Sep 26, 2001 >> Back
From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's acceptance speech of his 1970 noble prize for literature. He is talking about the "spirit of Munich", referring to the way that the world handled Hitler before the outbreak of WWII:
"The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people--and there are many in today's world--elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today-- and tomorrow, you'll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)"
> i would really appreciate your perspective on these words
Nice quote. And it makes sense. Some more thoughts (perhaps too many :)) ...
Gandhi once said that if there was a choice between violence and cowardice, he'd pick violence anyday. There is no excuse for cowardice, which in its essence just results from serious attachment to oneself. However, that is NOT to say that courage implies violence.
While violence maybe better than passivity, retreat, and cowardice, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Non-violence comes from a space of power, strength and inner resolve that love will transform the anger of the oppressor. It is not to say that when someone hits you, you don't hit back. It is, rather, to say something much more powerful -- that when someone hits you, the strength of your love will shake the foundation of anger and negativity that resulted in the oppressor's action.
Gandhi's salt march is an excellent example. One by one, people lined up to get whacked in the skulls, get bloodied in the face, get wounded like never before in their lives. That is hardly passivity, retreat or cowardice. They took a stance and stuck to it. But that's just one part of the story. Gandhi told everyone very clearly that you are to look the oppressor in the eye, summon all the compassion your heart can gather, and wish well unto them as they hit you. Thousands and thousands of folks lined up for this. For three consecutive days. Until finally, the oppressors were transformed with the changed conditions.
Years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrated the power of compassion in a similar way. And even in this day and age, Dalai Lama is doing the same with the Tibetan struggle for independence. What these revolutionaries have shown and are showing is that victory is not when you suppress the oppressor; it is when you transform the oppressor. Their view of the world is not about my people, my country, my well-being -- they are concerned with all of humanity. They fully understand what Gandhi said so eloquently: "Eye for an eye and the whole world will be blind."
Having said that, though, I don't think that refusing to fight is always the right answer. Krishna helped Pandavas fight a war in the India epic, Mahabharata. In almost all scriptures, "demons" are fended off with the metaphoric use of violence as well. But first we must identify the demon properly. In our own ignorance, unruly reactions to seeming injustice and oppression just add fuel to the fire. However, if the intent serves the whole with compassion, it dissolves the gap between the oppressor and the oppressed. If your fight is a reaction to internal anger and outrage, you are getting sucked in, deeper and deeper into the tornado. If, instead, you are fighting for the benefit of all, you will fight a different fight, even if it involves violence.
It has been argued by many critics that had Gandhi been a Jew going up against Hitler, he would've been dead in a second. That may be but I don't think those circumstances would've manifested for Gandhi since it wasn't in line with what he had to do, for himself more than for the world. We can't superimpose the manifestations of Gandhi's movement in 2001, or for that matter in 1948.
Every moment has its own truth and we need find that; if Gandhi was alive today, his truth could've manifested differently (or it could've been the same). People are often too lazy to find out the Truth so they just want to sit there and draw from stale ideologies, concepts and theories of the past, of which they have no experience. If not anything else, we can certainly draw inspiration from Gandhi's relentless drive to find that truth. That seems to be the main thing. The endless rat-race, pursuit after some convoluted concept of success which means absolutely nothing in face of death, should be transformed into 'experiments of truth'.
To me, non-violence is about the victory of love over hatred, peace over turmoil, wisdom over confusion. How it manifests is a different story but until we are in synch with those fundamental tenets of nature, we will suffer. And for me, I can honestly say that I am bringing suffering unto myself because I am not nonviolent in every single moment. Furthermore, that personal suffering is contributing the continuous external war that has been continuing for a long time now (we only notice it when buildings blow up and people die) and until we are determined to stop it, within ourselves, we will continue to experience it again and again, in different ways.
Before responding to the situation, let us place emphasis on fully understanding the situation. People are talking about peace without having any concrete experience with peace; others are talking about war while totally oblivious of their intent. Unfortunately (or fortunately), this is not a mere exercise in rational intellectualization. This requires some 'experiments with truth' and demands that you 'be the change'. Those with passivity, retreat, and cowardice need not apply. :)
Be the change,
Nipun