WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- SOME BASIC RULES -
With repeated thanks to Mark Juergensmeyer who let me copy them from his book, Fighting with Gandhi.
I cling to Satyagraha, even though I understand it less than a Sudanese mother might, the vaccine for which she went to the ends of the Earth to save her child. We have this in common: we have something precious to save, we know it works, and neither of us cares whether we understand it or not ― be it vaccine or Satyagraha. Expert medics may save her child; expert verifactors may save the world. We lay-folk can only hope. Bring it on at any cost!
· Do not avoid confrontation. Evasion merely prolongs the underlying conflict. Instead, welcome peaceful contradiction and the light it may cast on your truth.
· Stay open to communication and criticism. Each side has only a partial view. The perspective of the Other is essential to sort truth from untruth.
· Find a resolution and hang onto it. Once a better alternative appears, seize it and base your strategies on it. But be willing to challenge it as well.
· Consider your opponent an ally. Do nothing to harm and alienate those who oppose you. If you do so by accident or bad habit, seek forgiveness as soon as possible and make amends. Remember, your goal is to struggle together against anti-truth. [Author’s note: avoidance, accusation and resentment are my worst weaknesses ― see the items below, at which I fail all too often].
· Make your tactics consistent with your goal. When possible, use the goal itself as a weapon. When not, use only actions consistent with it.
· Be flexible. Be willing to change tactics, alter short-term goals, and revise your notion of the opponent, as well as your conception of the truth.
· Be temperate. Escalate your actions by degrees. The idea is to prevent your opponents from feeling intimidated. Their response should be communicative rather than defensive. You want to attract them into friendship and allegiance, not alienate them, as we have been indoctrinated to do in our dealings with the fearsome Other.
· Guard your sense of proportion. Determine which issues are trivial and which are worth your time and energy. The basis for judgment is the degree life and its quality are abused. Mount a campaign whose strength is equal to that of your opponent and appropriate to the issue.
· Be agonizingly disciplined. Especially when many activists mount a collective effort, make certain that your position is coherent and your side is devoted to nonviolence. Consistency is one of your major strengths.
· Know when to quit. A deadlocked campaign, or one with negative results, may require that you revise your tactics and even change your goals. There is no victory in concession to your prejudices without an agreement in principle. In a Gandhian fight, you may not claim victory until your ex-opponents also claim it.
· Be circumspect. Mass movements should practice Satyagraha as a last resort. They should use it only after every other resistance against untruth and violence has failed. Only those qualified by suffering may do so on any occasion.
Once you have absorbed these rules, (please review them carefully a couple times), you begin to grasp the enormous moral reeducation we require.
Several times? What am I thinking! At least five times a day for a full year under the vigilant gaze of a peace master. That would be the millionth part of the weapons indoctrination to which we have submitted to since childhood, teaching us the exact opposite of everything you just read. Good luck with that!
How can we turn enemies into best friends; defuse automatic reflexes of distrust and pre-emptive assault? Our Learning requirements are staggering; they surpass by far this shallow scribe’s intellect, self-indulgent sermonizing, off-the-wall temper and craven desire to make those who disagree submit or perish. We have a long, hard road to travel.
“Man, this here’s no joke.” Francois Villon
Mark Juergensmeyer’s excellent bibliography covers Gandhi’s writings and those of his principal analysts and biographers. He questions Gandhian tactics as they apply to cold-blooded ideologues and weapons elites who dominate current events and history. He studies the fatalism and saintly patience required to practice Gandhian principles against devil worshipers like Hitler and Pol Pot. Those moral ogres seem to be immune to common appeals to reason that might sway a fellow Learner, even if he disagreed with us.
Wouldn’t it take decades (millennia) of immense suffering to verifact successfully alongside their descendants slightly less crazy? Unless total annihilation at their hands intervened meanwhile? Faith in reincarnation might re-emerge for this reason: its implicit perpetuation of the truth, whatever harm might befall in meanwhile.
He pushes Gandhian logic to its extreme. Should we make an exception for benign coercion? Could we force people to behave better in their own best interest? Wasn’t that the error of the Grand Inquisitor? Can we succeed if we believe ourselves weaker than our antagonists? Gandhi thought not, lest we risk the moral pitfalls of the Grand Inquisitor.
Gandhi has been described as a Hindu saint, political moralist, religious ethicist, rational mystic, peaceful revolutionary, etc. These labels don’t fit him at all. His heart ruled his head. Gandhi was the ultimate tragic lover: a cartoon hero rushing headlong over cliffs and crushed under her rock falls in pursuit of his beloved. Using his body as a stylus and his beloved India as a slate, he composed psalms to his Beloved, the same way Solomon wrote his Song of Songs.
During his last minute on Earth – having held Kali at arm’s length for a lifetime and in despair over this incarnation of his Beloved whose fangs ran with the blood of a million Hindu and Muslim victims – he nodded to Her latest, exalted emissary who shot him dead. You can see that on film; Gandhi greeted his assassin as if he had foreseen that fate all along.
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