Nonviolence and Peace Movements: Crash Course World History 228 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

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