Jim Douglass
“We have passed beyond the imaginable limits of violence. Can we pass equally beyond the imaginable limits of nonviolence?”
It almost looks like a nuclear bomb.” That was the comparison many of us made when we saw the carnage and destruction from the attacks on the World Trade Center. Was there something prophetic in the comparison?
The explosion of a single nuclear weapon in Manhattan would be a quantum leap of violence. This inconceivable event would make even the enormous tragedy of September 11 seem tiny by comparison. Yet it is the logical next step in response to the policy of retaliation we are unthinkingly pursuing.
Nuclear weapons–which represent the end not only of New York City and Washington, D.C., but of our entire world–are already accessible to small groups of people. No billion-dollar “missile shield” will 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? Or will our talking heads take us blindly to Armageddon?
Martin Luther King, Jr., understood our situation profoundly. He summed it up in his contingent prophecy for the rest of human history: “Nonviolence or nonexistence.” King knew humanity had passed beyond the imaginable limits of violence at Hiroshima. Today, God and history challenge us to pass equally beyond the imaginable limits of nonviolence. King, like Gandhi and Jesus, felt there were in truth no limits to nonviolence.
Like the prophets before him, King was a realist. By “nonviolence” he did not mean a world without conflict. He meant a deepening, widening commitment to meet every conflict with unflinching compassion, noncooperation with evil, and an effort to see through the eyes of one’s opponent. “Love your enemies,” Jesus said; see through their eyes while resisting all evil, Gandhi and King interpreted. In the nuclear age, this is not a counsel of perfection, but a ground rule 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 doing. He saw precisely what Rome would do to Jerusalem and the temple if the spiral of violence were not broken. The end of that world came forty years later, in the leveling of Jerusalem. That event prefigures the end of our own world. And just as the Jews of Jesus’ day could not imagine the destruction of the temple, we seem equally incapable of imagining our own destruction.
King’s prophecy, like that of Jesus, is the vision of a complete realist: Nonviolence or nonexistence. King knew that the relatively unexplored reality of nonviolence, the lived reality of the reign of God “on earth as it is in heaven,” was infinitely more powerful than any bomb on earth.
Nonviolence is rooted in the unshakable belief 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, not assaulted by our missiles in an act of vengeance. May God’s justice and peace be with all of them, as with all of us.
Let the suffering of countless brothers and sisters, crushed by our policies, be felt by us as one with our own suffering in the shadows of September 11. Let the depth and urgency of their demands for justice become our own, in an inconceivable transformation and unification.
In response to unimaginable violence, let there be the inconceivably more powerful response of impartial justice, a concern for the truth, a compassion for all, and nonviolent noncooperation with evil.
Either that, or let us recognize what we are now choosing–the end of our world. Nonviolence or nonexistence.
Author Jim Douglass is a peace activist and author of several books, including The Nonviolent Coming of God. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
Reposted from The Other Side Online, © 2002 The Other Side, January-February 2002, Vol. 38, No. 1.