Awakening Peace Through Nonviolence

11-27-01 Bhamini Nadarajan“The next great political unfolding for our age is a broad-based commitment towage peace, to declare it with as much serious intent and effort as we have ever employed in the waging of war” says Marianne Williamson in her book, The Healing Of America. The last century saw massive and destructive wars such as the two World Wars.Today we are a world that has not found change yet, by continuing to wage wars inseveral parts of the globe. Peace has been threatened in many nations and chillingly somenations have not seen peace for a long period. To see another war escalating as in the past, to a global scale, one with more nuclear armaments such as it is possessed today,capable of much more destruction that history has ever recorded before, is simplyinconceivable. Fortunately “we’re going through a kind of mind change … all around theglobe … (and it) has more to do with the reassessment of values and meanings” statesWillis Harman, author of An incomplete guide to the future. So humanity today is saidto have been inspired by a new awakening and for this reason we may commit ourselvesin a path other than of war and violence. However, since this is also the period of humansin possession of such deadly weapons as we have today, I believe that we are left with noother choice than to just seek peace and to seek through rather least destructive means.Two figures come to our mind when we mention nonviolence in politics – Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The ideologies of attaining peace throughnonviolence as the means to fight against violence, injustice and oppression took concreteshape in a vast social level, probably for the first time in history, through the leadingguidance of Gandhi and King. Even though we have been practicing to think of

nonviolence as a “defunct political force” today, it is - as Williamson had envisioned afew years ago - emerging again to be applied with a far more serious effort andcommitment. The U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell has come up with a proactive pledge to reach peaceful resolution amidst the long and ongoing violent tensions in theMiddle East. He has been quoted in the CNN news report on November 19

saying,“(we) need to make a 100-percent effort to end all the violence” and he has proposed thiseffort as part of a plan called the “Mitchell Committee report”, which provides a visionfor a “peaceful coexistence of Israel and a new state of Palestine.” This is a unique step, proposed during this era attempting to touch that political essence, as had beenmanifested through Gandhi and King. So far, we have been detecting the use of military prowess around the world to foresee an end to the differences, conflicts and violence. Butthe results have shown that the use of physical might, although at times as a justlyintended mean, has in fact escalated the unrests. And the alarm rang on September 11

soloud as to wake up the world to the futility of any kind of violence – unjust and just – andit was a call to reveal that the spirit of Gandhi and King cannot be obsolete yet.As mentioned earlier, in parts of the world today physical force and violence have been largely advocated to fight injustices; and unfortunately such means have onlyworsened the situations into deadly conflicts instead of reaching closer to the goal of justice and peace. The present situation in Sri Lanka is sadly an example as would besome of the other places in the world. The country’s large minority group of Tamils, hassuffered oppression and discrimination – from the BBC news athttp://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special report/1998/sri_lanka/ newsid_50000/50926.stm. Some groupsrepresenting the people began to use violence giving rise to clash with the government,while the groups aimed for a separate state as a resolution. Almost five decades later, the

future for a peaceful resolution looks grim. During the course, the conflict has resulted incountless and gruesome murders and destructions continuing to this day. In this situation,we cannot help but reflect on the possibility that, had the groups representing the peopleendured and led a fight against discrimination through other effective ways – as it isoften advocated that violence does not resolve anything – such as through constructive propagation, persistent attempts for dialogue with the government and other nonviolentmeans, the Sri Lankan Tamils may now be seeing a hopeful future – though indeed wecannot say for sure of what never took place – if not have achieved a situation of justice,equal opportunities and peaceful living.We have seen the means of nonviolence serve humanity to successfully rise abovedifferences, oppression and injustice, such as through Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.,whereas we appear to have had less faith in adapting it in today’s world. In every periodof humanity we experience life anew as we human beings are each born anew into thisworld at different periods. Since our life becomes an experiment for each one of usin spite of our long human history, the following of the means of nonviolence to fightinjustice also becomes an experiment. Gandhi had expressed this by saying, “I havenothing new to teach the world. Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills. All I havedone is to try experiments in both on as vast as scale as I could”. As conflicts and war rage in our world today, it is necessary that we learn to be willing to experiment likeGandhi and King in order break the vicious cycle of violence, which we have painfullyadapted to resolve injustices and differences among us. And there is no better time for this than now as we see our world moving towards more respect for freedom and humanrights, as the Dalai Lama – the political and spiritual leader of the Tibetans - aptlyconveys the noble trend of our period.