Week of January 20, 2025

Transcript

Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler with the next edition of the Nonviolent Moment where we're looking at the great slow, steady, inspiring development of nonviolence throughout the world.

And we need it badly. There are some very distressing trends that are going on. There's a book by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway called, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. That book came out in 2010 at Bloomsbury Press, but it's just getting some more notice now.

I think this is very disturbing because if we can't trust science, what can we trust, you know? Willis Harman, former regent of the University of California, a friend of ours, he called science, “Our knowledge validating system.” So, if that starts to crumble, we have very little left. This is central to the whole issue of nonviolence. Kenneth Boulding said, “Science and nonviolence have this in common, that where falsehood is discovered, it is rejected.”

Now, the other disturbing development is in a different field, but a very important one again. And this is an article in The Atlantic recently. It was called, The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows. And the subtitle is “Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation which seeks to destroy the secular state.”

Okay, well, I hope that's an exaggeration, but there is no question that when religious movements, and sometimes we can justifiably call them cults in this sense. When they adopt violence, the results can really be devastating.

I'm thinking of one of my favorite people, Saint Augustine, and how he had to confront these manic groups of “Christians” who went through North Africa, flagellating themselves and beating up on other people for not being religious enough. So, this is by way of saying, friends, as I probably didn't need to emphasize that there are some really disturbing trends going on in our world.

And I was thinking this morning that it's all about dehumanization. And when we want to restore peace and nonviolence and sanity, we're talking about re-humanization. And I think that can go – we can look at four stages of the problem.

The worst stage was called, 20 or so years ago by some biologists, “Pseudospeciation,” where you look upon other groups of humans as not exactly human. You know, you start giving them animal labels. I'm not going to mention any example. And in this state of pseudospeciation, violence is almost inevitable.

On the way to recovery, you pass through a stage that I'll call “othering.” I'm thinking of a conversation I had with a military science officer on my campus some years ago. I said to him, “You know, well, you know, how does it make you feel to be in the business of killing people?” And he instantly shot back, this obviously touched a chord. And he shot back. “Not people. Enemies.” So, they're human beings, but they're enemies of ours. That's Stage 2.

Now, in Stage 3, you recognize that others are people just like us. And in Stage 4, you have, if you can have it, the realization that all life is one. And I'm going to get back to that at the end. But I want to give you one evidence of that, one representative of it, is a beloved Swami, who passed away in the late 50s in India, Swami Ramdas. I get quotes from him every day. And today I got this, “We have to take the whole universe as the expression of the one Self. Then only our love flows to all beings and all creatures in the world equally.”

So, that's the “life is one” stage, and it's critical for us to recognize that some individuals have reached this stage. And therefore – I mean, heck, we're individuals too. If we want to see peace and nonviolence in the world, our point is to try to get closer and closer to that stage, which a few rare individuals have reached.

And it's not like this isn't happening. Let me just cite a few good things that are going on, pointing us in the right direction.

First of all, we need new media. Absolutely need new media because the media forms our culture. It forms how we look at the world. And it's been known for some time that it's doing a bad job. In the sense that it's giving us a vision and a way of looking at the world in which different separateness is exaggerated. Materiality is exaggerated. And we are on our way down a slope which leads to pseudospeciation and violence.

So, there are now a number of excellent alternatives. One is called Ground News. It's an app and a website that gives a trustworthy analysis that we all deserve. So, in addition to gathering related articles globally into one place, they reveal sources. They reveal a bias of sources and their factuality so they can cut through some partisanship and sensationalism, which is a besetting difficulty of the media, and focus on the facts. So, they report, for example, on who is funding a given media outlet.

Now, I want to turn from news to action. And I am known technically as a stakeholder in Nonviolent Peaceforce because it's an organization that I was involved in the founding of and which I followed very closely. Two very close friends of mine are the original directors of it. And there was just an overview recently on some of the things that they did in 2024.

Now, mind you, they're not the only organization that's doing what is today called UCP or unarmed civilian peacekeeping. And there are some variations on that, but let's just call it UCP. And there are some 20 organizations. There are some 200 people who have served in them.

And here's some of the things that they did outside of the really dramatic one, which is called interpositioning, where you just try it out in the middle of a field between opposing forces and change the dynamic dramatically by saying, “This is not a ‘you against me’. There are three parties here.” And you change the dynamic by risking your life for peace.

And I want to add, incidentally, that although people have been doing this for 20, 25 years, and in a less formal way on and off forever, the number of casualties is extremely low. I know of only one person, Tom Fox in Iraq, who was killed, and he wasn't even doing UCP at the moment. He was just there.

But anyway, here's some of the things that Nonviolent Peaceforce did last year. In the Ukraine, they identified frontline volunteers and gave them access to counseling, training, and protective gear so they could continue their lifesaving work.

Now, how about my hometown? In New York City, there was a trial brought about by a woman named Vilma Kari, who had been attacked. And she was very frightened, to the point where she could not go to court and continue her case. But accompaniers from Nonviolent Peaceforce, gave her confidence and safety. Because of their – now, this is a technical term, protective presence, and also because of safety planning.

Now, sometimes people raise an objection to this kind of work. And the objection is called peace imperialism. Where you march into a place and say, “You know, you people can't defend yourselves. We're here to show you how to make peace and get out of conflict.” But we, in the field, are perfectly aware – I almost said, painfully aware – of that danger.

And I want to reassure you that the professionals who are doing unarmed civilian peacekeeping, whether it be Nonviolent Peaceforce, Meta Peace Teams, Peace Brigades International, whatever, they only go where they have been invited, for one thing. And they withdraw the minute the situation has been de-escalated, for another thing.

And third thing, they tend to recruit participants. You can't say volunteers because they're paid. They tend to recruit participants from the region in question. So, they are helping to build capacity on the ground, and that facilitates their withdrawal.

Okay. So, I talked about Ukraine. I talked about the Big Apple, New York City – and New York City is not what we call a cross-border intervention, but it is nonetheless, certainly, what we would call a third party. And, of course, certainly, a civilian, rather than a military or police intervention. So, these are the kinds of criteria that we think about in this business.

Okay. Now in Iraq, the NP helped a number of women, just as they have done in Africa. They helped a number of women get the skills and the confidence to advocate for their rights, promote safety, and reshape their communities. And to do that for women in that part of the world is a signal achievement.

Finally, on this topic of what NP did last year, in South Sudan, someone called Mama Sunday and Women Protection Team members, strengthened their reporting mechanisms for survivors of gender-based violence, and improved their access to critical mental health and psychosocial support services.

And I'm not sorry I'm ending on that note because it's a new development, the importance of which was recognized by people like myself in the peace movement a long time ago. But it's taken a while for us to actually build it into the institutions where people can have the necessary psychological protections for carrying on this kind of work. Because when you see violence, it hurts, even if you're not a perpetrator.

And a student of mine, Lizzy Brock, very, very nice young lady, she went to Central America with Peace Brigades International, which a lot of that was happening at that point. They were doing, protective accompaniment. And Lizzy, felt that she was basically fine. You know, she did her tour of duty, was like close to two years, came back to Berkeley. And one fine morning she was walking across Telegraph Avenue to get to campus. And she had a panic attack. And it was a doozy. She could almost not get across the street and actually, to some degree, endangered her life.

So, this was trauma that she had internalized by working with traumatized people and being on the ground with violent persons – persons who had taken to violence. And so, at that time, there was very little that PBI as an organization could do for her. But now this is built into the whole process from beginning to end. That, I think, is going to help a very great deal.

All right. What I'm doing now is giving you lists of good things that have happened, on our way up the scale of re-humanization. And you may recall that in my quote from Swami Ramdas, he didn't say, “All people.” He said, “All beings and creatures in the world equally.” And I wish we had our office kitten down here with us to hear this report. She'd really appreciate it.

But a year ago, and we did report on this, a local organization called Direct Action Everywhere, DAE, were bracing themselves for a very serious trial. There were three activists who had taken animals from Ridglan Farms. These were dogs in this case who were being mistreated. And these three faced possible 16 years in prison. But their motto was ‘compassion is not a crime’. And apparently that landed with the right people.

So, back a year ago when we were reporting on this trial, I could never have predicted that we would be where we are now due to their ‘collective persistence’, another technical term in intervention in nonviolence more broadly. Firmeza Permanente, it was called in Central America – due to their persistence, the case has completely flipped.

So, we now have not animal rescuers facing prosecution for saving three dogs, but the farm is facing prosecution for abusing them and thousands of other dogs. Just last week, a judge in Wisconsin, her name was Rhonda Lanford, agreed to appoint an attorney to investigate and potentially prosecute Ridglan Farms.

Now, let me comment on this from the point of view of being a nonviolent actor. I am not ecstatic about the fact that they are being prosecuted, but they have to be called to account. They have to be made to recognize. They have to take accountability for what they're doing. Ideally, this would be addressed through education. Education, which would enlarge people's worldview and help them to understand that all life is sacred. But there are times in the world of nonviolence when you have to do things that are less than equal. Mahatma Gandhi called this the madman with the sword analogy.

Let's say you're in your village and a madman is running through the village with a sword, wreaking havoc. Of course, today, it wouldn't be a sword. We know it’d be AK-15s and the damage would be practically unstoppable.

But let's just take his example. Here's somebody who's deranged, who's going to commit violence, like breaking into a school or something like that. And let's say you need to stop that person to protect innocent life, and you don't have time to talk them out of it. In that case, you may have to use – I'm going to use the term abusive force rather than violence. You may have to use force to stop that person.

However, let me quickly add, in his 50 years of active work in two continents, Gandhi was never faced with this situation. So, we're using it in the way that physicists create, you know, a very unusual situation. They ping the system to see how it will react. I think it's good to know that nonviolence is not helpless, and that sometimes the use of force actually has to be applied and could possibly be called not violence.

So, this reversal in the case against the three DAE activists is welcome. But it does remind us that we need to start earlier and go deeper and open people's eyes to the fact that all life is sacred.

Recently, someone, I think he was part of the January 6th attackers who tried to break into Congress – they did break into it, actually and a policeman was killed in that event. One of those people, I think it is, who was seen painting a sign called No Lives Matter.

So, of course, on one level he's trying to paraphrase and satirize Black Lives Matter, but on another, he was expressing Stage 1 and dehumanization, pseudospeciation, which drives people into such a state of alienation that inevitably they will commit violence.

We did not give life, and we have no right to take it away. In fact, the purpose of our life, according to Gandhi – and I completely subscribe to this. The purpose of our life is to serve others, to serve life, to promote it, to support it. And that's where nonviolence becomes so critically important as the biggest missing element, I think, in our educational system.

And I want to close now with a quote from Martin Luther King. He was a brilliant person, as well as being courageous and on the right side of things. He was absolutely brilliant. And that idea is reinforced for me every time I listen to one of his speeches.

And he said, this is a quote. “When your character is built on a spiritual and moral foundation, your way of life will influence millions.”

So, friends, that is how nonviolence works. We all have the opportunity to look around for a way to build our life on what he's calling a spiritual and moral foundation. And to fulfill the purpose of our being here on this planet by helping life in all of its aspects.

So, thank you very much for listening. I have very much enjoyed sharing these thoughts with you, and I look forward to conversing with you in our next program.