by Peace News

André & Magda Trocmé, Chambon, 1941; courtesy plu.edu

André Trocmé was almost a pacifist when he was called up into the French Army in the 1920’s. He was in a geographical survey unit in which he hoped he would not have to bear arms. On landing in Morocco, where a rebellion was in progress, he was issued with a rifle, which he returned, and he proceeded into the desert unarmed. His action was discovered when an inspection took place several hundred miles from the coast.

After listening to Trocmé’s explanation an officer told him that he should have known sooner that he was obliged to carry a rifle. Now he was an integral part of a group of 25 men who might be called upon to defend themselves with arms. If the group were attacked he would be indicted before a military court as a deserter. Happily the group was not attacked. Trocmé had learned his lesson and became a fully convinced conscientious objector.

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by Mark Engler and Paul Engler

The Salt March; artist unknown; courtesy guides.wikinut.com

History remembers Mohandas Gandhi’s Salt March as one of the great episodes of resistance in the past century, and as a campaign, which struck a decisive blow against British imperialism. In the early morning of March 12, 1930, Gandhi and a trained cadre of 78 followers from his ashram began a march of more than 200 miles to the sea. Three and a half weeks later, on April 5, surrounded by a crowd of thousands, Gandhi waded into the edge of the ocean, approached an area on the mud flats where evaporating water left a thick layer of sediment, and scooped up a handful of salt.

Gandhi’s act defied a law of the British Raj mandating that Indians buy salt from the government and prohibiting them from collecting their own. His disobedience set off a mass campaign of non-compliance that swept the country, leading to as many as 100,000 arrests. In a famous quote published in the Manchester Guardian, revered poet Rabindranath Tagore described the campaign’s transformative impact: “Those who live in England, far away from the East, have now got to realize that Europe has completely lost her former prestige in Asia.” For the absentee rulers in London, it was “a great moral defeat.”

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by the Non-Resistance Society

Editor’s Preface: In conjunction with the Tolstoy article (just below) and his theory of non-resistance, we are posting today the statement of purpose of the Non-Resistance Society founded in Boston in September 1838 at a special peace convention organized by the abolitionist social reformer, William Lloyd Garrison; the Declaration was indeed primarily written by Garrison. It was agreed upon at the Boston convention and published on September 20, 1838. The society further rejected social distinctions based on race, nationality or gender, refused obedience to “human governments”, and opposed individual acts of self-defense. The declaration is one of the earliest statements of philosophical anarchism, pacifism, and non-resistance in the USA. Please see the Editor’s Note at the end for further information and links. JG

William Lloyd Garrison cigar box cartoon; courtesy cigarboxlabels.com

Assembled in Convention, from various sections of the American Union, for the promotion of peace on earth and good will among men, we, the undersigned, regard it as due to ourselves, to the cause which we love, to the country in which we live, and to the world, to publish a Declaration, expressive of the principles we cherish, the purposes we aim to accomplish, and the measures we shall adopt to carry forward the work of peaceful and universal reformation.

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by David Hartsough

Cover art courtesy Cambridge University Press; cambridge.org

When people think of Palestine and Israel, they often picture Palestinians as suicide bombers and terrorists while the Israeli military are seen as bombing whole neighborhoods in Palestine. The violence and counter-violence and endless war has created a hopelessness about any peaceful future for the Holy Land.

However, during a month-long stay in Palestine and Israel recently, I found something else. I found something very positive and hopeful and perhaps the key to a peaceful resolution of this tragic conflict — and a possible path toward a peaceful future for both peoples.

I found that violence is not the whole story. Endless checkpoints, 26-foot high walls, and the great fear and mistrust between many Israelis and Palestinians are grimly persistent features of life there. But there is also an alternative to this cycle of destruction being forged on both sides. There is a larger story beyond the script of retaliatory violence – a story of a growing nonviolent movement that both Palestinians and Israelis are building.  It is this larger story that I would like to share.

Active Nonviolence is alive and well in Palestine and Israel! The interfaith delegation I co-led to this region witnessed, first hand, many Palestinians who are engaged in active nonviolent resistance to the occupation of their lands in the West Bank. Weekly nonviolent demonstrations have been held in many villages, including Bil’in, Nil’in, Al Ma’sara, Walaja, as well as in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, some for more than five years. Israelis (including Combatants for Peace and Anarchists Against the Wall), and Internationals, (including Christian Peacemaker Teams, Ecumenical Accompaniment Program and Michigan Peace Teams) actively participate in these weekly actions. There is a deeply inspiring commitment by Palestinians throughout the region to keep struggling nonviolently even when Israeli soldiers shoot powerful tear-gas canisters and grenades, rubber-coated steel bullets, concussion bombs and even live ammunition at the unarmed villagers.

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by Terry Messman

Covert art courtesy PMPress.org

Street Spirit: Looking back at a lifetime of nonviolent activism, can you remember the first person who helped set your life on this path?

David Hartsough: Gandhi. My parents gave me Gandhi’s book, All Men Are Brothers, on my 14th or 15th birthday. And Martin Luther King who I met when I was 15.

Spirit: Why was Gandhi’s All Men Are Brothers such an inspiration?

Hartsough: Because he said that nonviolence is the most powerful force in the world, and he believed that, and he practiced it. His entire life was made up of his experiments with nonviolence, his experiments with truth. He took nonviolence from being kind of a moral, theological, philosophical idea, and showed it could be a means of struggle to liberate a country. That was a great model for me that nonviolence is not just morally superior to killing people, but was a more effective way of liberating people. Also, his belief that all people are children of God. We are all one. We’re not black versus white, Americans versus Russians, good guys versus bad guys. We’re all brothers and sisters. I took that seriously and that’s what I believe.

Spirit: What was your first involvement in a social-change movement as a young activist?

Hartsough: When I was 14, there was a Nike missile site near where I lived in Philadelphia. This was when people were hiding under their desks in school or going into air raid shelters to try to be safe when we had a nuclear war — which is absolutely ridiculous. So I organized other young people to have a vigil at this Nike missile site over Thanksgiving. We fasted and we walked around with our picket signs in front of the place, and that’s where my FBI record started.

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by Terry Messman

Logo courtesy of www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org

 “Governments have the power to throw us in jail and shoot at us and intimidate us,
but they don’t have the power to kill our spirits.” David Hartsough

Spirit: David, when were you hired as staff organizer for the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco?

Hartsough: I was hired in 1973 to be part of the Simple Living Program. My wife Jan and I shared the staff position. Then I began the American Friends Service Committee [AFSC] Nonviolent Movement Building Program in 1982.

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by War Resisters’ International

Editor’s preface: The following article comprises the WRI’s founding statement of purpose (1922), with important revisions in 1935 and 1937. This posting also inaugurates our most ambitious project thus far. In conjunction with WRI, London, we have started to undertake the research of the enormous WRI archive held in Amsterdam by the International Institute of Social History (IISG). The archive occupies 63.3 meters of IISG shelf space, with spill over material in approximately 40 other archives at IISG, and with material at the Peace Palace in The Hague. The purpose of our project will not be, of course, to post anything or everything, but rather to make a selection of material that bears on the influence of nonviolence on the early 20^th century peace movements, and vice versa, especially the period c. 1910-1950, that is, from the years leading up to WWI, to the aftermath of WWII. Wherever possible, we shall also be providing our own pdf scans of the original material, in order to make the material more accessible to scholars. The pdf links will be noted at the ends of sections, or the ends of articles. Acknowledgments are at the end. JG

WRI broken rifle logo; courtesy wri-irg.org

Statement One (1921): War Resisters International. What it Is and What it Advocates

In many countries there are organisations of men and women who are pledged to refuse all war service. They are affiliated to an International Secretariat,  Paco [Esperanto for peace. Ed], Bilthoven, Holland. The basis of the international movement is simple but uncompromising. Members of the affiliated bodies are required to agree to this affirmation: “War is a crime against Humanity. I have therefore decided to support no kind of war, and to strive to remove all causes of war.”

War is a crime against Humanity.

Holding these views War Resisters welcome the proposal of a General Strike whenever war is threatened. They urge that the Trade Unions should agree to declare a strike as soon as their Governments order mobilisation of troops, and that the strike should be continued until the order has been withdrawn and other steps taken to settle the dispute.

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by Rev. Dr. John Haynes Holmes

Editor’s Preface: This is the text of a sermon John Haynes Holmes preached to his congregation at the Community Church, New York City in March 1922. It was published in pamphlet form in April of that year, and is one of the earliest extant US statements about the significance of Gandhi, although Haynes also mentions a previous sermon to his congregation some months before, which could not be retrieved. This continues our series of postings of original, historical documents. See the notes at the end for further textual and biographical information. JG

Portrait of John Haynes Holmes, courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org

As I enter this morning upon the discussion of Mahatma Gandhi, of India, and of the universal significance of the work which he is doing in his native country, I am irresistibly reminded of the day, which was not so long ago, when I first had the pleasure of presenting this man to this congregation, and of declaring my conviction, the same now as it was then, that Gandhi is incomparably the greatest man now living in the world. How the situation has changed in these few months! At that time Gandhi’s name was practically unknown outside the borders of India. I hit upon it by the merest chance; and, although I came to feel upon the instant that here was a creative spiritual genius of the first order, my information was of the meagrest description. Furthermore, all endeavors to get additional information met with failure.

Today, however, Gandhi’s name is appearing on the first pages of all the newspapers. Scores of articles have been published in the magazines and reviews of this country, England and the continent. A great journal, the New York World, sends its leading correspondent to India to “spy out the land,” and he returns to write of Gandhi and his policy of nonviolence and non-cooperation. From almost utter obscurity, this man mounts in a few months to a fame as universal as it promises to be immortal. He holds today the center of the world’s attention. That position of primacy held so proudly by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 and 1919, and by Vladimir Lenin in 1920 and 1921, is now occupied by a little Oriental who has never held any official position, who seeks neither glory nor power, and who languishes this day behind the bars of an English jail.

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by Charles C. Walker

Logo of UK-FOR; courtesy of for.org.uk

Gandhi’s influence on the peace movement  in the United States was felt as early as the 1920s. An effective exponent of Gandhi’s ideas was John Haynes Holmes, a prominent Unitarian minister and reformer, and an outspoken pacifist in World War I. He first set forth his discovery of Gandhi in a 1922 sermon titled “World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi” which was widely circulated. In another sermon the same year, “Who is the Greatest Man in the World Today?” this designation of Gandhi amazed many listeners, most of whom had never heard the name before. Gandhi’s autobiography was first published in America in the magazine Unity, which Holmes edited.

There were landmark books: by Romain Rolland in 1924, and three by C.F. Andrews published in 1930 and 1931. The Power of Nonviolence by Richard B. Gregg first appeared in 1934, and two revised editions were subsequently published. Probably no other book on nonviolence has been so widely read by U.S. pacifists, or so widely used as the basis for a study program.

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by Terry Messman

Dust wrapper courtesy Univ. Press of Kentucky

During their hard-fought struggle to overcome nearly impossible odds and win voting rights for African American citizens who had been disenfranchised for 100 years, civil rights activists marched down the long and treacherous road that led from the brutal battlefield of Selma, Alabama, through a seemingly endless gauntlet of beatings, bombings, bloodshed, gunshots, martyrdom, and a tri-state assassination conspiracy.

Even though their nonviolent efforts to win the right to vote were met with some of the most shocking violence of the civil rights era, the Freedom Movement stood its ground and claimed perhaps its most significant and far-reaching victory for human rights — the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As a young man, Bernard LaFayette was chosen to become the key organizer of this dangerous and bloody struggle, and he offers a fascinating insider’s look into the Selma campaign in interviews and in his recent book, In Peace and Freedom, My Journey in Selma. The lessons in community organizing, in this highly insightful case study, are deeply valuable and relevant to today’s human rights activists.

Find the Cost of Freedom

In opening up this chapter of the Freedom Movement to reveal its lessons, it is important to approach it, not as some academic case study in nonviolence, but with the clear-eyed realization of the terrible price that was paid in bloodshed and the loss of life. LaFayette has given us something far more profound than just another case study of nonviolence. He has also opened our eyes to the heartbreaking sacrifices made by decent and compassionate people such as Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo and Rev. James Reeb, who selflessly gave their very lives in their commitment to fighting for the most basic of human rights.

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