July/August 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

In the Midst of a Murderous World

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges, Public Affairs, New York, 2002
The Unconquerable World – Power, Nonviolence and The Will of the People, Jonathan Schell, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2003

Zia Mian is a physicist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University.

The twentieth century saw war like no other. Mass production became mass destruction as states warred in World War I and II. Super powers armed for and threatened a nuclear war to end the world. Empires and people clashed in struggles for freedom. People fought against each other in civil wars where ethnicity, religion, and language became a death sentence.

Chris Hedges of The New York Times has seen twenty years of war, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Israel/Palestine, Sudan and Yemen, Algeria, India, Iraq, Turkey, Bosnia, and Kosovo. In his moving book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he helps us to see the experience of the fighting and suffering and dying he has seen and what war does to those who fight it, those who are caught up in it, those who support it, and those who report it. It is painful but essential reading, a reminder of how fragile is our humanity. Of the many moments, none may haunt more than his report of an encounter between Palestinian boys and Israeli soldiers he saw at the Khan Younis Refugee Camp, in the Gaza Strip:

“Out of the dry furnace air a disembodied voice crackled over a loudspeaker from the Israeli side of the camp’s perimeter fence. ‘Come on, dogs,’ the voice boomed in Arabic. ‘Where are the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!’... The invective spewed out in a bitter torrent. ‘Son of a bitch!’ ‘Son of a whore!’ ‘Your mother’s cunt!’ The boys darted in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separated the camp from the Jewish settlement abutting it. They lobbed rocks towards a jeep, mounted with a loudspeaker, and protected by bulletproof armor plates and metal grating... The soldier inside the jeep ridiculed them and derided them. Three ambulances—which had pulled up in anticipation of what was to come—lined the road below the dunes. There was the boom of percussion grenades. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shot with silencers... I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were ripped out, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital... I had seen children shot in other conflicts... but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

In his challenging new book The Unconquerable World, which every peace activist should read, Jonathan Schell seeks to answer the question of whether we have any alternative to what Hedges describes and what Albert Camus famously called “a murderous world.” Schell has seen and thought and written about wars, starting with his classic reporting on the Vietnam War (see his collection The Real War) and a generation was moved by his powerful reflections on nuclear war in The Fate of the Earth and The Gift of Time. In The Unconquerable World he wants to show that “nonviolent action can serve effectively in the place of violence at every level of political affairs.”

In The Unconquerable World Schell is thinking at a different level. War, he argues, is the property of a system—the system involves the state and nationalism as a form of political organization and identity, industry and capitalism as forms of economic organization, science and technology as forms of knowledge, and imperial conquest and rule as a way of providing resources for all of these. The culmination of the war system was nuclear weapons, a military capacity so destructive that its use would destroy those who wielded it as surely as it would destroy an enemy. What benefits in such victory? What use such weapons? Between great powers, Schell argues, war is now obsolete.

Austrian garrison, Gortz, January 1, 1915 © André Kertész

Schell draws attention to a second revolution. He notes that the history of the twentieth century is not just of great powers and their wars against each other. There is a history and a power they do not easily admit, the power that has “enabled poorly armed or unarmed or entirely nonviolent popular movements to defeat the military forces of the most powerful empires of the past two centuries.” To understand this power, Schell recalls some important parts of the history of people’s struggles, from England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, to the American Revolution, the storming of the Bastille in Paris, and Russia’s Bolshevik revolution—in all cases, he shows how power was seized without violence. The turn to violence came afterwards.

In trying to understand nonviolence and violence, Schell looks at Mahatma Gandhi and Hannah Arendt and offers the distinction between “cooperative power” which is based on popular support and “coercive power” based on the use of force. He writes, “Both kinds of power are real. Both make things happen. Both are present, though in radically different proportions, in all political situations. Yet the two are antithetical. To the extent that the one exists, the other is ruled out.”

Schell argues “In this distinction between two kinds of power, love and fear are functional equivalents,” they can both produce obedience. “In a coercive system, fear, of course, is the product of force. But of what, in a cooperative system, is love the product? What summons up the love that produces the consent, the support, the willing agreement on which cooperative power depends?” The answers he offers are truth and freedom.

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