One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

Not many books excite me as much as this first one from Binyavanga Wainaina has. I will just put the excerpt here and let you decide for yourself. I must add though that I have always had a keen eye for anything written in the tense he prefers to uniquely use, the present tense. And to make it even more interesting what he is narrating is from the past, as a memoir does.

I can not wait to own a copy.

This excerpt is copied directly from the Graywolf Press website. Enjoy.

Excerpt from One Day I Will Write About This Place

 Chapter 1

It is afternoon. We are playing soccer near the clothesline behind the main house. Jimmy, my brother, is eleven, and my sister, Ciru, is five and a half. I am the goalie.

I am seven years old, and I still do not know why everybody seems to know what they are doing and why they are doing it.

“You are not fat.” That’s what Mum says to me all the time. “You are plump.”

Ciru has the ball. She is small and thin and golden. She has sharp elbows, and a smile as clean as a pencil drawing. It cuts evenly into her cheeks. She runs toward Jimmy, who is tall and fit and dark.

She is the star of her class. It is 1978, and we are all in Lena Moi Primary School. Last term, Ciru was moved a year forward. Now she is in standard two, like me, in the class next door. Her first term in standard two, she beat everybody and topped the class. She is the youngest in her class. Everybody else is seven.

I stand still between the metal poles we use as a makeshift goalmouth watching Ciru and Jim play. Warm breath pushes down my nostrils past my mouth and divides my chin. I can see the pink shining flesh of my eyelids. Random sounds fall into my ears: cars, birds, black mamba bicycle bells, distant children, dogs, crows, and afternoon national radio music. Congo rumba. People outside our compound are talking, in languages I know the sounds of, but do not understand or speak, Luhya, Gikuyu.

My laugh is far away inside, like the morning car not starting when the key turns. In school, it is always Ciru number one, blue and red and yellow stars on every page. It is always Ciru in a white dress giving flowers to the guest of honor—Mr. Ben Methu—on Parents’ Day. If I am washing with her, we are splashing and laughing and fighting and soon we are in a fever of tears or giggles.

She twists past Jimmy, the ball ahead of her feet, heading for me. I am ready. I am sharp, and springy. I am waiting for the ball. Jimmy runs to intercept her; they tangle and pant. A few moments ago the sun was one single white beam. Now it has fallen into the trees. All over the garden there are a thousand tiny suns, poking through gaps, all of them spherical, all of them shooting thousands of beams. The beams fall onto branches and leaves and splinter into thousands of smaller perfect suns.

I laugh when Ciru laughs and I find myself inside her laugh, and we fall down holding each other. I can feel her laughter swelling, even before it comes out, and it swells in me too.

I know how to move with her patterns, and to move with Jimmy’s patterns. My patterns are always tripping on each other in public. They are only safe when I am alone, or when I am daydreaming.

Ciru laughs loud, her mouth wide and red. The sound jumps toward me, flapping sheets of sound, but I am lost. Arms and legs and ball are forgotten. The thousand suns are breathing. They inhale, dim and cool into the leaves, and I let myself breathe with them; then they puff light forward and exhale, warming my body. I am about to let myself soak inside this completely when I am captured by an idea.

The sun does not break up into pieces.

It does not break up into disembodied parts when it falls into trees and things. Each piece of the sun is always a complete little sun.

I am coming back into my arms and legs and the goalmouth, ready to explain the thousand suns to Jimmy and Ciru. I am excited. They will believe me this time. It won’t seem stupid when I speak it, like it often does, and then they look at me, rolling their eyes and telling me that my marbles are lost. That I cansaythatagain. They are coming close. Jimmy is shouting. Before I fully return to myself, a hole in my ear rips open. The football hits the center of my face. I fall.

Goaaaaal. A thousand suns erupt with wet laughter; even the radio is laughing. I look up and see them both leaning over me, dripping sweat, arms akimbo.

Jimmy rolls his eyes and says, “You’ve lost your marbles.”

“I’m thirsty,” says Ciru.

“Me too,” says Jim, and they run, and I want to stand and run with them. My face hurts. Juma, our dog, is licking my face. I lean into his stomach; my nose pushes into his fur. The sun is below the trees, the sky is clear, and I am no longer broken up and distributed. I scramble and jump to my feet. Juma whines, like a car winding down. I pump my feet forward, pulling my voice out and throwing it forward to grab hold of their Thirst Resolution.

“Hey!” I shrill. “Even me I am thirsty!”

They don’t hear me.

They are headed away from the kitchen, and I follow them into the long clumps of uncut grass at the top of the garden, Juma at my heels, as they weave in and out of Baba’s tractors, swerve to avoid dog shit, run through shade and fading sun, past little eruptions of termites in Kikuyu grass, and forgotten heaps of farm spare parts piled behind the hedge that separates the main house from the servants’ quarters. Then they turn, shouting hi to Zablon, the cook who is washing dishes outside in his white vest and blue trousers and Lifebuoy soap and charcoal smell. I shout hi too, now flowing well into their movements. They stop, then turn to our regular racetrack down the path from the servants’ quarters to the kitchen.

I find them there, Juma’s nose nudging Jim’s leg, and I watch them pour the cool liquid down their throats, from glasses, see it spill off the sides of their cheeks. Jimmy has learned to pull the whole glass of water down in one move. It streams down the pipe, marble-bubbles running down a soft translucent tube of sound, like a frog.

He slams his glass on the countertop, burps, and turns to look at me.

What is thirst? The word splits up into a hundred small suns. I lift my glass and look up. Ciru is looking at me, her glass already empty as she wipes her lips on her forearm.

*   *   *

I am in my bedroom, alone. I have a glass of water. I want to try to gulp it down, like Jimmy does. This word,thirst, thirsty. It is a word full of resolution. It drives a person to quick action. Words, I think, must be concrete things. Surely they cannot be suggestions of things, vague pictures: scattered, shifting sensations?

Sometimes we like to steal Baba’s old golf balls and throw them into a fire. First they curl, in a kind of ecstasy, like a cat being stroked, then they arch, start to bubble and bounce, then they shoot out of the fire like bullets, skinned and free. Below the skin are tight wraps of rubber band, and we can now unroll them and watch the balls getting smaller and smaller, and the rubber bands unfold so long it does not seem possible they came out of the small hard ball.

I want to be certainly thirsty, like Jimmy and Ciru.

Water has more shape and presence than air, but it is still colorless. Once you have the shape of water in your mouth, you discover your body. Because water is clear. It lets you taste your mouth, feel the pipe shape of your throat and the growing ball of your stomach as you drink.

I burp. And rub my stomach, which growls. I fiddle with the tap, and notice that when water runs fast from a tap, it becomes white. Water, moving at speed, rushing from a tap, has shape and form and direction. I put my hand under the tap, and feel it solid.

The shape of an idea starts to form. There is air, there is water, there is glass. Wind moving fast gives form to air; water moving fast gives it form. Maybe . . . maybe glass is water moving at superspeed, like on television, when a superhero moves so fast, faster than blurring, he comes back to himself a thousand times before you see him move.

No. No. Thirst is . . . is . . . a sucking absence, a little mouthing fish out of the water. It moves you from the everywhere nowhereness of air, your breathing person; you are now a stream, a fixed flowing address, a drinking person. It is a step below hungering, which comes from a solid body, one that can smell, taste, see, and need colors. Yes!

But—I still can’t answer why the word leaves me so uncertain and speculative. I can’t make the water stream down my throat effortlessly. It spills into my nostrils and chokes me. Other people have a word world, and in their word world, words like thirsty have length, breadth, and height, a firm texture, an unthinking belonging, like hands and toes and balls and doors. When they say their word, their body moves into action, sure and true.

I am always standing and watching people acting boldly to the call of words. I can only follow them. They don’t seem to trip and fall through holes their conviction does not see. So their certainty must be the right world. I put the glass down. Something is wrong with me.

*   *   *

We are on our way home, after a family day in Molo. We are eatingHouse of Manji biscuits.

Beatrice, who is in my class, broke her leg last week. They covered her leg with white plaster. The water heater in our home is covered with white plaster. Beatrice’s toes are fat gray ticks. The water heater is a squat cylinder, covered in white sticky hard, like Beatrice’s new leg. She has crutches.

Crunch is breaking to release crackly sweetness. Crunch! Eclairs. Crutches are falling down and breaking. Crutch!

Biscuits.

Uganda, my mum’s country, fell down and broke. Crutch!

Field Marshal Amin Dada, the president of Uganda, ate his minister for supper. He kept the minister’s head in the fridge. His son wears a uniform just like his. They stand together on television news, in front of a parade.

I am sleepy. Ciru is fast asleep. Jimmy asks Baba to stop the car so he can pee.

I immediately find I want to pee.

We park on the shoulder of a valley that spreads down into a jigsaw puzzle of market gardens before us. For a long time, I have wanted to walk between the fault lines of this puzzle. Out there, always in the distance, the world is vague and blurred and pretty.

I want to slide through the seams and go to the other side.

After pissing, I simply walk on: down the valley, past astonished-looking mamas who are weeding, over a little creek, through a ripe cattle boma that is covered with dung.

Look, look at the fever tree!

Her canopy is frizzy, her gold and green bark shines. It is like she was scribbled sideways with a sharp pencil, so she can cut her sharp edges into the soul of whoever looks at her from a distance. You do not climb her; she has thorns. Acacia.

She is designed for dreams.

I am disappointed that all the distant scenery, blue and misty, becomes more and more real as I come closer: there is no vague place, where clarity blurs, where certainty has no force, and dreams are real.

After a while, I see my brother, Jim, coming after me; the new thrill is to keep him far away, to run faster and faster.

I stretch into a rubber-band giant, a superhero made long by cartoon speed. I am as long as the distance between me and him. The world of light and wind and sound slaps against my face as I move faster and faster.

If I focus, I can let it into me, let in the whole wide whoosh of the world. I grit my teeth, harden my stomach.

It is coming, the moment is coming.

If I get that moment right, I can let my mind burst out of me and fold into the world, pulling it behind me like a cart. Like a golf ball bursting out of the fire. No! No! Not a golf ball! The world will flap uselessly behind me, like, like a superhero cape.

I will be free of awkwardness, of Ciru, of Jimmy, of Idi Amin dreams. The world is streaks of blinding light. My body tearing away, like Velcro, from the patterns of others.

Later, I wake up in the backseat of the car. “Here we are,” Mum likes to say whenever we come home. My skin is hot, and Mum’s soft knuckles nibble my forehead. I can feel ten thousand hot prickling crickets chorusing outside. I want to tear my clothes off and let my skin be naked in the crackling night. “Shhh,” she whispers, “shhh, shhh,” and a pink-tasting syrup rolls down my tongue, and Baba’s strong arms are under my knees. I am pushed into the ironed sheets that are folded back over the blanket like a flap. Mum pulls them over my head. I am a letter, I think, a hot burning letter, and I can see a big stickysyrup-dripping tongue, about to lick and seal me in.

In a few minutes, I get up and make my way across to Jimmy’s bed.

From One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina. Copyright © 2011 by Binyavanga Wainaina. All rights reserved.

All rights are obviously reserved and I take no credit personally other than just for review and review only.  

But Still I Will Ride

Despite the efforts of the not-so-funny magpie that decided to scare me to the ground last Monday evening, I will still rise above that fear and ride whenever I can.

So here is Mia.

Disclaimer notice: I did not name the bike.

Python pre-101 or is it Go Wallabies

So python being the most basic language I know I am just gonna let it tell like it is.

A simple print 3-liner that only tells the program to print a Wallaby that sits on the All blacks. Due to laziness, I will just post my screen image so you can see the source file and the command-line from where the script is executed. Also for the sake of seeing the colour scheme in the editor and distinguish my gibbering from the code. Python doesn't get any easier than that so indulge yourself in this simple Python pre101 as you sit back and wait for a brutal crashing of the All Blacks tomorrow. The three magic steps being a) declare what s is, b) print it and c) exit program with success and boom that's it. Comments are purged out with a # as is clear. Go to the command prompt of your choice and do a python filename and that's it. I assumed that you already have python installed but my machine came with as do all linux distributions I suppose.

Specially for you JK.

And for all those interested in a real python 101 check out Swaroop's 'A Byte of Python'.

 

Here are the lines if not clear from the picture;

# Created by Wakariera on October 16th 2011.
#!usr/bin/python
# waka/desktop/wallabies.py


s = 'Wallabies > Allblacks and that is the only way out'
print s

exit #there is not even a chance of thinking about the < case because it simply isn't happening

*Compiled on GNU Debian Squeeze at 201110161204 with python 3.

Kipchoge Keino; as Legendary a Kenyan Runner as They Come

I reproduce this wonderful piece by Mr Bob Reeves as Kipchoge Keino is presented with his honorary degree at Bristol.

17 July 2007 - Orator: Mr Bob Reeves

Mr Vice-Chancellor:

Today I will tell the story of a man who in his own country is revered, and is regarded around the world as having been one of the greatest athletes of all time; a man who has motivated large numbers of his countrymen to achieve standards in sport which might have been regarded as impossible until he paved the way. Yet this is a man whose greatest achievements are largely unknown.

I start at the Mexico Olympics of 1968. Kipchoge ‘Kip’ Keino, aged 28, was entered in three events, the 10,000, 5,000 and 1,500 metres, something out of the question nowadays.

He was unwell throughout the Games; indeed the German team doctor believed he had gallstones, and that running would endanger him. Run he did, however, and in the 10,000 metres, he was in the lead with a lap to go, when he collapsed, staggering off the track. The race was won by fellow Kenyan Naftali Temu, who thus became the first from his nation ever to win Olympic Gold. Kip was determined to finish, and though disqualified already for leaving the track, got to his feet and completed the distance.

Four days later, Kip was in action again and he took Olympic silver in the 5,000 metres, narrowly losing out in a thrilling finish. He qualified for the final of the 1,500 metres, but still unwell, he was put to bed and told not to run again. On the day of the final, he stayed in bed, but about an hour before the race, he got up, took his kit, and boarded a bus, determined to take part, even if it killed him.  The bus became stuck in traffic, so Kip, already late, alighted and ran two miles to the stadium, just in time to register for the race.

His main rival, Jim Ryun, undefeated for three years, possessed a renowned finish. Kip countered this by setting a searing pace from the start, such that he burned off all opposition, somehow holding form to the finish to win his first Olympic gold in a new Olympic record time, with Ryun 20 metres back in second place. The doctor took Kip back to Germany straight after the Games and removed the gall stones.

This story provides an indicator of the character of a man who has left his mark as a great athlete and remarkable human being.

How did Kip Keino come to be the star of the 1968 Olympics and the sporting icon for Kenyan athletes in the years ahead? We need to look back to his childhood.

He was born in Kipsamo in Western Kenya. Both his parents died when he was very young, and he was brought up by an aunt. He was raised in a rural area, the nearest school being far away.

Kip spoke to our high performance sports group when visiting Bristol in January. He was asked when he had started training for athletics. He replied:

‘When I started at primary school. I ran in my bare feet four miles to school in the morning, home for lunch, again for afternoon school and back at the end of the day. I did this every day until I left school’.

Mr Vice-Chancellor, 16 miles of running a day from the age of 5 might have helped us to be international athletes also!

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail’. The paths trod by Kip Keino, either to school or round athletic tracks throughout the world, were already there, but he certainly left a trail.

After school, Kip trained for the police, later spending some time at the Police College in Aldershot. He could have stayed and qualified for Great Britain! Instead he became a Kenyan Police Physical Training Instructor, and it was while in the Kenyan force that he began what was to be his lifelong devotion to aiding young children. He could not resist the pleas for help from orphans and needy youngsters, who, in increasing numbers, he took home or were brought to him by fellow policemen knowing of his concern. Kip was away often, and his wife Phyllis, already with the first of what would be seven children of their own, supported the view that no child should ever be turned away.

It was when in the police that Kip’s running ability saved him on several occasions, none more so than when out in the bush one day, he was attacked by a rogue buffalo, a dangerous beast. Kip just made it to a tree, which he leapt into, spending the whole night there. In the morning, the buffalo lost interest and went off, leaving an unscathed Kip to jog home.

In the early sixties Kip’s athletic career had blossomed, though it was not until after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, in which he just failed to reach the 1,500 metres final, that he came to the fore, breaking the world 3,000 metres record in 1965 by six seconds in his first attempt at the distance. He broke the world 5,000 metres record two months later, and in the 1966 Commonwealth Games won two golds, putting him well on track for his epic performances in Mexico two years later.

During the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games of 1970, Kip showed that life was not a simple jog in the park! After winning the 1,500 metres, he received an anonymous threat should he win the 5,000, a letter stating ‘Our guns fitted with telescopic sights will be on your heart and we do not miss’.  Games organisers took this seriously and security was increased in the village. On his way to the track for the final, someone approached Kip, saying quietly, ‘Use your head or you will be in trouble’. Kip ran most of the race tucked in a bunch of runners, settling in the end for a bronze, probably a wise move.

In the 1972 Munich Olympics, aged 32, having come second in the 1,500 metres, Kip entered the 3,000 metres steeplechase, an event he had rarely run, and won his second Olympic gold. By now, however, his role as father to the fatherless had already begun to eclipse that of being a champion runner.

Kip retired from the track in 1973 when athletics had only just become professional. He and Phyllis had $20,000, enough to buy some farm land in Eldoret on which he built a house. This was to become the family home, a large extended family, and a home where all the children made a contribution, perhaps tending crops or helping in the house.

Kip and Phyllis wanted to provide a proper education also, and when more land was purchased on the other side of town, they were able to build a primary school catering for over 300 children, adding another home for more orphans. Parents in the locality want their children to be educated there, alongside the orphans, and it is now recognised as the best primary school in the region..

In 2008, the Kip Keino Secondary School will open, offering education to around 400 children, again including the orphans. It will have an emphasis on sport. Associated with it is a training centre for elite athletes aged 14 to18, who will receive scholarships and an excellent education alongside athletics opportunities.

The Kip Keino Foundation encompasses the orphanage, schools and farm. Kip has clarified its goals in writing the following:

‘A fundamental challenge facing every society is to develop economic and social systems that continuously contribute towards improvement in human life. Of great importance is the building of systems that contribute to sustainability of the environment upon which human life depends.’
This is what he is doing in Eldoret.

Further afield, Kip has been Chairman of the National Olympic Committee of Kenya for a decade and he is a leading member of the International Olympic Committee.

Now in his late sixties, Kip still runs, as he did when going to school over 50 years ago. He ran firstly for his education, then later for his country. Asked why he runs now, he always replies simply, ‘I run for life’.

Earlier this year, in Bristol, he signed an agreement linking the City of Bristol with Kenya in a multi-faceted project leading to the London Olympics of 2012. This four- year project will twin Bristol and Kenyan schools, establish opportunities for Bristolian and Kenyan sportsmen and women, explore the possibilities for collaboration in commerce and provide support for the Kenyan Olympic team up to the London Games.

I asked Kip what, in his extraordinary life, had been his proudest achievement. He quietly replied ‘The orphanage’. His creed is ‘You come with nothing and you leave with nothing’. One thing is certain - when it is time for Kip to leave, he will leave a great deal, not least many hundreds of young people, all calling him ‘Dad’, whose lives have been enriched by him.

Mr Vice-Chancellor, we have before us a Nandi tribesman, who went on to be a world-renowned athlete and international statesman, but perhaps whose greatest achievement has been in and around his own home. I present to you Kipchoge Keino as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.

Credits to reddit for the post that got me to see this one.

I had to reproduce this article here by a 'rogue African journalist', Charles Onyango-Obbo from Daily Nation. I think he is spot on. This article inspired one of my speeches at Toastmasters so I must post it.

 

The meaning of Wangari Maathai’s life – by a rogue African journalist

The death of Nobel Peace Prize winner and eminent environmentalist Wangari Maathai brought to an end the easiest part of her life.

The most difficult, making sense of what her life meant, must now begin.

It was impossible to think of Maathai without thinking of forests and trees.

It was as if there is no forest she didn’t want to save, and no open space in which she didn’t want to plant a tree.

So, ultimately, it is from the forest and trees that we must seek the meaning of her great life.

One of the forests she fought to save is Karura, which lies between Limuru and Kiambu roads.

Now, cab drivers who have worked that route ferrying foreign visitors to places like Village Market, have an interesting old story.

In the late 1990s, before the American and, later, Canadian, embassy was built in Gigiri, those ends of town seemed remote.

The story goes that a government official was visiting Nairobi from the wildly forested Democratic Republic of Congo.

His country had just gone through a rebel war that ousted its long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

He was, understandably, therefore, uneasily aware of the power of forests (where rebels hid).

He had heard of Village Market and asked a cab to take him there. As the cab hit Karura Forest, he panicked and started shouting hysterically as he fumbled to jump out of the cab.

Forests do that to Africans. So to be an environmentalist in Africa at the time when Maathai set out on her green journey, was something special.

No object stars in African (and indeed European) folklore, fairytales and mysteries like the forest (and river, you might add).

From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to the tales of Amos Tutuola, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, to Chinua Achebe, the forest is inescapable.

It is a magical place full of generous fairies and handsome princes; but also a place of menace, crawling with ogres and evil snakes.

African tradition, however, goes beyond this two-dimensional view of the forest and introduces a third spectrum — a spiritual one.

For the African, the gods live in the forest. In Nigerian author Achebe’s books, when a citizen of the village offends custom, he is taken to the forest and finished off.

However, when the community is in distress, when its harvests have failed, offerings are taken to the forest to ask the gods to intervene.

In more recent times, when Maathai was a little girl of say, 10, the forest brought liberation to African women.

In times of arranged marriages, girls (who never went to school) in the village could only independently meet young men who were not picked for them by their parents when they went to the well or to the forest to collect firewood.

At the same time, the forest was a source of bondage and discrimination because the girls were condemned to collect firewood, while the boys went to school.

One of the most complex contradictions of our times developed.

In one sense, it seemed necessary for the forest to go away for women in African villages to find freedom.

But when the forest went away, things got worse. Women walked longer distances for firewood.

Over the years, we solved the problem of water. We dug boreholes and safe wells. But the forests just kept disappearing.

So the fight to protect the forest, had essentially to be a fight for women’s rights.

The latter required that you challenge the political order, that most women of Maathai’s generation were too isolated and feared the resulting rejection, to do. However, Maathai did.

In that sense, she was not just the original environmentalist, but also one of the region’s pioneer feminists.

But women’s rights make little sense in an undemocratic context. So Maathai became a democracy activist.

Still, all those weren’t enough. Maathai needed to be something else — to embrace the spirituality of the forest, the logic that it is the source of our sustenance.

By choosing to champion a campaign that planted trees, she expanded that sustenance.

With that she entered a fourth dimension; she became a cultural activist (in the epistemological sense of the word).

I have tried, and simply can’t find any woman of recent times who existed simultaneously in the four dimensions that Maathai did.

All credits to Charles.

The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act

I reproduce here a Noam Chomsky's 1967 interview speech given how relevant it is in light of issues developing in the world regarding peace and non-violence. 


This was delivered as an entry in a speech contest organised by the Lions Club Woden.

The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?

If you'd listen carefully to the title of my speech, you will realise that there is a deliberate question mark appended to it. I have to attribute the idea to Noam Chomsky, from whom the reference question was the subject of an interview he gave in 1967. You may or may not have had much exposure to Noam Chomsky, but to me, he remains the most important intellectual alive. A linguist, political activist, philosopher and writer who's successfully written over 100 books, Noam Chomsky surely is a defining figure in advancing political awareness and perhaps to explain this phenomenon is this in his own words and I quote, “My political awareness begins with my earliest memories during the Depression -- pathetic people coming to the door to try to sell rags, riding on a trolley car with my mother past a strike at a textile plant and watching security forces beat women strikers, sensing the dark clouds of fascism spread over Europe, and a lot more. There was no defining moment. Just no alternative.”

The kind of question I had asked, The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? is one that can not be answered in any meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of political historical concrete circumstances and figures. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate an even greater evil.

Away from theory though, what one meets in the real world are shades of grey and obscure complex relations between means and ends and incalculable consequences of actions and so on and so forth. Practically, advocates of non-violence have a strong case because I think in all circumstances, they can very justly claim that there is a better way than to resort to violence. Let me mention a few concrete instances that exemplify my point.

The events leading up to the United States declaring war on Japan on December the 8^th 1941 come to mind. On November 6^th 1941, just a month before Pearl Harbour, Japan had offered to eliminate the main major factor that really led to the Pacific war, namely the Closed Door Policy in China. This offer came with one reservation though, they would only eliminate the closed door in China if it were also applied in, say Latin America, the British Dominions and so forth. This of course was considered absurd and ignored by the United States. That was one of the factors that led to the attack on Pearl Harbour and the war which as a matter of course, was politically impossible for United States not to declare, even when they knew that the blame was distributed. But again, we are talking about what is and what is moral, not what is a natural reflex. And the advocates of nonviolence are really saying that we should try to raise ourselves to such a cultural and moral level, both as individuals and as a community, that we would be able to control this reflex. According to Gandhi, non violence does not mean docile submission to the will of the evil, but it means the use of all of the soul’s powers against the will of the tyrant. And to quote Gandhi, “nonviolence is not an excuse for the coward, but is the supreme virtue of the brave. The practice of non-violence needs much more courage than the practice of arms. …Vengeance is a symbol of weakness as well... A dog barks and bites when it is scared.”

Now what were the consequences of striking back? On December 8^th, 1941, the United States struck back quite blindly and unthinkingly, and I'm not sure in retrospect that the world is any better for it. So even after Pearl Harbour, I would advocate for nonviolence, not as an absolute moral principle, but as conceivably justified in those particular historical circumstances. In short, there may well have been alternatives to the Pacific War.

The anti-war movement in the United States deserves recognition for it's argument for nonviolence. Tolstoy lends us interesting insights about civil disobedience in the context of the United States. To quote from one of his essays of 1897, “The Beginning of the End” he points out that until recently men could not imagine a world without slavery. Similarly, one cannot imagine the life of man without war. “...a hundred years have gone since the first clear expression of the idea that mankind can not live without slavery; and there is no longer slavery in Christian nations. And there shall not pass another hundred years after the clear utterances of the idea that mankind can live without war, before war shall cease to be. Very likely some form of armed violence will remain, just as wage labour remains after abolition of slavery, but at least wars and armies will be abolished in the outrageous form, so repugnant to reason and moral sense, in which they now exist.”

We live in an aggressive society, and we live under conditions of almost unparalleled freedom. We therefore have the opportunity to eradicate a good part of the illegitimate violence that plagues our lives and that is destroying the lives of many who are much less fortunate. I think we have no choice whatsoever but to take up the challenge that's implicit in this prediction of Tolstoy's. If we do not take up this challenge, we will help to bring about a very different state of affairs which was reportedly predicted by Einstein, who was once asked his opinion about the nature of a third world war and replied that he had nothing to say about that matter, but that he was quite certain that the fourth world war would be fought with clubs and stones.

The basic arguments that should surely lie the thought of violent reactions to rest are I think simple to conjure. Governments happen to be monopolies of power and efforts to retaliate violently almost always bring more harm to the oppressed and in most instances makes these governments to clench their fists even tighter. A perfect piece to fill this picture puzzle is events that are currently rolling in Libya. To the extent that you can compare the nature of the uprisings in Egypt and Libya, interesting observations can be drawn from what violent and nonviolent protests have a power to deliver. Egypt was able to non-violently oust it's political figure head, Mubarak, in a few weeks of campaigning while Libya's Gaddafi could potentially be anywhere! Because they haven’t yet captured him as they would like. And as Martin Luther King, the well respected advocate for nonviolence put it and I quote, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence . Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force”.

Another reason to avoid violence is that violence always tends to antagonise the uncommitted or otherwise called the 'swing' population. What any nonviolent movement wants is to enrol as much of its public as it can since peaceful active resistance only materialises when it is strongly backed by the a sizable populace. This case I believe is one to be made for the Hezbollah of Lebanon and Hamas of The Palestinian territories.

Refer to chomsky.info for the whole excerpt of the interview.