Is Spreading Love and Tolerance Asking for It?

Posted on January 18, 2004 in Compassion Courage & Activism

A chatter on Undernet #political — a person who I shall call one of the negativist leftists (who are often hard to discern against a background of rampant negative conservatives) stated “Anyone who devotes their life to spreading love & tolerance is killed.”

We know the names. Gandhi, Christ, Martin Luther King, the girl who was plowed under in Israel recently as well as others. But this remark smacks of a partisanship that I can stomach no more than that of the extreme Right. Its purpose is to inculcate despair so that we won’t work for love and tolerance, so that we will join the ranks of revolutionary movements and extremist nation states.

What’s the reality? From my experience attempting to spread love and tolerance in a war zone (Croatia, 1992), I conclude that I was at no greater risk than any other civilian. I was harassed, it is true, by soldiers– just as many others were. If shells rained to the earth or bullets flooded the air, I could be hit just like any one else.

It is true that in our latest wars, civilian casualties have been high. But as a percentage of their group, these numbers are relatively low. And who can say that they died because they were spreading love and tolerance? They died because they were in the wrong place — for reasons entirely beyond their control.

The people who live at the greatest risk of being killed are not those who spread love and tolerance but those who carry assault rifles, fly helicopters, wear suicide bomb packs, ride in tanks, etc. The lesson I learned in Croatia was that if you were a civilian in a war zone — any kind of civilian — you ran the risk of being caught in the crossfire. A soldier might suspect you as a spy and train his crosshairs on you. You might be caught in the path of an errant missile. But I also learned that if you carried a gun and wore a uniform, you were at a very high risk of being shot if you showed yourself to the enemy. The Serbian soldiers walking on the other river would shoot you if you had a gun.

I have to file this claim along with the lies about WMDs and links to Al Qaeda that led us into the Iraq debacle. The purpose is to push us into violence, to say that nonviolence does not work.

I am not convinced. There are risks with nonviolence, but I suspect that if the casualty counts of nonviolent demonstrators were compared to those of soldiers, we’d find a much lower percentage of fatalities and wounds. I remain committed to nonviolent action: despite my contempt for George W. Bush’s policies, I will not be deceived into following a true believer of either kind into training for the slaughter of other human beings.