Nonviolence (19 page)

Perhaps the real reason for the bombing is revealed in the U.S. government publication
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report on the Pacific War,
dated July 1, 1946:

On 6 August and 9 August 1945, the first two atomic bombs to be used for military purposes were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. One hundred thousand people were killed, six square miles or over fifty percent of the built-up areas of the two cities were destroyed. The first and crucial question about the atomic bomb thus was answered practically and conclusively; atomic energy had been mastered for military purposes and the overwhelming scale of its possibilities had been demonstrated.

Or perhaps Eisenhower had it right when he observed that once you start the business of killing, you just get “deeper and deeper.” What would that now mean for a world with nuclear weapons?

Whether mankind will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not perturb us. The law will work, just as the law of gravitation will work whether we accept it or no. And just as a scientist will work wonders out of various applications of the laws of nature, even so a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work greater wonders.

—MOHANDAS GANDHI,

published in Young India,October 1, 1931

S
ince the close of the twentieth century it has become commonplace to refer to it as the most catastrophically bloody century in history. Lenin, who saw war as “an inevitable stage of capitalism,” had predicted this at the century's beginning. By the end of the century, an estimated 187 million people had died in war, the equivalent of 10 percent of the planet's population at the outbreak of World War I. That made it a record century, but also a far higher percentage of war fatalities were civilian than in any previous century. In World War I, one-fifth of casualties were civilian, but in World War II it went up to two-thirds. In twenty-first-century warfare, such as in Iraq, the casualties may be as high as 90 percent civilian.

But it is seldom mentioned that the twentieth century was also the greatest century for nonviolent activism: from 1945 until the close of the century the world saw more victories for nonviolence than ever before in history. It started with a peculiar man in India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, called Mahatma, “the great soul,” was an example of how a rebel genius was killed and then turned into a saint, the easier to ignore his legacy. For Gandhi did not want a militarized India with a nuclear weapons program.

Gandhi was a quirky man with a mischievous sense of humor. Asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “I think it would be a great idea.” But he was not a narrow nationalist. He was a British-educated lawyer influenced not only by his own Hinduism but also by Jainism, Buddhism, and the teachings of Jesus. He was a great admirer of Leo Tolstoy, who had withdrawn to his country estate to rail against Christian clergy for denying the true teachings of Jesus. “Thus it is that these nations have become attached to a false Christianity,” Tolstoy wrote, “represented by the Church, whose principles differ from those of paganism only by a lack of sincerity.” Gandhi and Tolstoy corresponded with each other. Gandhi was also an admirer of Henry David Thoreau, whose
small book
Civil Disobedience,
written while the author was in prison, Gandhi had read while himself in prison.

Gandhi was attracted to eccentric theories of sex, diet, and bodily functions. He had lusts and passions that infuriated him. A tiny man, as a youth he defied his parents' interdiction against the eating of meat, hoping that a meat diet would make him large and strong like the carnivorous British. His marriage had been arranged when he was thirteen and lasted until his death, sixty-two years later. No doubt a good Freudian would have liked to have had him on the couch. At sixteen, his father died while Gandhi was having sex with his young wife. He later said, “This shame of carnal desire … is a blot I have never been able to efface or forgive.” This seems to be at the root of an impulse to deny physical pleasure. Into old age he convinced attractive young women to lie naked through the night with him in order to test his resolve to remain chaste. He also lived much of his life without money or possessions.

Despite frequent expressions of inward doubt, he always displayed a confidence that allowed him to take unpredictable and un-fashionable positions. He was fond of a quote from Thoreau: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do any time what I think right.” He supported the British in World War I despite his absolute rejection of warfare—a position that left his followers confused. Gandhi believed that to defeat an enemy, the enemy must not feel defeated or humiliated. He did not want the British to be bitter, as they would have been if India turned against them in the World War.

He had no doubts, however, about the power of nonviolence. In 1921 he wrote: “Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering, and avoidance of violence, victory is certain.” This confidence reassured his followers and unsettled his adversaries, though neither completely understood him.

The British tended not to take him seriously. Like the American revolutionaries, he advocated the making of homespun and rejected use of cloth from British mills. To the British this made for a comic figure, the spindly little man dressed in beggar's rags. Many British leaders, including Winston Churchill, spoke scornfully of
him. When the British colonial government finally and reluctantly recognized that he was a man to be reckoned with and agreed to meet with him in 1931, Churchill angrily snorted about “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceroy's palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”

Gandhi wrote to Churchill: “I would love to be a naked fakir but am not one yet.” A fakir is an Indian monk who wanders, begging for sustenance.

But the real Gandhi, unlike the saint, was not a dreamer—he was a tough pragmatist who focused on winning. As he pointed out, “Strength does not come from physical capacity, it comes from an indomitable will.” Churchill soon understood that this combination of nonviolence and pragmatism made Gandhi a dangerous opponent. In 1935 he said, “Gandhism and all that it stands for must finally be grappled with and crushed.”

Gandhi was first and foremost a political activist, and he had utter contempt for nonactive pacifism. Like William Lloyd Garrison, he regarded such a passive stance as cowardly, calling inaction “rank cowardice and unmanly,” and said that he would rather see someone incapable of nonviolence resist violently than not resist at all. “Violence is any day preferable to impotence,” he wrote. “There is hope for a violent man to become nonviolent. There is no such hope for the impotent.” Feeling so strongly about the distinction between nonviolent resistance and pacifism, he was dissatisfied with the absence of a proactive word for his beliefs.
Ahimsa,
nonviolence, the absence of violence, did not begin to express the active nature and strength of a program of political action. And so he created the word
satyagraha,
literally “truth force.”

He began his first
satyagraha
campaign as a thirty-five-year-old lawyer in South Africa and after seven years got the South African Indian government to agree to end discrimination against Indians. Black Africans have frequently criticized him for having failed to show any interest in the plight of the black South African majority. But Gandhi was unpredictable. He expected his loyalty to Britain
during the war, a gesture few understood, to be repaid with moves toward independence after the war, but the British appeared unmoved. In the 1920s he began campaigning for Indian independence with strikes, boycotts, and protests.

It is notable how much his program to expel the British resembled the American program before it turned violent in 1775. Like a twentieth-century John Adams, Gandhi wrote in 1930:

Much can be done…. Liquor and foreign cloth shops can be picketed. We can refuse to pay taxes if we have the requisite strength. The lawyers can give up practice. The public can boycott the Courts by refraining from litigation. Government servants can all resign their posts….

The argument is frequently made that Gandhi was able to succeed only because of the gentle nature of his opponents. Religious philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, for one, in his long-standing disagreements with Abraham Johannes Muste, a Calvinist minister turned labor organizer turned peace activist, argued, “Pacifism was irrelevant in dealing with Hitler.” There are several problems with this argument, the first being that the Danes and isolated groups of religious pacifists in other countries had demonstrated that even against Nazis nonviolence could achieve some goals. But those who dismiss Gandhi's accomplishments because they were “only against the British” are also overlooking how ruthless and brutal British colonial rule could be. The history of British rule on the Subcontinent belies this myth, especially their treatment of the Pathans along the Hindu Kush, with its strategic Khyber Pass, where the British tried to control by fear the gateway from Afghanistan to India for a century.

In 1842 the British attempted to secure the area by sending their 4,500-man Army of the Indus through the Khyber Pass. One survivor made it to Fort Jalalabad. But the British were determined to subdue the Muslim tribesmen, the Pathans, who were said to be one of the most warlike people in the world. So were—it is so easily forgotten—the British.

The British sent expedition after expedition into the Pathan hills, an area known to the British colonial army around the world as “the grim.” In the nineteenth century, they shelled the Pathan villages. In the twentieth they bombed them from the air. Thousands of Pathans were flogged or otherwise beaten. But Pathan snipers fired ancient, handmade rifles from somewhere in the rocky crests. Then in the 1930s something happened that made them more dangerous, more threatening than the British army had ever imagined: the Pathans joined up with Gandhi's nonviolence movement. The British knowingly asserted that this was a trick, that Pathans were not capable of nonviolence. They sealed off the area and for two decades brutalized the nonviolent resisters. Pathans were shot down in large groups, tortured, jailed, flogged, imprisoned for life in distant Indian Ocean penal colonies, or hanged. The British army burned their fields and their houses. There was no due process of law in the Pathan zone.

Their leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, called Badshah Khan, the Khan of Khans, was almost the complete opposite of Gandhi, the gentle Hindu. A photograph of the two of them appeared to be manipulated, for Badshah Khan, the Pathan aristocrat, was a mountainous man with broad shoulders and a square, strong-featured face surrounded by the thick hair of his head and beard. Gandhi, from the humble side of a middle-class caste, barely came up to his shoulders and was frail, and his baldness gave roundness to his small head. But they were firm allies, determined to build, through nonviolence, an independent India for Muslims and Hindus together.

In 1929, a young man who had heard Khan speak gave him the idea of organizing in a way that was consistent with Pathan tradition, and so he recruited the world's first nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgars, the Servants of God. Any Pathan could join Khan's army by swearing an oath to renounce violence and vengeance, to forgive oppressors, and to embrace a simple life. Khan quickly recruited five hundred soldiers who opened schools and maintained order at gatherings and demonstrations. Khan went from town to town urging Pathans to rise up in civil disobedience.
In Peshawar, when Khan was arrested by the British, the entire town's population took the oath and joined his army. The region was stopped by a general strike and the British sent in the army with armored vehicles. When they began firing into the crowd, the demonstrators stood stoically. Some were shot many times. One boy walked up to a soldier and asked him to shoot him, and the soldier shot the boy dead. As people fell, others moved forward to be shot. The British continued shooting for six hours and then began the work of hauling away the bodies and burning them. The result was that 80,000 new volunteers took the oath and joined Khan's army.

One platoon of an elite Indian regiment, the Garhwal Rifles, refused to fire and every man in the outfit was sentenced to stiff prison terms, one for life; and even when negotiations forced the British to release political prisoners, all the Garhwalis were made to serve their full terms.

The British tried to provoke the proud Pathan soldiers into breaking their vows of nonviolence. Huge, powerfully built men were publically stripped, humiliated, beaten with rifle butts, poked with bayonets, thrown in cesspools. Some killed themselves to avoid breaking their vow.