the West. Young Malala Yousafzai may have done the world a greater service than she realizes by honoring his name at the august body of the UN General Assembly.

 

Posted on July 18 at Waging Nonviolence

Finding security in a world of insecurity

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By Stephanie Van Hook

Americans are learning as a nation the truth about security. In the era of Julian Assanges and Edward Snowdens, we have gone through a checklist—spying does not make us secure and even fails to warn us that entire regions are imminently in revolution; foreign wars do not make us more secure but instead more hated; a war on terror does not make us secure but rather breeds even more terrorists; operating drones does not make us more secure as it spreads hot conflict across numerous borders and angers entire societies; increasing our military spending does not make us more secure as it means we have dwindling budgets left for bridges, education, protection of our food/air/soil/water and so we become more insecure.

Our retributive prison system does not make us more secure with no rehabilitation and instead gives us ranks of recidivists; our police forces do not make us more secure when entire communities are afraid to call them; electing new people to office who speak of the promise of security turns out not to make us more secure and indeed strips us of the securities guaranteed in the endangered Bill of Rights. Alas, it seems, even a Bill of Rights does not make us secure.

Shopping does not make us secure; a new line of clothing or makeup will not make us secure; controlling women’s bodies, disenfranchising people of color, creating new, violent games for our youth do not make us more secure. What will make us more secure?  We will, and it is time for a radical shift in the way we think not only about security but about who we are.

The genius of Gandhi, and the attractive force that he embodied during the Indian Freedom Struggle for people around the world was that he was a secure person. More than that, he was secure in the midst of doing everything that the dominant paradigm would say would make him insecure, and he did so in a very simple way.

When he realized that passivity was not an answer to solve the problem of foreign domination, he upheld nonviolent creative action. When he realized that untruth was the order of the day (even back then!), he upheld the principle of truth; instead of maintaining a vision of “the greatest good for the greatest number,” or a utilitarian approach to social uplift that required sacrificing some for the good of all, his motto was “the uplift of all,” sarvodaya. And he struggled to uphold these values in his personal life. This is the secret of security: like love, at its highest, it is not something that we receive; it is something that we do. And in doing security, in being secure and promoting the security of others, we find our own. It starts with the spirit, not the spy game. It takes a shift toward altruism, not a shift toward shutting down others and others and others and finally ourselves.

Of course, in times of insecurity, the secure person threatens the status quo. It is not without risk that we are called to live our truth. Gandhi was one of many who lived the consequence of speaking truth to power: like Dr. King, he was assassinated; yes, but his goal was not to save his life, rather, to use his life for a higher purpose. He wanted to use his life to challenge the underlying story of who we have come to believe we are. He knew that to do so, taking risks was a part of the package.

Security is risky, but the paradox arises from our belief that we can be secure at others’ expense, separate from them – from our belief that our physical well-being (as opposed to our meaning) is the locus of our security.

We do not necessarily have to be willing to risk our lives–what if we risked our egos, instead? What if we risked our sense of separation from one another, our institutionalized alienation? What if we took bold action for a more peaceful world, just by shifting the way we see ourselves?  Insecurity is contagious, and so is deep security. It’s risky to believe in what we cannot see with our eyes, yet this isn’t unnatural to us. We listen to fear all of the time and let it dictate our actions and the nature of our relationships to others.  Julian Assange and Edward Snowden may be afraid for their lives right now, but they are not afraid that they’ve wasted their lives.  Are they not the secure ones in that sense?

We can enlarge what they have announced with their sacrifice (and not necessarily by going that far). The Buddha once said, “of all relationships, the best is trust.” The NSA revelations have shown that we have tried to build a world of distrust in a mistaken search for security. Let’s begin by dismantling that.

How do we start? In earnest… 

By holding ourselves to a higher standard of what we can achieve with our lives: challenging ourselves to become more forgiving and willing to negotiate; more fearless and unwilling to humiliate; more generous, with all of our resources; more constructively empowered to do right by ourselves and others; more willing to learn from our mistakes without allowing ourselves to feel degraded in the process, we will slowly, steadily build a more secure world, from the inside out. We are not working in isolation—the children in our homes and neighborhoods, the inheritors of this world and our states of mind, are watching us.

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This piece was distributed by Peace Voice.

Is the Monsanto protest the next Salt March?

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By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

monsantoWhen a people is faced with a destructive system that has been insidiously putting its tendrils down in many sectors of society, steadily taking over its institutions, it can seem all but impossible to dislodge that evil; but it always seems that a system like that will have some vulnerability, some leverage point that an aroused people can ferret out and be rid of the evil.

The question is, has the Monsanto Corporation become that leverage point by attacking which we could be on our way to the crumbling of the entire system of militarism, racism, greed, and violence that we loathe. Could 2 million person worldwide, May 25th’s march against Monsanto be our Salt March? And our answer is, yes; if we choose to use it as such.

We are aiming high here. Monsanto is a giant corporation; it has a firm grip on many elements of our government. It has created an internal system, including the personnel it attracts and holds, of an insensitivity to life and nature that is unparalleled even in our insensitive age. That is their strength. It is also their vulnerability.

imageGandhi, with his insight and his passion, saw that with the simple mechanism of the salt tax the British Raj had a chokehold on the life of India, particularly its impoverished millions. Vandana Shiva has rightly named her movement in India against the corporate giant a “seed Satyagraha” to emphasize the parallel with Gandhi’s pivotal campaign. (“Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year” are the words of a Indian peasant prayer). In the case of Monsanto, of course, we have a subtler situation than that tackled by the Salt Satyagraha; Monsanto’s employees do not come from another country and wear a different-colored skin. Still, it is as dangerous and as offensive as the British attempt to commoditize salt to the extent that Indians were not allowed to harvest it from their own seashores.

We would like to offer some suggestions for seizing the opportunity presented by the widespread revulsion against this one corporation’s practices to not only humanize some of those practices but turn the tide of corporatization and de-democratization of which they have become an emblem.

petaluma-seed-bankHowever the present march turns out, we should consider it a step on a long journey – and plan that journey. A great deal of what Gandhi would have called “Constructive Programme” – education, community building, long-term efforts like organic and community-based farming to replace the old system (the center of our town, Petaluma, has a GMO-free seed bank that used to be an old-paradigm money bank) – and the beginnings of a robust, diverse, and smart resistance movement represented by, among other things, the present march. We need to plan how to continue the steady pulse of constructive alternatives while escalating, as needed, the resistance.

Interestingly enough, the Salt Satyagraha did not actually “succeed” in changing the salt laws, but that was all right because it was only a step in a long strategic journey. If Gandhi did not have a strategy India might still be a colony even if the Satyagraha was a success! We who are being colonized internally by Monsanto (and other corporations) need to build on the present momentum, deliberately. We’re not marching against Monsanto, really; we’re marching for the protection of life against literally poisonous commercialization. That will take time, and we need to think through that time beforehand; how will we, for example, choose whether to emphasize construction or resistance?

The destructive, cruel Monsanto practices did not put down roots overnight, and they did not spring up without steady watering. This toxicity of Roundup flourished in a toxic culture that separated us from one another and the rest of life and we must nourish a culture of deep, inclusive respect for all of us so such cruelty cannot creep through the cracks again. Strategically speaking, let’s not reinvent the wheel. Study the victories – and failures – of movements that have taken place around the world; there are groups committed to nonviolence (like Occupy DC, among many others) who are already on the move against one or another aspect of this problem with whom we can strategize and otherwise join our creative energies.

Learning from this past, and in some cases recent experiences, we should not let our events devolve into a struggle with the police and state security apparatus: they are not the enemy, and in any case we cannot overcome them on their terms. Invite a local peace team when you’re planning a public event.

Let’s not think this is going to be easy even with all of this planning; but it is going to be possible. Monsanto et al have gone too far, entrapped as they are by their own corporate logic: patenting seeds?! This is offensive at such a deep level that with some respectful, reasoned arguments and effective imagery backed by creative passion and relentless dedication that insanity can be exposed for what it is – even to many who are now drawing a salary from Monsanto.

deer!!!People will undoubtedly ask us, why are you doing this? That’s the opportunity we are waiting for. Explain that we believe life – all life – is worth more than profits; we are doing this because modern conditions have robbed us of the awareness that we are all in this together, as ML King said, in “a single garment of destiny” –we and the planet that nourished us as it can go on nourishing if not treated with such callous disregard. We will be planting seeds in the minds of such questioners far more potent than the engineered monstrosities of Monsanto.