Of course today is the birth date of John Lennon, now I am not one to harbor on the idea of birthdays and instead believe every day is worthy enough to celebrate surviving. But as Lennon imagined a utopia of peace and prosperity, he was not the only one to do so. He had some of the most dedicated and courageous warriors for peace on his side. For the cowardly are the ones with tanks and guns, but those who fall in the tradition of nonviolent movement, they are the strongest of wills because they believe in another way possible to solve the problems than harboring continual aggression.
Like a never-ending track medley, where the baton of resistance hands off to the next strong enough to learn from the preceding march, civil disobedience carries the torch. The first voices to be recognized as prophets for peace were the leaders of today’s religions: Abraham, Buddha, Moses, and Jesus. These voices lived their ideal of nonviolence to such an extreme that they influenced billions of souls over the past three millennia. Don’t kill, don’t harm another, and love all as equals.
When the ancient Egyptians exploited and manipulated the Jews, Moses did not fight back, he gathered his people and walked away into the desert escaping from slavery. They resisted and yet did not return with violence. The ideal of civil disobedience during the Romantic Era and after the Enlightenment was significantly discussed in the ideals of American Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. While in the southern states, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery and began the famous Underground Railroad.
An admirer of Thoreau, moved by his beliefs, sought to write letters to soldiers in his own native land. “You are a soldier. You have been taught to shoot, to stab, to march. You have been taught to read and write led to exercise and reviews; perhaps have been in a campaign and have fought with the Turks or the Chinese, obeying all orders. It has not even entered your head to ask yourself whether what you were ordered to do was good or bad” (Leo Tolstoy, Notes to Soldiers). Tolstoy had sought to enlighten soldiers to use their courage to put down their weapons and consider why it was necessary to obey orders that permitted them to kill.
Thoreau and Tolstoy had an admirer as well, and the young Hindu lawyer found instant karma; “All terrorism is bad whether put up in a good cause. Every cause is good in the estimation of its champion. … In other words, pure motives can never justify impure or violent action” (Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi went beyond the writings of the two idealist authors. He activated on the ideals and made them into a reality. He moved millions of people in India alone to overcome the British Imperialism. Walking throughout the countryside and the cities, refusing to pay false taxes, as Thoreau had done in the US, and bringing people together to make enough noise to rattle the establishment.
Yet before Gandhi had shaken the world of identifying resistance through other means, a significant Women’s Suffrage activist in the United States in the first ten years of the 20th Century did just as Gandhi but sooner. Alice Paul picketing the streets and obstructing traffic with her fellow Silent Sentinels in 1917 brought to the government’s attention that it was due time to grant women the right to vote. Alice Paul along with Ida B Wells and Lucy Burns were not merely going to walk away. They were going to stand up to the government and make sure that women were noticed.
As Albert Camus, another contemporary of Gandhi, reflected, “Yes, Man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life” (Camus). Camus, a French Algerian, was aware that if people choose to act violently they most often end in violent ways. If one chooses to act a life of peace and motivation, nonviolent and resistant they will be enthralled throughout history as saints for a cause. Unfortunately, like Gandhi who died via the very means they abhorred, the act of violence is a constant vice of society. But these individuals even aware of this fate would live on through their legacy and inspire others beyond their mortal time.
Martin Luther King Jr. was significantly influenced by Gandhi’s message even after Gandhi had passed away via violent means. The end did not justify the life experience of talking truth to power. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King promoted: “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than a dialogue” (MLK); regardless of the physical threat, the Civil Rights Activists who marched with King chose to act peacefully when they knew that their oppressors were brutal. Though he lost his life for his cause, King represented a quality of leadership during his time and today.
Perhaps religion plays a part in the leadership of those who seek nonviolent means or perhaps it is a spiritual discipline that enacts courage and strength. Regardless of religious faith, the universal value of human life has individuals from all religions who have activated the approach of nonviolence, just as individuals from each religion have acted violently due to misreading the message of prophets. Gandhi’s Muslim counter-part in Pakistan and India Gaffar Khan moved thousands of people to not seek brutal means to reach independence. Gandhi’s disciple Mridula Sarabhai as well would seek justice in Kashmir as she dedicated her life to promoting human dignity. The Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr. Aung San Suu Kyi, and others from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Arab and Hindi traditions pushed the prominence of ethical messages that the founders of such religions encouraged.
Somehow politicized fractions, greedy for power and control lose the underlining message of religions: do not harm or exploit your neighbors. Responsible leadership with responsible teachers is vital in the education of future leaders and to overcome the double standard of defining what it means to be civilized. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, whose famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underlines the emphasis of responsible teaching: organizing, consistency, boldness, unity for liberation, objectivity to understand otherness, and critical thinking, which involves having the ability to ask hard questions.
“Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perceptions of reality” (Freire). These false perceptions are hopelessness, skepticism, helplessness, and victimization. Education can help us overcome these false precepts. A moral teacher, like Martin Luther King or John Lennon, or Cesar Chavez, tends to teach the best lessons outside of the classroom.
Cesar Chavez followed the lessons from his predecessors and utilized organizing tools to bring his fellow Hispanic American farm workers together and overcome exploitive working conditions in California throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. His organization known as the United Farm Workers, worked with local communities to unify and maintain pressure on the exploitive farm owners through peaceful means.
Does ‘power come from the barrel of a gun’? Is it the only way to break class structure and confront the establishment through violent means? Can getting organized and fighting back for one’s rights merely be interpreted through brutal acts? These men and women mentioned throughout the essay beg to differ. True strength comes from the actions and reactions one takes in life. As John Lennon sang for imagine world peace, some audiences could not imagine the idea other than in a fairytale. However, the footprints left in history from such responsible leaders felt that leading by example would continue to motivate this constant struggle to protect dignity.
In 2011, several leaders on the streets across the globe have chosen to follow the lessons of nonviolence. In Chile, Camila Vallejo, at 23 years of age, motivates and strengthens the student protests. She preaches nonviolence, and has connected protestors throughout the university system to stand up for the right to a better education. One form of protest that has been used is known as cacerolazos – banging pots and pans, making noise to overcome the police brutality, and shouting slogans of resistance.
In Syria, Razan Zeitouneh, 34, utilizes journalism and peaceful protests to shed the message that the people of Syria are tired of an oppressive government; and though the Assad dictatorship atrociously kills its own dissidents, Razan Zeitouneh and her fellow citizens continue to resist. She states, “If we didn’t believe that we will win, we wouldn’t be able to bear all this.”
As well as in Yemen, Tawakkul Karman, 32, has shown leadership in the face of military force to overcome abuse via peaceful means. Her fellow protestors and her organization Women Journalists Without Chains, carries onward against unnecessary tactics by powerful elites, in order to make necessary democratic reforms.
Camila Vallejo, Tawakkul Karman, and Razan Zeitouneh are potentially the next great teachers to follow the tradition of nonviolence to lead the world from the current paradigm of limited hegemonic fear to the open sharing freedom with the multitude. The legacy that Thoreau taught Tolstoy, Gandhi taught Martin, and Lennon sang to the hippies, lives on, while those in repressive power at previous times are only remembered for their crimes against humanity. How will you want to be remembered? Which form of leadership moves you in your heart and which moves you by the fist?
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