A history of nonviolence
The author of "Cod" suggests that the world's most dangerous idea could have derailed the American Revolution, the Civil War and possibly even World War II.
By Mark Engler
Read more: War, Books, Reviews, Martin Luther King Jr., Book reviews
Sept. 13, 2006 | George Orwell was never much for pacifists. He wrote of his nonviolent political adversaries during World War II: If they "imagine that one can somehow 'overcome' the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen." To Mohandas Gandhi, his Indian contemporary and fellow anti-imperialist, he accorded only a grudging and critical respect. Yet because he viewed many pacifists as specialists in evading unpleasant truths, Orwell did admire Gandhi's unflinching honesty with regard to the Holocaust: When asked about resistance to the Nazis, Gandhi argued that the Jews should have prepared en masse to sacrifice their lives in nonviolence -- something Orwell regarded as "collective suicide" -- in order to "[arouse] the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."
No doubt Orwell would have been skeptical of the contentions advanced by author Mark Kurlansky in his new primer, "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea." Compared with the standard histories offered in American public education, these arguments can safely be described as contrarian: "The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain," Kurlansky writes; "it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews."
"For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War," he explains further, "there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals." Joining the chorus of dissidents, Kurlansky attempts to shed light on the epic failures of warfare to secure peace, as well as to cultivate a new understanding of "the way in which things actually happen" in history.
Author of previous works including "Salt: A World History" and "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World," Kurlansky has established himself as a pioneer in the field of micro-history, producing idiosyncratic investigations into small topics that bloom into tales of broad general interest. In his new book, he shows a command of a sweeping body of pacifist history, and he makes centuries of material flow into an overview that is far more combative than its protagonists' peaceful ways might suggest.
A standard narrative of nonviolence as a modern political instrument -- especially in the United States -- might start around the time of Henry David Thoreau, who, sitting in jail for war tax resistance, first argued that civil disobedience could undermine the legitimacy of the state and provoke a crisis in governance. The story might mention "peace churches" like those of the Quakers and their creation of a pacifist way of life based on Jesus' teachings. But it would soon rush forward to figures like Gandhi, who pioneered the strategy of how to apply nonviolent disruption on a mass scale, and to Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi's most famous American importer.
In Kurlansky's history, however, Jesus himself is a relative latecomer to the scene. Well before him there appear individuals like Mozi, the Chinese rebel-philosopher who lived from about 470 to 390 B.C. Mozi was an opponent of Confucius who championed the concept of "mutual love" and was exasperated by the prevalence of warfare: "To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold," he argued. "This the rulers of the earth all recognize and yet when it comes to the greatest crime -- waging war on another state -- they praise it!"
Kurlansky spends the bulk of his short book progressing from ancient China to the dawn of the 20th century, profiling groups that rejected the "ideology of warfare." The ranks of the war resisters include early Christians, the French Cathars, Protestants like the Anabaptists, Mennonites and Quakers, white Americans in the abolitionist movement (African-Americans tended to be more open to supporting violent slave rebellions), and the international peace organizations of the 19th century.
Statements of nonviolent doctrine appear in each of the major world religions, and Kurlansky prepares a succinct and useful survey of them. The Hindu principle of "ahimsa," or "not doing harm," is an old tenet that Gandhi would later find significant and that is taken to extremes by the Jainists, who "keep their mouths masked to insure that they do not accidentally inhale a tiny insect." Kindred sentiments range from Buddhist prohibitions on taking life, to Taoism's invocations of water wearing away stone, to Mohammed's complete ban on violence in his model society at Mecca, to Moses' "Thou shalt not kill" and Jesus' "Turn the other cheek."
Early on in the book the distinction between two closely related ideas, pacifism and nonviolence, becomes important. "Pacifism is passive," Kurlansky acknowledges; it is a "state of mind" that rejects war and aggression. "Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing"; it uses tactics such as marches, boycotts, strikes and sit-ins to provoke social conflict to advance a cause. The author purports to be concerned with the latter. But in fact the groups he traces are generally active only in the sense that they might preach against war and face sometimes severe persecution for their refusal to take up arms. They are not nonviolent in the manner of the lunch-counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, which forced a confrontation around desegregation.
By the end of the book, it's clear that Kurlansky himself is a pacifist, although he never admits it outright. While he may well be supportive of active nonviolence, time and again his attention returns to pacifism. His primary concern is to "end war" in toto, not to use nonviolent persuasion to advance other causes. Tactical innovators in nonviolence consistently receive short shrift: Thoreau is among the many theorists he mentions only in passing. Gandhi and Martin Luther King receive just a few pages each, and it would be difficult for a reader to understand their distinctive contributions. The subtitle's promise of a tutorial notwithstanding (Kurlansky's "25 lessons" are scattered throughout the text and only enumerated explicitly in an appendix), there is little in the book of concrete usefulness for a modern-day practitioner of nonviolence seeking to engage in creative social disruption.
The book has rather more to offer a conscientious objector heading for a draft interview. Kurlansky can be heavy-handed at times, especially when he's drawing parallels between his lessons from history and our present state of war. (When he uses historical examples to show that warmongers will inevitably denounce nonviolent critics as immoral traitors and will always claim to have God on their side, the implications for today are plenty clear without him calling out Karl Rove and President Bush by name.) Yet Kurlansky can also be a compelling narrator, willing to dive into age-old debates without intellectual hesitation. At the core of "Nonviolence" lies a series of "What if?" scenarios questioning whether the major wars of U.S. history might have been averted. Many of the book's arguments were famously foreshadowed 25 years ago in Howard Zinn's war-resister-friendly "A People's History of the United States." Still, they remain rare and relevant in our current political discussion. Once the guns start firing, Kurlansky observes, debate about the necessity of a war ceases, at least for a time. To that we can add: Once a war is enshrined and justified in the history textbooks, popular reappraisal will be long in coming.
The American Revolution, from the pacifist's perspective, "was a brutal civil conflict" where "[c]ivilians would run in terror at the approach of either army. Homes were sacked and women were raped." Worse yet, it was arguably superfluous. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson years afterward, "The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced." Kurlansky concludes from this that colonists could have expelled the British by continuing a program of nonviolent protests and acts of economic resistance like the Boston Tea Party.
The same quotes from Adams appeared not long ago in Jonathan Schell's "The Unconquerable World," although Schell used them only to say that, since the revolution had been completed before military engagement commenced, the war was therefore one of self-defense against recolonization. Kurlansky goes much further in suggesting that the war was altogether unnecessary. This is a bold proposition, something that could no doubt keep a conference of historians indoors debating through a sunny weekend. But it is also an important challenge to America's founding myth, opening the door for a wider reinterpretation of who we are, and what we might become, as a nation.
Next page: Did nonviolent resistance save more Jews in World War II than the Allies?
