UCA News
Contribute

Would Gandhi's nonviolent approach be as effective today?

Since 1900, civil resistance movements have proven successful in a majority of cases
Would Gandhi's nonviolent approach be as effective today?

(AFP Photo/Narinder Nanu)

Published: November 13, 2014 04:35 AM GMT
Updated: November 12, 2014 04:36 PM GMT

In the decades since the death of Mohandas Gandhi and of his student and successor in the art of nonviolent struggle, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, the understanding of how civil resistance can be effective has expanded. New ideas and practices have emerged in societies that Gandhi could not have foreseen as venues for people's movements, targeting forms of oppression that he had not encountered and which have been able to succeed against brutal regimes and dictators.

The social science of nonviolent action has also deepened, showing among other findings that while violent campaigns have achieved their goals in roughly one-quarter of all cases, civil resistance has since 1900 succeeded in more than half of all such campaigns.

So the question posed by Rabbi A James Rudin — whether "Gandhi's nonviolent resistance" could be used to oppose Islamic State atrocities — sidesteps the greater reality that today, it would not be Gandhi's notions, but a more advanced form of nonviolent conflict, burnished by the collective experience of hundreds of social movements in Gandhi's wake worldwide, which were predicated in no small part on his experiments and practices.

One of the most common and misleading criticisms of Gandhi that Rudin invokes is when he says that Gandhi was either "naïve" to believe that nonviolent action could work against the Nazis or was indifferent to their atrocities. Self-educated and relying on newspapers for foreign news, Gandhi was doubtless not well briefed on the implications of Hitler's rise. Yet as the French scholar Jacques Sémelin documents in his classic study Unarmed Against Hitler, effective nonviolent resistance in nations under Nazi occupation was able to thwart some of Hitler's aims.

Sémelin cites civil resistance to the Nazis by teachers and church leaders in Norway; medical doctors in Holland; scholars and clergy in Poland; Czech and Slovak students and scholars; industrial strikes by laborers and miners in Belgium and France; and notably in Berlin, by the wives of Jewish men who had been taken to the death camps but were returned. All of this helped slow down and undermine the German war effort.

Gandhi may have anticipated this when he said before World War II that facing nonviolent resistance would be a "novel experience" for Hitler.

Mary Elizabeth King is the author of A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance and Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924-25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Change.

 

Full Story: Nonviolent conflict modeled by Gandhi could be just as effective today

Source:National Catholic Reporter

Help UCA News to be independent
Dear reader,
Lent is the season during which catechumens make their final preparations to be welcomed into the Church.
Each year during Lent, UCA News presents the stories of people who will join the Church in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is their Lord. The stories of how women and men who will be baptized came to believe in Christ are inspirations for all of us as we prepare to celebrate the Church's chief feast.
Help us with your donations to bring such stories of faith that make a difference in the Church and society.
A small contribution of US$5 will support us continue our mission…
William J. Grimm
Publisher
UCA News
Asian Bishops
Latest News
UCA News Catholic Dioceses in Asia
UCA News Catholic Dioceses in Asia
UCA News Catholic Dioceses in Asia