In a world where letters and airplane flights can carry death sentences, it’s hard to think about making peace with terrorists. On the radio call-in shows and in newspaper columns, I’ve heard angry Americans advocate a no-holds-barred approach seeking swift military vengeance as the only reasonable answer to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

You can’t reason with fanatics, their argument goes, so let’s use our military power to defeat our foes. The only language they understand is violence, so smart bombs and elite special forces are now the weapons of choice to strike back at the nefarious enemy hidden within Afghanistan. Never mind the civilians that will die as a result of errant bombs. War isn’t perfect. In any war, innocent people will be killed. War isn’t for weak-minded people who waffle on whether to act. You’ve got to go out there and do what needs to be done. You’ve got to be totally committed if you want to succeed.

But is there any room for dissent, I wonder. Alternatives to bombing? Is it possible to negotiate peace with terrorists? Is it possible to listen to their demands that the United States give up its military presence in Saudi Arabia, proud home of two of Islam’s most revered sites: Mecca and Medina? Could the United States government be willing to seriously consider the creation of a Palestinian state amid bitter religious tensions in the Middle East? Or will we have to wait until the dust settles and Osama bin Laden and company are captured and convicted before any true negotiations begins?

This war on terrorism has created all the hype of apocalyptic calamity and the cult of fear swells with each new report on biological terrorism, widened investigations and secret plots to kill thousands. No doubt, we should take such threats seriously and take the necessary precautions to ensure public safety, but as we move forward in this war (not a crusade!), are we creating yet another chapter in the war annals of this planet or are we setting some new precedent that will ensure a more lasting peace will follow?

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. M.P. Mathai, one of the world’s foremost scholars on Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi. Mathai is an author, lecturer and professor at the School of Gandhian Studies at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, India. He was visiting Haywood County on the invitation of peace activist and former Methodist missionary Mark Rouch, who had met Mathai some years before on a trip to India. Mathai came to give a lecture on Gandhi at Long’s Chapel United Methodist Church near Lake Junaluska on Oct. 11, which just happened to be the one-month anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

It’s not every day that you get the privilege to talk with a Gandhian scholar and in light of all the violence in the news, I was thrilled to hear that my friend Mark Rouch was willing to schedule Mathai to come into one of my classes at Tuscola High School as a guest speaker. In the middle of an otherwise busy day, Mathai was able to talk to a group of American teenagers about the revolutionary life and principles of one of the most profound leaders of the 20th Century.

As Mathai explained to the students, many people before and after Gandhi had practiced forms of nonviolence in their daily lives and many before and after Gandhi were political revolutionaries, but no one up to that point in human history put the principals of nonviolence into such a major political movement as Gandhi did. His demonstrations and acts of peaceful resistance helped liberate India from British rule, and thus, he is remembered by his nickname, “Mahatma,” which means “great soul.”

Though considered an average student in school and diminutive in physical stature, Gandhi was able to amass millions in his effort to free India from the control of the British Empire. Mathai illustrated Gandhi’s powerful impact by recalling one of Mahatma’s most famous nonviolent protests. After a great deal of prayer and consideration, Gandhi launched a struggle for India’s independence when he decided to wage a nonviolent protest against the British salt tax in 1930. Indians were forced to pay a tax on British salt, so to defy this law, Gandhi wrote letters to British government officials and his closest friends explaining his resistance to the salt tax. Many laughed at his defiance. Undeterred, Gandhi set out with his friends on a march to the Indian Sea where they would make their own salt. They marched 10 to 15 miles a day and prayed each day as they made their way to the sea some 240 miles away. Along the way, the marchers picked up thousands more. Throughout the country, more than a dozen other similar marches began. On April 6, 1930, Gandhi and millions of other Indians broke the British law and proceeded to make their own salt. Many were brutally beaten by the British military. Hundreds were killed. But Gandhi instructed his followers that there should be no retaliation. It was one of the largest and most successful nonviolent demonstrations in history, a major step towards winning India its independence and the inspiration for later nonviolent protests of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

One of the reasons Gandhi’s peaceful movement proved to be so successful, Mathai explained, was that it involved thousands of women. Too often in violent struggles, the women are left out. Gandhi showed the world that one person really can make a difference.

In a mere hour, Mathai was only able to go into a brief overview of Gandhi’s life and his commitment to peace, but even in an hour, the enduring legacy of Gandhi burned in my mind. Surely if one small man could unite so many people, there is hope that peace is not as elusive as it now seems. People working together can prove that. While critics of Gandhi note that he could not save India from being divided by bitter religious factions and that he was eventually killed by an assassin’s bullet — a victim himself of the violence he had worked so hard to dissolve — Gandhi did set a wonderful example of how to keep our thoughts, words and deeds in unison with what we know to be true.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have awakened a new sensitivity in Americans. We are suddenly part of a war we thought would never reach us. If living in a nuclear age was bad enough, terrorists have upped the ante by crashing passenger airplanes into the heart of a major city and making us second-guess how we go about our daily lives.

“We must find a way out of this danger,” Mathai said. “This violence has reached a boiling point.”

As Mathai asserts in his book, Mahatma Gandhi’s World View, civilization has reached an unprecedented crisis in the history of this planet. Humans now have the ability to destroy the entire human race and wipe out all life on Earth. Mathai argues that basic human greed has created a complex host of problems such as crime, poverty, hunger and environmental degradation, which have laid the foundation for war and violence.

“The attempt to achieve development, conceived in the narrowest sense of economic growth at any cost, through massive, large-scale industrialization, made even ordinary decent existence inaccessible and impossible for the common masses,” Mathai writes. “Industrialization prescribed as a panacea for poverty and unemployment and the only means for achieving material plenty, proved to be utterly counter productive and disastrous. By displacing millions ... by causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem, as a result of emitting poisonous pollutants all around, by creating unmanageable urban centers that are vortices of crimes and social evils and by leading to the creation of nearly impregnable power centers, industrialization has exposed its true nature thoroughly. In spite of this stunning self-disclosure industrial activities have not suffered any serious setback ....”

Could the answer to our problems lie in the ignoble truth that we are exploiting too many of the world’s resources at the expense of Third World countries? Before Osama bin Laden became a household word, didn’t we think of Afghans as a luxury pet or a comfy blanket? Did it take two exploding towers and thousands of lives to make us see that there are people in this world who resent us for living so extravagantly as millions in other parts of the world barely survive from day to day?

There are those out there who would argue that we Americans and the rest of the “civilized world” have worked hard to achieve the good life. Why should we give it up? Why should be give up our cable TV, our Wal-Mart discounts, our fast food and big cars? It’s practically un-American, unpatriotic to even consider what terrorists are dying to tell us: that we should re-examine our values, our insatiable hunger for materialism, our “bigger is better” mentality, our sex-saturated advertisements, our corporate practices of using sweat shops to stretch a dollar, our foreign policies that support pseudo-Democratic governments that have shady human rights records.

In our eagerness to fight what we call “evil,” are we ignoring the evil that lies within us?

These terrorist attacks did not “suddenly happen,” Mathai explained; they were the culmination of many events over a long history.

If we are to find true peace, we must seek out the causes of violence, and that search is not as simple as firing epithets at Muslims who are made into easy targets of our anger. Instead of pointing fingers of blame at a remote country half way around the world, perhaps we should stop and rethink what we are doing in our own backyards. Are we as consumers purchasing products from companies that engage in exploiting the resources of other countries? Are we blindly electing leaders who make the legislation and policies that in turn affect how people in other countries are treated? Are we ignoring the plight of misfortunate people around us? Are we helping to make the world a more violent place by promoting the use of weapons? Are we aiding in violence if we endorse it, even if we don’t directly engage in it?
Are we succumbing to violence and the old habits of war if we do not actively wage peace instead?
“Many of us don’t know that there’s a lot of violence within us,” Mathai said. “We must begin the great mission of removing violence from our lives.”

Though peace may be what we say we want, are we willing to remove the obstacles in ourselves that keep us from getting there?

(Beadle is a writer and teacher in Waynesville. He can be reached at mabeadle@hotmail.com.)

 

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