Satyagraha

A friend pointed out that this was not only the 10th anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks, but also the 105th anniversary of the start of Gandhi's Satyagraha campaign.

And people were wondering, how can we resist with the state so powerful, and we don’t have any weapons, you know, because every time, even today, when somebody talks about resistance, everybody thinks in terms of weapons and war and fighting. And that’s when grandfather explained to them that we don’t need any weapons of mass destruction. We have the ability to respond to this nonviolently and with self-suffering. And that’s what he encouraged the people to do. And they came out into the streets with love for the enemy. You know, grandfather didn’t tolerate any hate for the enemy or any anger for the enemy. He said nonviolence has to be complete nonviolence. We have to have love and respect for the enemy, and that is the only way we can overcome them. And that’s what he showed in his work.   -- Arun Gandhi

I tend to be dubious of political programs that rely on saintliness, given the short supply. Nonviolence seems so impractical, until you compare it with the track record of violence.

Nonviolence entrepeneurs

Followup to The Organization of (Non)-Violence

Reader bhyde introduced me to the useful term "violence entrepreneurs" (originating with political scientist Charles Tilly, I believe). I'm somewhat pleased and somewhat annoyed (and not very surprised) to find that some ideas that I had come up with on my own were already somebody's longstanding research speciality. These violence entrepreneurs specialize in building boundaries, polarizing populations, and heightening conflict. A growth industry.

More-or-less coincidentally, I happened recently to see a film about some nonviolence entrepreneurs: the documentary Encounter Point, which is about a variety of Israeli and Palestinian activists who are trying to establish dialog, reduce the level of hatred and distrust, and generally promote the opposite of what a violence entrepreneur would do.

Encounter Point is an 85-minute feature documentary film that follows a former Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother who risk their lives and public standing to promote a nonviolent end to the conflict. Their journeys lead them to the unlikeliest places to confront hatred within their communities. The film explores what drives them and thousands of other like-minded civilians to overcome anger and grief to work for grassroots solutions. It is a film about the everyday leaders in our midst.

Some of the people featured belong to a group called the Bereaved Families Forum. These are parents whose children have been killed in the course of the conflict, and somehow managed to get beyond the natural feelings of anger and hate and confront the larger problem. They seem to wield an awful moral authority, bought at the maximum price, and are deploying it as best they can.

The film left me somewhat unsatisfied. I wanted to be able to dive deeper: what sort of process did these people go through to arrive at their current mission? How did they manage to transcend the parochical emotions of hte conflict and approach it as a broken system? An 85-minute documentary can only give hints of answers to this question. I also wanted to see a broader picture: how are these peace efforts being met in the larger context of Israeli and Palestinian society? Is any headway being made? Are these isolated efforts of a few individuals, or is this potentially a broader movement? Again, not something a short documentary can answer. Efforts at peace and reconciliation are not new; and these aren't the only ones. The film's website includes a list of over 100 organizations working in some way for peace, justice, and human rights in the context of the conflict. So, with all this goodwill, what's the problem? Why haven't they won yet? Or, a better question, what would it take for these efforts to be stronger, to prevail over the forces that lead to violence and conflict?

One quote that leaped out at me was when one of the activists said something like "The politicians want to use our grief as an excuse for further violence, and we have to stop them". So there is a realization that prolonging the conflict is in some people's interests. But what does it take for everyone to realize that, to decide that the real enemy is not the other side, but the violence entrepreneurs on both sides?

The organization of (non)violence

Both Gandhi and the Palestinans have come up in conversation here recently, so I have to post this: The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank, by Gershom Gorenberg (who blogs at South Jerusalem, which is where I found this). It takes a look at the (fairly dim) prospects of Palestinians taking up the strategy of nonviolence that was successful in the hands of Gandhi and King. He finds a few figures in the Palestinian world who might have taken up that role, but for the most part any movements in that direction have been sabotaged, either by more violent Palestinian factions or by Israel. Saints are in short supply.

This fits into my own intermittent thinking on polarization and the dynamics of conflict. Peacemakers are a threat to those who proft from war on both sides. I previously noted that there are standard intra-group conflicts between warmakers and peacemakers. In this particular case, because of the control one side has over the others' affairs, warmakers in Israel were able to reach across the conflict and sabotage a potential peacemaker on the other side.

The mechanics and dynamics of group solidarity and group conflict seem endlessly fascinating, the kind of thing that raises interesting questions that most people can't even recognize as issues. It seems perfectly natural that Israel and Arabs should go to war, or France and Germany should go to war. But "Israel" and "the Arabs" are composed of individuals, who have or ought to have their own goals and agendas. What makes people ready to sacrifice themselves for a group? Suicide bombing is only an extreme case; every solider has been convinced (or coerced) to risk his life for the good of a larger whole. The extroardinary level of social cooperation in humans is matched in the animal kingdom only by the social insects. They too, spend a lot of their energy on war. But the level of cooperation in ants and bees has a genetic explanation. Human groupings, for war and more noble purposes, rely on something else, something that can make abstraction seem worth dying for.

Reflecting on my current sniping with Gagdad Bob and his minions. My mild efforts to tone down the conflict have been unsuccessful. We are bitterly insulting each other, the internet equivalent of war, and over what? Abstractions called "left" and "right", which can't even be defined consistently. Nonetheless they are terribly real in their effects. So is the abstraction called "God", another cause of many a war:



Which led me to this piece, which I remembered reading when I was 12 years old or so.

The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.

The years have not diminished its shocking clarity.