Exploring the Bancroft Library The Centennial Guide to Its Extraordinary History, Spectacula... Book

The subtitle of this book lets you know what to expect if you pick it up intending to read it: Nonviolence: Twenty Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea.

For me, nonviolence is a part of an ideal world. I am drawn to it but do not know where in my being it originated. I do not want to make the concept a weak rationale that explains how I try to travel on my life’s path. How do people fall under the spell of nonviolence?

I am a member and supporter of the War Resisters League. I joined many years ago by agreeing to this statement:

The War Resisters League affirms that all war is a crime against humanity. We are determined not to support any kind of war, international or civil, and to strive nonviolently for the removal of the causes of war, including sexism, racism and all forms of human exploitation.

The United States’ oldest secular pacifist organization, the War Resisters League has been resisting war at home and war abroad since 1923.

Nonviolence is the absence of violence. There is no positive word that conveys that state of being. “Advocates of nonviolence – dangerous people – have been there throughout history…” Kurlansky asserts on the first page. Some have seen nonviolence as an unattainable ideal. We have the example of Jesus as a person who placed nonviolence at the top of the Jewish tenants. “You shall not kill,” is the most concise commandment of the Jewish and Christian religions. Whoops.

Active practitioners of nonviolence are always seen as a threat, a direct menace, to the state. The state maintains the right to kill as its exclusive and jealously guarded privilege.
…
One of history’s greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace.
…
And so a religion that is in the service of a state is a religion that not only accepts war but prays for victory.

Here is a GR review that includes the 25 lessons:

The first third of the book revolves too much around religion for my liking. History tells us that nonviolence will not come through the religious bodies of the world. Religions justify violent warfare more often than they proscribe it. The answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?” is a nonstarter for most Christians. Jesus is the aberration. Only one of the twenty-five lessons makes a reference to religion and that is to say “Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.” The Historic Peace Churches, Quaker, Mennonite, and Brethren, hardly qualify any more for their peace designation.

The Revolutionary War and the Civil War are visited in turn with only a very little attention paid to any nonviolent aspects. Opposing the American Revolution does not mean seeking a nonviolent way to separate from the British. Some did call for a negotiated settlement and there were numerous demonstrations and boycotts and we all know about dumping the tea in the harbor. What if Nat Turner had lead a nonviolent uprising? What indeed. There are the standard revelations that Lincoln’s goal was to preserve the union far more than to end slavery and that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the southern slaves where Lincoln had no authority. The history of the U.S. is by and large a history of wars and conflicts.

There were peace and antiwar movements in the U.S. until the time the U.S. entered World War I. Then it was equated with espionage. Calls for peace die with the firing of the first bullet. And the peace movement, at its best, never really espoused nonviolence but simply non war.

Nonviolence eventually becomes an antiwar book more than a book about nonviolence. You could contend that being antiwar necessarily means that you are nonviolent. The story of the Danish reaction to occupation by Nazi Germany shows how Danes took direct action to accomplish nonviolence rather than simple passivity. In this example, often referred to, nonviolence is at the forefront and is successful.

Later there are some fascinating pages about World War II and the Holocaust. The point is made that people and governments did know the Holocaust was happening and, for a variety of reasons, chose to do nothing. But the connection of this information with nonviolence is not clear to me. It may be that the connection is that a common objection to nonviolence is that it would not have been effective in saving the Jews. (The Danish experience notwithstanding.)

The American and English firebombing of cities killing thousands of civilians and the atomic bombing of Japan are also brought into the conversation about war. Again, I wonder about the relevance in a book about nonviolence. Maybe we are to see the worst results of violence in these cases to encourage us to try nonviolence. But that does not seem to have worked.

Gandhi comes up, of course, but strangely very little of King. A.J. Muste, a twentieth century pacifist, gets more than a brief mention. And then come the antinuclear movement, the civil rights movement, and the antiwar movement, all with their bits of nonviolent tactics and strategy. But only a commitment of a few who believed in the philosophy of nonviolence.

Major changes of government in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary occurred without bloodshed. The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina are another example of nonviolence. And there are more experiences of nonviolent change included in the concluding pages of the book.

The first half of Nonviolence gets two stars from me: too much emphasis on religion which has a bad history in regard to nonviolence. But the second half gets four stars as it gets into real examples of the success of nonviolence in the world. So, as a whole, I give the book three stars.