Reconciliation of Hawaiians For and Against Sovereignty
ASIA--PACIFIC, 21 Apr 2014
John H. McFadden – TRANSCEND Media Service
For both sides of the Hawaiian sovereignty issue, the idea of reconciliation with their opponents seems ridiculous and even insulting. After all, both sides are thoroughly convinced they are right and that the other side is, well, poorly motivated, to say the least. But that’s partly because they have no experience with modern professional efforts to reconcile embattled opponents. This article outlines this conflict in Hawaii, introduces readers to modern reconciliation efforts, and gives examples of how some of the most controversial issues can be resolved for the benefit of all residents of Hawaii.
Pro-sovereignty advocates intensely believe they are completely justified in their view of the annexation of Hawaii and events leading to and issuing from it. They believe, as the title of a well known book in Hawaii states, Hawaii’s constitutional monarchy that existed in the1800s is The Stolen Kingdom. The “takeover,” as they call it, was illegal, grossly immoral, an outrageous, unforgivable theft replete with deceit, unwarranted intimidation of the sovereigns, King Kalakaua and Queen Liliuokalani, and military intervention by a rogue naval officer and his men—a clear violation of international law. The vote in the U.S. Congress for annexation violated the U.S. constitution, and in the vote for statehood, the U.S. violated United Nations rules; if our government had followed the rules, proponents argue, the Kingdom likely would have been restored in 1959. Many sovereignty advocates deem Hawaii an “illegally militarily occupied sovereign nation. In view of this involved and passionately held position, the proposal to reconcile does seem insulting; it’s like saying, You can’t be completely or even mostly right; after all, reconciliation can mean conceding that maybe some of your most passionately held ideas are wrong. Add that some prominent Hawaiians think that all proposals coming from non-Hawaiians are condescending and wholly inappropriate.
To the modern heirs of and sympathizers with the mostly American men who plotted and carried out the events leading to American annexation in 1898, the so-called Bayonet Revolution in 1887 against the King and the ousting of the Queen in 1893 were wholly justifiable acts. That’s because of the King’s dire mismanagement of the economy and corruption and the Queen’s illegal attempt to get rid of the constitution the American “reformers” forced on the King. The revolution, the Americans believed, was no less justified than the American revolution against the British monarchy. The 1887 constitution severely limited the King’s powers and took away voting rights from most Hawaiians. Then the foreigners had the votes necessary to install the mostly American business and professional men into the powerful positions in government. And their powers made possible deposing the monarchy altogether in 1893 and the annexation in 1898. Anti-monarchy advocates in the 1800s and their modern brethren felt justified partly by their passionate belief that a monarchy is an unjust concentration of power that is inherently corruptible; this rationale along with their belief in the superiority of a democratic form of government helped them justify their rise to power. This belief is represented in the well known doctrine, Manifest DestinyThe superior benefits to the people of a democracy are unquestioned, so it is every democratic nation’s obligation to, in essence, “save the world” from monarchies and other unrepresentative forms of government.
When I tell my mainlander friends about this struggle, their first reaction is to suppose that the sovereignty movement must be on the fringe destined to fail. But consider that more than half of the State legislators, most Hawaiian academics, widely admired former senator, Daniel Inouye, and many others are convinced not only that sovereignty is morally and politically justified but that it is inevitable and will be passed into law. A referendum revealed that 83 percent of Native Hawaiians in Hawaii, of which there are approximately 200,000, believe that the U.S. owes Native Hawaiians considerable reparations in land and money; this finding directly implies that this large percentage of Native Hawaiians believe that the takeover of Hawaii was unjust. Moreover, modern versions of the 19th century conflicts appear in the form of numerous heated lawsuits and counter-suits. Political fights over land and money presumably owed to Native Hawaiians as reparations for the takeover involve the legislature and the highest government officials. Large-scale demonstrations, including the centennial of the 1893 ousting of the Queen were big and elaborate enough to impress even many of the opponents of the Sovereignty Movement. Most recently, demonstrations against the Genetically Modified Organisms being raised on the Islands rely on appeals to the past injustices and even on identification with the pre-19th century Hawaiian warriors. And the anti-sovereignty groups include a grandson of perhaps the principal architect of the overthrow of the Kingdom, Lorrin Thurston, and that grandson, Thurston Twigg-Smith, was until recently a prominent newspaper editor and owner who wrote a thorough book justifying the overthrow, annexation, and vote for Statehood. Perhaps the Sovereignty Movement’s most spiritually based people are the followers of Pilahi Paki, a revered teacher who emphasized the power of the Aloha spirit and the divine. Her students I’ve talked with emphasize that the hostility toward opponents one finds in too many of the pro-sovereignty groups makes the movement extremely unappealing. These followers of Paki believe that the spirit of Aloha, meaning compassion, mercy, tolerance and the like will save not only Hawaii but the world. In light of these beliefs and activities for and against sovereignty, it’s clear that, while the future of the Sovereignty Movement is uncertain, it is not at all on the fringe.
In this political/social climate, it does seem to make little sense to propose reconciliation. Reconciliation seems obviously impossible and even insulting to both embattled parties who are convinced beyond doubt not only that their positions are justified but that their opponents are poorly motivated. Angry name-calling happens on both sides for some people. There is no widely-known precedent for reconciliation in this kind of situation. And both sides think they are on track to win the conflict; they’re convinced that the law, political action, and in the case of the followers of Paki, the Aloha spirit, will hold sway. And there’s enough merit to this conviction on both sides, enough merit to fully convince already convinced people that it’s right and reasonable to stay the course of reliance on the spiritual leaders, courts, lawmakers, and politicians, much less their wealthy benefactors, which mostly are multi-national corporations on the side of the anti-sovereignty groups.
While I agree there is merit on both sides, I think that reliance on the law may doom the Sovereignty Movement inasmuch as the rich and powerful tend to win those battles. Moreover, legal battles tend to be about winners and losers. They’re divisive. Both of these problems with reliance on the law don’t bode well for achieving what may be the most ideal result: political and social reconciliation, a united people mostly doing what’s best for all citizens. And as a Presbyterian clergyman devoted to the power of unconditional love, I have great respect for and kinship with Paki and followers of hers I’ve talked with. But I must also challenge their view that the Aloha spirit will prevail, just as in other writings I’ve challenged my fellow Christians who believe that love conquers all.
Love is, I agree, the most profound goal of life. Bu I don’t believe that loving people is a sufficient way to attain that goal. By itself, it’s not an effective method. The core problem with any proposal that relies on loving others as a method for engendering love, I believe, is that love (compassion, mercy, etc.) depends on empathy. It depends on knowing and understanding somebody enough to believe that they are worthy of love or to sense that they are. It’s easy to miss that requirement when one already loves many people. We just don’t think about the fact that we love because we thoroughly enough know the people we love and believe they are worthy of our love or that they’re capable of responding to it. Moreover, it’s difficult for loving people to admit that they are not and have no way of becoming consistently, or unconditionally, loving. But practically any belief system rooted in love you can think of is at least subtly moralistic, which is to shaming, sometimes in the form of abandoning people with whom proponents disagree. The idea here is, for instance, If those angry proponents of sovereignty don’t respond to our Aloha, there’s no point relating to them. That abandoning move makes the point that, if you only have the Aloha spirit, you have no compelling method for achieving justice, reconciliation on a scale that’s needed to solve the divisive conflict over sovereignty in Hawaii. Or more pointedly, you don’t have a way of reaching entrenched, angry opponents. I’m fond of summing up this problem by quoting a former member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He said to me, “They told me to love myself but didn’t say yow.” As I’ll show, empathy is required to evoke feelings of reconciliation and love too.
I fully realize how unappealing and arguable my criticisms of legal, political, and spiritual methods are to practically everyone in Hawaii. But if either side becomes less hopeful that the conflict can be advantageously resolved, it will seem worthwhile to at least briefly consider an alternative view. So perhaps this article should be put in a time capsule. Mostly kidding.
In considering the prospect of reconciliation, there is at least a plausible retort to the idea that it’s impossible to achieve. The idea that reconciliation is completely impossible to achieve exists partly because relevant examples of successful reconciliations aren’t widely known. That lack of knowledge is, in large part, what this article seeks to correct.
On a small scale, promising developments occurring over many years involve the efforts of human service professionals. Many of them are called, “organizational development” consultants. They have demonstrated the power of trying to reconcile both sides of intense conflicts in varying sizes of public and private organizations, including churches, law enforcement bodies, and large corporations. These professionals rely almost exclusively on empathy, by which I mean accurate, intellectually compelling, thorough understanding both from without and within the other side’s view. This practice is available throughout the civilized world. But, of course, it would be easy to think of a gaggle of objections to this level of the use of empathy. The main point of them is that these efforts to reconcile opponents aren’t relevant to Hawaii. They’re too confined within a single organization, too small a group of people involved. Nevertheless, this practice is not entirely irrelevant inasmuch as, like the situation in Hawaii, the opposing groups were filled with anger, distrust, and conviction that they were right and the other side was wrong and poorly motivated.
A more relevant, less well-known process is happening on a larger scale in the field of international relations. A minority group within this profession also relies on empathy. Most notable among these empathically oriented professionals is James Blight. What initially impressed me about Blight is that he won the respect and confidence of some world leaders, including American cabinen members, Rusk and McNamara, who were involved in the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. McNamara so respected and confided in Blight that they eventually wrote a book together about “deploying realistic empathy” in international conflicts. Castro, Russian leaders Gromyko and Kruschev’s son, and North Vietnamese leaders had extensive conversations with Blight. Why?
Unlike other international relations experts, he took no position for or against the leaders. Rather, he engaged them in probing conversations of their motivations for their behaviors. He listened and accurately reflected their views, and as much as possible, he empathically challenged their assumptions. “Empathically challenged” means something like, I know, Fidel, that you wanted Russia to keep the missiles in Cuba and continue threatening the Americans; did you know how Kennedy and Kruschev worked out a face-saving rationale for ending the missile crisis in Cuba? The point is to avoid judging and otherwise threatening the leaders while subtly enabling them to rethink their views.
Most remarkable perhaps was a conference Blight held in 1997. He involved North Vietnamese and American leaders in an examination of the events leading to the Vietnam War. Using the leaders own documents and memories, Blight enabled the leaders to realize that the war happened because they incorrectly understood each other’s motivations. The North Vietnamese thought we were trying to take over their country and, from there, other ones as well. We had a similar view of the North Vietnamese. The truth was that we only wanted to stop them from taking over large swatches of Southeast Asia, and they only wanted to stop us from doing the same. Neither side had imperial motives, but each side thought the other did. But the two sides never got together in an open-ended forum to carefully and thoroughly crawl inside the other side’s views. Imagine what would have happened if someone like Blight had been the Secretary of State during the run-up to the war. Perhaps that great tragedy might never have happened. Blight calls this process Critical Oral History. As such, it seems especially well suited to Hawaii, because many of the sovereignty-related conflicts there center on the disputed history of the late 1800s.
Also impressive is Blight’s current work in Iran. Aided partly by Bill Clinton, Blight has established relationships not only with former Iranian ambassadors but, most remarkably, an official prominent in the ultra-conservative Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. To read Blight’s account of his conversation with Deroudian of the Corps is an experience to be studied by anyone who wants to help solve important conflicts. That’s partly because a crucial worry people have about empathizing with one’s opponents is starkly revealed in Blight’s report.
Deroudian’s complete distrust of and anger at Americans for tilting the Iran/Iraq war in favor of Iraq can imply that conservative Iranians like him are hell bent on attacking us. And it’s difficult not to worry that Blight’s empathic understanding would help justify and encourage militant Iranians to attack American interests. This fear of being attacked that comes up when one empathizes with an opponent is almost a genetic reaction. That’s how automatic it is. It’s sort of like what happens in the animal kingdom when an opponent in a do-or-die fight bares his neck in submission. Empathy feels like condoning, allowing, appeasing, submitting, and the like.
This is the main reason people instinctively react against the use of empathy in conflicts. When you scrape all of the justifications for rejecting the use of empathy, you find an entrenched fear that empathy equals submission. What if a conference of leaders finds incontrovertible evidence that the U.S. was guilty of immorality when we sided with Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war? If that happened, it’s as if an instinct so automatic and intense that it’s irresistible would come up. Again, the urge to attack the U.S. politically and even militarily would seem justified by that finding. But even a prominent member of one of the most violent and dogmatic regimes in modern times, Deroudian, didn’t react that way. And he didn’t despite having already concluded that the U.S. was guilty when we sided with Iraq. Rather Deroudian enthusiastically encouraged Blight to conduct Blight’s Critical Oral History process for American and Iranian leaders. He wanted the opportunity to show that Iran’s purposes in that war were reasonable and also to hear the American rationale for supporting Iraq. It was Blight’s focused interest only in understanding for the sake of, at the very least, avoiding future hostilities that encouraged Deroudian’s positive interest in meeting in an essentially reconciling forum. This is empathy at work in, perhaps, it’s most influential realm.
How would a conference of reconciliation in Hawaii happen? In my screenplay, Ukulele Changes, a wealthy benefactor pays for a conference at a beautiful, seaside hotel in Oahu. He pays for everything, lodging, meals…everything. The invitation packet to the conference would include something like this article and a description of the format of the conference. A Blight type of person would moderate an extended examination of both sides…all sides. The invitees would represent all of the major groups promoting sovereignty and anti-sovereignty positions, with special attention paid to the vast majority of Native Hawaiians who are only interested in reparations of money and land, not sovereignty. Blight and his many assistants will have asked for submissions of positions and supporting documents for each group. The conference would be divided into two parts: investigation of the claims of both sides concerning the history of Hawaii and proposals for the future of Hawaii.
Part of the rationale for this kind of conference is straightforward. It is that people who formerly only fought each other from a distance in the media and arcane court proceedings are face-to-face. When you’re fighting at a distance, you’re freer to exaggerate and even make up things to back up your position. Moreover, in the conference, you can’t do what is difficult to avoid when working with a handful of colleagues to produce an article, speech, or book. You can’t selectively quote some writings and avoid writings that disconfirm your position. The moderator and his assistants have studied extensively all of the materials used by both sides, and when there is a disagreement about an issue, they bring to bear all of the relevant materials.
What’s difficult to appreciate if you have little experience using empathy to solve problems is that, as I implied earlier regarding Deroudian, when you empathize with one side, the other side feels threatened. To take a simple example, when conducting therapy with a couple, if I explain that
it’s no wonder your partner got intensely upset; you may think she’s over-reacting, but when you factor in that her father put her down relentlessly for being overweight and stupid, it’s understandable that she would blow up when you even just subtly observe that she’s gained some weight; she has a historical sensitivity to any mention of her weight or shape.”
Typically, her partner will react negatively, saying, “But what I am supposed to do…just grin and bear it when she blows up at me for something innocent I said.” It takes some talking to enable both of them to realize that we’re only trying to understand her, not condoning her behavior or asking him to just accept it. I say, we’re thinking that if both of you understand where this over-reaction is coming from, you’ll both be more able to feel empathic toward both of you rather than just fight. The least value of these insights is that, when the fight ends and you go off by yourselves, these insights will come to you and you’ll be able to recover well from the fight. You’ll be able to not only feel better but closer, feel more in love and have more mutual respect.
This is a clinically proven method for making a relationship last.”
Likewise, if Blight were to say the following to the ardent anti-sovereignty groups, they might fear that he’s stacking the deck against them:
“You’re saying that Lorrin Thurston sincerely believed that Hawaii was being ruined by King Kalakaua and that his reform movement, the so-called Bayonet Revolution, was as justified as the Americans’ revolution against the King of England. And as Thurston Twig-Smith argues in his book, the King’s acceptance of a bribe is ‘the event that appears to have been the straw that led to forcing the Reform Constitution on his regime….’ But there is considerable evidence that the Americans really didn’t care what the circumstances were or how the King was behaving. From the beginning, they were against the monarchy on the grounds that it is an inadequate form of government. And the wealthy sugar plantation owners, it can seem, just wanted what they wanted, that they were consumed by greed. But you’re arguing that, in any case, the monarchy is a corrupt, unjust form of government. You seem to be saying that the end justifies the means. But our government in modern times owes trillions of dollars. The economy is much, much weaker than the Kingdom’s was. How do you deal with that concern?”
This question seems like a threat. It seems to lead toward the conclusion that the so-called revolution against Kalakaua was unjustified. And from there, a kind of domino effect comes to mind, leading to the conclusion that Hawaii should be returned to the control of Native Hawaiians. But as in the case of Blight’s conference on Vietnam and his talks with Deroudian and other leaders, no such frightening possibility was in the wind. (Of course, it could happen but not as the result of moralistic pressure. It’s only in the non-empathic context of fights between the two main sides does that kind of winner-take-all right away conclusion seems inevitable.
In an actual Critical Oral History process, it’s up to the moderator and his staff, with help from any like-minded participants, to head off these kinds of fears. In the therapy I practice, we have in mind the principle of shoring up the side that appears to be caving in, or losing the historical battle the process is trying to move outside of. But professionals don’t arbitrarily support both sides. To help each side, they must find accurate, intellectually compelling reasons based on thorough examination.
The fighting mentality is constantly reasserting itself in any empathic process until both sides come to a mutually satisfying conclusion. One such conclusion might be that, while the Americans sincerely believed in the validity and morality of their revolution against the King, there’s insufficient evidence that is was justified. Then participants are challenged by the specter of greed. M many Hawaiian writers and leaders have said that greed does explain the takeover. But it’s possible to show that, although some of the members of the Committee of Thirteen that orchestrated the Bayonet Revolution were motivated by greed, most of them were much more motivated by their beliefs in Manifest Destiny. Even those who were motivated by greed, it can be shown, can be understood empathically. This last idea is especially challenging for most people on both sides of any rich/poor conflict.
Greed is perhaps the least studied “sin.” I know of only one scholarly article on the causes of greedy behavior. The attribution of narcissism comes into play in any conversation of greed, but that description suffers from the same problem that the concept of greed does. They’re non-explanations. There’s no there there. If I were to say, The sun comes up, because the sun comes up,” readers would instantly grasp that there’s no explanation there. The word, “because,” suggests that I’m offering an explanation, but it’s obvious that all I’m doing is inserting a description of the phenomenon I’m trying to explain in the position in the sentence of the expected explanation. I’m just re-describing what happens most mornings, not explaining it. It’s a bit tricky that the same thing is going on in almost all prevailing explanations of behavior. In this case, most people say that the person who is behaving greedily does so because they’re greedy. So this attribution suffers from being empty, of offering no explanation. As a civilization, we’re engrained to believe this non-explanation, despite that is completely illogical. Moreover, the idea that people are greedy because they’re greedy suffers from being totally demeaning. That’s no way to have a relationship with anyone.
At bottom, this moralistic understanding trashes people who behave greedily for not caring about anybody but themselves; they’re loveless, basically immoral, we think. But a real, full explanation of any such person always reveals that acquisitiveness always is a distorted way of acting out, or dramatizing, some inner suffering. It’s difficult to believe that about rich people, because we imagine that they “have everything” and therefore can’t e regarded as having any significant inner problems. That just doesn’t occur to us. But there’s good anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps the most familiar rich people whose life stories reveal that they were acting out their suffering is George Bush and his father by the same first name. As the book, Bush On the Couch, suggests, where there’s adult dysfunction in the lives of leaders, there’s childhood abuse that explains it. George W. Bush was grossly psychologically abused, and his father was grossly physically and psychologically abused by his father, Prescott Bush.
In a Critical Oral History project, the above kind of empathic counters to hostile characterizations are difficult to consider. After all, people are extremely angry and intensely believe in moralistic characterizations of problem behavior. That’s where the importation of experts on both sides of moralistic vs. empathic understandings can help participants wrestle with their familiar beliefs and this emerging one.
Again and again, proponents of reconciliation have to show that the conclusions reached about travesties committed by either side don’t have to lead to a predictable conclusion. It can seem if that, if we come to understand the Committee of Thirteen empathically, we ought to conclude that Hawaii ought to remain a U.S. state. But there’s no necessary connection between the two. The future of Hawaii is dependent on many considerations, not just that one. Jon Osorio, one of conservative Hawaiians’ targets of intense criticism, is remarkably temperate. He’s sometimes characterized by the opposition as a “Marxist.” But unlike many other pro-sovereignty leaders, he’s not convinced that a monarchy should be in Hawaii’s future, even if the Kingdom is completely restored and, therefore, completely free of U.S. control. He’s open to a republican form. You see? There’s no clear imperative that has to come from any conclusion along the path of reconciliation.
There are mainly guiding principles, like the idea that harmony, or pono, ought to be Hawaiians’ goal. Peace on earth, good will toward everybody. And an undying faith in empathy, in patient, thorough, credible understanding is at the center of these principles too.
Of course, there is powerful resistance to reconciling efforts; the idea that people will have to submit to something they can’t stand is perhaps the most prominent worry. Hopefully, more and better writings and speeches with question/answer opportunities will enable enough people to seriously consider the prospect of a conference of reconciliation. Empathy’s resonance to the Aloha spirit helps too.
Indeed, it’s Hawaii’s core commitment to Aloha that explains how Hawaii may in fact be the mustard seed of ideal change in the world, as Hawaiian spiritualists say. I agree in the following sense. The Aloha spirit is the spiritual soil that perhaps is the richest place on Earth to plant the seeds of empathic insights.
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John H. McFadden: I’m a published author in my field, psychotherapy, and I’ve branched out into the field of international relations, mainly as a proponent of the work of James G. Blight, a former professor at Harvard and Brown, which is based on “realistic empathy.”
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Apr 2014.
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