Civil defense is defense of civility

Since the Pentagon spent $4.7 billion on public relations this year, we might assume they put some topspin, backspin, slice, and arc in their game. They carry gauze, veils, and halos in their vast toolchest, and pull vats of mud and tar behind their warwagons, all to deal with the images of friends and enemies. All elites--military or corporate or rulers--do this.

In his classic Power in movement, Cornell professor of Government Sidney Tarrow traces the arguments and theories of what social movements are and how they work. He alludes frequently to what movements looked like from the beginning of academic and popular assessment of what they meant to themselves and to their opponents and to the public at large. Some of these factors result in natural tension that only nonviolence can resolve properly.

For Durkheim (1951) and most others, social movements were seen through the lens of the French Revolution and early 19th century industrialism (Tarrow, p. 5). Added to this, of course, were the adversarial styles of most labor fights in the first half of the 20th century, inflamed by the export of Leninist revolutionary vanguard violent philosophy. In many ways, the indigenous labor movements in the US were in fact hijacked by those who believed that power comes through the barrel of a gun or, at least, through the arc of a swinging club about to connect with the head of a cop.

In the case of the pictured 1934 Teamsters strike in my hometown of Minneapolis, the small Teamsters Union had a number of Trotskyist Communist League members who helped foment a mob mentality as they went out to strike in a climate of unregulated robber baron capitalism with goon squad paramilitary units. Indeed, most of my great uncles were truck drivers in Minneapolis then and one was hospitalized by these paramilitary units. When the cops shot and killed one of the strikers, that act triggered massive sympathy for the strike and literally half the population of the entire city were in the streets for the funeral.

Many in my boomer generation grew up with such links to direct battle for labor rights and these were the organizers who trained us. I will forever be grateful for their great lessons and will forever be internally battling much of the emotional content that they taught me to load into conflict. I spent the first years of my political life learning all their lessons and the next several decades unlearning and trying to replace many of their responses that shot straight to hate and violence. This is how collective memory works for all of us in our culturally specific ways and is why we have to work relentlessly and with great resilience to refashion those responses and the images that are created by our responses to social conflict.

Why? Didn't the French Revolution succeed? Didn't the Teamsters succeed?

Yes, but they also created victims and enemies that came back to haunt them again and again. Plus, any violence in any movement feeds into the ability of the elite who own and govern to tar and smear us with the Jacobin-Hoffa terrorist-thug brush of frightening violence and brutality. Those of us in any movement pay a dear price for the violence of others and we have to defend our movements against this vat of mud by creating a highly disciplined nonviolent force that creates and maintains that image of nonviolence. If we don't do that, we lose sympathy and recruitment falls. It shows we have no strategic plan and without that, as Sun Tzu told us 2,600 years ago, "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Movements need the strategy of growth and the tactics of imaging toward recruitment. That is best achieved by making our movements look inviting, lower risk, and fun, or, as Tarrow put it, in a carnival spirit rather than anomie and social disintegration.

References (Sid Tarrow pictured)

Tarrow, Sidney (1998). Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Teaching nonviolence: Roots of research

Academic research into nonviolent conflict management began at least fifty years ago with the work ranging from Elise

and Kenneth Boulding (founders of many institutions that survive in some form today, such as the Consortium of Peace Research, Education and Development, which is now the Peace and Justice Studies Association) to Gene Sharp (founder of the Albert Einstein Institution).

The most integrated researchers have come from the mold of the above named. The Bouldings founded COPRED in 1970 with the mission of integrating the knowledge generation of peace researchers, the teaching applications of peace educators, and the work in the field of the peace activists.

By contrast, the Peace Studies Association, founded in 1987, kept a far more narrow mission, that of working only with post-secondary educators, not with K-12 peace educators nor with peace activists.

The two organizations merged in 2000 and PJSA is much closer to the Bouldings' original creation.

PJSA hosts the wide range of those who labor to research, teach and implement constructive conflict methods. Many PJSA members are active in their original disciplinary associations as well, which continues to give PJSA a robust agenda and rich conference context every year. Sociologists study the peace movements and other social movements, political scientists look at the hard-edged operations of governments, philosophers discuss ethical implications of our methods, psychologists examine the role of collective memory and other psychological phenomena on our methods of conflict management, historians parse out new information and analysis of peace and conflict campaigns and campaigners from the past, activists tell their stories, and the cross currents inform each other.

The Albert Einstein Institution is not a membership organization. It provides trainings but is not an activist group. It does research into civil resistance and publishes analysis. Its work is translated into many languages and in print around the world.

Arguably, without these and other organizations, nonviolent conflict management would be far less known and practiced on our poor Earth and more conflicts would be resolved violently.

If each organization stops one war per century, each will be amazingly valuable to humankind. If the next generation of such institutions, such as the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, can stop even more wars, we are on our way to solving the scourge of humanity.

Teaching nonviolence: A Thoreau analysis

In our field of study of civil resistance and in the texts on nonviolence, we often include the germinal Thoreau essay, On Civil Disobedience (not the original title). There is much to admire about it and there are some limitations.

Thoreau was not a pacifist, though he did not pick up a gun himself. He wrote in favor of John Brown--a Christofascist who chopped off arms of opponents in Kansas and famously attempted to ignite an armed slave rebellion in his attack on the Harpers Ferry military post in 1859, instead helping to ignite the US Civil War two years later. While Thoreau wrote approvingly of the American Revolution, Thoreau never volunteered for armed service, though to be fair he died of tuberculosis just as the Civil War was fully ramping up in 1862, when he was just 44. His entire nonviolent resistance, admirable though it was, consisted of refusal to pay a poll tax and his grand price for this was one night in jail.

Why do we canonize his essay? It's brilliant and it's an American original. It's anti-imperialist (against the clearly expansionist Mexican American War) and it's a call for resistance to paying for such war and for any defense of slavery. It is also a challenge to act on conscience and it sets out an argument that one person of good conscience operating against immoral policy of any government is operating justly. His views were expressed with great eloquence and he had the academic's rare gift to also speak to regular folks.

So when we study civil resistance we ought to understand that Thoreau wrote toward strategic nonviolence in the sense that his stands were not pacifist in philosophy but that he happened to choose a nonviolent method--refusing to pay his tax that supported a war with which he did not agree. But was he attempting to organize a movement? Was he a campaigner? Perhaps in his own vague way he was, and he certainly has given the generations fodder for their own attempts to organize Americans toward offering civil resistance when it's called for. But Thoreau was not part of any organizational efforts. He was a persuasive essayist and chronicler of what Richard Gregg would much later call voluntary simplicity in the tradition of the Stoics and some of the Cynics in ancient Greece and Rome (Thoreau, a Harvard-educated scholar, translated from the original Greek and Latin). Thoreau was much more an individualist, a Yankee who advocated with great cogency for freedom and who believed in freedom for all.

As we teach our students to use critical thinking, we use our own in evaluating the context of the primary texts we offer to our students. Thoreau is a great gift to America and to the world; let's not misappropriate his beliefs, but rather use them as accurately as we can in the light of what we teach from each of our perspectives.

Teaching nonviolence: Process paramount

Although Sarah Palin and others want us to be a Christian nation (in the Constantinian Just War sense) and are willing to create fictions to support that notion, Plato spoke at least as clearly as Jesus did to the Founders. Indeed, as I was walking in Washington one fine winter day, on my way down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Congressional end to the White House, I passed the Department of Justice and looked up to see, carved in stone at one top corner of the building, Plato's Conflict Resolution and Civil Resistance quote from 2,400 years ago, "“Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” As I was walking toward a nonviolent act of resistance to nuclear weapons that would soon land me in the clogged arteries near the heart of the justice system in D.C., the words spoke to me quite clearly. Justice takes work; even the rulings of the Supremes get overturned--one wave of demagogic hatred can wipe out the footprint of a good jurist.

Nothing in the world of nonviolence is carved in stone except aphorisms noting the permanence of impermanence. Nothing is set in concrete except the one concrete principle that the ends are the means, process is product, and nothing is ever settled once and for all (time).

Christians justify war. Monks get guns. Democracy is installed and forcibly shoved down the throats of those who never voted for it and never rose up seeking it--even as it naturally thus devolves in the mother country into bickering reactionaries jerking each other's chains and serving up kneejerk ripostes rather than authentic appeal to altruism. There is no system of governance nor belief that does not require constant upkeeping and generation-to-generation renewal, maintenance and evolution. The live spirit in a faith can be usurped quickly into killer identity politics and greed can move like cancer into the heart of free people who do not guard against it. For those overcoming injustice, impermanence is hope; for those who are sure they've established a timeless practice, time will teach better.

This is the calling to which educators answer. Yes, growth and progress are important, but protecting our intellectual flanks from revisionist invasion and occupation takes devotion to pedagogy and andragogy that is both critical and repetitive. I am currently teaching students for whom Gulf War I is ancient history from before they were born and the fall of the Berlin Wall is nearly writ in hieroglyphics. Lessons from the Civil Rights movement are suspect and Gandhi is a myth. These are all students who have come through high school, and few of those schools send on students with a good set of balanced and informed priorities.

Hence, the need to teach and the need to teach process. In the field of Conflict Resolution and Civil Resistance (CR2) the way we learn and the way we decide are the way we make friends and organize. It is all adaptive and process-oriented or it doesn't work. The mythos of violence is the quick and permanent fix. The way we teach CR2 is that all our work is iterative and necessarily redundant. My slogan, from Denzel Washington in the film Philadelphia, is "Tell me like I'm a fourth grader." Keep it simple, or at least add simple layers one at a time, and build up understanding of the complexities of conflict management and our methods.

Indeed, that is the message I use when discussing the finding of the Freedom House 2005 study, showing that nonviolence is far more sustainable if we want civil rights, human rights, and democracy. Violence is a poor producer of all those metrics over the long haul, so that whatever the revolutionaries were dreaming of achieving with violence is a chimera, a polluted process that tries to guarantee finality and thus assures ephemera. CR2 is not only the only chance at win-win, it's the best hope for an outcome that mirrors the path we take to get there. That is what students need to learn.

Frosty should last forever, right? Actually, he's a digital moment and a neural bit in three minds. He's lost a lot of weight and little Alexa is already taller and heavier. Will nothing stop changing? Sigh...

Teaching nonviolence: When it gets an F

There are recordings in the British War Museum of those who served in the trenches and those who tried to advocate for the rights of conscientious objectors. One of the women interviewed recalled that young pacifists, inspired by Jesus, by notions of the women's peace movements that had attempted to forestall that war, and possibly by Mohandas Gandhi's then-new satyagraha in South Africa, would come into the peace office and say versions of, "If I have love in my heart and no weapons in my hand, I know I can walk onto a battlefield and no one would hurt me."

This level of naivite and blissful immaturity has often been associated with nonviolence, but those who practice it and chronicle it not only know about its efficacy but about its dangers. Nonviolence, after all, is not about pusillanimity and conflict avoidance, but rather about volunteering to sacrifice in the strategic hope that the social psychological gains will pay off. If I am innocent of hurtful intent and I demonstrate willingness to suffer, I will win the sympathy of others, and possibly motivate them to support us in some way. This is the wager.
(pictured is the 'tank man,' the most inspiring moment of the otherwise catastrophic struggle, when tanks were stopped by a lone protester)
Sometimes it works--more than half the time. But wandering out onto the field of contest without understanding the risks of failure is a setup for pain and bitterness. There is perhaps no more enduring agony of this phenomenon than the tantalizing success and then crushing defeat of nonviolence in Tiananmen Square in China in June 1989.

Assumption College nonviolence scholar Michael True taught in Nanjing University in China 1984-1985 and again during the 1989 democracy push. His teaching and writing about the 1989 events is a helpful addition to the literature about the nonviolent successes of Gandhi and King. True considers the aspects of strategic analysis offered by Gene Sharp and Bruce Jenkins and he also incorporates first-hand knowledge of the Chinese culture at that time, as well as the implications of nascent globalization on that period.

True frames the Chinese episode differently than do some of the Chinese who were youth during that campaign. He sees the success and near-miraculous advances made by those youth from the dual perspectives of the long view of Chinese history and the short view of the history of strategic nonviolence. While direct involvement tends to sharpen and deepen emotional responses, the view of the analyst can temper those understandable swings from fear to euphoria to defeated despondency felt by the organizers who survived while so many of their comrades were killed or imprisoned.

One out of every five humans lives in China. There is no country more at the epicenter of the battles between ecofascism and ecofeminism, wealth via hyperconsumption and poverty, tyranny and democracy, sustainable growth and industrialized cancer, centralized planning and free market predation, freedom and subservience, and globalization or insularity. The 1989 movement was at the leading edge of the forces for nonviolence, freedom, democracy and sustainable development, making unprecedented gains and self-organizing millions of Chinese to do what had never been done in Chinese history, to seek nonviolent people power self determination.

China had no traditions to support either democracy or nonviolence. Students, workers, and even some peasants, came together to try to learn both and the pressure on them was enormous as they learned the lessons quickly under the media's unprecedented glare. Li Peng and Deng Xiaopeng, the 'Gang of Old' who had a long history of crushing rivals dating back to the 1949 independence war to smashing the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957 and steadily on to all threats (mostly internal, from the vast stretches of suffering aspirational Chinese, region to region, year to year, movement to movement). Romancing the Maoists--we still see it in ultraleftists in the West--is ultimately a fascination with bloody centralized dictatorship with a 'people's' mask.

True points out that when student democracy demonstrations of 1986-1987 were repressed forcefully, there were no international repercussions, which may have emboldened Deng Xiaopeng in June 1989, certainly a caveat to the human family interested in promoting and protecting nonviolent actionists. Without pushback, dictators feel they can get away with murder and can transmogrify that into mass murder, which is what they did. This has been demonstrated elsewhere. When in 1993 Johan Galtung called on the international community to show serious support for nonviolent Kosovars, the world mostly yawned, and we saw the results of the arrogan Milosevic forces. Underestimating the needs of indigenous nonviolent movements for transnational support is an underexamined danger.

True arrived in China on the same day Mikhail Gorbachev did, May 16, 1989, and the tension was palpable. This rapproachment (first Soviet leader to visit in more than 3 decades) was exciting and frightening. Chaos in China is frequently cataclysmic, since social conflict has so few overt outlets and tends to gather and build up pressure before bursting. The Chinese leaders know they let some pressure out at their own risk and keep it clamped at their own risk, which might explain how their messages were not only mixed but contributed to the disaster. Gorbachev was seen as a beacon of freedom by students and workers and as a harbinger of collapse and power loss by the Communist Party in China.

In his 2001 Peace and Justice Studies Association conference workshop, True also discussed the unfortunate semiotics of the Goddess of Democracy statuein the square, which looked far too much like the Statue of Liberty, and allowed the ruling elite to brand the demonstrators as dupes of the West. Further, there were (possibly planted) Molotov cocktails and last-minute interference and sound system usurpation by some who were almost certainly agents provacateurs. Last, and stressed by many scholars of nonviolence, the ironically named Peoples Liberation Army is reported to have offered amnesty and a brief window to all in the square to leave. An unknown number--some say hundreds, some thousands--elected to stay and were in fact massacred by early morning, June 4, 1989.

Failures of nonviolence of this magnitude are lesson-rich. Innoculating against agents provocateurs, building government and NGO networks of external support, choosing images and metaphors carefully, understanding the true depth of fright of those with big weapons and many other factors are important to the calulations. Knowing when to punch out means knowing how to preserve the forces you have, though failing to stay when the moment promises great victory is the countervailing hope that can lead to tragedy. Having the best intelligence is key, of course, and if we are serious about promoting nonviolence, we need to teach more about failures and less about the same victories we all know.

References

True, Michael (2002). The 1989 democratic uprising in China: A nonviolent perspective. In Mallick, Krishna, and Doris Hunter (Eds.). An anthology of nonviolence: Historical and contemporary voices. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 253-266.

Teaching nonviolence: Nonviolence is negotiation

Some say the field of conflict resolution depends upon negotiation. True. Then they teach that civil resistance is what civil society does when unjust rulers refuse to negotiate. True. They teach that therefore teaching from a conflict resolution perspective is mutually exclusive from teaching from the civil resistance perspective. False.

Here is an excerpt from what Dr. King wrote in response to white clergy who criticized him for committing civil resistance in Birmingham in 1963:

"You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth."

In our Conflict Resolution studies we learn from the Harvard Negotiation Project about the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, the BATNA. This is exactly what civil resistance is. Not only do ordinary citizens have the power to change their BATNA during a conflict, good campaigners are as transparent about it as possible, so that the BATNA can be, in some cases, nonviolent deterrent power. A transparent campaign with a robust civil resistance component or potential will also change the BATNA for the ruler, which alters all conflict calculations.

Principled negotiation consists of four basic principles:

~Separate the people from the problem
~Focus on interests, not positions
~Invent options for mutual gain
~Insist on using objective criteria

Principled negotiation, which is one core method we teach in Conflict Resolution, is precisely what a good civil society campaigner incorporates into any civil resistance strategy. While Saul Alinsky may have advocated calling some of the people the problem, Gandhi would not have done so, nor did King, nor Cesar Chavez. OK, Serb nonviolence is an exception, with Otpur youth chanting for Slobodan Milosevic to "Save Serbia: kill yourself!" They used it to emphasize their determination to separate Milosevic from nationalism, and from national pride, and from Serbian self-interest. It seemed to work there.

Focusing on interests rather than positions leaves room for satyagraha but not for duragraha, that is, remaining open to good ideas for collaborative agreements that benefit everyone rather than squatting obdurately on one fixed position is stronger conflict resolution and more adaptive civil resistance. Roger Fisher and Bill Ury are careful to advise against compromising on principle and preparing to collaborate on practically anything else.

This leads to inventing options for mutual gain, and if we ever see peace in Palestine Israel, that is how it will happen. Indeed, that is how almost every successful civil resistance is concluded and how every successful mediation happens. The overlap is tremendous. When civil society is successful at isolating the dictator from his own armed forces, nonviolence can actually be seen not as negotiating with the dictator, but rather with other constituencies, and when all are satisfied that they will gain more than they will lose by working together, change happens.

Insisting on using objective criteria is precisely how recruitment in civil resistance campaigns happens. When police dogs bit African American children in Birmingham, or when the fire department blasted children with firehoses so powerful they would strip the bark off trees, most Americans were galvanized to support the minority struggling with dignity and nonviolence for basic human and civil rights. When nonviolence is the only tactic, it is much easier to frame all campaigns in this exact fashion, a search for what is fair.

So teaching civil resistance can be regarded as a component of teaching conflict resolution, or conflict resolution can be seen as an element in the civil resistance body of theory and set of tools.

Teaching Sharp strategic nonviolence

Gene Sharp is a US political scientist whose original study of nonviolence was from a profoundly personal philosophical pacifist point of view. He spent a year in US prison for refusing the draft to the Korean war in the early 1950s but was determined to understand how armed and unarmed struggle actually worked in order to see how unarmed struggle could be effective.

Some say his key insight is that the structure of power always rests upon the consent of the governed. His influences include 16th century French philosopher Étienne de La Boétie, who posited that all servitude is voluntary, and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who said that India was not taken by the British but was given to them by Indians and then who put those ideas about getting it back into play. Sharp's work has been to produce actual research and theory that explain this notion and provide design patterns for removing tyrants from power.

Since Sharp's original work on this was published in 1973, no serious teacher of nonviolence has omitted his works nor analysis. For many, his often impatient rejection of any discussion of philosophy or religion was unnecessary and even offensive, but what Sharp was doing was staking out new boundaries for the discussion of ruling power and how it is created and destroyed. He viewed all other considerations as distracting and contaminating, a threat to truly understanding his method. This, in turn, set up some resistance to his ideas by those who were more attracted to the philosophy or religious teachings of pacifism.

I believe we are finally seeing that false debate subside, but in its place is the much more sinister new one introduced by an odd bed full of those who seem chagrined that nonviolence can take the place of good old fashioned Marxist-Leninist violence and terrorism plus those who really are despotic and logically fear Sharp's proven theories. These opponents are no longer a friendly batch of pacifists who want to teach love and kumbaya without pesky strategies and political theory; these are intellectual thugs who resort to calumny and traducement and smear tactics that mirror the polemical dishonesty of Fox News, but from the left. If the stakes weren't so serious, the humor would be profound, watching ultra leftists squirm into bed with Ahmadinijad or Mugabe, as if we are supposed to reject the people power in favor of bloody dictators because Gene Sharp has also offered advice to those who didn't like Hugo Chavez's thuggish tactics.

Those who teach nonviolence have a sacred duty to explain this to students. Why? Because teaching nonviolence in some ways is like teaching violent combat. If all you offer is enough to get started, the potential practitioners know just enough to be dangerous to themselves. They cannot defend their adherence to nonviolence if a relatively sophisticated ultra leftist charges them with committing a service to the US empire. It's an easy defense, frankly, but it's one that should be discussed by nonviolent teachers and trainers to prepare students to withstand the inevitable attack.

Yes, Gene Sharp has been called the Machiavelli of nonviolence, but that ignores the unique attribute of strategic nonviolence, which is that the methods mirror the goals, as Gandhi also taught. When Sharp teaches people power, his work is directly responsible for reducing casualties on all sides, and that, for most of humanity, is a worthy goal in itself--and ultimately, we hope, the point of our entire enterprise of nonviolent practice.

PsychoSatyagraha: Teaching nonviolence

How were we thinking about nonviolence back in the day? Gandhi was a saint, right, and that's why he succeeded. End of story. It's all philosophy and religion and Gandhi was known as the Mahatma, the Great Soul, which motivated thousands to join him and--poof--the British left, enlightened.

Ah...not quite.

Richard Gregg (pictured) was inspired to visit and learn from Gandhi in India in the 1920s. He was a social philosopher who really began to translate Gandhian nonviolence into practical, explicable social organizing and conflict management models. He thought about the psychological aspects, calling what Gandhi did 'psychological jiu-jitsu', that is, using the power of the oppressor against himself, allowing the hatred and violence to expend themselves with far less harm than if those tactics (the oppressor's strength) would have been countered with similar but asymmetrically weaker hatred and violence. Gregg really influenced the western analysis of why Gandhian nonviolence might work.

Gregg's 1934 germinal work, The Power of Nonviolence, is still a classic, and the second edition, in 1960, included a foreword by the young Martin Luther King, Jr. Gregg also integrated the swadeshi philosophy in his own life, moving to a farm with Helen and Scott Nearing (pictured), who were quite influential in the nascent self-reliance movement in the US. Gregg coined the term voluntary simplicity and staked out an early claim toward our slowly developing notions connecting war to resource conflict to consumerism to ecological care to urban dependency to injustice. We are still learning this basic system of interlocking causes and effects.

Teaching nonviolence is Sisyphean, not for sissies

Colman McCarthy was a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post for more than 25 years. Now he devotes most of his time to teaching high school kids, and anyone else, nonviolence. His lesson plan, including a variety of readings, is available online. It is a great starter for any student of nonviolence, skewed mostly toward the philosophical side of understanding nonviolence, but with enough strategic material to bring the student forward in a somewhat integrated manner. He offers that freely to all and is also an adjunct for the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at American University. His curriculum is available and is used in community settings. Indeed, Peaceforce Oregon chapter leader Terri Shofner just concluded a nine-month community class, Adventures in Nonviolence, using McCarthy's materials.

How advantageous would it be to our cultural appreciation of nonviolence if McCarthy's teachings could be syndicated? When students get to military age, to voting age, they are so saturated and immersed in a war culture and the assumptions that culture carries that nonviolence is either never considered or simply waved off as (one of my students put it in a paper I read just this morning) "naive and immature." What if the cultural assumptions at least included nonviolence as a logical alternative to violence, so that our nation would not be regarded as weak if it put aside its arsenal of destruction and picked up the tools of civil society organization and mobilization instead?

I am asked, periodically, to guest lecture in high schools. I do so freely, as a volunteer, whenever I'm asked. The reactions are predictable. Most kids look at me with great incredulity. I know I'll need a few more sessions with them to make serious progress, but I give it a go. I can tell how they've been enculturated and I can tell what their teachers have been doing. Some student groups are fairly receptive, some are mildly interested, and some seem disinterested or even hostile. I can tell I've entered a war culture when I step into a US public high school.

Those who teach war get students totally prepared by our culture to slide right into the curricula without question. This is how we manage our international and transnational conflicts. We threaten, we arm, we base around the world, we have horrific weapons at the ready 24-7 on and under the seven seas and in more than 150 of the world's 192 nation-states on approximately 1,000 bases. Of course. This keeps us free and prosperous. These assumptions may not come with numbers but they are ubiquitous, the air that young intellects breathe, the soil from which their thoughts grow, the water from which their wisdom flows. Violence feels so natural to us.

(photo of vase depicting Persephone supervising Sisyphus)

We need more Colman McCarthys, willing to roll that rock of nonviolent education up the hill of the war system with youth year after year, giving them a new culture to try on, showing them new paths around the mountain to a new way of being, of waging conflict, of running their lives and steering our country. Each new crop of young ones comes soaked in the war system that makes the task of McCarthy--and the rest of us who teach nonviolence--truly Sisyphean. We begin at the bottom each time.

Over the generations, fed by great experiments and more education, the hill won't be so steep, nor so high. If we are good enough at this, we will change the slope of the war trainer from the long downhill slide, easy and frictionless, to an unscaleable cliff face--which, since Sisyphus himself was a killer, is some kind of cosmic justice. A global alliance of teachers of nonviolence can change the world.

Teachers of nonviolence

Who teaches nonviolence? This short look at a short list at some of the most accomplished scholars and practitioners is woefully incomplete. I've tried to highlight some who feature at least one of the following characteristics:
1. Research--conducts it, knows it
2. Practice--has done it, does it
3. Forward thinking--integrates philosophical and strategic
4. Charismatic--excites students
5. Mentoring--guides students who then do wonderful things

Gail Presbey teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy. She writes: "My favorite part about teaching you: Your openness to new ideas and experiences. When I pose philosophical ideas, you are interested and willing to debate them. Also, when I ask you to go into the community for service, you take up the challenge." She travels the world and engages in both research and practice, both of which inform her teaching.

Barry Gan Barry directs the Center for Nonviolence at St. Bonaventure University. He edits Acorn, the journal of the Gandhi-King Society, and co-edits Peace & Change, the journal of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the Peace History Society. He is co-editor of Nonviolence in Theory and Practice, 2nd edition. His students love him.

Erica Chenoweth is a researcher into strategic nonviolence at Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut. Her work is at the edge of the field of determining what methods of struggle work under what conditions producing what results.

George Lakey is a professor and researcher at Swarthmore College. He was a founder of Training for Change and has trained thousands of nonviolent activists and community leaders over the decades. George brings long years of activism to his teaching.

There are many more professors, but also many nongovernmental organizations train nonviolent actionists who will do accompaniment, civil resistance, interposition and other forms of nonviolent action. As we educate, we introduce new social norms and that is how they change. I am so grateful for these tireless teachers and the hundreds of others who labor at offering humankind another method of conflict management.

Teach nonviolence: Early efforts

On December 5, 1987, a meeting was convened at the University of California-Irvine. Representatives of 23 peace studies programs attended and many others expressed their strong support for the initiative. This meeting explored the needs of peace studies programs, agreed upon the necessary steps toward meeting those needs, and formed The Peace Studies Association.

One early peace studies program was at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, a Quaker school. The academic major was launched in 1974 and has several tracks, none of which include the word nonviolence, and one of which is "Religion and Pacifism." The base and tilt of that program is the tradition of pacifism based on the Quaker Peace Testimony of 1660, which in many ways was the recognition of the dangers of trying to mix politics and religion. While the 1660 document was clear on pacifism, it also removed Quakers from their controversial role that had earned them so much oppression when founder George Fox allied himself with Oliver Cromwell and then Cromwell lost power. The identification of pacifism rather than nonviolence in many ways is adaptive for the Quakers but it made the introduction of the notion of strategic nonviolence into curricula somewhat harder. Indeed, while the core of the Earlham Peace and Global Studies program requires a 100-level "History and Theory of Nonviolent Movements" course, there are no other courses in the current major with the word nonviolence in them and "Marxism" is actually required in two of the tracks. Pacifism, not nonviolence, is the clear focus.

On the other hand, the first peace studies program established in the US, in 1948 at Manchester College in North Manchester, Indiana, has been in evolution toward understanding movements at the curricular level since at least 1971 with its launch of Nonviolent Social Change, (newsletter dove logo) its newsletter devoted to understanding nonviolent movements. Ken Brown (photo: Kenneth Brown) and others have been the heart and soul of that evolution. They have helped students who wish to be a part of various mass nonviolent movements (at the School of the Americas protest, photo from Manchester College Peace Studies files) and they integrate their Church of the Brethren religious pacifism roots with a strong study of strategic nonviolence.

Another welcome initiative was the Plowshares Collaboration between Goshen College, Earlham College and Manchester College peace programs, though in the long and multipronged set of mission items the word nonviolence never appears.

Pacifism as an individual spiritual witness has marked the historic peace churches for more than 400 years. Entraining Gandhi's theories and practice of mass liberatory nonviolence has been much more recent, but it has happened far more seriously just in the past few years, as the early work of Gene Sharp has begun to bear fruit and shows its robust value. This slow incorporation of a more flinty-eyed idealism has been the result of Sharp's ongoing work and that of his many excellent proteges, many of whom have their own mentees and schools of thought and praxis.

Teaching nonviolence

(Nonviolence teachers, mother and daughter)
Students are skeptical about nonviolence when they come into class. They usually leave convinced that nonviolence is the most adaptive method of conflict management. How does this happen?

First, we come to understand nonviolence as a way to fight for respect without engendering the massive consequences that using violence usually brings. No one needs to prove they can beat up Mr Nonviolence. In fact, when I was in prison, one fellow came over to my cot in the middle of the gang room and, towering over me, looked at me scornfully and said, "I'm going to knock out your fucking eye. What are you gonna do with your nonviolence?" I paused and thought to myself (as the rest of the room grew so silent you could hear breathing), this would be a wonderful time for my creative nonviolent response to work. Finally I said, 'Well, that would be mean of you and I'd reserve the right to see you catch another case.' That message was quite confusing. The room held its breath for a minute and then came a twitterlaugh from one or two guys. Then the big guy hulking over me laughed. We were friends from then on. I broke all the rules and rewrote them in the moment. I cared for his face and mine, literally, and it worked (thank goddess).

Second, we learn that it is the only possible chance for a win-win outcome. When you use violence against violence, there will be one winner at the most, and often two losers. At least with nonviolence you have a chance for a win-win.

Third, we learn that, when we use nonviolence, at least we aren't contributing to the level of violence in the world. We can control our own behavior and no one else's. (Las Madres braved the Pinochet regime and helped bring it down without harming anyone) If we aren't adding to the violence we remove at least that reason for anyone else to be violent.

Fourth, it becomes clear that the success rates of nonviolence are superior to those of violence. The empirical comparative studies are becoming fairly overwhelming in their cogency and robustness. In any given conflict, bet on the nonviolent side and it is your best bet. (Otpur in Serbia, where 'powerless' students prompted the end of the Milosevic dictatorship) You may not always win, but it will be more than half the time. With violence, you are lucky to collect a quarter of the time.

Fifth, the costs of violence are becoming better known and are huge, to the ecology and economy, to all other enterprises, and to the well being of the masses of people. (Che Guevara was in on one successful violent revolution that brought in decades of a military government and he advised many unsuccessful attempts, such as this one in Congo)

Sixth, the beneficiaries of violence are now understood and identified. They are the owner class, the military officers, the war profiteers and those who can extract the wealth--human and natural resources--of conquered regions. People on the ground, the regular people, do not benefit. They pay.

Finally, the factors in transforming conflict from destructive to constructive are more well known each year as peace research identifies and exegetes them for us. The numbers and qualities of the tools in our chest are far more mastered than ever. Nonviolence is no longer about saving our spiritual butts. It's about winning.

Clothes down the occupation: Gandhian freedom fashion

Gonsalvez, Peter (2010). Clothing for liberation: A communication analysis of Gandhi’s swadeshi revolution. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The connection of homespun cloth—khadi—to India’s liberation is well known. But the progression of Gandhi’s increasingly radical dress and the communication elements and effects are documented and evaluated in Clothing for liberation: A communication analysis of Gandhi’s swadeshi revolution by Social Communication professor Peter Gonsalves (Salesian Pontifical University, Rome). For scholars of semiotics, social movements, nonviolence and Gandhi, this is a welcome addition to the ever-growing oeuvre of Gandhicentric analysis.
Gonsalves organizes his analysis in five sections. First, the overview and amazing statistics of Gandhi’s prolific output as assembled under the initial order of Nehru into the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, the sweeping blockbuster (or at least wheelbarrow buster) of 100 volumes of Gandhi’s writings, averaging 500 pages each. From his study of this and of other Gandhi scholars’ analysis, Gonsalves concludes that Gandhi “was convinced that only a communication strategy that was methodologically planned, hermeneutically relevant, creatively symbolic, morally disciplined, geographically extensive and founded uncompromisingly on satya [truthfulness] and ahimsa [nonviolence] would succeed” (p. 2).
Second, Gonsalves examines Gandhi’s fashion evolution through the lens of the theories of Roland Barthes, French cultural analyst, structuralist and semiotician. Key to this set of connections is the synthesis and illumination of the structuralist approach as “its fundamental tenet lies in its attempt to study not just the elements of a whole, but the complex network of relationships that link and unite those elements” (p. 50). In a cascading exegesis of what Gandhi’s choices denoted and signified, we see clothing communicating at several interlocking levels to a wider and wider cross section of India’s masses.
Third, Gonsalves turns to the tools and theories of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner for a view of the diachronic socio-psychological implications of the symbols Gandhi grew, from his political thinking about swadeshi to his definitional social drama. Gandhi spinning and Gandhi wearing fewer and fewer items of clothing drew him closer to the masses and his careful communication of that produced a nonviolent one-two punch that surprised an empire.
The British Government considered Gandhi’s switch from politics to social work just another new obsession. Only in 1930, when it became evident the khadi campaign was a part of a larger political struggle against the Empire, did the Government wake up to the consequences of Gandhi’s symbolization. But by then it was far too late to stop the rivers of men and women in white khadi walking courageously to manufacture salt at Dandi on 6 April 1930. Moreover, salt, a new symbol of freedom from the English yoke, was born (p. 82).
Fourth, Gonsalves directs the lights of symbolic interaction theory as offered by Erving Goffman to scrutinize the coherence and ever-sharpening resolution of the rhetoric and performance of Mohandas Gandhi. How did Gandhi conceive of his people as performers in his epic battle and how did he prepare and deploy them? How did his self-assessment coincide with his intentions for his nation? His first series of great battles was internal, waged concomitantly to the social struggles. “His desire to bring his exterior self in line with his interior principles was far from easy. It took him nearly 33 years” (p. 96).
Finally we come back ‘round to Gandhi himself to his unique ‘approach to symbolization.’ As he rejected the symbology that had been coopted to oppress his people he discovered his own symbols, drawing deeper, from the ‘bottom of society’ (p. 125) to an overarching purity that was irresistible and motivational to people supposedly noted for their fatalism and acceptance of poverty and oppression. As he shed accoutrement, he came into sharp focus to the millions in hundreds of thousands of villages, eliciting their loyalty based on identification with a champion, their hero.
Using western scholarship to evaluate Indian messaging is instructive, offers welcome connections, and is simultaneously suspicious, though the foreword by Keval Kumar asserts that the more worn path of identifying Gandhi’s clothing choices in the context of the spiritual evolution toward the Hindu sanyasi is inadequate. What Gonsalves gives us are the nonverbal communication theoretical elements that can see the fabric of Gandhi’s strategies synthesizing the spiritual, political, strategic and communication master into his holistic liberatory leadership over decades.
There are some hints at why it took so long for the liberation of India despite Gandhi’s national leadership and abilities to rouse the nation. For example, his decision to call off the huge hartal [stop work] and satyagraha struggle that began in 1921 and had made such amazing progress. On 22 February 1922 a crowd of approximately 2,000 in Chauri Chaura burned 22 police to death and Gandhi not only fasted five days in penitence for his self-perceived role in prompting the mob, but called off all protest, was promptly arrested and charged with sedition 10 March 1922, and essentially challenged the British judge who next presided over Gandhi’s trial to either resign the bench and join the struggle or sentence him to the maximum. Judge Broomfield played his part, acknowledging Gandhi’s special status and then indeed sentencing him to six years. Violence—historically regarded as the quick way to win—set back Gandhi’s efforts again and again. Despite his astonishing communication abilities, he was either forced to—or was too fast to—shut down campaigns when any violence broke out anywhere.
Gonsalves contributes a firm piece of scholarship to the study of Gandhi’s life and how he became the message. Just as “there is no way to peace; peace is the way,” (attributed to A. J. Muste) Gandhi’s very appearance became his message. His semiotics of struggle were remarkable in that they enmified no one, just poverty and oppression, while appealing to everyone, including those called enemy by others, to feel the friendship in seeking truth and nonviolence. His words are measured by the hundreds of thousands and ultimately his nonverbals were quite important and can be seen in just a few small but highly important symbols, from his scant diet to his scant clothing. His stage presence to his people and the world is exegeted deeply in this valuable volume.

Agents in our midst

The military at your peace meeting? You look around the room and wonder, which one of you is an agent of the US military sent to gather intelligence on your peace group, and possibly attempt to convince you to commit violence? The scraggly guy--he might be deep undercover. The white-haired grandmother who claims she was active in the 60s (back when lots of police and some military were infiltrating groups and urging them to 'get radical' and start bombing or at least throwing bricks)? Probably the earnest young woman dressed all in black.

"Another lawsuit filed in January by Hildes — and which Honig says is being closely monitored by the ACLU — involves members of an anti-war group in Olympia. They allege that a civilian employee of the Force Protection Division at Joint Base Lewis-McChord infiltrated their group. His identity was revealed through a public-disclosure request.

The employee has since been outed as a 'professional informant' on a website. That individual and his civilian boss are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

Piek, the base spokesman, said the Army has opened an investigation into those allegations and that he could not discuss them further. He declined to discuss the employee, saying that the man's work was 'sensitive.' A telephone message left at the man's home was not returned Tuesday."
--Mike Carter, 'Activist spied on? Man wins settlement," Seattle Times, 5 May 2010

The courts are making a few rulings on the government's decision that dissent is illegal--protection against which the military arrogates unto itself endlessly. "You should thank me for defending your rights to your idiot opinion" is a common refrain heard by anyone who has the temerity to critique anything the military does.

Indeed, this is the fundamental flaw in the idea that militarism promotes democracy. It is used to crush democracy and to undermine it. No democracy is tolerated within the military--it is pure command and control--and that is part of the rationale for the Posse Comitatus Act. It's a bit like Gene Hackman's ship commander of a thermonuclear missile-carrying submarine in the film Crimson Tide: "We're here to preserve democracy, not practice it."

The lawsuits to defend our peace promotion are a good thing because they go a long way toward uncovering the facts. Again and again they reveal that the ones who advocate violence are quite often infiltrators--agents of the police or military. Why? Two reasons, leading to a third.

First, get a group to commit an act of violence and public sympathy vanishes. The relationship is fairly direct and quite quick. "Oh, they are throwing stones at the military? Well, that is stupid and no better than military violence."

Second, get the group charged with violent crimes and drain their resources as you wreck their reputation. They will be hiring lawyers, serving time and have no real effect on the issue they originally protested.

Finally, as the group realizes they are infiltrated, they develop a security culture that finishes them off. They are suspicious of each other, trying to hedge their communications and they withdraw from new recruits, acting much more in secrecy and with decreasing democracy themselves. They become dysfunctional and marginalized.

How do groups resist this?

Be nonviolent. If you commit to nonviolence they may watch you and even make agent provocateur attempts that will fail and they will lose interest.

Be open. Draw bright lines around personal privacy, but open the group's decisionmaking process to all. This gives the agents a voice, which they may try to abuse, but transparency and nonviolence are natural concomitants and can weather these attempts when maintained.

Be democratic. If one strong personality attempts to rule a group but the group maintains its spirit, tone, and philosophy, the internal strife of a group is limited and within tolerable bounds. If we cannot be democratic we cannot logically advocate for it.

This is not anarchical. Even though I love Dorothy Day, I cannot fully commit to anarchy, and even though she identified as an anarchist, she really wasn't in many ways. Someone fasting in Rome to convince the Catholic bishops of something is buying into their version of command and control and only trying nonviolently to persuade them, not to truly engage in anarchical spirituality.

And Jim Lawson noted well that you cannot just do whatever at a demonstration and expect it to be effective. He advocates a 'fierce discipline.' The way we decide what our spirit and tone will be is democratic and even by consensus quite often, but when we take to the field we need to commit to conduct with Lawsonian ferocity. Indeed, that is how we overcome the agents in our midst. If our discipline is rock solid for nonviolence, they cannot erode it and they will learn that.

Once in a while they learn it so deeply they defect. Jack Ryan was an FBI agent assigned to monitor our various movements and he eventually quit to become a Catholic Worker himself. Bring 'em on.

Jumbo shrimp, clean war, oxymorons arise!

"The C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan, which was accelerated in 2008 and expanded by President Obama last year, has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Washington in part because it was perceived as eliminating dangerous militants while keeping Americans safe.

But the attack in December on a C.I.A. base in Afghanistan, and now possibly the failed S.U.V. attack in Manhattan, are reminders that the drones’ very success may be provoking a costly response."
--Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, 6 May 2010

Killing people will provoke a longing for retaliation. This goes on until everyone's dead, someone decides unilaterally to stop, or the parties are convinced by wiser minds to talk it out until they can come to an agreement on going forward without further violence. That is history and that is part of what we know from both fields of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution. Most of us in the field of Conflict Resolution seem to actually internalize this without exceptionalism and we tend to challenge our own democracies to in fact develop those wiser minds. But Security Studies is catching up to our work in that regard and passing us by in some ways. In fact, some of them are so good we'll just have to take their work straight into our field as the next generation of knowledge about nonviolence as a far more adaptive response to violence. Sometimes it takes a brilliant scientist with 10 research assistants in a research center at a university to empirically show us what we should have learned in kindergarten.

The work done by Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan and others is quite exciting. Indeed, Chenoweth runs a longitudinal and expanding study on the outcomes and factors of conflict management methods called the Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research at Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut--just 40 miles from where the New York SUV bomberwannabe lived. Her work is breaking out of old worn models, braving and paving new examinations of the contextuals of conflict in history and presently.

Her work is bringing her to the clear conclusion that nonviolence is the most adaptive response to conflict, whether you are a power party or a weak party. The only questions revolve around your skill, your connections, your ability to rouse support, and what you can bring to the table. Bringing bombs will earn bombs back. When that is the formula for nation-states and there is no moral or ethical consideration, violence works quite well, as history shows us, especially for the elite powers who can insulate themselves from any backlash.

But ethics erode in the face of violence. The descending spirals produce fewer moral considerations until you have a system that believes drone attacks are a superior method of engaging in conflict and the other side, deeply offended by the killing of civilians by airborne machines, resort to contemptible methods like those of bombing suspect, Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year old from Pakistan, where the drones have killed more and more civilians in past months.

So humanity again chooses: the model of Erica Chenoweth--complex but clear nonviolence--or Faisal Shahzad--an eye for an eye. One vision, one darkening nightmare of blindness for all.

Shazad is lucky; he won't have to live with himself as murderer, because his carbomb failed. Instead, in all likelihood, he will be valorized by his Taliban mentors as a warrior for the poor and oppressed. He will spend some time incarcerated and we can hope for his rehabilitation.

What about the rest of us? Will we show future Shazads that the American people are opposed to the violence that is killing Pakistani children with Predator and Reaper drones launching Hellfire missiles at them (test photo of Hellfire attack shown) with no risk to the US military pilots who are sitting playing their deadly video game literally thousands of miles away? Those "pilots" are immune from danger while the ones at risk are just American citizens who happen to wander by when the next evil plot unfolds. Thus the Taliban believes it is closing that circle--you kill our kids and our mothers and yours are next. Evil for evil.

Is this how we should plan for our future? Nonviolence has so much to teach our government and our people. I am so glad Chenoweth's former partner in this research, Dr. Maria J. Stephan, is now in the US State Department. I hope she can help them understand and mend their ways.

Making the meeting: cross cultural conflict

How can you practice nonviolence with someone whose conduct makes you confused and uncomfortable? It is quite hard, and indeed, not accurately reading the meaning of someone's words and gestures usually means it's hard to trust that person.

A rudimentary example is personal space. We in the US believe that expansive spaces mean freedom and that is what we stand for. When people with whom we may disagree get too close we are uncomfortable and indeed our perceptions of what they mean moves from assertion to aggression.

Meanwhile, in that person's culture, personal space may be quite small. They may be a tactile sort, trying to come close to reassure you of their basic good intent by moving close in, possibly even touching you. For many Americans, by this time all the warning bells are going off in our brains. Danger! Enemy! Imminent Attack!

The basics of intercultural conflict management begin with intercultural communication, which relates to intercultural literacy.

Some cultures are monochronic, time-driven, nearly obsessed by arriving and departing on time. They tend to feel as though anyone practicing time management in any other way is disrespecting others.

Some cultures are polychronic, and a 9 a.m. meeting means morning, which means before lunch, and if necessary, lunch can be later. If a person from such a culture is meeting with someone from 8 a.m. and the 9 a.m. meeting is going to begin, they often have an impossible task of stopping the 8 a.m. meeting. They tend to feel that ending something abruptly is a sign of disrespect. The people at the next meeting will understand--if they are also from a polychronic culture.

I think it's interesting that it's all derived from respect, from the desire to save face for everyone involved.

When a person from a monochronic culture arrives in a polychronic culture, some adjustments help. When a colleague of mine was involved in the peace process in Nicosea, in Cyprus, an American negotiator arrived in town, gung-ho and making dates to talk to everyone. He set up several meetings. Everyone insisted on meeting in cafes.

The American arrived punctually and no one else was there. He waited and waited and after 15 or 20 minutes decided he must have made an error, and left. This happened several times with different people and groups of people.

By the end of his first two weeks, who do you suppose had the reputation as the no-show? Yes, the American. Everyone else came to the meetings, arriving and enjoying coffee and conversation while waiting for the new guy, who never showed--since he had already left, increasingly frustrated with the no-show Greeks and Turks. They always met at coffee shops for exactly that reason; might as well have a good time while waiting for everyone to arrive.

The real peacemaker becomes culturally literate and operates in the cultures in which she finds herself. I saw Dimitris the Greek peace radical do this when he introduced the brand new Turkish-Greek Student Association at Portland State University, where I teach. The room was packed. The 7 p.m. start time had come and gone by half an hour. Finally, a Turk and a Greek stood by the podium. Dimitris drew up his five-foot-seven figure with his sparkling friendly eyes and said, "Thank you for your patience. We're starting a little late. It's cultural."

Everyone laughed because he didn't say it was Greek nor Turkish, just, It's cultural. Thus, he used the polychronic similarity to bond everyone to each other and make all sides instantly relaxed, either sharing an element of identity or appreciating his note that the Turks and Greeks shared it and were such good peacemakers themselves. It was a simple, brilliant declaration.

When I worked with tribes I learned about this and thought I had it well understood. So when my fellow peace and justice organizer scheduled us for a meeting to plan a walk around Lake Superior to honor the memory of Walter Bresette, I said, well, we realistically can help in two ways, neither of them major. Let's let the people from around this lake gather in the morning and we'll show up just after lunch, when they finally stop socializing and get down to business.

We showed up at 2 p.m., which is when I thought the 9 a.m. meeting would actually get underway in earnest, discussing the actual logistics. Turns out when we walked in the last of the important people had just finally arrived from Ontario and they were about to have lunch. Good lesson! They had spent all morning and early afternoon gathering, catching up, being respectful of the long journeys everyone had made. If we had been operating on the American mainstream model it would have been business at 9 a.m. and it would not have allowed for the knitting of the social, tribal, familial fabric so necessary to a culture so beaten down for so long.

Learning about another culture before experiencing it is a faster path to peaceful relationships. Contextualizing responses that seem odd helps to appreciate responses that might otherwise be offensive and alienating. This is all part of nonviolence, if we seek success with it.