Every one of those lives lost in Iraq -- American or Iraqi -- has been wasted -- carelessly, willfully, selfishly thrown away by BushCheneyRumsfeld et al.
Unfortunately, the waste of life won't end soon. And with every new casualty announcement, the ache in my heart becomes more throbbing, more piercing, more permanent.
But, history shows us that violence does not make things better. Violence is not an effective means for social change. In fact, violence against an oppressive government usually strengthens that government. Violence that targets innocent people through terrorist acts drives the rest of the populace into the embrace of the oppressors. Let me give just two examples.
1. Peru. I know Peru well. I've done field work there and have spent quite a lot of time living amongst Peruvians and working with them. Quite by accident, a friend and I witnessed some of the early history of Sindero Luminoso in Cuzco. During my travels there, I witnessed the results of the violence. Thankfully, I was not of violence myself.
The history of economic and political oppression and repression in Latin American is long and horrible, and it can't be recounted here. But that history does still live -- there is still a callous, unthinking brutality in the way Latin American elites control their countries. As a Peruvian friend said to me, the legacy of the Spanish Conquest is insidious and it lives throughout the society.
There have been times when I've witnessed things in Peru that made me feel that there was no option but to take up a gun and fight. I can easily comprehend how the people who must live with it day and day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime, reach such despair that joining a violent revolution seems the only way to change their country.
One of the major studies of Sindero Luminoso cited social advancement as a major reason why many lower middle class people supported Sindero. Sindero was not much supported by the desperately poor, but rather by educated people who saw themselves forever locked out of any meaningful status in their own country.
And guess what happened? There was a brutal civil war, complete with horrific terrorist bombings that killed women and children, massacres of peasants by both sides, many incidents of "desaparicidos" -- students, workers, writers, artists who left with Sinderistas, police or military escorts and never came back. When Sinderistas entered a highland village, they frequently massacred all the older men in the village and forced young people to join them -- they used child soldiers, just as are being used in Africa today.
Over time, the Peruvian population grew to hate Sindero Luminoso far beyond whatever resentments they had because of their social situation, and they began to cooperate -- enthusiastically -- in tracking down Sinderistas. It was that engagement by the population that eventually brought down the SL leadership and got them all sent to prison.
But, guess what? Peru is still and will remain a terribly unjust place. It is a country where "injusticia social" is a way of life.
When I was there, I would say to my Peruvian friends, "Well, you really need non-violent resistance. You need a Gandhi-like figure to lead a non-violent resistance. Nothing will really change until thousands of people march in the streets non-violently in support of their demands for justice."
And they laughed at me. Naive American woman. Ha Ha Ha.
That was before the non-violent revolutions in much of Eastern Europe. Now we have much more empirical evidence for the value and longevity of non-violent movements.
Look at the globe. Put your finger on a country. Was the revolution there violent or non-violent? Which succeeded and which failed?
The slow, steady work of non-violence takes a great many years to show results -- but the results when they come, be it in the Ukraine or in Czechoslovakia or Poland or even the Soviet Union, come quickly, like an overpowering tsunami, and not even the most brutal Ceaucescu can withstand it.
2. On the other hand, there are the Palestinians, who have been entirely dedicated to violent action against Israel for over sixty years. The horrible back-and-forth of killing and killing and bombing and bombing. What has it accomplished?
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