The Power of Non-violence

PRINT THIS PAGE

The Power of Non-violence

Martin Luther King, Jr.

June 04, 1957

From the very beginning there was a philosophy undergirding the Montgomery boycott, the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. There was always the problem of getting this method over because it didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning. We had to use our mass meetings to explain nonviolence to a community of people who had never heard of the philosophy and in many instances were not sympathetic with it. We had meetings twice a week on Mondays and on Thursdays, and we had an institute on nonviolence and social change. We had to make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence. This method is nonaggressive physically but strongly aggressive spiritually.

NOT TO HUMILIATE BUT TO WIN OVER

Another thing that we had to get over was the fact that the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.

Then we had to make it clear also that the nonviolent resister seeks to attack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system. And this is why I say from time to time that the struggle in the South is not so much the tension between white people and Negro people. The struggle is rather between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will not be a victory merely for fifty thousand Negroes. But it will be a victory for justice, a victory for good will, a victory for democracy.

Another basic thing we had to get over is that nonviolent resistance is also an internal matter. It not only avoids external violence or external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. And so at the center of our movement stood the philosophy of love. The attitude that the only way to ultimately change humanity and make for the society that we all long for is to keep love at the center of our lives. Now people used to ask me from the beginning what do you mean by love and how is it that you can tell us to love those persons who seek to defeat us and those persons who stand against us; how can you love such persons? And I had to make it clear all along that love in its highest sense is not a sentimental sort of thing, not even an affectionate sort of thing.

AGAPE LOVE

The Greek language uses three words for love. It talks about eros. Eros is a sort of aesthetic love. It has come to us to be a sort of romantic love and it stands with all of its beauty. But when we speak of loving those who oppose us we’re not talking about eros. The Greek language talks about philia and this is a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends. This is a vital, valuable love. But when we talk of loving those who oppose you and those who seek to defeat you we are not talking about eros or philia. The Greek language comes out with another word and it is agape. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you come to love on this level you begin to love men not because they are likeable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them and here we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. It is the type of love that stands at the center of the movement that we are trying to carry on in the Southland—agape.

SOME POWER IN THE UNIVERSE THAT WORKS FOR JUSTICE

I am quite aware of the fact that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as a unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God. There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice and so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship. And this was one of the things that kept the people together, the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.

God grant that as men and women all over the world struggle against evil systems they will struggle with love in their hearts, with understanding good will. Agape says you must go on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness but you must keep moving. We have a great opportunity in America to build here a great nation, a nation where all men live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. We must keep moving toward that goal. I know that some people are saying we must slow up. They are writing letters to the North and they are appealing to white people of good will and to the Negroes saying slow up, you’re pushing too fast. They are saying we must adopt a policy of moderation. Now if moderation means moving on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness, then moderation is a great virtue that all men of good will must seek to achieve in this tense period of transition. But if moderation means slowing up in the move for justice and capitulating to the whims and caprices of the guardians of the deadening status quo, then moderation is a tragic vice which all men of good will must condemn. We must continue to move on. Our self—respect is at stake; the prestige of our nation is at stake. Civil rights is an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our civilization in the ideological struggle with communism. We must keep moving with wise restraint and love and with proper discipline and dignity.

THE NEED TO BE “MALADJUSTED”

Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word “maladjusted.” Now we all should seek to live a well—adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, “Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, “All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: http://www.salon.com/2006/09/13/kurlansky_nonviolence/

WEDNESDAY, SEP 13, 2006 04:30 AM PDT

A history of nonviolence

The author of "Cod" suggests that the world's most dangerous idea could have derailed the American Revolution, the Civil War and possibly even World War II.

MARK ENGLER

•  Share 3
 
•  0
 
 
 
• 0
 
 

TOPICS: NATIONAL SECURITY, BOOKS, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

George Orwell was never much for pacifists. He wrote of his nonviolent political adversaries during World War II: If they “imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.” To Mohandas Gandhi, his Indian contemporary and fellow anti-imperialist, he accorded only a grudging and critical respect. Yet because he viewed many pacifists as specialists in evading unpleasant truths, Orwell did admire Gandhi’s unflinching honesty with regard to the Holocaust: When asked about resistance to the Nazis, Gandhi argued that the Jews should have prepared en masse to sacrifice their lives in nonviolence — something Orwell regarded as “collective suicide” — in order to “[arouse] the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”

No doubt Orwell would have been skeptical of the contentions advanced by author Mark Kurlansky in his new primer, “Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea.” Compared with the standard histories offered in American public education, these arguments can safely be described as contrarian: “The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain,” Kurlansky writes; “it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews.”

“For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War,” he explains further, “there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals.” Joining the chorus of dissidents, Kurlansky attempts to shed light on the epic failures of warfare to secure peace, as well as to cultivate a new understanding of “the way in which things actually happen” in history.

Author of previous works including “Salt: A World History” and “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” Kurlansky has established himself as a pioneer in the field of micro-history, producing idiosyncratic investigations into small topics that bloom into tales of broad general interest. In his new book, he shows a command of a sweeping body of pacifist history, and he makes centuries of material flow into an overview that is far more combative than its protagonists’ peaceful ways might suggest.

---

---

A standard narrative of nonviolence as a modern political instrument — especially in the United States — might start around the time of Henry David Thoreau, who, sitting in jail for war tax resistance, first argued that civil disobedience could undermine the legitimacy of the state and provoke a crisis in governance. The story might mention “peace churches” like those of the Quakers and their creation of a pacifist way of life based on Jesus’ teachings. But it would soon rush forward to figures like Gandhi, who pioneered the strategy of how to apply nonviolent disruption on a mass scale, and to Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi’s most famous American importer.

In Kurlansky’s history, however, Jesus himself is a relative latecomer to the scene. Well before him there appear individuals like Mozi, the Chinese rebel-philosopher who lived from about 470 to 390 B.C. Mozi was an opponent of Confucius who championed the concept of “mutual love” and was exasperated by the prevalence of warfare: “To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold,” he argued. “This the rulers of the earth all recognize and yet when it comes to the greatest crime — waging war on another state — they praise it!”

Kurlansky spends the bulk of his short book progressing from ancient China to the dawn of the 20th century, profiling groups that rejected the “ideology of warfare.” The ranks of the war resisters include early Christians, the French Cathars, Protestants like the Anabaptists, Mennonites and Quakers, white Americans in the abolitionist movement (African-Americans tended to be more open to supporting violent slave rebellions), and the international peace organizations of the 19th century.

Statements of nonviolent doctrine appear in each of the major world religions, and Kurlansky prepares a succinct and useful survey of them. The Hindu principle of “ahimsa,” or “not doing harm,” is an old tenet that Gandhi would later find significant and that is taken to extremes by the Jainists, who “keep their mouths masked to insure that they do not accidentally inhale a tiny insect.” Kindred sentiments range from Buddhist prohibitions on taking life, to Taoism’s invocations of water wearing away stone, to Mohammed’s complete ban on violence in his model society at Mecca, to Moses’ “Thou shalt not kill” and Jesus’ “Turn the other cheek.”

Early on in the book the distinction between two closely related ideas, pacifism and nonviolence, becomes important. “Pacifism is passive,” Kurlansky acknowledges; it is a “state of mind” that rejects war and aggression. “Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing”; it uses tactics such as marches, boycotts, strikes and sit-ins to provoke social conflict to advance a cause. The author purports to be concerned with the latter. But in fact the groups he traces are generally active only in the sense that they might preach against war and face sometimes severe persecution for their refusal to take up arms. They are not nonviolent in the manner of the lunch-counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, which forced a confrontation around desegregation.

By the end of the book, it’s clear that Kurlansky himself is a pacifist, although he never admits it outright. While he may well be supportive of active nonviolence, time and again his attention returns to pacifism. His primary concern is to “end war” in toto, not to use nonviolent persuasion to advance other causes. Tactical innovators in nonviolence consistently receive short shrift: Thoreau is among the many theorists he mentions only in passing. Gandhi and Martin Luther King receive just a few pages each, and it would be difficult for a reader to understand their distinctive contributions. The subtitle’s promise of a tutorial notwithstanding (Kurlansky’s “25 lessons” are scattered throughout the text and only enumerated explicitly in an appendix), there is little in the book of concrete usefulness for a modern-day practitioner of nonviolence seeking to engage in creative social disruption.

The book has rather more to offer a conscientious objector heading for a draft interview. Kurlansky can be heavy-handed at times, especially when he’s drawing parallels between his lessons from history and our present state of war. (When he uses historical examples to show that warmongers will inevitably denounce nonviolent critics as immoral traitors and will always claim to have God on their side, the implications for today are plenty clear without him calling out Karl Rove and President Bush by name.) Yet Kurlansky can also be a compelling narrator, willing to dive into age-old debates without intellectual hesitation. At the core of “Nonviolence” lies a series of “What if ?” scenarios questioning whether the major wars of U.S. history might have been averted. Many of the book’s arguments were famously foreshadowed 25 years ago in Howard Zinn’s war-resister-friendly “A People’s History of the United States.” Still, they remain rare and relevant in our current political discussion. Once the guns start firing, Kurlansky observes, debate about the necessity of a war ceases, at least for a time. To that we can add: Once a war is enshrined and justified in the history textbooks, popular reappraisal will be long in coming.

The American Revolution, from the pacifist’s perspective, “was a brutal civil conflict” where “[c]ivilians would run in terror at the approach of either army. Homes were sacked and women were raped.” Worse yet, it was arguably superfluous. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson years afterward, “The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced.” Kurlansky concludes from this that colonists could have expelled the British by continuing a program of nonviolent protests and acts of economic resistance like the Boston Tea Party.

The same quotes from Adams appeared not long ago in Jonathan Schell’s “The Unconquerable World,” although Schell used them only to say that, since the revolution had been completed before military engagement commenced, the war was therefore one of self-defense against recolonization. Kurlansky goes much further in suggesting that the war was altogether unnecessary. This is a bold proposition, something that could no doubt keep a conference of historians indoors debating through a sunny weekend. But it is also an important challenge to America’s founding myth, opening the door for a wider reinterpretation of who we are, and what we might become, as a nation.

Kurlansky goes on to take issue with the idea that the Civil War was an effective means of ending slavery. The Union Army, of course, did not set out to free the slaves. Such a cause would not have been well received in the North as a justification for the conflict. President Lincoln pronounced that his objective was “not either to save or destroy slavery If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” When the Emancipation Proclamation finally came, it cynically applied only to rebel territory and not to border states within the Union that permitted slavery, like Maryland. Could the abolitionist movement of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison have won a more decisive end to slavery without the war? We can’t know. It is worth noting, though, that the freedom ultimately afforded to Southern blacks by the war proved limited, and it took a nonviolent movement, a century later, to secure any genuine protection for their basic civil rights.

As a rejoinder to pacifism, no one is cited more frequently than Hitler. But even with regard to World War II Kurlansky makes some provocative proposals. The claim that the war was launched to stop the Holocaust only became widespread years after the war ended. “Neither Roosevelt, Churchill, nor most of all Stalin wanted to make the war about saving the Jews,” Kurlansky writes, “because, as with freeing the slaves, going to war to save the Jews would not have been popular.” Despite urgings from groups like the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Allied leaders refused to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz because, they said, “We have a war to win.”

It’s not hard to think of objections to Kurlansky’s reading of this war. He argues that nonviolent resistance in Denmark proved far more effective at saving Jews than did militaristic uprisings in other countries. True, the Germans succeeded in deporting only about 400 of Denmark’s 6,000 Jews, while in the Netherlands, where there was armed resistance, over 100,000 members of a Jewish community of 140,000 were killed. But certainly the Nazis might have made a more concerted effort if the Danish had a larger Jewish population — and if their army was not preoccupied with fighting a war on multiple fronts. Moreover, Kurlansky contends that only in the isolation and brutality of wartime did Hitler launch the “final solution”; he had previously entertained ideas of merely deporting all Jews to Madagascar. Be this as it may, it remains fanciful to think that the fate of Jewish Europeans would have been rosy had fascism progressed unchecked by military force.

What is missing from the book is just the sort of reckoning with the price of nonviolence that Orwell respected in Gandhi. “If you are not prepared to take a life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way,” Orwell wrote. Yet Kurlansky ultimately dodges the question of how the spread of fascism could have been stopped without the force of arms. He never sketches a strategy of nonviolent resistance that might have sacrificed many thousands of lives to stop the Nazis. Absent this, the alternate history he implies seems unrealistically bloodless in a way that hard-nosed advocacy of nonviolence need not be. After all, the war itself required millions of sacrificed lives and also ushered in the age of nuclear war. However grotesque the demands of nonviolence might be, they might still compare favorably.

Kurlansky’s arguments are valuable not because they are always airtight, but rather because such contentions are rarely considered at all. It would never cross the minds of most Americans to question the necessity of the patriots taking up arms against the British or U.S. soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy. Given that our government was all too easily able to obtain support for launching its current war, and that Iraq is unlikely to be our last military adventure of the 21st century, this is surely a costly failure of imagination.

Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be reached via the web site http://www.democracyuprising.com.

MORE MARK ENGLER.

Protest as Terrorism? Worth a Read.

Protest as Terrorism?
The Potential for Violent Anti-Nuclear Activism
ROBERT FUTRELL
BARBARA G. BRENTS
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This article examines the potential threat of terrorism toward the Nevada Nuclear Test Site
and the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository by domestic protest groups,
particularly anti-nuclear activists. The analysis is based on the history of direct action antinuclear
campaigns against the facilities, particularly the Nevada Test Site, and suggests that
violence as a form of protest, particularly the type of violence that is aimed at jeopardizing
human safety (as opposed to violent destruction of property), is very unlikely. It is argued that
the normalized relations between authorities and protesters that occurred at the peak of
direct actions is critical to maintaining the nonviolence that has characterized activism at
the facilities. But, the current climate of heightened government scrutiny and repression
toward various types of perceived terrorist threats may affect future forms of protest and
engender violent responses on both sides.

Keywords: terrorist; anti-nuclear; social movements; Yucca Mountain; Nevada Test Site;
normalized protest