Don’t side with violence.
Suppose the recent revelation that the CIA considered kidnapping and assassinating Julian Assange back in 2017 is not enough to break America’s hypnotic acceptance of violence as a misguided means of keeping us all safe. In that case, I do not know what will. Such egregious government misconduct got the Daniel Ellsberg case dismissed during the Nixon Administration. I hope this would convince British authorities to continue to deny extradition to the United States and the Biden administration to drop their case against Assange.
Non-violence is a big part of Julian Assange’s message. People do not want war with their neighbors; they have to be lied to by the government and institutions to go to war or inflict violence upon others. Governments need violence to justify their existence and stay in power. That is why they are so afraid of Julian Assange. He, as a journalist, exposes their lies, but most importantly, uses his platform to preach non-violence. And like Jesus, who preached non-violence and exposed the hypocrisy of the authorities, he was also persecuted.
I hope to see Mr. Assange freed someday soon. The president of my new country (I am in the process of canceling my subscription to violence — It is a relatively slow bureaucratic process) said he would offer him asylum. Perhaps we would become neighbors someday.
By “Don’t side with,” what we often mean is don’t support violence by a particular entity. We already do this by paying taxes or compulsory military service in the case of governments. For both the weak and strong alike, violence will never work. Just look at the Palestinians or the Arab Spring or America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan; violence accomplished nothing. Encouraging the weak to use violence is as much a betrayal as it is with the strong, a betrayal of both entities as well as our principles. We know it is wrong.
If any system relies on violence, be it Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, etc., it is doomed.
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If we change public opinion and end our subscription violence, more writers and thought leaders need to recognize violence as a root cause of most of our problems.
Because many of the disciples did not understand Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, especially his commandments relating to the non-resistance to evil by force (Matthew 5:39), we arrive at this manifestation of violence against ourselves. Remember that when Jesus was alive, we were all the same people; we were all Jew or Greek. Christianity as we know it today did not exist yet.
A great book on this subject of non-resistance to evil by force is “The Kingdom of God is Within You” by Leo Tolstoy, written in 1893, where a central theme is “Resist not Evil” and how Tolstoy predicted WWI, WWII, and the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons. But, Tolstoy also gives us a prescription for ending violence and war. And that prescription is not only to return Christ’s teaching from the Sermon on the Mount but is rooted in common sense and other spiritual, religious, and philosophical traditions.
“Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war .” — Judith Butler.
“Whoever relies on the Tao in governing men doesn’t try to force issues or defeat enemies by force of arms. For every force, there is a counterforce. Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.” — Laozi.
“Good and evil are not equal. Repel evil with good, and the person who was your enemy becomes like an intimate friend.” — The Quran — 41:34
“If you have the choice between being right and being kind, choose to be kind” — Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.
