Can a nonviolent movement exist without a leader? The greatest nonviolent movements have been set alight by charismatic figures like Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. While their ideals persist, the movements they led fell apart when they were assassinated. This suggests that their power was a weakness as well as a strength. Is there another way? Can a grassroots nonviolent movement grow organically from a shared awakening, rather than dependency on the magnetism of a leader?Father John Dear, a peace activist for 25 years, says yes. “We have enough from Gandhi, Dr. King, and Dorothy Day,” says the Jesuit priest. “The group becomes the leader. The movement is the leader.”
Two-thirds of the planet is already engaged in grassroots nonviolence, Dear says, but not the U.S. In 2000, our country made almost half the $36.9 billion in international arms sales, according to Frida Berrigan, research associate at the World Policy Institute. We supplied weapons to more than 92 percent of the participants in global conflicts. She quotes Jimmy Carter: “We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of arms.”
That 800 million people are malnourished today is directly related to Los Alamos, according to Dear, a situation that could be changed in two weeks. Addressing an audience at San Francisco de Asis Church recently, Dear said, “Like all of you, I’m totally horrified by what’s going on in the world today.” Not only is violence immoral and illegal, but totally impractical, he said.
During an interview prior to his remarks at the church, Dear, author of “Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings,” told me that a nonviolent movement requires three steps:
1.Meditation/ contemplation. The challenge is to begin imagining peace and nonviolence.
2. Community. This can consist of a group as small as five friends committed to nonviolence who gather for moral support and mutual education.
3. Action. Not everything, but something.
The third step is the most difficult for Americans in this country, said Dear, because nonviolence requires active loving—not only a commitment not to kill, but a willingness to be killed; not just a refusal to inflict suffering, but a willingness to suffer. “Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good,” said Dear. “You cannot claim to be about good without being publicly, actively against evil.”
Peace activists routinely hear that their efforts won’t change anything, but Gandhi rejected the notion that the end justifies the means, asserting instead that the means are the end. “Instead of being totally effective, risk being ineffective,” said Dear. “Instead of being totally relevant, risk being irrelevant.” Václav Havel, the writer-activist in the forefront of the Czech movement for independence from the Soviet Union, wrote in “Disturbing the Peace” that “it occasionally makes sense to risk appearing ridiculous and act bravely.” He wrote that for people who view society “from above,” that is, from a position of power, “anything that does not produce immediate results seems foolish. They don’t have a lot of sympathy for acts which can only be evaluated years after they take place, which are motivated by moral factors, and which therefore run the risk of never accomplishing anything.”
Truth was the wellspring of Gandhi’s movement, which he called Satyagraha, or “insistence on truth.” He considered truth so fundamental that he ultimately made a subtle but radical alteration in his definition of God, from “God is truth” to “truth is God.” Havel described the successful nonviolent movement in Czechoslovakia as “living in truth.” Along with similar movements throughout Eastern Europe, living in truth contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, says Jonathan Schell in his book “The Unconquerable World.”
The living in truth movement started from “below,” as Havel describes it—from the grassroots. It wasn’t dependent on charismatic leaders, nor did it confront the totalitarian Soviet government directly. Rather, it rendered the government redundant by bypassing it. Having seen how their government routinely sacrificed truth to ideology, the Czech activists repudiated ideological polemics, instead devoting themselves to “truth”—concrete causes neglected by the government, such as social and educational programs. “I leave it to those more qualified to decide what can be expected from Gorbachev,” Havel wrote in 1987, “and, in general, ‘from above’—that is, from what is happening in the sphere of power. I have never fixed my hopes there; I’ve always been more interested in what was happening ‘below,’ what could be won there, and what defended.”
Next month: Blinded by ideology? The truth shall set you free.