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In this special episode of Nonviolence Radio, Stephanie and Michael return to an interview from 2017 with Arun Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, who died at the age of 89 earlier this year. In what follows, we get to revisit some special moments from that program. We hear Arun speak about how his grandfather taught him about the broad and inclusive nature of nonviolence, about the power of anger (properly used) and about Gandhi’s promotion of the charkha (spinning wheel) as a key tool for achieving Indian independence: what might be our charkha today? Arun speaks clearly and tenderly about lessons from his grandfather and these clips from that interview help to bring to light not just Gandhi’s principles, but a sense of his personality.
[From my grandfather] I realized that nonviolence was not just about not fighting, it was about not exploiting, and not wasting, and not harming people in different ways. Actually, it’s passive violence, non-physical or passive violence that fuels the fire of physical violence. So logical, if we want to put out that fire of physical violence, we have to cut off the fuel supply. And since the fuel supply comes from each one of us, we have to become the change we wish to see in the world.
These selections from Arun Gandhi’s interview are followed by lots of good news in the Nonviolence Report.
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Arun Gandhi: So, when people say that nonviolence is not relevant today, what they’re basically saying is that love and respect and understanding and compassion are not relevant today. And if that could be true, then we are doomed.
Stephanie: Greetings everybody. And welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook and I’m here with my co-host and news anchor for the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence.
On May 2nd, 2023 social activist Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, passed away in Kolhapur India at the age of 89. On today’s episode we remember Arun’s wisdom and dedication to his grandfather’s legacy for nonviolence.
Back in 2017, Arun joined us on Nonviolence Radio around the time of the publication of his book, “The Gift of Anger.” We wanted to bring this interview out of our archives to pay him this small tribute. In it, he discusses his views on anger, on the dynamics of nonviolence, the legacy of his grandfather and why it all still matters today. And perhaps, even more so as the years go by.
Let’s turn to the interview.
Arun: Gandhi’s life began in South Africa. The transformation that took place in his life started in South Africa. He had several institutions running there in South Africa. When he decided to go back to India, he wanted somebody to volunteer to stay back and run those institutions and continue with the protests against apartheid.
And so, my dad volunteered to stay there and we lived in the Phoenix Ashram – my dad did all the work, you know, running the institution as well as fighting apartheid and prejudice.
And so, I grew up there, with my two sisters. And we became victims of apartheid and prejudice. The minority whites had really perfected the art of divide and rule. And so, they had divided the Indians, the African and the colored people, and kept them fighting among themselves so that the white people could rule.
The result was that it seemed like everybody hated everybody. And since the Africans were in the majority, they vented their anger towards the Indians. So, we became the butts of hatred from the blacks as well as the whites.
And so, I had this experience growing up, and I was beaten up at the age of 10 by whites and then by blacks. I was very angry and wanted revenge. And that’s when my parents realized that I needed some help; the best they could think of was to take me and leave me grandfather who would teach me how to deal with these things.
So, at the age of 12 we went to India. And it was not especially to leave me there, but it was one of the occasions when the whole family went to India, we used to go every three years to India to connect with the family. But this period, we had been away from India for much longer than three years because of WWII.
The last time we had been to India was in 1939 and then until the end of WWII in 1945 we couldn’t go. So, it was time for the family to go and kind of rejuvenate themselves. And so, we went, and I was left with grandfather.
He had a way of teaching which was very unique. He never sat me down and preached to me or gave me lessons or anything like that. He would use something that happened during the day to convert that into a lesson.
The first lesson that he taught me was about anger and how to deal with anger. You know, we never talk about anger. We don’t teach anybody how to deal with anger. And the result is that we all end up abusing anger. He said that anger is good. It’s not something that we should be ashamed of or deny. It is a good emotion, but what we need to do is to learn to use it constructively and intelligently.
And that’s what he impressed on me. And he taught me how to not react in a moment of madness, but to take time and think about the situation, find out how best you could deal with the issue that caused your anger in a way that would satisfy all the people involved in it. And then find a way of doing it, and do it.
So, that, I think, was a very powerful lesson because Harvard University did a study, and they found that more than 80 percent of the violence that we experience in our lives, either in our personal lives or in our national lives, it’s generated by anger. We just get angry, and we lash out and say things and do things that, sometimes, change the course of our lives completely.
And yet, we don’t have to do that. We can learn to use anger intelligently. We have created a culture of violence because of the materialistic lifestyle that we have chosen. To sustain that materialistic lifestyle, we have created a whole culture of violence. And that culture of violence dominates every aspect of our lives – our speech, our sports, our entertainment, our relationships, even our religion has now become violent.
And so, it’s steeped into all aspects of our life. And it’s that culture of violence that creates conflicts all the time. And you know, we try to find peaceful ways of resolving those conflicts, but what we end up doing is ‘band-aid therapy’. It’s only when a conflict emerges, we try to find the peaceful solution to that conflict.
But until we don’t focus on the entire culture of violence and try to transform that whole culture, we’re not going to be able to create peace in the world. Humankind has been working for peace for generations now, and we are nowhere near achieving peace because we have not attempted to change that culture of violence to a culture of nonviolence.
I would say that the culture of violence brings out all the worst aspects in human beings. Because the culture of materialism, you know, is based on selfishness, self-centeredness, about greed, on our wanting more and more of everything. And so, it’s a very exploitative society. Everybody is exploiting everybody else individually and nationally. And that spawns this whole culture of violence.
What we need to do is to make it – transform it into a culture of nonviolence because nonviolence is based on all the positive aspects in the human being. It’s about love and respect and understanding and acceptance and all of these positive things. So, when people say that nonviolence is not relevant today, what they’re basically saying is that love and respect and understanding and compassion are not relevant today. And if that could be true, then we are doomed.
If we are going to have to live with the negativity and greed and violence and that kind of thing, then there is no hope for mankind. We have to understand what nonviolence is and try to practice it effectively.
Unfortunately, a lot of people just think of nonviolence as the non-use of physical force, that as long as we are not beating up on each other, if we are not at war with each other, we are living in peace. That is not true – because we are committing violence in many different ways, not just the physical violence, but there’s a lot of passive violence that we are committing.
And that was a lesson that grandfather taught me by transforming a little incident with a pencil into a major lesson.
I was coming back from school and I had this little three-inch butt of a pencil in my hand, and I, you know, decided I deserved a better pencil. This was too small for me to use. And so, without a second thought, I just threw the pencil away because I was so sure that grandfather would give me a new one when I asked him for it.
But that evening when I met grandfather and asked him for a new pencil, instead of giving me one, he subjected me to a lot of questions. He wanted to know how the pencil became small, and where did I throw it away, and why did I throw it away, and on and on. And I couldn’t understand why he was making such a fuss over a little pencil – until he told me to go out and look for it.
And I said, “You must be joking.” I said, “You don’t expect me to look for a little pencil in the dark.” He said, “Oh, yes, I do. Here’s a flashlight.” And sent me out with a flashlight to look for this pencil. And I think I spent about two hours searching for it. And when I finally found it and brought it to him, he said, “Now, I want you to sit here and learn two very important lessons. The first lesson is that even in the making of a simple thing like a pencil, we use a lot of the world’s natural resources. And when we throw them away, we are throwing away the world’s natural resources. And that is violence against nature.
And the second lesson is that, because in an affluent society we can afford to buy things very easily, we over-consume the resources of the world. And because we over-consume them, we are depriving people elsewhere of these resources. And they have to live in poverty. And that is violence against humanity.”
And that was the first time I realized that nonviolence was not just about not fighting, it was about not exploiting, and not wasting, and not harming people in different ways. Actually, it’s passive violence, non-physical or passive violence that fuels the fire of physical violence. So logical, if we want to put that fire of physical violence, we have to cut off the fuel supply. And since the fuel supply comes from each one of us, we have to become the change we wish to see in the world.
If we don’t change our attitudes and our behavior and our, you know, relationships with each other, we are never going to be able to create peace in the world.
Stephanie: That was Arun Gandhi, and you’re on Nonviolence Radio. My next question for Arun had to do with the nature of anger and whether somebody can be both nonviolent and have anger within them and in that context that we looked at his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi, could we consider Gandhi an angry person, and yet also nonviolent? Here’s his response.
Arun: Oh yes, he was an angry person. You know, anger is good. It’s not something we should deny or repress or suppress. He was angry, but he had learned to use that anger intelligently. And so, he was able to channel that anger intelligently and do things, and achieve things.
If he wasn’t angry, he wouldn’t bother to fight for India’s independence or for human rights or justice. He would just be quite content with his own life. It was anger that motivated him to do things. So, anger is good for all. I mean, it’s good that we have anger. What is bad is the way we abuse it, instead of using it intelligently.
Stephanie: My next question for Arun Gandhi had to do with the political situation in the United States. How can we understand the anger that’s being generated toward politicians and toward the political system, and what’s taking place? This is what he had to say.
Arun: I think what we need to do, and what I’m sure my grandfather would have done, was not to look at this in isolation. You know, we tend to look at incidents in isolation only when they become a crisis, and we can’t ignore them anymore, that we – like terrorism, for instance. We ignored the incidents that led up to terrorism all these years.
And even now, we still ignore it. And now we are faced with terrorism, and we want to put an end to it. And what do we do? We just send in the Marines and bomb them out. We can’t bomb people who are unhappy and for some reason are showing their unhappiness through violence. We have to sit down and find out, where did we go wrong, and where did we as a society – what do we need to do to change these things?
Now, Trump came into power because of this situation in the country, because of the way the politicians have been exploiting everybody for all these years. And they’ve just gone wild with this whole democratic setup, with the cost of elections going up so much. And then we elect the politicians so that they would do something for the common people.
But once they are elected, and they go into Washington D.C., they’re working for the lobbyists and for the big moneybags. And so, they ignore the poor people.
And what happened was all these poor people who have been ignored by society, by politicians all these years, when factories these closed down and people were laid off and because of technology, things had changed and people couldn’t follow – were not able to accept those changes because of their ignorance.
We didn’t do anything to help them, to re-educate them, to help them economically. We just left them to find their own ways. And, in many cases, they just suffered. I mean, they go out to all these – Appalachia and the inner-city areas and big cities where people are living in misery and poverty and destitution. And you see that in the midst of all the affluence that we have in this country.
It’s natural that the poor people are going to get angry. And when somebody like Trump comes in and starts stoking the embers and saying that, “I am going to do something for you, and I’m going to clean up Washington D.C.,” they fall for it and they elect him. So, the blame for that lies with all the politicians and for all of us, in fact, because we have all ignored the whole situation.
And I am convinced that things like poverty and all the things that affect people at the human level, is not something that can be tackled by the government alone. The government is not capable of working out of compassion. They can do things bureaucratically, but they can’t do anything with compassion.
And that is where people need to come into the picture, where NGOs and others who all come in and try to help the poor people and bring about a change and bring about better understanding and so on.
And that is not being done. We just all, you know, are content to do our own thing, and we say, “Well, eradicating poverty is the government’s job and bringing better relations between Muslims and others is also the government’s job.” The government won’t do anything. We all have to get together and do it, the things.
So, what I’m saying to people today is just protesting against Trump and wanting to throw him out is not going to really help our society. What we need to do is to get down to finding out, why did these people vote for Trump? And what were their problems, and what is their situation, and how can we as people get together and help them?
Stephanie: That was Arun Gandhi, and you’re on Nonviolence Radio. So, my last question for Arun in this interview had to do with the charkha or the spinning wheel within the Indian Freedom Struggle and the way that it granted employment to every single person. It was really the central focus of the constructive energies of the Indian campaign. And the $10 million question of the Metta Center and here on Nonviolence Radio is what is the charkha, what is the spinning wheel, of our movements today? So, I thought I would pose this question to Arun. Here’s what he had to say.
Arun: I think the charkha today is trying to find ways of eradicating poverty and ignorance among people. And there are various different ways. The charkha at that time was relevant because India was in tremendous poverty. And basically, because Britain was taking away Indian cotton to produce cloth in England and sell it back to their colonies.
You know, the reason why Britain became such an industrialized power so quickly from an agricultural economy to industrial economy was because they had their whole colonies to exploit. They would take the raw material from the colonies and process it in England and bring it back to the colonies and sell them at higher prices.
So, when our cotton was taken away, it destroyed our own textile industry which was going on for centuries because it was a small, you know, cottage industry kind of thing. People in communities were producing their own cloth and spinning and all that. And all that was destroyed by Britain taking away the cotton.
And grandfather realized that political independence for India is going to be meaningless as long as economic independence is not achieved. And that’s why he wanted the spinning wheel. So that even little children in the villages could spin and produce their own cloth, and revitalize the cottage industry that was thriving at one time, when they were making hand-loom clothes and providing for the villages.
So, that was very relevant at that time. But that’s not relevant today because, you know, things have changed today, so we have to find different ways.
Now, one of the things that I do now, what I’ve been doing for the last 18 years, is taking a group of people on a Gandhi legacy tour. And we go to India every year. And I have identified 10 amazing programs where individuals have started the program and transformed the lives of millions of people. Just by their dedicated service.
Now, there are different kinds of programs. There’s like SEWA. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of an organization called, SEWA. In Ahmedabad, SEWA was started by one lady, Ela Bhatt, many years ago. And she was giving her own money to very poor women to start their own little business and try to earn something to supplement the family income.
And that grew and more and more women came to her, and then she started organizing things in a better way, and she got more funding. And now, in about less than 40 years or 50 years since she started this microloan thing, she is now covering about 10 million women in India. And now they’ve expanded to Afghanistan and other countries too.
So, she has really transformed their lives. They now had their own cooperative bank, and they don’t have to depend on the commercial banks. And the lives of 10 million women have been transformed.
So, these are the kinds of things. These are the charkhas of today that we need to discover and work for so that we can bring about a change in humanity. Nonviolence empowers us to do things. We don’t have to be helpless, and we don’t have to say, “Well, what can I do? You know, these are the problems of other people, and they have to resolve it. Or it’s not my business, you know.” That selfishness is from the culture of violence.
But when we adopt the culture of nonviolence, then we become more giving and more compassionate, and we look at all the problems within our society as our problems and try to find resolutions of those problems.
Michael: Welcome everybody. I’m Michael Nagler with the Nonviolence Report, facing my usual problem of trying to choose among the many, many nonviolent episodes that are taking place around the world.
So, I think I’d like to start with a quote, actually, from a new book by Bob Van Oosterhout. It’s called, “Understanding Fear and Fear-Based Thinking.”
And in it he says, “The best way to not have any enemies is not to be one.” This reminds me very much of a famous line from the Indic epic, The Mahabharata, where a hero, Yudhishthira, has gone to heaven and presents his credentials to the Indian St. Peter, and he says that his epithet is Ajātaśatru. Which means, “He whose enemy has never been born.”
And they say, “How can you say that? There’s thousands of people who are just trying to kill you. “ And he says,“Well, they may have been my enemy, but I wasn’t theirs.” And let me throw on one more quote which is a very important one to me, ever since I first read it about, oh, 10-15 years ago. It’s from St. Augustine. And he says, “Imagine thinking that your enemy can do you more damage than your enmity.”
Now what these people are all saying, in their various ways, is they’re reflecting on their inner state of being and how ultimately that state is our own responsibility, whatever others may try to do to us. It reminds me of Martin Luther King saying, “I will never let anyone bring me so low as to make me hate him.”
So, in the world of nice quotes, let me give you another one from Pace e Bene which they published last month. A definition of nonviolence that they got from Kathryn Soltis, who’s the director of the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova. And her definition is, “Nonviolence is justice without enemies.”
So, there’s a lot of food for thought in all of that thinking that we’ve just been reflecting on. So, while we’re talking about Pace e Bene, meanwhile, they are gearing up for the Campaign Nonviolence Action Days which, as you may be aware, happen from September 21st to October 2nd. Where they’re going to sound the alarm on climate and connect the dots between racial justice, peace building, economic equity, and environmental healing.
If there’s anything that characterizes the peace movement of today, it is this intersectionality, or the recognition that events cannot be taken in isolation.
So, on the Action Days – Campaign Nonviolence Action Days webpage, they have a very nice quote, “The temperature is rising and so are we.” And by the way, Pace e Bene is seeking an education coordinator. It would be a wonderful job for anyone who believes in peace education and wants to work with a splendid organization.
I want to mention three anniversaries that are rolling around. First, a rather sad one and then two much more hopeful ones. The sad one is that this is the 75th anniversary of what Palestinians call the Nakba or the Catastrophe, where the State of Israel was founded on land that had been occupied by them, by Palestinians.
So, on Sunday, May 14 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, an organization called American Muslims for Palestine, AMP, along with many others, will be leading a rally in Washington D.C. at the Washington Monument.
I might mention in passing that there are now three European cities that have cut ties with Israel, whether they had formal relationships with the State of Israel or not. Liège is the most recent one, and they have just joined Barcelona in Spain, and Oslo in Norway.
And for me, this raises a very interesting question which we can almost never get away from in peace work. And that is when we have an opponent, should we isolate that opponent to show our disapproval or join with them in order to make a kind of discourse community where we can work out our differences. And I think every case has to be evaluated on its own merits.
But I said that there were three nonviolent anniversaries – or violent ones. We’ve gotten rid of the negative one. This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a really iconic change-making book. And that was Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher.
That book had such an impact that I was still teaching at Berkeley at the time, and I invited Fritz to come and talk with us. He spoke to all three of my courses. And I don’t think I’m going to forget that very easily.
Now one of the things the institutions that came out of “Small is Beautiful” and the work of E.F. Schumacher, is the Schumacher College in the U.K. And as you might expect, this is a college which has a large vegetable garden. I mean, had a vegetable garden at the University of Berkeley, but in my years at that institution, I never saw a vegetable that came out of that garden.
But just last year at Schumacher College in the U.K., our friend Satish Kumar points out, “The campus produced 40,000 pounds of veggies.” That’s a lot to put alongside all the PhDs and so forth that they also produced.
This year is also the anniversary of something that took place 65 years ago, and that is the Voyage of the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule was a small yacht that deliberately sailed into the nuclear test zone in the South Pacific. And that event ignited protests that, in fact, led to a partial ban on nuclear weapons testing. And now, the Golden Rule people want to finish the job. It’s now back to the fight for nothing short of nuclear abolition, an idea which, in fact, is being discussed at the UN and elsewhere.
[New Developments] So, carrying on with some more positive developments, the next one will be in the area of restorative justice. Now, the restorative justice approach to mass incarceration is the almost polar opposite of what is usually practiced against that problem of mass incarceration, which is a very real one.
And there is a film called, “Into The Light,” which is based on this program I want to talk about a little bit. It’s called, Bridges to Life. This program has been in existence for 24 years. 55,000 prisoners have graduated from it in 185 prisons and other facilities with the help of a little bit over 3000 volunteers.
So, here’s a couple of quotes from the film. One is, “I became friends with people who experienced my worst actions,” one incarcerated person said. “They didn’t see me as a perpetrator, and I didn’t see them as victims.” It’s that fundamental idea in nonviolence that you see the human being for what he or she is, and you do not see them through a label like, oh, you know, almost anything. Almost any kind of label is going to obscure you a little bit from seeing the person. A lot of food for thought there, but I do want to move on.
There’s another quote I’d like to share with you from another former inmate, “I don’t’ advocate being soft on crime,” he said, “but neither do I believe that locking people up for decades is making the world safer.” Boy, is that ever true.
A couple of years ago, a very interesting article was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist where I published my first nonviolence piece, actually, many years ago.
It’s this article is called, “Peaceful societies are not utopian fantasy. They exist.” That’s by Douglas Fry and Geneviève Souillac, March 2021. Of course, the interest is peaceful societies is more than just anthropological. It’s an attempt to learn from them things that we can learn to make our own world more peaceful. So, power to it.
There is now ongoing an interfaith effort that has been organized by FOR, the oldest peace organization in the country, Fellowship of Reconciliation. And what they want to do is to get us to declare Mother’s Day as a national day of prayer, mourning, repentance and contemplation to solve the crisis of gun violence.
Now originally, Mother’s Day was a day for world peace. That’s what those mothers were about. And that orientation was rapidly lost. And now I’m very happy to say that it’s been refound.
Incidentally, the rhetoric here, a national day of prayer, mourning, and so forth, is reminiscent of what Mahatma Gandhi said about his first nationwide strike in India in the 1920s, that he wanted it to be called a day of prayer.
Now, Catholic sisters all over the world are carrying out the very programs Pope Francis laid out in his document, Laudato Si, which are the opening words of a famous prayer by Saint Francis. So, this is a plea for the Earth. And it’s mostly environmental and gardening and things like that. But in the Congo, some of these Catholic sisters are staying on to help sufferers in conflict zones. So, you get yet another case of intersection. And here’s another one.
The woman who became the first wildlife veterinarian in Uganda in 1995 – she was 25 years old. Her name was Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka. It was a time when the future looked very bleak indeed for wild mountain gorillas who are, of course, very close to us in terms of evolution, and most of them live in southwestern Uganda.
And now I’m happy to say that they’re bouncing back. They’re showing positive growth due to her insight that keeping the gorillas healthy was linked with the health of people in nearby communities.
Here’s a quote from her book, “Walking with Gorillas.” That title could bring up all sorts of images, but she means real ones. And here’s the quote, “As conservation groups, we have to get much more sensitive about the fact that communities have to be doing well before wildlife is to do well. You cannot conserve wildlife in isolation when the people living next to it are so poor.”
There’s another organization doing some good work that I’d like to uplift here. It’s called Yes We Can Peacebuilders. Unlike some of the other groups I’ve been talking about today, this is a relatively new one. And they are dedicated to promoting and teaching nonviolence. Inspiring and engaging people to create nonviolent communities and eventually nonviolent nations and a nonviolent world. So, very much in favor of that.
The nation’s schools are really suffering. And this is something that’s very close to my heart as a career educator. There have been proposals to reduce gun violence in schools that, I think, are worse than useless. I won’t even mention them here.
But students have walked out of classrooms earlier this month to take place in a nationwide protest, demanding gun control legislation. Now, gun control legislation is something that I would call a sine qua non, but not the complete answer. In other words, without gun control legislation, you’re sending a message that it’s perfectly okay to have guns and use them.
However, a lot more has to be done than just making them illegal. We have to change the culture. We have to change to a culture in which people recognize their unity with one another and bring them to a condition where it will be unthinkable for them to carry out violence.
Then, even if we didn’t have gun control, the guns would more or less disappear by themselves. But I’m an intersection guy and I say we need all of them.
So, let me move abroad a little bit now and talk about things that are happening in three countries. Of course, a lot of emphasis has to be on Iran, where the Islamic regime is trying to impose strict dress codes after a wave of unrest in which women and girls remove their headscarves. They did this in protest to the death of Mahsa Amini who had been detained by morality police for not wearing her headscarf quite correctly.
These demonstrations in Iran have not always been nonviolent, unfortunately. I think that’s going to detract from their effectiveness. But recently, there was a video that circulated worldwide of motorbike riders, scooter riders, bicycle riders, and others, parading through Tehran with women who were not wearing the hijab.
And of course, that’s an example of a group concerted protest action. That’s one type that has a definite role to play in all nonviolence campaigns. Though again, it’s not the only thing that you can do. You can do educational and other efforts in very small groups without being confrontational.
However, it’s hard to avoid confrontation altogether. And if you do it at the right time with the right tools, it can often be a successful climax of a nonviolent campaign.
A columnist in the Washington Post by the name of Amanda Ripley has an important message for mainstream news. She points out – and it’s based on science, that hope is critical to human flourishing, and it belongs in the news.
“Hope isn’t just thinking everything will be okay,” she says. “Hope is the belief that your future can be better and brighter than your past. And that you actually have a role to play in making it better.” I couldn’t agree more with that statement, and I wonder if maybe we should have a whole program dedicated to that idea at some point. But be that as it may, she concludes by saying, “For journalists, hope is a defiant way of being in the world, ever on the lookout for what is, but always alert to what might be.” That’s the part that could make a critical difference by encouraging people and preventing burnout and so forth.
Now, here’s a very hopeful development, speaking of hope. Is that the Vatican, which has done a lot of hopeful things recently, has now formally repudiated the so-called doctrine of discovery, which was used to justify colonization, and created enormous suffering throughout the world.
So, back on March 30th, they formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery and officially declared that this historic policy that was used to justify colonial exploitation is “not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church.”
This summer, we’re going to get a really fun and informative and helpful museum in Houston, Texas. It’s called the Eternal Gandhi Museum of Houston. I’ve been following the developments and watching what they have planned for the exhibits and consulting with them, and it looks very promising – very glad to say that that will be open.
But now for two things outside the US of a similar nature, in India the Gujarat Vidyapith, which is an institution in a university that was actually founded by Gandhi, is now inviting applications from interested individuals for the International Course on Gandhian Nonviolence: Theory and Application.
It’ll be one semester, and it’ll start on the second of October, and it will be finished in January of 2024. It’s absolutely free to enroll for the course, including all meals and accommodation. And if you’re interested, send your CV and a letter of motivation by May 31st or earlier if possible.
Then closer to home here in Central America there will be a CPT delegation. Now, CPT used to be Christian Peacemaker Teams. They’re now Community Peacemaker Teams. And they’re sending a delegation to Colombia, which is especially designed for English-speakers. So, you don’t need fluent Spanish in order to be on this one. And it’s going to take place June 24th to July 3rd. So, you can go and make peace in Central America and be back just in time to celebrate the 4th of July.
And now, for an event which cannot be said to be East or West or North or South, it’s the whole world. It’s the air.
May 13, is world migration day. And in this case, it doesn’t mean immigrants. It means birds. It’s a day for the climate action and for migrating birds. And they’re going to focus on the waterways. And that’s particularly propitious because just recently many, many nations have signed on to a global ocean’s treaty which could make a very big difference ecologically to this planet of ours. So, for more on World Migration Day, go to ebird.org.
So, as you probably know – well, you probably know two things. You know that we are very close friends with Nonviolent Peaceforce, work with them in various ways. And you also know that on the world scene one of the most serious conflicts – armed conflicts, group conflicts, wars going on in the world today is taking place in Sudan.
Now, South Sudan is a place where nonviolent interventions have been done very successfully by Nonviolent Peaceforce. We have part of that in our film, “The Third Harmony.” And Nonviolent Peaceforce has recently joined with quite a number of other groups, Nonviolence International, Win Without War, Stop Genocide, I can’t mention all of them.
But they have issued a letter to the president, that is President Biden. And they’re calling upon him to do the following – appoint a special envoy for Sudan. Sanction abusive actors. I guess part of that has to happen, but it really shouldn’t be relied on too heavily. And I was happy to see that in the case of Iran, a group called Society for Democratic Freedom in Iran has said, “Yes, people have to be brought to the law. They have to be brought to justice under the rule of law, but they are not going to engage in retaliation and retribution.”
That’s an extremely good way to exit from a conflict without kicking over the spiral of violence to do another cycle of conflict.
So, appoint a special envoy. Sanction actors. Engage in atrocity prevention. Now, we have a strategy in the U.S. called, the U.S. Strategy to Anticipate, Prevent, and Respond to Atrocities. And they coordinate messaging and other actions with the atrocity prevention working group, the United Nations and the African Union.
Next, seek an arms embargo on the warring parties in all of Sudan. Do this at the UN Security Council. Of course, the nation that puts the biggest number of arms into world circulation is the United States. So, that will be a delicate one to negotiate.
Next, support human rights monitoring and documentation of the efforts. Call for a special session on Sudan at the UN Human Rights Council. That, again, could be very helpful. Increase emergency assistance and support local civil society. Pursue accountability more robustly. As I’ve said, that has to be done very, very carefully.
And finally, prepare for increased humanitarian needs in pre-existing vulnerable areas. Like Darfur and other areas that were already experiencing unmet humanitarian needs, insecurity, and violence.
So, these areas have large displaced populations in addition to refugees and other vulnerable communities. And those conditions will be much worsened if the fighting should increase in these areas.
So, this is an excellent example, again, of a cooperation of a large number of peace groups on a given project, to intervene in ongoing conflict in a way that Nonviolent Peaceforce and Meta Peace Teams and other organizations have been slowly developing since the plan, I think, was first put forward in about 1980 on Grindstone Island in Canada.
This has been the Nonviolence Report. I’m Michael Nagler. Thank you very much.
Stephanie: Well, that’s our show for today, everybody. I want to thank our mother station, KWMR, to Matt Watrous, Annie Hewitt, Bryan Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence. To all of the syndicator stations across the Pacifica Network, thank you very much.
And to you, all of our listeners, you can find out more at NonviolenceRadio.org, including this show, this show’s transcript, past shows, and a lot of information about nonviolence. And until the next time, everybody, please take care of one another. Bye-bye.
Arun Gandhi said: “You can quote me as saying Mahatma Gandhi would disagree with the Plowshares actions because they employ tactics of secrecy and destruction of property. I also think locking up the most courageous and devoted peace leaders for long prison terms is a way of weakening the peace movement. Those leaders could do much more for peace outside of jail than in it.” ( The Jesus Journal – Summer 1995 – No. 77 – page 44 )
“Common people who are not directly involved in social debates and political conflicts have their lives to live, they become angry at those who are disturbing their lives or damaging property that has to be repaired using public funds. Thus the average person, whose support is often necessary for lasting success, is alienated. Rather than leading to a resolution, they escalate the conflict and create more deeply entrenched opponents.” (Legacy of Love by Arun Gandhi – page 132)