about something we haven’t discussed much here at Crash Course. Peace. Peaceful, non-violent protest.

Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Finally an episode where no one gets killed.

Mmmm. Ehhh. Some people are gonna get killed, Me From the Past. Sadly, peaceful, nonviolent

protest is often just peaceful on the one side.

So we’ve talked a lot about war this year on Crash Course, how it shaped civilizations

and nation states. And it’s easy to assume that humans are kind of naturally violent

and prone to fighting. And in recent human history, especially during the 20th century,

we got scarily good at waging war, right? There were, of course, the two World Wars, but there

were also many other very destructive smaller wars and we can’t forget that there were also genocides.

But one of the most remarkable and often unnoticed aspects of the 20th century is the incredible

number of peace, non violence, and anti-war movements. Like, we know about Gandhi, but

what makes the 20th century unique in history is that Gandhi wasn’t unique. There was

actually a surprisingly large number of peace and nonviolence movements that were occurring all

around the world. So in this episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about the nonviolent

heavy hitters, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. I guess I should say, the heavy “non-hitters”

because, you know, they were nonviolent. But they were, by no means, the only ones.

So by 1900, Europeans pretty much dominated the world, even though there had been relative

peace in Europe since 1871, Europeans, using new weapons, had unleashed an incredible amount

of violence everywhere else on the planet. They had colonized most of Africa, Asia, and

the Pacific. Americans had also expanded across the continental United States, and were making

eyes at the Caribbean and Asia. And I want to be clear that this conquest and colonization

was consistently violent. But some people were beginning to question the very idea of

violence itself. Like in his 1894 book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Leo Tolstoy,

who knew a little bit about War and Peace, explored how Jesus’s message to quote “turn

the other cheek” was the basis for a life of nonviolence.

He argued that governments and individuals needed to give up violence if they believed

themselves to be true Christians, and Tolstoy also saw nonviolence as a solution to ending

colonialism. In 1908, Tolstoy wrote "A Letter to a Hindu" to Mohandas Gandhi, and in the

letter, he explained that Indians needed to confront British imperialism with love and

nonviolence. Gandhi not only read that letter, he also published it in his South African

newspaper "Indian Opinion" in 1909. And Tolstoy's ideas in this correspondence with Gandhi marked

the beginning of an informal dialogue between the advocates of nonviolence from around the

world that spanned the 20th century.

And Tolstoy wasn't the only influence on Mohandas K. Gandhi, he'd grown up in the Gujarat region

of India where there's a sizable Jain community. And through the Jain monks Gandhi was exposed

to the idea of Ahimsa: non-violence or non-injury to life. He also read widely including western

writers like John Ruskin, and Henry David Thoreau.

So after his return to India from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi began to distill his thinking

related to non-violence into a more explicit philosophy. In his 1929 autobiography "The

Story of my Experiments with Truth", Gandhi wrote about how his belief in Ahimsa could

be the basis for Indian resistance to British rule. So for Gandhi non-violence was both

a way of life, and a tool for gaining Indian self-rule. He saw Western civilization as

violent and exploitative. That's ridiculous. I know the Eurocentrists are gonna get mad

at me for saying that but it is true, a smidge violent and exploitative at times. That said,

well done with like market-based innovation and the Mona Lisa and etc. OK let's move on.

Gandhi believed that Indians could reject that lifestyle and replace it with a nonviolent

one. And Gandhi also believed that Indians could bring about an end to British rule through

a combination of Ahimsa and Satyagraha, a word often translated as adherence to truth.

All right, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

These interconnected ideas of Ahimsa and Satyagraha are best seen in the Salt March of 1930. So,

since the mid 19th century, the British had placed taxes on salt, and since salt, in addition

to making food more delicious is necessary to live, Gandhi saw these laws as a perfect

example of how British despotism affected all Indians. Gandhi announced that he and

a small group planned to march from his home in Ahmedabad to the coast in order to harvest

salt. The march took almost two months and quickly gathered media attention from around

the world and the British raj in India was forced to choose between arresting Gandhi

for breaking a British law or else allowing him to break the law because he was harvesting

salt illegally. Millions of Indians were inspired by Gandhi’s challenge to British rule and

began their own protests against the salt law. As civil disobedience spread across India,

the British began to arrest people and the international media focused even more on the

protests and popular opinion began to see British rule as unjust. By refusing to meet

violent British rule with violence of his own and highlighting the injustice of British

rule, Gandhi was able to use nonviolence as an effective tool in undermining the colonial regime.

Thanks Thought Bubble. So as previously noted, Gandhi’s use of nonviolence is very well

known but it wasn’t unique. Throughout the early 20th century nationalist movements in

colonies throughout Africa and Asia also adopted nonviolence. Like one of the first nationalist

leaders to advocate for nonviolence resistance to Imperialism was Phan Chu Trinh. Just as the

Vietnamese independence movement was developing in the first decade of the nineteen hundreds,

Phan began to question the violent methods advocated by other nationalists. Like he spoke

out against the violent uprisings that were occurring in many parts of Vietnam. He also

resisted requesting help from Japan in the Vietnamese Independence struggle because of Japan's militarism.

In 1919, Egyptians protested against British rule by going on strike, and boycotting British

goods, and organizing demonstrations across the country. Those protests went on for months

and eventually in 1922 the British granted independence to Egypt. Although some key areas,

including the Suez Canal, did remain under British control. And even as nonviolence became

a tactic associated with anti-imperial movements in Africa and Asia it was also becoming entrenched

in the peace movement that developed in response to World War One. When war broke out in the

fall of 1914 there were lots of protests in the United States, which had yet to enter

the war. A number of young activists met to discuss how to stop it and how to prevent

the United States from entering it. This group included AJ Musty and Kirby Page and Dorothy

Day, all of whom would go on to become important figures in the Peace Movement in the United

States. They also helped found the Fellowship of Reconciliation or (FOR), which advocated

on behalf of conscientious objectors and encouraged nonviolent alternatives to conflict. And then

after the war ended many of these American peace activists began to expand their horizons

and they saw connections between nonviolence and antiwar movements and nonviolence in the

anti-imperial struggle.

There was, for instance, Ricard Gregg, a young activist who had been involved in the anti-war

movement in the United States, who traveled to India in 1925. He spent four years in India

studying with Gandhi including seven months living at Gandhi’s ashram in Gujarat. And

then when he returned to the US, Gregg wrote the very influential book The Power of Nonviolence

in which he described how nonviolence would remake the world.

I mention this to get across the idea that this was truly an international movement that

involved cultural exchange that went both west to east and east to west. And this idea

of nonviolent resistance was also very compelling to artists. During the Spanish Civil War the

nationalist forces of General Franco heavily bombed the Basque village of Guernica and

after reading about the destruction of the village, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso

who was working on a commissioned mural for the Spanish Republic abandoned the mural and

began painting Guernica to draw attention to the horrors that war inflicts upon innocent

civilians. The painting became one of the most famous of the 20th century and it remains

a powerful antiwar symbol. There were even nonviolent protests against the Nazis. Like

in 1943 the German Gestapo arrested about 1800 Jewish men who were married to non-Jewish

women. And as those men were being held in an office building, their wives gathered together

on the street. Armed German Gestapo agents attempted to disperse them with threats of

firing into the crowd and a stand off between the unarmed women and the armed Gestapo went

on for a week. Instead of firing on the women, Joseph Gerbils, the Nazi party director in

Berlin, ultimately decided to back down and he released the men. The so called Rosenstrasse

protest was the only successful public protest against Nazi policies in Germany but it wasn't the only protest.

And then we have the Civil Rights Movement in the United States which brought together

many of the different strains of nonviolent resistance in the 20th century. Like during

World War II, civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin met AJ Musty and other members of the

Fellowship of Reconciliation, and they spent much of the war protesting racial discrimination

in the armed forces but at the same time Rustin was also becoming increasingly aware of the

injustice of the British colonialism in India and Africa and began to protest that as well.

And we see this global cross-fertilization of nonviolent ideas again in 1948 when Rustin

traveled to India, where he met with many of Gandhi’s associates -- Gandhi had been

killed in January of that year -- and learned about the role of nonviolent protest against

the British. And in the following decade, Rustin would teach Martin Luther King Jr about

Gandhi’s tactics, so he could use them in protesting against racial segregation in the

United States. King himself traveled to India in 1959 to learn more about nonviolence. And

before leaving he explained that he was quote “more convinced than ever before that the

method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people

in their struggle for justice and human dignity.”

And the principles of nonviolence would come to shape the strategies used for the remainder

of the Civil Rights Movement. Nonviolent resistance was also an important protest tactic during

the Cold War. Alexander Dubcek, the Czech Communist Party’s first secretary, began

a series of reforms to communist rule in Czechoslovakia in January 1968 that would become known as

the Prague Spring. And the Soviet Union was like no no no no no no no we don’t like

democratic reforms or Spring. So they sent in troops to destabilize Dubcek’s government

and in response to that invasion, civilians quickly took to the streets in support of

Dubcek and to resist the invasion. Most people resisted through a variety of nonviolent means,

including deliberately giving wrong directions to Soviet tanks, forming human blockades across

bridges, and distributing protest materials. Secret radio stations were set up to broadcast

calls for nonviolent resistance across the country. And the protest continued on for

the rest of 1968. In January of 1969, two Czech students burned themselves to death

in a Prague square to protest the Soviet occupation and as the tensions between the protesters

and the Soviets escalated, the Soviets began a violent crackdown. By the summer of 1969

they'd brought the demonstrations to an end.

Historians took note of all of this stuff, like historian Gene Sharp published his multi

volume Politics of Nonviolent Action which was reportedly read by a lot of the original

protesters in the Arab Spring of 2011, which reminds us that nonviolent resistance movements

advocating for and in some cases achieving political change are not just part of history,

they are also part of the world in which we live today. Ideas about nonviolence that began

with Leo Tolstoy at the beginning of the 20th century are still very much with us.

And I think it is good important to remind ourselves of two things. First, that Tolstoy’s

most famous book is called War and Peace. And secondly, that the 20th century while

it featured intensely destructive wars, was by many measures the least violent century ever.

Wars are traumatic and they have relatively straightforward narratives that allow us to

focus on human dramas and all of that stuff is appealing to historians. But really the

nonviolent struggles against oppression in the 20th century have been just as dramatic

and especially in the second half of the 20th century they have born fruit and not just

in the US and India. When the news focuses just on death and destruction it can be hard

to remember that more people are living under peaceful regimes than ever before and that,

at least between nations, inequality and injustice are diminishing. Nonviolent resistance doesn’t

always work and the governments that emerge form these movements aren’t always good

governments. The stories, as usual, are complicated. So the next time we think about the 20th century

merely as a century of war and genocide and nuclear weapons we need to remind ourselves

that it was also a century in which hundreds of millions of people emerged from poverty

and fewer people died as a result of violence. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.

Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz studios in Indianapolis and

it’s made possible by our Subbable subscribers. Thank you so much for watching and as we say

in my home town, don’t forget to be awesome.