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July/August 2003
The Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell Metropolitan Books 2003, 413 pages (cloth). Reviewed by Walter Wink Jonathan Schell, whose book The Fate of the Earth [date] was so instrumental in mobilizing civil resistance to the arms race in the 1980s, has now written a book that has the capacity to mobilize public sentiment against violence and for nonviolence in a world still hell-bent on annihilation. Magnificently written, timely in the extreme, and profoundly true, this is an instant classic that deserves to be read by everyone who senses that nonviolence is an idea and practice whose time has come. Schell sees two conflicting traditions - one worldly, sanctioning violence, the other spiritual, forbidding it. Today the means of annihilation paradoxically leave us in a situation where it has become literally true that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, as Jesus predicted. Deep as is his debt to the great proponents of pacifism, Schell writes, “I often paused to ask myself whether I had become a pacifist. Although I had drunk deeply at the sources of pacifist thought, I had to answer that I was not. Perhaps I simply lacked the strength for that exacting discipline. However that may be, as soon as I pictured myself a pacifist, my mind would teem with situations, both historical and imaginary, in which it was clear that I would support the use of force or myself use it.” That may be the best I could do, too. Still, I believe that a prior commitment to nonviolence is a necessary precondition of nonviolent struggle, even if, in actual instances, we are unable to maintain a nonviolence stance. According to Schell, war has undergone a series of metamorphoses. We have passed from traditional or conventional wars, in which aristocrats and mercenaries engaged in limited warfare; through the innovations of Napoleon, which established total wars involving the entire populace of a nation; to nuclear deterrence, in which immense arsenals were deployed in the hope that they would never be used. From there we have proceeded to revolutionary people’s wars waged by common folk, and on to nonviolent struggles made necessary by the states’ sheer monopoly on weapons. This progress toward nonviolent democracy is always in danger of devolving into imperialism, however - a danger the United States now faces as a clear and present danger. A republic must cease to be a democracy and accept the role of imperialist power, or it must stay at home and accept, not a balance of power, but a community of power. Since 1870, no great powers have fought “limited” wars directly against one another (although many have fought small powers). They have fought total wars or they have not fought at all. But the bomb showed that war had gone the way of tyrannosaurus rex and the saber-toothed tiger. Now we possess destructive powers so immense that the only rational policy was to prevent their ever being used at all. The dilemma was that one could neither use the bomb nor get rid of it. The bomb had ruined war by transforming it into extinction. Thus, as the bomb stymied the use of weapons of mass destruction, guerrilla warfare was used to end colonialism around the world - surely an important step toward nonviolent struggle. Unfortunately, peoples’ war immerses the people in the violence from which it seeks to deliver them. Violence is a method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few. Under a totalitarian system, successful nonviolence is revolutionary; under a democratic system it is an agent of reform. For the one it is lethal, for the other curative. What the revolutionists of the past half millennium have learned, often from scratch each time, is that true revolution is not achieved by a changing of the guard, but by the establishment of what the Vietnamese called hiérarchies paralèlles. These para-governments were nowhere better exemplified than by Solidarity in Poland, where the resistance, which had tried fighting in the streets and been crushed, instead created the shell of a civil society within the rotting shell of the communist state. Like Gandhi with his constructive program, Solidarity activists sought to achieve immediate changes in daily life. The life they desired could begin to be lived right now, they saw, under the conditions of the old system. “Such a program should give directives to the people on how to behave, not to the powers on how to reform themselves,” argued Solidarity’s Adam Michnik. So the Poles set up independent institutions. Assistance was given to the families of workers jailed by the government. Independent underground publications multiplied. A “flying university” offered uncensored courses in people’s apartments and other informal locations. Organizations devoted to social aims of all kinds - environmental, educational, artistic, legal - sprouted everywhere. “Parallel structures” would in turn give rise to a “second culture,” which would eventuate in a “parallel polis.” Living in the truth had led Václav Havel to the moral discovery that before living in truth is a protest, it is an affirmation. With wrong coming up to meet us everywhere today, we simply cannot respond to every injustice, crisis, and travesty emanating from the seats of power. But we can begin to build an alternative society now, a shell within the shell of the imperialist regime. Only, this time that shell within the shell must be global. - Walter Wink
Walter Wink is a widely-known author and New Testament scholar.
©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
