A young woman was sitting almost directly across the lunch table from me. From India, wearing a sari, she was dark, almost black. On her forehead was a dot of red dust. She was talking, in a litling voice, to some friends on my side of the table. I wanted not to stare at her and didn't try to listen to her conversation. Then, in a moment of silence around us, as she responded to someone's remark about "enemies," I heard her say, "I come from a culture in which there is no concept of enemy."
A strange statement. Hardly comprehensible. No concept of enemy? How about concepts of sun and moon, friend, water? I came from a culture in which the concept of enemy was central, seemingly indispensable--the culture of Rand, the U. S. Marine Corps, the Defense and State departments, international and domestic politics, game theory and bargaining theory. Identifying enemies, understanding and predicting them so as to fight and control them better, analyzing the relations of abstract enemies: All that had been for years my daily bread and butter, part of the air I breathed. To try to operate in the world of men and nations without the concept of enemy would have seemed as difficult, as nearly inconceivable as doing arithmetic, like the Romans, without a zero.
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The sense of what she said in our protracted discussion was this. First, in answer to my question: In Gandhi's teaching, no human should be regarded or treated as being "an enemy," in the sense of someone you have a right to destroy, or to hate, or to regard as alien, from whom you cannot learn, for whom you can feel no understanding or concern. These are simply not appropriate attitudes toward another human being. No one should be regarded as being--in his or her essence or permanently--evil os as utterly antagonistic. No people should be seen as being evil persons, as if they were without good in them, a different, less human order of being, as if one could learn nothing from them or as if they were unchangeable, even if what there were doing in the moment was harmful and terrible, indeed evil and needed to be opposed. Thus the whole notion of enemy was both unneeded and dangerously misleading.
This was so said Janaki, even though what people do is often terribly wrong, in the extreme sense that it demands not merely to be condemned but to be resisted, nonviolently but militantly, at personal cost to oneself, even at the risk of one's own life. This was the very sense in which one could characterize certain ways of acting--though not the actors themselves--as "evil." Yet in opposing people's wrongdoing, even the worst sort, evildoing, in trying to change their hearst and their actions and, above all, to protect others from their harmful behavior, one need not, should not, attempt to destroy them or threaten them with physical harm.
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Nearly all evildoing, she pointed out, like nearly all coercive power, legitimate and illegitimate, depends on the cooperation, on the obedience and support, on the assent or at least passive tolerance of many people. It relies on many more collaborators than are conscious of their roles; these include even many victims, along with passive bystanders, as in effect accomplices. Such cooperation could be withdrawn with powerful effect. Actions of individuals could ignite organized noncooperation, as the example of Rosa Parks led to the Montgomery bus boycott. Her refusal to obey a command, valid under the law in Alabama, to yield her seat on a bus to a white male passenger, her choice to suffer arrest instead, challenged the habits of obedience of all black people in Montgomery....
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She spoke a good deal of Martin Luther King and urged me to read his Stride Toward Freedom, which she had just quoted to me. I had never though much about King, and I certainly hadn't know his concept of militant nonviolent action. I had scarcely been aware of the strength of King's opposition to the Vietnam War since 1965. I was impressed by her description of the stand he had taken at the Riverside Church in New York City almost exactly a year before, April 4, 1967. Against the urging of many of his allies, black and white, he had risked losing support for the civil rights movement and sacrificed his access to the White House by denouncing the war uncompromisingly because, he began by quoting, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."....Janaki urged me to meet with him--she thought she could arrange it--and I decided I must. Her account gave me a sense of hope for what might come to happen in American that I had also found, just in the last few months and in a different way, in Robert Kennedy.
We didn't go back to the conference. We stayed together and talked throught he next day as well. Late that afternoon, April 4, 1968, we turned on the evening news and learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed. Washington was burning.