Spirit in Action
Gandhi & the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment With Truth
James W. Douglass is author of a number of books including Gandhi & the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment With Truth. He's cofounder of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Washington State and Mary's House, a Catholic Worker house in Burmingham, Alabama.
- Broadcast on:
- 10 Mar 2013
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ We've got a rich experience ahead for today's Spirit in Action. We'll be visiting with activist and author James W. Douglas. Jim has spent decades struggling against evils woven into our national life, like militarism and poverty. Among other issues, he fought nuclear proliferation by founding the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Washington State, and also Mary's house, a Catholic worker house in Birmingham, Alabama. His latest book is Gandhi and the Unspeakable, his final experiment with truth, but he's also written other crucial books for our time, JFK and the Unspeakable, the Nonviolent Cross, Resistance in Contemplation, and more. Jim Douglas joined us today by phone from Birmingham, Alabama. Jim, it's great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thanks, Mark. I'm glad to be talking with you. You were up in Washington State for quite a while, right? That's correct. We lived next to the trident nuclear submarine base across from Seattle. We moved to Birmingham because of our work along the tracks of trains carrying nuclear weapons to the trident submarine base, which we saw regularly because we were living in the last house alongside the tracks going into the trident submarine base. So as part of a campaign to raise consciousness about the nuclear arms race and to stop those trains and the larger train of the world's destruction that runs through our lives, we moved to Birmingham alongside the tracks going to an east coast trident submarine base at Kings Bay, Georgia, and that was in 1989, and we founded a Catholic worker house here in the early '90s, and we've been living here ever since. For some people, they're perhaps unaware of the continuing production of nuclear weapons in the United States because we've got a good democratic, peaceable president on hand, right, even though he's escalated a few different wars and so on. Most people understand that there's something in the works about drawing down our nuclear weapons. Does that have any effect on you yet? Well, it has an effect on all of us in that it tends to lull us into unconsciousness. It has had no effect in terms of really ending nuclear weapons as a kind of sword over all of us in the world, and at any point through an accident or through a conflict, for example, between Pakistan and India, or for that matter between ourselves and Iran, we could be developed in a nuclear war that would make the term climate change horrendous through a nuclear winter that would end life on Earth. I think this is all real relevant to both your recent book, Gandhi and the Unspeakable, his final experiment with truth, and the book from back in 2008 that you wrote called JFK and the Unspeakable. We're not going to talk extensively about the JFK book this time, but I think that the crux of it was JFK's face-off with Cuba and with the Soviet Union at that point, and it's about nuclear weapons, right? It's about nuclear weapons, yes, and it's about the courage of the one president we've had who has resisted his military advisors to the point even of establishing a relationship with his foremost and our foremost enemy. In that case, Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union alongside another enemy, Fidel Castro of Cuba, who has survived to this day. And when Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis turned to Khrushchev rather than his CIA and Pentagon advisors and refused there, they might have called a counsel basically in order to him to invade Cuba and to attack the Soviet Union, when he stepped against their wishes and overtored, reconciling with his enemy, that was the beginning of the end of his presidency and of his life. He was regarded as a traitor, as a heretic in terms of Cold War theology, and the procedure that he followed from that October '62 crisis until his death in November '63 was one of peacemaking with Nikita Khrushchev, and that's what led to his death. I don't think that that's in the common mind these days that that was inherent in the whole problem troubled, but I also think that he didn't start out as some kind of a pacifist. He would not have been in that strain, let's say, of Catholicism, would he? Not at all. He was a Cold Warrior, and in some sense he remained a Cold Warrior to his death, but he was in the Biblical sense turning Cuba, Metanoia, Repentance. He was turning away from that threat to life everywhere toward the possibility of peace with our enemy. So in that sense he was following the imperative of Jesus, love your enemies, and he was following the imperative of Gandhi discovering truth in the opponent in the forces that would be least amenable to our own philosophy or attitude. So Kennedy learned to do that out of necessity, and he had a broad enough mind and a deep enough empathy with other people to follow that kind of policy. In the midst of the Cold War that required enormous courage, a courage that he talked about, wrote about in profiles and courage, and that he then lived down. Well, let's get talking about Gandhi and the Unspeakable, his final experiment with truth. I guess some people are not going to know what you mean by the word unspeakable. You want to fill us in so that we're all on the same page with you and Thomas Merton? Merton wrote a book called Raids on the Unspeakable, and Thomas Merton, for those of us who are familiar with him, was a great Catholic monk and writer whose life ended in 1968 when he died in Bangkok, Thailand from an apparent accident. Merton, in Raids on the Unspeakable, tried to come to terms with a kind of systemic evil that, especially in the '60s, was felt and sensed. But lay in corners, dark corners, it had resulted in enormous kinds of events from Hiroshima and Nagasaki's destruction by our nuclear weapons up through the Vietnam War, and including the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin of the King of Malcolm X. And Merton spoke of an unspeakable reality that, in the silence, he buys description, paralyzes us, and it's basically where we don't want to go and still don't want to go in our current struggles with the same kind of principalities and powers as they were identified in the writings of St. Paul. So the unspeakable is a term that suggests without quite naming but encouraging us to name those powers. And was President Eisenhower naming a piece of it when on his exit speech from office, he talked about the military industrial complexes, that part of the unspeakable systemic forces that are included here? That's a great example, and that's the background to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. President Eisenhower, as he was ending his two terms as President, identified what he had not dealt with in his presidency, the powers of the military industrial complex, and he left them up to his successor, John F. Kennedy, who did try to deal with him, and as a result, lost his life. But President Eisenhower is a good example, and he did make a huge contribution to our understanding of things by that description that he gives of the military industrial complex, which would threaten democracy and has, I believe, submerged our country in something considerably below a democracy. Obviously, over in India, where Gandhi was living and working and doing his great work for his country in the world, the military industrial complex was something different. So the unspeakable, in that case, has its own context. Can you add some flesh to what the unspeakable is in India's context? Gandhi had to confront, especially, the empire of the British. That was the reality that controlled India for Gandhi's struggle for freedom, and for the Indian peoples finally achieving it. Then, in that particular context of imperial dominance, there was the kind of consequence of divide and rule by the British, dividing Muslims from Hindus and turning them against each other by all kinds of schemes, and that resulted in the creation of Pakistan as a predominantly Muslim reality and trying to separate it from India, as they did, in fact, succeed in doing. In 1947, when independence was granted to India, the British were behind much of that, but also the Hindus and the Muslims, who diverged from Gandhi and saw themselves in sectarian terms, they contributed to attitudes of violence that resulted in genocidal attitudes in 1947, '48, and Gandhi had to struggle with all of that, and he also had to struggle with the efforts of Hindu nationalists, such as a man named Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a nemesis of his, to revolt against the British through weapons and through assassinations and through revolutionary warfare. Gandhi was up against it and was distinctly in the minority when he began his work for Indian independence and got to struggle with those forces all his life, and he lost his life to them in January 1948. Because you've written about both JFK's and Gandhi's assassinations and several others, and about the forces and the truths that were behind those assassinations, some people might think, "Oh no, here's another conspiracy nut," but I think that both your documentation, which is very thorough in my experience, and your objectives might convince them that there's something vital to look at here that's not about, let's talk about conspiracies so much as, let's talk about the strong forces throughout under our civilization, if we call it that. Do you want to talk about what those realities, what the difference views of realities, is specifically the difference between Gandhi's vision of the underlying reality we could have versus that that is perhaps captured by the unspeakable? Gandhi's understanding of non-violence was what he called in a term that he created, Sajagraha, "truth force," or adhering to the truth is what it literally means. He used as a synonym for truth force, soul force, and love force, and what's common to all of those terms is force. He's talking about something that is at the heart of the universe, the most powerful force in existence, besides which a nuclear weapon is inconsequential in power. He's talking about a power that can be experimented with in the same profound way, analogously, that we experiment with the atom, but which can go far beyond it. So we called his story of his own life and the story of my experiments with truth. He realized in the process of those experiments with truth that he was going up against systemic forces that would result in his own death, so he spent his whole life preparing for his death. In the course of that also, he realized that to get to the heart of that power through the kind of darkness that one had to go through in order to confront Hindu Muslim conflicts, to confront the British Empire, to confront the ways in which people were oppressed by their own people within India, so-called untouchability. He knew that he could get there only if he learned to love in profound ways his opponents. That was at the heart of Satyagraha, just as it's at the heart of Jesus teaching from whom he drew much of his understanding of Satyagraha. So as Gandhi went through these different layers of reality in his campaigns, he got more and more deeply into what Merton was talking about as the unspeakable and uncovered deeper and deeper layers of it to the point where Hindus and Muslims were slaughtering one another and Gandhi had to go from one side to the other, risking his life constantly in order to reach a deeper level of nonviolence which could transform those conflicts. And he did manage to transform them during his final year and a half, and even to stop the genocide between the Muslim and Hindu factions at the point of his death. But he leaves profound questions and problems for all of us to face today. I've been humbled by the additional things that I learned about Gandhi in Gandhi and the unspeakable. I mean, I knew about Gandhi and most of us know about Gandhi, but when you talk of him being prepared to give his life and actually planning on it, I had no idea to what depth that preparation involved. I mean, it started in South Africa. You want to give a few examples of what you mean about that? When he was in South Africa, beginning to practice as a lawyer, Gandhi, of course, had to face the oppression of his people there. In an early encounter when he was coming off a ship that was docking in South Africa, he was besieged by a hauling mob and they almost killed him as he was walking from the ship. He was saved by the wife of a police inspector who called the police and helped to escort Gandhi to a house where he and his family were almost burned alive. In responding to those events, Gandhi realized that if he continued that kind of work, he was going to die probably as a result. In each instance, he forgave very immediately those who were attacking him and he tried to realize if he were going to die in any of those instances, the presence of God both in his attackers and in whatever was meant for him to do and how he might have been meant to die. So he always repeated the word of God for him, "Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama" in those instances. And as time went on, he was even attacked by people who were close to him as he tried to realize the truth of the other side in these conflicts. He was thought to be a traitor to the Indians, a man who was a comrade of his and those struggles beat him over the head with a pipe because he thought he was selling out to General Smuts, the Indians' adversary in South Africa. When Gandhi who had walked openly into that attack recovered, he immediately asked about the man who had beaten him up and insisted that he not be prosecuted. And he thanked God for his learning through that experience, how he could take another step toward truth, toward death, and toward reconciliation simultaneously. He saw them all as one in the same hope. And he continued that through the rest of his life to the point where he did actually die at the moment that he was bowing to his assassin and saying, "Rama, Rama." And what I took from that is that this was not cheap grace. It's not, "Okay, I forgive you." Which I've heard politicians and other people who religious or spiritual talk about that, but to be very close to have been killed. I mean, he was left for dead in a couple of different situations. And to come back without rank or with only love and seeing God in that person, that's something that's challenged me. How did seeing this or reading this or perhaps you've known about it for decades? How has that changed you? I find it particularly amazing how Gandhi felt toward people who most threatened his vision. Who most, I guess you could say, were struggling with the things that he most profoundly believed in. So, it to me, in my own context, it means recognizing the truth of people in our society in our government who believe things profoundly different than I do. The Central Intelligence Agency is one place where I find it difficult to agree with people. U.S. military is another, but I have to recall that these people are members of my own family, both in the sense of our human family and also literally. I mean, I've married into a CIA family, and I have good friends from the past who are now very high within the U.S. government, one the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, with whom I went to school at Santa Clara University, and now he's our Secretary of Defense. So, these are people, whether CIA military or my own family, with whom I have to constantly remember. This is a family disagreement. And that's basically how Gandhi looked on his relationship to, for example, Winston Churchill, who didn't even like the idea of negotiating with a man of Gandhi's color and in consequential background. Does it at all take the wind out of your sails if you are looking at that other person as possessing a piece of the truth? I mean, I think some of us fear that unless we maintain a strong sense of the other person as the bad person, that we won't have the gumption to get up and do what needs to be done. Well, it may take some wind out of our sails in terms of a breeze we shouldn't be going with in the first place, but it gives one a sense of power and a possibility that is inconceivable otherwise. For example, when it comes to Osama bin Laden, who became our summary of evil in the universe for quite some time, one can imagine, instead of sending in a team to kill him, instead knocking on the door and walking up the stairs and sitting down with him and talking with him, that is, of course, inconceivable with our attitude nowadays in the war on terrorism, just as it was inconceivable that one could do such a thing with our communist enemies in the 1960s, and for that matter, it's still inconceivable to a lot of people that we can talk with, Fidel Castro, and reach all kinds of mutual truths. It gives one a whole new universe and a whole new power of envisioning a different kind of world when one sees that truth does have a power, and in Gandhi's case, it was power enough to make Churchill's power rather small in comparison. So, not violence, not only works, it gives one an understanding of force and of power that is absolutely different from the one that we have now. You know, when I learned about Gandhi in the past, I thought certainly that he was strongly spiritually motivated, religiously motivated, there wasn't any question about that, but I had my doubts about how pure that was. In the movie, Gandhi, for instance, there's one point where they're talking about what can we do, the British of outlawed, we can't do a protest or a strike, that's illegal, and Gandhi all of a sudden gets a light bulb over his head and he says, "A day of prayer and fasting." That's what we're going to have, not a strike. And they said, "Oh, this is a clever way of having a strike." And he says, "No, no, it's a day of prayer and fasting." I thought he was just being wily there, and you have some comments in the book, I think, back in the footnotes. I remember seeing that someone who thought, "Maybe he's being wily." And he says, "No, I'm being earnest." And having read the book, again, Gandhi and the Unspeakable, I have the sense that he was being as wise as serpent and as innocent as dove at the same time, and that this was coming from a totally authentic place that he really would not lie or manipulate. Well, the person who called him possibly wily was Muhammad Ali China, who was his great opponent and the creator of Pakistan by his opposition to Gandhi. And the instance that you're speaking about was when mountain batten, who was in charge of the transition as a British imperial figure from occupied India to a free India and a new nation of Pakistan, when mountain batten was confirmed with Gandhi, Gandhi of all people proposed that the leader of the interim government be Jinnah, Muhammad Ali China, his greatest enemy in conventional terms, his greatest adversary in what kind of terms Gandhi might concede to using. Mountain batten couldn't understand why do you want Jinnah to become head of this government rather than your own people, Nehru, with the logical successor? And Gandhi said that was the one way to avoid the partition of India and Pakistan, and that if Jinnah were given this power, he would have to work with the opposing forces, Hindu and Muslim both, and he would have power to do that, and he would have to take a somewhat different attitude. Well, Gandhi didn't put all of this into words, but Mount batten keptically said, "And what would Jinnah say if he knew what you were proposing?" Gandhi said, "Oh," he'd say, "Wily Gandhi." And Mountain batten said, "Would he be right?" And Gandhi said, "Absolutely not. I am completely serious in my proposal." So he would even go to the point of proposing that his enemy be the head of the government in order to avoid the consequence of partition and of enmity between Hindus and Muslims in a more profound sense. Of course, that proposal was unacceptable to whom? It was unacceptable to his own people. Nehru would, of course, had to forego his own power in order to allow Jinnah to take that position. And the Congress Party that Gandhi had worked with for decades did not want to relinquish their power with Nehru at the head of the Indian government. So Gandhi's ingenious proposal that Mount batten and others thought might really have succeeded with Jinnah, it went for not. Which is unfortunate for India and Pakistan and the rest of the world. We still have the tension right along the Kashmir front here. A lot of people, I think, probably mistakenly have the idea that Hinduism is inherently nonviolent and that Islam is inherently violent. One of the things I've been exposed to is, and that you mentioned in the book, is about the Bacha Khan. You want to mention a little bit about that for our listeners? Bacha Khan was the leader of the Muslim community in the Northwest province of India that has since been absorbed into Pakistan. And the traditions of the people in that area were violent in the extreme warfare between clowns, between different groups of people within that part of India. And Gandhi always believed that those who were most likely to be committed satiographies, people of truth and nonviolence, were of a militant or military or a background of war. That was proven when Bacha Khan was converted to nonviolence, especially through the example of Gandhi, and led tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the Northwest frontier. In a nonviolent revolution in that area against the British Empire, and he continued doing that for decades after Gandhi's own death. And Bacha Khan spent decades in prison as a result of that, and he became a prime example of the way in which people who had been cultured and trained to do violent acts transformed those ways of discipling themselves. And engaging in war into nonviolent resistance in deeper ways than most pacifists have ever realized. And my understanding is, Jim, that he did this completely from an Islamic point of view. He wasn't a disciple of Gandhi's. In fact, I think when he started, he didn't even really know about Gandhi. Bacha Khan was a Muslim to the core and remained Muslim all his life. He was drawing on the Quran, the Islamic scriptures and teachers for his understanding of nonviolence. And he of course absorbed Gandhi's Sajagraha into that context just as we as Christians can do. So Bacha Khan was and always remained a Muslim until his death, and his people were far dominantly Muslim in the Northwest frontier. One of the topics that I've wrestled with over my life, and I'm certain that you, as part of the Catholic Worker Movement and your activism up in Washington State with the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, you must have wrestled as I have with the interface and the lines between violence and force and coercion. And it seems to me that Gandhi issued any sort of coercion, and I've never been quite clear to go to that point. How do you wrestle with those different aspects of getting things done? Well, we've had points in our work, speaking of what my wife Shelly and I have been involved in, whether the campaign against nuclear weapons or the Vietnam War, or work against the death penalty, where we've had to see violence within our own ranks. And we've had to speak out on it. That involves tooth force in ways that colleagues may not agree with. It may involve criticizing our own movement and our own community in ways that don't seem acceptable. In relation, for example, to a demonstration that we had in the 1980s at Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action against a train bearing nuclear weapons going into the Trident Base, we felt that our own ranks and we were coercive in ways that were unjustifiable absolutely toward the police, that we were violent toward the police. We had a nonviolent discipline that we had said we would maintain, and we failed to do that, and people rushed against that train for understandable reasons. I mean, that was a train carrying six times the power of the Second World War, and it could incinerate parts of the planet and lead to all kinds of terrible destructions. But the way to deal with that is not by running at a train and pushing at police and risking their lives if they're going to fall against the train and something of that nature. So we spoke out against that kind of coercion on our part, violence on our part, and I'll tell you those weren't easy days. And we have had to continue to be critical of ourselves and our own mistakes. In that case, it was a mistake of not discerning failures in nonviolence training and differences in philosophy that went into that demonstration. So I'm not talking about somebody else, I'm talking about us, but by admitting that, I think we established deeper relationships with our opponent. Both people who didn't agree with us in the peace and justice movement, and also the police who began to understand that we weren't just trying to reach an objective and stepping over them in the process. In fact, the first visitor I had in prison after I was arrested for sitting in front of the train that day was the prosecutor from the county who had helped put me in jail in a sense, and he wound up resigning his job. So unexpected things happened when we get mixed up as to who's the other side and who's our side and instead goes simply for the truth. You're listening to spirit in action. I'm your host, Mark helps me for this northern spirit radio production website, northernspiritradio.org. You'll hear our archives of almost seven years, links to our guests so you can find out more about them. You can also leave comments and make donations on our site. Our guest today is James W. Douglas and his most recent book is Gandhi and The Unspeakable, his final experiment with truth. And he has a number of other books back in 2008. It was JFK and The Unspeakable. He's also written The Nonviolent Cross, Resistance and Contemplation, The Nonviolent Coming of God, a number of good books, and you'll find links how to connect with those via my site. Again, we're speaking with Jim Douglas. You were just talking, Jim, about the way you stood up for your beliefs. As part of the Catholic Worker Movement and general nonviolent movement, are you Catholic born and raised and how do your views fit into the Catholic mainstream? Hi, I'm Catholic born and raised and I think they should fit into the Catholic mainstream. I don't think they do. I say I think they should because they're based on the teachings of Jesus and not only Gandhi, but St. Francis of the C.V. and Dorothy Day, who's now being considered as a saint and probably will be officially that some day in the future. I think when we talk about the mainstream, we're talking about hopes for what can be the mainstream someday in the future. And my beliefs are common to every major religion in the world, not only Christianity, but nonviolence is at the heart of every major religion in the world. So if we can get to that root, in other words, if we can radically understand our own roots as people of faith or simply as people because nonviolence is radically at the roots of humanity, then we can have a future in the world. Dr. King rephrased Gandhi's and Jesus hopes as nonviolence or non-existence, and that's the future. It's that future or no future at all. Obviously, in doing this research about Gandhi, and certainly you've had contact with Gandhi in his teachings beforehand, you've probably come to see similarities and differences between your views and the views that he was espousing. And of course, those of Savarkar, the mastermind behind Gandhi's assassination, what would you say are the similarities, commonalities, and differences in those three cases? Well, Savarkar thought that the only way that one could be effective in resisting the empire and achieving independence for India was through assassinating officials and revolutionary violence. His was the dominant opinion in 1909, England negotiating lobbying British officials on behalf of his movement in South Africa. Savarkar debated with Gandhi over the meaning of Hindu mythology in the Ramayana, the great Hindu classic work later in 1909. At the same time, a Savarkar was behind the assassination of a prominent British official. So, assassination is a very key way in which Gandhi and Savarkar differed. I of course agree with Gandhi on that one. And I also believe that that particular method of violence is one that has become dominant in our own country right now. We are very much in the process of becoming a nation of assassins. That's our policy, our major military policy. Now, as we use drones to do it from the air and special forces, teams, seals and others to do it from the ground and from helicopter raids, as in the case of Osama bin Laden. So, I think that Gandhi was very visionary in recognizing that that was an evil that could not be in any way condoned while seeking freedom from an enormously powerful and oppressive force. And Savarkar saw it as necessary to the point where he thought Gandhi's acceptance of nonviolence would emasculate India, would bring it to its knees. And so, he masterminded an assassination of Gandhi in order to eliminate that man who would destroy the capacity of India to gain freedom or to defend itself. He was profoundly wrong, but when we criticized Savarkar, I think we sometimes fail to realize that we have adopted his methods and that they are dominant now in our own attitudes toward self-defense or in the so-called war on terrorism. One of the points that Gandhi made, and I think it was baseline for his entire beliefs, is that the means that you use inherently poison or affirm the end that you're going toward. You highlight this quite well in Gandhi and the unspeakable. How much are you attached to that belief? Is that ground level for you, too, in terms of beliefs? I think the means is the end in the process of becoming. That is what Gandhi believed, what I learned from Gandhi, and what I think is true in all of our actions, not only in relation to war and peace, but in anything we choose to do. So, I'm a Gandhian in that sense, and when people ask me, you know, how to identify myself sometimes, I say I'm a Gandhian Catholic. Of course, Catholic means universal, as well as the particular way in which I worship. Gandhi is my way of understanding means and ends. I think his classic work in the Swaraj is the best expression of that. He wrote that relatively short essay on a ship when he was going back from his trip to England in 1909. He was so absorbed in responding to the attitudes of assassination and violence that he met in London with Savarkar and his followers displaying those attitudes that Gandhi was writing, alternately between his right hand and his left hand, his right hand would become tired, and then he switched to his left hand. Gandhi was ambidextrous, and he wrote this beautiful work that not only dealt with the outer word forms of violence, that we would, you know, recognize most easily, such as assassination. He dealt with the whole civilization, Western civilization, that he felt was a violence of means and of domination and of oppression, and he identified all kinds of elements that are the background of our own country and civilization today as the sources of violence. And in order to really live a non-violent way of life, we would have to come to terms with those just as much with the question of war. One very interesting point in which these philosophies, these ideas, these deep perceivings of reality were spoken about was when President Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize. What did you think of what he said in that speech? Well, President Obama has often referred to Martin Luther King and to Gandhi as inspirations, and I accept his sense of being connected with them. However, it raises many questions when it comes to his application of those visions, and I think his adoption of those visions is in minor ways as opposed to the core of what we carry out. We carry out in our international politics and national politics. So I once wrote a kind of appreciation of his words on Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In one instance, he was a participant in a dialogue with some high school students in Virginia, and a young woman who was a ninth grader asked him a very specific question saying, "If you could have lunch with anyone, who would it be?" He immediately said Gandhi, and the president went on to say, "Well, it wouldn't be a very big lunch. He doesn't eat very much." And then he went on to describe the kind of organizing that Gandhi did with people who had little power and how, by bringing them together, he achieved a great power and they achieved a much greater power together. And at the very end of his appreciation of Gandhi, President Obama said that the kind of change that Gandhi brought will not come from Washington. It will only come when the people bring it to Washington. I think he had an insight there that we need to follow deeply, and without spending as much time criticizing the president for policies that reflect our own attitudes. We need to be recreating our attitudes so that we don't become the kinds of assassin supporters that create policies in our own government. You know, one of the things that I was curious about at the book, and I don't feel like I've had it fully answered yet, Gandhi and the unspeakable, he's been assassinated. There's been essentially complicity in the government there to not prosecute Savarkar or to not successfully prosecute Savarkar who's behind it all in his forces, his alliances through the RSS and his philosophy of Hindatu. You say, and other people have said, that Gandhi perhaps won through his death. What's your perspective at this point? Did he win? Did he lose? Was his assassination maybe the straw that broke the camel's back that prevented this wonderful movement that Gandhi was so inspirational to? Did it prevent its success or did it in fact materialize the success? Well, we provide the answer to that question because the assassination of Gandhi as in the case of the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King continue to this day, they have been covered over and not dealt with. In the case of Gandhi in India, because Savarkar's involvement was not dealt with by the Indian government, led even by Gandhi's own disciples, Nehru and Patel, because the evidence that they had against Savarkar, including testimonies that could have been provided by his guard and his secretary, because that was not drawn upon in the trial, Savarkar was allowed to walk free. Why did that happen? Well, the Indian government was afraid of his power. It was afraid to confront a very serious nationalist, erratically nationalist, in the sense of being very violent power within Hindu politics. By not confronting it, Savarkar's legacy became the power of the government and a coalition government at the turn of the century. And Savarkar is today celebrated. There's a national monument to him where he was in prison on the Andaman Island. His picture is in the parliament of India. This is the assassin of Gandhi, the man who was most responsible for it. In the same ways, because we haven't dealt with the assassination of President Kennedy, the main organizers of that assassination, namely the institution known as the Central Intelligence Agency, is a dominant force in American foreign policy and politics. Don't deal with it. We are the answer to the question that violence dominates. Well, of course, we can deal with it even today. President Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination, Gandhi's assassination are with us right now, with us right now. And that is how we have become a nation of assassins, rather than a nation pursuing the kind of politics that Kennedy was willing to choose with our enemy, Akita Khrushchev, a policy of reconciliation and peace and of hope. Then perhaps one concluding question, Jim, and you've perhaps answered this or answered most of it. As you know, I'm Quaker, and you're Catholic. I was raised Catholic, by the way, and had a very good experience of it. I think it made me a very significant part of who I am today. In Quaker terminology, we speak about that of God in everyone, which I think Gandhi also did. We try and reach toward that and nurture that. The phrase that you use in titles of your two recent books about the unspeakable, I think, talks about that dark side. What do you think is the balance between the unspeakable in each of us and the light in us, that of God in us? I'm not sure that there is so much a balance as a choice. We have to choose that reality at every step that we take. And in the case of President Kennedy to talk about him for a moment because of Quakers, he met with six Quakers in his office on May Day of 1962. And they confronted him with all questions about that of God in everyone because he was failing, especially at that point in his presidency, to realize it. And they, even as Quakers, expressed a skepticism that he was capable of changing all that much. We often take that attitude toward people of power, especially in the Oval Office, you know, can somebody change in that kind of a context. There was one point at which he was being criticized very adamantly by the six friends, the six Quakers who were meeting with him. Just the seven of them all alone in the Oval Office because he hadn't appointed people that they would have wanted to the Arms Control and Disarmament Commission. In fact, he was inviting and appointing Republicans and people who didn't possibly even believe in the politics of disarmament that he was pursuing. He said, "How can you do that?" And Kennedy said, "Well, he needed a bridge to the Congress, and he needed people who weren't necessarily pacifists or even that strongly inclined toward his own policies, but he felt that they could learn and could provide a bridge." Then he looked around at the circle of Quakers that were sort of besieging him because of his attitude there, and he said, "You believe in redemption, don't you?" And I think that's a good question for all of us as we confront people skeptically that we don't think can change. Do we believe in redemption? Do we believe in change? Do we believe in the possibilities of a new attitude toward change that the enemy or that are adversary or that our opponent might have a little bit of a difficulty realizing? Because if we don't believe in that in him or her, we're not really believing in it in ourselves. So the choice of seeing God in everyone, in absolutely everyone, from Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden to Muhammad Ali Jinnah to all of Gandhi's other opponents. When it's Churchill, whomever, there is God in everyone, and there is the possibility of truth and love and reconciliation with all of them, as all you good Quakers know from the beginning. And we have trouble operationalizing it. Sometimes we forget our own truths. So it's very good of you, Jim, to bring them up for us. Again, we've been speaking with James W. Douglas, author of his recent book, Gandhi and the Unspeakable, his final experiment with truth. You can also find other very important and crucial books for our day, like JFK and the Unspeakable, why he died and why it matters. You've done a good job today, Jim, of conveying to us why it matters. And I thank you for your work, your work with the Ground Zero Nonviolent Action, with Mary's house there in Birmingham, Alabama, and with all of this literature, which helps call us back to these essential truths. I thank you so much for joining me for Spirit and Action. And thank you, Mark, and thanks to Northern Spirit Radio for this opportunity to explore those truths with you. James W. Douglas has been with us today for Spirit and Action. Come to nordonspiritradio.org for links to Jim and his work. We'd like to take you out today with a topical song by one of my very favorite singer-songwriters, Carrie Newcomer. I've had Carrie on my Song of the Soul program before, and she'll be with me again in the next week or two. This is about an early American settler trying to live out the Peaceable Kingdom. Here is Carrie Newcomer, "Do No Harm." See you next week for Spirit in Action. John Roth had a heart like flame. He believed all souls were love the same. He packed up his hopes and his family. And moved to Ohio. There in the deep dark wilderness where the newborn son is soon was blessed. Raising up in the ways of the old prophets named him Isaiah Roth. "Do No Harm" should not blood the only love here is love. We can call the kingdom down here on earth. Be it your swords in the clouds. Don't be afraid. I'll show you how. Lift your eyes to the skies. All is holy here. The forest people are sinking near. His message to the red children clean. We can build the Peaceable Kingdom here in the shadow of these trees. They planted oats and beans and maize. They planted their hearts in the dirt of that place. And they learned to speak about hope and grace. Him a language of John Roth. "Do No Harm" should not blood the only love here is love. We can call the kingdom down here on earth. Be it your swords in the clouds. Don't be afraid. I'll show you how. Lift your eyes to the skies. All is holy here. When I say a Roth had just turned ten. He was working up in the loft again. He looked out. He saw eight white men come riding up that day. The men called out from the deepening lane. Saying you'll come out and we can't trade. The forest people walked out on a parade with smiles and open hands. The white traders lifted up their guns and shut them down each and everyone. And they eat in that John Roth begun. They're bleeding on the ground. "Do No Harm" should not blood the only love here is love. We can call the kingdom down here on earth. Be it your swords in the clouds. Don't be afraid. I'll show you how. Lift your eyes to the skies. All is holy here. Now the world is aged by the dears. The Quakers came and settled near. All I'd say a Roth still preaches here. That the greatest law is love. Now some people say it's all his skin. Just the ravings of some old man. But I'd say a Roth says he's still kin. To be eaten on the hill. "Do No Harm" should not blood the only love here is love. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]