Tell It To the Marines

The flickering campfire light reflected off the cold barrel of an M-16 Armalite. A guerrilla, in thought, rose, placed a few more pine chips on the fire, and sat down again. Then conversation resumed. Late into the night, a dozen guerrillas and a few visitors were discussing their lives and their visions for the future of the Philippines. In fact, this was the third night of such discussions in this remote mountain redoubt, and the exchange had become fairly honest, sometimes painfully so. It must have been about 2:00 a.m. on that third night when we put the question to them directly: What about your use of violence? How will that affect the revolution you are seeking? Might it be possible to achieve a more just and compassionate Philippine society with nonviolent means?

The response exploded with more force than an M-16: "How strange to hear an American talk to us about nonviolence!"

We First World pacifists have consistently rejected the just war thesis. For similar reasons many equally question the just revolution proposition. While guerrilla groups have fought, to overthrow corrupt and oppressive regimes, as in Nicaragua or El Salvador, pacifists--who generally share an abhorrence for those regimes--have maintained that there must be a better way than armed struggle to bring about genuine liberation.

A pacifist spokesperson in the United States was once quoted as saying: "What evidence is there that the Central American movement has had an in-depth understanding of nonviolence and made a serious attempt to apply nonviolent struggle to the situation facing them?"

Sometimes the question is asked in this way: "Why is it that when people are killed in a nonviolent movement it is said that nonviolence doesn't work, yet when many more people die in guerrilla warfare no one says violence doesn't work?"

Some of us pacifists make these arguments primarily from a biblical perspective, namely that Jesus in his mountainside sermon and in his very life calls for a "higher way," a way of turning the other cheek both figuratively and literally. This higher way means loving your enemy. While Jesus' ministry is solidly to "release the oppressed" (Luke 4:18), his ethics preclude the use of even "revolutionary violence" against the foe.

Others of us make such assertions on more pragmatic or humanitarian grounds. This pragmatic voice says that the armed course to overthrow tyranny is far too costly in human lives lives not only of those we call oppressors (which, in this viewpoint, also have intrinsic value) but lives of the oppressed as well. Further, we maintain, the revolution built on violence will reap violence after the revolution. "Whatsoever a man soweth..."

As persons who have spent the greater part of our last 15 years in revolutionary situations in Vietnam and the Philippines, we have witnessed something of the effects of armed violence. In response we simply cry: there must be a better way. Can there be any way worse?

It's the cost that staggers, the sheer cost in human lives. And for us the force of that comes not by reciting the millions of casualty statistics of warfare. It comes in remembering people: our closest friend, Em Trinh, racing back home from the rice field after a bombing raid on her village only to discover her mother burned to death in their napalmed house; Em Trinh's sister, crippled for life when an 82 mm mortar fired by the guerrillas at the army outpost fell short into her refugee camp. And we remember flying in a C-123 plane with eight green body bags filled with lifeless young Americans who were sent, likely against their will, to fight a confusing war in Asia.

First World radicals who have never experienced the dehumanization of protracted years of killing and fear that inevitably accompanies armed revolution should not be too glib in applauding or advocating armed struggle as the solution for the problems of the Third World.

The social cost may be even greater. The level of hatred and duplicity generated by warfare escalates to demonic proportions on both sides of the conflict. Even after the cost has exceeded any perceived benefit, the spirit of enmity is fired up to sustain the warfare if only to justify the tremendous cost already incurred. When sustained over a period of years, such passion takes a gripping toll that does not disappear when the shooting stops.

For example, the U.S. government is essentially still at war against Vietnam in refusing any assistance to that country and encouraging virtual sabotage of Vietnam's economy. Similarly, the victorious Vietnamese government, while not carrying out the bloodbath against officers of the former regime as some had predicted, still detains likely thousands of these people in onerous re-education camps. Armed warfare plants seeds of dominance which will yield bitter fruit in succeeding generations.

The spiritual cost may be the greatest. What does it do to me to spill the blood of another human? For me to perceive my enemy as less than human? For me to decide whether that person should live or die? What does that do to my spirit? To my ability to build a society of compassion and wholeness?

Answering these questions has caused us to come to the firm conclusion that our troubled human community needs a creative and vigorous application of the potent attitudes and techniques of engaged nonviolence (truth-force, or satyagraha, as Gandhi put it). Attitudes and actions which empower the lowliest persons to see themselves on equal standing with the most powerful. Attitudes and actions which refuse complicity in the evil of the oppressor but which simultaneously recognize "that which is of God" even within the oppressive person. A power through which, in the words of Philippine activist Romy Tiongco, "I will not seek to hate enough to be willing to kill, but to love enough to be willing to die."

The need for an effective articulation and implementation of an engaged and aggressive program of nonviolent struggle has perhaps never been greater. This need arises particularly in light of the scale of weaponry, both conventional and nuclear, that is available today, and which is so total and global in its capacity to kill and destroy.

Having made all these assertions, we now ask: what is the appropriate stance or involvement for concerned First World advocates of nonviolence vis-a-vis revolutionary movements in the Third World?

During our eight years in Asia we heard the concerns of those persons struggling for social justice in their societies either through armed or nonviolent alternatives. We think they would address the following observations and questions to First World pacifists.

- Your message is of interest only when there is evidence that you have felt the weight of oppression.

Have we known experiences comparable to tossing on a bamboo bed in an isolated farmhouse waiting in gnawing suspense for a knock on the door from the drunken National Guard? Or of being clubbed repeatedly with a police truncheon for insisting on proceeding with a nonviolent street march? Or of feeling the dizzying weight of sustained malnutrition?

Filipino revolutionaries have helped us understand that the reason many guerrillas, particularly farmers and tribal minorities, first took up the gun was not with the goal of seizing political power. They armed themselves because they felt threatened. They armed for self-protection.

Nung Carlos shifts nervously on the hand-hewn bench. He's not sure if it is safe for him to talk to his visitors. His leathery bare feet, like roots of the aging banyan, find firm grip on the pounded earth and his eyes steady into a what-is-there-to-lose countenance.

He begins his story by saying that he was born on another island. He was a sharecropper on 12 acres. The landlord took one-half. The soil was depleted. One of his six children died of pneumonia. But the doctor, consulted at the last desperate minute, said if the child had not been undernourished, it would likely have lived.

Soon thereafter, Carlos moved his family to this province. Now he tills three acres, barely enough to feed his four children. (Another died in the meantime.) The hardest time is from March to June: the "hunger months."

And now Carlos has just received word that the land he is farming here was claimed by a sugar tycoon who is expanding his 3,000-acre sugar hacienda. The sugar grower, with the assistance of the town's best lawyer, has won a court ruling saying that Carlos must evacuate the land on which he is "squatting." He remembers the last time farmers resisted such an order in this area. Six were shot and the rest were dumped into trucks and hauled away.

Carlos has not yet decided what he will do, but his 18-year-old son has already taken to the hills with the armed guerrillas and vows he will seek "straight justice" for his family.

Indeed, it may be that we First World pacifists may know some nonviolent organizing skills or attitudes which would assist the Carlos family to achieve the justice they seek. If so, perhaps we are remiss if we do not share that knowledge in a sensitive manner.

But when we criticize revolutionary groups for taking up weapons to defend their land, are we not placing an unfair judgment on people like Nung Carlos' son and his comrades? Can our advocacy of nonviolent alternatives be authentic without our having experienced some of Carlos' vulnerability?

- If your primary preoccupation is with means rather than ends, you're not close enough to the problem.

This critique is not to minimize the importance given to means. Not only do means largely determine the nature of the end, but at any particular historical moment means are ends. But it appears to some that we First World pacifists spend so much time and effort discussing the question of nonviolent means that we lose sight of the injustice we profess to oppose.

By contrast, many persons in the Third World, and in pockets of the First World as well, are sometimes confronted with reality so threatening that the immediate reaction is: "Something, anything, must be done to change this." In such desperate situations an armed response, however poorly conceived, sometimes seems the only means available.

- Your class in society affects the way you respond to injustice.

The human creature is so delightfully complex and creative that it cannot be reduced to a prisoner of class. History is full of examples that demonstrate how people of different classes united effectively to bring about social change.

But if we want to understand why many people feel pushed to the alternative of taking up arms, we must take more seriously the question of class. One Filipino priest helped us see it in this way:

If you flash at me the word "hungry," what do I think of? I think of opening the door of the refrigerator and asking, "Now, will I snack on crackers and cheese, or will it be bread and jam? Will I have a Coke or a Pepsi? Or coffee?"

But when you flash that word "hungry" at the peasant in the barrio, he is apt to respond, "Should I dig up a few sweet potatoes or would that be foolish since they're not mature yet? How many more weeks until I harvest my corn? Must I borrow another sack from the middleman even if I have to pay back double one month from now when I harvest?"

Many of us First World pacifists tend to fall into an intellectual class. This fact does not necessarily validate or invalidate our 'conclusions, but it is a factor in determining our response to situations. For example, we do not hesitate to write a magazine article about a social injustice or to walk into the office of the governor or the military commander and confront him with a dehumanizing situation for which he is responsible. A poor farmer in the village is not likely to feel secure enough to do that.

- It is strange to hear privileged persons, particularly Americans, encourage us to be nonviolent.

Some of us will protest that we are only Americans by birth. Primarily we are human, world citizens, children of God. We say that truth has no nationality. If engaged nonviolent struggle is an effective means for human liberation, then it should be espoused by persons of all nationalities.

And yet, from the perspective of the Third World, we are often reminded that we from the technologically advanced countries have greatly benefited from adequate diets, education, and employment opportunities which in considerable measure have been available to us because of our country's privileged place in the world. And has not the position of the United States been related in part to a willingness to spill blood around the world "when necessary"? If so, are Third World persons so wrong to take note of our nationality?

Criticisms of armed revolution particularly from an American can strike Third World activists as hypocritical and self-serving. The perfunctory response of several of the veteran guerrillas to our question about violence suggested to us that they found the question genuinely uninteresting and irrelevant. One activist, however, responded with passion. Leaning on the M-203 grenade launcher by his side, he began:

Why is it we always seem to hear the question of nonviolence from Americans? Americans, who barged in and stole our country from us just when we succeeded in kicking out the Spanish colonialists! Americans who, to keep grip on their new colony, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the beginning of this century! Americans, who incinerated women and children in the villages of Vietnam with napalm! Americans, who maintain an economic world order that takes food from Filipino children in order to over-fatten the rich in their own country! Americans who maintain on our soil two of the largest military bases outside the U.S. in order to perpetuate this system of injustice and institutionalized violence....And now it is Americans who come and ask us why we are violent!

- We invite you to confront the institutions of violence in your own countries with the power of nonviolent action.

If engaged nonviolent action can be a potent and redemptive force for human liberation and social justice, we First World pacifists are challenged to do all we can, for example, to use those methods to stop the flow of U.S. guns into El Salvador, to keep U.S. ships with nuclear warheads from leaving our shores and docking in ports around the world.

The most eloquent testimony to the power of nonviolent truth-force with respect to the Philippines will happen when we First World pacifists make significant headway toward nonviolently confronting the giant U.S. military bases in this Pacific nation. And if we are concerned about challenging the forces most predicated on violent coercion in countries like the Philippines, we will direct our primary attention toward the inordinate U.S. domination of local economies and the weapons and military aid that the United States sends to repressive governments in the Third World, as well as the U.S. military bases all over the Third World.

If we do not take that challenge seriously, Third World activists might be forgiven for listening politely to our appeal for nonviolence and then replying: "Tell it to the Marines!"

But there is hope that as we become more potently engaged in addressing the violence our First World countries export to the Third World, we will find ourselves walking with brothers and sisters from all lands in a rigorous but life-giving path of justice and shalom.

Earl and Pat Hostetter Martin were Mennonite Central Committee workers and had spent five years with war refugees in Vietnam and three years with small farmers in the Philippines when this article appeared.