I find the idea that if we use their tactics against them that we we will become them laughable.
As an example, a woman who fights of an attacker and saves herself will not become a violent predator because of her actions, she will, perhaps, save other women from the same attacker. Thanks for this article.
I agree that much of what passes for normalcy is violence, built into our culture and endemic at multiple "hidden" levels. Fast food is an example, violence against the Amazon Rainforest and the cultures of the people who live there, ending in violence against the body of the person eating the "food," resulting in health problems creating prey for the diet industry and pharma companies. There is little we do in industrial society that isn't interconnected this way.
The essential problem with resistance in any form is it comes far too late. That is not to say I don't favor resistance, it's in every word I write.
Like the formative years of childhood, early indoctrination into society is key. The household that reads to their children is healthier than the one that plunks them in front of a TV. Our society at large is the second one. Overcoming the brainwashing and ignorance is for the most part an impossible task.
My last article focused on the inevitable and likely soon collapse of the basin states of the near dead Colorado River. The social and economic chaos of that alone is enough to break the US. Anger and disorganized resistance are likely as well as climate migration and deaths from crashed agriculture, supply chains, wet-bulb temperature and more. At that point it's too late for an organized, effective response.
Ultimately what we have here is a species that became too successful in manipulating its environment, 8 billion plus of us that live and die by fossil fuels. The oil men, bankers and oligarchs are all manifestations of the survival instinct made lethal at global scale by technology.
All that said, I do appreciate this knowledgeable article. Even as our odds of survival diminish every day, calling out the insanity gets me out of bed. Good, thoughtful work, Max.
Thank you Geoffrey. I disagree that it's too late for resistance, although it's certainly too late for many things. Even to the last breaths, we will still have moral choices to make.
I don't disagree about choices and fighting with whatever tools and resources we individually and collectively possess. I'm writing a follow-up piece to the Colorado River situation on Texas water, the Rio Grande and New Mexico. I feel a moral choice to at the very least warn, and certainly appreciate your perspective and commitment.
It seems really bad. I'm so worried about the river and all those who depend on it. The Southwest is heading towards a Gulf situation of total dependence on A/C and desalinization for basic survival.
It is bad, and most people don't seem to realize it. The situation is quickly approaching dead pool at both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. My article from a week ago.
In the global north we're cowed and blinkered. We are frightened by shadows, probably because we have had it so good (relatively speaking) for so long. Like you, I find the violence/non violence discussion is not forefront in the activism of colleagues in the global south. Thiers is a focus on tactics. Always. Whereas in the north 'the movement' twists itself in knots walking between the prescribed lines. Challenging with words, and passive 'protests', and little more.
Absolutely, Margi. The discourse is so profoundly different when people's lives are on the line. As I'm sure you know as a former climate negotiator, the small island nations have called the drive for restricting atmospheric carbon levels to 350ppm "a death sentence." Their death sentence is what many relatively privileged activists in the global north see as a positive goal. Millions of people are fleeing their homes and losing their lives to ecological collapse. That's why I support a broad range of tactics, thoughtfully employed. This is an emergency, and we need to act like it.
Excellent! Thank you. I'm currently doing a doctoral degree in depth psychology (PsyD), and there is a lot of research on how important "green space" is for developing people. If it breeches the subject of activism at all, much of the academic writing is milquetoast at best echoing this "nonviolence" trope baked in your standard liberal thinking. They talk about "climate change" as this looming catastrophe that has no locus point and cannot be confronted, only survived. It's almost as if academia wants to reiterate fear in order to maintain total paralysis. Whenever I read your work amidst this, I am refreshed and feel a great sense of relief. I am actually able to draw on your writing for an upcoming presentation I'm giving, which I really appreciate.
You're taking on one of the core strategic issues here. I appreciate you quoting Arundhati Roy, who like Gene Sharp saw it as a matter of strategy. (Sharp had originally been a pacifist and abandoned that to promote nonviolence as a strategy instead, saying that the importance difference is between action and inaction. ) but my point is not there. Incidentally, I believe the other commentator is mistaken about the timing of MLK 's use of guns, and the Deacons for Defense, but that's not my point either.
I'm writing to ask your thoughts on Bayo Akolomafe, whose analysis is deeply radical and whose strategy I'm still trying to understand. I'm currently working my way through a lecture series,, and I see that he has many, many talks on YouTube. He's hard to follow, but I think that's the point.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you haven't read him yet I encourage you to check him out.
Thanks for commenting, Shodo. I'm not too familiar with Akolomafe's work. I believe I've read a few things he has written, but it was a long time ago now. Any suggestions on the most accessible or relatable starting points?
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilization of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. A book that explores this deeply is The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48587552-the-sovereign-street
Thanks for sharing Christian, I'll have to take a look at that. Bolivia certainly has a far more vibrant tradition of people's movements and functional democracy than the United States does.
Great presentation of a difficult topic, Max. It makes for some deep contemplations and reflections. What immediately comes up for me is the meaning of the word 'violence', which is "behavior involving physical force to cause harm". Since harm is the desired outcome of the violence, the dueling perspectives involved are often over the degree of harm being inflicted upon humans and the more than human members of the planet.
The default position is reflected in the Precautionary Principle of "do no harm". For me this works well for those of us conscious that simply by our living on the Earth in a Western culture we do harm daily. Sometimes great harm. We can discuss the best ways to reduce and even reverse that harm, but to have a discussion there is an assumption of sympathy and compassion between those in dialogue.
A major issue arises when those in our societies who wield vast amounts of power have no empathy to register the impact of the harm they impose on the world. These people are now in primary seats of power and are being fully exposed as the Epstein Class. The level of their depravity is difficult if not impossible for most of us to fathom. Since these sociopaths are unreasonable by definition, how does one implement acts of nonviolence to stop the genocide of an entire cultures?
Thank you, John. Yes. I agree. That's the problem. I think those in power have vastly improved their techniques for managing / defusing / responding to non-violent social movements since their heyday, now ~75 years ago. That's not at all to say those methods are bunk or useless — absolutely not. But our movements can't be static. We need to evolve.
Thanks very much for sharing, Rachel. This is a brilliant piece. The section under this heading (A “nonviolent” response to nonviolence) is particularly interesting. Appreciate it.
You are very welcome! I'm glad at least one more pair of eyes saw it. I think the title might scare some folks away a bit when they're probably those most in need of reading it.
Yeah. I feel like this sort of discussion should be front and center in social movements, even ones committed to non-violence. But there is such a taboo around this.
You are totally twisting the Reverend Martin Luther King’s history and words to try to make a point here that he would never have made. In short, his conversion to nonviolence came after years of having guns in his home. Then he spent time in India learning Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha (non-violent resistance) to promote the cause.
It was precisely the level of violence weilded the US government that helped convinced MLK that fighting back with violence would be fruitless. Using violence brings the cause down to a war between two factions. Using nonviolent resistance, in contrast, creates a moral conflict that forces at least some opponents to reevaluate their stance.
This well written piece with a link below explains, “As historian Michael Kazin argues, the famous scenes from Birmingham of police dogs snapping at unarmed demonstrators and water canons being opened on young marchers ‘convinced a plurality of whites, for the first time, to support the cause of black freedom’.’ “
We do have spectators in the United States, so there’s no need to resort to the kind of violent self-defense that might be embraced by isolated cultures trying to protect their homelands in the Amazon.
In the United States, nonviolent resistance works best, as the people from Minneapolis have shown us. It’s tragic that we lost some wonderful human beings in the MN resistance, but there would’ve been many more deaths if people had responded with violence.
I was ten when the Birmingham Police unleashed the dogs on marching protesters. The optics horrified me. Yes, nonviolent protest was effective.
But, MLK and his personal armory and the work of the Deacons for Defense was to alert the KKK that any attempts of lynching could have fatal consequences. Peaceful protest does not restrain vigilante thugs.
Too, I think that Minneapolis is not a done deal. The thugs are in the woodwork and will come out at election time. Peaceful protest will not subvert polling place interference. The potential for deadly force will.
You might be interested to read the essay shared by Rachel in another comment here. It provides a more detailed breakdown of this issue and is quite relevant to your comment.
Regardless, I strongly disagree that I am "twisting the Reverend Martin Luther King’s history and words to try to make a point here that he would never have made." I referenced him a single time, and used a single quote which stands alone quite clearly. Nor did I attempt to imply that he would agree with anything else I wrote in this article.
Regardless, Melanie, I think you're actually right — I agree, as I said in the article, that non-violent resistance can be very effective, and it is certainly an elegant political form of resistance. I think in many cases, it's the best path forward, and I agree that the resistance in Minneapolis is a great example of that (although of course, it wasn't entirely non-violent — there were armed self-defense patrols, and many angry protests against ICE that certainly did not adhere to strict non-violent discipline).
Yet, as I wrote: "To make a clear distinction between non-violence and violence is to miss the point. Social movements succeed or fail through moral persuasion, but also through their ability to mobilize power, resist repression and co-optation, strike effectively at strategic targets, and disrupt business as usual. Whether using violence or non-violence, movements must be adaptable and prepared to abandon methods that have failed. The specific tactics matter less than the underlying revolutionary character of the movement — the commitment to winning, no matter the cost, and it is this that is undermined by the whitewashing of resistance."
If you look beyond social/ideological issues to those which are truly core to the continued power of the ruling class (or to be more precise, on which there is less "wiggle room" for those in power) — economic inequality and ecological destruction, aka extraction — every single indicator is far worse today than it was 50 to 60 years ago inside the United States. In other words, despite having an "audience," our strategies are failing miserably.
There is some ideological flexibility among the ruling class, which to me is typified by the existence of the Democrats and the Republicans, when it comes to social issues, and we have seen some progress in those arenas. But overall, things are far, far worse than they were.
Now, you and others might argue, and it would be warranted, that a serious nonviolent movement has not emerged to tackle these issues. I agree. I think the Civil Rights Movement was a serious and effective movement, but I don't at all believe that it was a nonviolent movement. It had many nonviolent characteristics and elements within it, but the broad swath of the movement contained far more than that.
I'm adding Melanie's comment response, which was posted on a separate note:
"Hi Max. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ll look at Rachel’s essay, probably tomorrow as I have to run. Quickly, you did mention King twice: first, quoting him on identifying the US government as the world’s greatest purveyor of violence, and later to describe the “arsenal” he had in 1958, before his conversion, if you will, to non-violent resistance. I just thought it gave an impression of him that didn’t hold with the stance he adopted slightly later in his life.
We’re on the same side ecologically, but I’m concerned about a growing acceptance for political violence among Americans. Miles Taylor notes about one third of Americans now find it acceptable, split fairly evenly among Democrats and Republicans. I find that disturbing.
"Hi Melanie, thanks for sharing this. I find the increasing acceptance of political violence scary as well. Yet what I find far more scary is that the ecological crisis is accelerating without even being slowed by all the efforts of our movement, and that billions of people and millions of species are facing extinction. In face of that, I’m more than willing to contemplate strategies and tactics that, in better times, we could set aside.
I don’t revel in the idea of violence. Far from it. But the violence is already here. The question to is not “will there be violence.” It’s happening now. The question is, do we change things or not. That’s what my article is really about. No rejecting one approach or demonizing the other, but about centering effectiveness and calling for a broader range of tactics to be considered.
I was raised in the peace movement. I’ve participated in a lot of non-violent resistance and will in the future. I hope with all my heart that we can succeed with non-violent means. At the same time, I see no evidence that this is the case.
Our movements are failing dismally. Our opponents control the media, the courts, the banks, the government. They are willing to use violence on any scale to maintain and expand their power. So what do we do when non-violent methods fail, over and over and over again? Do we try again, using the same methods that just failed? Do we give up?"
If an open pit mine was going to be carved into the earth in your backyard and the mining corporations had the law on their side to “legally” remove you by force would you still choose pacifism ?
It seems to me that pacifism doesn’t include resistance, while nonviolent resistance involves the kind of things I think you support, such as tree sits and blocking loggers from accessing old-growth forests. It’s a willingness to put one own body into potentially harmful situations, but not to employ violence against others.
That said, even Buddhists would find it acceptable for people to use violence to defend themselves if someone was attacking them directly. I would hope that in that situation, I could find a way to disable an attacker without killing them, but it’s really hard to say.
Appreciate you elaborating on your views on those terms. Still now you have that word “resistance” which is open to interpretation as well, but you have clarified what you mean a bit more (to some degree) so thanks.
Buddhists condone using violence for self-defence? Fascinating.
How about defending a helpless child that is being attacked in your presence using violence to disarm the attacker?
Gavin, as you can see, I am a staunch defender of nonviolent tactics. Not only for spiritual reasons, which is definitely a big part of it, but also for practical purposes: How on Earth would I be able to fight a huge, government-backed mining company by myself even if I used violence? They would have me killed or jailed in no time. It would be impossible to live a peaceful life there. So yes, I would sadly find somewhere else to live if that was the situation, after opposing it by every non-violent means I could find.
Re: “How on Earth would I be able to fight a huge, government-backed mining company”
There are myriad potential answers to that, the limitation is imagination and willingness to act, and not being helpless in the face of big brother and their corporate profiteering partners (as you seem to be implying).
How about defending your family if home invaders kicked in your door and threatened to kill a human relative of yours or sell them into slavery? Would you also choose “non-violent resistance” in that situation for spiritual reasons?
In my personal opinion, violence can be justified if the following criteria are met:
1) There is clear evidence of catastrophic damage that is irreversible on human timescales
2) All other methods to prevent such damage have failed
By the way, Are you familiar with the work of Tom Murphy, the retired physicist? He recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and shares a lot of your ideas.
Just a tiny contribution to the reflection your text has elicited from the back of my mind:
Gandhi’s little known abhorrence & disdain for cowardice.
Gandhi’s essential admonition was to act with courage as a non negotiable imperative when faced with injustice. Courage to resist the injustice. In any and all such cases: Courage as a remedy to both injustice and cowardice!
Courage as a mandatory course of action, for which he suggested two separate and different, respectively high vs. low roads of action.
Both however have the same common footing: to escalate the confrontational moment until a resolution of the injustice is brought about! The purpose and aim being: Fairness! Equity! Justice! Parity! Reciprocity! Whatever the adequate qualifier for “nullified or reversed injustice” is.
His normative preference, now historical/legendary, was for the nonviolent path, which he goes on to explain the psychological & tactical advantages of in confrontational dynamics. His preference of the high road, if my memory is correct, is known as Satyagraha. The west knows it as Martin Luther King’s approach.
His understanding of the low road was that of violent responses via resistance, retaliation or retribution.
Here’s the point: His own tactical & strategic preference notwithstanding, his main point was to urge victims of injustice to ACT! Rather than to give in to cowardice. And this is what is often missed in conversations about applied nonviolent strategy:
Either way, when faced with injustice, courage obliges you to act! Which path you chose, low or high, is yours bearing in mind that the consequences of the choice will be yours and yours alone to bear! But under no circumstance should you chose the cowards’ retreat or pliant defeat.
Somewhere, somehow; Gandhi’s courage over cowardice injunction belongs in this conversation. Y’all figure that one out.
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilizations of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. Read 'The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia' by Carwil Bjork-James to learn about them.
Thanks again, Max, this time for taking us into a very necessary realm of thought and action where few people are willing to tread. Could this be, in part, because of that other common aversion toward the topics of death and self-sacrifice (to the point of severe pain or death)? Many other reasons that this aversion/avoidance exists, I'm sure.
In one of your comments you gave an estimate that the violence/non-violence ethics and strategy debates have been hot topics for the last "~75 years." Well, since I am turning that age this year and have been wrestling with those issues for about 62 of those years, I might have a few things worth sharing here. I became committed to non-violence when I was about 13. When I turned 18 I decided not to comply with registration for the draft. A year and a half later I registered as a conscientious objector and spent about two years doing alternative civilian service with homeless or transient people in "crash pads." My commitment to non-violent resistance was first put to a serious test sometime after I became a father in 1974. My desire to protect my children from harm raised a lot of "what if" scenario questions and thoughts. That led to settling for something I called, "non-violent, protective physical restraint," in which we could attempt to physically restrain a violent attacker without doing the person unnecessary physical harm--just enough physical restraint to stop the attack. But how far toward real, serious violence could such a strategy go? I still don't have an answer for that.
Other thoughts on the topics that have come and gone and come back since those days, that maybe some of us can discuss sometime, include:
-Is violence unavoidable just because we have to breathe (inhaling and thereby consuming millions of micro-organisms) and because we have to eat? It is, if we remove our anthropocentric blinders and acknowledge the equal right to life of all of our relations (all species, plants included).
-If I can swat a fly or a mosquito with some kind of justification about avoiding harm, why can't I justifiably swat a psychopathic dictator who does billions of degrees greater harm than those little, innocent relatives? I suppose that is much more easy to understand and accept ethically than tactically, as a path to successful resistance. But, why?
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a long-time pacifist who seriously and violently resisted a national force in WW2 Germany that very much resembled what we are up against today in the U.S. Was Bonhoeffer ethically correct and tactically wrong? Would the answer be different if he and his comrades had succeeded in their attempts to assassinate Hitler?
Sorry if I went on too long here. I guess there is still the possibility for more and further later. Peace.
I find the idea that if we use their tactics against them that we we will become them laughable.
As an example, a woman who fights of an attacker and saves herself will not become a violent predator because of her actions, she will, perhaps, save other women from the same attacker. Thanks for this article.
This Buddhist parable, in which the Buddha kills a man to stop a mass murder, is an interesting commentary on this: https://www.twobuddhas.org/post/compassion-beyond-violence-the-bodhisattva-captain-and-the-wisdom-of-self-protection
I agree that much of what passes for normalcy is violence, built into our culture and endemic at multiple "hidden" levels. Fast food is an example, violence against the Amazon Rainforest and the cultures of the people who live there, ending in violence against the body of the person eating the "food," resulting in health problems creating prey for the diet industry and pharma companies. There is little we do in industrial society that isn't interconnected this way.
The essential problem with resistance in any form is it comes far too late. That is not to say I don't favor resistance, it's in every word I write.
Like the formative years of childhood, early indoctrination into society is key. The household that reads to their children is healthier than the one that plunks them in front of a TV. Our society at large is the second one. Overcoming the brainwashing and ignorance is for the most part an impossible task.
My last article focused on the inevitable and likely soon collapse of the basin states of the near dead Colorado River. The social and economic chaos of that alone is enough to break the US. Anger and disorganized resistance are likely as well as climate migration and deaths from crashed agriculture, supply chains, wet-bulb temperature and more. At that point it's too late for an organized, effective response.
Ultimately what we have here is a species that became too successful in manipulating its environment, 8 billion plus of us that live and die by fossil fuels. The oil men, bankers and oligarchs are all manifestations of the survival instinct made lethal at global scale by technology.
All that said, I do appreciate this knowledgeable article. Even as our odds of survival diminish every day, calling out the insanity gets me out of bed. Good, thoughtful work, Max.
Thank you Geoffrey. I disagree that it's too late for resistance, although it's certainly too late for many things. Even to the last breaths, we will still have moral choices to make.
I don't disagree about choices and fighting with whatever tools and resources we individually and collectively possess. I'm writing a follow-up piece to the Colorado River situation on Texas water, the Rio Grande and New Mexico. I feel a moral choice to at the very least warn, and certainly appreciate your perspective and commitment.
It seems really bad. I'm so worried about the river and all those who depend on it. The Southwest is heading towards a Gulf situation of total dependence on A/C and desalinization for basic survival.
It is bad, and most people don't seem to realize it. The situation is quickly approaching dead pool at both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. My article from a week ago.
https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/leaving-las-vegas
In the global north we're cowed and blinkered. We are frightened by shadows, probably because we have had it so good (relatively speaking) for so long. Like you, I find the violence/non violence discussion is not forefront in the activism of colleagues in the global south. Thiers is a focus on tactics. Always. Whereas in the north 'the movement' twists itself in knots walking between the prescribed lines. Challenging with words, and passive 'protests', and little more.
Absolutely, Margi. The discourse is so profoundly different when people's lives are on the line. As I'm sure you know as a former climate negotiator, the small island nations have called the drive for restricting atmospheric carbon levels to 350ppm "a death sentence." Their death sentence is what many relatively privileged activists in the global north see as a positive goal. Millions of people are fleeing their homes and losing their lives to ecological collapse. That's why I support a broad range of tactics, thoughtfully employed. This is an emergency, and we need to act like it.
Excellent! Thank you. I'm currently doing a doctoral degree in depth psychology (PsyD), and there is a lot of research on how important "green space" is for developing people. If it breeches the subject of activism at all, much of the academic writing is milquetoast at best echoing this "nonviolence" trope baked in your standard liberal thinking. They talk about "climate change" as this looming catastrophe that has no locus point and cannot be confronted, only survived. It's almost as if academia wants to reiterate fear in order to maintain total paralysis. Whenever I read your work amidst this, I am refreshed and feel a great sense of relief. I am actually able to draw on your writing for an upcoming presentation I'm giving, which I really appreciate.
I'm very glad to hear that, Erica. There is a lot of value in saying out loud what so many of us know to be true, but are afraid to say.
I was looking forward to reading such a provocative appeal. I stand with you, as I know Herb G. would have! My best to you and Will.
Thank you, Kathy. Provocation was my intention here. This topic isn't easy to discuss, as I said in the piece. It's taboo. But it's essential.
You're taking on one of the core strategic issues here. I appreciate you quoting Arundhati Roy, who like Gene Sharp saw it as a matter of strategy. (Sharp had originally been a pacifist and abandoned that to promote nonviolence as a strategy instead, saying that the importance difference is between action and inaction. ) but my point is not there. Incidentally, I believe the other commentator is mistaken about the timing of MLK 's use of guns, and the Deacons for Defense, but that's not my point either.
I'm writing to ask your thoughts on Bayo Akolomafe, whose analysis is deeply radical and whose strategy I'm still trying to understand. I'm currently working my way through a lecture series,, and I see that he has many, many talks on YouTube. He's hard to follow, but I think that's the point.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you haven't read him yet I encourage you to check him out.
Thanks for commenting, Shodo. I'm not too familiar with Akolomafe's work. I believe I've read a few things he has written, but it was a long time ago now. Any suggestions on the most accessible or relatable starting points?
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilization of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. A book that explores this deeply is The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48587552-the-sovereign-street
Thanks for sharing Christian, I'll have to take a look at that. Bolivia certainly has a far more vibrant tradition of people's movements and functional democracy than the United States does.
Great presentation of a difficult topic, Max. It makes for some deep contemplations and reflections. What immediately comes up for me is the meaning of the word 'violence', which is "behavior involving physical force to cause harm". Since harm is the desired outcome of the violence, the dueling perspectives involved are often over the degree of harm being inflicted upon humans and the more than human members of the planet.
The default position is reflected in the Precautionary Principle of "do no harm". For me this works well for those of us conscious that simply by our living on the Earth in a Western culture we do harm daily. Sometimes great harm. We can discuss the best ways to reduce and even reverse that harm, but to have a discussion there is an assumption of sympathy and compassion between those in dialogue.
A major issue arises when those in our societies who wield vast amounts of power have no empathy to register the impact of the harm they impose on the world. These people are now in primary seats of power and are being fully exposed as the Epstein Class. The level of their depravity is difficult if not impossible for most of us to fathom. Since these sociopaths are unreasonable by definition, how does one implement acts of nonviolence to stop the genocide of an entire cultures?
Thank you, John. Yes. I agree. That's the problem. I think those in power have vastly improved their techniques for managing / defusing / responding to non-violent social movements since their heyday, now ~75 years ago. That's not at all to say those methods are bunk or useless — absolutely not. But our movements can't be static. We need to evolve.
globally, millions of deaths are attributed to air pollution, yet there's been no pandemic lockdown about that...hmm...
Yes. Death on a far greater scale than COVID wrought.
This came out in January but it really pairs well with what you've just written.
https://www.grassrootsthinking.com/nonviolence-is-violence-too-somebodys-gotta-die/
Thanks very much for sharing, Rachel. This is a brilliant piece. The section under this heading (A “nonviolent” response to nonviolence) is particularly interesting. Appreciate it.
You are very welcome! I'm glad at least one more pair of eyes saw it. I think the title might scare some folks away a bit when they're probably those most in need of reading it.
Yeah. I feel like this sort of discussion should be front and center in social movements, even ones committed to non-violence. But there is such a taboo around this.
You are totally twisting the Reverend Martin Luther King’s history and words to try to make a point here that he would never have made. In short, his conversion to nonviolence came after years of having guns in his home. Then he spent time in India learning Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha (non-violent resistance) to promote the cause.
It was precisely the level of violence weilded the US government that helped convinced MLK that fighting back with violence would be fruitless. Using violence brings the cause down to a war between two factions. Using nonviolent resistance, in contrast, creates a moral conflict that forces at least some opponents to reevaluate their stance.
This well written piece with a link below explains, “As historian Michael Kazin argues, the famous scenes from Birmingham of police dogs snapping at unarmed demonstrators and water canons being opened on young marchers ‘convinced a plurality of whites, for the first time, to support the cause of black freedom’.’ “
https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2014/01/17/martin-luther-king-nonviolence
We do have spectators in the United States, so there’s no need to resort to the kind of violent self-defense that might be embraced by isolated cultures trying to protect their homelands in the Amazon.
In the United States, nonviolent resistance works best, as the people from Minneapolis have shown us. It’s tragic that we lost some wonderful human beings in the MN resistance, but there would’ve been many more deaths if people had responded with violence.
I was ten when the Birmingham Police unleashed the dogs on marching protesters. The optics horrified me. Yes, nonviolent protest was effective.
But, MLK and his personal armory and the work of the Deacons for Defense was to alert the KKK that any attempts of lynching could have fatal consequences. Peaceful protest does not restrain vigilante thugs.
Too, I think that Minneapolis is not a done deal. The thugs are in the woodwork and will come out at election time. Peaceful protest will not subvert polling place interference. The potential for deadly force will.
You might be interested to read the essay shared by Rachel in another comment here. It provides a more detailed breakdown of this issue and is quite relevant to your comment.
Regardless, I strongly disagree that I am "twisting the Reverend Martin Luther King’s history and words to try to make a point here that he would never have made." I referenced him a single time, and used a single quote which stands alone quite clearly. Nor did I attempt to imply that he would agree with anything else I wrote in this article.
Regardless, Melanie, I think you're actually right — I agree, as I said in the article, that non-violent resistance can be very effective, and it is certainly an elegant political form of resistance. I think in many cases, it's the best path forward, and I agree that the resistance in Minneapolis is a great example of that (although of course, it wasn't entirely non-violent — there were armed self-defense patrols, and many angry protests against ICE that certainly did not adhere to strict non-violent discipline).
Yet, as I wrote: "To make a clear distinction between non-violence and violence is to miss the point. Social movements succeed or fail through moral persuasion, but also through their ability to mobilize power, resist repression and co-optation, strike effectively at strategic targets, and disrupt business as usual. Whether using violence or non-violence, movements must be adaptable and prepared to abandon methods that have failed. The specific tactics matter less than the underlying revolutionary character of the movement — the commitment to winning, no matter the cost, and it is this that is undermined by the whitewashing of resistance."
If you look beyond social/ideological issues to those which are truly core to the continued power of the ruling class (or to be more precise, on which there is less "wiggle room" for those in power) — economic inequality and ecological destruction, aka extraction — every single indicator is far worse today than it was 50 to 60 years ago inside the United States. In other words, despite having an "audience," our strategies are failing miserably.
There is some ideological flexibility among the ruling class, which to me is typified by the existence of the Democrats and the Republicans, when it comes to social issues, and we have seen some progress in those arenas. But overall, things are far, far worse than they were.
Now, you and others might argue, and it would be warranted, that a serious nonviolent movement has not emerged to tackle these issues. I agree. I think the Civil Rights Movement was a serious and effective movement, but I don't at all believe that it was a nonviolent movement. It had many nonviolent characteristics and elements within it, but the broad swath of the movement contained far more than that.
I'm adding Melanie's comment response, which was posted on a separate note:
"Hi Max. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ll look at Rachel’s essay, probably tomorrow as I have to run. Quickly, you did mention King twice: first, quoting him on identifying the US government as the world’s greatest purveyor of violence, and later to describe the “arsenal” he had in 1958, before his conversion, if you will, to non-violent resistance. I just thought it gave an impression of him that didn’t hold with the stance he adopted slightly later in his life.
We’re on the same side ecologically, but I’m concerned about a growing acceptance for political violence among Americans. Miles Taylor notes about one third of Americans now find it acceptable, split fairly evenly among Democrats and Republicans. I find that disturbing.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193795970"
And here is my response:
"Hi Melanie, thanks for sharing this. I find the increasing acceptance of political violence scary as well. Yet what I find far more scary is that the ecological crisis is accelerating without even being slowed by all the efforts of our movement, and that billions of people and millions of species are facing extinction. In face of that, I’m more than willing to contemplate strategies and tactics that, in better times, we could set aside.
I don’t revel in the idea of violence. Far from it. But the violence is already here. The question to is not “will there be violence.” It’s happening now. The question is, do we change things or not. That’s what my article is really about. No rejecting one approach or demonizing the other, but about centering effectiveness and calling for a broader range of tactics to be considered.
I was raised in the peace movement. I’ve participated in a lot of non-violent resistance and will in the future. I hope with all my heart that we can succeed with non-violent means. At the same time, I see no evidence that this is the case.
Our movements are failing dismally. Our opponents control the media, the courts, the banks, the government. They are willing to use violence on any scale to maintain and expand their power. So what do we do when non-violent methods fail, over and over and over again? Do we try again, using the same methods that just failed? Do we give up?"
Melanie,
If an open pit mine was going to be carved into the earth in your backyard and the mining corporations had the law on their side to “legally” remove you by force would you still choose pacifism ?
Also, non-violent resistance, such as that practiced by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, is not really the same as pacifism.
Thank you for the response(s).
Can you please describe the difference between “non-violent resistance” and pacifism based on how you define the terms?
Thanks.
It seems to me that pacifism doesn’t include resistance, while nonviolent resistance involves the kind of things I think you support, such as tree sits and blocking loggers from accessing old-growth forests. It’s a willingness to put one own body into potentially harmful situations, but not to employ violence against others.
That said, even Buddhists would find it acceptable for people to use violence to defend themselves if someone was attacking them directly. I would hope that in that situation, I could find a way to disable an attacker without killing them, but it’s really hard to say.
Appreciate you elaborating on your views on those terms. Still now you have that word “resistance” which is open to interpretation as well, but you have clarified what you mean a bit more (to some degree) so thanks.
Buddhists condone using violence for self-defence? Fascinating.
How about defending a helpless child that is being attacked in your presence using violence to disarm the attacker?
Gavin, as you can see, I am a staunch defender of nonviolent tactics. Not only for spiritual reasons, which is definitely a big part of it, but also for practical purposes: How on Earth would I be able to fight a huge, government-backed mining company by myself even if I used violence? They would have me killed or jailed in no time. It would be impossible to live a peaceful life there. So yes, I would sadly find somewhere else to live if that was the situation, after opposing it by every non-violent means I could find.
I appreciate you responding.
Re: “How on Earth would I be able to fight a huge, government-backed mining company”
There are myriad potential answers to that, the limitation is imagination and willingness to act, and not being helpless in the face of big brother and their corporate profiteering partners (as you seem to be implying).
How about defending your family if home invaders kicked in your door and threatened to kill a human relative of yours or sell them into slavery? Would you also choose “non-violent resistance” in that situation for spiritual reasons?
In my personal opinion, violence can be justified if the following criteria are met:
1) There is clear evidence of catastrophic damage that is irreversible on human timescales
2) All other methods to prevent such damage have failed
By the way, Are you familiar with the work of Tom Murphy, the retired physicist? He recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and shares a lot of your ideas.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
On Violence - Nonviolence
Courage & Cowardice.
Extremely interesting essay. Very instructive.
Just a tiny contribution to the reflection your text has elicited from the back of my mind:
Gandhi’s little known abhorrence & disdain for cowardice.
Gandhi’s essential admonition was to act with courage as a non negotiable imperative when faced with injustice. Courage to resist the injustice. In any and all such cases: Courage as a remedy to both injustice and cowardice!
Courage as a mandatory course of action, for which he suggested two separate and different, respectively high vs. low roads of action.
Both however have the same common footing: to escalate the confrontational moment until a resolution of the injustice is brought about! The purpose and aim being: Fairness! Equity! Justice! Parity! Reciprocity! Whatever the adequate qualifier for “nullified or reversed injustice” is.
His normative preference, now historical/legendary, was for the nonviolent path, which he goes on to explain the psychological & tactical advantages of in confrontational dynamics. His preference of the high road, if my memory is correct, is known as Satyagraha. The west knows it as Martin Luther King’s approach.
His understanding of the low road was that of violent responses via resistance, retaliation or retribution.
Here’s the point: His own tactical & strategic preference notwithstanding, his main point was to urge victims of injustice to ACT! Rather than to give in to cowardice. And this is what is often missed in conversations about applied nonviolent strategy:
Either way, when faced with injustice, courage obliges you to act! Which path you chose, low or high, is yours bearing in mind that the consequences of the choice will be yours and yours alone to bear! But under no circumstance should you chose the cowards’ retreat or pliant defeat.
Somewhere, somehow; Gandhi’s courage over cowardice injunction belongs in this conversation. Y’all figure that one out.
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilizations of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. Read 'The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia' by Carwil Bjork-James to learn about them.
Thanks again, Max, this time for taking us into a very necessary realm of thought and action where few people are willing to tread. Could this be, in part, because of that other common aversion toward the topics of death and self-sacrifice (to the point of severe pain or death)? Many other reasons that this aversion/avoidance exists, I'm sure.
In one of your comments you gave an estimate that the violence/non-violence ethics and strategy debates have been hot topics for the last "~75 years." Well, since I am turning that age this year and have been wrestling with those issues for about 62 of those years, I might have a few things worth sharing here. I became committed to non-violence when I was about 13. When I turned 18 I decided not to comply with registration for the draft. A year and a half later I registered as a conscientious objector and spent about two years doing alternative civilian service with homeless or transient people in "crash pads." My commitment to non-violent resistance was first put to a serious test sometime after I became a father in 1974. My desire to protect my children from harm raised a lot of "what if" scenario questions and thoughts. That led to settling for something I called, "non-violent, protective physical restraint," in which we could attempt to physically restrain a violent attacker without doing the person unnecessary physical harm--just enough physical restraint to stop the attack. But how far toward real, serious violence could such a strategy go? I still don't have an answer for that.
Other thoughts on the topics that have come and gone and come back since those days, that maybe some of us can discuss sometime, include:
-Is violence unavoidable just because we have to breathe (inhaling and thereby consuming millions of micro-organisms) and because we have to eat? It is, if we remove our anthropocentric blinders and acknowledge the equal right to life of all of our relations (all species, plants included).
-If I can swat a fly or a mosquito with some kind of justification about avoiding harm, why can't I justifiably swat a psychopathic dictator who does billions of degrees greater harm than those little, innocent relatives? I suppose that is much more easy to understand and accept ethically than tactically, as a path to successful resistance. But, why?
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a long-time pacifist who seriously and violently resisted a national force in WW2 Germany that very much resembled what we are up against today in the U.S. Was Bonhoeffer ethically correct and tactically wrong? Would the answer be different if he and his comrades had succeeded in their attempts to assassinate Hitler?
Sorry if I went on too long here. I guess there is still the possibility for more and further later. Peace.
When peaceful protest fall on deaf ears you must speak the language they speak.. money and violence
Thank you Jeff. I wish it were different. It isn't.