The Third September 11: 120 Years of Satyagraha and the Question of the Power of Nonviolence Today
September 11 is usually remembered as a date of violence. But this date also carries another history — the history of the birth of a political force grounded not in weapons, but in truth, love and nonviolence.
On 11 September 2026, the University of Helsinki hosted a special seminar marking the 120th anniversary of satyagraha — the philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance associated with Mahatma Gandhi. The meeting took place within the von Wright and Wittgenstein seminar and brought together philosophers, researchers and representatives of the international peace movement.
Professor Thomas Wallgren of the University of Helsinki opened the discussion with an unusual question: which September 11 will remain in human memory hundreds or even thousands of years from now?
Today, the date is associated above all with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. For Latin America, September 11 is also the anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile, the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende and the repression that followed. Wallgren invited us to remember both tragedies — New York and the National Stadium in Santiago — as places of violence and terror.
But there is also a third September 11.
11 September 1906
It was on 11 September 1906 that around three thousand members of the Indian community in the Transvaal gathered at the Empire Theatre — the Jewish Theatre in Johannesburg. They came together to discuss how to resist new discriminatory regulations imposed by the British colonial administration.
One of the organisers of the meeting was a young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
This gathering is associated with the moment when the idea and practice of satyagraha first crystallised clearly. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit satya — truth — and agraha — firmness or insistence. Gandhi defined it as a force born of truth, love and nonviolence.
One hundred and twenty years have passed.
Yet the question raised then has not disappeared: can a person resist injustice without becoming part of the same logic of violence they are opposing?
Today, this may once again be one of Europe’s central political questions.
What is power if it is not a weapon?
Modern politics almost automatically associates power with the capacity to coerce. A strong state is a state with an army. A strong alliance is one that possesses military resources. A strong response is one capable of inflicting sufficient damage on an opponent.
Satyagraha offers a completely different frame of reference.
At its centre is not the question of how to force another person to submit, but how to resist injustice without destroying one’s own moral foundations in the process.
This is why satyagraha is a far more demanding idea than a simple refusal of violence.
It is not passivity. It is not capitulation. It is not a proposal to do nothing in the face of aggression.
It is the claim that resistance is possible without turning oneself into a mirror image of one’s opponent.
Thomas Wallgren linked this idea to a broader philosophical question about the nature of truth. In academic philosophy, truth is often treated as a relation between a person’s statement and the external world: does what we say correspond to reality? Wallgren, however, drew attention to another tradition — truth as a moral and existential orientation, as a question of how to live in truth, not merely whether we describe the world correctly.
For Gandhi, this shift is fundamental. Truth ceases to be merely an object of intellectual knowledge and becomes a way of acting.
Nonviolence becomes difficult precisely when it is needed
It is comparatively easy to speak about nonviolence when there is no war.
It is much harder when missiles are actually falling on cities, people are being killed, territories are occupied and society demands an unequivocal answer to the question: “Whose side are you on?”
This is why today’s discussion of nonviolence cannot be limited to the history of Gandhi.
For the peace movement, the central question is not whether we can admire satyagraha 120 years later. The question is whether we are prepared to continue treating nonviolence as a political value precisely when society believes most strongly in the necessity of violence.
In this sense, the history of satyagraha intersects unexpectedly with today’s debates over conscientious objection, desertion, militarisation and the human right to refuse to kill.
If the right to say “I will not kill” exists only in peacetime, how much of a right is it really?
If we support conscientious objection only when it is the soldier of our political adversary who refuses to serve, are we defending freedom of conscience — or merely using it as another instrument of geopolitics?
And if the peace movement speaks of nonviolence only when nonviolence does not require a difficult moral choice from us, does it not gradually become little more than a beautiful historical symbol?
Refusing the weapon is only the beginning
But there is another uncomfortable question.
A person’s refusal to take up arms does not in itself mean that they have freed themselves from the logic of war.
Someone may refuse to fight personally while considering it entirely normal that others should fight. They may defend their own right not to join the army while supporting further militarisation of society. They may leave the military and still continue to view the world through the categories of enemy, victory, defeat and permissible violence.
This is why conscientious objection is an extremely important step, but it is only the beginning of a person’s demilitarisation, not its completion.
And here the discussion of satyagraha acquires an unexpectedly contemporary meaning.
If nonviolence is more than simply the absence of a weapon in one’s hands, then demilitarisation means much more than disarmament. It concerns language, education, media, ideas of masculinity and heroism, our relation to the opponent, and our ability to see a human being not as a state’s resource for war but as an autonomous bearer of rights.
After the war
Alongside Thomas Wallgren, the Helsinki seminar featured Rajni Bakshi, an Indian public intellectual and founder of Ahimsa Conversations; Guy Feugap, Africa coordinator of World Beyond War; Tord Björk, a Swedish public intellectual and activist in the environmental and peace movements and a member of the council of the International Peace Bureau, a Nobel Peace Prize–winning organisation; Timo Virtala, a lecturer at the Finnish Non-military Service Centre; and human rights defender Olga Karach from the Belarusian human rights organisation Our House.
The composition of the seminar itself showed how far the question of nonviolence reaches beyond a historical discussion of Gandhi.
Because one of Europe’s greatest challenges still lies ahead.
When the current war ends, millions of people will not stop living with its consequences on that same day.
Former soldiers, deserters, conscientious objectors, refugees, families of the dead, and people who have experienced occupation and violence will all be returning — physically or psychologically — to civilian life.
And then it will become clear that a peace agreement and peace are not the same thing.
A war does not end when the weapons fall silent. It ends when the logic of war ceases to determine how society understands security, the enemy, justice and the ways conflicts may be resolved.
This is why future demilitarisation must concern not only armies and weapons. It must concern people and societies.
Which September 11 will remain in history?
In 1795, Immanuel Kant wrote about the possibility of perpetual peace. Thomas Wallgren concluded the historical part of his presentation with the thought that perhaps Gandhi was right: perhaps truth, love and nonviolence can indeed prove stronger than violence, and perhaps the human history of war and terror is not the final form of our existence.
Today, this may sound utopian.
But on 11 September 1906, the three thousand people gathered in a Johannesburg theatre could not have known that the experiment they were beginning would become one of the most influential traditions of nonviolent resistance of the twentieth century.
One hundred and twenty years later, the question remains open.
We are very good at remembering the dates of wars, terrorist attacks, coups and military victories. They make up the familiar chronology of human history.
Perhaps we should learn to remember just as well the dates when people first tried to invent another way of being strong.
September 11 is one of those dates.
Olga Karach
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