by Terry Messman

Martin Luther King, Jr.; with poster for Poor People’s Campaign; photo by Horace Cort; courtesy AP

Sometimes, in the midst of protest marches, a feeling springs up unawares, a feeling that Martin Luther King’s last dream can never die. His visionary dream of a Poor People’s Campaign remains an unsurpassed blueprint for the edifice of human rights we are still waiting to construct, the resurrection of the Dream.

For many years, everyone from well-meaning educators to White House officials has called on Americans to honor the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., by volunteering in community projects such as fixing up schools and community centers, removing graffiti and collecting food. These various proposals for a day of volunteerism to honor the civil rights leader fall tragically short of King’s dream of economic and racial justice, and an end to war. For, in his last days, Martin was on the move to Washington, D.C., not to participate in a feel-good photo-op at some community renovation project, but rather to launch a showdown with the federal government — a government that, even under the leadership of liberal Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had refused to remove the burden of poverty from the backs of the poor.

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by B.D. Nageswara Rao

“Famous Vegetarians”; artist unknown; courtesy of herenow4you.net

Abstract

Gandhi’s message of nonviolence, and the methods he devised to practice it, are widely acclaimed to be of historical significance. However, his altruism seems contrary to the central tenet of Darwinism that survival is optimized for those who are adapted to the environment, i.e. those who are best prepared for war have the best chance of survival in a world where disputes are settled through violence. Nevertheless he chose nonviolence as an inviolable constraint in addressing all types of human problems and proclaimed, “While there are causes for which I am prepared to die, there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.” His formulations of Salt Satyagraha, civil disobedience and non-cooperation movements are striking examples of profound analytical thought analogous (in my view) to Einstein’s formulation of the Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein was confronted with the experimentally proven fact that the velocity of light in vacuum is unchanged in a moving frame of reference. With this inviolable constraint he reformulated the laws of Newtonian mechanics by invoking a previously unthinkable requirement that mass, length and time change in a moving frame of reference, and thereby deduced the principle of mass-energy equivalence (E=mc²). Thus the Special Theory of Relativity was born, and a new era emerged in physics. Gandhi’s principle of nonviolence offered an alternative to war in solving global disputes, and thus ushered in a new era in human history. His message has influenced other reformers around the world, notably Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. That it is not widely embraced is an indication of the fact that, functionally, human beings are basically driven by primitive Darwinian pressures generated by the reptilian brain, and have not allowed themselves to be persuaded adequately by the capabilities of the human brain which gave rise to ethics, altruism, and egalitarianism in our societies.

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by Sean Chabot

Editor’s Preface: An article by Nathan Schneider, which we posted 9 January, drew attention to a controversial essay by Sean Chabot and Majid Sharifi, which we also posted on the same day. Nathan’s article drew a flurry of comments, which bear consulting at this link, and to which Sean Chabot responded. Sean was also kind enough to answer some of our own questions and all of his comments have been edited into the following Guest Editorial. JG

First of all, I want to say that I am grateful to all those who have commented on the article I co-authored with Majid Sharifi, thus initiating a dialogue with critics as well as supporters. It is by sharing our relative (and therefore inherently flawed) glimpses of truth that we improve our individual and collective experiments with truth. I will try to reference the main disagreements and agreements in the hope of providing further clarity.

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by Amitabh Pal

Gene Sharp, 2012; photographer unknown; courtesy of tarata21.com

Gene Sharp is perhaps the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive. His work has served as a how-to manual for activists in a swath of countries across Eastern Europe and Asia. For instance, From Dictatorship to Democracy and The Politics of Nonviolent Action helped inspire the Serbian student movement that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Sharp writes, “Nonviolent action is possible, and is capable of wielding great power even against ruthless rulers and military regimes, because it attacks the most vulnerable characteristic of all hierarchical institutions and governments: dependence on the governed.”

Sharp drafted From Dictatorship to Democracy at the invitation of a Burmese activist. He was smuggled into Burma to assist in courses on nonviolent struggle for those resisting the military regime. He was in Tiananmen Square shortly before the tanks started rolling in. He has traveled to Israel and Palestine a number of times to disseminate his ideas. He was also invited into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, this time by the governments themselves. He consulted with ministers on the nature and requirements of the campaign that they were using to peacefully secede from the Soviet Union. The three governments also used as a guide his book Civilian-Based Defense. The three countries became sovereign with almost no loss of life.

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by Sean Chabot and Majid Sharifi

We vividly remember our hopeful sentiments upon witnessing thousands of unarmed people taking to the streets in the Middle East, starting with Iran’s Green Movement in June 2009 and culminating with Egypt’s uprising in January 2011. Like others, we felt heartened by the promise of nonviolent social movements in countries with populations that have long suffered from oppressive domestic governments and destructive foreign interventions. Soon, though, we realized that the people’s courageous struggles were in danger of perpetuating, rather than transforming, the human relations and global paradigm at the root of their suffering. We feared that promising manifestations of nonviolence would end up reproducing various structures and forms of violence. Unfortunately, we were mostly right in both cases. Although the Green Movement displayed the Iranian population’s capacity for resistance in the face of repressive domination, it did not bring down the Ahmadinejad government or contribute to improved social and economic conditions. And while Egyptians successfully overthrew the Mubarak regime, they eventually brought to power a president and a political party that have failed to enhance the quality of life and dignity of poor people in Egypt. What happened?

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by Nathan Schneider

Gene Sharp collage; artist unknown; courtesy of Socialistplatform

There is something of a genre of critique, one sometimes lobbed at Waging Nonviolence, which considers the discourse of nonviolence to be wholly subservient to the U.S. foreign policy interests, and/or the CIA specifically. It’s a line of attack that has generally baffled us, since anything worthy of the name “nonviolence” would certainly run counter to the doings of the largest and most pervasive military machine in the history of the world. Occasionally there seems to be some truth in these critiques, but it’s hard to know where that begins and the conspiracy-theory nonsense ends.

Now I think I know where to begin to draw the line. The reason is a new paper published in the journal Societies Without Borders in September by Sean Chabot and Majid Sharifi. It’s called “The Violence of Nonviolence: Problematizing Nonviolent Resistance in Iran and Egypt.”

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by Jeff Rudick

Editor’s Preface: In 1970, the year this article was written, the Catholic Worker Farm was in Tivoli, New York, not far from Bard College, a highly regarded liberal arts institution, as it still is. Indeed Bard was close enough for students to walk to the farm, and not only did many do this regularly, but some came to live at the Worker summers and holidays. The poet and theater director Jeffrey Rudick was one such student, and a valuable addition to the community. He was  “looking for a project” and Dorothy encouraged him to “get yourself to Delano and write about it for the paper”, as he recalls her saying. The Worker could be said to have “raised the social consciousnesses” of many generations of students, not just those from Bard. JG

Poster c. 1970, artist unknown; courtesy of University of Michigan

I joined the strikers in Delano, now well into their fifth year of a frustrating battle, for little more than five weeks, and hardly claim to know in a real way what their hardship was. But my impressions from the experience were and are strong and lasting, and I would like to share some of them.

I bussed up from Bakersfield to Delano through the flat commercial roads interspersed with long rows of vines. Delano appeared an ugly flat monotonous town devoid of woodland, crammed with the commercial clutter that plagues the landscape of America. I was later to learn that the railroad, which slices through the town, the planted orange trees and palms, and the long fields of vines on the outskirts were the only pleasing diversions for the eye.

As I sat on the bench in front of the small Greyhound station, I felt increasingly defensive. Many drivers in the traffic I was watching turned their heads and eyed me suspiciously as they passed by. I became conscious of my long hair as in so many small towns; I wondered if they knew I had come to join the strikers. I stepped into the nearest phone booth and leafed through the book for the number of the strikers’ headquarters. It was nearly dark and the last rays of the setting sun were fading, a dark shadow of rusted red becoming more prominent, until, as I reached the U’s there was a large red blotch as of crusted blood over the United Farm Workers’ listing.

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by World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates

“Knotted Gun”; sculpture by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, 1988; at UN building, New York.

Violence is a preventable disease

No state or individual can be secure in an insecure world. The values of nonviolence in intention, thought, and practice have grown from an option to a necessity. These values are expressed in their application between states, groups and individuals.

We are convinced that adherence to the values of nonviolence will usher in a more peaceful, civilized world order in which more effective and fair governance, respectful of human dignity and the sanctity of life itself, may become a reality.

Our cultures, our histories, and our individual lives are interconnected and our actions are interdependent. Especially today as never before, we believe, a truth lies before us: our destiny is a common destiny. That destiny will be defined by our intentions, decisions and actions today.

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by Gandhi Information Center, Berlin

In the name of humanity,

for the sake of all civilians threatened by war crimes,

especially women and children,

and for the benefit of Mother Nature suffering from war preparations and warfare:

We, the undersigned, plead for the universal abolition of conscription as one major and decisive step towards complete disarmament.

We remember the message of 20th century humanists: “It is our belief that conscript armies, with their large corps of professional officers, are a grave menace to peace. Conscription involves the degradation of human personality, and the destruction of liberty. Barrack life, military drill, blind obedience to commands, however unjust and foolish they may be, and deliberate training for slaughter undermine respect for the individual, for democracy and human life. It is debasing human dignity to force men to give up their life, or to inflict death against their will, or without conviction as to the justice of their action. The State, which thinks itself entitled to force its citizens to go to war, will never pay proper regard to the value and happiness of their lives in peace. Moreover, by conscription the militarist spirit of aggressiveness is implanted in the whole male population at the most impressionable age. By training for war men come to consider war as unavoidable and even desirable.” (1)

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by Dorothy Day

Editor’s Preface: Dorothy, of course, wrote innumerable anti-war articles for The Catholic Worker. So why choose this one to accompany the Gandhi Center in Berlin’s “Manifesto against Conscription and the Military System”, also posted today? Of all of Dorothy’s pacifist articles, reportage, statements of principle, this article is filled with a certain righteous anger that she did not often allow to seethe through her other CW writings, a righteous indignation that intensifies the moral purpose and message. JG

Is it Soviet Russia who is the threat to the world? Is it indeed? Then may we quote from Scott Nearing’s The Way of the Transgressor? (1) “What nation today has a navy bigger than all other navies combined? The USA. What nation today is steadily adding to the only known stockpile of atom bombs? The USA. What nation today is tops in the development of buzz bombs, jet planes, bacterial poisons and death rays? The USA. What nation today is spending the largest sums on military preparations? The USA. What nation today is permitting representatives of the armed forces to take over the direction of domestic and foreign policy? The USA. What nation today is arming its neighbors (in Latin America), intervening in the internal affairs of Europe and Asia, threatening the world peace and security and rapidly surrounding itself with a black curtain of anxiety, suspicion and hatred? The USA.”

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