Metta’s Opinion

By Michael Nagler

Reprinted from Waging Nonviolence, Sept. 6, 2011

Between Libya, which has endured more than 2,000 NATO bombings, and Syria, where more than 2,000 civilians have been killed by their own government so far, we see the two traditional responses to a perceived need for intervention by the international community in regimes gone wrong. It’s a grim picture—invaded Libya and abandoned Syria—and a sad comment on the paucity of human imagination, at least when that imagination is squeezed into the narrow confines of “realism.”

Fortunately this Hobson’s choice, and the comment it delivers on the creativity of our concern, is not, in fact, all humanity can come up with.

In the 1922, when Hindu-Muslim tensions were threatening to tear down everything Gandhi was building in India, he proposed that volunteers could go to villages in insecure districts and live there as a kind of resident third party to proffer good offices, abate rumors (a frequent escalator of conflict there and everywhere), and in extreme cases interpose themselves between parties in open conflict. He called an important meeting to put this institution, which he called the Shanti Sena (Peace Army), into practice for February, 1948 but, as we know, was assassinated days before it could take place.

Shanti Sena did nonetheless come into being. Despite various problems, it served creditably well in a variety of districts and the 1962 Chinese border incursion. More to the point, the idea spread throughout the world, where it was picked up by organizations as diverse as the World Peace Brigade, Peace Brigades International, India’s Swaraj Peeth, the colorfully named Rainbow Family of Living Light and even the Guardian Angels, known for riding the subways of New York to prevent crime. It also deepened into a force that could intervene across borders: not just in local communities but around the world.

The unheralded growth of this idea and its on-the-ground institutions is probably typical of how the best ideas in the modern world have to grow: from the bottom up. The movement for “protective accompaniment,” for example, which became the main focus of groups like Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International (the former being explicitly a religiously based organization, the latter explicitly not) was carried out by remarkably few individuals, negligible financing and even less coverage by the press. Nonetheless, it saved lives from death squads in Central America and equivalent forms or terror in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In one case, that of Guatemala, it seems to have created space for a real peace process to unfold when it saved individuals in a key human rights group from systematic assassination simply by being with them day in and out, so that anyone who did them harm would have to do so before the eyes of the world.

The improbable hope represented by protective accompaniment and other functions of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (as it’s now called, or UCP) did eventually percolate upwards to the attention of more official bodies: an international norm (not yet a law) called the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) has come into play after the shame of passivity in Rwanda, stating that “If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.” While not nonviolence, this does open the door for more UCP activities even as it breaks down the wall of absolute state sovereignty. More to the point, the UNICEF has made a grant of one million dollars to the most ambitious of the UCP organizations, Nonviolent Peaceforce, to do training for child protection in South Sudan and the Philippines.

In the penetrating light of Gandhi’s vision, passivity and violence are really two sides of the same coin. On the spiritual plane, they emerge respectively from fear and anger—both drives of the private, separate self. The only really different coin is that of nonviolence, or selfless love in action (to paraphrase Martin Luther King). The only meaningful choice, then, is not between intervening (with blind force) or not intervening, but between violence and nonviolence as a guiding principle.

As I write these lines, black Africans are being harshly persecuted in “free” Libya, usually for no reason. We should not be surprised. This is what violence does: it cannot but grope blindly after victims, as history so often shows. And it also shows, if we know where to look, that nonviolence does the opposite: it spreads hope and toleration, preventing enemies from oppressing if not actually converting them into friends. And now, as institutions emerging from this principle slowly find themselves and reach across borders into realms that formerly were reachable only by force—or by neglect—we get to choose.

Dear Community,

We recently sent out this notice on our email list. If you want to register to receive METTA emails, please do so at this page. For the links below, you can access them below:

a. Hope Tank Page (plus Hope Tank for Teachers’ Retreat)

b. Love Your Enemy: A Campaign to Reclaim Human Dignity Through Nonviolence

C. Hope or Terror? Gandhi and the Other 9/11

Let us know when you start your local Hope Tank.

By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

Reprinted from Waging Nonviolence, August 30, 2011

Most people remember Pandora’s box as a source of all the troubles in the world. In the original version, however, there’s an intriguing element: one thing remains in the box, for which the Greek word is elpis meaning “expectation” or “hope.” With the presidential elections of 2012 already heating up, many of us may well be asking ourselves, what happened to the high hopes that floated our spirits after the last one. In the words of Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?”

The myth may give us a partial answer: hope is still there, but we’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’s not to be found in a politician elected to high office, for however good a person he (or she—God forbid!) may be. That person will be constrained by an extremely corrupt and even vicious system. It is hidden inside the box of human potentials where we have not been able to see it through the crowd of troubles fluttering around the lid.

In other words, there is no dearth of hope, even in this benighted world, if you know where to look for it—not a hope that things will come together by themselves, to be sure, but hope that if we put our hands to the plough, we can restore some sanity and humane direction to human endeavors. We have learned one lesson: hope is not in a leader, it is the spark of leadership inside each of us. Each of us has an instinct for what Kenneth Boulding called “integrative power.” In the Philippine revolution of 1986 it was dubbed “people power”: the flame inside of individuals that cannot be extinguished by either politicians or the corporate usurpation of humanity. In the form of Arab Spring, hope is now passing through the phase where individuals are awakening from inertia to restless action that can be perfected to greater degrees of effective nonviolence.

As a friend of ours from Damascus recently shared, “One of the main characteristics of the Syrian revolution is that we are all working openly. The wall of fear has disappeared.” That is a taste of hope.

Albeit unnoticed by the mainstream and its media, nonviolence did not rest on its laurels since the heyday of Gandhi and King. We have an international institution now called the “right to protect” (R2P) which puts in play what is otherwise an abstract notion: the unity of life. We have an International Criminal Court which, for all that it perpetuates in a retributive model of justice, does, again, signalize the underlying unity of all people. In the words of Francois Fenelon (1651-1715), which have somehow become buried under the rubble of our industrial civilization, “all wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.”  These are signs of hope, as is the fact that insurrectionary groups are learning to share their “best practices” with others around the world—witness, for instance, the Serbian Otpor presence in Tahrir Square.

At the start of this week, in Delhi, Anna Hazare broke his fast for the right reason. It had done its work: Indian parliament agreed to the demand of Hazare and his supporters, “Team Anna” joined by some several hundred thousand Indians, that a commission of disinterested individuals be established to control the country’s rampant corruption.

What’s hopeful there is threefold: Hazare is orginally not “people” but person, so sparks of nonviolent energy are potentially everywhere—six plus billion of them. Secondly, Hazare has explicitly located himself in the Gandhian tradition, showing that “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” When something very positive about human nature is brought to the surface it is likely to stay there if and when individuals are imaginative and daring enough to seize on it. Thirdly, there are methods in nonviolence that awaken one’s adversaries to act against their self-will in favor of the well-being of something greater than themselves and their personal self-interest. We can even dare to hope that some of the people who went along with Hazare’s ultimatum sensed as they did so that their personal well-being was part of the whole and not in opposition to it. If that idea were to catch on, self-interested competition at the expense of others would be on the way out. The consequences are inspiring to contemplate.

What is preventing these hopeful developments and others we have not mentioned from becoming a whole new frame of reference? At the Metta Center, and elsewhere, we think the answer is to be sought by looking to ourselves. Gandhi called it svadeshi, or localism. Some years ago, when we told a young friend we wanted to start a new think-tank to develop an overview that would help these hopeful developments become a movement, Katie shot back: “We don’t need a new think-tank, we need a hope tank.” So we started one.

Each Friday after meditation and a potluck breakfast, we have discussions that are open but focused, namely on the theory of nonviolence, which we consider the essence of that spark. We invite you to host your own in your local community. Bring two or three friends, or strangers, together in a coffee shop, your living room, a community center, and have the audacity to explore possibilities, learn, discuss and create strategy for nonviolent change in all of its dimensions. Learn everything you can about nonviolence. Have full faith in the conclusion that Gandhi reached after fifty years’ ceaseless experiments: “nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of Mankind. It is the supreme law. By it alone can mankind be saved.”

Edited and published at Waging Nonviolence 8/23/11 as “Coming home from killing”

By Michael Nagler

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties. Apparently not much has changed since Coming Home, the Jane Fonda film of 1978.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

McCord, though he is understandably tense, does not seem to be completely  unnerved by the trauma. Instead, it forced him to wake up from the lies that had put him in a uniform to kill other people’s children halfway across the globe, and he took it upon himself to try waking up others. Among people who have lost loved ones to gun violence—like, for example, Azim Khamisa, who now works to dissuade school children from joining gangs after his son was mindlessly killed by one—some have discovered that turning grief and guilt to reconstructive work can be psychologically restorative. But their number is not legion. Many, many more have gone, and are now going, the way of Suzy from In Our Name.According to a covered-up story that is about to be released by Project Censored, a Northern California-based media watchdog service, the number of active-duty soldiers or veterans who have committed suicide has just surpassed the number of those killed in combat.

We are facing a social problem of massive proportions, as our already-grim experience with returning veterans from Vietnam should have warned us. Psychologist Rachel McNair developed the concept of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) to bring home to us the fact—now dramatically supported by neuroscientists—that you cannot send people out to kill and maim without expecting them to suffer enduring torments themselves, no matter how thoroughly you try to desensitize them beforehand. Thank God! Where would we be if this capacity to respond to the joys and sufferings of others could really be squelched?

There have been admirable attempts to get needed help to these spiritually wounded men and women; but the real answer, the only sane and compassionate answer, is prevention. And that means only one thing: to stop glorifying violence in our social culture and national policy—in other words, renounce war. It won’t be easy. Colonel Harry Holloway, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, told journalist Dan Baum recently, “As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we’re causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we’re accomplishing is worth the harm we’re causing … if we get into this business of talking about killing people we’re going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience.”

But what is the alternative? Those children who opened Ethan McCord’s eyes were killed by a machine in the sky a mile and a half away with 30mm cannon rounds—ordinance tipped with depleted uranium and meant for penetrating armor, not tearing apart human beings. If truth is the first victim in war, humanity is a close second. Thus, if we do not “pathologize” what is truly sick, we end up pathologizing what isn’t: peace. (Remember the “Vietnam syndrome?”) If we do not fear our own bestiality we end up producing a climate that, as none other than General Douglas Macarthur said, “renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.”

Perhaps those who still believe that war is an “absolutely necessary experience” would reflect with us on the following story. It was Poland, in 1942. The Gestapo was raiding the apartment of the Kshenskys, who had participated in the Jewish underground. Finding the “incriminating” evidence, they were about to take the mother, who was home alone with their two-year-old son, out to the courtyard and shoot her when she saw, with horror, that her toddler was playing with the shiny buttons on the Gestapo captain’s uniform. He, too, noticed, and stared down at the child.  After what must have seemed an eternity he looked up, his face totally changed, and said,“I have a son at home just his age, and I miss him very much.” Then he added, “Your son has saved your life,” and ordered his men out of the apartment. The child did not survive the war, but the Kshenskys miraculously did; their daughter, Lili Kshensky Baxter, is a former Chair of the National Council of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation.

There is a way out of this dehumanizing dilemma, and that is to rise up and say, “No!” War is not a necessary evil, nor indispensable activity. It is a horror and a travesty on human nature. We have international courts now; we have nonviolent intervention teams. There is, as there has always been, the possibility of conversation among civilized people—provided we elect them. And there are the arts of nonviolence, of which a Kurdish gentleman in Kirkuk said recently, “It may be slow, but you don’t lose your humanity.” Journalist Marshall Frady has given a beautiful description of how this kind of struggle not only preserves, instead of surrendering, our humanity but makes it into a spreading force:

In the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, … an oppressor can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience toward compassion and justice.

By: Michael N. Nagler

You can find another version of this article entitled “Economic Crisis or Nonviolent Opportunity? A Gandhian Approach to Financial Collapse”  at Waging  Nonviolence.

It was on a Tuesday night and I was just turning in when the phone call came: my son Josh had rear-ended a van on Highway 101 and was being readied, in shock and pain, for major surgery.  Seems that a private company with a franchise to transport inmates out of California’s prisons, already overcrowded in the late eighties, was so hard pressed to make ends meet that the drivers had gone without sleep for over twenty-four hours, on No-Doz.  Unwilling to stop to get the van badly needed repairs, they had lost power and turned off the lights (!) in order to save battery as they attempted to drift across three lanes to exit the road.

Privatization — aka profiteering — is very real for me whenever I watch Josh get around on his reconstructed hip.  What this mindless drive for profit has done to criminal justice and “defense” can be the subject of another article; let’s focus now, as our economy buckles under the strain, on the meaning of that drive itself — and an alternative every one of us should know about.

First of all, what’s an economy for?  The real purpose of an economic system is to guarantee to every person the fundamentals of physical existence (food, clothing, shelter) and the tools of meaningful work so that they can get on with the business of living together and working out our common destiny.  This was Gandhi’s vision, among others’.  Now, as we continue to pursue an intoxicating greed that in the end can never satisfy a human being, and the results become more and more obvious, we cannot afford to ignore him in this sector any more than we can ignore his spectacular contributions to peace and security.

For Gandhi, whose thinking on the subject matured in his classic treatise, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (1909), our economic system is driven by an inherently endless multiplication of wants. We will never know real prosperity — which must be based on the recognition that we are more than producer/consumers — until we shift the whole thing onto another basis entirely, the fulfillment of needs. These needs are physical, to be sure, but also and more importantly social and even spiritual.  They therefore go beyond what we consider the domain of economics proper; but getting that physical basis right is a good foundation.   What, then, are the principles of what has come to be known as Gandhian economics, and how could we implement them?

Arguably, the most revolutionary feature of this system is that in it the relationship of a person to material goods (or, for that matter, any talents they can deploy) is one of trusteeship. This concept, borrowed from English law, is the nonviolent equivalent of ownership: people regard themselves as trustees of their possessions for the good of their respective societies, rather than as owners for their own real or symbolic benefit (when you have more than you need, you are trying to impress others or yourself with your own importance). Wherever this relationship obtains — and clearly it is first of all a psychological, and only then a legal phenomenon — greed would find it difficult to get a purchase.  We would no longer over-consume, no longer surrender our responsibility to corporations as the most efficient instruments for overconsumption and accumulation, no longer need to fight wars over inessentials (or even staples, as there would be enough to go around), no longer ravish the planet in a vain search for happiness — the prospect is giddying.  The trick, of course, is how to bring about this shift.  Reeducation at this depth is not easy, but it is any day easier than trying to redistribute wealth and stop overconsumption and exploitation while so many people still feel that happiness is something they can buy  and there is not enough of it to go around.  No revolution, however violent, has managed to dispossess the wealthy of their wealth against their will; but there are extremely wealthy people like George Soros and some others who have cheerfully redistributed it when the concept of trusteeship took hold.

Trusteeship, like much of Gandhi’s thinking, falls in line with the wisdom delivered by scriptures East and West, that we are really not the owner of anything.  Indeed it needs no scripture to tell us this, since the stark fact of life is that all we think we own can be taken away by any number of contingencies — and, let’s face it, will be so taken by the final contingency of death.  Trusteeship, however difficult to achieve, liberates us psychologically from the existential insecurity that is driving us into this dead end of competition and greed.

Other features of Gandhi’s scheme are (material) simplicity, localism (svadeshi), the sanctity of “bread labor” (a phrase he got from Ruskin), and nonviolence towards others and the earth itself.  All came into play with his stellar program of spinning homespun cloth (khadi, or khaddar) that gave employment to otherwise idled millions (sound familiar?), united the country in a vast network of growers, spinners, weavers, and buyers, and, almost incidentally it seemed, broke the hold of the British Raj in India.

Today many experiments that could potentially provide one or another piece of this program are doing very well, thank you, around the world: community farms, local currencies, “transition towns” and so forth.  One thing that would certainly help them coalesce into a real movement, making them a visible alternative to the ‘multiplication of wants’ economy that’s collapsing around our ears, is a voluntary shift to trusteeship carried out by individuals at their own pace in their own applications.  And what’s not doable about that – provided we stay clear of television long enough to repossess our minds?

Economist David Korten has advanced a brilliant three-part strategy to change the economy: 1) change the defining stories of the mainstream culture. 2) Create a new economic reality from the bottom up, and 3) change the rules to support the values and institutions of the emergent new reality.  Gandhian economics in general, and trusteeship in particular, would be a major enabling condition, working as it does within consciousness itself, for these great changes.

It gets clearer every day that the role of progressives now is to provide a “safe haven” – a plausible, attractive alternative – for every sector of the current system which is undergoing a potentially terrifying collapse: security, education, healthcare, and of course the economy.  Gandhi had an eye-opening contribution to offer for all of these areas, and what we’ve just sketched out would be a great place to start.

By Michael Nagler

Please read these words of an American woman living in Norway:

“Our public officials have asked us to put compassion first, to nurture each other, listen to each other, put words to our feelings, to respect our vulnerability, to feel our anger and desperation but not allow hate or angst to take over.  King Harald, Queen Sonja, their son Crown Prince Haakon … all let us see their tears. The King promised that our humanist values would not be shaken.  The Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said: “We will meet terror and violence with even more democracy, openness and humanity – though not with naivety.”  He quoted a young woman from the Labor Party Youth organization who was present during the attacks, “If one person can show that much hate, imagine how much love we all can show together.”

We cannot fail to be moved by the nobility of the Norwegian people.  I know of individuals who have risen to this kind of maturity — like Eileen Egan who at age 80 was mugged and badly hurt but forgave her attacker and, as she said, “refused to live in fear.” The Amish community responded recently to a rampage like the present one that took the lives of children at their school.  But here we are seeing the courage — and wisdom —of an entire people.

Terrorism, as basically an extreme form of violence, follows the dynamics of violence anywhere: if you fight it with your own violence it gets worse (thought there might be some “successes” in the short run); if you respond to it with nonviolence — and the courage and nobility of the Norwegians today is exactly that (this was the people, remember, who courageously defied Hitler during the Nazi occupation during the famous Norwegian school teachers’ strike) — not only do you keep from falling into the debilitating mindset of fear and anger yourself, history shows that you also tend to inhibit the repetition of such disasters.

This is why in the UK, no stranger to terrorism, they tend, in the words of an English friend of mine, to “play it down (splash and publicity is just what the attackers want) and quietly set about solving the problem.”  Note the assumption that there is in fact a problem — that if someone hates you that much, there might just be a reason.  So this is an approach that, while it does not evoke the incredible generosity of spirit we are seeing in Norway, at least does not descend to the methods of the attackers and has been adopted because it tends to break the cycle of violence.

Then there’s our way.  The United States had a powerful kneejerk reaction to 9/11 which was not based on political realities but was framed as a kind of cataclysmic mythology à la Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings, or, yes, Harry Potter.  There is an “axis of evil” of mindless terrorists out to get us because “they’re jealous of our freedoms,” and we’re not reacting out of private vengeance (only), we’re saving the world.  After 9/11 President Bush lost no time evoking cowboy mythology with his “wanted dead or alive” rhetoric that similarly demonized and in a way trivialized the presumed mastermind of the evil attack (the recent film Cowboys and Aliens finishes the merger of the two mythologies).

End-time mythological fantasies are not a safe way to think about the real world. Norway will reel from the blow she has felt, but will still be the open country they want; to some extent they will be the stronger because they have discovered the possibility of love in the depths of hate.  The UK has many problems, but terror has not knocked them off their perch, except insofar as they have been swept into the American mythology in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And then there’s us.  We have sacrificed the lives of over four thousand of our own servicemen and women in Iraq alone (a country that had nothing to do with the attacks) and left an estimated 100,000 wounded, many of them yet to be counted as the post traumatic stress of the meaningless brutality comes home.  Over 7,000 coalition troops — more than twice the total who died in 9/11 — and close to two million Iraqis and Afghans have died in the ensuing violence.  Nearly $4 trillion is down the drain in the two theaters.

Looked from another perspective, Anders Breivik completely failed in his mission to start a revolution and choke off the tolerance of Norwegian society.  The various attacks on the UK have had some “success,” without causing any fundamental changes.  But Osama bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He not only devitalized our economy and many of our democratic freedoms but damaged America’s credibility in the world.

It is not too late to restore a good measure of that credibility.  As one peace scholar voiced shortly after the attacks: “terrorism cannot be condoned, but it can be understood,” that is, not turned into an apocalyptic myth that condemns us to endless war and the sacrifice of our freedoms in the name of “security.”  This is not who we are.  As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 comes up, why don’t we defy the terrorists by strengthening, not weakening, our democratic institutions with the principles of nonviolence? What is stopping us, the American people, from rejecting Islamophobia and the police-state mentality into which we fell when we were first reeling from the shock of 9/11?  Eileen Egan refused to live in fear.  Shall we go on refusing to free ourselves from it?  Let us reignite the courage and idealism with which we once inspired the world.

By Michael N. Nagler and Stephanie N. Van Hook

The law enforcement entities dealing with the appalling massacre in and around Oslo last Friday have been understandably preoccupied with the question, did the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, act alone. That is an important question for them, but it does nothing to help the rest of us understand and respond to this tragedy.

Let us assume that he acted alone, in the legal sense that unlike Timothy Mc Veigh of the Oklahoma City bombing he did not have accomplices. Acting alone does not mean that he acted in a vacuum. Thus we have to understand the climate in which he thought and acted. Just imagine if the media were asking instead, or in addition:

1. What is being done to reduce messages in the surrounding culture that are known to predispose a person to act out in rage?
2. What is the official discourse saying or doing to counteract this pressure?
3. What are we doing to raise awareness about nonviolent alternatives to retribution and security?
4. What are we doing to reduce hatred within and among people?
5. What are we doing to prevent weapons and knowledge of their use from being readily available and normalized?
6. What are we doing to show that these acts are not “senseless” but can be understood and prevented in very large measure—without employing the violence that further instigates them?
7. What kind of reporting is happening to make people feel safer and to show an image of the human being that is not selfish, violent, enraged and murderous?
8. What are we doing to educate people against far-right “Christian” extremism?
9. What are we doing to inspire people to imagine a future better than violence?
10. What will we learn from this tragedy?

Right now, the answer to all of these questions would be, basically nothing. And that does not bode well for our security.

Once Breivik was in custody it very soon came to light that he is a right-wing extremist “Christian” obsessed with the “danger” of Islam, and as such part of a growing trans-European movement. The most interesting feature of this movement–and here the press must be credited for pointing it out–are the uncanny similarities (uncanny if you don’t know how violence works) between the rhetoric of a manifesto he authored and/or signed and that of his opposite number, Osama bin Laden, even down to referencing the Crusades, though of course from opposite viewpoints. Apparently fundamentalisms have more in common with each other than they have with the discourse of rational people on their respective “sides.” There is no question that since 9/11 the “war on terror” meme has become the dominating mythology–I use the word advisedly–that has kept us in a posture of indefinite warfare–and that this posture perpetuates the very dangers we are seeking to avoid.

Unfortunately, Secretary Clinton stepped into this trap when she lost no time declaring, before the identity of the perpetrator was even known, that “We must…bring [them] to justice” — the rhetoric of the war on terror.  We know, unfortunately, what “justice” means in this setting, because we saw what it means just recently in the murder of Osama bin Laden.  It means unvarnished vengeance, and thus a guarantee that the cycle of violence will continue.  As a U.S. commander said in Iraq a year ago, “We are making terrorists faster than we can kill them.”  Does this sound like security to you?

But when we speak of a climate in which Breivik and others like him are operating, we must recognize that it has an even deeper cause than the reciprocal terrorisms invoked by the “war.”

Violence has, to bring in an analogy from science, a ‘background count.’  From the early days of nuclear science Geiger counters were used to record the level of radioactivity in a given area.  To know how much ionizing radiation an object is giving off one has to subtract the amount that the device is picking up from the surrounding environment.  Similarly, hate has a background count.  And it’s getting worse.  Notice the changing affiliations in the trans-European xenophobia — at first they supported Islamists against Jews, further back that they supported Communist Russia against China, and then switched.  This shows that the underlying motive is unspecific hate.

Why aren’t we asking, “Who or what is creating an atmosphere of egotism and hate in our culture?”  Unfortunately, because we already know the answer, and do not want to hear it.  Social scientists from every relevant discipline have been telling us for decades that the worsening parade of violent imagery in our mass media definitely and inevitably produces more violent mind-sets and thus more violent behaviors. To try to piece together the motivations of a deranged person — which, along with trivial details like the number of shots fired, etc., is often the preoccupation of the media — is an exercise in futility.  Deranged minds are by definition beyond the reach of reason.  But that does not mean we cannot understand what’s driving them — or do anything about it.  Terrorism across the board would go down to the extent that the pervasive dehumanizing imagery of the commercial mass media would go down.  Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has shown that the very same video games used to prime Army recruits to shed their inhibitions against killing are the ones being pulled off the shelves of game stores by young people everywhere.  Any one of us who persuades a child not to buy such games and him or herself abstains from patronizing violent television, games and movies — I realize this means almost all of it — will be showing the way to reduce terrorism.

So while we recoil in horror from what Breivik did and how he thinks, we have to realize that our culture provided him with the mind-set (including a low image of human life), the weapons, and a convenient ideology.  It would be sheer hypocrisy to neglect these causes of the problem — and dangerous folly.

Terrorism of this particular kind — xenophobic fundamentalism under cover of religion — would go down if we stop electing leaders who rely on it for their popularity.  Terrorism itself, in any stripe (and yes, I am among those who include war) would go down if we would turn our backs resolutely on the ‘entertainment’ and other forms that rely on violence for their popularity.  This gets us down at last to the real issue.

Germany’s Angela Merkel did rather better than our Secretary of State in calling on us to “unite against hatred.”  We can do this.  Our institute, the Metta Center for Nonviolence, has launched Love Your Enemy: a Campaign to Reclaim Human Dignity Through Nonviolence. It is our contribution toward counteracting both the discourse of Islamophobia and the underlying acceptance of violence.  We invite you to join us.

In any case, we can all raise the issues outlined above and act on them even if — or especially because — our political figures and the official discourse of the media apparently never will.  Our children expect nothing less.  If we want to give them a secure world, we really have no other way.

Dear Friend of Nonviolence,

I woke up this morning with a feeling of satisfaction. I woke up knowing that the work of the Metta Center— to which I have dedicated myself head, heart and hand—is making a positive impact in the lives of people worldwide. These people that come through our doors or send us mail every week attest to a great change that is taking place: more and more people are searching for a deeper meaning in their lives, and instead of turning toward short-lived, immediately gratifying experiences, they are dedicating their lives to ensure that nonviolence become an integral part of every culture, every institution and every decision as we move into a future that is otherwise uncertain. For all those who face injustice, who want to put an end once and for all to violent responses to conflict, and the embarrassingly low image of the human being projected at us from the mass-media, as a friend in Nicaragua told us today, “Your words encourage us all to keep going in this struggle.” Yes, we must continue forward in our greatest freedom struggle yet, the freedom from hatred and ultimately the freedom from violence.

Even with this keen desire to make change through nonviolence, surprisingly people still know little about its power. When we told a woman from whom we sought to rent an office in Petaluma (we’ve moved north!) that we work on nonviolence, she shot back, “what kind of violence?” Many people still associate nonviolent action with the same, outworn techniques and images the press serves up: either you are in the street with a sign, getting arrested, or you are a saint. At the Metta Center, we can share the knowledge, strategies, techniques that have emerged over a long course of research, practice and action, making Metta well-poised to articulate nonviolence within an entire field of study and action, ranging from the assessment of a certain technique as it would strategically fit the purposes toward a working solution to violence to a broad vision of how to embrace nonviolence in one’s daily life, ultimately becoming not just a person who sometimes uses nonviolence, but a nonviolent person (and this is hard work).

Nonviolence is more than the absence of violence; it is the transformation of a negative drive into a positive force for change, that when harnessed under discipline, can generate the power to change the world. To this end, Metta has witnessed the birth of many new and exciting projects over the past year. We have revamped our 10-week summer youth internship, making this year one of the most exciting, as one of our young people is fresh in from Cairo, Egypt! We have invested in webinar technology, with the capacity to host online conferences for up to 1,000 people at a time, which will help us spread the message about nonviolence principles at an ever-increasing speed. We are growing a series of workshops with the National Peace Academy’s certificate program, an online program in nonviolence with Teachers Without Borders, and Metta’s own offering of retreats for educators, corporate employees, and issue-based activists. This year, we will also begin the exploration to offer a “Pilgrimage to the Land of Gandhi” to visit one of Gandhi’s ashrams in India and other sites of nonviolence interest where we can learn from them. All of this not to mention our ever growing (and ever diversifying) resources of talks, videos, study-guides, and books.

Most importantly, we have launched a nationwide campaign. “Love Your Enemy: A Campaign to Reclaim Human Dignity Through Nonviolence,” was established to offer an alternative to the fear and hatred roused by 9/11 (and this year we are at the 10th anniversary). We resist by learning about nonviolence, practicing reconciliation, and unplugging from the mass-media’s harmful messages. We offer a solution by working with people to make 9/11 not only a day of remembrance, but a day for a new chance at a peaceful tomorrow—to remind people that we are in this struggle for the long-run, and that nonviolence requires nothing less of us than a deep commitment to building a better future. (Please visit www.mettacenter.org/mc/projects/love-your-enemy for more information about getting involved in this campaign.)

This work is supported by generous individuals who believe in the power of nonviolence. We thank everyone who has supported us in the past. Today, we are asking you to make a commitment to ensure that our organization can continue to grow and expand, to ensure that we can make more of our resources available on a wider basis, helping us to change the culture of violence we are facing everyday.

· Make an offering of a monthly contribution of any amount, from $5 dollars to $500 dollars. These contributions help to offset the everyday costs (they can add up for a small organization working on budget).  It is a great help.

· Join our ‘Beloved Community Subscription Service’ and receive everything we write and create in your inbox as we make them for $100 a year.

· Support a project, such as a workshop or retreat, making it possible for us to offer scholarships to those not in the local area.

· Become a Sponsor of Metta by making a three-year commitment toward a project.

All contributions can be made at our website (and have a look at our 2010 Annual Report while you are there). You can also mail your check (made out to the Metta Center at 1730 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berkeley, CA 94709).

According to an ancient Upanishad, “You are what is your deep driving desire; as is your desire, so is your will; as is your will, so is your deed; as is your deed, so is your destiny.”

I hope that you draw inspiration from our dedication and our passion for nonviolence, and that you continue to stay in touch. We are looking forward to hearing your story, too.

Best wishes,

Stephanie Van Hook, co-Director

PS: We are pleased to offer anyone who donates more than $100, while supplies last, their choice of a beautiful pashmina shawl or men’s scarf with our logo and an inspiring quote from Gandhi.

Petaluma, CA.