Metta’s Opinion

Their weapon’s don’t scare us

by

Originally published on Waging Nonviolence, by  | November 1, 2011, 1:41 pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have long argued that nonviolence works best when it deals not with mere symbols but with real things that have symbolic power. Gandhi’s Salt March was an outstanding example; another is the ongoing actions of Palestinian farmers, oftentimes organized and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Project, to plant and replant olive trees that are uprooted, poisoned, and otherwise destroyed by Israeli settlers or the military.

There is something primordial, and even beautiful about a direct confrontation of something real and true — and especially a living thing — with the destructive power of human delusions. The olive tree is both a symbol and an actual source of Palestinian well-being, and hence of Palestinian hopes and dignity. To uproot them, which is contrary to Jewish law, is to enact one’s own violence in a way that even the perpetrator is forced to understand the evil that person is perpetrating.

This “forcing reason to be free,” as Gandhi called it, is an important part of nonviolent dynamics. Not long ago, a courageous woman who ran a shelter for destitute mothers with children in Delhi was told by city authorities that she would have to pay taxes that up until then had been waived. She explained that they were a shoestring operation and if the taxes were imposed at least three of her women would have to be turned out on the street. “We can’t help that,” said the men.  “All right,” she replied, but then took them through the door to the large dorm where her charges were housed, and said, “You choose which ones to turn out.” The men left and the tax waiver remained in place.

In the important film Bringing Down a Dictator that chronicles the 2000 Otpor (‘Resist!’) uprising, which in one dramatic day turned Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic out of office (after eleven weeks of NATO bombings that only consolidated his hold on power), student leader Srdja Popovic explained, “we won because we were on the side of life.”

This symbolic valence might be said to be missing from the present occupation movement. Fun, music, and face paint may say “life” to some people more than business suits and portfolios, but they don’t quite evoke the reality and urgency that enabled the oppressed Serbian population to rise up against harsh police brutality and is enabling the Palestinians and their international supporters to face even fatal resistance in Beit Omar, Surif, and other West Bank villages. Proudly declaring that “their weapons don’t scare us,” the message of the Palestinian Solidarity Project, which is coordinating not only the olive-tree planting but roadblock removal, and apartheid wall demonstrations, is quite accurate:

Peace and security are rights not just for some of us, but for all the people of the world. Controlling another person’s life, possessions, future, and thoughts is a crime and a humiliation. We have dreams and hopes of freedom, so we are inviting all the people of the world to stand with us and share in our struggle for freedom.

For any such struggle to succeed — be it that of the Palestinians or of Occupy Wall Street or even a larger movement for peace — it must be able to counter the power of the Apocalyptic myths that have driven the post-9/11 wars and brought the U.S. to a point of near ruin financially and morally. These prevailing narratives of militarism revolve around the powerful archetype of good and evil, order vs. chaos; but they can be overcome by an even more powerful myth, if you will (I taught mythology for many years at U.C. Berkeley), which is the struggle for life itself against death.

The answer is to take back not just our incomes and some civic spaces, but the “spaces” in our minds and our public discourse. In practice, this would mean making common cause with the Palestinian struggle and looking for other ways to show, patiently but insistently, that in opposing greed and militarism we are on the side of life — which would have the added advantage of being true.

 

Return to home page

A Tower Too Far?

by

By Michael Nagler

 

The other day I was chatting with a friendly checkout clerk at an upscale supermarket in Petaluma, CA.  The young woman behind me, far from getting impatient, cheerfully joined in.  This is California.  As the conversation was about little-known facts I took a chance and mentioned a little-known fact that has been much on my mind of late, the fact (yes, it is one) that on 9/11 three WTC towers were brought down by ‘controlled demolition.’ The clerk, a tall African fellow shook his head, “We don’t want to go there, when it comes to that one,” and the young woman’s good cheer froze. “I didn’t know that,” she stammered.

 

The facts made public by 1500 architects and engineers are no longer in doubt: that traces of nanothermite, the high-energy explosive used for such purposes, are evident in the dust of the site (even after much of the wreckage was hastily whisked away); the buildings fell into their own footprint in a way that would defy the laws of physics if they had fallen the way the official story has it; terrific explosions were heard and felt coming from beneath the buildings by numerous eye-witnesses (at least one of whom appears to have been murdered).  In short, the official story, that the buildings ‘pancaked’ to earth because key steel columns were softened by fire, is a lie.

 

“… by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness to them” (William James) — i.e. by calling them “conspiracy theorists.”

 

Behavioral scientists, among them Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University, have given the rather bland name of SCADs, or State Crimes Against Democracy (most of these are cries against humanity) to acts that involve high-level government officials, often in combination with private interests, who engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election and “fixed” intelligence on non-existent WMDs to justify the Iraq War.  What do many of these have in common with the battleship Maine, the Lusitania, Hitler’s staged Gleiwitz incident of August, 1939 and for that matter FDR’s pretending not to know the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor two years later — and, as is now clear, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which exhaustive studies by James Douglass show to have been orchestrated by elements in high circles of our government?  Like 9/11 itself, sometimes referred to as “the new Pearl Harbor,” they were cooked up to thwart peace initiatives or to plunge a country, notably our own, into war.

 

They have been much on my mind because of the alleged plot by “highest officials” in the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in New York City.  While it is remotely possible that what we are being told is true, this story is so unbelievable that doubts have been raised even in the mainstream media, where such doubts are usually rigorously smothered.  And this moves the issue into far more serious territory than that of academic acronyms (like SCADS) or a curious form of ‘emperor’s new clothes.’  For let’s face it: the people who assassinated President Kennedy – and his brother, and Martin Luther King, whoever they are, certainly have the power and the madness to drag us into a third, and far more devastating Middle Eastern war.

This makes it extremely urgent that we break through the psychological numbness that makes it possible for horrendous crimes to be “hidden in broad daylight” with nary a whistle of alarm.  The syndrome has to be stopped, and if those conspirators have their eyes on Iran it has to be stopped before they go any further.

 

One is tempted to cry out, Dan Ellsberg or Julian Assange, step forward and snatch the cover off these people!  But whoever they are they moved swiftly after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to close the gap that got the camel’s nose under the tent of secrecy, to neutralize, as far as one can tell (e.g. from the electoral frauds of the 1990s) the one institution that protected us from this kind of plot, namely the courts.

 

The denial factor when it comes to monstrous crimes is very powerful, and the elements within and around our government who commit them have learned to count on it very successfully.  But as the old poem has it, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again;”  there is a resiliency in the human spirit that can surely be awakened so that a public now reeling from two disastrous military adventures that have brought us to the brink of financial and moral ruin already may show the plotters they have gone too far.  There is just a chance that we can use the latest ruse (as it appears to be) to not only stop the drive to wage war on Iran but break up the regime of lies and denial that is rendering our democracy powerless.  We will have to do two things:

 

  •  Mount a “pledge of resistance” to offer serious civil disobedience in the event of any attempt to attack Iran militarily or provoke them into reckless action.  And more broadly,
  • Bring about a regime of truth to replace the myth-driven fantasies that marked the country’s reaction to 9/11 (and concealed its origin).  This change has to reach deeper than the political: it has to include the existential lies of advertising — not just the lies about individual products (“scientific tests prove…”) but the implied lie that we need these products to be fulfilled — or need them at all, in most cases.  This is a kind of psychic background that renders us vulnerable to all manner of falsehood, including the “Star Wars” interpretation of terrorist attacks, and the belief that the only way to deal with them is war.

 

As Gandhi said, and demonstrated with his life, truth and nonviolence are opposite sides of the same coin.  Just as the practices of violence have lead us deeper and deeper into the regime of untruth, the practices of nonviolence can steadily liberate us from that deadly grip.

 

Crunch Time for Occupy Wall Street

by

 

By Michael Nagler

Originally published on Waging Nonviolence, October 18, 2011

Remembering the agonies I went through when the tanks moved in on Tiananmen Square in June, 1989, I was relieved that most (I wish it were all) of the protestors who make up today’s amazing Occupy movement do not intend to occupy the symbolic spaces they are in indefinitely. This struggle is not about particular pieces of real estate but the institutions that may be associated with them—iconically, of course, Wall Street. And it would be a bad strategy—it’s always bad strategy—to hold on to symbols, especially when they make you an easy, concentrated target.

The movement has empowered youth (and others) in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in some 1,500 locations in 82 countries, creating in the process a beautiful culture of consensus decision making. But that was the easy part.

Now it is time to go from a “happening” to a movement, to not only protest against, but overturn and replace the obnoxious institutions and behaviors that have (at last) brought us together. For this, I think, three things will have to happen.
1) This has been largely a nonviolent movement; but we must realize that there’s nonviolence and nonviolence—or more conveniently put, nonviolence and non-violence, i.e. the mere absence of physical harm. The latter was well expressed by the words of a Yemeni protestor: “They cannot defeat us, because we left our guns at home.” In other words, not to irritate your oppressor is smart strategy. But the other degree of nonviolence, non-hyphenated if you will, can be heard in a ringing challenge of Gandhi’s: “It’s not nonviolence until you love your enemy.” He also characterized what he called “perfect ahimsa” (in today’s lingo, principled nonviolence) as “freedom from ill-will,” not just from weapons. In this degree of nonviolence, not to irritate your oppressor is not just strategic—useful as that may be—but a deep principle.

We need to awaken this principle if we want telling, long-lasting and deep change; and to do that the protestors will have to seperate the people from the behaviors they will no longer tolerate. Cursing “cops” as was done in Oakland  last week weakens us. Gratifying as they fall on our ears, labels like ‘bankster’ will have to come off, revealing people like us who got themselves into a fix because of the climate of alienation and greed in which we live.

As we’ve been urging at the Metta Center for some time, every individual who wants to make her or his maximum contribution to the great change we all need should stop patronizing the mass media that got us into this mindset of alienation and greed in the first place. She or he should replace that culture, with its desperately low image of the human being, with the culture—for it is one—of nonviolence. Read all the Gandhi you can get your hands on. We have “moved our money.” Beautiful. But we’ll be amazed what happens when we move something much more powerful than money: when we move our minds.

Happily, judging from the idealistic young faces I’ve seen first-hand and in YouTube videos, I don’t think this is at all impossible. I actually think it’s the challenge we’ve all been waiting for.

2) It is clear that the time is now to step back and come up with a long-term strategy. We should be no more stuck on one tactic or mode—protest—than we should be on one piece of real estate. Furthermore that strategy, as Rabbi Michael Lerner has pointed out, will have to grow past protest to include serious nonviolent resistance, e.g. civil disobedience. We are up against very serious entrenched interests backed by virtually limitless money and physical force. It can be overcome, because evil is always vulnerable, because money and force are limited instruments; but we must be prepared to meet it with an equivalent force of commitment and sacrifice.

The protestors, as the media point out, have a bewildering array of issues. Well, just about all of them are valid, because the malevolent energy of the system by now reaches almost everywhere. But we will have to understand the core of that malevolence and figure out how to confront and purify it. We will have to decide on what I call a keystone issue—something that’s winnable and well-aimed enough that succeeding at it will weaken the entire system.

Driving this strategy must be an overview that pulls together the innumerable economic and other alternatives that are already happening into a coherent picture. This is, if anything, more important than the protest piece. Nonviolence, as King said, is not just non-cooperating with evil but cooperating with good—Gandhi’s “constructive programme.” And finally,

3) Let’s remember what we’re really fighting for. When we call for the dignity of every person, does that not imply, as I suggested above, that we need to vastly improve our image of the human being per se? We should all be conversant with the way both modern science and the world’s spiritual traditions agree that we are not separate, material creatures doomed to compete for scarce resources; we are deeply interconnected, with one another, all life, the planet that nourishes and houses us. Our fulfillment comes from relationships, not consumption; our security comes from turning enemies into friends, not from eliminating them.

Six years ago I stood with a large group of young people on the roof of the student union building on the Berkeley campus, ticking off the ways they were better off in their understanding than we had been in the heady, but not very sophisticated days of the Free Speech Movement. It was exhilarating to see that improvement. It’s even more exhilarating to see it on the move.

Corporations are not people: We hold these truths to be self-evident. . .

by

by Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook | Originally published on Waging Nonviolence on October 11, 2011, 2:11 pm

When is a Person not a Person?

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PSR) recently answered this absurd question with the obvious and embarrassing answer: when it’s a corporation. According to PSR’s statement, in case anyone is confused, a human being:

“is a complex organism with capacities for joy and pain, reflection, and the compassionate appreciation of others. Mature persons are expected to display reasoned judgment, and are personally responsible for their own actions (our emphasis).  Human beings live, breath, think, experience emotions, and internalize values such as empathy and caring for others. Like all sentient beings, they suffer, and die.”

Corporations possess none of these functions, which make being human sacred, valuable and worthy of dignity. As the Occupy movements grow in remarkably inspiring ways, they have a unique opportunity to raise the human image from the slander and propaganda of the corporate media—where our capacity for consumption defines us and our desire for wealth drives us—to a more promising, and far more accurate conception of what makes us truly human: our capacity for nonviolence, motivated by our most precious desire for freedom. As Gandhi put it, “Non-violence is the law of the humans…”

It is clear in these movements that we are not fighting against a dictator who has been in power for longer than his share of time; we are fighting a new form of colonialism. It is time to take Gandhi more seriously than ever, as he led a campaign against colonialism for more than 30 years before laying down his life for the movement that we are now called on to continue bravely. Overcoming the juggernaut of corporate personhood through our highest ideals and desires is by no means a painless and rapid process. By its very nature, nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the most rewarding course that we can take. The benefits of what we receive in the process will certainly outweigh any short term sacrifices we may be required to make, even if that means our very bodies.

In order to do it we may have to be prepared to sacrifice everything, but never our humanity—or that of anyone. Resorting to violence would inevitably break the spirit of the movement, and our spirit is what we have in our favor—indeed, it is the whole issue. Violence is inhumanity itself. The admirable nonviolence that has characterized the actions of the protestors so far will have to be maintained as the movement morphs and grows and we find ourselves in situations where how to maintain it is not as obvious. But maintain it we must, since to use violence in the cause of humanity—and nothing less is really at issue here—would destroy the very thing we are fighting for.

Man’s inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. How we created a system to perpetuate this ultimate form of inhumanity, declaring that abstract entities are ‘persons,’ is not as obvious. Perhaps it was a cracked system from the beginning; perhaps it was the genocide we raised in the name of personal economic gain, or slavery, or war. Did anyone else notice the cruel irony when we dropped bombs on the “targets” over Japan, that were named “Fat Boy,” and “Little Man”? When Dr. King said that we have “guided missiles and misguided men” was he not referring to the horror where cities consisting of human beings became dehumanized while the machines built to kill them were given human names? Yet he believed that we could overcome that steady violence of dehumanization to guide us toward “beloved community,” not the cemetery of vengeance and destruction. A human being—any human being—must be held worthy of redemption from even our most grievous misdeeds, not because we have faith in a celestial father figure who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, but because we have faith in people.

There are at least two projects, to our knowledge, that seek to recall the giveaway of our precious humanity to abstract corporations through Constitutional amendment: Move to Amend and the Environmental and Social Rights Amendment, shepherded by Rabbi Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Let them be the constitutional ‘arm’ of the movement. And it would be well for all of us to draw attention to a basic fact, that corporations, as we know them, are by their very definition what PSR calls “a misleading and highly dangerous fiction” when they pretend to sequester human beings from their “personal responsibility for their own actions.”  Even “B-“ style corporations that dethrone the profit motive and observe the “triple bottom line” of person, profit, and planet” do not always avoid this dangerous fiction.

What began in imitation of a wave of political freedom struggles in the Middle East, some nonviolent and some not, has become a critical struggle for the dignity of humanity itself. And for that, nonviolence is the only option.

Can we be the 100 percent?

by

Can we be the 100 percent?

by Stephanie Van Hook | Originally published on October 4, 2011, 12:35 pm at Waging Nonviolence

Occupy Wall Street has signaled the changing weather of a looming “American Autumn” and consequently galvanized the progressive movement. The 99 percent, as they call themselves for the interests they want to represent, have shown tremendous courage in the face of police brutality. They have also demonstrated remarkable perseverance, despite the general lack of accurate mainstream attention on their efforts to reclaim a democracy that takes the human being into account over corporate interests. But perhaps the most inspiring aspect of this movement is that its members are choosing nonviolence to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the movement would be more inspiring, more effective, and ultimately truly nonviolent, by including the one percent.

 

Nonviolence is not a mere strategic tactic as touted by scholars of political theory, including some within the progressive movement itself; it is more comprehensive, and as such, much more powerful than the limiting definition these people have adopted (to our detriment as a movement with a real future). The basis for the power of nonviolence is emerging more and more in science, not to mention that it has always existed across the wisdom traditions—namely as a positive force governing human interaction that allows us to build deeper bonds and uncover a greater sense of unity as people.

 

Gandhi (who celebrated his birthday on October 2nd) said, “It is the law of the humans,” meaning, we exercise our full humanity as we exercise our full capacity to do good to others. And it is illogical to think that we can raise the image of humanity if we do not take all of humanity into account. Within that excluded one percent are people, indeed some powerful people who will simply point out our hypocrisy of methods if we dehumanize them in our movement. When we use dehumanization as a tactic, we borrow it not from any true theory of nonviolence, but straight from the paradigm of violence. It is the violent who gave us “corporate personhood;” we need to espouse radical humanization to set right that distortion.

 

As Gandhi disclosed in regard to his national struggle against the British Raj, “Behind my non-cooperation, there is always the keenest desire to cooperate on the slightest pretext even with the worst of opponents.” Of course we are not blind to the evil that has been perpetuated in the name of citizens of the United States by the one percent. Those grievances are well known. Nor do we deny that there is a group with whom we are in opposition; but we have to be clear about where that opponent resides. When Gandhi says that he is willing to compromise with his opponent it is because he was aware of a higher reality, that we are an interconnected whole that in the end, our opponent is none other than ourselves.

 

“Conquer anger,” the Buddha says, and “you will conquer the world.” It is in conquering ourselves that we will begin to conquer our foes and have the full force of nonviolence at our disposal for persuading our opponent to change, not by violence or domination, but by employing the right means to, as Gandhi said, “compel reason to be free.” Conquering anger does not mean suppression or passivity, it means using it for constructive ends; it means transforming it into a creative force. Gandhi put it this way, “I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

 

This is the secret of nonviolent action: conserved anger can become love, not a soft, passive love, but a love that can disarm a person expecting a harsh remark or an insult. Our friend David Hartsough, for instance, experienced this force at a lunch-counter sit-in in a segregated Virginia. When his life was threatened with a knife at his chest by an angry segregationist, David, in an effort to transform his anger and fear turned to his aggressor and said quietly, “You do what you think is right brother, and I will try to love you anyway.” The man dropped his knife, began to cry and left the restaurant.

 

This is why at the Metta Center we recommend finding a spiritual practice such as meditation. We recommend practicing it everyday, anywhere. Gandhi himself turned prison time into an opportunity to meditate and continue to build the movement. With the October 2011 protests looming large, we have a great opportunity to keep our flame going and build it and other protests currently underway into an enduring movement. That one percent of energy saved each day in meditation is going to keep us from burning out, from harboring resentment and anger, and for keeping the struggle going for building a nonviolent future for the United States. We will get there fully when we are chanting, “A nation united can never be defeated” and mean all of us, 100 percent.

Neither Victims Nor Executioners

by

By Michael Nagler, originally published at Waging Nonviolence, Sept. 26.

The execution last week of Troy Davis by the State of Georgia on the International Day of Peace was a painful blow to all sensitive people—really to all humanity, not to mention our prestige as a nation. Whatever may have been the “correctness” of the legal procedures leading up to it, it must seem to many no better than a legalized lynching.

 

Scholar René Girard, with his keen insights into the all-too-prevalent dynamic of scapegoating, ancient and modern (the latter more disguised but no less deadly), often cited lynching as a thinly disguised institutional form of that deadly reflex held over from (even) more barbaric times. By the sheer irrationality of its logic, the death penalty in the United States (and wherever else it is held over) must qualify as ritual. Homicides slightly increase in states where the penalty is reintroduced, and killing in order to show that killing is wrong does not deserve the name of logic.

 

A California prisoner not long ago who had gotten on in years waiting his turn on death row and had a heart condition by the time it came, told a guard on his way to his execution not to bother reviving him if he had an attack. “Of course we’ll revive you,” the official quickly rejoined, “we absolutely believe in the sanctity of life.”

 

In fact, we would maintain, all violence is irrational, which is why it is always counterproductive in the long run—and why it can be overcome despite its apparent ubiquity. Truth and nonviolence will overcome unreason and violence if we understand properly how to engage its power.

 

Just before he went to his death, Davis said to Edward Dubose, president of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, that this fight is bigger than one person, “whether they execute him or whether he is freed, the fight must go on. Let this case be a crossroad.” If we can make it such, it will be a far better tribute than naming September 22nd after Troy Davis or any of the symbolic observances that have been suggested, however fitting and however much emotional satisfaction they would temporarily offer. Let us think how this could be such a crossroad.

 

A few weeks ago the death of a three-year-old child in Oakland, CA galvanized an entire neighborhood. Everyone pulled together and succeeded in stopping all violent crime for the time being, which in that neighborhood is an impressive achievement. Every now and then some tragedy, it is hard to predict when or how, wakes people up.

 

What if these healthy reactions were cumulative? What if, every time there was a salutary shock and a new set of people came to life they would not go back to complacency after the shock wore off but would add their creative energy to a growing movement? It’s not impossible. Gandhi actually felt it was a “law,” one of two that he discovered in his eight-year Satyagraha campaign to raise the dignity of the Indian communities of what is now South Africa—and by extension, he was well aware, their oppressors and eventually all of us. There is no limit to how small movements can start if they stay true to their cause, if it is just; and to their vision, if it is sufficiently inspiring, for if those conditions were met they would inevitably grow. He called it the “law of progression.”

 

The other was the “law of suffering,” that states that, as he put it, “things of fundamental importance to the people are not secured by reason alone but have to be purchased with their suffering… If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.” We will get back to that law in a moment.

 

The secret of continuity, Gandhi discovered, is “Constructive Programme,” whereby people create parallel institutions if necessary and go on to create the world they want rather than, or alongside protesting the injustices they don’t want and expecting others, especially governments, to do it for them. Constructive programs not only build continuity but put a movement in a stronger position when the time does come for outright resistance.The spontaneous uprising of that Oakland neighborhood was a good, if only beginning example. If those of us who are grieving the death of Troy Davis and are no longer willing to put up with our constant failures to stop such atrocities would commit ourselves to staying together to learn all we can about nonviolent techniques, including the deeper philosophical meaning of nonviolence itself—how it implies a much higher image of the human being than our mass media culture allows—and settle down to a strategic vision for a long term solution, that would be a much bigger example.

 

I mentioned the “law of suffering.” The forces, mental and other, that cause people to cling to an outlandish, counterproductive form like the death penalty are very strong. At some point when our constructive program has matured—when, for example, we have built up model cases of restorative (rehabilitative) justice here and there and explained their logic to educators, the media, policy makers, and anyone listening—we will nonetheless have to put up a good nonviolent fight against the entrenched superstition around us. At that time we will have to do more than carry a sign and go home, more even than put up with police brutality as others of us are doing right now on Wall Street. We will have to be ready for serious risk in some well-chosen, strategic form.

 

With solid training and a robust constructive program behind us, with strategy and courage, one can hope that this “redemptive suffering,” as King put it, will be brief and effective. I may be overly ambitious, but I do not believe I am naïve in envisioning that such a movement could go from the barbaric death penalty to our bloated retributive justice system to war itself, carrying out what Troy Davis bequeathed to us in his last letter:

“So thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated… This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe… Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We Will Win!”


Compassionate Design

by

Originally published as “September 11 and Satyagraha” on Tikkun.org on September 8, 2011

by Michael N. Nagler

As the news of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination spread through India on the first day of February, 1948, an American journalist was stunned by the intensity of the grief swirling around him.  An Indian friend explained to him, “You see, the people believe there was a mirror in the Mahatma in which they could see the best they were capable of; and now they fear that the mirror has been shattered.”

 

Well, if so, it is time to pick up the pieces.

Many people are already doing so. Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest lists countless projects that could be pieces of a Gandhian “constructive program.”   What’s missing is the frame.

 

As early as 1909, when he wrote his classic Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Gandhi seems to have known that even his plan to rescue India from the greatest empire the world had ever known — without using its methods — was part of something even greater: to rescue the modern world itself from its creed (even then outworn) of materialism, the “economy of wants,” the disempowerment and acquiescence in cruelty that can only bring competition and violence in its train.   Liberating India through nonviolence would, he dared to hope, create an “ocular demonstration” of the untapped power of that method — and what it implies about human nature.  For the fact that nonviolence works — which it does — witnesses to a  whole new worldview and radically higher image of the human being. He was to write time and time again that the human being can never be fulfilled without realizing, or at least striving to realize, her or his highest potential — her or his identity with the Supreme Reality, or God.  The freedom struggle itself simply expressed that message.  It was meant to show the whole world that individuals can rise to unparalleled heights and sweep resistance before them through the power of heart unity.

 

There is a ‘clash of civilizations’ that is yet to be resolved, but Huntington was wrong about which ones they were.  It is not ‘Western Civilization’ against that of other lands, as Gandhi’s opponents in South Africa thought.  It is what Martin Luther King called a “thing-oriented” civilization and a “person-oriented” one that is at heart of the “great turning.” It iis a struggle to liberate all of us from the humiliating image of the human being, one that’s sustained by the endless propaganda of our powerful mass media, and replace it with something more ennobling, and far more accurate.

 

Nonviolence as “Counter Instance.”

 

Gandhi insisted that nonviolence is a science, and he seized upon such glimpses of a higher truth as could be wrung out of the science of his day, for example the experiments of N.K. Bose showing that plants have a kind of consciousness.  Imagine how much he would have made — and we can now make — of science today.  Science is dramatically breaking free from the reductionist mold that gave it intoxicating successes in the “control” of nature (she seems to be kicking back) but prevented it from realizing how dangerous that control was in the hands of painfully immature people (Martin Luther King: “we have guided missiles and misguided men”).  Quantum physics, neuroscience, evolution and the life sciences, psychology, games theory and other areas: all are saying that we are all more intimately and undeniably interconnected than we had imagined (though some of us have always intuited); that cooperation has trumped competition throughout the history of life, that we humans gain far more satisfaction from states of empathy and what is called altruism than we do from “winning” over others — that life has a deep, as yet unfulfilled meaning, even to search for which raises us to some degree from depression and despair.


 

This new bent in science (see Tikkun for November/December of 2010) has brought science back in line with the wisdom tradition that threads its way through nearly all human cultures down the ages. The quantum theory of matter/energy, that is, of the outside world, takes its place alongside a parallel theory of mind, that is of the inner world, that was known as channika vada or the ‘doctrine of momentariness’ when it was elaborated by Buddhist scholars from earlier hints in the Vedantic tradition — and from their own experiences in meditation.  In other words, thoughts are as discontinuous as things — the apparent multiplicity we experience in both the inner and outer worlds is at base equally unreal.  The quantum nature of the outer world was discovered at the turn of the twentieth century, of the inner world perhaps five thousand years ago in India.  The union of these two great visions is poised to happen now, and that could be an incredible breakthrough for a humanity struggling more urgently than ever before to realize the great dream that all life is one.


 

It would be immensely helpful if we were prepared to spell out some of the leading features of our new story: 1) There is a force that has driven evolution — this much is obvious — toward higher and higher manifestations of life; in other words to the unfolding of Consciousness.  (Ironically, fundamentalists reject the strongest evidence for the ‘intelligent design’ they argue for).  It is in this all-embracing Consciousness that we are deeply interconnected, that life is one.  That is why war doesn’t work — we have now thrown nearly $4 trillion dollars into two wars where, in the words of a military commander in Iraq, “we are making terrorists faster than we can kill them.”  We cannot injure another person — or the life-sustaining system of the planet — without injuring ourselves, as can now be shown in neuroscience and psychology; “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (MLK). 2) We are not doomed to compete for rapidly shrinking resources because the resources we really need for our fulfillment — love, wisdom, respect — are not limited: in some cases they seem to increase with use.  3) We are not by any means the product of genes, hormones, neurotransmitters or any other inanimate entity any more than we are of the position of the stars: we have both responsibility and free will.  And finally: 4) We have an as-yet-undeveloped capacity for growth. “So far as we know,” wrote neuroscientist Robert Livingston, “the usefulness of cognitive processes such as consciousness, perception, judgment, and volition has not begun to meet any limits.”  We have reached severe limits of physical growth, as individuals and a species.  But we can expand our awareness of unity, our capacity to serve human well-being and change the world for the better beyond the limits we take for ‘normal’.  Which is exactly what Gandhi did.


 

And speaking of Gandhi, there is a ‘stealth’ feature of the new story that should not be overlooked.  The prevailing story and its human image are a crucial support for policies of violence and reaction.  Indeed, these policies have no other support (except appeal to raw egoism) and cannot stand up to the scrutiny of either logic or experience.  Like khadi, the homespun cloth that seemed innocuous but undermined the economic pillars of the British regime, a sense of who we really are would undermine the present system and all its destructive features.


 

Love Your Enemy

 

As this issue of Tikkun comes out, many of us in the progressive community have been bracing ourselves for another outpouring of ‘patriotic’ rage on this tenth anniversary of 9/11; but some of us will be doing something about this grim memorial.

 

9/11 can also be — indeed it always was — an opportunity.   At the fifth anniversary of 9/11, which happened to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) in South Africa, we at Metta published a booklet called Hope or Terror pointing out the road not taken; and three months ago we launched a bold project to use the present anniversary to heal and repair, to draw out our latent capacity for reconciliation, and in so doing build the foundations of a long-term campaign that will confront the war system itself.  If carried out long and well enough, this campaign could play a significant role in making war a bad dream.

 

The project is called “Love Your Enemy: A Campaign to Reclaim Human Dignity Through Nonviolence”.  It arose from a need to give a voice to the many Americans from all walks of life who, like ourselves, were repelled and alarmed by the gloating over the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — Americans like the group that walked from Washington, D.C. to New York City carrying a banner that said, “Our Grief is not a Cry for War.” Several of the walkers were people who, like myself, had lost loved ones in the attacks on 9/11. When the walk ended, they formed “Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,” an enduring reminder that not everyone thinks security comes from threat power.

 

The project has three distinguishing features that qualify it, we feel, as a piece of Gandhi’s mirror, faithfully reflecting the whole picture:  1) it is based on personal transformation, 2) it is not merely symbolic (people get this wrong about Gandhi often) but engages us in constructive work — in this case, on human relationships, and similarly, 3) while getting a “market share” of the attention that 9/11/11 roused it will not be a one-off but the start of a long-term campaign.

 

Here’s how it works.

 

The core of the campaign is embedded in its arresting name: love your enemy.  Not, ‘let them get away with anything’ — that’s not love. As a friend of mine said right after the original 9/11, “terrorism cannot be condoned; but it can be understood.”  But reach out to someone with whom you’ve had a difficulty, so that you act as a personal model of the behavior we want to see eventually in our society. Acts of forgiveness and reconciliation can be tricky, however.  They are always helpful — certainly at least for the forgiver — but given the depth of human consciousness there are often deeper currents of resentment that remain unresolved.  In order to make our gestures toward reconciliation real, we have been recommending that participants experiment with a five-part program we worked up for anyone who, after getting a vision of the world we want, wants to embody that world and be an effective agent of bringing it to birth:

 

·      As far as possible, boycott commercial mass media, with their violence and materialism, their embarrassingly low image of the human being. Instead,

·      Learn everything we can about nonviolence.  Do not take it to be a bundle of tactics, but a way of being and acting life that directly counters, and can replace the old story.  (We’re here to help.)  Taken in this way, nonviolence is actually a culture, fully embedded in science and spiritual wisdom.  It can replace the culture we have begun to cast aside in step one.

·      If we haven’t already done so, find a spiritual practice.

·      Humanize our daily life: make personal contact instead of ‘virtual’ relating wherever possible; think of love and service as our way of being in the world.  Human contact, even if not conflict-free, can effectively replace the need for entertainment that drives us into passive media: “one good latte with a friend is worth five bad movies.”

·      Get involved in a project of peace, social justice, environmental protection, or all of the above.  Be idealistic but strategic: where can you really make a difference?  ESRA, the brain-child of Rabbi Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, is a natural.

 

The fourth point that unfolds into the eponymous exercise of ‘love your enemy’: patch up a soured relationship.  Start with a relatively easy relationship to address, like a neighbor with whom you’ve disagreed over where his dog answers the call of nature, and build up at your own pace to more serious disagreements. Remember, the goal is not to win over the other person, though that would be lovely: it’s primarily to win over the alienation in your own mind: as St. Augustine said, “imagine thinking your enemy can do you more damage than your enmity.”

 

Metta is acting as a hub for sharing stories about successes with all this, especially such reconciliations, by conducting regular conference calls and a blog.  All this is preparation for:

 

A Nationwide Satyagraha. Now individuals, most of whom have hopefully been practicing these steps along with us, observe the following on the three days surrounding 9/11:

 

September 10: A ‘media fast’ and, for those inclined to do so, a day of silence in shared grief and commemoration for the dead and for the attendant violence that has caused and is causing the death of so many.

 

September 11: Call on public places to turn off inflammatory media and instead engage in dialogue about the causes of terrorism and the basis of real security. Have a look at the discussion points on our website.

 

September 12: Participate in a nationwide conversation to share further stories and plan next steps.  Be in touch with Stephanie@MettaCenter.org to join in that conversation.

 

In the end, the real freedom struggle is to free ourselves from hatred and alienation; as King said,  “I will never let anyone bring me so low as to make me hate him.”  Gandhi added his characteristic practicality by saying, “I have learned from bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as steam conserved is converted into energy, anger conserved can be turned into a force that can change the world.” LYE is a chance to carry out just such an “experiment with truth:” to turn the sting of 11 September into a step on the long road forward toward beloved community and peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Death Squads and Democracy: A Hidden Legacy of 9/11

by


With newly retired General David Petraeus sworn in as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency last week, we are reminded, as the New York Times put it back in April when he was appointed to the position, that this is only “the latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.” This shift of the agency’s function from gathering “intelligence” (we wish) to carrying out murderous operations has been going on steadily, and we all know what it means: torture has been enshrined as a regular feature of our military enterprise. CIA personnel regularly torture prisoners, regularly cover up much, but not all, of the evidence for these heinous crimes against humanity, and have been up to now been winked at by the public and Congress for the part that comes to light.
Of course, this shift intensified after 9/11, and the tenth anniversary of that horrific day has given us an occasion to really revisit what it means. We should be aware that no people can survive such degradation of their most basic values. When the CIA/US Army shifts more and more to paramilitary operations it shifts more and more out of the few safeguards that were erected around  modern militaries to prevent them from carrying out grave abuse. It makes them look more like the death squads of Central America and Colombia than a democratic institution.
The medieval Church had its “secular arm,” to which “heretics” were handed over for (often horrible) deaths, providing the Church and the public with the convenient illusion that they had handed over with their victims the responsibility for killing them. The CIA (and doubtless other formal and informal “security” agencies to greater and lesser degrees) has its parallel in its “black budget” and even blacker deeds, its appeal to “security” as an excuse and cover-up for inhumane acts that can never bring security to any person or nation. The Church burned a French peasant named Jeanne d’Arc, whom it later declared had been a saint; what we are burning is the soul of American democracy.
I am focusing here on torture, but equally shameful and counter-democratic are the drone attacks which for me exemplify sheer cowardice and the necessity to carry all this out in secret so that, as the New York Times report of April 28 goes on to say, “the American spy and military agencies operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.”
There are two things a democracy cannot tolerate, without losing its fundamental character: secrecy and violence. The latter may not be as obvious, but think about it: democracy derives its whole meaning from the sanctity of life, the worth of the individual. Violence negates both.
Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from this pernicious shift is that it was and will be inevitable, as long as violence—whether in uniform or not—is the underlying force on which we seek to build our security. The journalist Norman Cousins pointed this out long ago when it was revealed, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that U.S. Navy personnel some time after World War II had carried out an “experiment” of spraying lethal bacteria into the fog over San Francisco Bay, killing at least one person whose grandchildren were then suing the Government. As Cousins said, 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, because when we set up an elite to do it for us with destructive force it will not be possible to keep that force within civilized limits.
There are thousands of Americans who have reached out to Muslim fellow Americans to counteract, one on one or in small groups, the dependency on violent defense by overcoming the very hatred and superstition that make us think we need it. There are peace ambassadors like the tireless activist (and Waging Nonviolence contributor) Kathy Kelly who have gone to Afghanistan to carry reconciliation to the lands most devastated by the perceived need for revenge. These are the people who are really showing us the way to security, and with it the real defense of everything that makes our democracy meaningful.
The official story about the reason for 9/11 attacks has it that “they are jealous of our freedoms.”  If so, we have handed Osama bin Laden and his cohorts a victory they could scarcely have dreamed of, for a people that gives away its moral integrity to a clandestine force is neither brave nor free. In the end, the entire system of war and militarism will have to be replaced by nonviolent equivalents—and they do exist—if we want our democracy to be real. The torture and secrecy that have now come to light in the heart of that system is a good place to start.
By Michael Nagler
Published at Waging Nonviolence, Sept. 13, 2011
With newly retired General David Petraeus sworn in as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency last week, we are reminded, as the New York Times put it back in April when he was appointed to the position, that this is only “the latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.” This shift of the agency’s function from gathering “intelligence” (we wish) to carrying out murderous operations has been going on steadily, and we all know what it means: torture has been enshrined as a regular feature of our military enterprise. CIA personnel regularly torture prisoners, regularly cover up much, but not all, of the evidence for these heinous crimes against humanity, and have been up to now been winked at by the public and Congress for the part that comes to light.

Of course, this shift intensified after 9/11, and the tenth anniversary of that horrific day has given us an occasion to really revisit what it means. We should be aware that no people can survive such degradation of their most basic values. When the CIA/US Army shifts more and more to paramilitary operations it shifts more and more out of the few safeguards that were erected around  modern militaries to prevent them from carrying out grave abuse. It makes them look more like the death squads of Central America and Colombia than a democratic institution.

The medieval Church had its “secular arm,” to which “heretics” were handed over for (often horrible) deaths, providing the Church and the public with the convenient illusion that they had handed over with their victims the responsibility for killing them. The CIA (and doubtless other formal and informal “security” agencies to greater and lesser degrees) has its parallel in its “black budget” and even blacker deeds, its appeal to “security” as an excuse and cover-up for inhumane acts that can never bring security to any person or nation. The Church burned a French peasant named Jeanne d’Arc, whom it later declared had been a saint; what we are burning is the soul of American democracy.

I am focusing here on torture, but equally shameful and counter-democratic are the drone attacks which for me exemplify sheer cowardice and the necessity to carry all this out in secret so that, as the New York Times report of April 28 goes on to say, “the American spy and military agencies operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.”

There are two things a democracy cannot tolerate, without losing its fundamental character: secrecy and violence. The latter may not be as obvious, but think about it: democracy derives its whole meaning from the sanctity of life, the worth of the individual. Violence negates both.

Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from this pernicious shift is that it was and will be inevitable, as long as violence—whether in uniform or not—is the underlying force on which we seek to build our security. The journalist Norman Cousins pointed this out long ago when it was revealed, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that U.S. Navy personnel some time after World War II had carried out an “experiment” of spraying lethal bacteria into the fog over San Francisco Bay, killing at least one person whose grandchildren were then suing the Government. As Cousins said, 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, because when we set up an elite to do it for us with destructive force it will not be possible to keep that force within civilized limits.

There are thousands of Americans who have reached out to Muslim fellow Americans to counteract, one on one or in small groups, the dependency on violent defense by overcoming the very hatred and superstition that make us think we need it. There are peace ambassadors like the tireless activist (and Waging Nonviolence contributor) Kathy Kelly who have gone to Afghanistan to carry reconciliation to the lands most devastated by the perceived need for revenge. These are the people who are really showing us the way to security, and with it the real defense of everything that makes our democracy meaningful.

The official story about the reason for 9/11 attacks has it that “they are jealous of our freedoms.”  If so, we have handed Osama bin Laden and his cohorts a victory they could scarcely have dreamed of, for a people that gives away its moral integrity to a clandestine force is neither brave nor free. In the end, the entire system of war and militarism will have to be replaced by nonviolent equivalents—and they do exist—if we want our democracy to be real. The torture and secrecy that have now come to light in the heart of that system is a good place to start.