Viewpoint Jesus, Gandhi, King point the way
By JAMES W. DOUGLASS
It almost looks like a nuclear
bomb.
That was the comparison many of us made from the carnage and
destruction from the attacks on the World Trade Center. However, the explosion
of a single nuclear weapon in Manhattan would be truly a quantum leap of
violence, once again reducing the towers of our ambition to rubble and the land
of our dreams to a horror beyond all horrors. The next stage of this unfolding
scenario will make the enormous tragedy we are experiencing now seem tiny by
comparison. Yet a nuclear explosion in our country and our hearts is the
logical next step in response to the policy of retaliation we are unthinkingly
pursuing.
Nuclear weapons, which represent the end of not only New York City
and Washington, but the end of our world, have already become accessible to
small groups of people. Nor will any billion-dollar missile shield
stop a suitcase holocaust weapon from being carried into downtown Manhattan. We
are living literally at the end of the world. Will we recognize that state of
the question? Or will our talking TV heads take us blindly to Armageddon?
Our greatest prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., understood our
situation profoundly. He summed it up in his prophecy for the rest of human
history: Nonviolence or nonexistence. King knew humankind had
passed beyond the imaginable limits of violence at Hiroshima. God and history
have therefore challenged us to pass equally beyond the imaginable limits of
nonviolence. King, like his master, Jesus, and Mahatma Gandhi felt there was in
truth no limits to nonviolence.
As were the prophets before him, King was a realist. By
nonviolence he did not mean a world without conflict. He meant a deepening,
widening commitment in humanity to meet every conflict with unflinching
compassion, non-cooperation with evil and an effort to see through the eyes of
ones opponent. Jesus said, Love your enemies. Gandhi and King
learned to interpret this as a command to see through your enemies eyes
while resisting all evil. In the nuclear age, these are not counsels for
perfection but ground rules of survival.
So what do we do when our opponents are willing to advance their
cause by the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands and millions once they
possess that nuclear weapon?
Jesus, a realist if there ever was one, said that we had better
settle our conflicts. As a Jew in a corner of the Roman Empire, Jesus of
Nazareth knew what the center of power was capable of. He saw precisely what
Rome would do to Jerusalem and the Temple if his countrymen did not understand
and think beyond the spiral of violence. The end of that world 40 years later,
in the leveling of Jerusalem, prefigures the end of our own world, which we
seem equally incapable of imagining.
Kings prophecy, like that of his master, is the vision of a
complete realist: nonviolence or nonexistence. King knew that the relatively
unexplored reality of nonviolence, the lived reality of the kingdom of God
on earth as it is in heaven, was infinitely more powerful than any
bomb on earth.
Nonviolence is the unshakable belief, as Gandhi put it, that
everyone without exception has a piece of the truth. Let the voice of even
Osama bin Laden and the alienated millions he speaks for be heard by us, not
assaulted by our missiles in a totally blind act of vengeance.
Let those among the living, who we think may have conspired with
the dead hijackers to mass murder, be brought to a fair trial, just as we if so
accused would wish to be tried by the standards of international law and our
own Constitution.
In response to unimaginable violence, let there be the
inconceivably more powerful response of impartial justice, a concern for the
truth, and nonviolent non-cooperation with a counter evil.
Either that or let us recognize what we are now choosing: the end
of our world.
Nonviolence or nonexistence.
James W. Douglass is the author of four books on the theology
of nonviolence and is co-founder of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent
Action next to the Trident submarine base in Seattle. His latest book is
The Nonviolent Coming of God (Orbis Books).
National Catholic Reporter, September 28,
2001
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