Dato Mahadev Shankar: From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace

From a Culture of Violence
to a Culture of Peace

Dato' Mahadev Shankar,

Retired Appeals Court Judge, Malaysia

(The soft overcomes the hard;
water quenches fire)

First of all I want to thank Sokka Gakkai International, Sokka Gakkai Malaysia and the Physicians for Peace and Social Stability for inviting me to share my thoughts with you on a matter of life and death for human civilization as we know it.

Physicians for Peace and Social Responsibility are so called because their avowed aim is to promote well-being, not by means of the knife, but to stimulate the power of self-healing inherent in all mankind.

Two parables should help to focus our minds on the psychological parameters of the issue which now confronts us.

Akbar, undoubtedly the greatest Emperor India ever had ruled India from 1556 to 1605. Although illiterate himself he was a great humanist. He had six prime ministers, each representing the interests of his particular community. The Hindu was Birbal.

“Birbal,” asked Akbar “Why are there so many cows and goats in my kingdom and so few tigers?”

Birbal took Akbar to the zoo where he had packed one cage with a herd of hungry cattle and another with a dozen ravenous tigers.

Into the cattle pen he tossed in a bundle of hay. Each animal took a mouthful and withdrew to make way for the others behind.

Into the other he threw in a dead buffalo. All the tigers immediately converged to start a fight to the finish, because each one wanted to eat the entire carcass dead buffalo all by itself. The survivors could not have had many teeth left intact to enjoy the meal.

Thus violence is self-defeating.

My second story concerns a millionaire named McArthur (not General Douglas McArthur - our man was a wealthy farmer) who decided in 1938 that the USA was inevitably going to be sucked into Europe’s war with Germany. So he moved, far from the madding crowd, to a small island in the Pacific. It was Guadalcanal which, just five years later, became the most bitter battle ground in the Pacific theatre.

So we cannot opt out of trouble by running away from it, since there is no guarantee of safety in the face of global crises today.

Violence in any shape or form brings immediate suffering for its victims.

It becomes suffering for its perpetrators in the medium and long term because it never even succeeds partially in achieving its original purpose.

Take Vietnam in the face of the French and the Americans who came after them, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Iraq at the receiving end of the political ambitions of Bush and Blair – all glaring examples of this fundamental truth.

To understand why in spite of this lessons the power brokers repeatedly make the same mistake we have to start at the beginning.

The film South Pacific is a musical set against a back-drop of island paradises. But out of character with all the other songs is this one which carries a powerful message as to where the seeds of the culture of violence are sown and then germinate.

Let me sing it to you now:

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

This is the kind of cultural programming which was institutionalized by Stalin, Hitler and Tojo.

By way of sharp contrast let’s take the Victoria Institution in our time. There was no racism there. In our school song we acknowledged our debt by praising the multi-racial fathers of our school. Down to this day I don’t look at Dato Kamarul and think he is a Malay. I don’t look at Dato McCoy and think here is a Eurasian of Scottish ancestry. We were taught that our school mates are just other human beings like us, each worthy of the dignity of any other human being.

Humanitarian values comes from a humanitarian education.

We here in Malaysia urgently need to determine whether it is not going to be too heavy a price to pay for breeding a single spectrum monocultural national identity.

To preserve social stability we must learn to value diversity.

And we must emphasize that truth and justice are universal values.

The engine riding on hate and fear is propelled by POWER and GREED.

In the 19th Century the fashionable definition of power was the capacity to bend another to one’s will. Today it is the capacity to direct how a nation’s resources shall be distributed.

Economic duress is the constant companion of military might and that is what the global culture of violence has become.

The worrying part of all this is that the ordinary individual seems totally impotent not just to prevent nation-states from going nuclear but to bring any meaningful pressure to bear on Governments to ensure that a nation’s wealth is distributed in a just and equitable way.

Our concern here today is to discover whether there is any way in which this trend can be reversed.

Can a culture of violence be transformed into a culture of peace? At first sight this question looks like an invitation to participate in an exercise of futility.

And indeed so it would be, if you thought you could wave a magic wand and immediately effect the desired transformation.

Don’t ever say I am only one sorry lonely man. What can I do to change things?

Remember that constant dripping wears away the hardest stone.

Constancy is a close cousin of other virtues - courage, confidence, and conviction.

Let’s take some examples close to home.

Chee Kim Tong was a humble bus conductor in the Trengannu Bus Company then owned by Lim Eng, Dato Lim Ah Lek’s father.

Those days it was the done thing if you knocked someone down on the East coast roads not to stop but to scoot to the next police station and come back with an escort.

When a bus knocked down someone outside Kemaman, the driver and all the passengers bolted off leaving Chee Kim Tong to face a mob of parang wielding villagers. He disarmed everyone of them without any weapons except his martial arts skills, which can be traced back to my eternal hero, an itinerant Buddhist Indian monk – Daruma – who created the art of ShaoLin, the prototype of every other form of Asian martial art whose core message was that it was a discipline for the purification of the human mind and not a tool for bullying others.

Statistically the control freaks in whom power and material wealth are concentrated only form about 0.1% of the countries they lord over. How such a small minority manages to hold sway over the multitude is one of the great paradoxes of human history.

But mercifully history is replete with individuals who have wrought great cultural changes armed only with the force of their personalities and the justice of their cause.

Buddha was not born in Britain, Jesus was not a Japanese, and Muhammad was not a Malaysian Bumiputra.

This is a very important observation because these prophets are revered not only in the country of their birth but all the world over.

However potent their personalities and however meritorious the justice of their cause they would not have acquired their universal validity if the means were not at hand to spread the message.

We have today the Internet, which spreads information at the speed of light.

With such an ally our capacity for reform is limitless.

Do visit the website www.writespirit.net/authors and you will find a host of great leaders there to inspire you.

One caught my eye. She was called Peace Pilgrim – a woman who just walked across America spreading her simple message and thereby accelerated the end of the Vietnam war.

Have you noticed that when a tree of a particular species flowers, all the other trees of that species world-wide follow suit.

Civilisations also share that characteristic. Akbar’s reign was contemporaneous with the Renaissance in Europe, and the Ming Dynasty in China. These kingdoms were far apart and yet they reached their zenith in terms of artistic and cultural achievement together.

I am optimistic that we are on the verge of a new Renaissance.

Despite the apparent might of greedy power brokers and warmongers we have more than an even chance to transform the culture of violence to a culture of peace.

We need to empower ourselves by making common cause with others who share our aspirations.

We need to discard our fears.

We must become living proof of our capacity for compassion.

As we gain momentum we will surely become a global force that cannot be ignored.

The transformation we so earnestly desire must take place because however hard-hearted a person is, there is nothing so troublesome as a guilty conscience.

Cyberspace is a huge mirror from which power crazy persons cannot escape looking at themselves.

The weapons of war have changed over time in the pursuit of the capacity to out-reach one’s enemies in terms of speed and range. The tragedy of nuclear weapons is that this differential has been bridged between its opponents. Even a pre-emptive strike will be followed by mutually assured destruction.

Fortunately the art of war must always remain the same because of the limitations of the human beings who want to wage it. And they are the ones we must redeem by getting them involved in our commitment to a culture of peace.

Let us rise to our ultimate challenge, which is to get everyone to share our belief that service to humanity is the best work of life.

Shah Alam
2nd September 2007

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My Comments (DQ): 

This insightful speech was given at one of Sokka Gakkai-PPSR Peace Meeting to commemorate the Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear bombing, some years ago, by a man of great erudition and humanism, Dato' Mahadev Shankar, retired Appeals Court Judge, Malaysia. 

Humanist wisdom and lyrical aspirations which are of a bygone era, when men of such elusive distinction can still evoke forgotten mystic chords of compassion and advocacy for peace and non-violence....