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Gandhi And The Struggle
Against Imperialism
International Day of
Nonviolence, 02/10/07, United Nations, NYC
By Johan
Galtung, dr hc mult, Professor of Peace Studies;
Mr Chairperson,
Foreign Ministers, Excellencies, Panelists,
23/01/08 "ICH" -- -- Gandhi
was fighting the UK Empire, meaning UK invasion and
occupation. One invasion, Viceroy Richard Wellesley in 1798
against the Sultan of Mysore, was also clearly anti-Muslim. The
same year Napoleon's mission civilisatrice invaded Egypt
to make himself Sultan el-kebir, Great Ruler, but were thrown
out in 1801. The English came in 1807 and Egypt was a colony
till 1922.
Gandhi fought an evil
empire as seen by how they reacted to the Sepoy mutiny 150 years
ago or to the 1919 Amritsar massacre. Churchill not only
referred to him as a semi-naked fakir, but sincerely hoped he
would fast himself to death. But in 1947 it was all over: first
went India, then the rest of the empire, mainly due to Gandhi's
nonviolence. Today they are both, India and England,
blossoming, India with a brilliant linguistic federalism and
phenomenal economic growth, England heading the same way but
still with some residual imperialism. And Gordon Brown sounds
much like Tony Blair without the flare; in the "special
relationship" with the senior partner.
The US global
Empire--broader, deeper, and more evil--was the successor to the
UK global Empire, with Israel being the successor in the Middle
East and Australia in the Pacific. They all have settler
colonialism in common. That spells invasion and
occupation; today by the USA in Iraq, Afghanistan and partly
Saudi-Arabia, and by Israel in Palestine. But people hate being
invaded and occupied, regardless of invader-occupier creativity
in legitimizing the exercise. So there is massive resistance in
all four, like there was in Norway under Germany.
How did Gandhi
resist? By brilliantly transcending the conflict between
the kshatriyah varnadharma of violent heroic
struggle, and his own swadharma of nonviolence into
nonviolent heroic struggle, known as satyagraha.
Born 9/11 1906; with no readiness to kill but to be killed, the
ultimate sacrifice.
To many satyagraha
above all means nonviolent struggle resisting direct and/or
structural violence. But there is much more to satyagraha,
particularly five points that go beyond such terms as
"struggle", "resistance", "heroic" and "sacrifice", way into
deeper and wiser politics than victorious invasions.
All five points apply
to the four anti-imperial struggles today. The struggles spell
an end to fundamentalist Christian US and hard Zionist Israeli
imperialism. But the gandhian points would raise USA and Israel
to conviviality with others. They cut both ways: these are
gandhian messages not only to the invaders-occupiers in
Washington-Jerusalem but, also to the invaded-occupied in
Iraq-Afghanistan-Palestine-Saudia. The more they are practiced
the better for both sides, and for us all.
Point 1: Never
fear dialogue.
Gandhi dialogued with
everybody in his many struggles, including with the Viceroy of
an Empire he had come to loathe. And it bore fruits. It is
pathetic to watch a US Secretary of State travel in and out of
Israel assuring them that she will meet with neither Hamas, nor
Hizbollah, nor Damascus, nor Tehran when that is exactly what
she has to do to make her points and maybe learn some new ones.
She may feel it is too much an honor for those evil parties. But
they [1] may not see an encounter with the USA as that much an
honor, nor [2] will this approach make them more amenable. They
will not go away anyhow.
But this also applies
to a Mullah Omar and a Hektamayar, representing the religious
and the national resistance, on top of which comes the
resistance from the overwhelming majority of Afghans one way or
another who simply want neither invasion nor occupation.
USA/NATO fight three wars. Thou shalt dialogue. The
conditionality approach, first NATO out, then talks, is highly
understandable, but that point can be much better communicated
in a dialogue covering all issues.
Point 2: Never fear
conflict: more opportunity than danger.
For Gandhi conflict was a
challenge to know each other, having something in common, not
being irrelevant to each other. Let us talk it over! He
preferred violence to cowardice and conflict, disharmony to no
relation at all; the best being, of course, the nonviolence of
the brave and relations of harmony.
Conflict can be
understood the Anglo-American way as violent clashes of
actors-parties, or as an incompatibility of the goals of those
actors-parties. The former perspective leads to control of one
or more party, usually of Other, even to
incapacitation-expulsion-extermination. The latter may lead to
problem-solving. Thus, how can legitimate goals of all parties
be accommodated? Could it be that even Other has legitimate
goals? And--horribile dictu--that I, Self, fall short?
A conflict can be seen
by the less mature and very self-righteous as a chance to impose
oneself, prevail, to "win". Or, by the more mature, as an
occasion for Self-examination rather than Other-censure, and a
search for that possibly new reality where legitimate goals of
all parties can be accommodated. Like the Muslim world's goals
of Respect for Islam and the Western world's goals of Democracy
and Free markets. Not easy, that one.
Maybe West could learn
from Islamic economics deep respect for economic transactions as
human transactions? And Islam from the West deep respect for
more diversity of views and opinions? Welcome conflict, welcome
challenge!
Points 3 and 4
introduce a major medium in which all conflicts unfold: time.
Diplomats in general, not only Anglo-Americans, negotiate
ratifiable agreements in the game of goals, values, interests as
they present themselves synchronically, at present. But
in real life the past throws long shadows into the
present. Conflicts are often asynchronic, the parties live in
different time zones; years, decades, centuries apart. They all
have their own Greenwich Mean Time, and often very mean, indeed.
And in real life the
future is like a light-house with red, yellow and green
sectors: Danger, stay out! - Proceed with care! - This is the
road! Some lights are strong, even blinding, others are
perceived only by the most sensitive. You neglect them at your
own considerable risk. As the advisor to Serbian president
Cosic, Professor Stojanovic, said of the US approach before the
1999 illegal NATO attack on Serbia: USA suffers from excessive
presentism, aware neither of history, nor of what the future may
hold in store of good, bad and worse.
Point 3: Know
History or you are doomed to repeat it(Burke)
Gandhi knew the history of
the English and their Empire often better than they themselves
while at the same time being at home in his own, the facts and
the equally important fiction (like the Mahabharata). He came
to the conclusion that the UK imperial inclination to glory and
ruling the waves (with some land thrown in) had to be fought at
its root, by spinning chains of nonviolence into the very heart
of England. So he did.
But history sediments
layers of trauma, not only glory, in the collective memory. How
can we ever understand the resistance of the four without
understanding the traumas suffered by
Iraq: 1258, the Baghdad
massacre by the Ilkhan and the Pope and 1916, UK carving
out Iraq; province 19, Kuwait in 1898;
Afghanistan: the UK
invasions 1838-1878 and the soviet 1979;
Palestine: 1916 Sykes-Picot
treason, 1948 nakhba for 711,000;
Saudi Arabia: the 1945
treaty killing the wahhab vision of life.
Suffer such
unreconciled traumas, and, rightly or not, next time the
perpetrator comes uninvited the response is "there they go
again". Anglo-America is so self-righteous that they do not
even fear confirming predictions flowing from history. Like
most perpetrators their memory is short. Victims never forget.
Acknowledgment of the traumas and conciliation are much overdue.
Point 4: Image the
future or you will never get there.
"Be today the future you
want to see tomorrow" was Gandhi's way of translating this point
into positive non-cooperation and civil disobedience, emptying
the oppressive structures while at the same time shedding light
on the future and training the satyagrahi for positive
peace, conviviality, not only for the repertory of meetings,
resolutions and demonstrations.
The unifying vision in
the struggle is Invaders Go Home!, saying that loud and clear.
But Gandhi's vision went beyond independence, swaraj, to
a world that included the occupier: more English than today, but
as friends, on a basis of equality!
Very compelling, very
disarming. Maybe there is a message here for all six parties to
think, speak and act in terms of a future together? Example:
a Middle East Community--modeled on the European Community that
accommodated former Nazi Germany--of Israel's five border
countries Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine fully recognized and
Egypt, with a formerly hard zionist Israel?
Point 5: While
fighting occupation clean up your own house!
Gandhi was certainly
resisting the English Empire and fighting for swaraj.
But that did not prevent him from attending to such ills of his
own Mother India as untouchability, discrimination of women,
misery, and the increasing gap between Hindus and Muslims. The
latter ultimately led to the partition which, with the
disastrous change of the proposed borderline by the last
Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, led to a blood-bath and a trauma
exacerbating for generations the protracted Kashmir conflict.
That the colonizers
also critiqued untouchability and women discrimination,
outlawing its extreme expression in the suttee, did not
prevent Gandhi from attacking these social ills. His was not the
cheap logic of denying any truth also held by the chief
antagonist. Many at a lower level of maturity become victims of
polarization. Nor did he attack caste because the colonizers
often used it as one of their levers in their divide et
impera tactic to dominate India. He fought it as evil in its
own right.
Back to occupiers and
occupied: what could they learn from Gandhi in addition to
turning from violence to nonviolence?
- USA: to struggle
energetically to lift the bottom 50% of society where basic
needs are concerned; to decrease the gap between rich and poor;
to restore to dignity the First Nations, the Inuits, the
Hawaiians; to lift discrimination; to reduce the alienation and
fear underlying the violence and drug abuse in spite of the fact
that many who hate the US Empire say so -
- Israel: to lift Arab
Israelis into first class citizenship, to reduce the increasing
gap between rich and poor and between Ashkenazim and Sephardim
and other groups; to reduce the corruption and normless hedonism
tearing at the society in spite of the fact that many who hate
hard zionism say so -
- Iraq: for the Sunnis to
give up their goal of running Iraq from Baghdad, for Kurds and
Shias to fight nonviolently for their inalienable right to open
borders to other Kurds and Shia Arabs, for them all to find a
unity in diversity somewhere between federation and
confederation; to preserve such Hussein gains as literacy,
welfare state, freedom of choice for women to wear the hijab
or not in spite of the fact that Saddam said so -
- Afghanistan: will be
managed by Afghans, but enter a compact with drug-consuming
countries: we reduce the supply, you reduce the demand by
creating more humane societies and we monitor each other in
spite of the fact that invaders and Taliban say so - ;
- Palestine: to continue
the Hamas struggle against corruption, renewing the society, to
lift non-Muslim Palestinians into first class citizenship; to
pursue energetically the struggle on the basis of the Qur'an for
more gender equality.
- Saudi Arabia: to try to
bridge the gap between wahhabism and Western materialism, to be
up front searching for alternative non-polluting and
non-depleting ways of converting energy; to pursue energetically
the struggle on the basis of the Qur'an for more gender
equality; to explore non-Western form of democracy.
There is so much work
to do! The problem is how to channel the energies produced by a
conflict so that the parties blossom. The three (and a half)
occupations have to be lifted, invaders have to go home and
dismantle their imperial structures. Both sides must be
liberated from the disastrous tie of imperialism. Fighting the
gandhian way both sides can blossom because these energies are
used positively. Nonviolent resistance
would have served Iraqis against both Hussein and Bush, Afghans
against their invaders, Palestinians inside and outside Israel
against hard zionism, and Saudis much better than the violent
9/11 (an extra-judicial execution of two buildings for their
sins against Alla'h?).
To repeat, Gandhi also
used these five approaches in his constructive handling of
conflict:
Point 1: Never fear
dialogue
Point 2: Never fear
conflict: more opportunity than danger
Point 3: Know
History or you are doomed to repeat it(Burke)
Point 4: Image the
future or you will never get there
Point 5: While
fighting occupation clean up your own house!
As Sonia Gandhi said
in her concluding address this morning of the first
International Day of Nonviolence: Let us embrace nonviolence,
and become truly human. A vote of thanks to India for
putting Gandhi and his nonviolence on the political agenda!
* The United Nations
General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution on 15 June
2007 to observe and celebrate annually Mahatma Gandhi's
birthday, October 2, as the International Day of Nonviolence.
The resolution was piloted by India and was co-sponsored by 142
countries. Among those not cosponsoring were the United States
and Norway.
On 2 October 2007
there was an informal meeting of the UN General Assembly
Plenary. Among the speakers were the UN Secretary General Ban
Ki Moon, and Sonia Gandhi who also expressed her gratitude to
the co-sponsors of the resolution. Following that there was a
Round Table Meeting in Conference Room 5, UN Building. The
panelists were Dr Ahmed Kathrada, Prof. Amartya Sen, Dr Ela
Gandhi, Dr Gene Sharp, Rev Jesse Jackson Sr, Prof. Johan Galtung,
Prof. John Nash and Dr Lia Diskin.
Johan
Galtung, dr hc mult, Professor of Peace Studies; Founder
TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network.
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