Here’s the key point in a profile of Gene Sharp, who has written extensively on how to resist tyrants:
Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”
This is precisely why non-violent protest can work against some regimes but not others. Those regimes whose armed supporters are willing to kill peaceful protesters survive this kind of resistance just fine; those without the nerve to kill people wholesale end up retiring to Saudi Arabia, if they’re lucky. That’s why the ChiComs and the mullahs are still in charge, and why we’re not seeing a lot of “people power” in Syria. Now, a regime can continue for a long time after it has lost the will to kill, simply out of inertia — it takes a serious and sustained non-violent challenge to force it to confront the choice between mass slaughter and surrender. But once you force the question, as the Egyptian protesters did (and as the peoples of the former Soviet empire did 1988-1991), they’re finished.
This is why Gandhi and Martin Luther King were successful — not because of the power of pacifism as an ideology but because they were dealing with opposition that was simply too civilized to kill on the scale necessary to defeat them, even though such killing would have been quite easy to accomplish. And this is why preaching non-violent resistance to Hitler or Stalin wasn’t just silly, it was immoral; Niebuhr once wrote mockingly of someone calling for the use of “soul force” against the Nazis, asking how soul force was supposed to stop Stukas and Panzers. (If anyone knows the citation for that article, please send it to me; I’ve searched in vain for it.)
Soft-headed liberals (sorry for the redundancy) too often confuse non-violent protest with pacifism. In many cases, peaceful protest is an important tool in fighting for liberty. But renouncing the use of violence in principle, under any circumstances, simply makes one an accomplice to evil and is an abomination.
I agree. An America that sells out the Atlantic for the momentary pleasure of wild salmon, surf and sun is doomed to fall.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThanks for expressing this so well. I attended a Christian college, where a number of students on the Christian left were indeed so softheaded that they believed it was virtuous to refuse to resist evil with force in defense of self or another. It was one of the issues that made me aware I could never really become a liberal.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseVery well put!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGandhi was a traitor to the British Empire.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn the case of tyrants who are vicious and violent, there is still a way to topple the government. It's risky if the state is all-powerful, but it's less risky because you don't congregate where it's easy to kill protesters.
It's the general strike. If the economy shuts down, it's difficult to survive for long. (Of course, it's only effective if most everyone participates, and if it lasts long enough.)
It's also difficult for the government thugs to force people to work; they'd have to set up shop in every, well, shop and ensure they put a full day's work in.
And, in the long run, a lack of motivation among subjugated people will run an economy in the ground anyway, bankrupting it. Witness the Eastern bloc and the 'republics' of the Soviet Union.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGeorge Orwell wrote a really good piece on how Pacifism = Fascism, here:
External Link
Mr. Orwell made the same point that Mark is making: It is easy to be pacifist against countries that will not kill you outright, but being pacifist against countries that'll cut your throat simply because you are there is a grave immorality. That's why I scoff at all the "pacifists" here in this country who can afford such a position behind a wall of nukes aimed at our enemies and laud the common man in Tunisia who lit himself ablaze as a protest against his tyrannical government because it was his only means of standing up to it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseKind of on topic, science fiction author Harry Turtledove wrote a short story called "The Last Article" speculating on how Gandhi and his tactics would fare against Nazi Germany.
In short, through some wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians, and literally decimating striking workers, the Germans terrorize India into compliance. Gandhi and his allies do not comprehend until too late that not only was Nazi Germany as bad a Allied propagnada stated, they were in fact worse.
When your enemy's ethics and morals allow them to commit heinous acts in support of a "greater good" (ala Jihadist who dont mind killing civilians as they are "martyrs" to the cause). Violent response becomes the most moral way to eliminate the evil.
Unfortunately, too many people equivalate actions and motives. Killing an innocent family because your target is hiding in a house next door and your aim is off, is fundamentally different than killing the same family when you deliberately bomb their bus in order to cause chaos.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf I see a man sexually assaulting a woman, I'm not going to "peacefully protest" the act. I'm going to lay hands on him. Violence sometimes is the most moral act.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePresley Cannady:
"I agree. An America that sells out the Atlantic for the momentary pleasure of wild salmon, surf and sun is doomed to fall."
Huh? Non-sequiter, much? (Or was this comment intended for another post?)
Redgrunt84:
I e-mailed Mark a link to the Wikipedia article about that very Turtledove story (novella, really) which I instantnly thought of while readin this post. I know it has been anthologized several times, including in one of Jerry Pournelle's military SF books from the 80s ("There Will Be War" - either volume 6 or 7, if memory serves.) Anyway, that's where I first read it. I heartily recommend both the Turtledove story and the Pournelle anthologies. Both will repay a trip to the used book store, or some digging around on the 'net.
I also discovered something else in that series that came to mind as I read Mark's post: "Proud Legions" by T. R. Fherenbach. Actually chapter 25 of his Korean War book "Proud Legions" (written in 1963) it works very well as a stand-alone essay.
The following paragraph is part of what stuck with me from it. (When TRF was writing, and even when I first read this in the 80s, "Jihad" was an alien word to most Americans. I knew it from Frank Herbert's "Dune" novels, not from history.)
"Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and American, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.
For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions – as its prophets have long proclaimed.
Except that in this world are tigers."
There are tigers, indeed.
Anyone interested can read the entire essay/chapter here:
External Link
Regards,
Joe
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJD522:
Read the title of the post very carefully, then lighten up.
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