TIBETSPACE

SHARP'S DICTIONARY OF POWER AND STRUGGLE, 2

I spent part of my Thanksgiving break going through Gene Sharp’s new book, Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle:  Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts.  As I indicated in an earlier post, it’s a necessary book, for students and teachers alike, because it organizes the terminology and a few of the recent events that surround the field of nonviolence and civil resistance.  Some of the entries seem obvious, but all of them are useful, if only because they are given a place of residence between two covers.  We need more of these kinds of books as nonviolence matures, both as a subject and as a practice.  

I said in that earlier post that I would mention an entry or two that caught my eye.  Ever heard of “Collective Disappearance?”  Here’s how Sharp defines it:

The severance of all social contact with the opponents by the population of a small area, such as a village.  They remain hidden somewhere within the territory.  Hiding distinguishes this method of social noncooperation from protest emigration.  Not to be confused with the practice of extremely repressive governments physically “disappearing” resisters and their supporters.

I was drawn to this idea because I believe there are various ways that all of us can disappear whenever we find it helpful or necessary to do so, withdrawing our support from the mental habits as well as from the social and governmental practices that we don’t support.  Or that are actively harming us.  When I read Sharp’s definition, I thought about the Buddhist concept of renunciation, a distant and powerful cousin of “collective disappearance.”  

Here’s what I mean.  Renunciation doesn’t ask that we deny ourselves the vices we’d secretly love to indulge.  Denial won’t last, and if it does, frustration rises as a result of it.  Instead, we need to understand the abusive nature of the bad habits that manage our days (hatred, anger, jealousy, pride, greed, even nationalism and ideology—things like that), and then determine the nature of our own complicity with these corrosive habits.  (And complicity, remember, might amount to a silent tolerance of them.)  But once we’ve gotten some clarity about our involvement with these habits, we will see that they cause great pain both for ourselves and for others.  

At this point, we have some new information, and with it, we’ll find it easier to renounce these habits because we see clearly that they are destroying us by limiting our vision, by compromising our vast potential for happiness.  And we will take steps to remedy the problem; we will renounce these habits not because we think we ought to renounce them, but because we see that they are making our lives harder than they need to be—this is real renunciation. 

Renunciation does not happen because we blindly follow ordained codes of behavior or dogmatic prohibitions, but because we wake up to the nature of our own attachment to and support of abusive practices.  This will come as a shock to us, but the shock will give us the urgent energy we need to make the changes we’ve envisioned.  These changes will be personal in nature, but they will have a political implication.  Whether the political implication becomes obvious or not we don’t always know, but the action is the same:  we understand the destructive nature of a specific habit of thought, and then take the necessary steps to break it.

Still, the outward change, the socio-political change, that might be visible to our friends has been occasioned by the inner change, the spiritual force of renunciation.  Which, in Sharp’s phrase, amounts to a kind of “collective disappearance” from these oppressive forces, whether they are personal or, as Sharp indicates, political.

 

SHARP'S DICTIONARY OF POWER AND STRUGGLE

Gene Sharp, the guru of nonviolence in America whose books were spotted throughout the Middle East during the Arab Spring, has recently published another book:  Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle:  Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts, and it's a useful primer and reference book for nonviolence.  Terms, movements, legislations, conflicts, principles, the book includes nearly 1,000 entries, and it will be immensely useful for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the rich history of this broad-based and cross-cultural movement.

As I go through the book, I'll post a term or anything that strikes my fancy, and maybe offer a comment or two on it.  Here's the first one that struck me:

Cultural Resistance—Persistent holding to one's way of life, language, customs, beliefs, manners, social organization, and ways of doing things despite pressures of another culture.  This resistance may protect a culture of indigenous origin or be directed specfically against a culture imposed by a military occupation or colonialism.

Cultural resistance may take very undramatic forms, such as teaching one's language to one's children.  This may be a form of microresistance.  Only rarely may such resistance be tied to political resistance or open struggle.  When it is, it usually becomes a form of defiance or noncooperation.

Such persistent holding to one's own culture may lead to cultural survival even in highly unfavorable circumstances.

Comment:  This is what I love about Gene Sharp.  He prosaically and thoroughly charts the ground of nonviolent resistance, and he leaves no stone unturned.  Here, he's made available our daily lives for the shaping of a resistance movement, even the lessons that we leave our children.  Maybe I'll start to teach my daughter about the deceptions of American advertising from an early age, and maybe she'll learn that buying certain products at a bargain prices causes real human suffering far away, and maybe some of the students in the Occupy Movement had parents who were part of the 60's protests, and maybe a little of their own sense of justice trickled down and is now returning when injustice seems on the verge of winning.

Cultural Resistance, an idea whose time has come because it's an idea that's always been with us. 

FOUR THOUGHTS FOR THANKSGIVING & CHRISTMAS THAT WILL, SHARPEN, ENERGIZE, AND MAYBE DE-STABILIZE YOUR HOLIDAYS

I don't have much to say about Thanksgiving that hasn't already been said. Like most American holidays, Thanksgiving has been neatly removed from the historical events that originally surrounded it. But that doesn't matter. What matters for every holiday, after the corrective lessons have been delivered, is how we behave, or what we do, or why we think as we think.  How we belong, in short, to the community that we call ours and that we gather around us during these times. Holidays, however trying they are, provide us with good opportunities to assess ourselves and our places in our communities.  To jump-start this assessment, I've listed here four quotations I've kept in my head for some time now.  In short, they resound.  

Refer to them throughout the holidays as needed.

1. "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." (Simone Weil)  Weil is speaking here about realizing the many opportunities for compassion and generosity that lie all around us, all day long. And it’s particularly true at holidays.  With the advent of social media, however, we begin to feel that if we aren't liberating countries or curing diseases, the heroic stuff that crowds our inboxes, then we have failed in our mission, and all we have left to do is load up another plate of turkey.  But liberating countries begins with liberating ourselves, and that begins with seeing everyone as deserving of a focused attention.  No one is less important than anyone else, a lesson that lies at the root of all spiritual and ethical traditions (see point 4). And we acknowledge this with a focused attention as we pay homage to the life that we are witnessing in anyone that engages us in conversation.  The lotus salutation from India bears witness to this as well, the physical gesture of two hands touching at the finger tips and thumbs, and a gesture that recognizes the mutual miracle two people share whenever they speak with one another:  “We are alive, we are here, and we are human. We have far more in common than not, so let us remember this as we move forward together.”  The holidays, in fact, offer us a target-rich environment for paying attention, in Weil’s sense of the word.
2. "Because we ourselves have faults, we tend to see faults in others."(Gyatrul Rinpoche)  We recognize in others those things that we have within ourselves.  Both good and bad.  After all, we know familiar territory when we see it.  And this includes our faults.  I know someone is misbehaving because I've spent a good deal of my time misbehaving as well.  Now, the trick is to remember this little adage just as we start pointing out someone else's misbehavior—that's a tall order, but it's possible to do it, to accomplish it gradually.  And tolerance grows from this practice (see point 3).
3. "With patience and devotion, we must contemplate the state of suffering of sentient beings, and work to develop from the depths of our heart the wish that they be free of it." (His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama)  His Holiness has been saying this, or something like it, for as long as I’ve been listening to him.  Unlike the other three quotations on my list, this one actually describes a practice, something you can do on a daily basis to develop compassion and altruism.  You start by listening to your own inner catalogue of irritations, sorrows, sadnesses, and inconveniences:  “It’s cold, and I don’t have a coat; I’m late, and I won’t get my work done; I’m ill; I’m very ill; my best friend is very ill; I miss my son; I can’t make my payment.”  You get the point.  Then you realize that everyone has the same problems, and many have problems that you would consider much worse.  The point?  Everyone is suffering as much as you are, and they care as much about themselves as you care about yourself.  And so as a radical, mind-bending, unprecedented experiment, you spend five minutes each day contemplating this simple fact.  And then spend ten minutes, when you’re ready for the next escalation of reality; and then fifteen.  Again, you get the point.  Soon, you’ve been introduced to life-as-it-really-is, and something magical has happened:  you’re no longer quite as concerned with your suffering, you’re a better listener (see point 1), and you feel in your bones the freedom that comes from de-emphasizing your own problems and standing in solidarity with human suffering (see point 2).  From this simple practice arises, “with patience and devotion,” as His Holiness said, both a profound sense of community and the wish to free the members of that community from their suffering.  In those who have spent their lives working with this principle, this wish transcends nationality, religion, culture, and ethnicity.  It’s why we call them saints, and give them awards, and get tingly when we’re in their company.  We feel we are witnessing the authentic mind of compassion, and we see its seed, momentarily, within ourselves.  And for that moment, everything becomes possible again.
4. "And the King shall answer:  So I say to you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these, my brothers and sisters, so you've done it to me." (Jesus, Matthew 25:40, King James Version, slightly updated)  Maybe the most profound statement that Christ made, and certainly a sentiment central to all the major spiritual traditions, here is the core of the social Gospel. It is the central spirit that has rippled through the Occupy Wall Street movement, and it is why Wall Street is trembling.  It is a statement of spiritual realignment, of changing our default settings from a concern for our own advancement to a concern for those who have been denied advancement.  This is Christ’s statement of solidarity with the poor and with the social changes that such concerns dictate, and so it has a political component.  Furthermore, it identifies the enlightened perspective with an acknowledgment of human suffering and poverty—poverty of the body, poverty of the spirit, and poverty of the mind.  Poverty, plain and complex.  And even more than that, the statement bristles with an intolerance for human suffering and the will to abolish it.  Finally, It is an uncompromising and corrective statement about the nature of divinity and its presence within each of us—our most exalted human impulses are those that flash to the surface, sometimes in anger, always in compassion, at the sight of our brothers and sisters bearing the suffering that others have imposed on them.  The holidays, a time of joy, offer us ample opportunity to recommit ourselves to ending human suffering.  If we look carefully at the holiday landscape, we will see that great joy throws great suffering into graphic relief.  We cannot miss the hungry child on the streets at Christmas, and so we transform that feeling of compassion, which might not arise as strongly in August, into a re-commitment to our practice of developing love and compassion for all sentient beings.

These quotations embody four of the most radical spiritual and socio-political ideas that I know of, so please use them with caution.  They have toppled empires; turned back violent hordes; and established loving communities.  Proceed with caution.

 

DANCING GANDHI: A REVERIE ON SOCIAL ACTIVISM & POLITICAL DISSENT

I can’t remember the first time I saw a picture of Gandhi, but I’m certain it wasn’t a picture of Gandhi dancing.  I feel a little uncomfortable looking at the image, but at the same time, I can’t turn away from it.  I come from a long line of English Puritans and Anglican blue souls so I prefer the Gandhi of the popular press:  devout, committed, stern, ascetic, celibate, overly disciplined.  I’ve seen many pictures of Gandhi smiling, of course, but they only served as a foil. His human smile only sharpened for me his inhuman discipline.  

Besides, my people don’t do well with emotion, and we certainly don’t dance.  Media Gandhi is my Gandhi—I take my icons straight, after all.  Neat, with no emotion.

But here I’m looking at a different Gandhi, and I suspect this is the Gandhi that ultimately convinced the British to leave India.  This is the man who handed India its independence.  Because here we see a man who is willing to break form, to question the power of his own self-constructed image. Dancing Gandhi understands the power of spontaneity, and if you understand spontaneity and know how to marshall its power, as Gandhi obviously did, you will then have your way with an imperial bureaucracy.  Why?  Because bureaucracies will mistake spontaneity for volatility, and volatility threatens the core of every oppressive government.  This mistaken perception, in turn, will cause these governments  to misbehave in ways that no one will tolerate—and they will dissolve.  

But Gandhi’s spirit is not a volatile spirit.  Gandhi’s spirit is an organic spirit, and far more dangerous from the British perspective because his spirit felt comfortable with impermanence and the constantly changing demands of an impermanent world.  The truly bureaucratic spirit cannot do that; bureaucracies exist to impose order, and when that order becomes oppressive, spontaneity is what we need.  Spontaneity disrupts order and confuses the ordered. 

So I look again at dancing Gandhi, and I feel that now is the time to dance; or cry; or laugh—the spontaneous spirit I believe, by the way, that motivates the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Deep within Gandhi, of course, I feel an inner stability that recognizes how all these affairs of the world pass, and that each must be endured, enjoyed, understood, analyzed, comprehended, shared, parlayed—whatever the moment demands—as they manifest.  And only as they manifest.

And when their season is over, the only wise thing to do is recognize their ending as prelude to all those things that are newly arising.  Dancing Gandhi, whirling spontaneously around his deliberate convictions, embodies this balance for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VETERANS DAY: A FEW THOUGHTS ON WAR & PEACE

Today is Veteran’s Day, a day when the pundits make Big Statements about Big Subjects.  I’m not a pundit, but here’s mine:  I believe that many of the freedoms that I enjoy today were secured by the very wars that I abhor and oppose.  

That doesn’t make a lot of sense.  But neither does war, and neither does peace, and that is my point.

As I watched MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ today, I heard the heartfelt appeals to help the veterans of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Our country, as we all know, has dropped the ball here.  The men and women who fought in these wars suffer from an array of physical and mental problems, and unlike our World War II veterans, they are suffering alone and alienated, unintentionally quarantined by a country who has learned too much about the motivations that drove our leaders to enter these wars.  

After all, who wants to be reminded of a mistake that is expensive, that creates widows and widowers, and fatherless and motherless children, and suffering, and trauma, and deformity, and homelessness, and exile that extend for decades into the future?  Who wants to be held accountable for that?

Because we don't like to clean up our messes, and because these particular veterans from these particular wars remind us of those messes, we turn our backs on them.  It's not pretty.  

We identify the soldier with the war, and that’s a mistake.  If we are to have a national defense, then we must have soldiers.  Yet our soldiers are not to blame when our government deploys them in reprehensible ways.  We must blame our elected leaders and those of us who elected them.

Remember:  soldiers don’t have the luxury, or the desire, I suppose, to indulge just-war theory.  They fight when they are told to fight.  And so as citizens of a liberal democracy, and as compassionate citizens, we honor that principle because we have benefited from it, and we honor the soldiers who return from war, whether or not we approve of that war.  

All veterans deserve the same care and treatment—we honor our soldiers by comprehensively healing our soldiers.

And yet as I was listening to the talking heads this morning, with their anxious and laudable concern about PTSD, drug abuse, and depression among our veterans, I heard nothing about treating the root cause of these symptoms. 

I heard nothing about the logical and comprehensive prevention of war.  

I heard nothing about nonviolence.  Or peace.  Or Mahatma Gandhi.  Or Martin Luther King, Jr.  Or Gene Sharp.  Or the Dalai Lama.   Or Nelson Mandela.  All I heard was the feverish language of triage, without a single word given to stopping the wars that impel the injuries that maim the soldiers that require the healing that’s quickly forgotten by a culture weary of war.  

Because we will never rid the world of war, we must make certain that we never rid the world of peace.  But here’s the problem.  We must also match the vast resources that our government pours into war—and the preparation for war—with an endowment, if you will, for peace.  This endowment will not be funded by the federal government, which is in the business of making war.  A peace endowment must find its funding in human capital, in the wealth of energy and creativity that arise spontaneously when we remind ourselves that we do, in fact, revere life and that we will do what we can, in our daily lives, in our jobs, and in our families, to embody that reverence.

Exercise:  Remind yourself as many times as you can today how deeply you revere the lives of those that are closest to you, and when you see a stranger on the street, tell yourself that he or she also has a similar compliment of loved ones, and then realize that this reverence should logically, and can finally, with practice, be extended to everyone that you see.  This is a practice that bears results in real-time. 

In fact, from that simple exercise have come the individuals who gave themselves and, at times, their lives to peace; the organizations that are formed to continue the spirit of these sacrifices; and in the best of times, those substantial victories when people, communities, and countries have chosen peace over war.  

War happens, but so does peace.  And neither will make sense to everyone all the time.  But it is easier and better to live with the victims of peace than it is to live with the victims of war.  

So prepare yourself to choose peace.  It’s not a choice that will arise without work.

TWELFTH TIBETAN SELF-IMMOLATES IN FRONT OF CHINESE EMBASSY IN NEW DELHI

In New Delhi today, Sherab TseDor, 25, self-immolated in front of the Chinese Embassy. While human rights are always at stake in these protests, the central concern regards the fate of the Tibetans who are currently living in Tibet under an increasingly oppressive Chinese regime.  The young man read a statement before he set himself on fire and claimed that he hoped to join the "eleven martyrs" that had preceded him.  Indian police, however, were able to extinguish the flames, and Sherab is currently recovering from his wounds in a Delhi hospital.  

Sherab marks the twelfth Tibetan to undertake this heroic form of protest.  His action also underscores the close connection felt between the Tibetans living in exile and their fellow countrymen who remain in Tibet.  The mainstream cable channels in our country, where most Americans seem to get their news nowadays, has not covered the Tibetan resistance movement in any depth—it never has, in fact—and it is sad that an originally free people has been denied the kind of coverage that they deserve in our country.  Still, because of the efforts of the Dalai Lama, who is bigger even than American cable, and because of the resolute will of the Tibetan people, both in Tibet and in exile, the Tibetan cause has garnered a steadily growing audience of supporters.

In fact, the newly elected Prime Minister of Tibet, Lobsang Sangay, was in our nation's capitol today to speak to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and the Prime Minister's speech, a long one, is a masterful treatment of American support of the Tibetan cause.  

He reminds the Commission that Tibetans have taken great sustenance from American support over the years:  

In very difficult times, American support keeps Tibetans’ spirits up and their hopes alive – hopes that the future may bring change that will allow Tibetans to reclaim their dignity and their fundamental freedoms.

But Tibet is at a crossroads now, it seems, as the oppression in eastern Tibet is intensifying daily and as the importation of Han Chinese into Lhasa and the surrounding areas continues at a steady pace.  

Now, with the advent of the fire protests, shouldn't we move from being a more or less silent partner to Tibet's goals of freedom and democracy toward a more vocal and insistent advocate of their fundamental human rights?

Wouldn't that do wonderful things for our international reputation?

Surely, now would be an auspicious time for us to begin a more public phase of our support.

THE ELEVENTH SELF-IMMOLATION IN EASTERN TIBET

Palden Choetso, 35, and a Tibetan Buddhist nun from the Kham Tawo region of Eastern Tibet, set herself on fire today as she called for the long life of the Dalai Lama (story).  She has apparently died from her burns.

This news arrives on the heels of learning yesterday that the Confucius Institute, a cultural organization tied directly to the Chinese government, had offered Stanford University $4 million to endow a professorship in Chinese, with one condition: Stanford must refrain from speaking about Tibet in any fashion. Richard Saller, Stanford's Dean of Humanities and Sciences, refused these draconian terms, and China, of course backed down (story).  

Good for Dean Saller.

There are currently 75 Confucius Institutes at American schools and universities, and while they are not all set up blatantly to propagandize about Chinese oppression in Tibet, the Chinese government clearly feels that it must address the pro-Tibet feelings that have been growing for years on many American campuses.  And the Confucius Institute is one way of doing that.  

Besides, eleven Tibetans have now undertaken extreme acts of heroism that the Chinese government cannot control or spin or filter.  Eleven nonviolent monks and nuns vs. the Chinese empire . . . and the whole world is watching. 

I'm thankful for the role that our universities and our students have played in raising awareness about the current occupation of Tibet by the Chinese government. At a time when American higher education wrestles with enormous problems regarding funding and curricular matters, it is heartening to see that the Chinese government, at least, sees us as a threat to their designs on Tibet.

China, in fact, seems to take us more seriously than many of our legislators.