Violence, Nonviolence and Responsibility

I presented the following text on a panel at San Francisco State University tonight about nonviolence and was asked to explore the theme: Mending the Social Divide, Awakening the Common Good. The semester long series of events was called the Ghandi-King-Chavez 2010 Season For Nonviolence put on by the Institute for Holistic Health Studies. The text follows:

I would like to use my time to raise a few questions about the definition of violence and therefore how we define nonviolence, and the ways these questions may or may not change how we think about responsibility in the context of the discussion we have been having.

A video, captured by an Italian news station, circulated on the web not too long after the contested June elections last summer in Iran. In it, thousands upon thousands of protestors are shown marching together down a Tehran city street. I hold my breath and scan their faces, as I have been doing since the demonstrations began, searching for family or friends. But many wear masks to hide their faces— and I am reminded by the cautious ways individuals in the crowd look to their left and then to their right, their glances quick and worried, just how great the risk is that they are taking. And yet despite the dangers and their fears, so many walk brazenly with arms raised and fists clenched shouting their demands. Green, the color this movement has taken up to symbolize their demands for justice, democracy and the security of certain freedoms in the country, litters the crowd. Together, shoulder-to-shoulder, they are moving slowly and carefully.

Suddenly, 2, then 3, then 5 police motorcycles charge the demonstration, clearing large sections of the street of people. The voices still call out loudly but now they sound frantic. Screams of terror and fear pierce the chaos. One voice in particular still haunts me -a woman’s shriek so shrill I cannot make out the words. The ordered and peaceful march is upended with people running here and there. The camera, no longer steady, captures images as shaky as the tree a man climbs for safety from the bikes below. As the people gather themselves, their calls grow stronger, more unified. They sing: “Marg bar dictator. Marg bar dictator.” Death to the dictator. And then, one of these motorcycles crashes and catches fire— more chaos.

And something beautiful happens. The armed police officer, bloodied and shaken, is guided by a few of the protestors away from the gathering crowd. The fear in his eyes is unmistakable but he allows these kind protestors to protect him, and they do. This is a peaceful protest, a nonviolent movment. One man raises his arms to the crowd and asks them to please stay calm and leave the officer alone while the others stand guard to keep him safe. From the crowd, one angry protestor approaches shouting that the man should be punished but a line of women and children in green form around him demanding that the officer be left alone. Amidst the chaos and screams back and forth, the shaken police officer is offered water and his wounds are tended to.

I offer this story because it touches something so deep in me, a heartbroken and desperate longing for justice. A belief in humanity and the human heart, however naïve and idealistic that might be in a world where the most developmentally successful nations understand violence as sexy, as entertainment. What room is there for non-violence when violence is such big business? War movies. Horror flicks. Television shows about espionage, mafia or police brutality. Rape and other forms of sexualized violence in ads and music videos. The sheer amount of violence that we are exposed to on a daily basis desensitizes us to its reality and chips away at our care.

But this raises a question for me. Does a population’s relationship to violence, impact its understanding of nonviolence? Would it be so easy to experience gratuitous violence as entertainment if I were living in the Congo, Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan today? What don’t I see as a result of my privilege, my safety, my lifestyle, my history? If war, hunger, the threat of rape, torture and the effects of mass ecological devastation were realities I had to experience directly on a daily basis, would these images and stories be as appealing to me?

Here’s another story: Just a few weeks ago, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 600 people were brutally killed in clashes over diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, zinc, significantly, coltan, which is used in mobile phones and other electronic gadgets, and also cassiterite, commonly used in food packaging. To date, over 12 million Congolese have been murdered and countless other tortured, brutalized and violently raped daily. 12 million. This is more than the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Balkan conflicts, the Iraq War and the earthquakes in India and Haiti combined. The UN has been on the ground in the Congo for over 10 years now to keep the peace but a report by UN-commissioned experts said UN involvement had done nothing to quell the violence— and Human Rights Watch even went so far as to suggest recently that the UN is risking becoming complicit in atrocities against civilians there. And so, the rebels continue to kill and plunder natural resources with impunity to support Western European and North American lifestyles.

This story raises another set of questions for me about the term “violence.” How is it understood in the context of these conversations about nonviolence in this room? Some forms of violence such as rape, murder, torture, are easy to identify. But what about the more subtle forms of violence that lead to or sustain them?

How many of you already knew what I shared about the Congo?

Why is it that human rights violations in Iran are so often on the front page and yet we hear very little about the abuses and the devastating death toll in the Congo? I am glad that the struggles in Iran are getting attention, but as someone who cares about justice in this world, it is my responsibility to ask that question.

What are the politics behind what news we get and when? Why are some representations in the media repeated over and over again —a scowling dark-skinned man wearing a turban, holding a machine gun and a Khoran or Black Africans, always in natural settings, wearing very little clothes, often either dirty or colorfully costumed. What are the effects of these images in how I think about these groups of people? Do they influence my assumptions about who they are? If so, is it possible those representations could also influence the policies I do or don’t support?

How are the stories I read being framed for me? For example: Are we really ready to “talk” with the Iranian government, is it really a “negotiation” if the terms are that the U.S. goals of the negotiations (suspension of Iran’s nuclear program) need to be met before the talks begin? Why don’t we believe Iran when it says its nuclear program is peaceful? This is a country that has never once launched an aggressive war against any nation; the only wars Iran has ever fought have been in self-defense. Why is it that states who have conducted nuclear tests and who have not even signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: India, Pakistan, and North Korea are not as frequently in the news? For those convinced that Islam is a faith whose believers follow it blindly, it should be noted that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the stockpiling and use of Nuclear Weapons as un-Islamic and therefore forbidden. Wouldn’t it then be logical to assume that the Iranian government, blindly following its faith, would stay true to their word? Is it possible that by painting a picture of Iran as a fanatic state with values that are inferior to those of the West, the U.S. is better able to make the case for its aggressive policies?

The point is not that nuclear weapons proliferation should be supported. Far from it. But to be a responsible and engaged citizen of a democracy means asking these questions.

Stories that do appear about the conflicts in the Congo inevitably tell the story of the wild African male militants who rape and murder their own people. These stories rely on images of the “barbaric and savage” African Other that we have inherited from Orientalist anthropologies to explain why and how this could happen— and what this does is keep us from asking any more questions. The violations are beyond horrific but taken out of the context of the larger economic and global systems that prey on the Congolese people and produce devastating conditions of poverty and corruption that feeds the violence, we are left explaining away the atrocities as the petty conflicts of primitives.

Economic forms of violence are the least reported but most ubiquitous. Decades of structural adjustment loans and programs have impoverished Haiti to the point where the infrastructure of the country could not withstand the earthquake that recently ravaged it. A U.S. coup of the Aristide government politically destroyed the country and contributed to this economic indebtedness and dependency. But worse than that is the fact that Haiti is currently falling even further into debt and impoverishment by what western countries are ostensibly and proudly calling “aid” —essentially high interest loans for services that are largely channeling the money back into Western European and North American economies— This too is violence.

So I ask myself: what is the work I must do to recognize these other more subtle forms of violence that lurk in the shadows just beyond identification? I am proposing that of course nonviolent actions can look like demonstrations, human chains, hunger strikes, sit-ins. These are all the sexier and more exciting forms of nonviolence. But they are largely impotent without the very real and very hard work of critical reflection, study, and analysis. To do the work of knowing history is nonviolence.

To take responsibility for the history that we have inherited by learning it so that we can be prepared to make better choices now and in the future is nonviolence. I am proposing we start now, if we have not already, to make the link between nonviolence and this practice of critical reflection that takes into account history, representations in the media, imbalances of power and privilege, racism, classism, sexism— to identify the politics behind the framing, to see the double standards where they show up.

Another job for a nonviolent ideological warrior is to honor the sanctity of difference. In my eagerness to meet the other of another history, culture, faith, place, gender, sexual orientation, class—. In my eagerness to look into the face of this other and extend my hand, I may look for similarities to which I can relate. This attempt at relating is of course a beautiful thing, but it too easily becomes dangerous when I make the assumption of sameness where it may not exist— or when I prioritize what is the same over what is different in ways that shut difference down, cap or suffocate it so that it can no longer breathe. What would it take for me to look into the face of another and accept the impossible difference it holds? What feeds a hubris so acute as to allow me to assume I could possibly know Other, the histories that shaped it, the legacies it inherited, the values it lives that have no words?

Not too long ago, I was chatting with a friend and shared a story with him about an encounter with a man who had physically restrained me in a way that shook me up quite a bit. He listened intently to me, and my explanation of what had been going on for me during that experience. I explained what I had learned and what the experience meant to me in the context of my life as a woman grappling with the very real physical and mental insecurities and threats to my safety that mediate every decision I make daily, what paths I will walk on my way home at night, whether or not I make eye contact with the man ahead of me in line, how often I ask a male acquaintance about his wife and kids to remind him of his place. To my frustration and surprise, my friend began to reinterpret my story for me, explain better what I had meant to say, and feed it back to me in the context of his own experience with women.

He wanted me to understand that my story was not about my experience as a woman but was very much like a series of other experiences he too was familiar with that had nothing to do with gender at all. He proceeded to describe some of those experiences to me. In fact, none of those stories resonated with me at all and not a single one even touched what I had been trying to explain to him about the struggles I face as a woman every day. The very real threat of rape and sexual violation that I must negotiate on a daily basis. I walked away frustrated, not because he didn’t understand, how could I expect him to? He is not a woman. How could he possibly know what it is like to be a woman in this world? I was frustrated and angry at his sense of entitlement, his arrogant assumption that he could understand, and his attempt to take my story and make it his own, to rewrite my story and project it outward as a representation of some universal human experience applicable to anyone anywhere regardless of the specifics of gender that I knew had mediated my experience.

And this happens so often. I know I fall into this trap sometimes, maybe we all do— and when I do it is because I was not thinking. So I am asking that we think. When we exoticize, naturalize or romanticize the Other, what we are doing is inflating or foregrounding certain aspects that are most interesting or appealing to us (such as religious or spiritual traditions) and thereby making less visible if not invisible other aspects. Suddenly rich traditions are disassembled, flattened, taken out of context or interpreted in ways that are at the very least unfair misrepresentations and at worst, the grounds for policies that violate their very being. In looking for what I wish to see or am capable of understanding, the world becomes a prism of the familiar. In so doing, I not only rob the other of his/her voice and space to exist, I do violence to myself, my possibility for imagination, for inspiration, discovery, creativity, surprise and beauty. To work hard to see difference and allow it room to breath; to work hard to allow room for the discomfort of not-knowing; to work hard to respect what I do not understand is the work of nonviolence. Would not a humble acceptance of the mystery of the other, and the limits of my understanding, be a beautiful act of generosity? Of nonviolence? Of alliance?

In my work as a social and cultural anthropologist, one of the things that has repeatedly come up in my research is the danger of universalizing certain Western values and assuming their relevance the world over. In many cases, the effects are relatively benign. But in other cases, they can be quite horrifying. A very simple and well-known example is article 17 of the universal declaration of human rights: the right to property. Of course on the surface of it this sounds good right? But would the first Native American nations or Hawaiian people have agreed that this is a universal right? These people found the notion of ownership of property absurd and signed away their lands thinking the white colonizer a fool. But decades later would witness the mass genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas, oftentimes under an assumption of property rights and a certain “manifest destiny,” a god-given right, that not all peoples impacted by it would be asked to weigh in on.

I am suggesting that the assumption of shared values is an assumption that a nonviolent activist should take very seriously and be very careful about. We cannot assume that what is good for us, is good for everyone— especially when so often, as in the case of the Congo, what is good for us has come at the expense of the Other.

Altogether, the point I have been trying to make is simply that nonviolence is more than a choice to not use arms. I would like to propose that to be a nonviolent warrior, it is not enough, and not always appropriate, to be anti-nuclear proliferation or anti-war for example. That is the preferred stance that will always be my first choice, but I will also pay attention to respect when others under devastating circumstances must necessarily make choices to defend themselves by any means necessary. Arundhati Roy, author of God of Small Things and nonviolent activist who has lobbied against the production of nuclear weapons in India and violent development practices such as the Narmada Dam project, recently gave a talk here in San Francisco. She said it best when she asked (this is not a direct quote): “If a person is already starving, can he or she really go on a hunger strike?” The point is not of course to argue whether he or she can or cannot.

It is simply to ask: are there times when the promotion on nonviolent action is itself a violent thing to ask for or to expect? Are there times when the promotion of nonviolent action is self-serving?

Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that hell is other people. What he meant was that an encounter with the other makes certain claims on you. You cannot but be impacted by it; you are forced to respond. You may walk by the screams emerging from a burning house, but that is a choice you have to make. The question is not: will you respond. The question is: how will you respond.

Sometimes I think we, here in the center of power, plug up our ears and rewrite the story because those screams are too much to bear and the burden of responsibility and guilt torments us. I invite you to let the world move you and tear you apart. With great pain comes the capacity to experience the depths of love and beauty, justice and freedom.

This is an appeal for you to commit to the practice of an ideological warrior, a nonviolent actor. You will have to pay close attention to the subtle ways that words and ideas circulate around you and threaten to blind you to their dangers. You will have to work hard, train and commit. Like any practice, it will be difficult. Sometimes it will hurt. Sometimes, you will be haunted by the ghosts you watched suffer and could not save. Sometimes, their cries will rip you open and your tender and skinless heart will beat the stronger for it. Let us prepare. Be persistent. Work hard to pay attention. Witness actively, not passively. Slash at the forces that numb our souls.

In the words of one of my favorite nonviolent ideological warriors, Howard Zinn, may he rest in peace:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness… And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future… the future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” — Howard Zinn