Time for Outrage!

Nonviolence: The Path We Must learn to Follow

I am convinced that the future belongs to nonviolence, to the reconciliation of different cultures. It is along this path that humanity will clear its next hurdle. And here, too, I agree with Sartre: we cannot excuse the terrorists who throw the bombs, but we can understand them. In “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” Sartre wrote, “I recognize that violence, manifested in any form, is a failure. But it is an inevitable failure because we live in a world of violence; even though it is true that recourse to violence to fight violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that this is the only way to make violence stop.” To which I would add that nonviolence is a surer way to make it stop. One must not support terrorists, as Sartre did in the name of this principle during the Algerian War, or at the time of the attack on the Israeli athletes committed at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. It doesn’t work, and Sartre himself, at the end of his life, ended by questioning the meaning of terrorism and doubting its justification. To say that “violence doesn’t work” is much more important than to know whether or not to condemn those who have recourse to it. In this notion of “working,” of effectiveness, lies a nonviolent hope. If such a thing as violent hope exists, it is in the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire (“How slow life is/And how violent hope is”), not in the political realm. In March 1980, three weeks before his death, Sartre admitted, “We must try to explain why the world of today, which is horrible, is only one moment in a long historical development, that hope has always been one of the dominant forces of revolutions and insurrections, and how I still feel that hope is my conception of the future.”

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence-choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate.

The message of a Nelson Mandela, a Martin Luther King Jr., is just as relevant in a world that has moved beyond victorious totalitarianism and the cold war confrontation of ideologies. Their message is one of hope and faith in modern societies’ ability to move beyond conflict with mutual understanding and a vigilant patience. To reach that point, societies must be based on rights whose violation prompts outrage-no matter who has violated them. There can be no compromising on these rights.