from Mike’s keynote speech at Leeds Holocaust Day 2011
There are foundational stories that underpin our lives, of which we are barely conscious. These are the culturally reinforced stories that make sense of the world, that interpret reality to us, and form our identities – both individually and collectively. Often we become conscious of them only when they are challenged by other stories contradictory to, or incompatible with, our own. Yet unless we expose and challenge them, some of them will continue to lead us down spirals of violence and abuse – without us even realising it…
For instance, the ‘myth of redemptive violence’ enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. As an exercise, next time you watch a film, ask yourself: is this the underlying story, the fundamental assumption? (Vic Thiessen first put us onto the myth of redemptive violence in film, at his 2007 T4P festival worshop.)
After perhaps the most violent century in human experience, we have to stop believing and acting out this myth. But surely, you say, only violence works in extreme cases – such as the need to defeat the Nazis in the 1930s-40s. And yet, here’s a story I’d never heard…
Bulgaria’s Bishop Kiril told Nazi authorities that if they attempted to deport Bulgarian Jews to concentration camps, he himself would lead a campaign of civil disobedience, lying down on the railway tracks in front of the trains. Thousands of Bulgarian Jews and non-Jews resisted all collaboration with Nazi decrees. They marched in mass street demonstrations and sent a flood of letters and telegrams to authorities protesting all anti-Jewish measures. People hid Jews and churches accepted large numbers of ‘converts’, making it clear they would not consider the ‘vows’ binding. Every single one of Bulgaria’s Jewish citizens was saved from the Nazi death camps.
With this century’s potential for even more conflict than the last, we must learn new ways of tackling or managing it – and stop giving credence to the myth that, ultimately, violence works. (Be it direct violence, structural violence, or cultural violence – or cite Johan Galtung.) Can we do that – at home, politically, socially, everywhere?
And we’d also do well to live and think more critically about the stories in which we’re unconsciously embedded – and whether we want to continue replicating them. For instance, there’s the opaque story of capitalism – that we barely see, because we’re so embedded in it – that itself has inflicted different kinds of untold violence on the world’s poor and the planet itself. Can we not find alternatives to that?
The full transcript for Mike’s speech can be read at www.t4p.org.uk/hmd2011.
February 24, 2011 at 4:05 pm |
thanks Mike. Whole speech is great (read it y’all). Redemptive violence is/was a far left theory as well, associated with Franz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’ – mainly because J-P Sartre’s intro to that book stressed Fanon’s theme of violence as a means of de-contaminating the minds of subjugated colonial peoples. This is an idea which people like me accepted with too little study – and people much more violent than me applied in the Red Army Faction, Red Brigades etc. More recently I looked at Fanon again and realised that Sartre had played up revolutionary violence and completely ignored Fanon’s universal humanism. Significantly, the near-revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt have not employed violence, redemptive or otherwise, and it looks like in Libya the mania for violence comes only from the dictator and his ‘tent friends’. I’d like to think that the Arabs have read Fanon rather more intelligently that J-P did.
May 1, 2011 at 8:01 am |
I have just read the transcript and value strongly all that Mike said. Working for peace is an uphill struggle … One of the problems is that we all want to maintain our indivi-’duality’ which implies a dualistic ‘you and me’, ‘them and us’. At the same time we recognise the need for unity … not uniformity … but unity. It is this apparent tension that we are too lazy to address perhaps. Consequently the undercurrrent of prejudice goes undetected untill something triggers off an undertow which drags us down – Islamophobia is an illustration … in theory we can live with ‘them’ untill ….. and the old prejudicesraise their ugly heads.
I would propose a spiritual way forward in the form of non-dualism which I have not the time to unpack but it involves seeing all that is and interpreting it without the need to separate, isolate and define. It involves putting to one side the critical faculty of our thinking mind and simply allowing things to be. In so doing we are engaging with the unitive principal behind all the wondefrful diversity we see and interpreting from that position in love. All faiths have their mystical traditions which enable us to engage in this way and also find a mutual, uncritical starting point from which to relate.
I make it my business to spend 20 minutes a day in what my Christian tradition calls contemplative prayer and it has begun to affect the way I look at the world, other people and other traditions … thanks again Mike (my old friend) Maybe catch up soon
Bruce