Over at Killing the Buddha (which I also co-edit), we’ve got a really valuable conversation today between the radical of many causes Abe Osheroff and the activist/journalist Bob Jensen. It’s a reflection on intransigence, futility, and the failures of hope, which should be familiar themes to anyone who has put any time into struggling against the principalities and powers of injustice:

Robert Jensen: I’ve heard you use the term “long-distance runner” before. Is that the key—the notion that we have to be in it for the long haul and not expect things to change dramatically all at once?

Abe Osheroff: Not the long haul—the endless haul.

RJ: What’s the difference between long and endless?

AO: Oh yeah, there’s a difference. We will never win the fight. We will influence the players. We may be able to make life better in many ways. We will blunt the shit that the government and the corporations throw at us. But we’ll always be coping with things. My view is that there’s no destination for the train I’m on. No destination, just a direction. No final station on that train. There’s no final destination, no socialist society where we will all be able to sit back and have a wonderful life. Bullshit!

RJ: No utopias.

Read the rest at Killing the Buddha.

Among Catholics eager to stop and prevent war, matters can quickly become theoretical. The church, after all, generally teaches some form of just war theory, which allows for the possibility that war might be necessary and even right under certain circumstances. But in my interview with Andrea Bartoli of the Catholic lay organization Sant’Egidio, published today at The Immanent Frame, he suggests that the theoretical question has gotten more attention than it deserves. The gospel preaches peacemaking, and Christians should be hearing—and acting on—that call first and foremost. Practice matters more than theories.

NS: Since Augustine, Catholic tradition has upheld just war theory. Does Sant’Egidio see itself, like the Catholic Worker movement in the United States, as a challenge to that tradition? Or does its approach to peacebuilding fit within the just war framework?

AB: Augustine discusses peace about 2,500 times and war a couple of dozen. Everybody discusses what Augustine said about just war, but they usually fail to recognize that he speaks about just peace much more. Sant’Egidio focuses on the parts of Augustine that focus on peace. War is a possibility. War is a human choice. But from our perspective, the Christian position cannot be but a peaceful one, both in terms of being peaceful ourselves and in terms of being peacemakers. We don’t begin with theories. We work for peace because, to the poor, war is the worst of all conditions—Andrea Riccardi called it “the mother of all poverty.” Rather than holding a theoretical argument in favor of, or against, war, we need to be bound to practice. We’re more concerned with orthopraxis than orthodoxy. We want to be orthodox, but we have an even greater desire to actually practice the gospel.

Read more about Sant’Egidio’s remarkable work in our  full interview at The Immanent Frame.

Last week on WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, there was a nice interview with Gene Sharp and his assistant at his office. In the interview, he discusses his take on nonviolent action, what’s going on in Iran, and far-left critics who think he’s a government agent. The segment can be streamed off of the station’s website.

Professor Colman McCarthy, the Founder and Director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. once commented that, “The most revolutionary thing anybody can do is to raise good, honest and generous children who will question the answers of people who say the answer is violence.”

I was reminded of his words a few weeks back.  I was sitting in my dining room, talking to my friend Jeremy and his family about my work at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.  We were discussing the gun lobby’s current campaign to allow individuals to carry loaded handguns in public spaces across America—churches, parks, schools, government buildings, child day care centers, metro transportation, airports, etc.—when Jeremy’s nine year-old son Colin piped in.

“There are people who think you can prevent violence with guns?” he asked.

“That’s right,” we told him.

“Cuckoo,” Colin replied, tracing rings around his ear with his finger.

I was pleasantly surprised.  It’s not that Colin isn’t a great kid; he is.  But he’s been obsessed with guns since he was a baby.  I distinctly remember a boy of two—denied toy guns by his parents—running around with a vacuum cleaner tube and “shooting” everything around him.  Now, a few years later, he’s graduated to air guns, water guns and violent video games like Commando 2.  This fascination with firearms that boys seemingly acquire upon exiting the womb is both awe-inspiring and disturbing.

So how does this young boy, who delights in shooting his guests with his Nerf N-Strike Maverick Blaster rifle, have the maturity to grasp the enormous danger that real guns represent to our society?  Why is he is able to embrace the thrill of violence in fantasy while rejecting it completely in reality?

Professor McCarthy says, “Peace is the result of love,” but cautions, “If love was easy, we’d all be good at it.”  He also warns, “If we don’t teach [our children] peace, someone else will teach them violence.”

I must have had my own good influences because, like Colin, I grew up with a gun obsession.  One of my prized possessions as a boy was a plastic M-60 rifle, complete with unfolding tripod.  My friends and I loved to get our toy guns out and play “war” around our elementary school.  I was also in the first generation of video gamers, and played all the shooters:  Postal, Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Soldier of Fortune, you name it.  And movies?  Die Hard, Predator, Assault on Precinct 13—I loved all that stuff.

Yet I never had the desire to own any real firearms, or mimic the “protagonists” of these games/movies in real life.  I was a big fan of Marvel Comics growing up and it always struck me that Captain America never carried a gun—the bad guys he brought to justice did.  Today, as a husband and father, I have become a passionate advocate for nonviolence.

Professor McCarthy’s dream is to add comprehensive peace studies programs to the curriculum at the nation’s K-12 schools and colleges.  “Every member of Congress was in first grade someplace,” he says.  “Maybe if we taught them a little bit about Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the first day, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.”

That’s a goal that’s worth working for, but until it is realized, we should all endeavor to learn from kids like Colin.

As Mother Theresa once said, “So often people say that we should look to the elderly, learn from their wisdom, their many years.  I disagree.  I say we should look to the young: untarnished, without stereotypes implanted in their minds, no poison, no hatred in their hearts.  When we learn to see life through the eyes of a child, that is when we become truly wise.”

Amen.

As a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as through essays in many newspapers and websites, Ira Chernus has spent decades bringing the tradition of nonviolence to bear on concrete current events, particularly American and Israeli foreign policy. What drives him most of all, though, is his fascination with nonviolence as a profound intellectual tradition, and the passionate thinkers whose minds and imaginations inspire the more visible work of public, performative activism.

On a recent trip to New York, Chernus took the time to talk with me about his work. He has written several books, but the one we discussed most of all is American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which is available in print through Orbis Books, as well as for free, in its entirety, on his website. Culled from the lecture notes of the course on nonviolence he has been teaching for years, it is a definitive chronicle of the major thinkers who shaped the distinctly American lineage of nonviolence.

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Here’s how it starts:

Waging Nonviolence: Why did you decide to write American Nonviolence as an intellectual history of nonviolence, specifically, as opposed to a history of movements and actions?

Ira Chernus: Part of the reason is just because that’s what I’m good at. If I’m good at anything, I’m good at ideas and being able to understand the underlying logic of a body of writing. Most of the major figures in the history of the nonviolence movement were not philosophers and certainly were not really theorists. They were leaders of movements that had to get jobs done. But in the course of their work, they offered a very, very rich body of ideas, but they didn’t lay them out systematically. Gandhi’s collected writings are, what, 93 volumes or something; he was writing at an incredibly rapid rate, and each thing he wrote was largely designed to meet the needs of a particular moment. He wasn’t thinking about laying out the overall intellectual architecture of his thought. He was not primarily a theorist. The same is true for Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, and any of the great leaders in the movement. But, as I read their work, I found that there was a very rich underlying intellectual structure there, and I believe—and maybe it’s just a leap of faith—that one of the things any successful movement needs is a strong intellectual structure.

For more, listen to the interview above.

On Sunday, voters in Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych as their new president, marking an end to the Orange Revolution. Yanukovych, for those who don’t remember, was the pro-Russian former prime minister who was ousted by the mass nonviolent movement after a rigged vote in 2004.

While I’m not one of the conspiracy theorists who see the “color revolutions” as orchestrated by the US, the election of Yushchenko was undoubtedly in the interest of the West, as was the Rose Revolution in Georgia the previous year.

Yushchenko had long been an advocate of economic “liberalisation,” according to an interesting piece by Niall Green, and oversaw the privatization of state-owned assets in the 1990s while he was head of Ukraine’s central bank.

His continued pursuit of these “free market” policies as president – including pushing for the country’s ascension to the World Trade Organization and turning to the International Monetary Fund for a massive $16.5 billion emergency loan (with all the usual strings attached) in 2008 – led to worse conditions for Ukrainian workers and a serious decline in the standard of living for the majority of the population during his tenure.

While some believe that Yanukovych has come around on these neoliberal economic policies in recent years, everyone seems to be arguing that he will also reorient Ukraine back towards Russia.

This story of dashed hopes after nonviolent movements or the leaders they install embrace toxic economic reforms – sometimes with little or no input from the public – is unfortunately not new. A tale similar to Ukraine’s could be told about South Africa after Mandela’s election, Georgia after the 2003 Rose Revolution, and Poland following Solidarity’s victory at the polls in 1989, as I document here.

Some responded to my article very critically, saying that we shouldn’t expect these movements to right every wrong. And I completely agree. Every movement is human and will make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that we should remain silent about where nonviolent movements fall short. That is the only way we will avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.

Therefore, when a nonviolent revolution pushes more people into poverty, which Martin Luther King wrote is a form of violence that “hurts as intensely as the violence of the club,” we shouldn’t shy away from critiquing them.

Last weekend I had an opinion piece published in the Melbourne Age, a major Australian daily newspaper.  It was responding to the recent scandal of gunsights used by Australian, New Zealand and U.S. soldiers having been inscribed with Biblical references.  This story gave me the opportunity to clarify both the fact that Christianity is intended to be nonviolent, and that nonviolence is never passive in the face of injustice or oppression.

There were a number of comments after the original article, and the discussion has continued in the letters to the editor.  Two objections were raised in Monday’s newspaper, and two responses to the objections appeared in Tuesday’s paper.

It’s a rare event when nonviolence (let alone Christianity!) gets a run in the mainstream media in Australia.  This was a source of great encouragement.

It also made clear just how far we have to go in explaining and communicating nonviolence.  Two things in particular frustrated me.

1. It doesn’t seem to matter how often you say that nonviolence is not passivity, people will continually object on the assumption that nonviolence is passive.

2. It might seem pedantic, but the pervasive editing of the correct ‘nonviolence’ to the incorrect ‘non-violence’ is a demonstration of the kind of misunderstanding nonviolence receives in mainstream culture.

Have a look and see what you think.

On what should be a sad occasion, I’ve found myself uplifted by the many great remembrances floating around the internet of Howard Zinn’s long and productive life. They serve as a reminder that a life well lived is to be celebrated, not mourned. His single greatest accomplishment was not writing A People’s History, but living an active life worthy of inclusion in such a book. He stands as an equal among the American heroes he wrote about for his organizing and speaking out against the Vietnam War, which, on one occasion, as Daniel Ellsberg recalled, led to him being beaten and arrested by police.

I was fortunate enough to have my own interaction with Zinn a few years ago. I was in the midst of discovering the power of nonviolent social movements and had come across his famous article “A Just Cause, Not A Just War,” published a few months after Sept. 11. Being somewhat blinded by my own passions and interests, I seized not upon his wonderful message that war is inherently unjust and must cease no matter the cause, but on this one little statement:

There might be situations (and even such strong pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil would be justified.

It struck me as an unfortunate disclaimer from a man I wholly admired, in an article I otherwise loved. Furthermore, I was not aware of any justification for violence given by Gandhi or King. So I wrote him and asked for an explanation. To my surprise, he wrote back:
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An Australian peace activist named Sheik Haron (pictured to the right) was recently charged with writing hateful letters to families of fallen soldiers. Jarrod McKenna reflects on this incident as a reminder to activists to “love the enemy”:

The world is ready for an activism which loves its enemies. As A.J. Muste put it, “There is no way to peace — peace is the way.” The early Christians were called “people of the Way” because they lived the way of Jesus. If the sharing of our faith is to have any integrity, Christians who say “Jesus is the Way” must embody “the Way of Jesus.” The same is true of peace activists (Christian or otherwise). As Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would often say, “Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

As a human being living in a time of tremendous challenge to the earth’s resources, I am quick to apply this message to the issue of sustainability. According to nonviolent principles, just as we love the soldiers and their families, we must also love those who pollute and degrade the earth. When we stand up for the earth, we might remember that most of us have polluted, and still pollute, in some ways, such as fossil fuel transport, using plastics, and heating our homes.

At this time, quickly and urgently, we are needed to build systems in which we can coexist with each other and with the earth. Sustainability is a form of peace–peace for our biosphere. Along the way to that lofty goal, when we refuse the pollution, still we may love the polluter. That love may be motivated by the vision of the reconciliation when we all will live together in peace on a healthy earth.

A New Yorker interview with Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, revealed that anti-whaling protesters have acquired the same type of non-lethal weapons used against them by Japanese whalers:

WATSON: …The Shonan Maru No. 2 actually attacked the Steve Irwin on three different occasions, using LRADs (Long Range Acoustical Devices) and water cannons.

KHATCHADOURIAN: LRADs are non-lethal weapons that have been used to disperse protesters, by soldiers in Iraq, and by ships trying to ward off pirates. They project high-decibel audio waves at their targets. Will you be getting one, too?

WATSON: We have one. We just have not used it—yet.

KHATCHADOURIAN: What gadgetry are you using?

WATSON: We have photonic disrupters to disorient the harpooners. They are lasers designed not to cause damage, but to blind temporarily, like flashbulbs. We have a few other tricks we have not used yet, and we continue to hit them with our non-toxic, biodegradable, organic stink bombs.

Last week, I asked if the Sea Shepherd’s aggressive anti-whaling tactics, which are known to include property damage, could still be considered nonviolent. But this new information about their non-lethal arms cache makes their position on violence rather clear and raises many new questions as well.

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The Guardian’s Bibi van der Zee wrote an interesting piece about the collision off the coast of Australia last week between the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd boat and Japanese whalers. The activists claim they were rammed by the whalers and nearly drowned, which if true, is certainly quite horrific. But van der Zee raises an important point regarding the Sea Shephards own past:

Frankly, if the Sea Shepherd boat was rammed by the whalers, it’s hard to get too hot under the collar about it when in the past Sea Shepherd have openly admitted deliberately ramming and sinking whaling boats themselves. Violence (against property or people) breeds violence. Once you step outside the legal framework you lose all protection for yourself.

This, of course, touches on one of the biggest questions facing nonviolence: Is property damage really nonviolent? I tend to agree with van der Zee that it isn’t, especially when it stands the chance of hurting people. But even when it doesn’t, the effect of largescale property damage tends to work against the perceived righteousness of the cause. What do you think?

Buddhism is often thought of as the exception. It’s a religion without gods (at least in some forms), to the chagrin of those who want to define religion as something along the lines of “belief in gods.” By the same token, as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism take the blame for some of history’s most savage violence, we tend to think of Buddhism as the sole nonviolent world religion.

A new book by Mark Juergensmeyer and Michael Jerryson (both of UC Santa Barbara’s religious studies department), Buddhist Warfare, reveals a Buddhism that is more complex than that and, the authors claim, more human. Jerryson writes, over at Religion Dispatches today:

Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence.

Before his fieldwork between 2006 and 2008 in Thailand, Jerryson thought of Buddhism as basically peaceful too. He actually went there to study Buddhist peacemaking. But what he found were militarized monks carrying guns and stockpiling weapons. It caused him to question the sources of his knowledge about the religion back home:

It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as mystical.

Yet these mystical depictions did not remove the two-dimensional nature of Western understanding. And while it contributed to the history of Buddhism, this presentation of an otherworldly Buddhism ultimately robbed Buddhists of their humanity.

Buddhist violence is certainly not limited to Jerryson’s experiences of it. For decades, Sri Lankan Buddhists have been carrying on a brutal civil war against a Tamil insurgency. For thousands of years, Buddhists have led and fought in armies, just as adherents of other religions have.

Does, Jerryson’s phrasing forces me to ask, violence equal humanity? Do we only know that our image of someone is human if it includes the specter of cruelty? I suspect that there is some truth to this. Just as Augustine of Hippo believed that faith begins with the recognition of one’s own sinfulness, Gandhi’s form of nonviolence was built on an intensive awareness of the temptation to violence within oneself. The power of his example suggests that even radical nonviolence depends on the recognition that violence is integral to human nature.

In the hands of Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, this book is not meant to be a glorification of violence, or an excuse for it. (Earlier in his career, it should be noted, Juergensmeyer wrote a fine little book called Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution, and he has since written important works on religious violence around the world.) Instead, they insist that we focus on Buddhist violence partly in order to fully appreciate the challenge of the alternative. Buddhist Warfare is likely to hit home most of all among American-born Buddhists, who have enjoyed the selective vision of a religion in which violence seems happily absent.

Before it fades too far into the past, I wanted to note a few things about the commentary that President Obama’s Oslo speech elicited because it reveals certain problems that will undoubtedly have bearing on events in the New Year. Obama’s speech was organized around the assertion that he, as a head of state, and we, as human beings, must grapple with two truths: a “hard truth” that governments “will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified” and another truth that “no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy” and “is an expression of human folly.”

This paradox has troubled thoughtful people through the ages, but it is not the paradox of our time. The puzzle of our time is just as weighty but more practical and, in a sense, has begun to dissolve or transform this older paradox. The puzzle of our time is that military might has sometimes spectacularly succeeded and sometimes spectacularly failed in achieving political objectives in the twentieth century and yet most people, certainly most Americans, and every American President, persist in assuming that physical violence is generally more effective than other means in times of emergency. The President spoke of just wars in his speech, inviting a critique on moral grounds. But most commentators sidestepped the issue of the morality of war and focused on the related but fundamentally different claim that violence is necessary because sometimes only force can stop the violence and evil of others.

Conservatives like Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly were quick to praise the speech because to their great relief it seemed to finally acknowledge the truth that American military might is the most important factor in the security and stability of the world. The President asserted that we have “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms” and for conservatives this seemed like a surprising sea-change, which they hoped was a result of him maturing into his role as commander-in-chief. (Though his axing of F-22 fighter jet development and billions for other weapons systems leaves them skeptical that he really adequately values our military power.)

Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks both wrote approvingly of the Christian brand of realism that Obama seemed to offer, which they understood as reflecting the proper balance between embracing the necessity of the use of the force and the idea that we should feel sad and dirty about it when we do. But realist commentators like Stephen Walt pointed out that the President was either disingenuous in his claim that American military power should underwrite international law or, as secular realists would expect, simply exempting the United States from the notion that international law should be enforced. After all, he clearly did not mean that the United States should be held accountable by the rest of the world for breaking international law or violating existing rules of conduct.

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In an earlier post, Ladd Everitt posed a provocative question: “Can peace be obtained through anarchy?” He answered: Maybe someday in the distant future when humanity becomes perfect, but not anytime soon because society needs protection from neo-Nazis. Wait, what?

If government is such a great protection against Nazis, then why did the Nazi Party pose its greatest threat to humanity when it was democratically elected into control of a national government? Democracy birthed the Nazi menace; it didn’t prevent it. In fact, anarchists would say that it’s exactly this kind of centralized political structure, with citizens willing to follow the commands of whoever wins power, that creates the opportunity for aspiring authoritarians to seize control and do their worst.

But Everitt isn’t the first to raise this specter of ‘ultimate evil’ to justify government and its inherent abuses. It’s a common scare tactic regularly deployed by politicians to legitimize all sorts of loathsome policies. Most recently, in his Nobel Prize lecture, President Obama sounded the Hitlerian alarm in a shameful attempt to justify his expansion of war in Afghanistan. Obama’s predecessors, Bush and Cheney, were also quite fond of this brand of rhetorical fearmongering, attempting to legitimize the “War on Terror” and the imminent threat of the “Axis of Evil.”

Nevertheless, humanity may always be faced with destructive or greedy opportunists who aim to harm others for their own personal gain. The anarchist solution is, quite simply: Don’t put them in charge. Better yet, don’t put anyone in charge, because history has demonstrated, over and over again, that power corrupts. Even the most well-intentioned peacenik will either be transformed into a scheming, power-hoarding monster by the political process, or will never gain a position of power in the first place. With such widespread support for powerful leaders, it’s easy to see why the most destructive people on the planet are running amok, wielding governmental and corporate power, and controlling entire regions of the globe. The results speak for themselves, none of which would be possible without millions of acquiescent adults enabling their leaders, eager to follow their every command.

But how could an anarchist society resist power-seekers who want to dominate and control others? There is only one way:  more anarchists. There is strength in numbers, and the more the better. Perhaps Everitt misses this possibility because he makes the common mistake of imagining anarchy without anarchists. That is, his hypothetical scenario of an anarchist society doesn’t seem to have many anarchists in it. Instead, it’s full of roving fascists (which seems more appropriate for a hypothetical society of roving fascism, no?).

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I began my recent dip into Slavoj Zizek’s Violence with a question that he raises but never quite answers: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” What he offers, instead, is an analysis of the violence that goes unacknowledged simply because we are so accustomed to it, because it is woven into the systemic order of society’s power relationships. But the crucial importance of this question to those of us invested in the theory and practice of nonviolence—forced to notice that it threatens to undermine our entire enterprise—kept me looking for other texts to help me think through it. At the end of that post, I promised a turn to Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which is what I’ll do now.

Butler is, says Cornel West on the dustjacket, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today.” A professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, she has played a defining role in the poststructural analysis of gender and sexuality, bringing Hegel, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others to bear on the foundational questions of human identity. I quote West most of all because I’ve mainly encountered Butler on panels alongside him, and their remarkable repartee has conditioned some of the most riveting intellectual experiences of my life. West plays the prophet and Butler the meticulous artificer, whose inventions tread along subtle gears to astonishing results. Together, they give me hope that the disciplined imagination still has something to say to our ever-more technocratic way of doing politics.

Frames of War is a series of essays on the horrific violence of US power during the last Bush administration. The book’s subtitle is When Is Life Grievable?, and it points to the heart of Butler’s argument: the senselessness of this violence stems from an inability (or unwillingness) to grieve for the human beings who fall victim to our weapons. Implicitly, we don’t even seem to consider those people really alive. She calls for “a new bodily ontology” (Butler’s prose is infamously technical) that allows us to recognize how intertwined we are with them. Other human beings are inevitably woven into, as she puts it, the conditions that make life livable for us, and consequently we have obligations to them. Grief would be a start.

What suggested to me the relevance of this text to the issue at hand was the discovery, while perusing it in Bluestockings bookstore, of the problem that orients its final chapter, titled “The Claim of Non-Violence.” It is a restatement of Zizek’s unanswered question:

I was asked by the philosopher Catherine Mills to consider an apparent paradox. Mills points out that there is a violence through which the subject is formed, and that the norms that found the subject are by definition violent. She asks how, then, if this is the case, I can make a call for non-violence.

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