In the 20th century women and men—the suffragists, Gandhi, Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and a million others whose names we don’t know—invented something new and important: the nonviolent social movement. They were drawing on earlier sources: Thoreau, the Sermon on the Mount. But it was, and still is, a fresh and dramatic innovation: a new way for the small and many to stand up to the mighty and the few. Though there isn’t much academic research (and, except in these pages, no nonviolent version of military schools like West Point), the academic research in recent years indicates that nonviolent campaigning is the most effective way of confronting power, far more likely to succeed than violent revolution. I’ve spent much of my life dabbling in it: helping build big nonviolent campaigns to stop pipelines or divest trillions of dollars from fossil fuel companies, and while we haven’t won the climate fight, we’ve definitely begun to shift the zeitgeist. When you fight, it’s amazing how often you win.
But it’s also amazing to me how little attention the world of entertainment usually pays to this kind of work. Instead, violence saturates our novels and movies. I realize that’s not a novel insight, and I don’t mean it as a moral judgment but simply as an observation. If you went to the paperback rack at the airport to find a book, you’d be hard-pressed not to think that America was under constant siege by demonic terrorists who are held back only by a veritable army of former CIA agents and Navy Seals who have gone entertainingly rogue in an effort to restrain the forces of chaos and terror. Ever since Tom Clancy, a certain kind of (very popular) novel has been obsessed with cataloguing the make and caliber of every weapon that these men use in pursuit of their rough justice. And not just the U.S.—there are literally more books about murders in Scandinavia than there are murders in Scandinavia.
Meanwhile, at the movies, week after week, new iterations of superhero serials appear. They are fantastically imaginative—the supers have long since moved past bending steel, and now employ a staggering range of powers both physical and psychic as they work out traumas from their past or confront injustices around them. Even the most creative of these sagas, however, invariably finish with a fight. Force, in the end, is how things are settled.
The problem with these entertainments is not so much what they include as what they don’t. Nonviolence is interesting, requiring wit and creativity in the place of firepower. But this terrain is largely underexplored by the popular artists creating our vision of the world. There are infinitely more nonviolent campaigns underway at any given moment than armed conflicts—from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo boycotts, from people sitting down in front of bulldozers to those jamming airports to rescue immigrants, from the streets of Milwaukee to the forests of Brazil, people are constantly conjuring new techniques to reverse the injustices and inequalities that mark our planet.
Yes, murder automatically raises the reader’s heart rate; carnage creates cinematic spectacle; it’s the easy way out for writers. But I can tell you from my own experience that there is enormous drama too in non-violence, as people risk their liberty (sometimes their lives) to stand up to injustice. As I hope this book demonstrates, the tools at their disposal are almost infinite: shooting people and blowing things up is a limited dramatic vocabulary compared to the methods nonviolent campaigners have figured out how to use. Gene Sharp, the defining historian of modern nonviolence, once published a three-volume series detailing the hundreds of techniques that have been employed, from ostracism to hunger strikes, from hauling down street signs to confuse invaders to wading-in at segregated pools. (I’m grateful to him, and to Eknath Easwaran, for some of the history herein). Nonviolent campaigners often employ art, and the best of them recognize the power of wit—these are weapons absent from the arsenals of conventional armies. And every year brings new inventions: the fact that Greta Thunberg’s school strikes for climate action spread around the planet in a matter of weeks reminds us how fresh this new idea still is, and how the most unlikely people (a Swedish schoolgirl who credits her autism for much of her brilliant focus) can suddenly exert tremendous leverage.
This book, I hope, is an entertainment. It is designed less to teach than to intrigue. I hope some of its readers will find themselves curious about the many similar stories unfolding in the real world around them, and I hope other writers will begin to explore this terrain more thoroughly. Nonviolence is available to all—this book, therefore, is designed to be read by all, from pleasantly sophisticated younger people, and pleasantly unsophisticated older people. Even cynics, or people so saddened by the press of bad news in our chaotic historical moment that they’ve nearly given up, may find in it a few reasons for hope. Or hope against hope.
Obviously I’ve taken liberties with the historical figures who pop up in this account—I’ve never met the Dalai Lama, for instance, and I am under no illusion that he needs my advice on how to carry out his work. I once shook hands with Pope Francis, though that doesn’t give me the right, I suppose, to make him a character. But since I’ve always admired them, it was fun to work them into this tale; I’ve included lots of names of famous people, from Chinese pop stars to American politicians, but none of their actions or words are real--this is fiction. And as in this story most of the work gets done by many deeply committed people we never hear of. I’d like to thank my many colleagues around the world in the fight for a just and working planet. I’ve learned a great deal from them, and am eager in these pages to pay a little tribute to their courage, good humor, and creativity. I’m also grateful to Vanessa Arcara, who is my wonderful colleague; to Athena Currier, who came up with the cover and format; to a great many friends and family who read this in various forms (my beloved wife Sue Halpern was as usual chief among them, and Sam Verhovek was especially thorough); and to Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson for helping me figure out the unusual publishing scheme. Daniel Taylor provided more than a chunk of the inspiration.
Most of the time I sell books, because I enjoy eating and because I know that the library will let anyone who wants read it for free anyway—Indeed I have a ‘real book’ in the works at the moment. But given the subject matter, it seems right to offer this one up as a small (though at 150,000 words not I fear short) and somewhat misshapen gift to the world. Misshapen because I’m not really a novelist. This book is a prequel/sequel to a book of mine called Radio Free Vermont that a lot of people seemed to enjoy. But I called that one a fable, and this one a yarn, so as to let you know not to expect too much!
I hadn’t thought about an alternative to the constant barrage of violence in our media. Looking forward to reading this book!
I've never thought about the paucity of nonviolent strategies depicted in action/political fiction, so thanks for pointing it out.