Review - A Force More Powerful and Other Peace Books
By Colman McCarthy
Yes, nonviolence is a noble ideal but do you really think it would stop a Hitler? Or a street thug, a dictator, a death squad?
Pacifists are long accustomed to these questions, mostly thrown up by self-proclaimed realists. And they get the put-down message: nonviolence is a creed only slightly less trifling than hippies sticking flowers in soldiers gun barrels.
Readers whose minds are open to another view will be rewarded by A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (St. Martins Press, $29.95). It is a comprehensive and lucidly written addition to the literature of peace. Its worthiness puts the authors, Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, in the high company of Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, Michael True of Assumption College and Richard Deats of the Fellowship of Reconciliation--all scholars of mettle who bring before the public the many historical examples where the force of organized nonviolent resistance defeated oppression.
Ackerman and Duvall, deserving of praise for writing non-ideologically when they might easily have drifted leftward, use 14 chapters to report and analyze history-altering reforms created by nonviolent strategies. These include the Danish resistance to the Nazis, Solidaritys victory over the Soviet puppet regime in Poland, the citizen-power removal of the Pinochet junta in Chile, the near-bloodless elimination of the Marcos government in the Philippines, the work of the Palestinian American Mubarak Awad to rally civil disobedience against Israeli troops in the occupied territories.
These are the better known examples. Ackerman and Duval also explore the removal of autocratic governments in El Salvador, Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Oddly, the authors omit the story of Le Chambon, the French village that was a leading center for hiding Jews in the early 1940s and whose pacifist citizens successfully faced down the Nazis with weapons of the spirit, not weapons of steel. That story is told by Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.
Ackerman and Duvall do not portray Awad, King Christian X of Denmark, Gandhi of India, Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, James Lawson of Nashville and others as willing martyrs for the cause. Instead, they were hard-thinking political strategists who built bases for citizen support that would not crack when the heat rose.
Nonviolent resistance, the authors write, becomes a force more powerful than the hand of an oppressor to the extent that it takes away his capacity for control. Embracing nonviolence for its own sake does not produce this force. A strategy for action is needed, and that strategy has to involve attainable goals, movement unity, and robust sanctions that restrict the opponent.When the regime realizes it can no longer dictate the outcome, the premise and means of its power implode. Then the end is only a matter of time.
A Force More Powerful will likely stand as a book more powerful than any guts-and-glory war memoirs by generals or extollings of military might by one-note historians.
Some brave users of the force of nonviolence gathered in November 1998 at the University of Virginia for two days of dialogue and reflection. They were nine Nobel Peace Prize winners: Oscar Arias, the Dalai Lama, Rigoberta Menchu, Bobby Muller, Jose Ramos-Horta, Desmond Tutu, Betty Williams, Jody Williams and Harn Yawnghwe speaking for Aung San See Kyi. In The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss Our Future, (University Press of Virginia) Helen Cobban, a seasoned author whose global affairs column bolsters the Christian Science Monitor, brings to life the people behind the aura that a Nobel Peace Prize can create.
Cobban includes selections from the speeches of the nine, plus excerpts from exchanges among them. Some, like Jody Williams of Vermont, are natural storytellers, while others, including Oscar Arias, the Costa Rican, are theorists. The relevant ideas range from ways to demilitarize the world economy to bringing aid to the victims of weapons made and sold by defense contractors.
Not that anyone should strain to read global affairs columnists and their tepid prescriptions for ending international violence, but Cobban is almost alone in her analysis of current thinking by national security policymakers: few propose doing much beyond fiddling at the margins of the world system as we know it today. Few ask the deeper questions about what kinds of responsibilities people in different human groups should have toward each other. Few even start to tackle the complex problems raised by the issue of state sovereignty; few question the state-dominated, political assumptions on which most of the Western theory of international relations has been built until now.few, therefore have done anything that can be said to contribute to sketching out the moral architecture of a future world at peace.
Readers looking for an intellectual feast served up by peacebuilders who understand, and live by, the philosophy of nonviolence can find it in abundance in these pages. Sophisticatesfirst cousins to sophistsare likely to mock the laureates for denouncing militarism and nationalism as impractical. Oscar Arias, from an enlightened country that abolished its army 40 years ago and put the savings into true securityan educated, healthy and wealth-sharing populationagrees. Seeking peace and justice is impractical, all rightimpractical because it puts concern for human life before a free market drive for profits. Impractical because it listens to the poor who are crying out for schools and doctors, rather than the dictators who demand guns and fighters. Yes, in an age of cynicism and greed, all just ideas are considered impractical. You are discouraged if you say that we can live in peace. You are mocked for insisting that we can be more humane.
Many citizens of impractical bents earn the praising attention of Robert Coles in Lives of Moral Leadership (Random House, $23.95). In cant-free prose and understated commentary that reveals his meditative side that has marked his writing for some four decades in his more than 50 books, Coles is that rarity: a moralist who doesnt moralize, a religious man who avoids religiosity, a person of political vision who takes on political shortsightedness.
Longtime readers of Coles will find him returning again in these pages to people and events that shaped his conscience as a young psychiatrist. He gives ample space to his visits with Ralph McGill and Lillian Smith, progressive Georgians in the civil rights years. He goes back to his many conversationstapedwith Dorothy Day, Robert F. Kennedy, Erik Erikson. Equally compelling is what he learned from interviewing an elementary school teacher caught in the desegregation turmoil of New Orleans in the l960s, and a Boston school bus driver amid the same chaos when it was the Norths turn to reform.
For Coles, these are women and men who did no more than use their gifts for peacemaking, people who can bring us all up morally.They hand us along, become a source of moral encouragement to us, arouse us and stir us, move us to do things when we might otherwise not be provoked, and they have the will to act in pursuit of purposes we have come to regard as important.
Now in his early 70s, Coles own lifeas husband, father, writer, and teacher-mentor to thousands of students at Harvard, Duke and elsewhereis one of selfless generosity and kindness. The authenticity of his writing is traceable to those quiet expressions of moral leadership.
Anyone who breaks from the ethic of violence is a convert. In The Last Trek: A New Beginning (Pan Books, $19.95 paper), F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994, presents the story of his life before, during and after his renunciations of apartheid. For his conversion, de Klerk jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with Nelson Mandela.
If he became a dove, de Klerk retained a sharp beak. He portrays Mandela as a double-talking glory-seeker. Desmond Tutus Truth and Reconcilation Commission aimed to discredit and humiliate me. He claims that at the Nobel ceremonies his Norwegian hosts were charming but decidedly and openly biased in favor of [Mandela and] the African National Congress.
These self-indulgent carpings decrease the luster of what otherwise is a readable and detailed account of one politicians awakening to justice.