This article is dedicated to the all activists risking their physical and emotional safety as well as their reputations in public to stand against colonialism, capitalism, police repression, socio-economic inequality and environmental destruction, all of which are processes that we have seen accelerated and deepened as a direct result of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic games. The purpose is simply to contribute to a discussion of the multiple ways that resistance can be envisioned by offering another spiritual perspective.

The Bhagavad-Gita is a well-known book with hundreds of translations and interpretations. On one hand its critics believe the book is rationalization for casteism and other forms of material inequality. On the other people have also found in the Gita a spiritual basis for resisting inequality including Gandhi who propounded the ethic of ahimsa or non-violence as a path of resistance to colonial rule in India. The idea of non-violence seems contradictory considering that the Gita takes the form of a conversation between a warrior named Arjuna and his charioteer Krsna on a battlefield moments before a massive fratricidal war. Yet, while there is some basis for Gandhi’s interpretation of the Gita, it is not the only one available to us.

The Gita begins when Arjuna asks Krsna to draw his chariot between the two armies so that he can see who has come to fight against him. When he looks across the battlefield he sees amidst his enemies neighbours, friends, brothers, cousins, teachers, uncles and even his grandfather Bhisma who have all been obligated by their political affiliations to side with the enemy. When Arjuna realizes these people have come to oppose him in battle his heart becomes weak, he drops his bow and refuses to fight. This is when Krsna speaks what is considered the basic truth of the Gita:

Krsna says, Arjuna you are lamenting what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead.

Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these warriors and kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.

As the embodied soul continuously passes in the body from childhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.

That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible.

No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul.

The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.

One who dwells in the body can never be slain therefore you need not grieve for any living being.

Krsna’s reminder that we need not lament for the inevitable death of the body is not however, a call for apathy and inaction. Rather it is a spiritual basis for action. It hints at something beneath the surface appearances of race, class, gender and other categories of difference. At the same time, it advocates a kind of strategic essentialism instead of just dismissing difference as a socially constructed chimera.

Krsna explains that the body is simply like an outward dress for the eternal soul and that because we strongly indentify with the body it becomes a psycho-physical basis of our various attachments and fears that constitute a kind of powerful illusion. This basic premise informs Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa. For example, Gandhi explains that to deprive a person of their liberty and basic needs is worse than starving the body because by doing so one starves the dweller of the body, the soul. Yet, while Gandhi’s words are compassionate we should recognize that he interprets the Gita at a certain time and place. He de-emphasizes the eternality of the soul to propose a politics rooted in non-violent resistance. What we are finding out with the convergence is that no political strategy is applicable across time and space. I believe that those with whom Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence has some resonance are now at a crossroads. The ideal of non-violence has assumed a kind of hegemonic status in our minds and hearts when it is perhaps no longer strategically viable. At a time when Canada is using events like the Olympics, the earthquake in Haiti and the ostensible war on terror as a cloak for accelerating its colonial role we need to consider that the Gandhian interpretation obscures the real message of the Gita, which is to embrace your identity and to fight.

The conversation of the Gita progresses systematically through various forms of argumentation. While overwhelmed by illusion Arjuna presents Krsna with a series of arguments for why he cannot fight by appealing to tradition, religion, ethics, law and social convention, etc. and Krsna overturns each of these arguments one by one so that Arjuna recognizes that his best course of action is to embrace his duty as a warrior and fight. In one instance Arjuna argues that he cannot fight against his grandfather Bhisma even though this patriarchal figure fights only for wealth. Arjuna fears that by fighting his grandfather he will bring shame upon his family. But Krsna counters that for an experienced warrior like Bhisma there is nothing more glorious than to die in battle because his fame will be increased, and because the battle is to occur on sacred land anyone who dies there will attain the heavenly planets and great wealth in their next birth. In another instance, Arjuna argues that religion prescribes the cultivation of knowledge over the performance of fruitive action. Krsna, counters that even though we are eternal in the embodied state we are always bound to act and so the idea of giving up action is an illusion. Therefore, action should be performed as a matter of duty, with detachment, even if the chance of success is not evident. To reject action out of weakness of heart or fear will only result in frustration. Krsna also argues that even if Arjuna does not believe that the soul continues after the body dies there is still no reason to lament and therefore he should fight without reservation and without considering victory or defeat. In various of ways Krsna tries to incite Arjuna to fight by appealing to his reason, his pride, his humour.

I think we can use this as an example. In many ways the conversation between Krsna and Arjuna represents similar conversations occurring within and outside the anti-Olympic movement regarding what strategies and tactics are effective. Dawn Paley has recently questioned how it has become possible for the right to consolidate itself despite its differences of opinions. She highlighted the overlap of interests between VANOC, the police and the media and argued that those of us on the left, however outdated this left-right dichotomy seems, with access to communication technology should work to enable horizontal communication; to communicate amongst ourselves rather than look towards the corporate media to gauge our success and determine the efficacy of our tactics. This is a sound proposal. The Olympics is the beast of an old generation that is on the way out. The need for such a massive security apparatus for a party that is ostensibly what everyone wants, and the need to monopolize all forms of mass communication to broadcast their values and traditions only signifies the insecurity and uncertainty that is bound up with most “Canadians” sense of who "we" are. Its time we re-claim our identities and voices and speak without reservation despite the nationalist chauvanism and the ridicule they heap on us and without the fear of censorship or worry that the diversity of our own interests and views will somehow tear us apart. We should use whatever is at our disposal including taking up and breaking up all the conventional understandings and interpretations, re-shaping them, re-making them and using them to our advantage. One of the ways that the right successfully consolidates itself is not only through monopolizing the process of communication but by claiming a monopoly on myths and stories and cloaking their interests in them. The Olympics are such a perfect example of this.

Henri Lefebvre once wrote that the invocation of the Greek gods symbolizes the vanquishing of Indigenous gods. This idea might seem tempting as in the context of the Olympics in a new colonial city but I think anyone inclined to embrace it would have to respond to Six Nations resident Melissa Elliot’s assertion that with the 2010 games the IOC and VANOC “are trying to create a false illusion, but we are here to break this illusion and to tell the truth by declaring the following: we are not Canadian; we are not a defeated people; this land was never surrendered; our nations and our people still exist and will continue to exist…” I doubt that Melissa thought how much she is like Krsna who ultimately slashes Arjuna’s illusions and inspires him to fight like never before. Melissa cuts to the bone of the illusion of a Canadian national identity not only for they people she represents, but for all the people that have come out in solidarity in the last week. We are constantly told that the idea of a more just society where no one goes hungry, where everyone has a home and where people can walk in their own streets without fear of the police is a socialist utopia or a hippy anarchist dream. But look at them now in their jerseys and jackets, waving their canadian flags and getting teary eyed when Canada wins a gold, whose life is the fantasy? Melissa reminds us of the diversity that IOC and VANOC have tried to repress, fence off, and white wash away with their broadcasts of all those herculean types, the constant repetition of myths to mystify inequality and power, and the plastic phantasmagoria to amuse and confuse the crowds. But the games will be over in another week and when the smoke and crowds clear we will still exist.