Success Doesn’t Mean Victory

If you can somehow compass a success without a conquest, you will not have alienated your previous opponent. And that means that you will have built closer relationships, and we should remember that this is always a goal of nonviolent action.

Transcript

Welcome to the second edition now, of the Nonviolent Movement. And it would be nice if almost all movements were nonviolent, but at least we try to create a nonviolent movement in a rather violent world here.

And since it’s only our second edition, second time, I'd like to again use at least part of the quote that Marshall Frady, the writer, a New Yorker writer, used in his very moving and very inspiring article on Martin Luther King, some years ago.

But here’s the quote that I want to start us off with today. “Therefore, in the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, when an oppressor’s violence is met with a forgiving love, he can be vitally touched and even at least momentarily, reborn as a human being.”

Frady says a lot more than that, but this is the part I wanted to concentrate on. “An oppressor's violence is met with a forgiving love.” I heard a dramatic example of this, when the YouTube series of convention speeches started and the first speaker, the first convention speaker that they quoted was John Lewis, the late John Lewis. And he told about being set upon by a mob when he was part of the Freedom Rides. I’m skipping some of the details here. 

And many years later, when Lewis was a congressperson, a man walked into his office and broke down in tears and said, “I was one of those people who beat you, and I want to ask you for forgiveness.” And then they had a really long hug, and both of them were crying. I think they were – you could say they were reborn as human beings. Because to be a human being is to live in empathic connection with others.

Moving on from there, I've just been noticing recently cases of single issues that serve as a flashpoint for much, much larger regime change. What we might almost call ‘total revolution’. That was a phrase that was invented to indicate that we need a complete changeover of society, what it's based on and how that basis is expressed.

But the Salt Satyagraha that Gandhi launched in India in the spring of 1930 was a classic case. Because salt was just a single issue. And you may even remember in the movie, in Attenborough's movie, John Gielgud saying, “Salt?” What's so important about that? But in fact, salt was the most potent way that the regime had a, so to speak, a death grip on the vitality of India's culture. And not to go into the whole campaign, Gandhi's genius consisted in this point of seeing the centrality of that one simple physical issue.

Another that came close to that was the campaign that he spent most of his last years on, which was charkha. And recently, I reviewed a video where I was introducing Narayan Desai, who was the son of Mahadev Desai, who was a very close associate of Gandhi's. In fact, when I want to tell you a story about that in a second. And I made the mistake of saying, “Charkha.” And Narayan, who is very keen eared, stopped me and said, “No, you mispronounced that, it’s Charkha. The ‘kh’ in Hindi is to be pronounced.”

But anyway, charkha was an issue that, again, got to the very heart of the control of India. And by taking back their spinning and weaving, they took back their freedom.

I want to say more about that in just a second, but election fraud is probably the most common single issue of this kind today. There can be a very brutal, very oppressive regime. We see this in the Sudan. We're seeing in many other places. And that regime manages to hold on until they try to get themselves elected. And this is what happened very dramatically in Chile, when they lose the election and then they cheat. And when that happens, people rise up.

So, you have a major full-scale systemic violence that comes to be expressed in a single concept, a single, sometimes even a single physical thing like salt.

Now, the last, and the first program in this series, our first Moment, I announced that what we would try to do is tackle a major concept in nonviolence on each episode. And the last time I did my favorite. And we'll probably get back to that. And that was constructive program.

Today, I'd like to talk about something called the paradox of repression. It's also, from the actor's point of view, known as a dilemma action. You put the opponent in a position where heads they lose, tails they lose. Normally, what this comes down to is if they try to block you, they look bad, and if they don't block you, they lose control.

And the charkha, the spinning wheel, was a good example of that. Because to go around to village after village, house after house, and say, “How dare you spin your own cotton in your own front yard with your own spinning wheel? Didn't you know we're in charge here?” That makes you look kind of ridiculous, which is often a vulnerability that can be exploited in oppressive regimes.

But there's some kind of psychological finesse, or psychological English by which this has to be done. And I want to say more about that in a second. But for examples, I want to take one from India, and one from our country, the US.

In Gujarat, there was a march to protest the setting up of a big dam across the Narmada River. The Narmada River was considered sacred by many, many Indians. And the dam was considered a desacralization, a sacrilege, shades of Standing Rock.

And so, these marchers wanted to cross, into Gujarat, the state where the dam was going to be built. Gujarat, being Gandhi's home state, by the way. And they were blocked.

So, what the marchers did is they took children and put them at the head of the march. They taught them patriotic songs and sent them in there. And that worked because really, just to block a contingent of children looked pretty bad.

Martin Luther King tried the same thing in Albany during the voting rights campaign. It was a bitter campaign, led to more violence than some. And there again, he used children for a march because they were much harder – they were unthreatening, to say the very least.

Now, another example that didn't involve children took place a few years ago in a town in southern Germany called Wunsiedel. In this town, there was a cemetery. And in the cemetery was the grave of an important Nazi leader. I'm not going to mention who he was. A big Nazi, shall we say, was in his grave.

And so, the neo-Nazis would have a very symbolic march to that grave site at a given date every year and honor the memory of this Nazi person. So, the townspeople really didn't like that. But they didn't also want to get into a violent confrontation with a bunch of neo-Nazis for both practical and ethical reasons. It just wasn't their style, it would be counterproductive.

So, what they did instead was they drew lines in the street at given intervals. And for every line that the marchers passed, they contributed a given amount of money to an organization which worked on helping people exit from neo-Nazi organizations. I think it was simply called “Exit Deutschland,” if I remember correctly. “Exit Germany.”

And so, these poor marchers, here they were contributing – the more they marched, the more they contributed to their own demise as an organization. You know, I don't like to humiliate anybody, and I don't think it's productive, but it was extremely effective and introduced even a note of humor, which can be extremely important in bringing about a nonviolent interaction.

Because what you want, for people to be reborn as a human being, as Marshall Frady says, humor is often a contact point that brings us together. And that has been used quite systematically here and there in nonviolent moments, nonviolent campaigns, and I kind of wish it had been used a little bit more.

But I as I said, there's a fine line here that we have to be careful about. There's a gray area. Cracking a joke with somebody is one thing. Making fun of somebody is another thing. And so, we want to be careful not to do that. That increases violence. It adds fuel to the fire, so to speak.

One classic example that comes to mind was done by a woman named Karen Ridd, whom I've met. I really admire her very much. She was working in El Salvador and needed to get to a particular region. She was blocked by police and, you know, there's no way she could force her way through, but it was extremely important for her to get to that meeting on the other side of the line.

But it turned out that Karen Ridd had a hobby. She was a clown. And it turned out that she had her clown costume in her backpack. You know, you’ve got to be ready for any kind of emergency, right? So, she stepped back and went out of sight of the guards for a minute, put on her clown costume, came out and started clowning for them. And they were laughing uproariously. And of course, in the end, they let her through.

That was the concept I was getting at here – though I did drift a little bit into the use of humor, but that's not a bad drift – is this idea of a dilemma action where you can make people – you can force people into a situation where if they let you go, if they let you do what you want, they have, in a way, conceded. And if they try to stop you, that makes them look very bad. So that's an important, approach for us to keep in mind. So, that's the paradox of repression.

I wanted to move on now to a couple – three quotes, which illustrate a major point in nonviolent practice. The quote that I'm going to start with is from a text called the Dhammapada. Many of you will be quite familiar with it. It is considered the central gospel of Buddhism. Approximately the same standing in Buddhism that the Gospels have in Christianity. In Chapter 13 of the Dhammapada, I read with some enthusiasm the other day, the whole chapter. Because it deals with happiness, very closely aligned to humor. Right?

And in Chapter 13, there’s a particular verse that goes, “Victory breeds hatred, for the vanquished are always unhappy.”

This is the dynamic I'm trying to get at here. That if you can somehow compass a success without a conquest, you will not have alienated your previous opponent. And that means that you will have built closer relationships, and we should remember that this is always a goal of nonviolent action.

Whatever may be the issue, the real – well let me put it this way. Whatever may be the legal, or physical issue that you're concentrating on, the really underlying issue, really, is always, rebuilding of human relationships. Which is, illustrated so very beautifully in that story that I quoted to you just now with John Lewis.

Now, I want to cite one instance of Martin Luther King and one instance of Mahatma Gandhi to show how they were vividly aware, they were keenly aware of this dynamic.

In “Stride Toward Freedom,” you will see a quote, actually from the White Citizens Council, which took place at a key moment in the Birmingham bus boycott. Where the councillors said that, incidentally, they weren't all that opposed to what the black marchers and their colleagues wanted. They weren't opposed to give it to them. But they weren't going to do that because, and this is almost a direct quote, ‘It will make us look as if they have won, and that we cannot tolerate’.

And King was keenly aware of this. What he said was, “We must never take on the psychology of victors.” You can succeed in a campaign and then lose everything by preening yourself and saying, we succeeded. We did this.

And this is a very important metaphysical component to this. Because in reality, in the spiritual reality that undergirds this phenomenal world that we're living in, the fact is – and I still myself, I can't quite wrap my mind around this. But mystics and sages, the wise ones, insist on it universally, across the board, the fact is that we are not the doer. Some universal force, call it God, or what you will, is acting through us. And there's even some scientific evidence these days that this might not be so off base. It might not be so woo-woo as it sounds.

And that becomes real when we can achieve the kind of, detachment. Detachment, which enables us to say, I didn't do that. I made myself in this instance for a bit, for a while, for, just momentarily, as Marshall Frady says, I made myself a little more transparent to the underlying goodness of the universe. And that's absolutely, absolutely true, I believe. And it also saves us from going into the psychology of victors. Which can ruin everything that you've worked for in a nonviolent campaign.

I witnessed this at firsthand one time, many years ago. We were in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. I seemed to get back to the Free Speech Movement even more often than I do to my early childhood, well, young person experience as a folk singer.

But anyway, there we were, standing in front of the administration building, Sproul Hall, and trying to gain the right to have political campaigning on the quadrangle of the campus. And it was really, pretty intense. And then somebody, some – one of us, ran in from Telegraph Avenue waving a newspaper, I think it was the Oakland Tribune, which shortly after that died.

Anyway, but what he was so excited about was that we were on the front page of the Oakland Tribune. Now, when that happened, there was a subtle psychological shift in the movement. Which, really, kind of vitiated our effectiveness a little bit, and kind of slowed us down. And that shift was, not to do what your heart told you was right, not to take a risk, primarily, not to stand up for the truth, but to get yourself into the newspaper to be famous.

It’s an understandable impulse. We all have it. I have it. Why do you think I'm sitting here in this radio studio? But, more seriously, it shifted the energy and the focus from getting this campaign to succeed to making us look good in public awareness.

And that was why Martin Luther King was so keen on making sure that people would not yield to the psychology of victors. In addition to the other factor that I mentioned, that if you are a victor, then the other person is the vanquished. And they don't like that. So, you're not succeeding at the deepest level.

And I want to talk about a couple of quotes from Gandhi. One of them came about, over a very important issue. It was, one that we have mentioned earlier, who gets to vote? What Gandhi wanted was some kind of – what he was opposed to, if I'm remembering this correctly, was a serious preferential weighting of votes towards the Harijans, the lower class, the disenfranchised class.

This is striking to consider this because Gandhi was so much in favor of uplifting these people, this community. He spent the better part of his life working on this. But he didn't want to do it by taking the vote away from the Brahmins because, that would not lead to a long-term solution. So, he had a – he went on a hunger strike, and he had a long confrontation with someone who was the representative of that community.

And in the end, he made a really handsome concession, and one of his women followers said to him, you know, wrote him a letter saying you should not have done that, you know? You've lost everything. And what he wrote back was or told Mahadev Desai to write back was, “Tell sister, my yielding was my victory. My yielding was my victory.”

And you can understand this on two levels. Psychologically, that not taking on the psychology of victors, that self-aggrandizement that happens, was a personal triumph that made him stronger going forward for whatever he wanted to do. And on the political level, it led to success.

So, I want to just talk briefly now about, one other episode that Gandhi endured with this particular person. He wanted ten years for the Brahmins to readjust to the new voting situation. And the representative of the Harijans said, “No, has to happen right away.”

This is fairly typical of the way most of us are on injustice issues. We are impatient. We forget to look to the longer-term, just as we forget to look to the longer, wider issue of human relationships involved. And Gandhi was adamant. Here he is, on the one hand, yielding very gracefully, which he was incredibly gifted at. People really thought he was losing even while he was winning. But on the other hand, when it came to a fundamental issue, he could be solid as a rock.

And so, he threatened to fast unto death. And he said, “Give me ten years or my life.” And the person said, “Okay, your life then.” And walked out. That was horrifying. And what happened was large numbers of Gandhi's followers took this guy aside and said, “We've got to talk.” And eventually, talked him into that compromise.

But this is where I wanted to illustrate that he had the ability to make the final sacrifice. And that somehow gave him the ability to compromise on everything that was inessential. That was his genius. Cling to fundamentals with your very life. Yield easily on everything that isn't a fundamental. It was a brilliant psychological and political success.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed, this second Nonviolent Moment as much as I have. Again, my name is Michael Nagler. I am a recovering classics professor, but now for many years since have been working withThe Metta Center for Nonviolence. So, I hope you've enjoyed our Moment, and I look forward to sharing another with you at our next episode.