Mark Kurlansky: Nonviolence

I have a bunch of books that I've read and collected quotes from, mostly waiting for me to get around to annotating them. Let's start with Mark Kurlansky's Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006, Modern Library). The book is a very useful, powerful even, meditation on nonviolence (and violence) throughout history.

The first point is that nonviolence isn't a particularly modern idea (pp. 25-26):

One of history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace. The state must make war, because without war it would have to drop its power politics and renege on its mission to seek advantage over other nations, enhancing itself at the expense of others. And so a religion that is in the service of a state is a religion that not only accepts war but prays for victory. From Constantine to the Crusaders to the contemporary American Christian right, people who call themselves Christians have betrayed the teachings of Jesus while using His name in the pursuit of political power. But this is not an exclusively Christian phenomenon. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism -- all the great religions have been betrayed in the hands of people seeking political power and have been defiled and disgraced in the hands of nation-states.

After discussing Martin's refusal to fight in 336 (p. 27):

But others refused service, too, including Martin's friend Victricius. The Church addressed this Christian urge toward conscientious objection later in the century, declaring that a Christian who had shed blood was not eligible for communion for three years. Thus did the Church acknowledge an objection to warfare, but not an insurmountable one. Then in the fifth century an Algerian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, wrote the enduring apologia for murder on the battlefield, the concept of "just war." Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, declared that the validity of war was a question of inner motive. If a pious man believed in a just cause and truly loved his enemies, it was permissible to go to war and to kill the enemies he loved because he was doing it in a high-minded way.

Kurlansky discusses Islam's founding and first taste of power (p. 34-35):

Like Jesus, [Mohammed] had no intention of founding a new religion but wanted to bring the spiritual values of monotheism to Arabs. . . . Mohammed's approach shunned abstract debate and encouraged pragmatic solutions. He always emphasized negotiating solutions, and by tradition there is tremendous emphasis on negotiation in Muslim history. Mohammed's attempt at a perfect society in Mecca enforced a complete ban on violence, which made Mecca prosper as a center of trade. During the hajj, the required pilgrimage to Mecca, the faithful Muslim was not allowed to carry weapons, even for hunting, nor to commit any violence, including words spoken in anger.

Islam, an unusually open faith whose early adherents came from many backgrounds, including Judaism, began to change after 622, when Mohammed and his followers moved from Mecca to Yathrib, a town 250 miles to the north, which was renamed al-Medinah -- the city. . . . But the establishment of Medina had an effect on Islam not unlike that of Constantine and Rome on Christianity. It was not that Mohammed was interested in conquest and empire like Constantine, but Medina had become, in effect, a state -- territory that had to be defended when it was attacked by men from Mecca who vowed to destroy it, and in 625 they almost succeeded. The defense of Medina, in several major battles, began Islamic military history and included the first Muslim-Jewish conflict, in which Mohammed massacred an armed Jewish group that rose against him. By the seventh century it was already an old pattern: the religious doctrine of peace meets the power politics of state, the rules are bent for the "just war," and once the first few doses are administered the state becomes an addict that will tell any lie to get its narcotic. War is simply the means. The real narcotic is power. As Hungarian writer György Konrád said of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, "Men can invent few libidinous fantasies more enjoyable than those of world domination." The African-American poet Langston Hughes called the leading nations "the nymphomaniacs of power."

This leads us to the Crusades, and Pope Urban II (p. 38-39):

Urban's speech became for the West what the tenth-century Hamdanid sermons became for the East, a textbook model for rallying the troops. It contains all of the traditional lies by which people are convinced to die and kill.

The enemy is evil -- in this case despicable. We, on the other hand, said Urban, have God on our side. It was an Augustinian just war. Those who did not support the war should be and would be singled out as immoral for failing to support the cause -- just as in every war those who refused to fight have been vilified by the warmakers. Even questioning a war must be attacked as a sign of suspicious weakness. In June 2005, White House adviser Karl Rove accused the Democrats, because they were questioning the war in Iraq, of wanting to "offer therapy and understanding to our attackers." The fact that no Iraqis had attacked the United States was irrelevant. The point in 2005, as in 1095, was that a failure to hate the enemy, once an enemy had been declared. was unacceptable.

On the Crusades (p. 43):

The Crusades were about power, not religion. And the Muslims understood this. Initially, they began looking for ties and seeking negotiations with the four new Mediterranean kingdoms the Christians had established in the Middle East. But slowly they built their own war propaganda machine. Just as the Christians established a term for their enemy -- the Saracens -- the Muslims began calling all the Christian intruders al-Frani, the Franks. Clerics began teaching that defeat at the hands of the Franks was God's punishment for their failure to carry out their religious duties. And one of those duties was jihad. By reviving the culture of jihad the Saracens were able to build a counter-Crusade and drive out the Franks. It has happened throughout history: peoples who go to war tend to become mirror images of their enemy -- another lesson.

More on how the Crusades resonate over history (p. 44):

Most warmakers try to claim that theirs is a holy war, a just war, that God is on their side, because their cause is just. In the United States the often-repeated inanity, "God bless America," though technically a request, is generally used as a declaration, God blesses America. And war is seldom far behind such assertions -- a holy war at that.

It is not surprising that the counter-Crusade and its war cries continue to echo in the Muslim world. Islamic militants from Palestinian Hamas to Libya's Muammar Qaddafi use Crusade and counter-Crusade imagery in speeches to rally the faithful. What is more surprising is that in the West, where the Crusades represent a humanitarian atrocity, an unconscionable act of aggression, a military failure, and one of the worst mistakes in the history of international relations, they also remain a model. Images of the Middle Ages and the Crusades in the movies, video games, and toys by corporations such as Disney steep children at an early age in the culture of warfare and killing. Urban's rallying cry has been copied over and over again. Contemporary right-wing American evangelists such as Billy Graham call their campaigns "crusades." In 2001, when U.S. president George W. Bush announced his "war on terror," his words echoed the messages of Pope Urban II. He even used the word crusade. Though George W. Bush may not even have known who Urban II was, Urban's famous speech had become the standard way to sell a war.

And then came colonialism (p. 65):

In the vast history of European colonialism, there are few incidents of nonviolent resistance by indigenous people, leaving unanswered the question of whether this would have worked. What is answerable is that nothing they did try worked. The indigenous people of five continents were facing an intractable enemy from a sixth continent that was convinced that they had the right to steal the land on other continents and destroy the inhabitants as peoples and cultures, and, in fact, that this was the proper thing to do. The Europeans had not only the public and the clergy, but the intelligentsia, the thinkers and philosophers, backing up their program of genocide.

Every war starts with a preemptive attack on the desire for peace (p. 76):

Another enduring lesson of history is that it is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable. Once the first shots are fired, those who oppose the war are simply branded as traitors. All debate ends once the first shots are fired, so firing shots is always an effective way to end the debate. The silence may not last for long, as the War of 1812, World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, all unpopular wars, demonstrate, but there is always a moment of enforced silence when debate and criticism are banished and this moment gives the war boosters at least a temporary advantage.

Again (p. 122):

In the United States the antiwar movement flourished until 1917, when the Americans entered the war. Suddenly laws were passed equating the expression of antiwar sentiments with espionage. Those who denounced the war could be sentenced to as much as twenty-five years in perison, yet 142 were sentenced for life and 17 were sentenced to death, though the executions were never carried out. Many thousands were so badly beaten and abused in prison in attempts to force them to change their stance, that at the end of the war only 4,000, about a third of the men who had said they would not serve, remained hard-and-fast conscientious objectors. The government allowed gangs to beat and even tar and feather war resisters and force them to kiss the flag. The American press, like that in Britain, belittled war resisters. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at the Harvard Club, called them "sexless creatures." Antiwar movies and books were banned, while people flocked to prowar propaganda designed to instill hatred of Germans.

Moving on to WWII (pp. 135-136):

There was something odd about the war propaganda machine. Since hatred of the enemy is a cornerstone of selling a war, in World War I the British and American presses, in collusion with their governments, made up the most outlandish lies about German atrocities. The Kaiser was portrayed as monstrous, "a lunatic." German soldiers were said to rape nuns and mutilate children. H.G. Wells, who invented the phrase "the war that will end war," also invested the myth of "Frankenstein Germany," the monster state. A story broken by the Times of London, that Germany had a factory that turned corpses into munitions, was widely believed, though completely fabricated.

But in World War II, when Germany really was led by a lunatic, when Germans did mutilate and murder children, when they had death factories that actually did make soap out of human beings, little fo this was included in the war propaganda. The governments of the Allied nations had not abandoned propaganda. And yet the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews, was a subject rarely touched upon in the media. Contrary to popular postwar claims, the Holocaust was not stopped by the war. In fact, it was started by it. Before the war, Jews had been stripped of their rights and property and in some cases thrown into labor camps along with Communists and political dissidents. Various schemes emerged, including one in 1940, shortly after the war had begun, to deport Jews to Madagascar, a plan that failed because it would have had to be negotiated with France and Britain and this could not be done in wartime. Only in the isolation and brutality of wartime, in 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union in late June, when Germans had millions of additional Eastern European Jews under their control, did Germany dare to turn concentration camps into death camps. And only in January 1942, at a secret conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, did the Germans plan Die Endlösung, the "final solution," killing them all. In the postwar world it became the Holocaust. But in reality the Allies went to war over geopolitical concerns. If they had wanted to save the Jews, the best chance would have been not going to war. But as with the slaves in the American South, there were too few interested in the plight of Europe's Jews.

[ . . . ] For the Allies, stopping the Holocaust was militarily irrelevant, and from a purely strategic point of view this was probably true. But more to the point, neither Roosevelt, Churchill, nor most of all Stalin wanted to make the war about saving the Jews, because, as with freeing the slaves, going to war to save the Jews would not have been popular. The many anti-semites in the Unitd States, Britain, and France would have been, or at least it was supposed that they would have been, resentful of being asked to fight for Jews. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels repeatedly claimed that the Allies were attacking Germany because they were controlled by Jews. Churchill and Roosevelt understood the potency of this claim and did not want to give it credence. Roosevelt had been criticized sharply after the 1936 election, when he slightly opened up Jewish immigration so that of the 300,000 Jewish refugees taken in by the world, who were a mere fraction of those trying to escape, two-thirds were received by the United States. This led to accusations that Roosevelt was "too close to the Jews," or that he was being manipulated by them.

The end of the Cold War (p. 170):

James Madison said, "All governments rest on opinion," and this is no less true of dictatorships than democracies. The problem with dictatorships is that the leadership is more corrupted by power than that of the democratic tyrant who can be voted out. So while the Soviet Union worked hard at maintaining public opinion, if it felt challenged, it usually responded brutally, even though this was unpopular. By the end of the 1980s such a large part of the population had turned against it that the Soviet Union could no longer function. On October 7, 1989, East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker ordered security forces to open fire on demonstrators in Leipzig. Egon Krenz, the man in charge of security, flew to Leipzig to prevent the shooting. Krenz feared that if their security forces opened fire it would mean the end of the regime. Ten days later, after Honecker was forced to resign, the regime did resort to violence. Within a month they were gone and the Berlin Wall was being chipped away by souvenir hunters.

The twenty-five lessons (pp. 183-184):

1. There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
2. Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
3. Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
4. Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
5. A rebel can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
6. Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
7. A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
8. People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
9. A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
10. The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
11. The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
12. The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
13. It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
14. All debate momentarily ends with an "enforced silence" once the first shots are fired.
15. A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
16. Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
17. Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
18. People motivated by fear do not act well.
19. While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
20. Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
21. Once you start the business of killing, you just get "deeper and deeper," without limits.
22. Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation -- which is only dismised as irrational if the violence fails.
23. Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
24. The miracle is that despite all of society's promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
25. The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.

A thin but important book. One of the strongest memories I have of the immediate post-9/11 era was of the vicious slander directed against pacifists. I remember thinking then that even if you thought war justified at that point, you should still show some respect to the pacifists, because sooner or later you'd need them. We need them (or should I say us?) now more than ever.

posted 2006-12-06

I've been reading Mark Kurlansky's remarkable book, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, so its lessons are especially fresh in my mind. One of those lessons is:

A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.

Admittedly, no one would ever argue that the US military occupation of Iraq was ever nonviolent, but many of its articulated goals were. In attempting to counter the insurgency by escalating its violence, the US turned those goals into lies, which finished them off, leaving no moral cloak, just brute force. That in and of itself might have been no worse than what Saddam Hussein had done, but the US had the further advantage of being an alien power assaulting people in their own homes. It should be easy to see why that didn't work.

posted 2006-10-21