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Description
ROBERT S. BOYNTON: When did you first start thinking about the idea of cooperative power and people's war?
JONATHAN SCHELL: In the late 1980s, shortly before the collapse of Communism. I'd been a reporter in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, an experience that had led me to reflect on the extraordinary power that local peoples have to expel invaders wielding superior military force. The United States won almost all the battles, but it didn't matter. It won itself to defeat. The process was observable on a day-to-day basis. The fighting, with its indiscriminate destruction, was driving the population into the hands of the adversary. You didn't have to be a geopolitican to see it. In fact, geopolitics got in the way of seeing it.
Then, in the early 1970s, I got to know some Polish folks, Jan and Irena Gross, who had been driven out of their country in 1968 for protesting censorship by the Communist regime. They were sending care packages--practical articles, including consumables, plus subversive literature--to their high school friends in Poland who were continuing to oppose the regime. Over the years these friends became some of the intellectual leaders of the Worker's Defense Committee, the predecessor to Solidarity. Among them were Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron. So, through that personal connection, I gained a vicarious experience of the events in Poland. At the time, I had little inkling of the global importance of what was afoot. It was only later that it became clear that these more or less accidental personal experiences had opened up a small window for me on what turned out to be a pivot of late twentieth-century history, namely, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1985, I was invited by Irena Gross to write an introduction to a wonderful collection of essays, called Letters from Prison, by Michnik. That introduction gave me my first chance to reflect on people's movements more generally. By now, I had had a taste of imperial defeats in two parts of the world. The empires--American and Soviet--were very different, and so were the movements, but they had something in common: the power of politics was beating the power of superior arms. In Vietnam, even as I admired the spectacular courage of the resistance, I did not admire the one-party system they seemed bent on establishing and did establish. In Poland, where the resistance was democratic, my admiration was unreserved.
Both experiences also gave me occasion to reflect on the relationship of imperial control to nuclear arms, something that had become a strong interest of mine. In Vietnam, the whole concept of 'limited war' had been born out of the paradoxical requirements of nuclear strategy. The idea was that although you could not fight a 'general'--i.e., nuclear--war, you could fight a 'limited' war. When it came to Poland, it seemed to me that perhaps it was because of nuclear paralysis that enough time was available for the slow process of nonviolent resistance to take root and succeed. These events made me wonder whether, if other totalitarian regimes, including Hitler's, had not been smashed by military force, they might also eventually--unlikely as it may seem--have fallen in the face of a people's movement. We'll never know.
RSB: The Unconquerable World does seem to alternate between your long-standing concerns over nuclear weapons, and your exploration of the role of people's movements in history. Would it be too much to say that, perhaps, one was the condition for the fruition of the other?
JS: The two were especially close in the trajectory of the cold war. Of course, the nonviolent people's movements of the twentieth century got going long before there was any nuclear standoff, or even before the start of either of the two world wars. So you can't really say that the people's struggles depended on the nuclear standoff, but the... |
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