The Bhagavad Gita, composed in Sanskrit sometime between about 250 BCE and 500 CE, is probably the most revered of the ancient writings of India, and the first of them to be translated into English (1785). Its name means “Song (Gita) of the Adorable Lord,” the lord in this case being the god Krishna. It is one small section of the Mahabharata, an immense epic poem, but it differs from most of the rest of that epic in telling not of action—it is set on the brink of the great battle of Kurukshetra—but of a spiritual dialogue between one of the warriors in that battle, Arjuna, and the god Krishna, who serves as his charioteer. Arjuna has fought magnificently in earlier episodes, and will do so again in later ones, but here, surveying the vast armies drawn up on both sides, and seeing his kinsmen on both sides ready to fight to the death, he “felt for them a great compassion , / as well as great despair” (1.28). “Gandiva, my immortal bow, /drops from my hand,” he tells Krishna (1.30); he wishes to kill no one, not even for the kingdom of the three worlds; “If the sons of Dhritarashtra, / armed as they are, should murder me / weaponless and unresisting, / I would know greater happiness!” (1.46); “I will not fight” (2.9). (Translations by Flood and Martin.)
Against this pacifist impulse Krishna musters all his eloquence and authority. Arjuna must rouse himself and rise above mere sensations; he must not mourn for those who die, mere transient beings, for the spirit is immortal. Arjuna belongs to the warrior caste, and he must not violate his dharma or duty. “There is nothing better / than a battle that is righteous” (2.31). Arjuna must avoid dishonor, which is worse than death, and seek glory. So far Krishna might almost be Odysseus or Ajax in the Iliad trying to talk Achilles out of his withdrawal from the war against the Trojans. But this is a mere preliminary, for Krishna then summons Arjuna to become a Yogi, to strive to attain the peace of Nirvana, while remaining a warrior and carrying out a warrior’s duty, and so the remainder of the dialogue is Krishna’s discourse on Brahman, Atman, Karma, the three Gunas, sacrifice, reincarnation, and all the rest of the Hindu cosmic scheme that a Yogi should understand. One of the first things Arjuna should understand is that his duty is to play his part as a warrior without considering the consequences; “Your concern,” says Krishna, “should be with action, / never with an action’s fruits” (2.47). Arjuna must “act / without attachment to your deeds” (3.9). In perhaps his bluntest praise of unquestioning obedience, Krishna sounds like any drill sergeant: “Whatever the best leader does / the rank and file will also do; / everyone will fall in behind / the standard such a leader sets” (3.21). And like an officer at a military academy quieting the troubled conscience of a student who knows there are laws of war, Krishna tells Arjuna that any guilt will be on the god’s head if Arjuna simply follows orders: “Referring all your deeds to me, / and focused solely on the self, / desireless, devoid of ego, /free of fever, join the battle!” (3.30).
Krishna, it turns out, is the God of gods, the source of the visible universe, the being of all things, even of Arjuna (10.37), and he reveals himself in his supreme divine form with the light of a thousand suns (11.12). Like Job before God in the whirlwind, Arjuna prostrates himself in adoration of the Adorable Lord while describing the wonders he sees. Krishna then returns to Arjuna’s opening refusal with these thunderous words:
I am almighty time, the world-destroying,
and to destroy these worlds I have arisen!
Those warriors arrayed in lines opposing
your men, even without you, will have perished!
Arise, therefore, and seize upon your glory!
With your foe conquered, enjoy thriving kingship!
I have destroyed your enemy already:
serve as my tool, O Ambidextrous Archer!
Kill! do not hesitate to take on Drona,
Bishma, Jayadratha, Karna, and the others,
warrior-heroes I have caused to perish!
You will destroy your enemies in battle!
(11.32-34)
There are several more sections, concluding with one that discusses how to do one’s work in the world while in a state of spiritual perfection, and the dialogue ends when Arjuna declares that he has arrived at that state—“Delusion lost and wisdom gained” (18.73)—and is ready to enter the great battle.
The Gita, considered by most Hindus to be one of their most sacred texts, must have inspired many warriors over the last two thousand years. In some ways it resembles a Zen training manual for samurai. It would seem a most unappealing text for a religious pacifist, but Mohandas Gandhi translated it into his native Gujarati in 1929, and in the following year he wrote that, “though I am reading many things, the Bhagavad Gita is becoming more and more the only infallible guide, the only dictionary of reference, in which I find all the sorrows, all the troubles, all the trials arranged in the alphabetical order with exquisite solutions” (Iyer 172). In his autobiography of the same year he wrote, “I regard it today as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth” (Iyer 66). On the face if it this is astonishing, knowing that “Truth” for Gandhi implied ahimsa or nonviolence, a word of little prominence in the Gita. We could only so regard it, surely, by disregarding its literal or historical meaning and taking it as an allegory, and that is what Gandhi did. He turned it inside out.
Gandhi tells us that he had never read the Gita in Sanskrit or in his native Gujarati or even in English until he met two Theosophist brothers in London in 1889 who were reading Edwin Arnold’s translation of it, or paraphrase of it, The Song Celestial (1885), and they invited him, to his embarrassment, to read the original Sanskrit with them. After meeting Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky, Gandhi became an associate of the Theosophical Society and read books about Hinduism in that circle. The Theosophical interpretation of the Gita was entirely allegorical; the literal meaning was barely registered. Arjuna is Everyman, the battle is fought in our body, Krishna is the vehicle of the body, that is, the mind (rather the opposite of what we might expect), and the commanders on each side are a catalog of our lower and higher faculties, the whole resembling a medieval European psychomachia, the battle of virtues and vices, or good and evil angels, over the soul (Sharpe 105). As Annie Besant was to write shortly after making her own translation in 1904, “The inner meaning, as it is sometimes called, that which comes home to the hearts of you and me, that which is called the allegory, is the perennial meaning, repeated over and over again in each individual, and is really the same in miniature” (Sharpe 108). In 1931 Gandhi claimed that he could see on his first encounter with the Gita “that it was not a historical work, but that under the guise of physical warfare, it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and the physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring” (Sharpe 117-18). That may be so, but when he first encountered the Gita it came already wrapped in Theosophical allegory, and that made it easier to bring it into harmony with his other sacred text, the Sermon on the Mount. As he defined the allegory in 1925, it is a variant of the Theosophical psychomachia:
When, thousands of years ago, the battle of Kurukshetra was fought, the doubts which occurred to Arjuna were answered by Shri Krishna in the Gita; but that battle of Kurukshetra is going on, will go on, forever within us, the Prince of Yogis, Lord Krishna, the universal atman dwelling in the hearts of us all, will always be there to guide Arjuna, the human soul, and our Godward impulses represented by the Pandavas will always triumph over the demoniac impulses represented by the Kauravas. (Iyer 33-34)
Whether or not it is plausible to interpret the entire Gita in this way, there were Hindu traditions of allegorical reading long before Theosophy, and the Gita itself occasionally uses military metaphors for psychological struggles, as when Krishna tells Arjuna, “slay the foe whose form is desire” (3.43), and “having cut away doubt, caused / by ignorance within the heart, / with the sword of your self-knowledge, / turn to yoga! Rise, Arjuna!” (4.42). These passages alone might have prompted Gandhi’s way of explaining the seemingly literal warfare, and he would have known of the allegorical swords in the Bible. (Though he does not cite these Gita passages, Arvind Sharma argues that Gandhi based his interpretation on “internal evidence.”) We should remember, too, that the bulk of the Gita is indeed a discourse about spiritual discipline and states of mind, and about the path of duty and sacrifice: this Gandhi felt would serve as a guide to anyone, and above all to a nonviolent satyagrahi, who is about to engage in a serious struggle that might claim his or her life. As soldiers in a traditional army undergo a severe disciplinary regime, so the soldiers in what Gandhi often called the “holy war” of nonviolence must be rigorously trained, and for this training the Gita is the best field manual. Krishna elaborates extensively on “non-attachment,” for example, and Gandhi seized on that virtue as the key to the strength of his nonviolent warriors. Gandhi, too, was well aware that many Indian nationalists who advocated violence against the British invoked the warrior discipline of the Gita. (One of them would kill him in 1948.) In a speech to students in 1927 he defined the “necessary equipments” for correctly interpreting the Gita: they were nonviolence (ahimsa), truth, celibacy, non-possession, and non-stealing, five pillars of Gandhi’s own metaphysics and way of life. Only so equipped “will you be able to reach a correct interpretation of it. And then you will read it to discover in it ahimsa and not himsa [violence, harm], as so many nowadays try to do” (Iyer 69). Reclaiming the Gita from the violent Hindu militants was a significant part of Gandhi’s strategy of uniting India around a militant but nonviolent campaign (Davis 139), and he did not hesitate to impose an unlikely allegory on this ancient story of the defeat of a hero’s pacifist urge.
* * * * *
Gandhi tells us in his autobiography that he found it difficult to read the Old Testament, falling asleep over the books after Genesis, and particularly disliking Numbers. “But the New Testament produced a different impression, especially the Sermon on the Mount which went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita” (Iyer 67). In a speech to the YMCA later that year (1927), Gandhi said that “The message of Jesus, as I understand it, is contained in his Sermon on the Mount unadulterated and taken as whole,” and that “If I had to face only the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it, I should not hesitate to say, ‘Oh yes, I am a Christian.” He cannot say so, however, because “in my humble opinion, much of what passes for Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount” (Iyer 145-46).
He was doubtless aware of the small minority of Christians, such as the Quakers and the Mennonites, who still strove to preserve the Sermon’s spirit in the teeth of that general negation, and he must have known something about the early church, where pacifism was widespread and Christians were martyred for refusing to serve in the Roman army. If so, Gandhi might have learned that pacifist Christians, inheriting the triumphalist violence of the Old Testament, placed the same allegorical interpretation on it as he, and the Theosophists, imposed on the Gita. We find it at least as early as Origen (c.185-254):
. . . those prepared to march to the wars of Israel [are those through whom God may] overturn the kingdoms of the Adversary. By them the shields of faith are carried and the weapons of wisdom brandished; on them the helmet, the hope of salvation, gleams; and the breastplate of love protects their breasts filled with God (cf. Eph. 6.16, I Thess. 5.8). This is what I think is meant by the soldiers, and these are the kinds of wars [they are to fight]. (Origen 200)
As he indicates, Origen is relying on the great passage about spritual warfare in Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians:
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (6.11-17, King James Version)
The allegory is perhaps most fully and eloquently expressed by Erasmus in his writings on peace in 1515 and the years following. In his essay Dulce Bellum Inexpertis (“War is sweet to those who do not know it”), he writes:
But since Christ gave the command to put up the sword it is not fitting for Christians to fight, except in that noblest of all battles against the most hideous enemies of the Church—against love of money, against anger, against ambition, against the fear of death. These are our Philistines, our Nebuchadnezzars, our Moabites, and our Ammonites, and with these we must make no truce, we must persistently be at war, until the enemy is completely wiped out and peace is established. . . . (Dulce 122)
And in Querela Pacis (“The Complaint of Peace”) (1517) Erasmus almost sarcastically adds:
If we wish to retain old titles, let Him be called the God of armies [as in the Old Testament] if you understand armies to mean virtues united together with good men for the destruction of vice. Let Him be the God of vengeance if you take vengeance to be the correction of vice, and if you understand the bloody slaughters of men that fill the books of the Hebrews, not as the tearing of men into pieces, but as the tearing of wicked affections out of their hearts.
(Querela 183)
A little later, the anabaptist Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, who are still pacifists today, made clear in his Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539-40), that
Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed, walls and gates broken down, and human blood shed in torrents like water. But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed and the wicked principle in man’s soul is broken down. . . . We have and know no other weapons besides this, the Lord knows, and if we should be torn into a thousand pieces. . . . Christ is our fortress; patience our weapon of defense; the Word of God our sword; and our victory a courageous, firm, unfeigned faith in Jesus Christ. (Quoted in Brock 107)
Examples are everywhere, from the Church Militant to the Salvation Army, from “Onward Christian soldiers” to the second half of William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” a hymn sung so often in the United Kingdom that it is known as its second national anthem:
Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
Bring me Arrows of Desire,
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land.
* * * * *
Gandhi’s allegorization of the Gita brings to mind the concept of the “greater jihad” in Islam, that is, the inner or spiritual struggle to bring one’s heart and mind into full harmony with Allah and the teachings of Muhammad, as opposed to the “lesser jihad” of warfare against infidels. The text which launched this idea, not in the Qur’an but in the “traditions” or hadith, has been dismissed by many scholars and Muslim authorities as inauthentic or false, and one certainly looks in vain for anything like it in the Qur’an itself. The Sufi tradition reads quite a bit of the Qur’an as allegories of the spiritual life, but in my slender reading of Sufism I have not found anything quite like the spiritualization of literal warfare found in Christian theologians and Gandhi, and many sufis have not hesitated to take up arms in physical jihads. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Muslim follower of Gandhi who had himself a great following in Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan from the 1920s to 1947, said, “I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against it. It is the weapon of the Prophet, but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience and righteousness. No power on earth can stand against it” (Abu-Nimer, quoted in Wikipedia article on Ghaffar Khan). It is intriguing that he should label these two virtues not only as a “weapon” of Prophet but as “the weapon,” as if the military battles Muhammad led and inspired were not important or distinctive.
Probably in the tradition of Jewish mysticism, too, especially in the allegorical readings of the Bible found in the Kabbalah, we could find parallels, perhaps even sources, for the Christian readings we have cited. It is beyond the scope of this article, and my powers as a scholar, to say much more on this subject, but it would be an interesting project to gather a series of studies of the ways different religious traditions have tried to cope with their blood-soaked sacred texts.
A Nietzschean might well describe allegory as a weapon of the weak. The lower castes, unable to meet the lords of the earth on their own ground, the field of honor in battle, dream up a compensating higher ground, and a more inward realm, of spiritual warfare where they, the losers in this world, are the winners in the next, while through allegory they transform the holy sagas of the heroes into secret meanings they cherish in their hearts while they bow and cringe before their masters. After several centuries, of course, the Christian version of this symbolic reversal prevailed ideologically, so that the dukes and knights and even the emperors had to pretend to believe in it. They had to pretend to believe that, spiritually at least, we are all equals, and the humblest among us may be the most exalted in the end. Out of these seeds, not only Nietzscheans have argued, grew the egalitarian spirit of democracy, abolitionism, feminism, and socialism even as Christian belief in the afterlife waned and the promised future was relocated onto the earth. And if all this was partly a consequence of the hermeneutics of the powerless, it shows the power of hermeneutics, at least, to transform the social order
* * * * *
There is nonetheless something melancholy in the tribute nonviolence pays to violence in its metaphors for spiritual energy and moral action, and something even more dispiriting in the desperate effort by pacifists to recuperate their holy texts that praise mass slaughter. Wars have been endemic in human society for as long as we have record, and battles to the death, if not sustained wars, were probably features the earliest human communities, as they are to those of our fellow primates. So was the hunting and killing of animals for food. When we remember this common and continuing condition, it seems a matter of course that all cultures will draw on images of violent deeds even when they talk about their apparent opposites, such as acts of love: hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow and maidens besieged by suitors are but two images so commonplace in western literature that we hardly notice their literal sense. Or such as debate in councils or law courts, which surely arose precisely as a substitute for physical conflict: the first metaphor offered by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By is “argument is war,” which they illustrate with such commonplaces as “He attacked every weak point in my argument,” “He shot down all my arguments,” and “His criticisms were right on target” (4). Where else would we turn for apt and vivid images? And so it seems all the more amazing, even with allegory as its weapon, that a subculture could arise anywhere that turned its back on violence against fellow humans and even fellow animals, that pacifists and vegetarians anywhere could resist not only the violence but the scorn and mockery of their larger society, as they have done, not only among Hindus and Christians but among Muslims and Jews, Buddhists and Jainists, and a few other societies elsewhere in the world. And if they metaphorized the violence all around them, if they stole words from the army to give themselves the strength to resist serving in it, well, more power to them, if that is not a military metaphor itself. You work on what you have, and if all you have is violence, then that is your material, that is what you beat into plowshares. The long, fitful process of civilization is a de-literalization of war: metaphorized in election “campaigns” and legislative debates, sublimated in sports, allegorized in our citing of sacred books.
It is not surprising, then, that Gandhi regularly resorted to military terms. He spoke of campaigns and marches, strategy and tactics, advances and retreats, officers and soldiers, discipline and training. About a satyagraha campaign he said that “An able general always gives battle in his own time on the ground of his choice. He always retains the initiative in these respects and never allows it to pass into the hands of the enemy” (Iyer 325). And he was always given to images such as this, drawn from either the Gita or St. Paul: “The sword of the satyagrahi is love and the unshakeable firmness that comes from it” (Iyer 327).
“Sword,” “ground,” and “battle” may be metaphors, but some of the military terms, I think, still retain their literal senses, or something close to them, when they are applied to nonviolent movements. Though he forswore violence and deplored warfare, Gandhi honored many of the soldierly virtues, such as courage, discipline, gallantry, loyalty, and readiness to die. For these are just as necessary to a satyagrahi in a nonviolent struggle as to a soldier in combat. In his instructions to his followers in 1918 he wrote, “Volunteers must remember that this is a holy war,” and he added, with the Gita implicit, “We embarked upon it because, had we not, we would have failed in our dharma” (Mukherjee 131). He demanded strict obedience to the rules. He was particularly pleased to recruit former soldiers, and he admired the Sikhs, some of whom joined his campaigns and transformed their warlike ways into a steely discipline at his command.
It may have been the presence of such warriors in his campaigns that led Gandhi to make the interesting claim that “Man for man the strength of non-violence is in exact proportion to the ability, not the will, of the non-violent person to inflict violence.” “Non-violence,” he wrote elsewhere, “presupposes ability to strike” (Merton 24, 36). This would imply that his ideal army would have been young men well trained in killing, rather than the largely civilian men and women of various ages that in fact made up his following, and that such an army would conquer in large part by impressing their opponents with what havoc it might wreak if it did not restrain itself. This imagined effect is of a piece with Gandhi’s hope of converting his opponent, such as the British Viceroy in India, through moral example, either through melting his heart or through proving to him that it is only a matter of time before the people shrug off their overlords and manage their own affairs. It is almost the opposite of what usually went on in his campaigns, where refusals to pay taxes or carry papers, boycotts, strikes, and blockades were not so much morality plays or exemplary displays as they were material interventions designed to make India expensive if not impossible for the British to govern.
The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s resorted so frequently to military metaphors that we need hardly give examples. Let these three suffice, all from Martin Luther King, Jr. “The desegregation of lunch counters, libraries, schools on a token basis may seem a small breach in the enormous fortress of injustice, but considering the strength of the fortress, it was a towering achievement. And Birmingham did more than this. It was a fuse—it detonated a revolution that went on to win scores of other victories” (King 104-05). King, steeped in the Bible, spoke like Paul and Simons and Blake—and Gandhi—of a spiritual sword. “In the summer of 1963, an army brandishing only the healing sword of nonviolence humbled the most powerful, the most experienced and the most implacable segregationists in the country. Birmingham was to emerge with a delicately poised peace, but without awaiting its implementation the Negro seized the weapon that had won that dangerous peace and swept across the land with it” (32). Speaking in Montgomery, 1965, King described the recent movement in Selma: “Once more, the method of nonviolent resistance was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary” (quoted in Sitkoff 166).
* * * * *
The history of nonviolence as a self-conscious practice can be broken into three main phases, though they have overlapped, and indeed all three still exist. If we begin with Christianity, we first see individuals of faith refusing to obey certain laws or commands and accepting martyrdom. As “passive resistance” or “nonresistance,” it was almost entirely a matter of individual conscience, seldom if ever organized on a communal basis, and it seldom inspired active interference with, say, the Romans’ ability to tax the citizens of its empire. And it was religious: if these Christians made any calculations at all about the impact of their “witness” on the world, it seems not to have gone beyond the possibility of inspiring other Christians to follow their example, certainly not to revoke a law or change a regime.
The second phase is the “classic” Gandhian phase, where the goal is social change in this world and the means are mass noncooperation and even active interference but where the animating spirit, or ideology, is still religious. Gandhi was an ascetic, celibate, vegetarian, meditative, spiritual guru, who did what he could to impose his practices on his band of satyagrahis. He was also an interesting and sometimes brilliant strategist and tactician who tried to manage an enormous campaign across the second-most populous country in the world against the most powerful empire in history. His successes and failures can be studied with profit by non-religious students of nonviolence, as many have done, such as Gene Sharp in his book Gandhi as Political Strategist.
The third phase retains the social scale and worldly strategic imperatives of the Gandhian phase but sheds the religion. You don’t have to be a pacifist to take part effectively in a nonviolent campaign. It may well demand great courage, and it will surely require discipline, but these virtues are not found only among people of faith. Sometimes, indeed, religious pacifists may cause trouble for a nonviolent campaign, because they may make too many demands on their fellow campaigners (to pray or meditate, eat only vegetables, eat nothing at all, dress soberly, shun military metaphors, and so on). The human trait that underlies nonviolent campaigns, according to Sharp, is often “the undeniable capacity of human beings to be stubborn, and to do what they want to do or to refuse to do what they are ordered, whatever their beliefs about the use or nonuse of violence” (Waging Nonviolent Struggle 23).
One distinctive feature of this third phase is the study of the history of nonviolent campaigns themselves. Though Gandhi was very interested in the general strike in Russia of 1905, he seems to have invented many of his techniques and initiatives out of general principles and his intuitions about the South African or Indian situation. We now have a large body of lore about nonviolent campaigns, with institutes, think tanks, and university doctoral programs analyzing it. Since World War II there have been scores of large-scale nonviolent movements throughout the world, many of them successes, at least in part, some of them failures, at least for now. Each major movement learns, or has the means to learn, from the preceding ones. Petra Kelly, a founder of the German Green Party and campaigner for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, had studied Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement while she was in America. The Chilean struggle against Pinochet drew courage from the example of Lech Walensa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, and from showings of the movie Gandhi in Santiago in 1983. The Otpor! movement in Serbia, which led to the toppling of Milosevich in 2000, had in hand a booklet by Gene Sharp that distilled the lessons of many campaigns, From Dictatorship to Democracy, first published in 1993 in Bangkok. Young people from Egypt and Tunisia travelled to Belgrade ten years later to meet with Otpor! leaders and returned to organize the overthrow of their countries’ regimes. In just the last four years several books have appeared with titles that indicate this new more worldly and harder-nosed tendency, such as Civil Resistance and Power Politics, the result of an Oxford University “project,” and (a subtitle) The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Sharp himself has recently released a large dictionary of terms—surely a sign of maturity in this growing field. Through all this research, nonviolence has acquired at least one non-metaphorical military attribute: institutes and a tradition of scholarship. The number of academies and think tanks for soldiers and their generals is past all counting, and they have existed for centuries. At West Point cadets study battles from Cannae to Benghazi. Now at last there are a few underfunded institutes and programs, and a body of lore, about nonviolent warfare.
In this third, more or less secular, phase, planners of a nonviolent campaign may not only draw from a large archive of historical examples and theoretical reflections, as military strategists do, but they may learn from the methods of violent warfare as well. In the end it is more than a metaphor to speak of nonviolent “warfare” and a nonviolent “army” that deploys nonviolent “weapons.” Both kinds of army require training and discipline and courage; “morale” is a crucial factor in both, as well as “demoralizing” the enemy. In both, sometimes massive numbers are essential and sometimes smaller units; in both, “fifth column” or sympathizers among the other side may be crucial. Sometimes on the part of a nonviolent campaign a brief “lightning” strike may be called for, but more often it is a Fabian war of attrition. Sometimes the tactics may be identical: when Russian tanks entered Prague in 1968 many street signs had been removed or moved around, so the tanks sometimes found themselves stuck in blind alleys or in muddy bogs, and while they were sitting around the Czechs could harangue the soldiers in them about why they should go home. Removing or relocating street signs, and producing false maps, were standard tactics during World War II.
Gandhi sometimes deployed the “element of surprise” against the Raj, once in a while calling off a demonstration, for example, and thereby hoping to throw the regime off-balance in what Richard Gregg famously called “moral jiu-jitsu.” Since a salient difference between military and nonviolent warfare lies in their use of secrecy, it is surprising that a nonviolent campaign can ever surprise. It cannot usually surprise the opposition’s police, since there is seldom a way to keep their agents from learning of the plans of a campaign, which must often be argued out among many people, but sometimes the opposition is confused by its own culture of secrecy and cannot believe what it is hearing. And in a nonviolent campaign, independent groups often show up and do things that surprise both sides: banners may suddenly appear on government buildings, or television announcers may refuse to censor the news. The whole point of nonviolent campaigns is very often precisely to draw spontaneous support from different sectors of society, so it can hardly be planned out in detail. As for secrecy itself, it is usually part of the culture of a nonviolent campaign to be open and transparent. It may not have much choice, given the inevitable infiltration by spies, but the virtue of its necessity is to contrast their open democratic way of doing things with the dark manipulations of a tyranny. In a military war, if one side learns some of the other side’s secrets, it keeps it a secret until it uses that knowledge to advantage, and maybe beyond. When the British and Americans cracked some of the military codes of the Germans and Japanese, they had to go to great lengths to act as if they had not done so, lest the enemies get wise and change them. If nonviolent campaigners learn some secrets of the government, usually the first thing they do is to reveal them to the world. Exposing secrets is itself part of the campaign.
Gene Sharp puzzled some readers of his magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), when he devoted several pages of it to distilling the wisdom of the great military theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Basil Liddell Hart (e.g. 493-500). He perhaps laid too much stress in those pages on the idea of central planning—he quotes Gandhi as saying “Only the general who conducts a campaign can know the objective of each particular move” (494)—for one typical difference between nonviolent and military campaigns is the dispersal of leadership in the former and its concentration in the latter. The original planners of a nonviolent campaign may spend the duration of it in jail and incommunicado, as Gandhi ought to have remembered, so the knowledge of what to do must be spread among many if not most of the “troops,” whereas for the last two centuries at least military generals have been sequestered safely behind the lines, perhaps thousands of miles away. But to ransack the annals of the warriors for ideas we can use has a satisfying logic. For all of human history these warriors have been the plague of the earth. Let us find what tools we can in their own armory and redesign them for a better kind of war, not only allegorically, as Gandhi reclaimed the Gita, but literally, as we undertake more campaigns to make the earth safe from the warriors.
Works Cited
Abu-Nimer, Mohammed. Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Print.
Brock, Peter. Pacifism in Europe to 1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Print.
Chenowith, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print.
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