The piece is worth the minute or two it will take to peruse. Greenway argues that despite our shock at seeing healers in such a role, movements - political, social or revolutionary - are rarely led by the poor, downtrodden, or oppressed. He gives many examples. The British traitors from Cambridge were deeply affected by what they saw as the great inequalities in Western democracies that the Great Depression of the 1930s intensified and the early leadership of the Irish resistance to British rule was often from among Protestants better able to participate in political life. He provides other examples:
- the early Bolsheviks, university educated at a time when that was rare in Russia
- Mahatma Gandhi, a lawyer
- Yasser Arafat, an engineer
- Che Guevara, trained as a doctor
- Ayman al Zawahiri, a doctor
- Osama bin Laden, a successful businessman
He could also have looked across the Atlantic, at the U. S. After all, much of the leadership of our own Revolution and establishment included highly educated and trained men like Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and men of accomplishment like John Hancock, Ben Franklin, and of course George Washington. Our civil rights movement was led by men of the cloth like Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. And as I reflect at the tumult of the 60s I see a parallel with the Bolsheviks - think only of Kathy Boudin of the Weatherman, whose father Leonard was a well-known lawyer for groups he viewed as oppressed. It washer father's house set on fire as she and others were building bombs, and she was imprisoned for the death of a Boston police officer: when she was a junior at Bryn Mawr College (my freshman year at Haverford) she organized a national conference of college students on the civil rights movement called the Second American Revolution.
Greenway writes When you are on the bottom rung of society you are not in a position to do much more than survive. But if you are educated and able to look around, you can relate to the poverty and oppression of your particular group, even if you are not yourself poor and oppressed. He reminds us that many Muslims are as horrified by terrorism as their non-Muslim neighbors. Some who grow up in Europe are in situations where they are not fully assimilated and equal to their neighbors, and simultaneously they can see what is happening to their co-religionists, including in traditional Muslim societies. The more educated they become the more aware of and troubled they are of what their co-religionists encounter. Greenway talks about the role of the internet in organizing, something we on the left in American should understand: after all, you are reading this on a site which uses the internet to motivate and organize in a fashion not so dissimilar, and something that is monitored - and feared - by those whom we seek to remove, albeit by Democratic processes, from their positions of power and privilege.
Greenway begins his piece noting those who remark that the arrest of the doctors in Britain somehow demonstrates that poverty and oppression are not the causes of terrorism. After reminding us how very few in the Muslim world actually turn to terrorism, he ends like this: So although potential terrorists may not themselves be poor or oppressed, poverty in the economic, social, and political sense is a great motivator for terrorism. Not even doctors are immune from that virus.
I do not claim to have the sweeping knowledge of history I sometimes see in the work of others. But I believe I have read broadly enough to be able to offer some pertinent remarks about this piece by Greenway. I think this is piece that should not only remind us how often the leadership of movements against power, violent or peaceful, will be led or instigated by those themselves better off, or even able to participate in the upper echelons of the society they now oppose. After all, many of these people have been trained for leadership positions, and that they choose to exercise that training in opposition to the social, economic, religious or political structures which provided it to them is always an option.
In my diary yesterday I explored implications of how people affiliate, what are the organizing principles of governments. In its selection for being rescued, the blurb said I argued convincingly that Americans need to fully explore the consequences of liberty, including the question of what to do with self-determined governments that we morally abhor . I think we need to similarly wrestle with the implications of challenging people to think morally, to care for others.
I want to explore this just a bit further. Let me begin with what may seem an irrelevant tale which I have perhaps shared with you before. A man walks up to a lady in a bar, and the following exchange occurs:
Man: "If I give you a million dollars will you sleep with me?"
Lady: "For a million dollars, sure."
The man then puts a penny on the bar and says "Let's go!"
The lady protests, saying "What do you think I am????"
And the man responds: "Madam, you established that with your answer to my question, now we are merely haggling over the price."
Many of us are understandably horrified at suicide bombers. And yet, imagine that you were a person horrified by the Nazis treatment of the Jews. Would you be willing to kill yourself if in the process you could take out a significant chunk of the Nazi leadership, including Hitler? What if Klaus von Stauffenberg had been willing to die in his attempt on Hitler?
Some of us are horrified at the idea of targeting civilians, and yet any besieging of a city involves suffering of civilians, in the belief that it might cause the military defenders to surrender. It does not matter if it is the Union Army attempting to starve Vicksburg into surrender, or the Allied air forces firebombing Dresden and Hamburg, or dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - those doing the attacking may in part be punishing for what they view as atrocities already committed by their opponents, but they are also trying to break the will of those opponents to continue by making the price of continuation too high. It seem to me that a bomb that kills 80,000 in an instant, or that incinerates 100,000, is only a matter of degree from a car bomb that kills 100 or an IED that kills and maims a handful of American soldiers or Marines in Baghdad - it is a haggling over the price.
Different world views clash, and when views clash, violence and destruction are usually hard to avoid. It is an unfortunate part of the human condition that people like to believe that to which they give their loyalty is superior, more true, and therefore worthy of being used as the standard for interaction with other points of view. This can lead to conflict, and such conflict can quickly escalate into violence.
I claim not great insight for anything I have written above. Others have said or penned each of the points I make, usually with far more cogency than I can hope to achieve. Why then do I offer these words?
I am not seeking to justify the actions of the doctors in Britain. Nor do I rationalize other actions of violence. But to assume that our actions of violence, whether done in our name by our government or done by groups of people because they feel threatened or oppressed are without rationality or justification in the minds of those who occasion such acts is to place oneself in a position of acquiescence and surrender. Violence begets violence. Oppression begets resentment. Resentment and the desire for revenge begets revolution and violence. And the cycle continues.
We cannot assume that we are rational and our opponent is not. We cannot argue that all of our motives are pure and those on the other side are venal and selfish. That is to misunderstand both our own humanity and to badly misjudge our enemy. And if you misjudge your enemy, be he a political opponent or part of an insurgent group, you are likely to suffer grievous losses and setbacks.
Many here are increasingly in roles of leadership. They have become radicalized by the injustices and inequities they see in our society. Some have been moved to try to change what they see.
Robert Francis Kennedy often quote a line from George Bernard Shaw: Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream
things that never were and ask why not.
If we find ourselves asking the first question, we are beginning to be sensitized to the things around us, include perhaps being able to grasp the issue of injustice. In my own case, I was ten when I first encountered segregation in separate bathroom facilities for those whose skin was darker than my own. I asked "why?" Change in the human condition occurs when one begins to grasp that things do not have to be as they are. At that moment we become those who ask "why not?" We need to recognize that change inevitably involves a cost to someone, even if only for those being asked to surrender positions of privilege and power.
I do not justify the recent acts of terrorism. I do ask that we ask the question "why" from the aphorism from Shaw. If what we encounter or experience is so shocking - as these acts of violence surely are - do we not have an obligation to honestly seek to understand? If we assume that the acts are irrational, then is unlikely we will be able to lessen the cycle of violence and destruction, and the hatred and resentment that will build - on all sides of any such conflict - will continue.
We all pay a price if we are unwilling to understand. We must be willing to consider alternatives. We must be the men who dream of what can be and are willing to wonder, "why not?"
Or,as was said by one revolutionary mentioned by Greenway, a man who as young lawyer in India experienced discrimination and spent much of the rest of his life trying to change by non-violent direct action, We must become the change we want to see in the world.
Peace. |
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