Kurlansky
Nonviolence
I am reading an excellent book by Mark Kurlansky entitled Nonviolence. Kurlansky writes, “The first clue… on the subject of nonviolence, is that there is no word for it…. while every major language has a word for violence, there is no word to express the idea of nonviolence except that it is not another idea, it is not violence.” There is, essentially, no ideological embodiment of nonviolence in language. Even the idea of peace is not the same as nonviolence, but it can suffice for this example. Imagine a world where instead of having war, we had ‘nonpeace’.Kurlansky is quick to point out that nonviolence is not the same as pacifism, which is associated with being passive. Nonviolence is a political means to an end, just as violence is, but it refuses to dehumanize others. Essentially, it tries to take seriously every great religions’ teaching of love your neighbor. If you do love your neighbor you will not invade, you will not wage war, you will not steal or cheat. The reason that we do invade, steal, bomb, kill is because we love ourselves more than our neighbors.The counter argument is an argument of justice. If you truly wish to love your neighbor then you must reveal the consequences of their actions. Thus when Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were loving not only Kuwait but showing Iraq tough love by invading. This is identified as the myth of redemptive violence: that performing a violent action can bring about nonviolent results.It is interesting that the first Christians never used the symbol of the cross, the symbol of violence against Jesus. They used the fish. That was their understanding of what Christianity was: following a fisherman, which often meant going to a cross. Now we follow the Christ of the cross, with few of us (in the West) ever going to one ourselves.
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More on Nonviolence
A few quotes from Kurlansky’s book:
“The early Christians are the earliest known group that renounced warfare in all its forms and rejected all its institutions.”
“For 284 years… Christians remained an antiwar cult. Christian writers emphasized the incompatibility of warfare with Christian teachings.”
“Active practitioners of nonviolence are always seen as a threat, a direct menace, to the state.”
“…once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religions changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace. The state must make war, because without war it would have to drop its power politics and renege on its mission to seek advantage over other nations, enhancing itself at the expense of others. And so a religions that is in the service of a state is a religion that not only accepts war, but prays for victory. From Constantine to the Crusaders to the contemporary American Christian right, people who call themselves Christians have betrayed the teachings of Jesus while using His name in the pursuit of political power.”