(no subject)
So, nonviolence.
One of the stories that sticks in the back of my mind from Legend of the Five Rings (samurai fantasy in a similar way that D&D is medieval fantasy) comes from the Way of the Phoenix book. The Phoenix Clan is a cloister of spiritual seekers, children of one of the founding religious traditions and practices in the Empire; as a result of commitment to their faith, many of them are avowedly pacifistic, even to the point of letting attackers injure or kill them in lieu of committing harm against the world. They are also evangelistic about their preference for peace and the pursuit of knowledge, and that preaching has the Clan as a whole looked down for their unwillingness to use force under any circumstances. The Phoenix armies (for they do have armies) do occasionally march, but they never do so lightly.
There are a few tales of Phoenixes paying the ultimate price for their philosophy, but the most remembered one is the story of one of their Clan Champions, who was disgusted by the bloodthirsty wars and battles fought between her neighbors to the north. Both of these other Clans, Lion and Crane, are bastions of honor and looked to as examples of what is noble, glorious, and worth preserving in the Empire; their traditions also pit them against one another in blood rivalries going back generations to the very dawn of history. The Phoenix Clan Champion saw this latest surge of bloodshed-- deemed a matter of honor by the participants, but viewed as gratuitous even by those only peripherally involved in the affair-- and chose to do something about it. Leading one of her legions down from the forests of her home, she positioned her forces between two of the greatest armies that had yet been assembled in the Empire, and sent messages to both daimyo leading the armies, beseeching them to put down their weapons and consider peace.
The messengers are rebuffed, sent packing; both generals want this fight too much, have staked so much on its happening, to consider putting down arms acceptable. The Champion then sends a second messenger to both camps, a warning: they will have to cut down every Phoenix in this army before they will be allowed to fight. The day of the battle dawns, and both armies surge forward to meet one another, eager to burn through Phoenix resistance and kill their hated enemies... except there is no Phoenix resistance. The samurai on the field stand solid, not defending themselves, allowing the other armies to cut them down where they stand. The Phoenix legion is killed to the last soul, including the Champion.
But by the end of it, the generals call off the attack-- an easy thing, as even their own forces have been sickened by their own violence. Each side retreats. The armies disband. One general commits seppuku; the other shaves his head and becomes a monk. It is cited as one of the shining examples of Phoenix virtue, and the fact that it worked bewildered me until I examined the reasons why it did.
The Phoenix did not come to tire enemy soldiers before battle could be joined. They came to cut not at military shifts and shapes, but at the resolve of the generals. Both sides believed their intentions to be justified, not just by the needs of the mortal world but by the laws set down by Heaven, by the heart of duty-- and by bushido. But bushido in the Emerald Empire is not just service; it is respect, courtesy, esteem, and compassion as samurai might make it. Both the Crane and the Lion value the tenets of bushido perhaps more highly and idealistically than any other Clan. Thus, when they revealed themselves as mere murderers and killers in their actions, their thoughts were turned against themselves-- and the generals find themselves following the only logical path that they can see this act concluding in.
The proposition, then: nonviolent means are attacks just as surely as raising a hand or weapon. They simply aim beyond the flesh and blood of their enemies. Is this the case in reality? I would say so.
Mahatma Ghandi, held as one of the innovators of nonviolent resistance. In that time, India was a colony of the British Empire-- a nation that kept colonies for one very specific reason, the same reason that Jamestown and other colonies were created: economics. Client colonies harvest raw materials (cotton, wood, iron, foodstuffs, tobacco, etc); the patron nation sends back manufactured products, and makes sure with military force that the colony does not develop manufacturing capabilities for itself. The colony has little option but to buy from the patron (taxes, military force, etc), and ideally the people who own the factories gain a new market that must be obedient to them or lose any chance at certain sorts of very necessary goods.
Such it was with India. Before the resistance, it was patently apparent that any attempt at armed resistance (as had worked for the proto-Usans, the Mexicans, so forth) was pretty much doomed to failure. Indians didn't have weapons to match the British, they didn't have infrastructure to support an army, and the British would be more than happy to put down uppity bloodthirsty savages. Physical force would not rule the day-- but as Ghandi observed, physical force was not necessary to be victorious.
Sure, the goal can be "win independence for India." To win, though, is to put it in terms of a contest or confrontation, which may well not be one that works. Is the goal also not "render the British army unable or unwilling to invest in the holding of this ground?" For that would get rid of them just as effectively...
Why does Britan want India? Economic reasons. They don't want to live here, by and large-- they just want its resources, which includes its markets. Britan -needs- those markets-- without control of those markets, how can it profit off of the resources it's importing?
Enter the khadi movement in textiles. Khadi is a simple homespun cloth-- not necessarily a fancy thing, but most definitely something that can be done on a lower scale with a lesser investment of resources. The population generally knew how to do it already. Why not scale that upwards, so that there is no money going back to Britan's clothiers?
But the British will see our work, and they will break it up! -- Then rebuild, and continue, and do not allow them to provoke you into violence. If you use violence, the soldiers will use violence, and the British people will see it as justified. But these people, so ready to rationalize the use of return force to protect their interests, believe themselves 'better' than using force to get their way. If they hear that their people are having to use violence to keep their coffers full, they will doubt themselves-- and they will have to make a decision they do not want to make.
It worked. Eventually, the British left-- not because their ability to hold the place was thwarted, but because it was unprofitable to sink money into the harvesting of raw materials for goods that they could not sell.
The Civil Rights Movement followed similar lines, though their target and intent was different. Maltreatment and disenfranchisement of blacks was a cultural rather than an economic system in the South-- a place that even today nurses a grudge for its losses-- but it was only one part of a larger system. Usan whites, especially those in the North and those in power, esteemed themselves on being ethical, sane, and reasonable. After all, they were the vanguard against terrible Communist forces, which subjugate and enslave men to an impassive state. Imagine their shock, then, when they found that parts of the nation were capable of and willing to do such things to their own countrymen...
Cognitive dissonance is a wonderful, terrible tool. It compels all sorts of readjustments in one's thinking. Sometimes, these readjustments are even for the better.
That's what the thought is (was?) right now. Grounded? Half-grounded. But that's the thought.
One of the stories that sticks in the back of my mind from Legend of the Five Rings (samurai fantasy in a similar way that D&D is medieval fantasy) comes from the Way of the Phoenix book. The Phoenix Clan is a cloister of spiritual seekers, children of one of the founding religious traditions and practices in the Empire; as a result of commitment to their faith, many of them are avowedly pacifistic, even to the point of letting attackers injure or kill them in lieu of committing harm against the world. They are also evangelistic about their preference for peace and the pursuit of knowledge, and that preaching has the Clan as a whole looked down for their unwillingness to use force under any circumstances. The Phoenix armies (for they do have armies) do occasionally march, but they never do so lightly.
There are a few tales of Phoenixes paying the ultimate price for their philosophy, but the most remembered one is the story of one of their Clan Champions, who was disgusted by the bloodthirsty wars and battles fought between her neighbors to the north. Both of these other Clans, Lion and Crane, are bastions of honor and looked to as examples of what is noble, glorious, and worth preserving in the Empire; their traditions also pit them against one another in blood rivalries going back generations to the very dawn of history. The Phoenix Clan Champion saw this latest surge of bloodshed-- deemed a matter of honor by the participants, but viewed as gratuitous even by those only peripherally involved in the affair-- and chose to do something about it. Leading one of her legions down from the forests of her home, she positioned her forces between two of the greatest armies that had yet been assembled in the Empire, and sent messages to both daimyo leading the armies, beseeching them to put down their weapons and consider peace.
The messengers are rebuffed, sent packing; both generals want this fight too much, have staked so much on its happening, to consider putting down arms acceptable. The Champion then sends a second messenger to both camps, a warning: they will have to cut down every Phoenix in this army before they will be allowed to fight. The day of the battle dawns, and both armies surge forward to meet one another, eager to burn through Phoenix resistance and kill their hated enemies... except there is no Phoenix resistance. The samurai on the field stand solid, not defending themselves, allowing the other armies to cut them down where they stand. The Phoenix legion is killed to the last soul, including the Champion.
But by the end of it, the generals call off the attack-- an easy thing, as even their own forces have been sickened by their own violence. Each side retreats. The armies disband. One general commits seppuku; the other shaves his head and becomes a monk. It is cited as one of the shining examples of Phoenix virtue, and the fact that it worked bewildered me until I examined the reasons why it did.
The Phoenix did not come to tire enemy soldiers before battle could be joined. They came to cut not at military shifts and shapes, but at the resolve of the generals. Both sides believed their intentions to be justified, not just by the needs of the mortal world but by the laws set down by Heaven, by the heart of duty-- and by bushido. But bushido in the Emerald Empire is not just service; it is respect, courtesy, esteem, and compassion as samurai might make it. Both the Crane and the Lion value the tenets of bushido perhaps more highly and idealistically than any other Clan. Thus, when they revealed themselves as mere murderers and killers in their actions, their thoughts were turned against themselves-- and the generals find themselves following the only logical path that they can see this act concluding in.
The proposition, then: nonviolent means are attacks just as surely as raising a hand or weapon. They simply aim beyond the flesh and blood of their enemies. Is this the case in reality? I would say so.
Mahatma Ghandi, held as one of the innovators of nonviolent resistance. In that time, India was a colony of the British Empire-- a nation that kept colonies for one very specific reason, the same reason that Jamestown and other colonies were created: economics. Client colonies harvest raw materials (cotton, wood, iron, foodstuffs, tobacco, etc); the patron nation sends back manufactured products, and makes sure with military force that the colony does not develop manufacturing capabilities for itself. The colony has little option but to buy from the patron (taxes, military force, etc), and ideally the people who own the factories gain a new market that must be obedient to them or lose any chance at certain sorts of very necessary goods.
Such it was with India. Before the resistance, it was patently apparent that any attempt at armed resistance (as had worked for the proto-Usans, the Mexicans, so forth) was pretty much doomed to failure. Indians didn't have weapons to match the British, they didn't have infrastructure to support an army, and the British would be more than happy to put down uppity bloodthirsty savages. Physical force would not rule the day-- but as Ghandi observed, physical force was not necessary to be victorious.
Sure, the goal can be "win independence for India." To win, though, is to put it in terms of a contest or confrontation, which may well not be one that works. Is the goal also not "render the British army unable or unwilling to invest in the holding of this ground?" For that would get rid of them just as effectively...
Why does Britan want India? Economic reasons. They don't want to live here, by and large-- they just want its resources, which includes its markets. Britan -needs- those markets-- without control of those markets, how can it profit off of the resources it's importing?
Enter the khadi movement in textiles. Khadi is a simple homespun cloth-- not necessarily a fancy thing, but most definitely something that can be done on a lower scale with a lesser investment of resources. The population generally knew how to do it already. Why not scale that upwards, so that there is no money going back to Britan's clothiers?
But the British will see our work, and they will break it up! -- Then rebuild, and continue, and do not allow them to provoke you into violence. If you use violence, the soldiers will use violence, and the British people will see it as justified. But these people, so ready to rationalize the use of return force to protect their interests, believe themselves 'better' than using force to get their way. If they hear that their people are having to use violence to keep their coffers full, they will doubt themselves-- and they will have to make a decision they do not want to make.
It worked. Eventually, the British left-- not because their ability to hold the place was thwarted, but because it was unprofitable to sink money into the harvesting of raw materials for goods that they could not sell.
The Civil Rights Movement followed similar lines, though their target and intent was different. Maltreatment and disenfranchisement of blacks was a cultural rather than an economic system in the South-- a place that even today nurses a grudge for its losses-- but it was only one part of a larger system. Usan whites, especially those in the North and those in power, esteemed themselves on being ethical, sane, and reasonable. After all, they were the vanguard against terrible Communist forces, which subjugate and enslave men to an impassive state. Imagine their shock, then, when they found that parts of the nation were capable of and willing to do such things to their own countrymen...
Cognitive dissonance is a wonderful, terrible tool. It compels all sorts of readjustments in one's thinking. Sometimes, these readjustments are even for the better.
That's what the thought is (was?) right now. Grounded? Half-grounded. But that's the thought.