{"product_id":"nonviolence-isbn-9780812974478","title":"Nonviolence","description":"In this timely, highly original, and controversial narrative, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author Mark Kurlansky discusses nonviolence as a distinct entity, a course of action, rather than a mere state of mind. Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cu\u003eNonviolence\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e is a sweeping yet concise history that moves from ancient Hindu times to present-day conflicts raging in the Middle East and elsewhere. Kurlansky also brings into focus just why nonviolence is a “dangerous” idea, and asks such provocative questions as: Is there such a thing as a “just war”? Could nonviolence have worked against even the most evil regimes in history?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKurlansky draws from history twenty-five provocative lessons on the subject that we can use to effect change today. He shows how, time and again, violence is used to suppress nonviolence and its practitioners–Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example; that the stated deterrence value of standing national armies and huge weapons arsenals is, at best, negligible; and, encouragingly, that much of the hard work necessary to begin a movement to end war is already complete. It simply needs to be embraced and accelerated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEngaging, scholarly, and brilliantly reasoned, \u003ci\u003eNonviolence\u003c\/i\u003e is a work that compels readers to look at history in an entirely new way. This is not just a manifesto for our times but a trailblazing book whose time has come.Mark Kurlansky is the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling and James A. Beard Award—winning author of \u003ci\u003eCod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eSalt: A World History; 1968: The Year That Rocked the World; The Basque History of the World; \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell\u003c\/i\u003e; as well as the novel \u003ci\u003eBoogaloo on 2nd Avenue \u003c\/i\u003eand several other books. He lives in New York City.I\u003cbr\u003eImperfect  Beings\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"We expect to prevail through the foolishness of preaching.\" \u003cbr\u003e —William Lloyd Garrison,   Declaration of Sentiments adopted by the   Peace Convention of Boston, 1838\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The first clue, lesson number one from human history on the subject of  nonviolence, is that there is no word for it. The concept has been praised  by every major religion. Throughout history there have been practitioners  of nonviolence. Yet, 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. In Sanskrit, the word for violence is  himsa, harm, and the negation of himsa, just as nonviolence is the  negation of violence, is ahimsa—not doing harm. But if ahimsa is “not  doing harm,” what is it doing?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The only possible explanation for the absence of a proactive word to  express nonviolence is that not only the political establishments but the  cultural and intellectual establishments of all societies have viewed  nonviolence as a marginal point of view, a fanciful rejection of one of  society’s key components, a repudiation of something important but not a  serious force in itself. It is not an authentic concept but simply the  abnegation of something else. It has been marginalized because it is one  of the rare truly revolutionary ideas, an idea that seeks to completely  change the nature of society, a threat to the established order. And it  has always been treated as something profoundly dangerous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Advocates of nonviolence—dangerous people—have been there throughout  history, questioning the greatness of Caesar and Napo-  leon and the Founding Fathers and Roosevelt and Churchill. For every  Crusade and Revolution and Civil War there have always been those who  argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it  was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals. The case can  be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence  from Britain; it was not   the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the  Jews. But this possibility has rarely been considered, because the Caesars  and Napoleons of history have always used their power   to muffle the voices of those who would challenge the necessity of war—and  it is these Caesars, as Napoleon observed, who get to write history. And  so the ones who have killed become the ones who are revered. But there is  another history that manages to survive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It survives, but nonviolence is in fact a marginal rejection of a  marginalized concept. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her 1969 study  On Violence, pointed out that while it can be universally agreed that  violence has been one of the primary movers of history, historians and  social scientists rarely study the subject of violence. She suggested that  this was because violence was such a mainstay   of human activity that it was “taken for granted and therefore   neglected.” Violence is a fundamental of the human condition, whereas  nonviolence is merely a rarified response to that reality. What does this  mean? If we lived in a world that had no word for war other than nonpeace,  what kind of world would that be? It would not necessarily be a world  without war, but it would be a world that regarded war as an aberrant and  insignificant activity. The widely held and seldom expressed but implicit  viewpoint of most cultures is that violence is real and nonviolence is  unreal. But when nonviolence becomes a reality it is a powerful force.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nonviolence is not the same thing as pacifism, for which there are many  words. Pacifism is treated almost as a psychological condition. It is a  state of mind. Pacifism is passive; but nonviolence is active. Pacifism is  harmless and therefore easier to accept than nonviolence, which is  dangerous. When Jesus Christ said that a victim should turn the other  cheek, he was preaching pacifism. But when he said that an enemy should be  won over through the power of love, he was preaching nonviolence.  Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique  for political activism, a recipe for prevailing. It requires a great deal  more imagination to devise nonviolent means—boycotts, sit-ins, strikes,  street theater, demonstrations—than to use force. And there is not always  agreement on what constitutes violence. Some advocates of nonviolence  believe that boycotts and embargoes that cause hunger and deprivation are  a form of violence. Some believe that using less lethal means of force,  rock throwing or rubber bullets, is a form of nonvio-  lence. But the central belief is that forms of persuasion that do not use  physical force, do not cause suffering, are more effective; and while  there is often a moral argument for nonviolence, the core of the belief is  political: that nonviolence is more effective than violence, that violence  does not work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mohandas Gandhi invented a word for it, satyagraha, from satya, meaning  truth. Satyagraha, according to Gandhi, literally means “holding on to  truth” or “truth force.” Interestingly, although Gandhi’s teachings and  techniques have had a huge impact on political activists around the world,  his word for it, satyagraha, has never caught on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      All religions discuss the power of nonviolence and the evil of violence.  Hinduism, which claims to be the oldest religion, though its founding date  is unknown, as is its founder, does not take a clear stand on nonviolence.  This ambiguity is not surprising for an ancient religion that has no  central belief or official priests and has a plethora of scriptures, gods,  mythologies, and cults. Hindus often repeat the aphorism “Ahimsa paramo  dharmah,” nonviolence is the highest law, but this is not an unshakable  principle of the religion. Violence is permissible in the Hindu religion,  and Indra is a warlike Hindu god. But there are also many writings of  Hindu wise men against violence, especially in a book known as the  Mahabharata. Hindu sages tended to see nonviolence as an unattainable  ideal. Perfect nonviolence would mean not harming any living thing. The  sages encouraged vegetarianism to avoid harming animals. The Jainists,  followers of a religion admired by Gandhi, keep their mouths masked to  insure that they do not accidentally inhale a tiny insect. But Hinduism  recognizes that even the strictest vegetarians harm plants, killing them  in order to live. A saint, it is said, would live on air, but Hinduism  recognizes that this is impossible. Complete ahimsa is not attainable.  Gandhi wrote, “Nonviolence is a perfect stage. It is a goal towards which  all mankind moves naturally, though unconsciously.” He believed human  beings were working toward perfection. Violence was a barbaric  retrogressive trait that had not yet been shed. The human being who  achieved complete nonviolence, according to Gandhi, would not be a saint.  “He only becomes truly a man,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This concept of man as an imperfect being who is obligated to strive for  an unattainable perfection runs through most of human thought. The  nineteenth-century French founder of the anarchist movement, Pierre-Joseph  Proudhon, wrote in his 1853 Philosophie du progrès, “We are born  perfectable, but we shall never be per-  fect.” The often repeated argument against nonviolence, that it is in our  nature to be violent—no doubt why violence deserves its own word—lacks  validity in light of the ubiquitous moral argument that it is our  obligation to try to be better than we are.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hinduism and Gandhi insist that nonviolence must never come from weakness  but from strength, and only the strongest and most disciplined people can  hope to achieve it. Those who are incapable of defending themselves  without violence, those who lack the spiri-  tual strength to match their adversary’s physical brutality, either  because of their own weakness or the determined brutality of the enemy,  are obligated to use physical violence for defense. In Hinduism, passive  submission to brutality is usually considered a sin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Whenever the Chinese denounce the pacifist tendencies in their culture,  they usually blame these tendencies on Buddhism. This is because Buddhism  is the only important Eastern religion in China that is of foreign origin.  Buddha, the sixth-century b.c. founder, was born near the Indian-Nepalese  border. If pacifism is a national weakness, many Chinese have contended,  surely it is the fault   of foreigners. And so Hu Shi, the Columbia University–educated Chinese  scholar (1891–1962), said, “Buddhism, which dominated Chinese religious  life for twenty centuries, has reinforced the peaceful tendencies of an  already too peaceful people.” His implication was that the rejection of  violence makes people passive, and many early-twentieth-century Chinese  believed their people had become too passive. This ignored the fact that  most religions and philosophies that reject violence do not encourage  passiveness but activism by other means—nonviolence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Buddhism forbids the taking of life, but there seems to be a wide range of  interpretations of this stance. In some countries it means vegetarianism,  but in Tibet, perhaps because of a lack of vegetables, it means that  animals must be slaughtered “humanely.” To a Tibetan Buddhist, however,  this means the opposite of what it means to a Jew. To Jews, humane  slaughter is the clean slitting of the animal’s throat and the removal of  all blood, whereas in Tibet it means death by suffocation, to avoid the  spilling of blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While the Buddhist interdiction on taking life was frequently interpreted  in China as a condemnation of militarism, this was not the case in  medieval Japan. In Japan Buddhism developed the “medi-  tation school” commonly known as Zen. In the Middle Ages, Zen monks became  warriors and monasteries became military fortresses. The original idea of  Zen was the suppression of the body in order to reach a higher level of  meditation. In the fourteenth century   the technique was applied not only to meditation but to swordsmanship and  archery. Three centuries later, Zen had become an integral part of the  warrior code in Japan. This was neither the first nor last incident of a  religion being perverted for military purposes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In Buddhism, as in Hinduism, there is the notion of humans reaching higher  levels, and one of the ways this is accomplished is by rendering aid to  all beings. But Buddhism is not the only source of nonviolent thinking in  China. The position on war and nonviolence in Confucianism, a belief  system developed in China from 722 to 484 b.c., is even more vague than in  Hinduism. It is not even clear that Confucianism is a religion. Many  prefer to describe it as a moral philosophy. Nor is there agreement on the  extent of the role of Confucius, whose real name was Kong Fuzi, a  contempo-rary of Buddha, who lived between 551 and 479 b.c. The Analects,  a compilation of Confucius’s sayings that was assembled long after his  death, defined the function of government as providing food and troops and  earning the people’s confidence. Asked which could be suspended in hard  times, he answered, “Dispense with the troops.” This idea that military is  essential to government but less essential than other functions runs  throughout The Analects.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Confucius was not a pacifist, nor did he teach the power of nonviolence.  But The Analects also at times rejects the notion of state   violence, saying, “If good men were to administer the government for a  hundred years, violence could be overcome and capital punishment dispensed  with.” And when the question comes up of how to deal with neighboring  barbarians, the standard rationale for   military campaigns in China, the reply in The Analects is: “If the distant  peoples do not submit, then build up culture and character and so win  them, and when they have been won give them security.”   It is a succinct statement of the nonviolent approach to political   activism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But the strongest Chinese stand on nonviolence came in opposition to  Confucius, from a man named Mozi, who lived from about 470 to 390 b.c.  Mozi frequently attacked Confucianists for being aristocrats, which has  led some scholars to conclude that he came from a class of slaves. But  like other rebels, including Jesus and Gandhi, he may have chosen to throw  in with the poorest class as a protest against their unfair treatment.  While Confucius was a voice of the establishment, Mozi was a rebel. While  Confucius envisioned a hierarchy of love in which the greatest affection  was given to family, Mozi called for universal love, chien ai, and  emphasized helping the poor. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mozi described the concept of chien ai: “He throws me a peach, I return  him a plum.”  Mozi saw this concept of mutual love, chien ai, as the key to righting the  world’s ills.Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama [quote]--The Economist","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304380551397,"sku":"NP9780812974478","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812974478.jpg?v=1767733859","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/nonviolence-isbn-9780812974478","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}