Meeting Violence with a Forgiving Love

In these examples, you see how the conversion of a person from a state of anger and fear to a state of what Marshall Frady called a forgiving love, actually does seem to have an impact on the entire emotional-spiritual consciousness environment and affects the outcome of a situation and changes the minds of others.

Transcript

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Nonviolent Moment.

And I will refresh our memories with a quote from Marshall Frady, the New Yorker writer who talks about episodes when an oppressor’s violence is met with a forgiving love. 

And that defines very well what this phenomenon that we've observed in the world of peacemaking and the world of nonviolence, when a threat can be overcome by an opposite approach, an opposite emotion, the emotion of love. And there are other ways also, I'm going to focus today more on courage as producing this nonviolent moment. This mysterious, alteration, this, conversion of an oppressor's violence. 

So the first example that I'd like us to think about today concerns a friend of mine, actually now. A woman named Karen Ridd, who's Canadian, and she was a member of Peace Brigades International. Peace Brigades International today, I think, is about the second largest of those 20 or so organizations that do what it's called, a civilian-based peacemaking or, has various names, too.

But it's where trained volunteers go into a conflict area and do the magic of being a third party that really cares equally for both parties and upsets what I'm going to call the mystique, or the delusion, the illusion of separateness and violence. 

So here we have Karen, who is in El Salvador, and El Salvador was an extremely violent place at that time. This is in 1989. And I wrote an article about this event, which I co-authored with Karen. It appeared in Open Democracy, and it was called Humor but not humiliation: finding the sweet spot in nonviolent conflict resolution. 

But I'd like to now quote from Karen herself, in that article. And she says, “I had been imprisoned with Marcela Rodriguez Diaz, a Colombian colleague,” that is, they were both members of PBI, and the Canadian embassy and the Colombian – the Colombian embassy didn't do much, but the Canadian embassy alerted a phone chain in Canada and eventually as – continuing now with her quote, “and my North American life was being valued more than hers, so I refused to leave without her. Instead, I was re-imprisoned and stayed until we could both be released.” 

Actually, what happened was Karen was walking across the yard, leaving the place where she had been blindfolded and handcuffed, put in a chair facing the wall. She and Marcela both were. It was a horrendous place. Torture was going on all around them. And she somehow suddenly is told that she can leave. But on her way out, her eye blindfold slips a little bit, and she sees Marcela sitting in that chair and halfway across the yard she says, “No, I can't leave her.” She turns around and actually walks back into that horrendous prison. 

And the guards were puzzled. They didn't know what to do. They, as Karen says, they challenged her. “Do you miss us,” they said. And she said, “No, no, of course I don't want to be here. But you are soldiers. You know what solidarity is? You know that if a comrade is down or fallen in battle, you wouldn't leave them. And I can't leave my comrade now. Not here. You understand. You know what it's like to lose a companero.” Sure enough, the guards released both of them and they both went free. 

Now, Karen's comment on this is, “I don't know what response I thought I would get. After all, I was speaking to a group of torturers. Yet, I knew that by placing the guards in what Martin Luther King called a dilemma action, I had some hope of changing their behavior.”

Now, this dilemma action is a very, useful and illuminating concept that we have in nonviolence. It means you can maneuver your opponent into a position where he loses one way or the other. So in this case, if they let her go, they would, you know, it'd be kind of embarrassing for them. They arrested these people for nothing and then just had to let them go. But if they kept them there, if they actually killed them, it would be much worse. So, in that sense, this was indeed a dilemma action. 

But I want to get a little bit deeper into the psychology of that nonviolent moment. It was like creating a proportion, if you will, I am to Marcela, what you soldiers are to your comrades. And by making that association, she was able to wake them up so that they could see the human reality of what Karen and Marcela were going through. 

Somehow they were able then to cross that barrier, to deflate the illusion that Marcela and Karen were just things. In fact, they had, spoken to them like that. That you're going to see now what we really do to you commies and criminals and so forth.

So, this is, for me, a classic example of the nonviolent movement when the oppressor's violence was, in fact, met with a forgiving love. Where Karen reached out to them and said, “I understand something about your life and it parallels mine. We are in this together.” 

So that's my first example. And, there are going to be three. And if time allows, I'm going to talk about another episode altogether. 

So, nonviolent movement number two concerns a Viennese psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl. That's F-R-A umlaut-N-K-L, Frankl. He, was imprisoned in Auschwitz. He was Jewish. He was in Auschwitz for two and a half years. 

And on one occasion, his fellow prisoners managed to escape. They had some kind of a break that they made, and they invited Frankl to go with them. But he refused to leave. Why? Because, after all, he was a doctor. And in that capacity he was able to give a lot of moral comfort and encouragement to his fellow prisoners. 

And I want to emphasize here that in Auschwitz, in one of the concentration camps, just being encouraged was more than a moral, an emotional phenomenon. It could make the difference between life and death. And there's another example of this that I will give you at a later time. But to encourage people was actually helping them to live. 

So, he was carrying out his function as a doctor, even though he didn't have even as much as aspirin to give them. And he refused to leave with these escapees, knowing full well that in the end he was very, very likely to die there.

Well, a strange thing happened. Those escapees were all captured and they were all shot. And Viktor Frankl survived. He survived, in fact, to come to California and speak to us at the Graduate Theological Union. 

And it almost makes you think that there may be some moral government in the universe, that this nonviolent moment was a moment that focused moral forces that were, otherwise, not able to operate in the universe. 

I'm suggesting, and I'm not insisting on it, we all have to make our own, belief positions. But I have a strong feeling that when Viktor Frankl did that incredibly courageous, self-sacrificing act where he refused to abandon his patients, that something shifted in the moral structure of the universe which protected him from death at that time. 

I'm not going to push this too far because, after all is said and done, it's something that’s difficult to explore scientifically. But my moral hunch tells me that something was going on here of a meaningful nature, and there's a cause and effect. Frankl sacrifices a chance to save his life, and the next thing you know, he gets up being saved anyway. 

Now, this episode came to mind because I was reading yesterday some really inspiring statements by the doctors of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. And, as you know, that hospital has been raided and attacked by the Israeli Defense Force. They have claimed that it was used as an operation base for the Hamas, for the terrorist attackers. Doesn't seem to be very strong evidence for that. But that's not what I want to get into right now. 

These doctors, are still ambulatory. They're still okay. They are physically all right. They could leave, knowing full well that the IDF is not going to spare the hospital. In fact, it has already practically destroyed it. It's a big complex. It's not just one building in the middle of Gaza City. 

And a doctor, Hakeem said, that while their medical capacity is now less than it has ever been, understandably, he said, quote, “If the Army surrounds the hospital, neither us nor the patients will be able to survive for very long. But we will try to do our best until our last breath. We chose this path, and we will stay with the patients and try to save their lives.” 

So, in these examples, you see how the conversion of a person from a state of anger and fear to a state of what Marshall Frady called a forgiving love, actually does seem to have an impact on the entire emotional-spiritual consciousness environment and affects the outcome of a situation, changes the minds of others. And that's really where nonviolence happens. That's nonviolence, as she is spoke, so to say. 

So, the other episode I'd like to consider with you, is maybe not so obvious in terms of its results, but illustrates, again, the same kind of trauma of that nonviolent commitment within the individual. In fact, in this case, it was within a large group of individuals.

In WWII, the Scandinavian countries occupied a rather different position in Nazi ideology from, let's say, the countries of Eastern Europe. They were regarded as more Aryan in their Aryan ideology.

And, nonetheless, they were occupied. And there are very inspiring moments of resistance that occurred in Denmark. The entire Danish-Jewish population, about 7000 people, were saved almost entirely, with very, very few exceptions, by a well-planned event. And incidentally, the fact that the Danish-Jews were about to be rounded up was tipped off to the Danish underground by one of the German attachés, a man named Georg Duckwitz, who, you know, he just kind of didn't go along with it.

But what I wanted to focus on here was Norway. Norway was much less resistant to Nazism and the Nazi occupation. So we have Denmark trying to resist as best they can. Sweden staying neutral. Norway more capitulatory perhaps than some of the others. 

And Norway then comes under the government of a Norwegian and by the name of Vidkun Quisling. Q-U-I-S-L-I-N-G. He was a committed Nazi. And he came up with a brilliant scheme, may not have been just on his own, that the entire high school curriculum of Norway should be Nazified. He issued this edict as the head of the country, that you teachers are now going to teach Nazism to your students. 

The teachers, almost in a body, I mean, about 85% of them if I remember roughly correctly, they simply refused. And of course, that put Vidkun Quisling in what we might well call a dilemma action. What was he going to do? 

Well, what he decided to do was round up those recalcitrant teachers and send them to Trondheim. Trondheim is north of the Arctic Circle. It was a ghastly place to be exiled to. If you were sick, if you were weak, if you were a little bit old, it might be a sentence of death to be sent up there. But up they went, and they absolutely refused to capitulate. 

Finally, Quisling came up with an idea which he thought undoubtedly was brilliant, but which backfired in a way that we often see happening in nonviolent campaigns. His idea was to send the wives up to talk to the schoolteachers and tell them to come back. That they missed them. That they were afraid for their lives. So all these women – gosh, I guess about 4 or 5000 of them go up to Trondheim, and they talk to their men. And what do you think they said?

They said, “We know why you are here. We do not want you to give up.” So instead of demoralizing the men and having them renounce their position, the wives actually strengthened it. And this meant that, really, Quisling was deprived of all his resources. He had played his last card. He couldn't think of a way of getting these men to capitulate.

So he said to them, “Okay, okay, come on back.” When they came back, he had a big assembly and he collected them all in a big assembly hall and said, “You teachers, you have ruined everything for me.” Whereupon I can imagine that they at least smirked, if not laughing out loud. 

So I hope these give us some insights from these episodes into what the nonviolent moment is. It's a moment of psychological struggle within the person, which brings about a corresponding change in others by some kind of mysterious phenomenon of contact that takes place on a nonphysical level. 

Let me leave us with one other example, which we actually have some time to talk about. And this takes place in our country during the Civil Rights Movement.

There was a big march, against the – march going toward a civic center because of the restriction of voting rights, something which is still very much alive and well in various regions of our country. And it really is a blot on our democracy. But stop editorializing and get back to the story. 

So here are these marchers. They're coming down the street, and they suddenly find themselves faced with what we might call a phalanx of police and firemen. And you know how those fire hoses were planned to be used. 

So this is an exact description of one of the marchers. He said, “We didn't know what to do. We got down on our knees to pray. Praying there on the sidewalk. Suddenly, we became,” and now I'm quoting his exact term, “we became spiritually intoxicated.” That's what I really want us to focus on. Not perhaps completely explain, but intuitively resonate with and understand. They became spiritually intoxicated. And now you have this unusual phenomenon. Nobody gave an order to do anything, but one after another, after another, they all stood up, and they walked right into those police and firemen.

The police commissioner was a notorious segregationist. His name was Bull Connor, and he gave the order. He shouted out, “Open the hoses!” Now we come to the really fascinating part of this description. The marchers just filed right through those police and firemen, who did nothing. And one fireman actually said, “My hand was frozen on the nozzle. I couldn't move it.”

It was also noticed by the marchers as they went through that a lot of the firemen were crying. And I think this also is something that we'll see time and again in the nonviolent moment. When a person, an opponent, is trying to express anger, trying to control somebody else's behavior through anger, imposing a threat of violence. And instead of responding either with fear or counter-violence, that person responds with what Marshall Frady calls a forgiving love. Which is not a sentimental love, but I would describe it as an awareness of unity. 

If you remember what I said about the soldiers in the case of Karen Ridd in El Salvador. That she instinctively, intuitively – and I think this is part of the nonviolent moment, that it throws you back on deeper resources, and enables you to come up with a scheme that you hadn't thought of.

This happened to a friend of mine. I'll get back to our story in a second. But this happened to a friend of mine, Ken Butigan, when he was at a demonstration. And he was lying down in front of the gates. This is in our film, by the way, The Third Harmony. He talks about it very movingly there.

They were having a lie-in in front of the gates of the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Nuclear Laboratories, where a lot of the nuclear research goes on. And a policeman came and ordered him to get up, and he refused. And so this guy started picking him up, trying to haul Ken to his feet. Ken is a very large person, by the way, trying to haul Ken to his feet, and his commanding officer on the sidelines shouts out, “Don't fool around with that guy, just break his wrist.” 

And so this man starts to break Ken's wrist. It hurt a lot. And Ken had, at that moment, a nonviolent moment. He looked up. He just, you know, looked up very non-threateningly, not frightened, not angry, looked up at that policeman and said, “You don't have to do that. You don't have to break my wrist.’ And so the policeman, as Ken describes it, was very confused at that time. Stood there for a while, held on to his wrist for a while, and then let him go.

And then Ken did exactly the right thing. He had absolutely refused to get up under compulsion – remember, this also is another important factor in nonviolence – he refused to get up under compulsion, but he was perfectly willing to get up on his own free will. So once this policeman had kind of given him his wrist back, he wanted to give him something. 

So, of his own free will, Ken gets up and walks with him. And, another way of using the nonviolent moment, they had this long discussion about nonviolence and why they're there, and why America doesn't need a nuclear policy, and so forth. All of those things that would not have been possible without that nonviolent moment happening in both Ken and the policeman.

Well, friends, there are many, many such episodes that we can think of. Possibly, you've had them, yourself. What it often comes down to, and you'll see some of this in our article, Humor but not humiliation, I want to get to one last aspect of that. 

What it often comes down to is your ability to perceive human connection when it seems to be least evident. Somebody threatening you, they're looking upon you as maybe even subhuman, something like that. And, no, you come to them as a human being and awaken the humanity in them. 

Another way that Karen Ridd did this to close the circle here, on one occasion, she needed to get to one area in El Salvador. She was blocked by border guards. She withdrew. It happened that Karen was a trained clown. She pulled her clown costume out and started clowning for these guys, and they let her through. So that's about the funniest and the oddest nonviolent moment that I would like to leave you with today. 

So, if you are interested in more of the same, please visit us at MettaCenter.org, and come back again to our next episode. I'm Michael Nagler with the Nonviolent Moment.