The first column expresses the opinion of Nelly Lahoud, a teacher at Goucher College here in Baltimore who is writing a book on radical groups in the Islamic tradition, that al-Qaida is a crazy-quilt patchwork of strange bedfellows who will not be able to maintain their marriage of convenience indefinitely:
In the process of maximizing its pool of jihadis, al-Qaida, while it gained the affiliation of many who happen to share similar political grievances, was also forced to welcome into its fold jihadis who are not all in agreement with each other on points of doctrine and law. ... Thus, if we take out the political dimensions that unite the jihadis and examine al-Qaida from a doctrinal point of view, we find a global movement that is much larger than the sum of its parts. That is because it consists of many groups that espouse differing doctrinal principles. ... The internal dynamics of al-Qaida, then, are not characterized by consensus building; rather, they are predicated on a rejection of other Muslims who do not share al-Qaida's narrow views. ... Strategists ought to realize that al-Qaida cannot be defeated through conventional wars. Instead, it must be given the space to self-destruct.
The second article is syndicated columnist Clarence Page's lament for those veterans of the Iraq war and other conflicts who have not gotten the type of Veterans Administration help that they need to conquer post-traumatic stress disorder, or what was in an earlier era called shell shock or battle fatigue. Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey killed himself at age 23 because he was haunted by his experiences in Iraq and the VA couldn't see its way clear to intervene.
It boggles my mind that a Bush administration so hellbent on staying the course in Iraq wouldn't be pulling out all the stops to get veterans the attention they need to make them whole (or as whole as possible) again. To me, it points up the fact that warmaking is no longer a viable option, politically or in other ways. The war machine is broken, and we had better start coming up with better alternatives for confronting hostile forces in the turbulent world.
I suggest an organized, principled commitment to nonviolence.
By nonviolence I mean the ideas of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, applied on a global, international scale. Mohandas K. Gandhi successfully led India's fight for independence, based on nonviolent principles. King led African Americans' successful fight for civil rights in the same manner.
The 1982 biopic Gandhi gives some idea what nonviolence is all about, practically speaking. Gandhi had, as a young man, an uncanny ability to figure out what to do to resist the government authorities in South Africa who wanted to treat Indian immigrants as little better than slaves. A successful resistance to the oppressive laws, he knew, could not resort to striking retaliatory blows, but neither could it be just passive acceptance of indignities imposed by the oppressors. By some alchemy, not striking back but not backing down would ennoble both the resistors and the oppressors, bringing out a sense of justice even in those who dispensed the injustice.
Gandhi moved to India after his rebellion in South Africa succeeded. He refined his brand of nonviolent resistance over the course of several decades there, until in 1947 it succeeded in bringing down the longstanding British dominion over his countrymen. A little more than a decade after India achieved its independence, Martin Luther King sought to apply Gandhi's principles of nonviolence to the American civil rights movement. King once said, "Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."
So one of the ways nonviolence might apply to the current world situation would seem to be for Arab peoples who find themselves under the yoke of an oppressive dictator or an insensitive royal family to stand up for their human rights without assaulting or hating those who deny them those rights.
But what, really, is nonviolence? Wikipedia says it is
both a moral philosophy and a political strategy ... which reject the use of violence in efforts to attain social or political change ... [and it is] an alternative to both passive acceptance of oppression and armed struggle against it ...
Yet, says Wikipedia, nonviolence is not necessarily equal to pacifism, inasmuch as
since the mid 20th century the terms nonviolence or nonviolent resistance have been adopted by many movements for social change which do not focus on opposition to war. Some nonviolent actionists even may support certain wars, while being willing to use nonviolent strategies to achieve their own goals.
Nonviolence arises as a philosophy out of various religious traditions:
The central tenets of nonviolent philosophy exist in each of the major Abrahamic religious traditions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) as well as in the major Dharmic religious traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism). It is also found in many pagan religious traditions.
"The power of rulers depends upon the consent of the populace," runs one of the major tenets of nonviolence. "Nonviolence seeks to undermine the power of rulers through the deliberate withdrawal of ... consent and co-operation."
Many minds, my own included, have trouble putting credence in any "third way" that avoids both passive acceptance of oppression and armed struggle against it. Yet the examples of Gandhi and King show it can work.
Yet when the antagonist is not literally an oppressor, but, say, an international terrorist organization (or a proxy thereof such as al-Qaida in Iraq), one wonders how nonviolence could work then. How is it possible for America to use withdrawal of consent and co-operation to undermine a foreign power, particularly a stateless one?
One possible answer which springs to mind involves the power of memes to leap from culture to culture.
A meme is a recipe for how to do something or make something. For example, a word such as "meme" — coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene — is a meme. In the case of the word "meme," the meme encapsulated by the word is a handy recipe for expressing the complex idea that human cultures evolve by virtue of inventing and transmitting packages of information about ... well, about how things are to be done or made.
Wearing a baseball cap turned backwards is a way of expressing a certain attitude to the world, or toward oneself, for example. It is accordingly a meme/recipe/packet of information that transmits itself to other people who are looking for ways to express that same attitude. Memes are potentially contagious. As their contagions spread, cultures evolve.
Nonviolence is a meme that can spread by contagion. So if we Americans were to adopt nonviolence in our own dealings with power elites at home, other cultures might catch the spirit and use the same techniques to overthrow their oppressors. In Arab cultures in particular — and in Muslim subcultures in Europe and elsewhere — such an eventuality might rob the fuel from the flame of resentment that turns ordinary people into jihadis. Where would al-Qaida be then?
By extrapolation, if other peoples began practicing nonviolent resistance to domestic oppression, we would no longer have to fight wars in places like Iraq to bring about just, democratic regimes there. And American youths like Jeffrey Lucey could stay at home in peace and never get bummed out by post-traumatic stress syndrome and battle fatigue.
So I say it's about time we started setting an example for the rest of the world, rather than trying to force it at gunpoint to adopt the ideas we say we revere — all the while undermining those very ideas by conspicuously curtailing human rights and liberties at home, in the name of national security and successfully prosecuting the war on terror.
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