- By Michael True

The influence of an extraordinary human being such as Gandhi is reflected in manifestations of life and work in history. In religious terms, it is related to the ability of a human being to convey a sense of the divine, of transcendence. Through these individuals we apprehend, if not comprehend, the intersection of time and eternity and truth in our time.

It is this quality that has, in a peculiar way, led some people to confine Gandhi to a place almost outside history, as if he were unique-a saint, in fact, which Gandhi was at pains to discourage at various times in his life. It is a caution we must take seriously if we are to appreciate the full significance of Gandhi's life and work- particularly if we are to remain faithful to his witness. This requires our not only passing along his tradition, but also critiquing it, indicating how it does or does not speak to theories and strategies for non-violent social change in our place, in our time.

Gandhi was, like us, a human being, with all the limitations and frailties that implies. In the words of another major theorist of non­violence, Gene Sharp, Gandhi was a brilliant strategist, in whom the word non-violence or satyagraha was made flesh. He accomplished this feat through continual experiment, multiple successes and failures, ever learning from his experience over a half-century of action, meditation, writing, and research.

In the process, Gandhi extended and deepened a tradition rooted in the 19th century and further back in history. He also helped to recover a tradition long buried by the violence of Western culture. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that "Jesus gave us the inspiration and Gandhi gave us the method."

The theologian Walter Wink has demonstrated, in his careful exegesis of a famous passage in Matthew's gospel, that Jesus was a practical as well as a moral leader, if we understand the implications of his counsel within the context of Jewish culture at that time. When Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, and surrender our cloak as well as our coat to someone in need," he was not counseling our remaining passive in the face of humiliation. Such gestures were confrontational in that culture. At that time, in a territory occupied by the Romans, Jesus was recommending concrete ways of resisting humiliation and oppression.

Without Gandhi's example, as well as the insights and writings of Adin Ballou's Christian Nonresistance, 1846, and Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1893, referring to Jesus's example, non­violence might have been lost to history.

In appreciating the extent of Gandhi's legacy, Indians are familiar with people and campaigns inspired by his example. What I can do, as a result of my twenty-year involvement with the International Peace Research Association and its Foundation, is to point to specific projects in other parts of the world. In recent history, "ordinary people," whom we know little about, have continued Gandhi's experiments with truth, in an ever-deepening history of non-violence: a concept, a force or power for social change that we have realized only partially.

Before turning to examples that I know at first hand, I must acknowledge that major non-violent movement in progress in Burma or Myanmar, where brave Buddhist monks and their associates resist the military government and work to restore the rightfully elected head of state, Aung San Su Kyi. In India, as well, landless peasants, under the leadership of Roger Gopal, have initiated a non-violent movement to obtain imbursement for lands seized by industrialists in Bihar. At such a time, anyone committed to non-violent social change must consider seriously what we as individuals individually and collectively might do to support them.

Gandhi's living legacy, however, stretches well beyond South Asia to other parts of the world, recently manifest by (1) the United Nations Decade for the Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World, passed by 169 members of the General Assembly in 1999; and (2) the Non-violent Peaceforce, headquartered in Brussels and St. Paul, Minnesota, now engaged in conflict resolution initiatives in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Mindanao, the Philippines.

Two powerful examples of Gandhi's persistent influence that I have chosen to emphasize, however, are (1) the Gaviria Cathedra, a programme in non-violence education in the richly endowed but violence-plagued country of Colombia, bordering the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea; and (2) the School of Americas Watch, a legislative and direct-action campaign to close down a center at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where the U.S. has trained members of death squads active throughout Latin America.

The non-violent initiative in Colombia is named after Guilliamo Gaviria, the late governor of the state of Antioquia, whose capital is Medellin, the city of perpetual spring. It is a region victimized by violence from the drug cartel, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC), as well as paramilitaries hired by multinational corporations appropriating the great wealth of Colombia.

Four years ago, farmers and peasants, after an extensive programme in non-violence education, organized a peace walk to liberate an area threatened and victimized by rebels, paramilitaries, and drug lords. Demoralized by killings and intimidation, farmers and peasants conducted a five-hundred-mile peace pilgrimage, "the Caicedo March," joined by the governor and former governor of the State of Antioquia, as well as non-violent activists and trainers from the U.S. During the long march, the rebels asked to speak with the governors and two Americans, including Dr. Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights activist and compatriot of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. When the four men agreed to negotiate with the rebels, they were kidnapped, the two Americans eventually released, and the governors held for six months in a rebel hideout.

During their incarceration, Governor Gaviria pleaded with civil authorities not to send Colombian military to try to liberate them. In several eloquent letters to his father, published in the press, the governor spoke eloquently of his dedication to non-violence, "as an alternative path that could direct our people to finally recognize the urgent necessity for a change in attitude. It consoles my soul to learn," he added, "that at least our kidnapping has been an instrument to shake public opinion" and to focus national attention on the misfortune of thousands of hostages victimized by the FARC. In these letters, Governor Gaviria indicated not only a sophisticated knowledge of non-violence theory and strategy, but also a willingness to sacrifice his life for his endangered countrymen and women. "I am a true believer in the potential of non-violence to transform behavior and attitudes, which will help us create new forms of politics and new models for social solution, for we cannot continue justifying violence as inevitable and accepting it as routine."

In spite of his pleas against intervention, government troops eventually moved into the compound, their assault ending in the death of Governor Gaviria and his compatriots. As a result of his sacrifice, his non-violent campaign today involves many people, including my congressman from Massachusetts, who has worked to reduce U.S. military aid to Colombia, whose president has been linked to paramilitaries. A major figure in this effort is a remarkable woman, Amada Benavides de Perez, who initiated Fundacion Escuelas de Paz, in the capital city, Bogota. Earlier, she had acted as a mediator in an effort to rescue her brother who was kidnapped by the FARC, for ransom. Recently appointed to the UN High Commission on Human Rights, Mrs. Benavides was rewarded for her courageous and effective effort with three death threats. Nevertheless, she and her associates continue working in the tradition of Gandhi in Colombia, one of many initiatives throughout Latin America.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Father Roy Bourgeois, M.M., and his co­workers maintain an eighteen-year-long direct action and legislative campaign to close the so-called School of Assassins, where the U.S. trains militaries from throughout Latin America, sometimes in torture. The evidence for this accusation was confirmed when activists read the training manuals at the base and broadcast them to the media. Through extensive research, the campaign has identified soldiers, some of them honor graduates of the school, involved in the murder of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador; four American women; six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers, and thousands of others in El Salvador.

Roy Bourgeois, who initiated School of Americas Watch, is a veteran of the Vietnam war, who then studied for the priesthood and worked for seven years among the poor of Peru and Bolivia. There, he took to standing with poor people victimized by police and military personnel. Forced into exile, he returned to the U.S. and began research identifying members of the death squads, finding that they were trained at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and financed by American's tax dollars. In an imaginative act of civil disobedience, Father Bourgeois broadcast a sermon by the martyred Archbishop Romero, throughout the School of Americas dormitories, pleading with the soldiers to stop the killing. As a result, he was arrested, and spent several months in jail.

As soon as he was released, Father Bourgeois rented an apartment near the main gate of Ft. Benning, and gradually involved tens of thousands of people in non-violent protests every November and in a legislative campaign at the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., to cut off funding for the school. That campaign continues, involving several members of the U.S. Congress in an effort to cut funding for the programme. Similarly, several Latin American countries, Argentina, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Uruguay, now refuse to send their police to the School of Americas (now renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHISC) for military training, as governments there extricate themselves from policies that perpetuate violence.

Such initiatives in Colombia and the U.S. are only two among similar non-violent actions confirming the fact that Gandhi is alive in the hearts and minds of men and women around the world. Daily, these "ordinary people" extend his legacy, building cultures of peace.

At the same, one almost despairs in our efforts to remain faithful to Gandhi's legacy, to non-violence and to peacemaking. As an American, I am painfully aware (a) that my own tax dollars help to pay for the U.S. government to make and to distribute weapons of mass destruction; and (b) that the $500 billion my country spends on armaments each year would feed, clothe, educate, and provide health care for every person in the world for several years.

At the same time, I remember that I am part of a global community committed to building cultures of peace in the midst of violence and injustice, and that each of us has a significant part to play in that effort. A daily commitment to non-violent social change takes courage, as Gandhi indicated in his experiments with truth, when one is forced to seek the good without fully understanding what that involves.

By way of conclusion, let me suggest two recent sources of inspiration and challenge that may be helpful in that struggle. The first, a book, Courageous Resistance: The Poiver of Ordinary People, 2007, focuses on strategies for peacemaking employed by ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

In a range of "impossible situations"-in Nazi Germany, Le Chambon, France, war-torn Rwanda and Burundi, Abu Gharib prison, and other places, these individuals engaged in selfless behavior, at high risks to themselves, to protect and sustain others in danger. Regarding victims and perpetrators as deserving human dignity, they transformed the context, broadened the prospects for survival, and created seemingly mundane institutions that reinforced the determination of others to resist evil. An essential message of this book is that positive reinforcement of even one person can strengthen other individuals' moral behavior and inspire them to action.

Another source of challenge and encouragement, for me, are works of art that offer modest, yet concrete hints of a global civil culture, an interdependent world, such as Denise Levertov's poem, "Beginners." In the midst of discouragement (Levertov was arrested several times for participation in anti war and anti-nuclear demonstrations), the poet bases her hope, it seems to me, on the legacy of Gandhi that is alive and well, even in dark times.

"But we have only begun/ to love the earth," Levertov says, then asks:

How could we tire of hope? - so much is in bud.
How can desire fail? - we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy...
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?...
Not yet, not yet - there is too much broken that must be mended
So much hurt we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.

Courtesy: Gandhi Marg, Volume 30, Number 4, January-March 2008