ADDRESS BY MR. EDUARD CHMELAR

ADDRESS BY MR. EDUARD CHMELAR

It is a great honor for me to be invited to speak to you at the celebrations of birth anniversary of a man who has influenced my thinking as few people. Even, let me say, not just thinking but also life. Gandhi's personality has been popularized by Richard Attenburough's classic film Gandhi with the phenomenal Ben Kingsley in the lead role, which won 8 Oscars. Shortly after the success of the film, Gandhi's autobiography was translated into Slovak, in which I as a teenager read that the thinking of the Indian philosopher was significantly influenced by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Half a year before the Velvet Revolution, I chose Tolstoy's philosophy of not resisting evil through violence as the subject of graduation from Russian. I almost did not pass the exam. The teacher of Russian language wrote in my evaluation sheet that this bourgeois deviation had been already overcome by Marxist-Leninist philosophy. It was only the school principal who saved me.

The Holy Trinity of the philosophy of non-violence consists of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but it is Gandhi who is mostly associated with the teaching of non-violence, therefore we commemorate this day as the International Day of Non-violence. The principle of non-violence in Western society is still confronted with a relatively large misunderstanding or intentional misinterpretation. The principle of nonviolence does not mean to passively look on to your loved ones being murdered, that you do nothing when an enemy decides to exterminate your nation from the surface of the Earth. This is the vulgarization of the whole dispute. Under no circumstances can violence become a veil for cowardice; equally, violent defense can not become a veil for aggression. It is clear that the Gandhi method could have evolved thanks to the relatively liberal environment of the British Empire, but in the Nazi Empire environment, Gandhi would have disappeared without a trace even before his teaching had succeeded in setting roots and finding adherents. Therefore, you need at least a formal democratic environment to act preventive, to get out of the vicious circle and to destroy the institutional roots of violence.

The philosophy of non-violence is based on the belief that the only way to honest life leads through resisting temptation. The temptation stems from the loss of control over the development of things, over one’s own behavior. It creates suffering from which violence is born and its consequence is nothing but more violence. Using violence is actually a manifestation of inner weakness. As Gandhi used to say, if you feel humiliated by the offensive behavior of another person, give him a slap to restore your self-esteem. But if there is peace in your soul, you should not feel humiliation. Self-knowledge, peace of mind, and deep self-confidence are signs of a great moral predominance. Non-violence does not mean to appease the evil, but not to support it. If we want to suppress evil, we must isolate it, not feed it, we must interrupt the infinite continuity of violence that is parasitic in us. Humanity does not create ideals to contradict them at the earliest opportunity, but to constantly approach them so that it is on its way to unattainable perfection throughout its existence.

Knowing to resist violence does not mean to remove its visible consequences, but to destroy its institutional roots. We will not create peace by defeating the enemy militarily. We will only achieve a ceasefire, during which the dissatisfaction of the defeated and the desire for revenge grow, which will lead to another conflict. We need to pay more attention to structural violence. A typical example of structural violence is a way of applying economic globalization. Centralization of decision-making leads to the disintegration of local social structures. People take refuge to their ethnic identity, which seems to them the only source of security. And as the source of such uncertainty is too far to be recognized and influenced, they

start to look with fear at their neighbors. From fear is then only a step towards aggression. Institutionalized violence is directly related to the concentration of power, but also to the value system of society. The real struggle of good and evil is not happening between individuals or nations, but within ourselves. Learn to fight with antagonisms, not with adversaries. Learn to act as an independent responsible person, not as a representative of an organization. Learn to live with the people you are fighting for, building up the natural foundations of self-confidence and belief in set goals. Learn to articulate the common interests of different people and to develop cooperation on this basis. Learn how to express your attitudes as clearly as possible without concealment and bias. But above all, learn to resist evil without violence.

Even in Slovakia we have an interesting tradition of non-violence. I consider Michal Miloslav Hodza to be the first Slovak pacifist and propagator of philosophy of non-violence. This top representative of the Stur movement is in historiography unjustly blamed of cowardice, as he left volunteers during Stur rebellion 170 years ago. The angry Hurban wanted to execute him, but Stur reminded him that they could not afford to execute the author of their political program ”Requests of the Slovak Nation”. The fact is that Hodza was a very sensitive person, a priest who took the Ten Commandments, it seems, much more seriously than the other priest Hurban. Watching the dead and mutilated bodies, Hodza threw away his weapon and after burning of Stara Tura (now it would be qualified as a war crime) he lost faith in the ideals of the insurgents and left them on the belief that the path of violence leads to a blind alley. Another notable propagator of the philosophy of non-violence was the personal physician of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Albert Škarvan, who, under the influence of the ideas of his great teacher, refused to take up military service for which he was imprisoned. The priest and philosopher Ján Maliarik was even directly influenced by Indian philosophy in his vision of world state and eternal peace. Let us not forget about the latest history. The first slogan of the Velvet Revolution written on a sign at the helm of the march on November 17, 1989, was: "We do not want violence."

Gandhi told us with his own life that the principle of non-violence must be learnt whole life. I am convinced that education for the culture of peace and non-violence should become part of the curriculum. It would be our most palpable contribution to the International Day of Non- violence. I have to say, however, that in recent years, I have begun to be influence by the teaching of another important Indian philosopher, poet, prose writer, play writer, music composer and social reformer, the first non-European laureate of Nobel Prize for Literature Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore and Gandhi agreed that they both professed the philosophy of nonviolence ahimsa, which originated in Jainism. Tagore, however, distanced himself from Gandhi's essentially nationalist motto of non-cooperation, and promoted closer cooperation between the East and the West, the harmonious blending of Western and Eastern thinking. He was more open to the world, and therefore he is becoming more and more likeable to me, although the size of Gandhi remains possibly forever undeniable.

doc. Mgr. Eduard Chmelár, PhD.

Academy of the Police Force of the Slovak Republic