Week of July 16, 2024

Nonviolence Report (begins at 44:09)

Michael: Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler, and this is your Nonviolence Report for the second week of July.

We have July 4th behind us, of course, but I wanted to share a quote with you from Qasim Rashid, who has a program called Let’s Address This. And let me quote directly what Qasim said. “This July 4, remember that our nation was not founded as a perfect Union. It is called to become a more perfect Union. It was not founded on the principle of Kings with divine rights, but upon the principle of a President accountable to the people and rule of law.” So, he calls upon us to strive to recognize this truth, uphold it, “with meaningful action for justice, and build that more perfect Union together.”

Well, I really hope you appreciate that quote as much as I did and have been thinking in the back of your mind, as I have been, that meaningful action for justice has to be nonviolent action.

Well, I’m going across the world now to a Himalayan region called Ladakh, which is kind of bordering China and India, which is technically a part of India, but really has more of a Tibetan culture and heritage.

And it has often been in the news because there was a woman named Helena Norberg-Hodge, who spent a year there and came back reporting on some unusual practices that people have. You know it sticks in my mind right now, for example, is one villager who’s had a big satchel of rice stolen by someone and this is very important for their substance up there. It’s hard to grow.

And so, Helena said, gosh, I hope we can find out who it is. And the man said, oh, I know who it is. And she said, “Well, are you going to do something about it?” He said, “No, because a community is more important than food.” It’s a very interesting approach. I’m not saying that it’s completely nonviolent, unhyphenated. It’s non-violent. And it shows that there are some regions which are absolutely dependent on that in order to maintain their community, their continuity.

But there’s more difficulty now going on in Ladakh. The Chinese have been encroaching, taking away agricultural land. And the Modi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, is boasting that not one inch of land has been lost, though actually, a significant amount of land has been lost.

So, the Ladakhis find themselves in a struggle between China, on the one hand, and their own central government of India, on the other. And it is very reassuring to listen to the following quote from a man named Wangchuk, who is a leader of the resistance movement there. And he says, knowing that violence would give the government an opportunity to stop the movement by force from means, we are united in following the footsteps and nonviolent principles of India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi.

So, this is perhaps, again, a kind of strategic nonviolence in that they’re not doing violence because they know it wouldn’t work. But gosh, I mean, that’s so much better than nothing and so much better than violence.

And again, in April, Wangchuk said he was inspired by Gandhi’s historic Salt March, and they decided to call for Pashmina March. If you’re familiar with the beautiful shawls, a peaceful Pashmina March towards the Line of Control in eastern Ladakh, that is the line between India and China.

And that was a way to draw attention to the grabbing of grazing land. Now, while all this is going on, Ladakh has also launched, under Wangchuk’s leadership, what he calls a climate fast. And he says that this climate fast activism is not a spontaneous reaction. So that is the second kind of nonviolent point I wanted to make here.

Quoting him again, “It is the hard work of the last four years, during which we educated the local tribal population about the lobbies of industrial players coming to build huge infrastructures in Ladakh.”

And now for my third point, he reiterated that the people of Ladakh are not against the development of the country. You might remember Gandhi was accused of being a Luddite, going backwards in time, and he absolutely was not. He did not want development. He was happy with development. But it had to be an environmentally and socially sustainable development.

So Wangchuk says the people of Ladakh are not against the development. He wants the industrialists that come in, who are trying to set up solar energy plants and other mining plants, to be sensitive to the climate and the environment. Quoting him, “Their unbridled initiatives to take over the grazing lands will snatch livelihood from tribals and deteriorate the fragile ecosystem of the region.”

Now, we should be aware here that the Himalayan region is sometimes called the third pole. You know, we have the North Pole, the South Pole, with their big ice deposits, ice sheets. And this is sometimes called the third pole because it is the source of ten major rivers in Asia and the greatest mass of snow outside the North and the South Pole.

But it’s melting and, due to global warming, is a very serious problem there. And once again, it’s a problem that people could get together and concentrate on. And it would do two things would be a win-win. You would stop quarreling, and you would rescue the climate, which has often been touted as the issue which is going to unite us all because it affects absolutely everyone.

You know on Nonviolence News, how we focus on unarmed civilian peacekeeping. We talked about Mel Duncan’s document, which really puts us further down the road in developing unarmed civilian peacekeeping. Here’s a bit of history that we might ponder.

Thirty years ago, Ken Butigan, who is a member of Pace e Bene, and a member of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, that’s about the time when I first met Ken, he took part in a week-long gathering. There were 20 Latin American and 20 North American changemakers. I myself was in meetings like that.

Now, Ken was struck by the testimony of two of the Chilean activists who – they played a part in removing dictator Augusto Pinochet from power, and they described how nonviolent people power had been successful in ending this dictatorship.

And they also shared carrying on further with our idea of training, they also shared how this episode, this nonviolent resistance insurrection, led to regime change. It, again, was not spontaneous. It was rooted in a decade of nonviolence training across the country. Eventually, 30,000 people a year were being taught the techniques of civil resistance. And these people served as the backbone for the movement for democracy. When the time finally came to act.

Now I’m emphasizing this because I think this is a wonderful model for many of the issues that we’ll be facing and the movements that will be arising going forward. And that is to say, we really cannot expect much success if we simply react to injustice or any other kind of issue that has to be addressed, we have to prepare.

And that’s not such a terrible thing because nonviolence is really a wonderful way to live. I’m now quoting George Lakey, a friend of ours from Philadelphia we’ve interviewed.

So, this is another environmental struggle I’d like to talk about briefly. It’s in Peru and there’s a group of Indigenous women there, like the Chipko movement that arose in Himalaya years ago.

And once again, they are not breaking the law. They are upholding a law very much like what we see in Brazil with the movement from landless workers. In this case, there’s a river, the Maranon River. It’s a sacred waterway. It flows from the Andes to the Amazon. They have recently managed to achieve a legal victory in protecting that river.

It’s a big step forward in the fight against climate change and elevating the concept of the rights of nature. And both these things were debated recently at the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum in Bolivia.

Well, friends, I am running very short on time. I just want to mention that there is a rising xenophobia in Europe and left-center groups have been finally uniting against this form of neo-fascism.

And I’m reminded of something I overheard in a train and the UK when an announcement came over the loudspeaker telling us what the next stop was or something. This person giving the announcement was obviously Indian, and a woman sitting across from me said, you don’t feel at home anymore, even in your own country. So, this is where xenophobia starts.

And how is it going to stop? Here again, I’d like to mention a resource, an experiment that was carried out in Princeton by two women called Wheeler and Fiske, who were able to bypass the reaction of otherness, when you see someone from a different race, by getting people to think about simple things, like, what kind of peanut butter does this person like, the person whose picture you’re looking at?

And so, until we can establish unity in diversity, that’s our basic window onto the world. I think little techniques like this that help us draw attention to our human identity will be the way to overcome xenophobia, and by extension, just about all forms of violence. So, thank you very much for listening, and I hope to be speaking with you again in our next episode.