Global spread of active nonviolence.

In the last century Victor Hugo wrote, "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." Looking back over the twentieth century we see the growing influence and impact of nonviolence all over the world. While "nonviolence is as old as the hills," as Gandhi said, it is our century in which the philosophy and practice of nonviolence have grasped the human imagination and exploded in amazing and unexpected ways, as individuals, groups, and movements have developed creative, life-affirming ways to resolve conflict, overcome oppression, establish justice, protect the earth, and build democracy.

Mohandas Gandhi pioneered in developing the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. On the vast sub-continent of India he led a colonial people to freedom through satyagraha - soul force - defeating what was at the time the greatest empire on earth, the British Raj. Not long after Gandhi's death, Martin Luther King, Jr. found in the Mahatma's philosophy the key he was searching for. He moved individualistic religion toward a socially dynamic religious philosophy that propelled the civil rights movement into a nonviolent revolution, thus changing the course of US history.

The Gandhian and Kingian movements have provided a seed-bed for social ferment and revolutionary change across the planet, providing a mighty impetus for human and ecological transformation. Many, perhaps most, still do not recognize the significance of this development and persist in thinking that in the final analysis it is lethal force, or the threat of it, that is the decisive arbiter of human affairs. Why else would we as a nation continue to pour hundreds of billions into weaponry even as we cut foreign aid, refuse to pay our United Nations dues, and send our armed forces abroad on peacekeeping missions without providing them with training in the way of peace and nonviolence?

We need to do a far better job of bringing into the public consciousness an awareness of the nonviolent breakthroughs that have been occurring and that provide an alternative paradigm to the ancient belief in marching armies and bloody warfare as the stuff of human history. What follows are, in necessarily broad strokes, some of the highlights of how this alternative vision is developing even as it changes history.

The Philippines

In 1986 millions of unarmed Filipinos surprised the world by nonviolently overthrowing the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who was known at the time as "the Hitler of Southeast Asia." The movement they called "People Power" demonstrated in an astounding way the power of active nonviolence.

Beginning as a reaction to the assassination in 1983 of the popular opposition leader, Sen. Benigno Aquino, the movement against Marcos grew rapidly. Drawing on Aquino's own advocacy of nonviolence, and aided by widespread workshops in active nonviolence, the people began to realize that armed rebellion was not the only way to overthrow the dictator.

In late 1985, when Marcos called a snap election, the divided opposition united behind Corazon Aquino, the widow of the slain senator. Despite fraud, intimidation, and violence employed by Marcos, the Aquino forces brilliantly used a nonviolent strategy employing marches, petitions, trained poll watchers, and an independent polling commission. When Marcos tried to steal the election and thwart the people's will, the country came to the brink of civil war. The Catholic cardinal called upon the contemplative orders of nuns to pray and fast for the country. Thirty computer operators tabulating the election results publicly denounced the official counting, exposing the fraud to the world. Corazon Aquino called for a nonviolent struggle of rallies, vigils, and civil disobedience to undermine the fraudulent claim of Marcos that he had won the election. Church leaders fully backed her call.

Crucial defections from the government by two key leaders and a few hundred troops became the occasion for millions of unarmed Filipinos to pour into the streets of Manila to protect the defectors and demand the resignation of the discredited government. Troops sent to attack the rebels were met by citizens massed in the streets, singing and praying, calling on the soldiers to join them. Clandestine radio broadcasts gave instructions in nonviolent resistance. When fighters planes were sent to bomb the rebel camp, the pilots saw it surrounded by the people, and defected. A military man said, "This is something new. Soldiers are supposed to protect the civilians. In this particular case, you have civilians protecting the soldiers." Facing the collapse of his support, Marcos and his family fled the country. The dictatorship fell in four days.

Ending the dictatorship was only the first step in the long struggle for freedom. Widespread poverty, unjust distribution of the land, and an unreformed military remained, undercutting the completion of the revolution: Challenges to the further development of an effective People Power movement continue.

Chile

The Chileans, who like the Filipinos suffered under a brutal dictatorship, gained inspiration from the People Power movement as they built their own movement of nonviolent resistance to General Pinochet. They used the image of drops of water wearing away the stone of oppression.

In 1986 leftist guerrillas killed five bodyguards of Pinochet in an assassination attempt on the general. In retaliation, the military decided to take revenge by arresting five critics of the regime. A human rights lawyer alerted his neighbours to the danger of his being abducted, and they made plans to protect him. Cars arrived in the early morning hours carrying hooded men who tried to enter the house. Unable to break down reinforced doors and locks, they tried to force barred windows. The lawyer's family turned on all the lights and banged pots and blew whistles, awakening the neighbours, who then did the same. The attackers, unexpectedly blocked by united neighbours, fled the scene.

Groups formed to carefully locate sites of government torture and then, after prayer and reflection, found ways to expose the evil. Some padlocked themselves to iron railings near a targeted building; others proceeded to such a site during rush hour, then unfurled a banner saying, "Here they torture people." Sometimes they would disappear into the crowd; other times they would wait until they were arrested.

In October of 1988, the government called on the people to vote "si" or "no" on continued military rule. Despite widespread intimidation against Pinochet's critics, the people were determined. Workshops were held to help them overcome their fear and to work to influence the election. Inspired and instructed by Filipino opposition to Marcos, voter registration drives and the training of poll watchers proceeded all over the country. The results exceeded the protesters' fondest expectations: 91% of all eligible voters registered and the opposition won 54.7% of all votes cast. Afterwards over a million people gathered in a Santiago park to celebrate their victory.

In the late 1980s, throughout Latin America, dictatorships fell like dominos. This came about not through armed uprisings, but through the determination of unarmed people - students, mothers, workers, religious groups - persisting in their witness against oppression and injustice, even in the face of torture and death. In Brazil the nonviolent movement for justice was called firmeza permanente, "relentless persistence." Base communities in the Brazilian countryside, for example, became organizing centres for the landless struggling to regain their land. In Argentina, "mothers of the disappeared" were unceasing in their agitation for an accounting of the desaparacidos - the disappeared - of the military regime. In Montevideo, a fast in the tiny office of Serpaj (Service for Justice & Peace) brought to the fore the first public opposition to Uruguay's rapacious junta and elicited widespread sympathy that turned the tide toward democracy.

Haiti

Nowhere has the struggle for democracy been more difficult than in Haiti, yet even there the people developed courageous and determined nonviolent resistance against all odds. The people's movement is called Lavalas, the flood washing away oppression. Defying governmental prohibitions and military abuse, the people demonstrated and marched and prayed. In 1986 when Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was silenced by his religious order and reassigned by the hierarchy to a church in a dangerous area dominated by the military, students from his church in the slums occupied the front rows of the national cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Seven students fasted at the altar, persisting for six days until the bishops backed down and allowed Aristide to continue working in his parish. Then, in December 1990, Aristide was elected to the presidency. Driven from office and exiled abroad, he was able to return only after US troops went into Haiti. The long-term building of a democratic society there faces enormous odds - but it can be built, given time and persistence and the strengthening of the grassroots movement out of which the first democratic elections were held.

China

Stunning developments took place in China in the spring of 1989. What began as a memorial march for a deceased leader quickly led into a mass expression of the pent-up longings of the Chinese people. With slogans such as "People Power" and "We Shall Overcome," students - later joined by workers - called for democracy, an end to corruption, a free press, and other democratic reforms. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese joined the protesters in Tiananmen Square. Day after day, week after week, they peacefully called on their government to accede to their demands. First a few, then hundreds, joined in a fast. Growing numbers of citizens, including police, soldiers, even generals, expressed sympathy with the movement. The first soldiers sent to stop the demonstrators were disarmed with gifts and goodwill, just as the Filipino soldiers had been in Manila. The top leaders of the government, in an important concession, met in a televised session with the students. The movement spread, beyond control it seemed, to other cities. Finally, however, a confused and divided government resorted to brute force, and on June 4 the massacre of Tiananmen Square occurred.

This great tragedy was not necessarily the end of People Power in China, any more than the Amritsar massacre of unarmed Indians by the British was the end of the Indian revolution, or the assassination of Benigno Aquino was the end of the democracy movement in the Philippines. Both of those tragedies proved to be beginnings rather than endings. Martin Luther King reminded us that "unearned suffering is redemptive." This can be true for a people as well as for an individual.

China has also brutally sought to destroy democratic rights in Tibet. The Tibetans' exiled leader and Nobel Prize laureate, the Dalai Lama, bravely persists in calling his people not to flag in their nonviolent efforts to gain their freedom from Chinese domination. He believes that these efforts will resonate with China's democracy movement, which was only temporarily set back by the Tiananmen Square massacre. He maintains that following the course of nonviolent resistance will in time bring political concessions from China that seem unimaginable at present.

Burma

A movement remarkably parallel to China's occurred in Burma a year earlier. In Rangoon, the capital, a students' nonviolent movement was launched in the summer of 1988 against the brutally repressive military rulers. Students began mass marches that increased week by week, as professionals, the middle class, and working people joined.

During this tumultuous period Aung San Suu Kyi quickly rose to prominence. The daughter of Aung San, the father of modern Burma, she had married an Oxford professor and moved to England. She had returned to Rangoon from abroad because of her mother's illness. Suu Kyi was drawn into the democracy movement and fearlessly spoke at mass rallies, once walking through a contingent of soldiers ready to fire on her.

Finally, as would occur in China a year later, the threatened leaders ordered a bloody crackdown, killing thousands of unarmed demonstrators, with thousands more fleeing into the jungle. In the May 1990 national elections, the people voted overwhelmingly for Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, even though she and the other NLD leaders had been placed under house arrest months earlier. The government refused to recognize the results of the election and continued to govern, keeping Suu Kyi under house arrest for five years. Meanwhile she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In one of her essays she wrote, "The wellspring of courage and endurance in the face of unbridled power is generally a firm belief in the sanctity of ethical principles, combined with a historical sense that despite all setbacks, the condition of man is set on an ultimate course for both spiritual and material advancement." Her quiet determination and courage continue as a tower of strength to the Burmese in their quest for freedom.

Israel/Palestine

Prior to the start of the peace process in the Middle East, the predominant impression of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, fed by media images, was one of rock-throwing Palestinian young men fighting well-armed Israeli soldiers. But since 1967 there had been two parts of the Palestinian resistance movement, the paramilitary and the civil. The Intifada (Arabic for "to shake off") was from its inception a multi-dimensional movement containing many nonviolent aspects such as:

* strikes by schools and businesses called to protest specific policies and actions of the occupying authorities

* agricultural projects, such as the planting of victory gardens and trees planted on disputed lands

* visiting committees for prisoners and the families of those who have been killed

* boycotts of Israeli-made products

* tax refusal, as in the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour where the VAT and income taxes were not paid

* solidarity demonstrations, undertaken when villagers were unjustly arrested, by other residents who went to police stations asking to be arrested as well

* establishment of alternative institutions to build Palestinian self-sufficiency.

Commenting on such developments, Labor Party leader Schlomo Avineri observed, "An army can beat an army, but an army cannot beat a people ... . Iron can smash iron, it cannot smash an unarmed fist."

The just demands and nonviolent actions of the Intifada strengthened the voices of Israelis working to find a just and peaceful resolution of the conflict. And, despite grave legal risks, covert meetings between Palestinians and Israelis slowly built growing areas of understanding. In March 1989 the chairman of the Palestine National Council's political committee told a New York audience how secret friendships with Jewish leaders helped Palestinian leaders to publicly adopt a two-state solution. In the fall of 1992, Norway began hosting fourteen secret meetings between Palestinians and Israelis out of which the Declaration of Principles was forged that provided the basis of the Israeli-PLO Accord signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.

Extremists on both sides have been unrelenting in their efforts to undermine the peace process. The assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the defeat of the peace forces in the May 1996 Israeli elections were grave blows to the Accord.

The forces of fairness and good will have an even more daunting task ahead of them. To those who say peace is now impossible, Gandhi reminds us, "Think of all the things that were thought impossible until they happened."

South Africa 

Decades of resistance to apartheid and witness for a multiracial, democratic society slowly but surely wore away the stone of oppression in South Africa. The brutal policies of the government convinced many that apartheid would only end in a violent showdown, that nonviolence could not overcome such a racist regime. Nonetheless, the heart of the resistance movement was basically nonviolent: education, vigils, rallies, marches, petitions, boycotts, prayers, fasts, and civil disobedience. Governmental attempts to stop the movement with massive detentions, bannings of organizations and individuals, intimidation and murder, could not, in the end, stop it.

Even the establishment of emergency rule in 1988 failed: the churches responded with a nationwide program called "effective nonviolent action" that trained citizens for grassroots campaigns to break racial barriers in housing and transportation, defend conscientious objectors, visit prisoners across racial lines, etc. Emergency rule, rather than strengthening the government, exposed its desperation and moral bankruptcy in the face of widespread nonviolent resistance.

An unexpected breakthrough came when President deKlerk began instituting reforms, eventually legalizing the African National Congress and releasing Nelson Mandela who had been in prison twenty-nine years. The dramatic changes demonstrate a concept from the civil rights movement in the US, "top down/bottom up" - i.e., pressure for change from the grassroots is met by reforms accepted by or initiated from the top, creating a dynamic tension that fosters change.

In the midst of these changes, the government still carried out brutal policies - but the force for change was not to be denied. When the first open elections in South Africa's history were held, the world saw an amazing manifestation: a whole nation peacefully voting for revolutionary change, moving from a white racist regime to multiracial democratic rule under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. His passion for freedom and justice for all was expressed in a greatness of spirit that reached out to his former enemies. In his inaugural address, he held before the people a unifying vision "in which all South Africans...will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, sure of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world."

Former Soviet bloc

The same "top down/bottom up" process occurred in the unravelling of the Soviet bloc that followed the policies of glasnost, perestroika, and democratsatsiya (openness, restructuring, and democracy) instituted by President Mikhail Gorbachev. Pressure from below - relentless persistence - helped to create a climate ripe for change. This ferment from below was long in building. On the one hand there was a small but determined band of human rights advocates such as Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner who were unrelenting in their call for the observance of universally accepted standards of human rights. Others - religious, peace, and environmental groups, artists and poets - refused to submit to totalitarian rule.

The crushing of Czechoslovakia's 1968 experiment to create "socialism with a human face" had strengthened the widely-held assumption at that time that communism was incapable of peaceful change and democratic openness, that nonviolence might "work" in India or the US, but never with the communists. This added fuel to the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and the belief that World War III was a virtual certainty. Not many paid attention to those aspects of the Czech experiment that contained hints of the People Power revolutions that were to flower in the 1980s - but they were highly significant.

The 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies had been expected to crush all resistance in a few days. It took eight months. Czechoslovakia's large and well-trained army was ordered to stay in its barracks while the populace responded in unexpectedly creative, nonviolent ways. The Czech news agency refused to report the disinformation that said Czech leaders had requested the invasion. Highway and street signs were turned around to confuse the invading forces. Students sat in the path of incoming tanks; others climbed onto the tanks and talked to the crews. While the people did not physically fight the invaders, they refused to cooperate with them. Clandestine radio messages kept up the morale of the people, passing on vital information and instructions, such as the calling of one-hour general strikes. The Czech leaders were able to hold on to their offices and continue some of the reforms until the nonviolence finally began to erode, quite possibly through the work of agents provocateurs.

Twelve years later neighbouring Poland took up the fallen nonviolent banner. Gdansk shipyard workers went on strike and, with prayers and rallies, Solidarnosc was born in August, 1980 - giving laborers an independent voice. Using strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, "Solidarity" began a grassroots movement for change that spread rapidly across Poland. The government responded with the brutal imposition of martial law in December, 1981. But instead of destroying Solidarity, the people began the creation of an alternative society from the base, choosing to live "as if they were free." A new society began to be born in the shell of the old. When finally, in 1989, open elections were held, Solidarity won by a landslide.

The Polish elections were aided by the breath-taking changes occurring in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's reforms, beginning in 1985, opened the floodgates of pentup longing for change that were eventually to sweep away even Gorbachev and the USSR. One by one, the nations of Eastern Europe saw the overthrow of totalitarian rule by people armed with truth and courage. A critical mass had been reached: growing numbers of people were emboldened by such things as the writings of Vaclav Havel from a Czech prison, and prayer meetings and discussion groups in Leipzig, East Germany. The symbol of these vast changes was the peaceful breaching of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, as the established order collapsed and the old regimes were swept aside with remarkably little loss of life or violence.

The widespread assumption that totalitarian regimes could not be overturned by unarmed people was decisively shown to be wrong. Governments ultimately derive their strength from the consent - either passive or active - of the governed. Once that consent disappears and resistance spreads, governments find their power to rule weakened and, under the right circumstances, destroyed.

What happened in Eastern Europe happened in the USSR as well. The reforms speeded up the stirrings for change, as thousands of grassroots groups sprang up to deal with a whole spectrum of social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural issues. In July, 1990, 100,000 coal miners went out on a strike in Siberia that spread westward to Ukraine. Strongly disciplined, the miners policed themselves, closed down mining town liquor stores, and gathered for massive rallies.

From the local to the national level, elections became more democratic, bringing about the election of reform candidates. In the spring of 1989, 2,000 persons, including Andrei Sakharov, were elected to the Congress of Peoples' Deputies in the freest election since the revolution. Popularly elected legislatures came into office throughout the USSR, breaking the monopoly of the Communist Party. The lead for these changes came from popular fronts established in republic after republic, beginning with Latvia (October 1988), Ukraine (September 1989) and Sajudis in Lithuania, which won multi-party elections (February 1990). Respect for the language, history, and traditions of the various nationalities challenged the Russification that had undergirded Soviet power and control.

The Baltic state of Lithuania was the first of the Soviet republics to proclaim outright independence - which it did on March 11, 1990. This most repressed of the republics started a "singing revolution," defying decades of cultural repression by reviving long-forbidden Lithuanian folk songs, festivals, religious practices, and traditions. Trying to halt the dissolution of the Union, Moscow retaliated with a crippling blockade. The following January, crack Red Army troops moved on the capital of Vilnius, killing fourteen unarmed demonstrators who were protecting the nation's TV tower. Instead of surrendering or issuing a call to arms, Lithuania called on the citizenry to "hold to principles of nonviolent insubordinate resistance and political and social noncooperation." The Lithuanians did just that, continuing their nonviolent and independent course.

Then in August 1991, elements of the Communist Party, the KGB, and the Army tried to stage a coup in Moscow. Despite the arrest of Gorbachev and his family, resistance was widespread. People poured into the streets to protect the Russian parliament. Women and students called on the soldiers to join the people. Religious people knelt in the streets in prayer. Closed newspapers and radio stations quickly set up alternative media. The Mayor of Leningrad told the military in his city not to follow the order of the plotters, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church threatened excommunication to those who followed the coup. Even some members of the KGB refused orders, risking death for their defiance. Eventually the coup attempt collapsed, opening the way for Lithuania and the other republics to begin an independent course.

The breakup of the Soviet empire will doubtless be followed by years of upheaval as its constituent parts find their place in a world reaching for democracy but often lacking the experience, patience, and vision to implement the hope. At this point in history we have learned a great deal about nonviolent resistance to evil and bringing down oppressors. We still have far to go in knowing how to take the next steps in fostering the democratic evolution of society that includes justice and peace, freedom and order.

Democracy is the institutionalization of nonviolent problem-solving in the social order. Education, conflict resolution, the struggle for justice, nonviolent direct action, organizing for special needs, voting on issues, adjudicating differences, framing laws for change and reform - these are all nonviolent in essence and help build what Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the beloved community." Democratic nations are truest to their values when they deal with other nation states nonviolently, through diplomacy, treaties, mutual respect, and fairness.

Nonviolent movements in the United States have a long and significant history, from the abolitionist struggle against slavery; the labour movement; the environmental movement; the movements for the rights of women, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, as well as other minorities and oppressed groups. Nonetheless, there is still far to go when one considers the degree of violence and the lack of justice in the national life and in the foreign policy of the United States.

At the time of the Philippine overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship, a Filipino writer said that whereas the past one hundred years were dominated by Karl Marx and the armed revolutionary, the next hundred years would be shaped by Gandhi and the unarmed satyagrahi, the votary of Truth. Gandhi said that "Truth is God," and that the Truth expressed in the unarmed struggle for justice, peace, and freedom is the greatest power in the world.

During Gandhi's lifetime, many looked upon him with contempt. Churchill dismissed him as a "halfnaked fakir." Communists and other advocates of violent revolution branded his nonviolence as bourgeois and reactionary. Most advances in the human race have faced long years of ridicule and opposition. New insights of truth are often considered heresy; prophets are driven out, their followers persecuted. But half a century after his assassination, Gandhi's influence continues to grow with the amazing spread of nonviolent movements around the world.

If a global, democratic civilization is to come into being and endure, our challenge is to continue developing radical nonviolent alternatives to war and all forms of oppression, from individuals to groups, from nation-states to the peoples of the world. We must continue to challenge the age-old assumptions about the necessity of violence in overcoming injustice, resisting oppression, and establishing social well-being.

What if a writer in the pages of Fellowship fifteen years ago had predicted that unarmed Filipinos would overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in a fourday uprising; that military regimes across Latin America would be toppled by the relentless persistence of their unarmed opponents; that apartheid would end peacefully, and that in a massive and peaceful plebescite, all races of South Africa would elect Nelson Mandela to the presidency; that the Berlin Wall would be peacefully brought down; and that Arafat and Rabin would shake hands at the White House at a ceremony establishing a peace accord between the PLO and Israel?

Such a writer would probably have been thought ridiculously naive and dismissed out of hand. And yet these things happened. Why do we so resist the potential in the "not yet" which is stirring in the present moment? Elise Boulding reminds us how deadly pessimism can be, eroding our determination to work for a better tomorrow. Hope infused in an apparently hopeless situation creates the possibility of change. This is the faith that can sing, in the face of police dogs and water cannons, "We Shall Overcome." Or as Joan of Arc muses in Shaw's St. Joan, "Some people see things as they are and ask `Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, `Why not?"'

Reprinted from Fellowship Magazine, July/August 1996 (Fellowship of Reconciliation, P.O. Box 271, Nyack, NY, United States 10960, phone: [phone], email: [e-mail]). Richard Deats is the Editor of Fellowship Magazine. He has been on the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation for the past 25 years.