FrankThoughts

Many of us have attended protests and participated in boycotts, but it often hasn’t resulted in real change. This has led many to believe that we’ve exhausted all non-violent options. This is a mistake. Switching to violent tactics would skip over many levels of nonviolent escalation.

First of all, I want to point out that the rationale for nonviolence is generally not namby-pambyism but rather because nonviolence is much more effective than nonviolence. Please forgive me for dropping a quote here from a rock musician, but it’s just the most succinct explanation of it that I’ve ever heard.

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.” – John Lennon

If you’ve ever wondered, in these crazy times, how a revolutionary force is ever supposed to defeat the United States military or its militarized police, the answer is that it’s not. That is a dead end. They will roll over you like grass, and most of the country will cheer them for it.

So you don’t fight, you disobey en masse. You refuse to cooperate, at times deliberately breaking the law, albeit peacefully, and dare the system to show its whole ass on TikTok, YouTube, and national TV, arresting and abusing regular citizens for breaking an unjust rule.

A lot of people quote-mine MLK — “a riot is the language of the unheard” — in order to suggest that he approves of riots. But it’s clear from his full quote in context that he does not approve of riots, he’s making a point about who’s to blame.

Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non­-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

What I think is interesting is that he argues here that nonviolence is potent, and he specifically calls out violence as counterproductive because “a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt”.

John Lewis wasn’t just a protestor who got his skull cracked open by a state trooper. He was a committed nonviolent activist who agreed with open eyes to practice nonviolent resistance in situations that he knew were dangerous. He was trained in nonviolent tactics in Tennessee under his mentor Rev. James Lawson. In these training programs, Lewis and others were subjected to intense physical abuse in which actors pretending to be a white mob would hurl insults, shout, blow cigarette smoke in their face, spit on them, pull them off of stools, and pour food over them.

Similarly, Rosa Parks wasn’t just a woman with tired feet, she was an activist who had worked with the Montgomery NAACP for 12 years, learned public speaking and constitutional law at the Highlander Folk School Workshops under Septima Clark, and had spent the previous months running the NAACP youth council, helping people study to beat the rigged Alabama literacy tests, organizing voter registrations, library sit-ins, and so on.

One reason these tactics worked is because of what the public saw on TV: state law enforcement mistreating innocent people trying to exercise their inalienable rights. The idea is that you force authorities into a difficult choice: either let activists continue doing what they’re doing, or be seen enforcing an unjust law. Nonviolent campaigns can also impose economic and political costs, recruit more participants, provoke defections among elites/security forces, and make ordinary governance increasingly difficult.

This is reminiscent of the Salt March, in which Gandhi and 78 followers marched for 24 days to the Indian coast in protest of the British monopoly and tax on salt. At the end of the march, Gandhi deliberately broke the law by making salt from seawater. Inspired by this, people across India began making and selling illicit salt and engaging in other forms of civil disobedience. Within weeks, the British authorities were arresting activists by the tens of thousands; eventually more than 60,000 people were imprisoned. The repression only generated further resistance. International news reports of nonviolent Indian protesters being arrested and brutally beaten — most famously at the Dharasana Salt Works — became a major embarrassment for British rule. Within about a year, Lord Irwin, the British Crown’s top representative in India, was negotiating directly with Gandhi. Gandhi went from 78 marchers to a nationwide movement and negotiations with the highest British authority in India within a year.

An interesting connection here is that Rev. James Lawson, who mentored John Lewis, actually studied methods of nonviolent resistance with associates of Gandhi in India, after which Lawson returned to the United States and started teaching these methods in workshops.

There is a famous study analyzing 323 major campaigns between 1900 and 2006, which concluded that nonviolent campaigns are significantly more successful than violent ones, even when accounting for the extreme brutality of the regime. Chenoweth’s subsequent research on The Radical Flank Effect — the argument that nonviolent campaigns often rely on a violent “flank” waiting in the wings as a persistent threat — could not find any correlation between the success or failure of a campaign in and the existence of a radical flank; and in fact, the research showed that participation in the campaign consistently decreases when the violent flank shows up.

In my opinion, if you want to look for a role model for today’s problems, look at what the citizens did in Minnesota when ICE showed up. Over 30,000 citizens in Minnesota received community-based training on how to be a effective constitutional/legal observers, including how to properly document law enforcement. Gov. Tim Walz encouraged people to establish a record of what is going on. “Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution…Accountability is coming, at the voting booth and in court.” Minnesotans showed up in droves with cameras and blowing literal whistles to make sure that ICE agents knew they were being watched; and they captured and documented several cases of abuse by ICE agents. Protestors also lined up in front of hotels that hosted ICE agents and made loud noises to keep them awake.

This post is not a call to action, it’s just an observation. People will tend to decide on their own terms the point at which conditions are so bad that they’re willing to bear the very real cost of further escalation. It often takes a significant number of people who are committed to remaining nonviolent while being abused and possibly arrested. And that, in turn, is much more effective when they can count on the support of a well-organized campaign.

Violent campaigns suck ass because they turn the public against you, suppress participation, cause disruption in basics like food and utilities, get loved ones killed, and even if you win, you can’t guarantee that the people in power will have the same vision that you do. Any other strategy would be preferable to this.