We had the opportunity to talk with Syrian nonviolence activist Bsher Said this weekend during his visit to the Bay Area and the Metta Center for Nonviolence. In the following short interview, Bsher describes principles of nonviolence and the status of the nonviolence movement in Syria.
Listen here
Believing as we do that life is an interconnected whole, and that there is an inescapable harmony between means and ends, and convinced by the proven effectiveness of nonviolent struggles in a just cause, we take the following pledge.
As preparation for a long-term struggle in this spirit, we will prepare ourselves by learning everything we can about the history, theory, and future promise of nonviolence. At the same time, we will eliminate or at least minimize our exposure to the commercial mass media, with their dehumanizing message of violence and consumerism.
Coming as it did in time for International Women’s Day, the decision of legislators in Virginia, to require women seeking an abortion to undergo a vaginal probe and see ultrasound images of their unborn infants has aroused considerable outrage. And controversy. 
Some (mostly Democrats) see it as an invasion of women’s privacy, if not technically a kind of rape, while others (mostly Republicans) say, with the conservative Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, “This law is a victory for women and their unborn children. We thank Gov. McDonnell and Virginia’s pro-life legislators for their work to ensure that women have all the facts and will no longer be kept in the dark about their pregnancies.”
I have a modest proposal that would resolve the issue. In Virginia, Texas, and the six other states that now mandate this procedure, let Army and other military recruiters be veterans who have lost an arm or a leg or been otherwise traumatized in combat. Let every recruiting station show continuous images of innocent noncombatants who died, including under attacks by American drones. Let the recruiting centers display that Russian proverb, “Every bullet finds its target in a mother’s heart.” And above all, let each prospective recruit and his or her mother be advised that he or she is not at all unlikely to commit suicide after undergoing the dehumanization of basic training (“basic” to all violent systems) and coming to realize the horrible hypocrisy of what they have been brought to do by a heartless state.
And especially in Texas, the execution capital of the country, let every warden who’s about to order the execution of a death-row inmate talk the matter over with the inmate’s mother. Let the executioners themselves listen to the heartbeat of the prisoner and hear his (or her) own story of how they were led by a violence-prone society, with its mass-media culture, to commit the crime.
If truth is the first victim in times of war and violence, women are a close second. In the war epics of ancient Greece there is a repeated formula that I will crudely but not inaccurately translate, “I’m in charge here, because I’m the one who controls the women.” It is not possible to have a violent society in which women are treated with respect. Often the very act of war is construed as rape. On the side of British jets gearing up to bomb Iraq the men painted a reclining woman labeled “Iraq” or “Saddam” about to use a bomb as a sexual object. The f-word became the standard American verb for ‘hurt’ or ‘kill’ in Army parlance.
The victimization of women in war, and the dehumanization of women as the mental preparation for war, are an unfortunate, unavoidable extension of our violent culture by other means. For all these reasons, the pious reverence for (unborn) life that wells up in conservative hearts has to be set down to thinly disguised hypocrisy.
At the same time, life is sacred, and let’s face it: abortion can be traumatic; it can break the most deeply-held bond of human connectedness, the bond between mother and child. We should encourage conservatives to shed their hypocrisy, not their sensitivity — that, on the contrary, they should expand. And we should insist that if they oppose abortion — and condemn it for the sexual license it enables, as the hateful remarks of Rush Limbaugh make clear that they do, let them join us in doing something to curtail unwanted pregnancies in the first place. Let them raise their voices against the use of sexual arousal to sell everything from cars to toothpaste; yes, even if it means the end of advertising as we know it. (Near the news of the Virginia Governor’s decision that I read this morning was an ad, “Sexy cars at the Geneva Motor Show”). Morality is too important to be left to the politicians.
Description:
As violence marches across our societies and the planet, we need to develop every possible means of reducing and interrupting its vicious cycles. This unique fellowship position will examine reconciliation processes through contact with key individuals and organizations, analyze their success rates for healing personal and societal violence, and make recommendations for implementing projects for reconciliation in an effort to reach key demographics who might benefit from these processes, such as returning veterans, individuals with a background of abuse, and other communities identified through the research.
NB: Applicants for the Atonement fellowship should first familiarize themselves with the book Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections in Atonement (Jossey Bass). (You can obtain a copy through the Metta Center or at your local bookstore).
Dates: Mid-June until Mid-August, 2012
Location: The Metta Center for Nonviolence, Petaluma, CA.
Logistics: Fellows will intern 3 days a week with the Metta Center and spend the rest of the week in research. Fellows will have access to library facilities at UC Berkeley.
Award: Fellows will receive housing in Petaluma as well as a stipend for completed research of $2,000.00.
Please submit a one page letter of interest, a CV highlighting relevant training and experience with the subject area, and two recommendations by March 25. Successful applicants will be invited to an interview.
For more information about our summer fellowship, please visit: www.mettacenter.org/mc/projects/fellowship
Please send enquiries to Stephanie Van Hook, Executive Director, at fellowship@mettacenter.org.
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, he spoke passionately in a sermon at Riverside Church in New York about the war in Vietnam. In this gripping speech about the hypocrisy of bringing democracy through napalm and the audacity of fostering a brotherhood through war and killing, he made a daring confession: “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today —my own government.”
The most significant social movement in the US in the coming months will be the Occupy movement, as it returns in some numbers to the street. As the Occupy movement grows more polarized between strategies in light of its upcoming spring activities, it might do well to reflect on the logic of Dr. King’s brave statement. Contrary to what Peter Gelderloos and others have claimed, it is violence and the stasis of a dysfunctional system of oppression that protects the state, not nonviolence. How does violence protect the state? Do a few general internet searches on the Occupy movement in images to see how that movement is visually narrated (not to mention how it feels to see the portrayed reduction of a promising national movement into a series of police confrontations).
Examining these images with some detachment, we might wonder how this civil war with police began. This examination might also give us some clues about the general population’s confusion about “what Occupy wants,” and the US citizenry’s preference for political candidates who do not create violence on the streets—even if those elected officials ultimately maintain systems of greater violence within our society and between it and other nations. If the choice is between unruly demonstrations and elections, Occupy risks becoming a reason to turn to politics as usual.
Paradoxically, while the public will be fascinated by police/Occupy confrontations, and while the media will mock activists’ lack of moral character and strength for accepting violence as an effective strategy, it will only make the way safer and clearer for greater state violence to be perpetrated in the name of national security. Who knows, we may be pulled into a new war with Iran in the coming year —what better way to stifle a movement: delegitimize it (through violence), and then unite us against a common enemy!
Violence in opposition to the State relieves the State and the citizenry of any guilt for a brutal response to all protesters—and it refocuses from the nominal issue to the issue of violence by protesters. Thus any violence by protesters serves the state well (just ask anyone employed by the government who has hired an agent provocateur). It is a weapon of mass distraction. Stop worrying about the uptick in home foreclosures, the dead being shipped back from Afghanistan, and the new increases in the Pentagon’s proposed budget—look at the violent window-breakers from Occupy who threaten us all!
Just a few weeks ago, I was in dialogue with an official from the Pentagon’s weapons acquisitions team. In his final assessment (the conversation was about the present year’s National Defense Authorization Act and our Metta Center advocacy of alternatives to killing), our organization’s proposal of a nonviolent policy—a new U.S. policy of deep reconciliation to combat terrorism— “creates guilt, which is not good.” In other words, by repressing guilt, we can continue killing people.
Keep in mind that soldiers are committing suicide in higher numbers than ever before, and therefore we should pay attention to what this guilt is telling us. This mindset of denial echoed by the Pentagon official, integral to waging war, is rooted in a belief about ourselves as separate from one another—in other words, that we should be able to kill one another without remorse, which is the supreme superstition of a violent system. On the level of the Occupy movement, we might formulate it as a principle: activists cannot harm the actors of the State without harming our movement. The more we fight against the police, the more we are allowing ourselves to be seen as accepting violent tactics, the stronger we make the system we want to change, the deeper that system digs in its heels. The more we entertain the use of violence, or even create occasions where it can break out, the more violence is justified. Why? Because as Max Weber’s definition of the State suggests, it “upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” Violence is the modus operandi of the State. To build a free society, we will have to use different means.
Nonviolence is not just protest, it is not simply occupying space and it is not just about adversarial confrontations; it’s about our humanity. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan brilliantly document the power of civil resistance when it uses nonviolence as its means to replace leaders. We should read their work and others, but we should not be afraid of going deeper either; more than changing a certain regime at this time, we need to transform a culture.
This change requires us to adopt a principle about human beings and human dignity: we will not use violence against others because we want to create a vibrant culture, a merciful culture, a generous culture because we as human beings have the potential to nurture these qualities within ourselves and each other. We will not degrade human dignity because it is not worthy of ourselves as people; let this be the motivation for our long-term struggle. The power of the violent State system would stand much less chance against a movement committed to this nonviolent, compassionate spirit of unity.
WESTERN CIVILIZATION could be considered a grand experiment, culminating in the three-plus centuries of the industrial revolution, to see if the universe could be accounted for without resorting to the concept of a Supreme Being or an overall purpose. The experiment was a huge success. It proved without a doubt that the universe can not be accounted for without introducing the concept of purpose; life could not have come about by chance — as Ervin Lazlo puts it, “pure chance…does not appear to be a significant factor in the evolution of life;” the human being cannot be described as a separate, finite, physical fragment doomed to compete for diminishing resources, but a (potentially) conscious actor in the fulfillment of the design that biologist Sally Goerner alludes to above.
If the physical universe were not governed by laws, science would not be possible; in the same way, if there were not laws governing the spiritual universe within human nature (and all nature), great mystics like Jesus, the Buddha, and in our own age Mahatma Gandhi would not have been able to make their tremendous discoveries or, if they did, to communicate them to the rest of humanity.
The existence of these spiritual laws is what enabled Gandhi to say, in 1909 when his movement was at a low ebb and his opponents determined to not yield one inch to his demands, “I was perfectly indifferent to the numerical superiority of my opponents.” Because, while numbers were on the opponents’ side — along with weapons, money, and the other accouterments of force — every spiritual law was against them; primarily the overriding law of unity to which all sages and most of modern science attest, which is the mother of all spiritual laws and which we can never break, though we stubbornly work at breaking ourselves against it.
This is why soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are killing themselves in record numbers — or living lives of hell when they return. And why a U.S. Marine who handed out food and blankets to tsunami victims in 2004 said, “I have been serving my country for 34 years and this is the first day I’ve gotten any fulfillment out of it.” One simple way of describing a future we all want might be, a future where we can get 34 years of fulfillment from our work for maybe a day or two of waste!
Thanks to the universality of these laws any one of us can master the “science” of Satyagraha, as Gandhi did, and be able to redress the evils of our time without perpetuating them. The science of Satyagraha is harder to master than math or physics, because the latter are objective — and because they are still, at present, so entrenched in our media, our education — our entire culture. Even some scientists, who should know better, go on describing reality as the motion of material particles a hundred years after the very existence of separate, material particles fled like shadows in the glare of quantum theory. Such is the power of an entrenched worldview.
But if we practice Satyagraha and explain to others that it is based on principles now supported both by the best of modern science and the enduring wisdom of humanity down the ages, we are bound, in the long run, to overcome the dismal, dehumanizing worldview that is causing vast suffering in the world. We have somehow created a system that draws upon the lowest, most destructive drives of our evolutionary heritage; but we engaging the best of which we are capable. We will be holding up a much higher image of human nature and the “compassionate design” of the universe that is not only what all of us deeply want but happens to be grounded in Truth.
It follows naturally from the first principle, the “compassionate design” of the universe, that “there is enough in the world for everyone’s need” — the cornerstone of Gandhi’s economics. It follows from the second that there is no conflict that does not have a win-win solution if we can only discover it (which is usually a matter of knowing what our real needs and those of others are) — that there is no offender who cannot be redeemed, no opponent who cannot be won over.
That the universe has a meaning, that it is pervaded by spiritual forces that every one of us can use to fulfill that meaning is the Good News of the 21st Century. Nonviolence is as native to this world as violence is inevitable in the “classical” view, often called dogmatic materialism. That view is clinging stubbornly to life, even though it made us feel “like gypsies in the universe,” as one scientist put it, where the most important things about us — our ability to feel, to love — were explained away rather than celebrated. It is high time to lay it to rest and we have every resource now at our disposal to manifest the brighter alternative.
By Stephanie Van Hook (distributed by Peace Voice 1.1.12)
Starting a revolution is like lighting a match; it risks becoming extinguished as quickly as it was lit. Sustaining a revolution, however, is like starting a fire, and ensuring that it has the fuel to burn as long as necessary. As an agent of change, I need that fire for as long as it takes for results to emerge, otherwise, I risk burn-out. How can we tell if our flame will prevail? We can know by checking our hearts: either we are burning with hatred and blame or with compassion and love.
Those who profess a commitment to what is called strategic nonviolence know how to start a revolution, that is, in the same way that one would have to fight if one is the weaker party: you do what you your opponent is trying to prevent you from doing, you cast all or most of the blame on them, and you draw upon the sympathies of the masses—the “reference public”– to express your power. In this approach it’s acceptable to use threat, humiliation, and coercion to get what you want, and you often accept short-term and short-lived “success” as your goal. Nonviolence in this approach is simply refraining from physical violence while one’s inner frustrations and pains continue to grow, or are left wholly unresolved. After lighting the match of revolution, a person using nonviolence by this definition can walk away from the responsibility to carrying it forward for the long run. So a people left their guns at home this round? Where will it get them when they decide to take them back out because a limited vision of nonviolence did not bring about the deep changes needed? Look at Egypt “post-revolution,” and Libya, for case by case examples.
If I truly cared about the people I want to serve, however, I take the whole human being, their entire humanity, into account. So, while certain individuals gained fame and recognition for their contributions to starting revolutions in 2011 for example, I wonder if that recognition was not premature, if not short-sighted: we should ask ourselves, is this kind of revolution going to last? Witnessing one too many “progressives” shouting their discontent at cheering, furious crowds, we need to step back: can hatred, blame and resentment continue to inspire a long-term struggle? I, for one, have never found this approach entirely inspiring, mature, or even entirely honest.
The revolution, as we often say at the Metta Center, is not about putting a different kind of person in power; it is about awakening a different kind of power in people. The kind of satisfaction that comes from hating another human being is nothing compared to the satisfaction that comes from transforming hatred into respect and consideration of the humanity of the other. The sense of security that comes from rejoicing in the death and misery of another human being is the absolute lowest form, and it is nothing compared to the joy of rejoicing in the happiness, and sharing in the sorrow, of other people. In South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they called this ‘Ubuntu,’ the concept that I affirm my humanity by affirming the humanity of others, or it is through other people that one is a person. In other words, one of the first ways of sustaining ourselves for revolution is by an awareness that I cannot do harm to another without harming myself. Peace psychologist Rachael MacNair has coined this truth in social science as ‘perpetration induced traumatic stress,’ or PITS. Yet just as I cannot harm another without harming myself, fortunately, I cannot truly benefit another without deeply experiencing that benefit in my own life. This is the point: if we want to create a society that takes humanity into consideration, the revolution will sustain itself when we learn how to do it ourselves, within ourselves. In the words of the great Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi:
Don’t get me wrong—I am not suggesting that there is not an outward struggle to wage; there is. I am suggesting that how we wage the struggle matters, and thus how we define our nonviolence also matters. If we limit our definition to simply “not using (physical) violence,” we should be suspicious that such a reduction can lead to more violence down the road because it denies our humanity. Further, we should not feel insulted if our opponents fail to see us for something more than threatening masses who endanger their personal i.e., physical, well-being, provoking further violence and repression from them. But is this who we are? Are we out there to pick fights or to make lasting change? If we widen our view to encompass a higher image of who we are, nonviolence means channeling and transforming violent thoughts, refraining from violent insults and language, as well as not using the body as an instrument of harm but an instrument of peace. Not only do we have a strategy, but we have a higher vision of what is possible and who we are as people. That, to me, is revolutionary.
A way to begin affirming this deeper commitment is by turning our attention inward (e.g. by unplugging from the mass media, which are grabbing our attention outward). Inner awareness is a tool to understanding our thoughts and emotions. We can look at it on the personal scale as well as the collective, but let’s start with individuals. When anger, frustration and resentment arise, don’t immediately blame others or take it out on the person next to you, even if they did provoke you. Neuroscience shows that human beings will respond negatively to threats, whether real or imagined. Take a walk, get exercise and give yourself detachment from the visceral response (which studies show take about an hour to pass through before we can begin to calm down, but experience tells me that this can take days and weeks). Upon achieving detachment from the situation, if you realize that the threat is real and not imagined, make a strategy for solving the problem nonviolently and constructively. You are not repressing anger, you are simply harnessing it for its full effectiveness. Unharnessed anger is an unlocked gateway to violent behavior which never is a one time occurrence, it will happen again; when it is harnessed, you can look squarely at the problem and direct that energy directly to it and solve it permanently. As we often quote Martin Luther King referring to anger in the Civil Rights movement, “We did not cause outbursts of anger. We harnessed anger under discipline for maximum effect.” Included in this effect is a rerouting of the violent energy so it does not recur as such.
This turning inward is a turning away from our conditioned responses that we have developed over time to maintain some kind of order in our minds. It is time we moved away from cruelty and alienation, and refused to give it a place in our toolkits of revolution. We can challenge ourselves all day long, as a personal nonviolence training; every small victory in becoming kinder is fuel for the fire for the long-term struggle for freedom. It is much harder than strategic nonviolence, and realizes the true meaning of “civil” in “civil resistance.”
Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi reminds us, “Love is that fire which when kindled burns everything else away.”
After that revolution, what remains? It’s time we found out.
