The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

This is a compelling book with well-supported arguments. "The Unconquerable World" explains why ventures such as the U.S. in Iraq are doomed to failure. My favorite section is the one dealing with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Modern American myth has it that the U.S. was solely responsible for the "defeat" of the USSR - through Afghanistan, the insane weapons race, etc. While these surely had their contribution, Schell describes the rise of people's movements in Eastern Europe that, without actively intending to bring about the demise of their oppressor, did just that. I highly recommend "The Unconquerable World" for anyone wishing to understand social and political change, and the very real possibilities of non-violence as a path for these changes.

Best known for THE FATE OF THE EARTH (1982), Jonathan Schell is an anti-war essayist and frequent contributor to "The Nation," "The New Yorker," "Harper's," "The Atlantic," and "Foreign Affairs" magazines. In his pacifist manifesto, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD, Schell examines the history of conventional war, nuclear war, people's war and revolution, from Von Clausewitz's premise that wars are fought to secure political objectives, to the Bush administration's ongoing "war on terrorism," while simultaneously examining the history of nonviolence, from Jesus's commandment to "put up thy sword," to Gandhi's, Havel's, and Martin Luther King's more recent nonviolent victories. (King liked to say that Jesus gave him "the message," and Gandhi gave him "the method" to practice what he preached, p. 246.) Along the way, Schell carefully develops his argument that all government depends for its existence on the cooperation of its citizens, civil servants, and soldiers. If that cooperation is withdrawn, the government will fail in its objectives (p. 128). This philosophy ("satyagraha") was demonstrated by Ghandi, who prescribed nonviolent action in which the participants refused to cooperate with laws they regarded as unjust or otherwise offensive to their consciences, accompanied by their willingness to suffer the consequences (p. 119). "The nonviolent actor," Schell observes, "exhibits the highest degree of freedom also because his action originates within himself, according to his own judgment, inclination, and conscience, not in helpless, automatic response to something done by someone else" (p. 133). In other words, noviolence is a means by which "the active many can overcome the ruthless few" (p. 144).Since September 11th, Schell writes, the "Augustan" policies of the Bush administration have brought us to the brink of "some nuclear 1914 or anthrax 1914" that could "send history off the rails" (p. 8). Americans are now faced with a choice between "two Americas" and two possible futures. In an imperial America, power would be put in the hands of the president and checks and balances would end; civil liberties would be lost; military spending would supercede social spending; the gap between rich and poor would increase; electoral politics would be dominated by corporate money; and social, economic, and ecological agendas would be neglected. In an alternative America, the immense executive power would be broken up into the three branches of government as the Constitution provides; civil liberties would remain intact; money would be driven out of politics; and the social, economic, and ecological agendas of the country and world would become government's chief concern (pp. 345-46). Whereas the Bush administration's policies rely upon individuals confirming the system, fulfilling the system, making the system, becoming the system ("living the lie"), Schell advocates a revolution in our hearts and minds in which violence becomes unnecessary, and we ar

Schell's identification of the phenomenon of "people's war," thebottom-up fight for freedom waged by colonized peoples over the last 250years is nothing short of revolutionary. The basis of the analytical framework he builds to explicate the different varieties of colonial oppression and local resistance, Schell historicizes people's war in its most important incarnations starting with the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion, moving through Gandhi's non-violent formulation which he developed in South Africa and employed against the British in India, discussing how this form of resistance taken up by Martin Luther King to fight the people's war against the squalid Jim Crow regime in the American South. He notes that over time, "people's war" has been successful more often than it has not, that colonial regimes cannot win against forces which refuse to fight using oppressor's tactics, or use the narrow forms of redress, such as "working through the system," which are offered by those in power under the head of democracy. He begins by examining the great military strategist Von Clausewitz's theory of warfare. In a section that it perhaps somewhat overlong, Schell takes apart Clausewitz in light of the changes in warfare since Clausewitz's time. Clausewitz did witness the first examples of total war in which every citizen was enlisted in the war as either a soldier or as a possible target of war -- the great "democratic" army of Napoleon, and wrote about it in contrast to prior European wars where relatively small forces of men fought limited conflicts for their aristocratic masters. What Clausewitz could not see was that with the emergence of the atomic bomb, total war was extended beyond competing nations, their peoples and ideologies, to include the entire world and the possible destruction of humanity. He notes, as does Jeremi Suri does in his history of the post-nuclear age, POWER AND THE PEOPLE, that the possession of nuclear weapons and the protests such weapons engendered (including the proxy wars fought by client states which became a feature of the post WWII landscape and were much more likely to end a global conflagration than skirmishes before the bomb) ultimately served to push together the Soviet Union and United States out of fear of their own people.Schell also discusses various theories of power, including the Hobbesian justification of power, the Weberian observation that the state holds power by reserving the right to violence. He upends a lot of this theory by noting that fear and intimidation only work for so long. Eventually people begin, like water freezing in a crack in the sidewalk, to break apart the structures of such regimes. He discusses how Vaclav Havel and his friends during the Soviet occupation initiated a small scale alternative "government" which sought to deliver minimal social goods, a stop that worked to give citizens a way to see they could exert control over their own lives even in the shadow of t

Through incisive historical analysis, Schell demonstrates that people power has been ignored to our own peril. In the modern world people simply won't settle for the neo-colonial status assigned to them by the corporate globalization / militarization machine. Just think about the war in Iraq and the new regimes in South America, for example, or the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun. And WMD have made the old and disasterous paradigm of all-out warfare obsolete.Schell traces people power through the American, French, and Russian revolutions, onto Gandhi's non-violent action and Mao's peoples' war. What is amazing is that even the most violent and repressive regimes have eventually collapsed non-violently. Often the greatest violence has come during the drive to establish a new order.Schell also suggests that we need to update the principles of liberal democracy. For example, respect for individual rights may need to be extended to include group rights, responsibilities, and power sharing. He cites the settlement in Northern Ireland as an example. This is, of course, tricky business, but he makes a compelling case that we need to be more flexible and far sighted in our concepts of democracy.Schell, now a columnist for The Nation, is a creative thinker and analyst of the first order - a true public intellectual.

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links This book, together with William Geider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and Mark Hertsgaard's The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, in one of three that I believe every American needs to read between now and November 2004. Across 13 chapters in four parts, the author provides a balanced overview of historical philosophy and practice at both the national level "relations among nations" and the local level ("relations among beings"). His bottom line: that the separation of church and state, and the divorce of social responsibility from both state and corporate actions, have so corrupted the political and economic governance architectures as to make them pathologically dangerous. His entire book discusses how people can come together, non-violently, to restore both their power over capital and over circumstances, and the social meaning and values that have been abandoned by "objective" corporations and governments. The book has applicability to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where the US is foolishly confusing military power with political power. As he says early on, it is the public *will* that must be gained, the public *consent* to a new order--in the absence of this, which certainly does not exist in either Iraq or Afghanistan, no amount of military power will be effective (to which I would add: and the cumulative effect of the financial and social cost of these military interventions without end will have a reverse political, economic, and social cost on the invader that may make the military action a self-inflicted wound of great proportions). Across the book, the author examines three prevailing models for global relations: the universal empire model, the balance of power model, and the collective security model. He comes down overwhelmingly on the side of the latter as the only viable approach to current and future global stability and prosperity. A quote from the middle of the book captures its thesis perfectly: "Violence is a method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few." Taking off from the above, the author elaborates on three sub-themes: First, that cooperative power is much greater, less expensive, and more lasting that coercive power. Second, that capitalism today is a scourge on humanity, inflicting far greater damage--deaths, disease, poverty, etcetera--that military power, even the "shock and awe" power unleashed against Afghanistan and Iraq without public debate. Third, and he draws heavily on Hannah Arendt, here a quote that should shame the current US Administration because it is so contradictory to their belief in "noble lies"--lies that Hitler and Goering would have admired. She says, "Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not