FOR- Fellowship Magazine -The Verdict of History: Nonviolence Works

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July/August 2002

The Verdict of History: Nonviolence Works

by John Swomley

It is a sad but actual fact that many of the leaders of organized religion are either supporting wars raging around the world or acquiescing in such warfare. This includes Christians and Jews, heirs of the Hebrew prophetic writings and of Jesus, sometimes known as the Prince of Peace. For example, the American Catholic Bishops announced publicly their vote (267 to 4) to support the war in Afghanistan against an entire nation "harboring terrorists."

In Rome, the American priest Richard John Neuhaus warned against pacifists and nonviolence, saying that the Church must not join "the chorus of those who say ‘Let’s go out and hug a terrorist because he feels unloved.’" Most of the heads of the other monotheistic religions in the US, from Billy Graham on down, did not mince words "about their desire to give spiritual and conscience comfort to the American war effort. "

Is there an alternative to war and massive armed violence? One answer is found in massive nonviolent action as used in India by Mohandas Gandhi and in the United States by James Farmer and Martin Luther King. It is time to look again at their methods and their successes.

Nonviolence, as they used it, was a very positive word. It described techniques for overcoming violence, imperialism, racism, or other evils injurious to whole groups of people as well as to individuals. Those techniques included boycotts, demonstrations, sit-ins, civil disobedience, blocking entrances, and other forms of non-cooperation with practices that injure or discriminate against persons. Nonviolence has also been used on behalf of animals and the environment.

These techniques have been so effective that when used in India by Gandhi and his followers the result was freedom from British occupation and control of India. In fact, that success led to similar actions in about fifty other countries, small and large, resulting in freedom from colonialism without war.

In the United States these techniques ended many forms of racial discrimination in both the South and the North. Women in the United States won the right to vote by using similar methods of social change.

The question for today is, have these or other nonviolent measures any relevance to the prevention or ending of terrorism or other forms of war? Let us examine one of their greatest successes: the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 1981, after Reagan's election and some years before Gorbachev came to power, there was a widespread popular uprising in Europe against the Reagan doctrine and the Reagan Defense Guidance Plan. The former called for a rollback of Communism, while the latter called for huge military budgets and war against the Soviets, beginning with the installation of intermediate-range missiles that could reach Moscow from Western Europe in six to eight minutes. In October 1981, 500,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Rome against deployment of these missiles; 300,000 in Bonn; 100,000 in Hamburg; 200,000 in Belgium; 500,000 in Madrid; 140,000 in Barcelona; and similar numbers in Denmark, England, and elsewhere. In 1982 a million people demonstrated in New York. The International Congress of Physicians Against Nuclear War was organized, and within a year grew to more than 70,000 members in forty-three countries. Bernard Lownes of Harvard Medical School, who with a Soviet physician co-founded the International Congress, addressed an estimated 100 million Soviet people in a nationwide TV program. The program was also widely used in the US.

In 1984 I was a senior US lecturer and FOR representative on a Peace Cruise of the Volga River with 214 other Americans and a number of Russian professors, with whom we American lecturers carried on a dialogue during the time on board. I spoke to members of the Soviet Peace Committee and addressed antiwar rallies of as many as 10,000 people in each city en route. These trips (including many organized by the FOR) and rallies took place for years, seldom mentioned in the American press. After one such rally, US young people with guitars sang antiwar songs as people exited the stadium. When we sang "Ain't Gonna Study War No More," over 200 Soviet people surrounded us and joined in singing every verse–in English.

On another FOR delegation to the Soviet Union, in May 1987, I was one of eleven US citizens who went to an international peace conference in Moscow. After the conference we went to see a movie in a regular movie house, entitled Repentance. It was a dramatic account of a repudiation of Stalinism and a call for freedom from dictatorship. It had played for two years in every major theater. The collapse of the Soviet dictatorship had begun.

There was no violent uprising. Instead, repentance began with the Soviet people–the intellectuals, writers, professors, physicians; the people of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kropotkin, and Berdaev. It began with the antiwar protests in Western Europe and the United States and with visits of US, European, and Third World delegations to the Soviet Union. A change of leadership occurred, and Gorbachev made it official.

The people of the Soviet Union launched a peaceful revolution that took many by surprise. Yet we were warned more than a year in advance by Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet think-tank known as the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada. In a December 1987 letter to The New York Times, he said, ". . . we have a secret weapon that will work almost regardless of the American response–we will deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the military expenditures that bleed America white, that draw America into dangerous adventures overseas and drive wedges between the United States and its allies, not to mention the loss of American influence on neutral countries?"

The secret weapon that deprived the United States of an enemy marked the end of the Cold War, the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the announcement of reduction of Soviet armed forces in Mongolia, in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, and, in Mikhail Gorbachev's words, the beginning of a "transition from an arms economy to a disarmament economy" beginning with the conversion of two or three military production plants in 1989.

We have seen the change of government in Poland, in Hungary, in East Germany, and the move away from totalitarianism inside the Soviet Union to greater freedom. Not since the days of India's Emperor Ashoka in the third century before the Christian era has there been such a renunciation of imperialism and aggression by a major world empire. The map of Europe has been changed many times, but never before was it the result of a unilateral nonviolent revolution by a people in a heavily armed major nation.

Initially President George H.W. Bush tried to claim credit for Soviet arms reduction when he told an American Legion convention, "Only willingness [on the part of the United States to modernize our missile system] gives the Soviet Union the incentive to negotiate real arms reduction." That is no longer a credible statement, since the Soviet did little negotiating. Its initial arms reductions were unilateral; its release of people from tyranny in Eastern Europe was unilateral. Soviet leaders even acknowledged and publicly apologized for the sins of those years. Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnaze told the Supreme Soviet, "It is important not to hide them, to admit them and correct them."

The further evidence that US military threats and militarization, including missile modernization, did not cause the peaceful revolution and substantial disarmament in the Soviet Union is that country's decision to break up into fifteen independent states and abandon the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia declared their independence in 1991. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus became separate republics, and with other former republics joined a loose confederation called the Commonwealth of Independent States. These gave the people of the Soviets the opportunity of accepting peaceful change, and decisive leadership to end dictatorship and engage in political restructuring. In this way a terrifying confrontation of powers was put to rest.

If it could be done in the late 1980s, it can be done again.

Disarming terrorism cannot be achieved through a widening war to destroy Bush's "evil" nations. Instead, it will require changing the attitudes of the most militarized nation in human history. It will require rejecting the leadership of a President who unilaterally attacked a defenseless people in order to eliminate their Taliban leader; and whose Secretary of Defense is the sole source of official news about the resulting casualties.

Ending the use of terrorism requires nonviolent change instead of the kind of violence the United States encouraged its ally Israel to use in seizing Palestinian land and beginning a reign of terror against resisting Palestinians.

Ending terror would also require massive efforts to end poverty in the Middle East. The fact that the 1947 Marshall Plan and billions of dollars were used to rebuild the European economy after World War II should illustrate what might be done in poverty-stricken areas in the Middle East, and eventually in Latin America and Africa, to restore confidence in the future of all the people. Such a gigantic plan to eliminate poverty would also require a transition in the United States, Europe, and Mideast nations away from an arms economy and away from special favors to oil-exporting nations.

Success in eliminating widespread poverty and ending the armed initiatives of the United States, Israel and other nations would make it less and less likely that the terrorism used against the United States in 2001 would happen again. The US would be known as the benefactor of all–a true beacon of peace and freedom.

It is the pacifist method of nonviolent social change, plus the transfer of billions now used to feed the military-industrial complex into a program to end poverty, that are the keys to a peaceful world.

John Swomley, former executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and professor of Christian ethics at the St. Paul School of Theology, lives in Kansas City. He is the author of numerous books.