Peace, Paix, Paz

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, said Gandhi. But more importantly one's own eye feels to us more important than another person's eye. And when what we have lost is a loved one our pain cannot be compensated by any number of loved ones lost by those we believe to be our enemies. For this reason violent retaliation always leads to escalation. We propose non-violence, negotiation and International Courts of Justice to deal with conflict as the only way to open the future. The destruction of the Twin Towers and the loss of so many lives is a tragedy and it should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But the loss of lives in the wars that followed these tragic events is equally unacceptable. May this be the end of terror and the beginning of dialogue for all those involved in this conflict.

Montreal October 2001

Conference & Demo for Peace

Non-Violence, the only way to an open future

On Sep 11^th  2001 our world changed. This was well depicted by Gary Trudeau in his Doonsbury cartoon, a young woman becomes aware that things have changed radically when she realizes she no longer cares about what Madonna had for breakfast. The main questions everybody is asking themselves are: will this spiral out of control into another world war? Can we make plans for our immediate and long-term future? Can I go on working on the things that are meaningful to me or will I have to put everything on hold to get involved in a conflict between forces I dislike (because they are all committed to seeking their goals through the use of violence) but that put me (and thousands of other civilians including 5000 people at the twin towers) in the crossfire. Our choices may be limited but there are some and my choice is to maximize the efforts to deal with the present crisis in the only way I know will open the future: through Non-Violence.

Many people justify the vicious circle of violence by claiming that there is a Human Nature, which is violent. The humanist point of view maintains that the only natural thing in the human being is the capacity to change and to make intentional choices. This may go against what we have learnt about the history of humanity. But History as taught in schools is completely biased towards the violent conquerors and warriors that built empires through oppression and enslaving people. It is as if when things are going OK nobody makes any notes but as soon as someone kills someone else everybody starts to busily write textbooks, as we have sadly seen in the past few weeks. We probably no longer remember the names of all the bloodthirsty imperialistic madmen that were offered to our innocence during our school years as the salient points in human evolution, but as a synthesis we have a vague idea that those were the only people who mattered. (There were of course a few scientists thrown in but never with the same enthusiasm). It is no different from the mechanical tendency in our own life to record more strongly the adverse life events than the happy, desired or expected ones, ending up with a vision of one’s own existence biased towards the tragic.

If there is something positive about this obsessive recording of the history of violence it is that it allows us to safely predict that a violent response will lead to more violence. Non-violence faces here its first challenge, the education of the next generations with a non-violent perspective, if we are to say: it stops here. No matter what happened before, it stops here. But… History cannot be dismissed, in the same way that the pain and desire for revenge of those who lost a loved one cannot be dismissed. The main difficulty facing non-violence is a negotiating table covered in images of body bags and babies blown to pieces. The only way forward is to help people ask for forgiveness to their dead because they will not be avenged, in order to give a future to their and our children. “An eye for an eye just makes both sides blind” read a placard in an anti-war 60’s rally. An eye for an eye suggests just an equivalent retaliation, a mathematical equation applied to retribution. It can never work for acts of violence because the death of my brother or my child will always feel a loss overwhelmingly bigger than the death of anybody else's brother or child. 

So, we propose negotiation to bring to justice those responsible for the atrocities of New York and Washington, but, what is the basic training in negotiation offered by the present system? To start from the most extreme and entrenched position and slowly inching towards the middle, and if one side feels that things and going too fast they stand up and leave the table. This generally works unless, of course, the other side decided in advance that what they really want is to start bombing a.s.a.p. (as seen with Serbia and Taliban). The Humanist style of negotiation is rather different. It consists of both sides asking themselves If they want to live and under what conditions, followed by focusing on the principle “when you treat others the way you would like to be treated you liberate yourself”. And then we work our way backwards on what has to be done today to achieve those objectives.

One of the main problems in implementing strategies to reduce violence is that there are vested interests that block the path, and we are not just talking about arms manufacturing and dealing but even at the level of prevention of criminal violence in a particular country. Dr James Gillian, conducted a study at Massachusetts that demonstrated that those violent offenders that completed a college degree whilst serving a sentence had a much reduced risk of re-offending than those who did not have access to such programmes. Unfortunately the state governor considered that people would commit crimes in order to get an education and closed the programme!

If there is any doubt that history, if left to its most mechanical tendencies, repeats its cycles of violence we only need to look at this, pointed out by a British comedian: that the Kosovan Albanians were protected from ethnic cleansing by Nato using Apache helicopters, named after a people who had been ethnically cleansed by the early colonization of America.

Another challenge is that things used to be much clearer. There was an agreement (amongst those who accepted war as the nature of things. Nobody asked me), conventional weapons were OK, chemical and bacteriological were not and nuclear were unthinkable. With the advent of depleted uranium anti-bunker weapons used in the Gulf War, Kosovo and Iraq, radioactive dust was released into the vicinity of the civilian population, contaminating people and the ground for who knows how long. Then Serbian chemical factories were bombed, again releasing a number of noxious substances and the clean up is still going on. The same for white phosphoros weapons. So how can we not be a little paranoid that others will also make use those weapons, if War has already become a little nuclear and a little chemical. The role of a non-violent movement is to point out that the only people who are reasonably protected from the effects of increasingly vicious weapons are governments and the military and that the death of civilians caught in the cross fire (called innocent victims if they are on our side and “collateral damage” if they are on the other) is likely to continue to increase. 

The creation of a non-violent world has to be proactive, not reactive. Once Hitler is galloping through Europe there is little point in lying in front of a tank holding a flower and saying “peace, man”. Unfortunately very few people are prepared to build a different society before violence strikes, so the peace movement very often appears to be reactive, and talking out of step, when non-violence has the least to offer. It’s just that at times of crisis other people, who in normal times just want to be left alone to pursue their individual interests without being concerned about the rest of humanity, want to listen for the first time. Education for non-violence means much more than preventing a violent response, or even a measured response, it means a commitment to preventing and resolving the social ills that sooner or later will erupt in a situation of violence. Non-violence demands the possibility of choice and when someone attacks you they may take your choice away. When violence is rampant (such as all out war) you do what you can, with the minimum force that will contain the situation, to save you and others from danger. There is no room in non-violence for revenge or “exemplary punishment”. Only building for the future.

Quasi psychotic extremists appear all the time, but if there are no large number of disaffected and oppressed people, who feel represented and vindicated by them, they stand alone without power to act out their violent fantasies. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant, over 200 years ago proposed the creation of The League of Nations as a way to stop the violence that was regularly erupting in Europe. He knew that non-violence is a function of people talking to one another. We have today the United Nations but the big decisions are still being taken by minority groups of countries: The Security Council (permanent membership assured by military, nuclear, might), the G7 (membership assured by economic power) and the World Bank. James D. Wolfensohn, its Director at the time of 9/11, has already warned that the Sep 11^th tragedy will have negative economic repercussions in Africa and that terrorrism will grow unless the world enters a new era of social justice.

The industrial military complex is still one of the few industries which does not go to find cheap labour in the Third world because that would mean to reveal its secrets to potential enemies. But once a machine gun loses its value needs to be replaced, so the countries that produce the weapons need to have a little war here and there to make sure that other countries buy the redundant stock. During the cold war the scenario of those wars was always elsewhere, not in the USSR or the USA, the countries that were really at war, but in all kinds of satellite of the empires in Africa, South America and Asia, like Afghanistan, where the “freedom fighters” armed by one superpower to fight the other are today coming back as Frankenstein-like (i.e. monster created by mad scientist that gets out of control) boomerangs to bite the hand that armed them. The instability produced by those wars further destroyed the economies of the countries in such a way that the multinationals could move in to pay slave wages to the population so they could sell their products at competitive value and huge profits in the developed one. But the weapons, like all products, need advertising and war allows for an unusual opportunity for exposure, such as we witnessed during the Gulf War when CNN’s presenter was shouting enthusiastically “and look at the precision of the SCUD Missile and that plane blowing up the bridge!!” in a way reminiscent of TV shopping. We heard later that they were not that precise and that lots of civilians had been vaporized by SCUDs, but business is business.

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 This is the proposal for Non-Violence presented by New Humanism

First of all we define violence as everything that produces pain and suffering in Human beings.  Everything that denies liberty, diversity and intentionality in others is violence and if we use violence to try to liberate ourselves from the system, it wins, because we become the same.  The basic moral principle of treating others the way we would like to be treated is a proposal that appears in all religions and cultures in their most humanist moments.

Because we may not be able to control the violence that is already unleashed at the present moment it is more urgent than ever to undertake the task of creating a Humanist Movement working for personal and social change based on the following points:

• The human being as the central value

• Affirming the equality of all human beings

• Recognising personal and cultural diversity

• Sustaining freedom of ideas and beliefs

• Development of knowledge beyond that accepted as the absolute truth

• Rejection of all forms of violence: Whether physical, economic, psychological, racial, religious, sexual, etc.

The humanist movement, already operating in more than 100 countries, develops projects with the previously mentioned characteristics in many different ways according to the interests of those people developing them.  Around the world people are developing the following projects:

Humanist Party.  Developing political proposals based on putting the value of human life as the central value; aiming to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a concrete reality for everyone, not just those who can afford them.  It also works for real rather than formal democracy and the criminalisation of environmental damage.

Centre of Cultures.  Working against racism, for anti-discrimination in general and the protection of refugees.

Education for non-violence.  Input into schools, NGOs and communities, with the participation of students, parents and teachers, community leaders and all who wish to expand the cause of non-violence. 

Economic projects alternative to the present system which is based on speculation and concentration of wealth and exploitation of the third world. 

Personal Development.  Learning to overcome one’s own violence through techniques of relaxation, communication, stress reduction, learning attention, etc. In so doing we free energy that is usually trapped by our suffering into changing the social environment.

All of this would not be possible without a strong direction towards self-organisation, i.e. the creation of self-sufficient and motivated networks of people who can ask themselves about their real needs rather than waiting for governments, celebrities or multinationals to tell them.

We support the creation of International Tribunals to try human rights violations and crimes against humanity (and we have no doubt we have seen one of those on Sep 11^th) recognised by all countries of the world.

Montreal 20/10/02

Education for Non Violence

www.educationfornon-violence.org

Non-violence does not come "naturally" to human beings; nor does violence. Both are learned through experiences, imitation and ultimately trial and error.

The Courses on education for non-violence are based on works developed within the context of the current of thought known as New Humanism to which we have added some experiences from other sources that we have found useful. Although there is a little theory most of the work is carried out in seminars/workshops during which the participants learn from their own personal experience and from other participant's experiences.

Both the World Health Organisation, which has declared violence an emergency in the field of health and Unesco are encouraging the development of programmes for a culture of peace and non-violence at all levels.

We consider that Violence can be:
" Physical (wars, terrorism, aggression, violent crime, corporal punishment, torture)
" Economic (poverty, exploitation)
" Psychological (destruction of people's self-esteem, manipulation through fear, bullying)
" Racial (exclusion, discrimination)
" Religious (intolerance, fanaticism)
" Sexual (abuse, degradation, genital mutilation, rape)
" Ecological (water and air pollution, water appropriation, green-house effect)
" Discrimination on the grounds of age, physical aspect, lifestyle, height, intellectual capacity, neighbourhood, continent, brand of trainers, obesity, etc…

Dehumanisation, also known as objectification, is the element common to all forms of violence.
Retaliation or a violent response to injustice or aggression always leads to an escalation of violence. We often discover also that the values of the violent world in which we grew up are already in us. Therefore, if we are already conditioned by the environment that has formed us, and if repressing prejudice is not helpful because it tends to arise when least expected, it may be necessary to do a little work…

In this framework we propose the Campaign of Education for Non-Violence as a way of bringing techniques to overcome violence to larger and larger numbers of people.

Why is Violence so difficult to eradicate? In our view it is because it is complex and multi-factorial. We study then the multiple factors to help modify both at personal and social levels, such as:
" Personal Factors: Tensions, lacks of self-esteem, impulsiveness, compulsions, frustration, painful memories, contradictions, the absence of a meaning in life.
" Factors in the relationship with the environment: Individualism, competition, resentments, isolation, lack of communication in the family, at work, social fragmentation, etc
" Factors of the Global System: Dehumanised social values, unreachable models of "happiness", the cult of celebrities, social injustice, the institutions that keep an unbalanced international order, etc.

We propose the combined action of courses and networks to give continuity to the work of non-violent change.

Course 1 consists of six 2 hours workshops which develop the following themes taking into account the interaction between individuals, their relationships and the global world:

1. Personal experience of violence and forms of violence. First strategies to overcome violence

2. Relaxation, breathing, body postures, Experience of Peace (to gain self-control)

3. Valid Action: Overcoming the contradictions that get projected into the world as violence. Developing solidarity

4. Overcoming discrimination

5. Virtues (discovering our positive points and seeing them in other people). Self-esteem.

6. Contribution to Organisations. Models

Course 2 adds other six 2 hours workshops on the following themes:

1. Non violent Conflict resolution whether interpersonal, collective or between different ethnic and cultural groups. The format is adapted to the level of violence and also to whether it is being carried out for training purposes or in real life situations.
2.The landscape of formation, aiming also to help resolve intergenerational conflicts, including those arising in migrant families.
3. The methodology of non-violence and organisational forms to exercise it; models and networks.

Both Courses encourage the participants to start to develop small projects to change situations of violence and discrimination in their immediate environment throughout the development of this training. It is our intention to make these techniques available to large numbers of people and organisations through cascade learning.