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(p2) - What is Satyagraha?

 

The term was coined after the Johannesburg meeting, when the Indians realized that the prevailing expression for the campaign they sought to wage, 'passive resistance,' failed to convey the active vitality of their method and could also lead to fatal confusion (as passive resistance, in the manner the term was used at the time, did not rule out the use of violence). Satyagraha literally means 'clinging to truth.' But 'truth' (satya) has broader meanings in the Indian languages than it does in English. It does mean truth as opposed to falsehood; but it also means 'the real' as opposed to the unreal or nonexistent, and the 'good' as opposed to 'evil.' The tremendous work Gandhi would go on to launch in India was based in this vision.

 

Satyagraha is a kind of force. It changes people for the better through nonviolent persuasion. No matter how brutal and dehumanized people become, the capacity for what Gandhi calls reason (or a kind of personal sensitivity) is always there.

 

A friend of Professor Nagler owes her very existence to this fact. Lily's parents-to-be were Polish Jews who were in the underground in Warsaw during WWII. One night the Gestapo raided their apartment and found documents that would have spelled their death; but just at that moment their little boy went up to the Gestapo captain and started playing with the shiny buttons on his uniform! His parents were horrified, but when the captain looked down at the little boy he stopped talking and, after a long moment that must have seemed like eternity he said, in a totally changed voice, "I have a little boy at home just his age, and I miss him very much." Then he quietly added, "Your son has saved your life" and ordered his men out of the apartment. Lilian, an important peace activist today, was born ten years later. Satyagraha is a way to do consciously what the little boy did in all innocence: to reawaken another's humane awareness; that is, by acting humanly ourselves, and by refusing to overlook the humanity of the other, to rehumanize ourselves in another's eyes.

 

Basic Principles

 

Satyagraha can take different forms in different situations - -indeed, many nonviolent practitioners believe, with Gandhi, that there is no situation, however extreme, in which it cannot work. There are certain basic principles, or enabling conditions, that most activists and scholars agree make up the core of Satyagraha:

 

   *  Means determine ends: we can never use destructive means like violence to bring about constructive ends like democracy and peace.

 

   *  Evil is the enemy, not the person committing it. In Christian terms, 'hate the sin, but not the sinner.' The clearest sign that 'truth power' is at work is when your opponent ends up becoming your ally, even your friend. Indeed, activists often discover that the more they can bring themselves to accept the person opposing them, the more effectively they can reach common ground.

 

   *  Our actions have far more consequence than the immediate, visible results. In fact, it is perfectly possible that our efforts may 'fail' to deliver the immediate result we want but succeed in doing more than we may have dreamed of.

 

(p3)