What Bono gets right about nonviolent resistance

This article What Bono gets right about nonviolent resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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U2 are at their best when they are either angry or ecstatic. On Feb. 18, they released “Days of Ash,” their first new record in almost a decade, and one of their most scathing. Its lyrics, rooted in Bono’s philosophy of nonviolence, challenge us to act.

“I love you more than hate loves war,” declares the chorus of the headlining song, written for recent ICE casualty Renée Good. “American Obituary” is a song of fury … but more than that, a song of grief,” said Bono in the album’s release notes. “Not just for Renee but for the death of an America that at the very least would have had an inquiry into her killing.”

“You say you wanna change the world / well how you gonna get that right / one life at a time,” follows a song titled “One Life at a Time” about Palestinian nonviolent activist Awdah Hathaleen, killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank. Its chorus addresses the sense of hopelessness that many feel — the idea that we’re powerless. “Our lives do have meaning, our votes do affect [the] lives of people we will never meet,” said Bono in a 2005 interview with Michka Assayas. “Politics matters. We grew up in a generation where we were told it didn’t, and we were bored: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.’ That’s wrong.” 

Bono, frontman and primary lyricist of U2, is well-known for his politicking. He has wielded his finances and fame over and over to exact change. At the turn of the century, he worked to eliminate the crushing debt that restricted the freedom of many African countries. He went on to found the ONE Campaign and Project (RED), with goals of economic opportunities and eliminating AIDS in Africa. “You can’t fix every problem. But the ones you can, you must,” Bono told Assayas. “It’s always the same attitude that wins the day: faith over fear.”

The rage Bono wrote into the new album is a key ingredient in the kind of nonviolent resistance that changes the world. But Bono’s politics have another ingredient — one rooted in the legacy of revolutionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu. That ingredient is hope.

The songs on the EP are calls to action fueled by anger and rooted in hope — the belief that love and humanity can win out against a poverty of both. “I’ve always seen myself as a kind of salesman — selling songs, selling ideas, selling the band and on my best day selling, well, hope,” he said in his 2022 memoir “Surrender.”

In the album’s release notes, Bono writes that “We need problem solvers, not makers, we need a place to meet in the middle that’s not the middle of the road.”

Why hope is so important 

Hope is what authoritarian regimes work to crush first. If you are overwhelmed, afraid and hopeless, you will not act. Rather, the anger inevitably formed by the regime’s injustices will seethe in you, a fire eating away at the soul rather than fueling action.

“Anger is the demand of accountability. … Anger is the expression of hope,” said feminist activist Soraya Chemaly in her book “Rage Becomes Her.” However, when it is unprocessed, she adds that, “Anger threads itself through our appearances, bodies, eating habits and relationships, fueling low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, self-harm and actual physical illness.”

The research I’ve conducted into paradigm shifts — how sociopolitical movements change culture — reinforces the importance of coupling anger and hope. Both are crucial motivators; both are required together to generate real change. Without anger, there is no urgency. Without hope, there is no endurance. We are full of anger — but where is our hope?

“For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all,” Bono told Rolling Stone in 2017. “The baseness of political debate, the jingoism, the atavistic fervor of Trump’s verbiage reminded us that we were dreaming if we thought evolution applied to consciousness. Democracy is a blip in history, and it requires a lot of focus and concentration to keep it intact.”

Bono is no stranger to how conflict can divide a country. He grew up during The Troubles in Ireland, an ethno-nationalist conflict spanning 30 years, rooted in British colonialism and fueled by religion. He wrote his first songs about the conflict, and worked against funding its violence. 

“We were deliberately trying to dry up funds for the IRA [Provisional Irish Republican Army] in America,” Bono told Assayas of U2’s early years. “We hated the Irish ambivalence to violence.” Bono watched as his community oscillated between condemning the use of violence to fueling it. “I just felt that we had to take a position, which was clear — that this violent route was not making the lives of anyone any better.”

It is natural that Bono’s philosophy would be informed by the legacy of Nobel Peace Prize winners Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. The two Northern Irish women knew that fighting could not continue if neighbors saw each other as exactly that — neighbors. They cofounded the Peace People and mobilized thousands in peaceful marches across the country. “One of the greatest blocks to movement is fear,” said Maguire. And fear, as authoritarians know, is the antithesis of hope.

The same kind of fiery faith fueled Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu while apartheid ate at South Africa. Rather than allow their anger to drive them to violence, they wielded it in a container of hope: the belief that not only could apartheid end, but that surfacing its atrocities via the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could put it to bed.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” said Tutu. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Finding hope in the US

The United States is boiling over with anger right now, with the president often framed as the source of all our woes. “Trump is not the problem,” Bono said in his memoir. “He’s the symptom of the problem. He’s not the virus. He’s the super-spreader. The virus is populism, and it’s as deadly as the plague. The real host is fear.”

The stress of living through so many horrors has us searching for answers and salves. Too often we find both in distraction — funny cat videos, shopping hauls. But what if we take our agency back, feel our anger fully and wield it for ourselves?

First, we need to have a vision, a hope for the country. One that is inclusive of all — even those we disagree with. The media has worked so hard to divide us that, for many, inclusion of certain groups now seems a step too far. 

Even if it feels that way, what might the country look like if we listened once again to King, and saw even those different from ourselves as our neighbors, not as a threat? “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves,” said King. “For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

A unifying future has to be believed in before we can wield our anger usefully. Bono put it succinctly in his memoir: “Compromise is a costly word. No compromise, even more so.” We cannot ask those with whom we disagree to compromise if we are not willing to do so ourselves.

Days of rage, days of hope

Anger without hope will burn the world down. It is the mindset that says, “If I go down, I’ll take you with me.” But with hope, anything is possible. Hope is inexorably tied to imagination; it cannot operate without it. “We need radical thinking, creative ideas and imagination,” said Maguire of the Peace People movement. 

And when hope runs out? In his memoir, Bono returns to his Christian faith, which has helped get him through his darkest days. “A good strategy for me is to continually go back to the source. To drop my bucket in the well in hope of a refill,” he wrote. “Why am I always talking about the scriptures? Because they sustained me in the most difficult years in the band and they remain a plumb line to gauge how crooked the wall of my ego has become. To [get] the measure of myself. This is where I find the inspiration to carry on.”

The last song on “Days of Ash” turns away from the anger of the album and instead centers hope. Rooted in the trenches of Ukraine, it cries “Volia,” over and over — “freedom” in Ukrainian. Though critics may say its tone is out of place on the album, it is very Bono. Our anger must have hope to be useful.

This article What Bono gets right about nonviolent resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/03/bono-new-record-nonviolent-resistance/