Toward a Nonviolent World Order

At the 53rd session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, November 1998, the General Assembly proclaimed the period 2001-2010 as the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World. The General Assembly said at that time that it: "invites Member States to take the necessary steps to ensure that the practice of peace and nonviolence is taught at all levels in their respective societies, including in educational institutions."

This was an historic decision of the General Assembly, whether the Assembly knew it or not. Through this move, the concept of nonviolence was strongly endorsed by the world's states. They promised to accept it, spread it, and teach it. To the best of my knowledge, this has never happened before.

Why does this matter? What is so special about this word and this idea? What do they contribute that is unique? We already have the word "peace"; we have "justice" and "human rights". Why bother with "nonviolence"?

The English term, "nonviolence", is a translation of a Sanskrit word, ahims (not just Sanskrit, actually, but several north Indian languages). Gandhi used the term ahims frequently and helped make it known in the West, and the English word "nonviolence" became increasingly common in the early 20th century as a translation of ahims . But neither these terms nor the concept for which they stand was invented by Gandhi. I find it frustrating to read accounts of nonviolence that start with Gandhi as if he received the idea of nonviolence out of the blue.

"Ahims " first enters the historical record as a common term expressing a complex set of ideas in the northeast of India (kingdom of Magadha and republic of Vaishali) about 2500 years ago. The concept was being developed and institutionalized at roughly the same time that democracy was being worked out in Athens. In its first historical appearance, it was especially important to religious groups such as the Jains and Buddhists that included monastic orders.

Nonviolence, as understood by these groups, was a clear and radical concept. In its Buddhist form it included, either directly or indirectly, at least the following seven elements:

1. The refusal to take part in mass organized violence such as war.

2. The refusal to take part in even small-scale violence against other human beings, as, for example, homicide, torture, and capital punishment.

3. The attempt to limit violence directed against non-human sentient beings–against nature, broadly speaking.

4. The attempt to end serious human deprivation by sharing society's resources so that everyone's basic needs are met.

5. The attempt to prevent, and to heal when they occur, vengeance cycles and conflict spirals.

6. The promotion of feelings of empathy and responsibility toward human and other sentient beings through education and dialogue.

7. The attempt to redefine masculinity so that it would be compatible with the above ideals.

We will have no trouble finding plenty to criticize in the attempts to put the above elements into practice in early India. We may find these attempts, from our modern perspective, too closely associated with asceticism, or with particular religious mythologies. Yet I hope it will be obvious from the list of seven elements that the concept of nonviolence was one that had clarity and did a lot of work. It was not a foggy concept and was not an expression of mere sentimentality. Nor, for that matter, did it remain a mere concept. It was institutionalized. In fact, the intentional communities created 2500 years ago in north India to embody this ideal (the Jain and Buddhist monastic communities together with associated circles of lay supporters) are among the oldest surviving institutions in the world.

When we consider the evolution of the concept of nonviolence over the past century and a half, we find that it has gradually shed its ancient, Indian and monastic guise. I think this is a good thing, in the same way that it is a good thing that democracy evolved from its Athenian form and became a legacy of the whole world. Nonviolence today flourishes in an intellectual environment where major social change is thought to be possible, and where communities aiming chiefly at individual perfection have given way to communities of social struggle. Nonviolence as it exists today comes with a huge array of strategies and tactics for the achievement of social change. It has benefited not only from secular political traditions but also from the intellectual traditions of the far East (especially Taoism) and traditions of the Middle East (especially Christianity), as well as numerous other traditions, including indigenous oral traditions. All of this is good, I believe, because it indicates that nonviolence is increasingly being seen as a global inheritance.

So, increasingly nonviolence is seen as occupying its own, important conceptual space; and it is increasingly seen as having international legitimacy. Will it eventually achieve the same trans-cultural legitimacy and power as democracy? No one knows the answer; and the answer depends, in part, on us.

*****

Now let me move to the topic of world order. I begin my discussion with a quotation from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December, 2003:

For the second time in two years, Vice President Cheney arrived at daybreak at Arnold Palmer Airport in Latrobe. Air traffic was halted briefly at about 7 a.m. as Air Force Two landed and Cheney's security detail loaded him and his favourite shotgun into a Humvee and drove up U.S. Route 30 to the exclusive country club...

Scott Wakefield, a dog handler at the club, said about 500 farm-raised pheasants were released from nets for the morning hunt. The 10-man hunting party that included Cheney shot 417 pheasants. [Elsewhere we learn that "Cheney shot more than 70".] The vice president was set to hunt ducks in the afternoon.

I have no interest on this occasion in arguing against sport hunting, or trying to persuade everyone to be a vegetarian, or anything of the sort. But do you not find it odd that a man who has just participated in his second invasion of Iraq–with thousands of casualties--would find relaxation on his day off by shooting at close range large numbers of helpless, semi-domesticated animals? Yes, pheasants and ducks are little things, but if we entrust a man with little things and he behaves like this, how will he behave when we entrust him with big things?

How will such a man behave when he is confronted with the question of whether or not to use force when dealing with an international problem? How will such a man act when it comes to the very biggest of things–-nuclear weapons? If we say to him: here, take the greatest of known physical forces, nuclear fusion, the process by which the sun works--take it, we entrust you with it, use if wisely. How will he use it?

Let me tell you how he and his friends will use it. They will announce the creation of a new generation of nuclear weapons. They will refuse to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. They will continue, with nuclear elites from other countries, to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They will move to weaponize space, standing virtually alone among nations on this issue. (Every year there is a vote in the UN General Assembly on a resolution on the "Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space." In the December 8, 2003 vote, 174 nations voted in favour of the resolution and four nations abstained: Israel, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the U.S.A.) And as Mr. Cheney and his friends prepare to fill space with their technology of domination they will attempt to recruit other governments to help them. They will put forward as an important step toward the achievement of "full spectrum dominance" a Ballistic Missile Defence programme, which they will allege is merely a national defence initiative. The insecure government of Canada will be tempted to assist in this initiative to pay for its sin of having refused to join in the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Graham will tell us this is a matter for Cabinet to decide, not Parliament (and certainly not the electorate, a large majority of whom, according to the polls, oppose participation in this scheme). Have you noticed that whenever our governments touch on war, and especially on anything connected to nuclear war, our democracy shrinks? Have you noticed that we end up back with a system almost indistinguishable from that of a king and his councillors? (The Oxford Research Group noted some years ago that not one of the five major nuclear powers consulted its parliament or other representative body before adopting nuclear weapons.)

And what will be the results of these nuclear initiatives? They will be predictable. Russia will say it has no choice but to counter these aggressive developments, and China will say the same. They both understand, for example, that Ballistic Missile Defence is not a mere defensive system. It is a step toward the military dominance of space, with all that this implies. And when China, in reaction, builds up its nuclear forces, India will do the same. And when India builds, Pakistan will build. All this is predicable, because the institutions of war constitute an integrated system, and a movement here has an effect there. We have seen it all before.

A decade of peace and nonviolence for the children of the world? Is that how we will remember the early years of the 21st century?

Or will we remember planes slamming into tall buildings? Fuel-air bombs in Afghanistan, shock and awe in Iraq, and the next phase of the nuclear nightmare? Not nonviolence, but violence. Violence the drama queen, the rivetting image, the show-stealer.

I am aware that banquet speakers have a tendency to say that we are at a critical moment, so you may be sceptical when I tell you this. But there is plenty of evidence for the assertion. If we examine US military spending since WWII, for example, we find four clear peaks: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the late Cold War (Reagan phase) and the fourth, which we have now entered–this last one started slightly before the "war on terror" was proclaimed but has escalated since then. We have every reason to believe we are entering a new and dangerous period of global conflict. And how long will this one last? Years? Decades? Centuries? What are we signing on for when we sign on for this one?

I was recently reading a German socialist pamphlet written in 1911. Its author could see that a terrible global conflict was not far away. He wrote:

Do our rulers and our ruling classes dare to demand this awful thing of the people? Will not a cry of horror, of fury and of indignation fill the country and lead the people to put an end to this murder? Will they not ask: 'For whom and for what? Are we insane that we should be treated thus or should tolerate such treatment?'

It turned out that the rulers and the ruling classes did dare to demand this awful thing. The people did not put an end to this murder. The people, including the major socialist parties and labour unions for whom the pamphlet was written, as well as a good part of the feminist movement, were insane. They joined up. They were defeated by nationalism. That war and the closely related war that followed in 1939 set back one social project after another–projects to end to the exploitation of one class by another, to end the exploitation of one country by another, and so on. This is why the great American pacifist A. J. Muste called 1914 "the fall of man."

When the 20th century ended the toll was 110 million people dead through war. The biggest of these wars were connected to imperialism: wars of competition between imperial powers, wars of conquest, and wars of anti-imperialist struggle. If the Cold War, another imperial rivalry, had led to nuclear conflagration, as it repeatedly threatened to do from the 1940s to the 1980s, it could have added another 110 million dead within the space of two hours.

And here we are now in the 21st century. Hardly has this latest phase of imperial struggle--the Cold War--been declared over than we are told to sign up for another global struggle, the "war on terror."

I must say that I get weary when I hear this expression, "war on terror." I become profoundly overcome with weariness. We see this expression used all the time in the Canadian press as if it refers to something real. Newspapers seldom put the expression in quotation marks. They do not warn us that it is a public relations expressions.

I recently co-authored an article for a journal (Medicine, Conflict and Survival) on the destruction of Iraq's water treatment capacity, from 1990 to 2003. We now have the documents to show that the United States knowingly ruined this water system, and, having ruined it, prevented its repair. The authors of this destruction knew from the outset (they discussed it as early as January, 1991) what the results of such destruction would be, namely the spread of disease in the Iraqi population. A U.S. Air Force document brags about this creation of a "public health crisis." It brags, in effect, about the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them under the age of five. Imagine if such a thing had been done to us in the West? Imagine if, let us say, Muslim fundamentalists killed hundreds of thousands of Canadian children by destroying or degrading our water supply? Would not our media call this terrorism? Do you not think they would call this the greatest act of terrorism in history?

There is no "war on terror." There is only a war of terrors: their terror in response to our terror, our terror in response to their terror, with no clear beginning and no discernible ending. The war we are called to be part of will be an interaction between two sets of killers–the Bushes and the Bin Ladens--who will happily dance the tango over the bodies of the rest of the world. As for Bin Laden, polarization was always one of his intermediate aims (the U.S. versus the Islamic world), and he has been quite successful. As for the Bush administration, this phase of global polarization serves its imperial purposes just as the Cold War did. It seeks Pax Americana.

Is it our fate, then, to be forced into another round of wars? Is there really no alternative to the imperial order we Canadians are asked to support? This ancient, creaking model of world order pursued by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Mongols, the Romans...Is this really the best we've got?

Wasn't there something about a new model being worked out in the mid-20th century? A third model. Neither the dog-eat-dog order of competitive states nor an imperial order, but an order based on cooperation and a set of common principles and rules--political, social and economic--agreed to by all states? Wasn't there talk of the rights of human beings and of societies? Wasn't there even some talk about an end to war? Wasn't there an organization invented called the United Nations, and didn't it have a Charter?

Is this third model a creation of dreamers? Hardly. It is what we experience in our communities every day. It is a system of law and culture. Under law I include the courts and police necessary to give life to the law; and by culture I refer to those elements of culture that promote the solving of problems without recourse to violence. This system of law and culture is not some pie-in-the-sky idea: there is not a village, town, city or province in this country that does not depend on it. If we were told to abandon this system of public order for a system of gang warfare we would be outraged. We know perfectly well that gang warfare is an inferior system for the maintenance of justice, peace and order. Yet at the global level we are supposed to accept gang warfare as if we knew of nothing better.

Well, we do not accept it. Canada is supposed to be committed to the global extension, through the UN and its agencies, of the lawful and peaceful order we have already created domestically. We are on record repeatedly as supporting this historic move. Why, then, are we tiptoeing around, placating empire? Why are we tinkering with "ballistic missile defence" and the other trappings of gang warfare? Mr. Bush likes to say, "we must stay the course." I am going to borrow his words. Mr. Martin, Mr. Graham: Stay the course.

But how do we build this global order? Well, one thing we need is a moral basis for it, a moral framework that can be accepted by every society in the world. This is why UNESCO supports and promotes the "decade of peace and nonviolence for the children of the world." Its members rightly feel that we cannot understand or promote the vision of the UN–the UN at its best, the UN as representative of a cooperative, humane world–without the development of a moral framework. UNESCO expresses the moral framework of the decade by choosing six broad principles that it feels are crucial: "respect all life; reject violence; share with others; listen to understand; preserve the planet; rediscover solidarity". (The concept of nonviolence has, in my view, influenced several of the six points, but its presence is most obvious in the second, which includes in its longer descriptions: "practise active nonviolence, rejecting violence in all its forms.")

Inevitably, our attempts to articulate global moral principles–-to contribute to the globalization of moral concern, the globalization of social values--will be hesitant at first, and our categories will seem very broad. But we must start this way. This list is a good one.

And if we are looking for a concept that does not bear the dubious scent of the modern West–the West that keeps talking about freedom and peace and human rights while engaging in large-scale theft and violence-–perhaps you will agree with me that nonviolence is an interesting candidate? It is neither from the West nor from the modern period. It is from a society that we euphemistically call these days "the south" or "the third world", and it has deep historical roots. Moreover, despite its past associations with quietism and renunciation, nonviolence has been for the last hundred years associated with active social struggle undertaken in a wide variety of contexts and cultures; and, with its connection to Gandhi and many other great activists, it still has the power to inspire the young.

It seems to me that our first duty is, therefore, to make sure that, as the General Assembly has said, nonviolence as concept and practice is "taught at all levels [in every society], including in educational institutions." This is only one small step toward a nonviolent world order, but it is a step worth taking.

I would like to think that young males in our schools and universities-–and I specify males because males are estimated to be responsible for about 90% of the direct violence carried out worldwide--could be challenged as courageously as young males in north India were challenged 2500 years ago. Is it too much to ask that we hold to standards as high as those proposed so long ago?

I would like to end with this challenge, which, although 2500 years old, remains fresh today:

P n tip tam pah ya p n tip t pativirato hoti. Nihitadando nihitasattho. Lajj day panno sabbap nabh ta-hit nukamp viharati.

"He has renounced the killing of living beings. He will have nothing to do with the killing of living beings. He has laid down the cudgel, he has laid down the sword. He is kind, he has a conscience, and he is filled with friendliness and compassion for all things whatsoever that have life."

Thank you.

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