About book Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From The History Of A Dangerous Idea (2006)
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: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... 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.
I've always been fascinated by nonviolence - it's one of those political tactics that I've seen touted, but secretly thought of as largely ineffective. After all, if the government has shut a large group of people out of the decision-making process, whether by disenfranchising a subset of the population or by becoming a dicatorship, I had trouble seeing how getting a bunch of them together and, for example, chaining them to something, was really going to change anything. I think I believed this in part because, growing up, my impression of how political actions could be effective came from movies and occasional books. When forced into a 300 page or two hour narrative structure, things like the civil rights movement have to follow a brief arc - increasing intensity, big climax, success! Kurlansky's book is an antidote to this overly simplified view of how change can be brought about in society - even if the group agitating for change isn't in possession of the usual sources of power. He draws explicit contrast between nonviolence and pacifism - pacifism being a decision not to engage in conflict, while nonviolence is a conscious choice to challenge the existing order and actively resist it, but to do so without bloodshed (at least on the part of the challengers). Even if you don't read the whole book, the opening is a complete knockout - Kurlansky talks about how many religions were initially largely nonviolent or even pacifistic, and came to condone or even encourage violence only after becoming embedded in larger political structures. His focus is Christianity, and he goes into detail about how early Christian converts in Rome would literally lay down their weapons and refuse to engage in battle, a far cry from the later Crusades, for example. For all its weighty topics, Kurlansky's writing is engaging and thoughtful, and the book is a solid, fast read.
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Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea is a book that I've seen many human rights activists who I admire recommend, and it's really opened my eyes to seeing things from a different point of view. In Nonviolence, Kurlansky provides an insightful overview of this powerful mindset and movement, citing its early origins in the foundations of religions such as Christianity and Hinduism, and carries it through to describing its use in relation to the fall of the Soviet Empire. He illustrates the differences between nonviolence and pacifism, draws upon how States around the world have manipulated religion to promote wars and ultimately promotes nonviolence as the only way to achieve sustainable peace. The chapters are short and accessible, yet packed full of information, and he rounds it off with a 25 lessons summary at the end to recap what you've just read.Nonviolence is a fascinating book which will help you to think about the futility of war and violence, and hopefully it'll encourage more people to question and proactively change (through nonviolent means) the power-mad agendas of their governments. One of my favourite quotes that's stuck in my mind is one by Hannah Arendt - "The practice of violence changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.".
—Evelyn
Mark Kurlansky is an excellent writer, He makes a very strong case for nonviolence. He sees nonviolence as a political tactic, and openly questions those cases in history that have been routinely touted as examples of regimes which would be impervious to a Ghandi-like resistance. He singles out the Nazi's and the slave-owning southern states of America as deserving special consideration, because it is the accepted wisdom that nonviolence would have been ineffective in these two cases. There are of course limits to what counter-factual histories can tell us, if indeed they can tell us anything, but despite Kurlansky's arguments, I find myself doubting the idea of countering Nazi atrocities with nonviolence.Nonviolence can be an effective tactic, but two conditions need to be met: The world has to be watching, and someone somewhere has to care about your plight. In the case of the European Jews or the African slaves, that simply wasn't the case. Either people were not watching, or people did not care, and so no amount of nonviolence on the part of the oppressed was likely to change behaviors.Many of the examples given in the book of nonviolent resistance resulted in death and ruined lives for those engaged in the practice. Certainly violence would have fared them so better in most cases, but are we expected not to fight when our freedoms and our lives are about to be taken? What about the lives and freedoms of our children, friends and others?Nonviolence is a tactic. When it can be effective, it should be used. But when you take violence off the table, and forever foreswear its use, nonviolence might be seen as a weakness to be exploited. All tactics have to be on the table.Still, I'm attracted to nonviolence as a practice, and in all cases that I can envision myself involved in seem amenable to this tactic. I'd have to be pretty desperate to give up peace. But that's easy for me to say, living as I do in my nice house in my nice city nestled here in New England. I won't be so quick to judge those in more dire circumstances.
—Steve
A very interesting history of non-violence, from ancient times to the present. Kurlansky presents some provocative ideas questioning the wisdom of war, any war, throughout history, including the saintly "Good War" of World War II and the American Civil War. He uses alot of examples, (such as Gandhi's campaign in India) to suggest that non-violence is more effective than armed struggle. He points out that in the Middle East, violence hasn't worked, isn't working and probably won't ever work. One thing keeping this first printing from being five stars were several typos and errors of simple fact, (e.g., women did not get the vote in the U.S. in 1929, it was 1920, and William McKinley did not give a speech in 1903 explaining why a war to "liberate" the Philippines from Spanish rule led to their annexation by the United States because he died in 1901. There are other errors like that, but it's still a great book.
—David Bales
