Satyagraha
“People become murderers, robbers and terrorists because of circumstances and experiences in life. Killing or confining murders, robbers, terrorists or the like is not going to rid this world of them. For with everyone we kill or confine, we create another hundred to take their place.”
Ghandi’s grandson Arun on a nonviolent response to terrorism.
A lot of people dismiss little old Ghandi’s nonviolence, or Satyagraha.
Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (Agraha) engenders and therefore serve as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement “Satyagraha“, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase “passive resistance”. (Ghandi in South Africa)
This all sounds very far-fetched and slightly ridiculous. Indeed, Einstein once marvelled that Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.
And yet, incredibly, Ghandi’s movement was able to secure independence for India in the face of resistance by the British Empire… in its time an unquestionably more savage and determined colonial power than the latter-day US.
What was its stimulus? To counter previous upwellings of discontent, the British response had always been to escalate the level of violence and repression. Ghandi had been leading a national wave of civilian disobedience and resistance.
But then in 1919, in response to the protests, a British general named Reginald Dyer trapped 10,000 unarmed civilians in an Amritsar marketplace by blocking the exits and without warning ordered his troops to fire on them for 10 minutes, killing 400, wounding over a thousand, and forbidding any medical aid until the next day.
Ghandi was shaken by this carnage and over the next few months formulated the principles of Satyagraha. He saw that opposing such State-sponsored wholesale terrorism with more violence could only lead to great bloodshed and an uncertain victory for either side. Eventually his movement forced the greatest superpower on the earth at that time to concede to Indian independence after centuries of rule.
There are always more bullets, and better bullets, and probably someone with more bullets than you, or cleverer ways to use them. Those “asymmetrical threats“.
But Ghandi saw that Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.