Nonviolence (22 page)

XI

We may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.

—WILL AND ARIEL DURANT,

The Lessons of History, 1968

N
o doubt it seemed that way in that most violent year, 1968. The Durants calculated that year that of the previous 3,421 years, only 268 had been without war. An outbreak of world peace has not been experienced since then. But the world is not without hope. Just as most news media, political leaders, cultural institutions, and pundits ignore nonviolence and glorify war, the world does not often recognize triumphs of nonviolence.

Most of the coverage of political movements in the 1970s focused on the waning of the activism and idealism of the 1960s. In France, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico, the main movements dispersed and the small, violent Weathermen-like groups went underground. The governments and police forces of these countries spent the next two decades trying to root out and kill every one of these underground “revolutionaries.”

But not everyone went home or underground. A great many used the nonviolent techniques they had learned and applied them to further the antinuclear cause, women's rights, the environmental movement, and gay rights, an issue so repressed and unpopular that even Bayard Rustin, a lifelong fearless rebel and himself a homosexual, did not embrace it as a cause until the 1980s.

Most of the Mexican opposition did not go underground but instead, for the first time in Mexico's violent history, opposed the government without violence, challenging rigged elections, exposing fraud and embezzlement among government leaders, and gradually putting pressure on the political process, forcing it to open up little by little, until in the year 2000 a fair Mexican election resulted in the peaceful removal from power of the longentrenched ruling party.

In the winter of 1989, when democratic yearnings began to un-seat the Polish Communist Party, when all of Central Europe fell, and finally the Soviet Union was dismantled, the world was shocked and completely taken by surprise by this sudden turn of events. No
one was more caught by surprise than the befuddled U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, and his advisers. Had they done it? In time they decided they had—that they had overthrown the Soviet Union by taking a hard line. Of course U.S. governments had been taking a “hard line” ever since the Russian Revolution. Woodrow Wilson had even invaded. But Ronald Reagan, by being a good cold warrior and stepping up the nuclear arms race, had pressured the Soviets right out of existence. To make this claim—and some still make it—is to ignore the Eastern Europeans who dedicated their lives to slowly, nonviolently chipping away at Soviet authority. And so one of the most spectacular victories of nonviolence in history is seldom mentioned.

A cynical observer would say that Reagan and the Reaganites were engaged in a standard exercise of political deceit. It is better to take credit than admit being caught by surprise. Some call this leadership. But the Reaganites may in fact have been sincere. It may have been inconceivable to them that the Soviet Union could have been brought down by nonviolence. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, most people believe that nonviolence can never work against a ruthless dictatorship. And Reagan had already labeled the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.” Either it was not as ruthless and evil as he had claimed, or nonviolence is capable of destroying an evil empire.

It all began in 1965, at the University of Warsaw, with two Communist students, Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, who, though arrested and expelled from the party, continued to organize among the Communist elite at the university. In 1968, students in Warsaw began demonstrating against the authorities after they closed down a stage production by the National Theater Company. The students were good Communists from good Communist families who believed that marching in protest was something a good Communist did. It came as a soul-altering shock when the Communist government unleashed almost unrestrained violence, beating them in the street. The young Communists, who had simply wanted to reverse a bad decision on censorship, began rethinking their entire
relationship to the regime. The movement spread throughout Poland and was met everywhere with sufficient violence that, by March, it appeared to have been crushed. These students were an elite and had failed to interest the rest of the population in their issues of intellectual freedom.

Adam Michnik, who had been a leader of the student movement, set out to unite students and workers through KOR, the Polish acronym for the Committee for the Defense of Workers, which offered moral and material support to dissident workers. The Polish government was trying to revitalize the economy through a series of measures that forced workers to produce more for less pay. The government harassed, arrested, and beat dissidents, but KOR continued its work. After a dock strike in Gdansk in 1980 led to the creation of a dissident trade union movement—Solidarity—the goal had been accomplished—a unified movement of intellectuals and workers. They even brought in the Church, and all of these factions were committed to the principles of nonviolence, consciously embracing Gandhi's belief in the power of nonviolent non-cooperation and never doubting that it would work for them.

But the rest of the world had no faith in nonviolence. The British in particular, avoiding self-discovery, always insisted that Gandhi had proven not the effectiveness of nonviolence but rather the essential civility of the British—or, as Stokely Carmichael liked to say, the Brutish Empire. In a 1949 essay on Gandhi in the
Partisan Review,
George Orwell even specified that Gandhi's tactics would never work against the Russians. In a 1985 essay, Czeslaw Milosz wrote about how frequently people make the argument that Gandhi's approach could not work against the modern totalitarian state, to which he replied, “Our natural tendency to place the possible in the past leads us often to overlook the acts of our contemporaries, who defy the presumably unmovable order of things.”

The movement's secret weapon was patience. The Poles accepted that it would take time. Jan Litynski, who had been a student protester in 1968, for which he spent two and a half years in prison, after which he was active editing underground newspapers and organizing
labor, told the
New York Times,
when the end came, “I guess what surprised me most is that I just did not think it would happen so soon.” It had taken twenty years.

Adam Michnik, writing from prison in 1985, gave several arguments in favor of nonviolence. Michnik, who grew up in the repressive society created by the Russian Revolution, wrote: “Taught by history, we suspect that by using force to storm the existing Bastilles we shall unwittingly build new ones.” He said, “In our reasoning, pragmatism is inseparably intertwined with idealism.” And this approach may be characteristic of all successful nonviolent activists. It is what perplexed Orwell about Gandhi. Michnik did not believe violence was a viable option for his cause. As he put it simply: “We have no guns.”

James Madison said, “All governments rest on opinion,” and this is no less true of dictatorships than democracies. The problem with dictatorships is that the leadership is more corrupted by power than that of the democratic tyrant who can be voted out. So while the Soviet Union worked hard at maintaining public opinion, if it felt challenged, it usually responded brutally, even though this was unpopular. By the end of the 1980s such a large part of the population had turned against it that the Soviet Union could no longer function. On October 7, 1989, East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker ordered security forces to open fire on demonstrators in Leipzig. Egon Krenz, his man in charge of security, flew to Leipzig to prevent the shooting. Krenz feared that if their security forces opened fire it would mean the end of the regime. Ten days later, after Honecker was forced to resign, the regime did resort to violence. Within a month they were gone and the Berlin Wall was being chipped away by souvenir hunters.

In Prague, on November 17, 1989, students marching in a procession to commemorate the shooting of a student by the Nazis were attacked by the Communist police. With East Germany falling, the Czech regime believed they needed to make a show of force. Rallies protesting the regime grew in numbers every day after the attack. The regime lasted only a few more weeks.

In Czechoslovakia it had begun twenty-one years earlier with a dedicated Communist who, like many on the left, was committed to nonviolence. Alexander DubCek was tall and dull, seemingly the opposite of a Gandhi. When the forty-six-year-old Slovak party hack became leader of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party on January 5, 1968, no one expected anything out of the ordinary, which was the reason the Russians had backed him. His wife and two sons sobbed uncontrollably at his fate. But he came with a lot of ideological underpinnings. His parents were, in DubCek's words, “Slovak socialist dreamers,” who had met after immigrating to Chicago's North Side. His father was a pacifist who opposed World War I and had gotten involved with Quakers who tried to smuggle him to Mexico to avoid military service. He was caught and sent to prison. After the war, disenchanted with the United States and excited by the breakup of the Hapsburg Empire, they returned to the new state of Czechoslovakia, where their son Alexander was born a few months later. No doubt as Alexander's career advanced, the Communists took into account his pedigree, that his parents were Marxists who had worked for the Soviet Union almost from the beginning and that Alexander had grown up on the Soviet frontier, trying to promote cooperative farming among the tribesmen. What apparently no one had considered was that Alexander had been raised not simply by good Marxists, but by that most dangerous breed—pacifists.

By the time Czechoslovakia was placed under his quiet control, it had become the most repressive state in the Eastern Bloc, having missed out on post-Stalinist reforms. In 1968 the Czechoslovakians were yearning not for a dull, gray leader but for dramatic change. In public meetings DubCek asked people what they wanted. They told him, and so in the midst of the totalitarian empire began a bloodless revolution. Freedom of speech, a free press, freedom to travel were all part of DubCek's “Communism with a human face.” Prague became the place to visit, and the limited hotel rooms were always booked. But DubCek wanted neither to overthrow nor to revolt. He wanted merely to reform. He repeatedly made clear to Moscow that Czechoslovakia did not want to withdraw from the Warsaw
Pact and regarded the Soviet Union as its close ally. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of Hungary in 1956. The Hungarians had not chosen nonviolent reform but armed revolution, and the Soviets went in to crush it. The invasion, though unpopular, was not firmly opposed, because the world accepts the idea of using violence against violence.

But Czechoslovakia was different. In August, when the Soviets invaded with tanks, DubCek urged his people not to resist, despite the fact that the Czech army was considered the best in the Warsaw Pact. When the world saw the Soviet Union invade one of its closest allies, and saw its tanks stared down by unarmed students, its defeat had already begun. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, years later, after his country had collapsed, agreed that nothing was ever the same after the 1968 invasion.

Gorbachev was part of a delegation that visited Czechoslovakia in 1969 to try to win over Communist youth. He encountered hostility everywhere. Often party officials seemed afraid to be in contact with the Soviet delegation, not afraid of violence but afraid to lose all standing with Czechoslovakians. “People refused to talk to us and did not answer our greetings. It was very unpleasant,” he recalled. In Bratislava, Slovak workers refused to meet with him. “I returned home weighed down by gloomy thoughts,” Gorbachev wrote in his 1995 memoirs.

With violence or without, it was too late for the Soviets. They had lost all credibility with the people. La Boétie had been right in the seventeenth century—you just have to stop conniving with the thief who plunders you. Gandhi, making the same point, had written, “No government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people, willing or forced, and if people withdraw their cooperation in every detail, the government will come to a standstill.” This became the successful strategy of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

Perhaps the reason the world did not appreciate what was happening in these countries was that part of the strategy, especially in Czechoslovakia, was to focus on small victories of everyday life. Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright and later president
of the Czech Republic, called it “defending the aims of life.” Organizations were formed to support the families of those persecuted by the government; alternative “universities” taught the things excluded from official education; environmental groups were formed and cultural activities established. Even before Solidarity, in Poland, alternative trade unions were created. Increasingly citizens could live life apart from the one established by the regime. Though the actions were small, the goals were large. Havel called this “living within the truth” and argued that if people lived their lives parallel to the state system and not as a part of it—which he termed “living within a lie”—there would always be a tension between these two realities and they would not be able to permanently coexist. The answer to the abuses of state was not to participate.