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In which John Green teaches you about nonviolence and peace movements in the 20th century. What is nonviolence? What is a peace movement? Well. traditionally, humans often resort to violence when they come into conflict. In the 20th century, it became much more common for people to enact change by means of nonviolence, and there was a common thread of connection between many of the most notable advocates of peaceful change. Crash Course will take you from Gandhi to Gregg to Bayard Rustin to Martin Luther King, Jr, to the Cold War to Arab Spring along a path of nonviolent resistance and peaceful change. It’s pretty great.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course: World History and today we are going to talk
00:03
about something we haven’t discussed much here at Crash Course. Peace. Peaceful, non-violent protest.
00:10
Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Finally an episode where no one gets killed.
00:14
Mmmm. Ehhh. Some people are gonna get killed, Me From the Past. Sadly, peaceful, nonviolent
00:19
protest is often just peaceful on the one side.
00:22
So we’ve talked a lot about war this year on Crash Course, how it shaped civilizations
00:27
and nation states. And it’s easy to assume that humans are kind of naturally violent
00:31
and prone to fighting. And in recent human history, especially during the 20th century,
00:35
we got scarily good at waging war, right? There were, of course, the two World Wars, but there
00:40
were also many other very destructive smaller wars and we can’t forget that there were also genocides.
00:45
But one of the most remarkable and often unnoticed aspects of the 20th century is the incredible
00:50
number of peace, non violence, and anti-war movements. Like, we know about Gandhi, but
00:56
what makes the 20th century unique in history is that Gandhi wasn’t unique. There was
01:00
actually a surprisingly large number of peace and nonviolence movements that were occurring all
01:05
around the world. So in this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about the nonviolent
01:08
heavy hitters, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. I guess I should say, the heavy “non-hitters”
01:13
because, you know, they were nonviolent. But they were, by no means, the only ones.
01:25
So by 1900, Europeans pretty much dominated the world, even though there had been relative
01:29
peace in Europe since 1871, Europeans, using new weapons, had unleashed an incredible amount
01:34
of violence everywhere else on the planet. They had colonized most of Africa, Asia, and
01:39
the Pacific. Americans had also expanded across the continental United States, and were making
01:43
eyes at the Caribbean and Asia. And I want to be clear that this conquest and colonization
01:47
was consistently violent. But some people were beginning to question the very idea of
01:54
violence itself. Like in his 1894 book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Leo Tolstoy,
01:58
who knew a little bit about War and Peace, explored how Jesus’s message to quote “turn
02:03
the other cheek” was the basis for a life of nonviolence.
02:06
He argued that governments and individuals needed to give up violence if they believed
02:10
themselves to be true Christians, and Tolstoy also saw nonviolence as a solution to ending
02:15
colonialism. In 1908, Tolstoy wrote “A Letter to a Hindu” to Mohandas Gandhi, and in the
02:20
letter, he explained that Indians needed to confront British imperialism with love and
02:25
nonviolence. Gandhi not only read that letter, he also published it in his South African
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newspaper “Indian Opinion” in 1909. And Tolstoy’s ideas in this correspondence with Gandhi marked
02:35
the beginning of an informal dialogue between the advocates of nonviolence from around the
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world that spanned the 20th century.
02:41
And Tolstoy wasn’t the only influence on Mohandas K. Gandhi, he’d grown up in the Gujarat region
02:45
of India where there’s a sizable Jain community. And through the Jain monks Gandhi was exposed
02:49
to the idea of Ahimsa: non-violence or non-injury to life. He also read widely including western
02:55
writers like John Ruskin, and Henry David Thoreau.
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So after his return to India from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi began to distill his thinking
03:04
related to non-violence into a more explicit philosophy. In his 1929 autobiography “The
03:09
Story of my Experiments with Truth”, Gandhi wrote about how his belief in Ahimsa could
03:14
be the basis for Indian resistance to British rule. So for Gandhi non-violence was both
03:19
a way of life, and a tool for gaining Indian self-rule. He saw Western civilization as
03:23
violent and exploitative. That’s ridiculous. I know the Eurocentrists are gonna get mad
03:28
at me for saying that but it is true, a smidge violent and exploitative at times. That said,
03:34
well done with like market-based innovation and the Mona Lisa and etc. OK let’s move on.
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Gandhi believed that Indians could reject that lifestyle and replace it with a nonviolent
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one. And Gandhi also believed that Indians could bring about an end to British rule through
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a combination of Ahimsa and Satyagraha, a word often translated as adherence to truth.
03:51
All right, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
03:53
These interconnected ideas of Ahimsa and Satyagraha are best seen in the Salt March of 1930. So,
03:59
since the mid 19th century, the British had placed taxes on salt, and since salt, in addition
04:04
to making food more delicious is necessary to live, Gandhi saw these laws as a perfect
04:09
example of how British despotism affected all Indians. Gandhi announced that he and
04:14
a small group planned to march from his home in Ahmedabad to the coast in order to harvest
04:18
salt. The march took almost two months and quickly gathered media attention from around
04:22
the world and the British raj in India was forced to choose between arresting Gandhi
04:27
for breaking a British law or else allowing him to break the law because he was harvesting
04:32
salt illegally. Millions of Indians were inspired by Gandhi’s challenge to British rule and
04:37
began their own protests against the salt law. As civil disobedience spread across India,
04:42
the British began to arrest people and the international media focused even more on the
04:46
protests and popular opinion began to see British rule as unjust. By refusing to meet
04:52
violent British rule with violence of his own and highlighting the injustice of British
04:56
rule, Gandhi was able to use nonviolence as an effective tool in undermining the colonial regime.
05:02
Thanks Thought Bubble. So as previously noted, Gandhi’s use of nonviolence is very well
05:06
known but it wasn’t unique. Throughout the early 20th century nationalist movements in
05:10
colonies throughout Africa and Asia also adopted nonviolence. Like one of the first nationalist
05:15
leaders to advocate for nonviolence resistance to Imperialism was Phan Chu Trinh. Just as the
05:20
Vietnamese independence movement was developing in the first decade of the nineteen hundreds,
05:24
Phan began to question the violent methods advocated by other nationalists. Like he spoke
05:29
out against the violent uprisings that were occurring in many parts of Vietnam. He also
05:33
resisted requesting help from Japan in the Vietnamese Independence struggle because of Japan’s militarism.
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In 1919, Egyptians protested against British rule by going on strike, and boycotting British
05:45
goods, and organizing demonstrations across the country. Those protests went on for months
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and eventually in 1922 the British granted independence to Egypt. Although some key areas,
05:54
including the Suez Canal, did remain under British control. And even as nonviolence became
05:59
a tactic associated with anti-imperial movements in Africa and Asia it was also becoming entrenched
06:04
in the peace movement that developed in response to World War One. When war broke out in the
06:09
fall of 1914 there were lots of protests in the United States, which had yet to enter
06:13
the war. A number of young activists met to discuss how to stop it and how to prevent
06:17
the United States from entering it. This group included AJ Musty and Kirby Page and Dorothy
06:21
Day, all of whom would go on to become important figures in the Peace Movement in the United
06:26
States. They also helped found the Fellowship of Reconciliation or (FOR), which advocated
06:30
on behalf of conscientious objectors and encouraged nonviolent alternatives to conflict. And then
06:35
after the war ended many of these American peace activists began to expand their horizons
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and they saw connections between nonviolence and antiwar movements and nonviolence in the
06:45
anti-imperial struggle.
06:46
There was, for instance, Ricard Gregg, a young activist who had been involved in the anti-war
06:50
movement in the United States, who traveled to India in 1925. He spent four years in India
06:55
studying with Gandhi including seven months living at Gandhi’s ashram in Gujarat. And
07:00
then when he returned to the US, Gregg wrote the very influential book The Power of Nonviolence
07:04
in which he described how nonviolence would remake the world.
07:07
I mention this to get across the idea that this was truly an international movement that
07:10
involved cultural exchange that went both west to east and east to west. And this idea
07:16
of nonviolent resistance was also very compelling to artists. During the Spanish Civil War the
07:20
nationalist forces of General Franco heavily bombed the Basque village of Guernica and
07:24
after reading about the destruction of the village, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso
07:28
who was working on a commissioned mural for the Spanish Republic abandoned the mural and
07:32
began painting Guernica to draw attention to the horrors that war inflicts upon innocent
07:37
civilians. The painting became one of the most famous of the 20th century and it remains
07:41
a powerful antiwar symbol. There were even nonviolent protests against the Nazis. Like
07:45
in 1943 the German Gestapo arrested about 1800 Jewish men who were married to non-Jewish
07:51
women. And as those men were being held in an office building, their wives gathered together
07:55
on the street. Armed German Gestapo agents attempted to disperse them with threats of
08:00
firing into the crowd and a stand off between the unarmed women and the armed Gestapo went
08:05
on for a week. Instead of firing on the women, Joseph Gerbils, the Nazi party director in
08:10
Berlin, ultimately decided to back down and he released the men. The so called Rosenstrasse
08:15
protest was the only successful public protest against Nazi policies in Germany but it wasn’t the only protest.
08:21
And then we have the Civil Rights Movement in the United States which brought together
08:24
many of the different strains of nonviolent resistance in the 20th century. Like during
08:28
World War II, civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin met AJ Musty and other members of the
08:33
Fellowship of Reconciliation, and they spent much of the war protesting racial discrimination
08:37
in the armed forces but at the same time Rustin was also becoming increasingly aware of the
08:42
injustice of the British colonialism in India and Africa and began to protest that as well.
08:47
And we see this global cross-fertilization of nonviolent ideas again in 1948 when Rustin
08:53
traveled to India, where he met with many of Gandhi’s associates — Gandhi had been
08:56
killed in January of that year — and learned about the role of nonviolent protest against
09:01
the British. And in the following decade, Rustin would teach Martin Luther King Jr about
09:05
Gandhi’s tactics, so he could use them in protesting against racial segregation in the
09:10
United States. King himself traveled to India in 1959 to learn more about nonviolence. And
09:15
before leaving he explained that he was quote “more convinced than ever before that the
09:19
method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people
09:25
in their struggle for justice and human dignity.”
09:27
And the principles of nonviolence would come to shape the strategies used for the remainder
09:32
of the Civil Rights Movement. Nonviolent resistance was also an important protest tactic during
09:36
the Cold War. Alexander Dubcek, the Czech Communist Party’s first secretary, began
09:40
a series of reforms to communist rule in Czechoslovakia in January 1968 that would become known as
09:46
the Prague Spring. And the Soviet Union was like no no no no no no no we don’t like
09:50
democratic reforms or Spring. So they sent in troops to destabilize Dubcek’s government
09:55
and in response to that invasion, civilians quickly took to the streets in support of
10:00
Dubcek and to resist the invasion. Most people resisted through a variety of nonviolent means,
10:04
including deliberately giving wrong directions to Soviet tanks, forming human blockades across
10:10
bridges, and distributing protest materials. Secret radio stations were set up to broadcast
10:14
calls for nonviolent resistance across the country. And the protest continued on for
10:19
the rest of 1968. In January of 1969, two Czech students burned themselves to death
10:24
in a Prague square to protest the Soviet occupation and as the tensions between the protesters
10:29
and the Soviets escalated, the Soviets began a violent crackdown. By the summer of 1969
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they’d brought the demonstrations to an end.
10:37
Historians took note of all of this stuff, like historian Gene Sharp published his multi
10:40
volume Politics of Nonviolent Action which was reportedly read by a lot of the original
10:45
protesters in the Arab Spring of 2011, which reminds us that nonviolent resistance movements
10:50
advocating for and in some cases achieving political change are not just part of history,
10:56
they are also part of the world in which we live today. Ideas about nonviolence that began
11:01
with Leo Tolstoy at the beginning of the 20th century are still very much with us.
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And I think it is good important to remind ourselves of two things. First, that Tolstoy’s
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most famous book is called War and Peace. And secondly, that the 20th century while
11:12
it featured intensely destructive wars, was by many measures the least violent century ever.
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Wars are traumatic and they have relatively straightforward narratives that allow us to
11:23
focus on human dramas and all of that stuff is appealing to historians. But really the
11:28
nonviolent struggles against oppression in the 20th century have been just as dramatic
11:33
and especially in the second half of the 20th century they have born fruit and not just
11:37
in the US and India. When the news focuses just on death and destruction it can be hard
11:41
to remember that more people are living under peaceful regimes than ever before and that,
11:46
at least between nations, inequality and injustice are diminishing. Nonviolent resistance doesn’t
11:52
always work and the governments that emerge form these movements aren’t always good
11:56
governments. The stories, as usual, are complicated. So the next time we think about the 20th century
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merely as a century of war and genocide and nuclear weapons we need to remind ourselves
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that it was also a century in which hundreds of millions of people emerged from poverty
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and fewer people died as a result of violence. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.
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Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz studios in Indianapolis and
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it’s made possible by our Subbable subscribers. Thank you so much for watching and as we say
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in my home town, don’t forget to be awesome.
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Previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video