What were Gandhi's views on the nature of violence?
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Douglas Allen   Watch the video   High Resolution Low Resolution

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Video Text: We can learn so much from Gandhi. He doesn't have all the answers--you have to use him very selectively--but his insights into violence and non-violence are so profound. So Gandhi is opposed to what most of us call violence, which is simply overt physical violence. That's why most people can say they're against violence. They're against killing people, torturing people, bullying people, rape--they're against overt physical violence. But for Gandhi, this is a small part of total violence.

So, Gandhi talks about the multidimensionality of violence. Language can be very violent--it can be a weapon that you use to control, manipulate, humiliate other human beings. Gandhi talks about psychological violence-- you can be full of hatred, you can be a very violent person internally, and this is reflected in how you relate to other human beings and how you relate to yourself in a very violent way.

Gandhi spends a lot of time on economic violence. We usually don't think of that. Exploitation is violence. Having economic relationships--power relationships--in which people use their economic power to control and dominate other human beings, and which humanly caused unnecessary suffering on billions of human beings in the world today. This is violence.

So, Gandhi talks about cultural violence, educational violence, religious violence, political violence--all these different dimensions of violence in which we're socialized. They reinforce each other so that we just assume a very violent worldview.

The other thing that Gandhi talks about to me that's so valuable is what he calls the violence of the status quo--business as usual. The fact that people are suffering silently because they're living in insecurity, terror, fear, they see no other options, or religion tells them that if they just suffer passively, they'll go to heaven, or you'll be reborn to a higher life. To Gandhi, this is the structural violence of the status quo in which we keep perpetuating this violent world in which we live instead of exposing it and resisting it and transforming it. So, you can see from the little I said, when you introduce these other notions from Gandhi, violence becomes something much more pervasive and much more profound.