Fighting with non-violence - Scilla Elworthy

In half a century of trying to help prevent wars, there's one question that never leaves me: how do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return? When you're faced with brutality, whether it's a child facing a bully in the playground, domestic violence, or on the streets of Syria today facing tanks and shrapnel, what's the most effective thing to do? Fight back? Give in? Use more force?

This question, "how do I deal with the bully without becoming a thug in return?" has been with me ever since I was a child. I remember, as a cousin, I was about 13, glued to a grainy black-and-white television in my parents' living room as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. Kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting blown down. I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase. My mother came up and said, "What on earth are you doing?" I said, "I'm going to Budapest." She said, "What on earth for?" I replied, "Kids are getting killed there; there's something terrible happening." She said, "Don't be so silly." I started to cry, and she got it. She said, "Okay, I see it's serious. You're much too young to help. You need training. I'll help you, but just unpack your suitcase."

So I got some training and went and worked in Africa during most of my 20s. But I realized that what I really needed to know I couldn't get from training courses. I wanted to understand how violence, how oppression works. And what I've discovered since is this: bullies use violence in three ways. They use political violence to intimidate, physical violence to terrorize, and mental or emotional violence to undermine. Only very rarely, in very few cases, does it work to use more violence.

Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later, he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the incredible skills that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in total devotion to non-violence. They realized that using force against force doesn't work. So what does work?

Over time, I've collected about a half dozen methods that do work and that are effective. The first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here, inside me. It's my response, my attitude to oppression, that I've got control over and that I can do something about. What I need to develop is self-knowledge to do that. That means I need to know how I tick, when I collapse, where my formidable points are, where my weaker points are, when do I give in, and what will I stand up for.

Meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power. My heroine here, like Satish's is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, she was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of Rangoon. They came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns. She realized straight away that the soldiers with their fingers shaking on the triggers were more scared than the student protesters behind her. But she told the students to sit down, and she walked forward with such calm, such clarity, and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun, put her hand on it, and lower it. No one got killed.

So that's what the mastery of fear can do, not only faced with machine guns. If you meet a knife fight in the street, that we have to practice. So what about our fear? I have a little mantra: my fear grows fat on the energy I feed it. If it grows very big, it probably happens. We all know the three o'clock in the morning syndrome—when something you've been worrying about wakes you up. I see a lot of people, and for an hour you toss and turn. It gets worse and worse, and by four o'clock, you're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big.

The only thing to do is to get up, make a cup of tea, and sit down with the fear like a child beside you. You're the adult. The fear is the child. You talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants, what it needs, how can this be made better, how can the child feel stronger. You make a plan and you say, "Okay, now we're going back to sleep; half past seven, we're getting up, and that's what we're going to do."

I had one of these 3:00 a.m. episodes on Sunday, paralyzed with fear about coming to talk to you. So I got it; I did the thing. I got up, made the cup of tea, sat down with it, and I'm here. Still partly paralyzed, but I'm here.

So that's fear. What about anger? Wherever there's injustice, there's anger. But anger is like gasoline. If you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. But anger, as an engine, is powerful. If we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward. It can get us through the dreadful moments, and it can give us real inner power.

I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policymakers. At the beginning, I was so outraged at the dangers they were exposing us to that I just wanted to argue, blame, and make them wrong—totally ineffective. In order to develop a dialogue for change, we have to deal with our anger. It's okay to be angry with the thing—the nuclear weapons in this case—but it is hopeless to be angry with the people. They are human beings just like us, and they're doing what they think is best, and that's the basis on which we have to talk with them.

So that's the third one: anger. And it brings me to the crux of what's going on, or what I perceive is going on in the world today, which is that last century was...