Yesterday morning, Sunday, I attended an 11:00 matinee concert at Budapest's new and swank Palace of the Arts. Setting out I wasn't clear from the brochure what precisely the program was to be, but as 2011 is the Franz Liszt bicentennial, and Liszt was named in the brochure, I had a pretty good hunch I would hear a Lisztian concert of some sort. Of what sort, I didn't particularly care. Orchestral, chamber, whatever. I just wanted to hear music, and see the Palace.
The event turned out to be less a Lisztian concert than a Lisztian lecture, conducted by a very amiable speaker who doubled as a good though way-too-occasional pianist. Much appreciated by the audience (who tee-heed at all his humorous asides), he left me cold, probably because he was lecturing in Hungarian. And, as this matinee was 90% Liszt lecture and 10% Liszt music, I had a lot of time to think in the drone between piano ditties.
Meaning, I drifted back to the night prior, Saturday, around 7:00, as I ordered some Ballantine's scotch in the incredibly opulent and ornate New York Coffee House. Paying twice the price I would have paid anywhere for the same whiskey, my server offered me -- whether in compensation or as consolation -- The International Herald Tribune, a New York Times publication that is much more global in coverage than its parent paper.
Reading through it, I came across a feature about an 83 year old academic, political scientist Gene Sharp, and how his decades-long writing on nonviolent resistance has become a staple for dissidents all over the world seeking to take down despotic regimes without resorting to armed insurrection. The article cited his influence among contemporary dissidents in Egypt as a recent example.
Dial back about eight or nine years. My then colleague and hall mate, drama critic Tish Dace, preparing to retire, called me to her office door one day and presented me with an armful of books plucked from her increasingly gap-toothed book shelves. They were all by a former colleague of hers, way back when UMass Dartmouth was Southeastern Massachusetts University. That colleague's name was Gene Sharp.
I brought those books home (at least one of which was written in French) that day and put them on my bookshelf. The titles seemed interesting, alluding to Gandhi, strategic civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, and such, but at the time I was very much a junior faculty member just trying to figure out my courses. Reading a colleague's colleague had to go on a back burner, a back back burner. I've kept the books, but haven't creased their spines.
Dial forward again. Now, the fact that these years later I come to Budapest to read about Sharp is kind of interesting in itself, but more interesting still (for me) is that just yesterday I finished reading the chapters in Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge -- the final installment of his monumental and majestic trilogy of the American Civil Rights movement during the years 1954-1968 ("The King Years") -- that cover the 1965 Alabama voter registration drive.
The short take: On March 7, 1965, attempting to walk across the Pettus Bridge from Selma, Alabama, onto Highway 80, and then to continue marching fifty miles more into Montgomery, there to confront Governor George Wallace and Alabama's continuing antics concocted to stymie black Alabamans from exercising their right to register and vote, hundreds of peaceful, committed-to-non-violence marchers were met on the bridge, and, in a fog of tear gas, brutally attacked with billy clubs by gas-masked county sheriff's officers and mounted Alabama state troopers. When the smoke cleared, marchers laid unconscious on the pavement.
Also when the smoke cleared, however, film of the unprovoked attack was in flight and on its way to the major networks. ABC thought it urgent enough to broadcast that very night, interrupting its much promoted television premiere of Judgment at Nuremburg.
It wasn't but a day or two before the world knew of "Bloody Sunday," and from it America was, in the words of President Johnson, "shamed."
Later that summer the Voting Rights Act was made law by Congress, enfranchising all Americans of not only the right to vote -- which they already had --, but the registration and polling processes by which to do so.
That Bloody Sunday moved opinion, and hence legislation, cannot be denied. Nonviolence prevailed in Alabama. (With the assistance of a lot of violence.)
Martin Luther King believed that through non-violent resistance, hearts could be won, not just from those who witness merciless violence but from those who perpetrate it. When met with non-violent resistance, hate would whither within the soul of the hater. All respect to Dr. King, the jury is still out on that.
Sharp's position is less transcendent: you don't pick a fight with someone who has all the weapons (including the laws, the troops, the armor and bullets), and would love nothing better than to be "provoked" into justified use of them ("self-defense"). Sharp would agree with King's tactics, but on different grounds. King's were professedly philosophical (as well as tacitly practical); Sharp's are baldy practical and resolutely strategic.
And as I sat in Budapest's beautiful Palace of Arts, lost in the acoustic mumble of that Lisztian lecture, I wondered might have happened in 1956 had Hungarian dissidents in Budapest known of, and subscribed to, non-violent civil disobedience, instead of taking on Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails and bolt action rifles? Short of out and out murder before a global audience, what would there have been for the Soviets to crush?
If non-violent resistance can topple the most despotic regimes, as the U.S. civil rights movement managed in the Jim Crow south, and as the recent take-down of Hosni Mubarek demonstrated in Egypt, what might have been the effect of non-violent resistance in 1956 Hungary? Would it have worked against a brutal, Soviet backed government?
Maybe King and Sharp arrived too late.
Who knows. What I do know is that my Sunday morning could have been made much simpler with a lot more music and a lot less musing.
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