Tag: George Lakey

Quaker professor George Lakey’s 8 nonviolent strategies to respond to terrorism piqued the Pentagon’s interest. Learn what happened next.

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Transcript

As an experiment, because I was teaching here at Swarthmore College, I decided to offer a course called “Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism,” and see if anybody would come. We had to lottery the course, there were so many students who were excited about this different approach.

Can There Be a Nonviolent Response to Terrorism?

What their job was, was to write. Each student had to choose a country that is currently threatened by terrorism; get to know that country—its strengths, its weaknesses; and develop a defense strategy against the threat, a strategy that would be nonviolent in character. That was their term paper for the semester.

The 8 Tools of Nonviolent Defense

There were eight different tools that I discovered in my research that have been used, actually, by various nation-states as defense modes. For example, one of those tools—you wanted an example—one of those tools is economic development. Do economic development in the area where the prime recruiting ground is for terrorists, because terrorist are very often motivated by economic injustice, and economic oppression. If you turn that situation around and provide plentiful jobs, a lot of the people that would otherwise decide on a career of terrorism will get a job and, you know, be straightforward citizens. And so, that’s one of the eight.

Healing as a Strategic Tool

What terror does—even the threat of terror to some degree—but what the actual act of terror does is traumatize the people most affected and the people that know them. The trauma, then, takes political form and increases that nation’s likelihood of doing stuff to the attacker that increases the amount of the attack. That’s what happened on 9/11. The U.S., by its response to Afghanistan, and then Iraq, increased the total number of terrorists available in the world, increased Osama Bin Laden’s prominence. It was just amazing… the U.S. decided to be the primary recruiter of terrorists against itself. But it did that not because it’s so stupid as to want to recruit terrorists for Osama Bin Laden, not intentionally. But because the trauma itself forced the U.S. into doing this mad thing that anybody pragmatic would not want to do. So, another tool of these eight is to go right into a healing mode for the people who were traumatized. In this case, in the U.S., it was really the whole population that was traumatized by the 9/11 experience. So, that’s another example of a tool.

Implementing Nonviolence as Policy

It’s hard to summarize those tools, because it took a whole semester to really lay them out, so that students would have enough ability to operate with them. They did. They did fantastic papers. In the meantime, the Pentagon heard about this, and asked me to come down. And so, I went down and met with a policy unit of the Pentagon that had to do with responding to terrorism. These were professionals in the field. I’m not a professional in the field of terrorism, but there they were.

So, I laid it all out and I said, in the beginning, the one reason that I want to lay out these eight for you, is not only because the students—who are definitely not experts, they’re undergraduates—were able to make so much sense for the defense planning for the various countries that they chose, including Israel, including the U.S., including Indonesia and other countries that were threatened. Not only were the students able to write papers that made so much sense but also, you, as experts, I’m hoping for you to show more about how synergies will happen by the combination of the eight. Because, yes, there are countries that have tried number two and number five but what if you take all eight, and forget about the military response, just say, instead of a military response, we’ll have a nonviolent response. Use those eight synergistically with each other, so that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. I want you, as experts to give me that kind of feedback.

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Swarthmore College professor George Lakey in this week’s Quaker Speak on why Quakers are nonviolent, pacifism and nonviolence (also known as nonviolent action). We talked with George Lakey about Quakers’ call to struggle, the myth that violence works, and how that’s all changing.

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Fox said that we do not war with outward weapons. Our understanding of Jesus is he will not ask us to do outward weapons. We don’t understand a holy Spirit that one minute says “be peaceful” and the next minute, “Go out and kill a lot of people.”

We don’t understand that kind of Spirit. The Spirit we experience is one that is consistent and wants us to not war with outward weapons.

I’m George Lakey, Philadelphia Quaker.

We’re going through a paradigm change right now. It’s something that I didn’t know if I would ever live to see because the paradigm that says, “when push comes to shove, you have to use violence,” is so tough and it’s been around for tens of thousands of years. It seems as obvious as the paradigm once was that the Earth was flat. Everybody knows the Earth is flat, right? Well, not any longer.

But that’s how toughly in-built the paradigm is that violence is what needs to be used when we’re going to really exert power and do humanitarian interventions or anything we want to do. “When it’s tough we have to use violence.” But that’s shifting now.

Quakers understood it 350 years ago because it was what they felt naturally you do when the spirit is in you saying, “love people and do what’s right. Set up the conditions under which it is easier to do right and stop oppressing each other.” The practical dimension of Quakers was expressed through nonviolent struggle.

Struggle, mind you. Not everyone responds in that way. Some people say “spirituality means I should avoid struggle.” But for Early Quakers, the Spirit wanted us to go out and do struggle. And so Quakers would pick fights.

Quakers would go into churches for example, and after a preacher had preached something that they felt like was really wrong, they would stand up and contradict the preacher even though that meant that it was pretty likely that they would be grabbed by the parishioners nearby and dragged out of the church and beaten up just outside the church. But they would do that, that’s an example of nonviolent struggle.

It’s because, “yes we make war with inward weapons”, and they even called themselves people who were struggling for the Lamb’s war. They were fighting the Lamb’s war. So this was a warrior outfit, these 17th century Quakers, who were fighting with nonviolent means.

There’s a new scholarly book [“Why Civil Resistance Works” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan] that the hardboiled political scientists who wrote it are getting enormous credit for. It describes in ways that political scientists and hardboiled realists, governance people, are taking deeply seriously because the book describes over 300 struggles in which regime change has been the issue: overthrowing governments or getting out from under an empire or stopping an occupation — big stuff. In this book, they prove that the movements that chose nonviolent means were twice as effective as the movements that chose violent means.

To anyone who is pragmatic of mind, this is news. This is extremely important. So it’s not only seeing the Egyptians overthrow Mubarak, or seeing the Tunisians overthrow their dictator or the other kinds of recent experiences that we’ve seen, but it’s also the scholarship—which is important in terms of idea formation—is beginning to catch up with this idea of nonviolent struggle.

It’s just believing that the Earth was flat. You can’t really hold it against people for believing that the Earth was flat. At a certain time in history, everybody knows that the Earth was flat. And at this time in history, most people just know that violence is the only way to do things when it’s tough. However, the excitement for me is there have been sufficient breakthroughs so that now an opening may exist. And maybe some adventurous person watching this will decide to open themselves to new possibilities.

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