by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 13, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the twelfth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. . . . others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. . . . Despotic governments can stand “moral force” till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.
—George Orwell, author and journalist
via Deep Green Resistance UK
Nonviolence has an important part to play in our resistance. That said, there are a number issues with how it is promoted. Also the advocates of nonviolence have not adequately responded to the arguments made against it.
The next four posts will explore the issues with nonviolence; the effectiveness of nonviolence; and why nonviolence has become the default tactic of western activists. Nonviolent action is a very important tool in our resistance against industrial civilisation. So is using force or self defense. When, and in what circumstance, a particular method should be used is dependent upon a number of factors.
Most activists do not hear any arguments against nonviolence; it’s generally accepted by liberal activists, and within liberal communities in general, that the use of “violence” or force is wrong and self-defeating. The state, mainstream media, and nonviolence fundamentalists have been very successful at demonising the use of force. As a result, many activists have internalised the fear and criticism directed at those willing to advocate for or use militant tactics to resist capitalism and the destruction of the natural world. [1]
Problem one with Pacifism and Nonviolence: Rewriting history to make nonviolence look more effective
Nonviolence fundamentalists have often reframed historic examples by (1) excluding important contributions made by groups using force or militant resistance and (2) overstating/exaggerating the (material) success of nonviolent movements and actions. Examples of these historical omissions and rewritings include the Indian Independence Movement, the US Civil Rights Movement and the African National Congress’ struggle to end Apartheid. [2]
Gandhi’s nonviolence movement would not have had the limited success it did without the insurrectional acts of Bhagat Singh [3] and Chandra Bose. [4] The Indian Independence movement was also assisted by the decline in British power after fighting two world wars in thirty years. [5]
The US Civil Rights Movement was largely nonviolent, but it is doubtful that participants would have been successful without the more militant strategies and tactics of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Groups like the Deacons for Defense provided critical armed protection from violent KKK groups and other white supremacists in the south, in many cases engaging in pitched shootouts. In other cases, their armed presence at rallies and houses where organisers lived prevented violence from taking place.
Faced with both militants and pacifists, the US government had a choice to work with Dr. King or to allow Malcolm X to gain more support. The US state ultimately chose to work with Dr King to reform civil rights laws. [6] Charles Cobb and Gabriel Carlyle argue that “although nonviolence was crucial to the gains made by the freedom struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, those gains could not have been achieved without the complementary – and under-appreciated – practice of armed self-defence.”
When Nelson Mandela was compared to Gandhi and King, Mandela’s responses was “I was not like them. For them, nonviolence was a principle. For me, it was a tactic. And when the tactic wasn’t working, I reversed it and started over.” [7]
While Mandela began by practicing only nonviolence, he realised that he could not effectively win the struggle against the South African Apartheid Government through nonviolent means alone. After this realisation, he helped to found the militant wing of the ANC, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). The combination of nonviolent and violent strategies and tactics is what ultimately brought the South African state to the negotiating table in 1990 [8].
Ward Churchill argues that there has never been a successful revolution or social reorganisation based solely on pacifism ; some form of “violence” or force has been essential in every case. [9]
In many cases of “successful” nonviolent resistance movements, change has been decidedly partial. “Take, for example, the issue of colonization in India and South Africa. Although many sources credit nonviolent campaigns and practices with the “end” of colonization in these regions (and others), in reality both India and South Africa exist under neocolonialist rule and hierarchies; rather than an “end” to colonialist practices, nonviolent movements have perpetuated the oppressive colonialist structures of power by placing power in the hands of indigenous elites while imperial powers still maintain control of the banks.” [10]
Contrary to what nonviolent advocates and pacifists often maintain, neither Gandhi nor King were completely opposed to the use of force. On this point, Gandhi affirmed that “I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor,” and “it is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.” [11]
In response to accusations of pacifism, King said “I am no doctrinaire pacifist. I have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism…violence exercised in self-defense, which all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal…the principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to master pure nonviolence.” [12]
Thus, the real views of these icons have been distorted into an dishonest, unhelpful lie.
Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan recently conducted a statistical analysis of the effectiveness of nonviolence. They compiled a list of 323 major nonviolent campaigns and violent conflicts from 1900 to 2006 and rated them as “successful,” “partially successful” or “failed.” [13]
On the whole, Chenoweth and Stephan utilize vague statistics to obscure more complex truths. They do not define violence in their analysis. They do not use a revolutionary criteria, and as a result the “Color Revolutions” and other reformist movements are classified as successful. They credit nonviolent movements with victory when international peacekeeping forces, i.e. armies, had to be called in to protect peaceful protesters. They have not published the list of campaigns and conflicts used in their original study. They explain that the list of major nonviolent campaigns was provided by “experts in nonviolence conflict,” who are likely to be biased toward promoting the efficacy of nonviolent campaigns and strategies. The “violent” conflicts they do include in their analysis are armed conflicts with over 1,000 combatant deaths: in others words, wars. Social movements and full-on wars are not comparable in this way; they do not occur under similar circumstances and factors beyond the participants’ choices influencing what sort of conflict occurs.
Chenoweth and Stephan state that they elected to include only “major” nonviolent campaigns, so weeded out ineffective nonviolent campaigns that only involved small numbers of people and yielded insignificant results. Chenoweth and Stephan took a number of measures to try to correct this bias in their study but none of these would of had a significant affect. [14]
This is the twelfth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- How Nonviolence Protects the State, Peter Gelderloos, 2007, page 5, Read online here
- Chapter six of Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the State, Jeriah Bowser, 2015, looks at these three examples in detail, Read online here
- See the Resistance Profile for Hindustan Socialist Republican Association on the DGR website
- How Nonviolence Protects the State, page 8-10, Read online here
- Pacifism as Pathology, Ward Churchill, 1998, page 55
- Deep Green Resistance, Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen, 2011, page 396. Pacifism as Pathology, page 142-3
- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/12/bob-herbert-on-nelson-mandela-1918-2013/, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/06/anger-at-the-heart-of-nelson-mandela-s-violent-struggle.html, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/05/don-t-sanitize-nelson-mandela-he-s-honored-now-but-was-hated-then.html, http://thegrio.com/2013/12/06/why-we-have-to-celebrate-nelson-mandelas-revolutionary-past/
- Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the State, page 75-81, Read online here. See my article on Mandela’s path to militant resistance
- Pacifism as Pathology, page 57 and page 137
- How Nonviolence Protects the State, page 8-10. Counterpower: Making Change Happen, Tim Gee, 2011 page 127. Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the State, page 68-96, Read online here
- Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the State, page 74
- Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence, and the State, page 92
- Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, 2012
- Failure of Nonviolence, Peter Gelderloos, 2013, page 43-46
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 6, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the eleventh installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
via Deep Green Resistance UK
Deep Green Resistance advocates for the sabotage of infrastructure. Some nonviolent advocates discuss the use of sabotage in relation to nonviolence.
In The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp does not classify the sabotage of property as violent, but states that sabotage could become violent if it causes injury or death. He considers that certain actions (including removal of key components, vehicle fuel, records or files) can fall somewhere between sabotage and nonviolent action. He describes that when nonviolent action has not been successful, sabotage has sometimes followed. Sharp does not describe any instances of sabotage being used by a disciplined nonviolent movement. In his view, sabotage is more closely related to violence than nonviolence, in terms of principles, strategy, and mechanisms of operation. [1]
Sharp also lists nine reasons why sabotage will seriously weaken a nonviolent movement:
- it risks unintentional physical injury;
- it may result in the use of “violence” or the use of force against those who discover plans of sabotage;
- it requires secrecy in planning and carrying out missions, which also may result in “violence” or the use of force if discovered;
- it only requires a few resisters, which reduces large scale participation;
- it demonstrates a lack of confidence in nonviolent actions;
- it relies on physical destruction rather than people challenging each other directly;
- sabotage and nonviolence are rooted in very different strategies—nonviolence in withdrawal of consent, sabotage in destroying property;
- if any physical injury or death happens, even if by accident, it will result in a loss of support for the nonviolent cause;
- sabotage may cause increased repression. [2]
Ackerman and Kruegler agree with Sharp and recommend avoiding sabotage and demolition, but they do identify “nonviolent sabotage” as a form of economic subversion that renders resources for repression inoperative by removing components, overloading systems and jamming electronics. [3]
Branagan differentiates nonviolent property damage and sabotage. Property damage that occurs during a nonviolent action may involve, for example, a hole in the road that has minimum impact, especially compared to ecological, structural, cultural or physical violence. In his model, sabotage is defined by conducting sustained systematic attacks on property, and then getting away with it. [4]
Bill Meyers describes that sabotage was the primary tactics used by Earth First! in the US in 1989. However, during this period nonviolence activists joined the group, arguing that sabotage is a form of violence that feeds a cycle by giving those sabotaged the excuse for their own violence. They also conflated property destruction with violence against persons. Meyers explains that by 1990, this shift in participants’ ideological stances regarding violence resulted in the transition of Earth First! from a revolutionary group that was a genuine threat to the corporations destroying the earth into a much less physically threatening group.
To conclude this run of articles, over the last seven posts I’ve attempted to: define nonviolence and pacifism; explain what nonviolent resistance is; describe its advantages; signpost you to where you can learn more about struggles and who is advocating for nonviolent resistance; and finally how nonviolence and sabotage fit together.
Pacifism is clearly based on good intentions and an understandable desire for a world at peace. Nonviolent resistance is a very important tactic in our struggle. But crucially, it can not be the only tactic if the movement for environmental and social justice ever hopes to be effective. If the planet is to remain livable in the medium term then the movement needs to determine which tactics are most likely to succeed. Regardless of the differences of opinion and focus within the movement, the movement as well as the planet are losing. Being wedded to mostly nonviolent tactics is a major cause of this failure.
Strategic nonviolence has an important part to play in our resistance but the need for some nonviolent advocates to only advocate pacifism or nonviolent resistance in any circumstances and try to mandate it across whole movements, is counterproductive and causing the movement to be less effective.
An act of sabotage or property destruction is violent or nonviolent depending on the intentions and the way they are carried out (see post 4). I don’t think that sabotage or property destruction of nonliving things such as buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure in the defence of life can ever be considered violent.
In the next run of posts I will explore the problems with nonviolence and pacifism.
This is the eleventh installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp, 1973, page 608/9
- Politics of Nonviolent Action, page 609/10
- Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century, Peter Ackerman and Chris Kruegler, 1993, page 39
- Global Warming: Militarism and Nonviolence,The Art of Active Resistance, Marty Branagan, 2013, page 124
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 28, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the tenth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
via Deep Green Resistance UK
The aim of this post is to inform those interested in researching how to strategically confront the state using nonviolent direct action or force; and how this information might be applied to their situation.
Two books describe and analyse a number of struggles. In Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, [1] Ackerman and Kruegler analyse a number of nonviolent conflicts based on their Twelve Principles of Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, which I described in a previous post. The conflicts include: the First Russian Revolution 1904-1906; Ruhrkampf regional defense against occupation, 1923; the Indian Independence Movement, 1930-1931; Denmark occupation and resistance, 1940-1945; El Salvador civic strike, 1944; Resistance against the Polish Communist Party, 1980-1981.
In The Failure of Nonviolence, [2] Gelderloos describes and analyses over thirty nonviolent and militant struggles, which have occurred since the end of the cold war. He uses a four point criteria: whether a movement seized space for new social relations; whether it spread an awareness of new ideas (and secondarily if this awareness was passive or whether it inspired others to fight); whether it had elite support; whether it achieved any concrete gains in improving people’s lives.
The struggles he lists are: The Oka Crisis, The Zapatistas, The Pro-Democracy Movement in Indonesia, The Second Intifada, The Black Spring in Kabylie, The Corralito (in Argentina), the Day the World Said No to War, The Colour Revolution, Kuwait’s “Blue Revolution” and Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution,” The 2005 Banlieue Uprisings, Bolivia’s Water War and Gas War, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution, The Oaxaca Rebellion, The 2006 CPE Protests, 2007 Saffron Revolution, The 2008 insurrection in Greece, Bersih Rallies, Guadeloupe General Strike, UK Student Movement, Tunisian Revolution, The Egyptian Revolution of 2011, The Libyan Civil War, The Syrian Civil War, 15M Movement and General Strikes, 2001 United Kingdom Anti-Austerity Protests, 2011 England riots, Occupy, The 2011-2013 Chile student protests, The Quebec Student Movement, and The Mapuche struggle.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database is also an online resources with some 1,000 examples of nonviolent actions.
Gelderloos also offers a very comprehensive list of those individuals advocating for pacifism and nonviolence. [3] Other organizations active in this realm include: the Albert Einstein Institution; the International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict, the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, Waging Nonviolence and Campaign Nonviolence.
The Radical Think Tank in London has been researching the ways in which nonviolent direct action could be used in the UK. Its members have identified three key mechanisms to enhance political participation and mobilisation to increase the campaign’s likelihood of success: (1) the conditional commitment or pledges; (2) dilemma actions, a lose-lose situation for the authorities; and (3) fostering open space, where people can talk freely about what’s bothering them, which is empowering and motivates them to act. They have also mapped out a number of hypothetical campaign progressions which combine all three mechanisms in order to show how much more effective they can be when combined.
This is the tenth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century, Peter Ackerman and Chris Kruegler, 1993
- Failure of Nonviolence, Peter Gelderloos, 2013, page 48-97
- Failure of Nonviolence, page 160-215
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 19, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the ninth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
via Deep Green Resistance UK
Advocates of nonviolent methods argue that their approach holds a number of advantages over using force.
One argument often made is that “violence” or the use of force weakens the movement, that it shifts attention to this form of resistance and away from the issues at stake. Some also argue that the use of “violent” means or force can give the government the excuse it needs to use violence against the movement. [1]
Gene Sharp argues that using nonviolent methods or “weapon systems” unfamiliar to police and military increases the activists’ total combat effectiveness. According to Sharp, any state repression against the nonviolent movement would expose state violence in the worst possible light, and shift public opinion and power relations towards the nonviolent group. In this way, organizers of nonviolent actions aim to cut off the sources of a regime’s power—one being its capacity for violence—rather than to attack the resources and the infrastructure produced by that power. Sharp considers that, in a sense, this may constitute a more direct attack on the opponent than could be achieved with “violence” or the use of force [2].
Marty Branagan contends that nonviolent actions have resulted in extraordinary achievements, are ethically superior, and are more effective. He also argues that nonviolence replaces the win/lose power play, which leads to a physical, legal and psychological response, with a win/win solution of cooperation. Nonviolent methods also avoid the long-term inter-generational hatred caused by “violence” or force. Branagan cites several studies that indicate that nonviolent struggles result in governments that better observe democratic rights. [3]
Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan conducted a statistical analysis of the effectiveness of nonviolence by compiling 323 major nonviolent campaigns between 1900 to 2006 and subjectively rating them as “successful,” “partially successful,” or “failed.” [4] However, the rating of reformist movements as successful, for example, do not use a revolutionary criteria. [5] I’ll explore the issues with this study in a future post.
Ackerman and Kruegler write that most nonviolent methods are chosen because they are the most effective and least costly means available, and that nonviolent action is often chosen because a military response is not an option. [6]
Mike Ryan describes two distinct arguments that support adherence to nonviolence: the ideological argument and the practical argument. Ideologically, nonviolence is seen as good/right and violence is bad. Practically, it is argued that it’s not the right time for violence; it alienates the people; it results in repression; and it will result in unfavorable press. [7]
This is the ninth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp, 1973, page 597
- Politics of Nonviolent Action, page 453/4
- Global Warming: Militarism and Nonviolence,The Art of Active Resistance, Marty Branagan, 2013, page 58
- Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, 2012
- Failure of Nonviolence, Peter Gelderloos, 2015, page 42-6
- Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century, Peter Ackerman and Chris Kruegler, 1993, page 4
- Pacifism as Pathology, Ward Churchill, 1998, page 126/7
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 17, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the eighth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
via Deep Green Resistance UK
Srdja Popovic, one of the organisers of Otpor, the nonviolent group that challenged Slobodon Milosevic in Serbia, now offers nonviolence training through the The Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). Popovic views a nonviolent campaign as a war, but one which is fought with different kinds of weapons or sanctions. [1] He argues that a successful nonviolent struggle requires nonviolent discipline, unity, and planning. [2] He points out that the state employs fear and the threat of arrest or more terrifying repercussions to make the people obey:
All oppression relies on fear in order to be effective…the ultimate point of all this fear is not merely to make you afraid. A dictator isn’t interested in running a haunted house. Instead, he wants to make you obey. And when it comes down to it, whether or not you obey is always your choice. Let’s say that you wake up in some nightmare scenario out of a mafia movie, where some wacko tries to force you to dig a ditch. They put a gun to your head and threaten to kill you if you don’t start shoveling. Now, they certainly have the power to scare you, and it’s certainly not easy to argue with someone who has a pistol pointed right at your temple. But can anybody really make you do something? Nope. Only you can decide whether or not to dig that ditch. You are totally free to say no. The punishment will certainly be severe, but it’s still your choice to decline. And, if you absolutely refuse to pick up that shovel and they shoot you dead, you still haven’t dug them a ditch. So the point of oppression and fear isn’t to force you to do something against your will – which is impossible – but rather to make you obey. That’s where they get you. [3]
Popovic then explains that once those involved with Otpor moved past the fear of the unknown—and of being arrested—they were able to blunt the state’s oppressive power:
The best way to overcome the fear of the unknown is with knowledge. From the earliest days of Otpor!, one of the most effective tools the police had against us was the threat of arrest. Notice I didn’t say arrest but just the threat of it. The threat was much more effective than the thing itself, because before we actually started getting arrested by Milošević’s police, we didn’t know what jails were like, and because people are normally much more afraid of the unknown, we imagined Milošević’s prisons to be the worst kind of hell…But then when things started getting heated, a lot of us actually were arrested, and when we got back we told the others all about it. We left out none of the details. We wrote down and shared with our fellow revolutionaries every bit of what had happened in the jails. We wanted those about to get arrested themselves – we knew there were bound to be many, many more of us picked up by the dictator’s goons – to understand every step of what was going to happen to them. [4]
While this reasoning may not be appropriate in all socio-political contexts (such as for survivors of rape, assault, domestic abuse, and hate crime), it’s useful as a real world example of the power of knowledge in organizing a movement.
He explains that in order for the average citizen to really engage with an issue, they need to believe something to be unfair or wrong. [5] Like Sharp, Popovic believes that “in a nonviolent struggle, the only weapon that you’re going to have is numbers.” [6] Nonviolent struggles try to win by converting people to the cause. Following this reasoning, Popovic advocates that a nonviolent campaign be relatable to arouse the sympathy of the masses. [7]
Author Tim Gee writes in Counterpower: Making Change Happen, that power is “the ability for A to get B to do something that B would not otherwise have done,” and that “if the interests of those in power are not threatened…the likelihood of rulers voluntarily giving up power altogether is small.” [8] Gee proposes a strategic approach he calls “counterpower, which turns traditional notions of power on their head. Counterpower is the ability of B to remove the power of A.”
The concept of counterpower involves challenging accepted truths or refusing to obey. Economic counterpower can be exercised through strikes and boycotts. Physical counterpower can mean fighting back or nonviolently utilizing human bodies to disrupt, stall, or permanently end the perpetration of injustices. [9] Gee goes on to describe four stages to a successful campaign: consciousness, coordination, confrontation, and consolidation. [10]
Mike Ryan makes the astute observation in Pacifism as Pathology that writers from the 1800s did not state that nonviolence means the “absolute, constant and permanent absence of force or violence.” Doug Man’s “The Movement” and Pat James’ “Physical Resistance to Attack: The Pacifist’s Dilemma, the Feminist’s Hope” argue that it’s important to use the least forceful response that is appropriate to that situation, rather than not using force under any circumstances.
If Man’s and James’ view on the acceptable level of violence were adopted by nonviolence movements today, then the ideological distance between nonviolent resisters and advocates of violent resistance would stem more from differences in analysis and choice of tactics, rather than the current focus on what’s moral or strategic. [11]
This is the eighth installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Non-Violent Techniques to Galvanise Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller, 2015, page 88
- Blueprint for Revolution, page 213
- Blueprint for Revolution, page 130
- Blueprint for Revolution, page 131
- Blueprint for Revolution, page 143
- Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp, 1973, page 52
- Blueprint for Revolution, page 204
- Counterpower Why Movements Succeed and Fail, Gee, Tim, 2011, page 200
- Counterpower, page 13
- Counterpower, page 130
- Pacifism as Pathology, Ward Churchill, 1998, page 136
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