Images of victorious and liberating armies have a powerful grip on the human psyche. History does indeed tell us about brutally violent foes who could only be defeated by still more intense brutality.
World War II provided perhaps the most recent evidence of this. On one side were the Nazis and their death camps. On the other side were the forces of the Allies who represented freedom and some basic human decency. This is why many cheered when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The assumption behind such cheering is that in some situations, there is no substitute for decisive and deadly force. This is sometimes true, but always with a dangerous twist. Deadly force is rarely decisive. Instead, it can escalate and prolong a conflict in ways that pulverise both reason and that “basic human decency”, which one set out to defend.
This is why those who demand stronger retaliation, on both sides, tend to ignore the crucial question — will a more brutal counter-attack achieve anything other than vengeance? And is vengeance a worthwhile goal?
Meanwhile, the public discourse tends to swing between lamenting human suffering and cold-blooded evaluations of what each round of violence might gain for its perpetrators. Consequently, those who work for and with nonviolence tend to be ignored or dismissed patronisingly as ineffective good souls.
Why is this dismissive attitude invalid? This question is always worth asking but more so in a week that begins with the International Day of Nonviolence, on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, and ends with the first anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
If securing physical territory and some semblance of safe existence, on a sustained basis, is the criteria of success, then violence has resoundingly failed both the Israelis and the Palestinians. This truth has been horrifically manifest over the decades but even more acutely over this last year.
Despite this, combatants on both sides would find it insulting to be reminded that, as Issac Asimov put it — “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
The claim that power flows from the barrel of a gun has a tenacious hold. Ironically, many who believe this disagree on everything else — thus the violence.
What actually flows from the barrel of a gun is not power but instant obedience. And forced obedience creates only the illusion of control, not true power. Gandhi lived this realisation, first by instinct and later by refining what he learnt through incessant experimentation. But it was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt who articulated this insight in the scholarly domain in ways that now powerfully inform the evolution of nonviolence practice.
All this is easy to overlook when violence is proliferating. In that situation, who cares whether war is “natural”, that is, inherent to human beings, or a toxic side-effect of what we loosely call “civilisation”?
And yet, these issues are central to the future of homo sapiens. That is what is at stake here, not just the future of the Israelis, Palestinians and their neighbours. This is largely because the “world order” that was assumed to be in place after World War II, is now decisively known to be a mirage. Deadly force often rules even though it repeatedly fails to achieve stated goals.
Practitioners of nonviolence have an epochal role in this context.
One, they have a broader and more holistic view of the human condition. This ensures that those who make claims about power flowing from the barrel of the gun don’t have a monopoly on what is deemed to be “realistic”.
Two, across the world, practitioners of nonviolence have doggedly and bravely stood their ground, even in locations of extreme violence — including Israel and Palestine. Thus, even when nonviolence looks marginalised and unheard — keeping its energy alive keeps complete darkness at bay.
Three, even when nonviolence does not “win” it expands or just holds space for resolving conflicts. Violence is, more often than not, ineffective and notoriously shrinks or closes spaces.
In case all of the above seems obvious, here is why it still needs to be reiterated. Nonviolence is commonly confused with self-denial and the kind of caring that makes a person or group weak. On the contrary, the essence of politically engaged nonviolence is strength and fearlessness.
In India, this is a well-established ancient truth. The premise of “ahimsa parmo dharma” is that what is driven by fear can never be ahimsa. Being fearless, as an individual, is the primary quality which enables nonviolence. This, in turn, can, potentially, enable the collective, the samaj, to deploy force in a limited manner in extreme situations. That is radically different from equating power with the barrel of the gun.
The logic of violence is precisely the opposite of this. Advocates of violence feed on fear, spread fear and must keep fear alive to keep their projects going. Their victory depends on convincing the rest of us that violence is more natural, thus inevitable and perpetual.
Refusing to accept or fall in with these claims is itself a form of resistance. It is, at least, a first step towards defiant optimism.
The writer is the founder of the YouTube channel ‘Ahimsa Conversations’
