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CounterPunch
February
8, 2003
Nonviolence
Its Histories
and Myths
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
Sometime in the early 1960s, I decided I was too
scared to participate in the Freedom Rides. I have neither the
moral standing nor the slightest desire to disparage the courage
of those who engage in non-violence. But non-violence, so often
recommended to the Palestinians, has never 'worked' in any politically
relevant sense of the word, and there is no reason to suppose
it ever will. It has never, largely on its own strength,
achieved the political objectives of those who employed it.
There are supposedly three major examples
of successful nonviolence: Gandhi's independence movement, the
US civil rights movement, and the South African campaign against
apartheid. None of them performed as advertised.
Gandhi's nonviolence can't have been
successful, because there was nothing he would have called a
success. Gandhi's priorities may have shifted over time: he said,
that, if he changed his mind from one week to the next, it was
because he had learned something in between. But it seems fair
to say that he wanted independence from British rule, a united
India, and nonviolence itself, an end to civil or ethnic strife
on the Indian subcontinent. What he got was India 1947: partition,
and one of the most horrifying outbursts of bloodshed and cruelty
in the whole bloody, cruel history of the postwar world. The
antagonism between Muslims and Hindus, so painful to Gandhi,
still seems almost set in stone. These consequences alone would
be sufficient to count his project as a tragic failure.
What of independence itself? Historians
might argue about its causes, but I doubt any of them would attribute
it primarily to Gandhi's campaign. The British began contemplating--admittedly
with varying degrees of sincerity--some measure of autonomy for
India before Gandhi did anything, as early as 1917. A.J.P.Taylor
says that after World War I, the British were beginning to find
India a liability, because India was once again producing its
own cotton, and buying cheap textiles from Japan. Later, India's
strategic importance, while valued by many, became questioned
by some, who saw the oil of the Middle East and the Suez canal
as far more important. By the end of the Second World War, Britain's
will to hold onto its empire had pretty well crumbled, for reasons
having little or nothing to do with nonviolence.
But this is the least important of the
reasons why Gandhi cannot be said to have won independence for
India. It was not his saintliness or the disruption he caused
that impressed the British. What impressed them was that the
country seemed (and was) about to erupt into a slaughter. The
colonial authorities could see no way to stop it. What they could
see was the increasingly violent antagonism between Muslims and
Hindus, both of whom detected, in the distance, the emergence
of a power vacuum they rushed to fill. This violence included
the "Great Calcutta Killing" of August 1946, when at
least 4000 people died in three days. Another factor was the
terrorism--and this need not be a term of condemnation--quite
regularly employed against the British. It was not enough to
do much harm, but more than enough to warn them that India was
becoming more trouble than it was worth. All things considered,
the well-founded fear of generalized violence had far more effect
on British resolve than Gandhi ever did. He may have been a brilliant
and creative political thinker, but he was not a victor.
Well, how about the US civil rights movement?
It would be difficult and ungenerous to argue that it was unsuccessful,
outrageous to claim that it was anything but a long and dangerous
struggle. But when that is conceded, the fact remains that the
Martin Luther King's civil rights movement was practically a
federal government project. Its roots may have run deep, but
its impetus came from the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and
from the subsequent attempts to integrate Central High School
in Little Rock, Arkansas. The students who braved a hell to accomplish
this goal are well remembered. Sometimes forgotten is US government's
almost spectacular determination to see that federal law was
respected. Eisenhower sent, not the FBI, not a bunch of lawyers,
but one of the best and proudest units of the United States Army,
the 101st Airborne, to keep order in Little Rock, and to see
that the 'federalized' Arkansas national guard stayed on the
right side of the dispute. Though there was never any hint of
an impending battle between federal and state military forces,
the message couldn't have been clearer: we, the federal government,
are prepared to do whatever it takes to enforce our will.
This message is an undercurrent throughout
the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Though Martin
Luther King still had to overcome vicious, sometimes deadly resistance,
he himself remarked that surprisingly few people were killed
or seriously injured in the struggle. The surprise diminishes
with the recollection that there was real federal muscle behind
the nonviolent campaign. For a variety of motives, both virtuous
and cynical, the US government wanted the South to be integrated
and to recognize black civil rights. Nonviolence achieved its
ends largely because the violence of its opponents was severely
constrained. In 1962, Kennedy federalized the National Guard
and sent in combat troops to quell segregationist rioting in
Oxford, Mississippi. Johnson did the same thing in 1965, after
anti-civil rights violence in Alabama. While any political movement
has allies and benefits from favorable circumstances, having
the might of the US government behind you goes far beyond the
ordinary advantages accompanying political activity. The nonviolence
of the US civil rights movement sets an example only for those
who have the overwhelming armed force of a government on their
side.
As for South Africa, it is a minor miracle
of wishful thinking that anyone could suppose nonviolence played
a major role in the collapse of apartheid.
In the first place, the ANC was never
a nonviolent movement but a movement which decided, on occasion
and for practical reasons, to use nonviolent tactics. (The same
can be said of the other anti-apartheid organizations.) Much
like Sinn Fein and the IRA, it maintained from the 1960s on an
arms-length relationship with MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe), a military/guerrilla
organization. So there was never even a commitment to Gandhian
nonviolence within the South African movements.
Secondly, violence was used extensively
throughout the course of the anti-apartheid struggle. It can
be argued that the violence was essentially defensive, but that's
not the point: nonviolence as a doctrine rejects the use of violence
in self-defense. To say that blacks used violence in self-defense
or as resistance to oppression is to say, I think, that they
were justified. It is certainly not to say that they were non-violent.
Third, violence played a major role in
causing both the boycott of South Africa and the demise of apartheid.
Albert Luthuli, then president of the African National Congress,
called for an economic boycott in 1959; the ANC'S nonviolent
resistance began in 1952.* But the boycott only acquired some
teeth starting in 1977, after the Soweto riots in 1976, and again
in 1985-1986, after the township riots of 1984-1985. Though the
emphasis in accounts of these riots is understandably on police
repression, no one contests that black protestors committed many
violent acts, including attacks on police stations.
Violence was telling in other ways. The
armed forces associated with the ANC, though never very effective,
worried the South African government after Angola and Mozambique
ceased to function as buffer states: sooner or later, it was
supposed, the black armies would become a serious problem. (This
worry intensified with the strategic defeat of South African
forces by Cuban units at Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, in 1988.) In
addition, violence was widespread and crucial in eliminating
police informers and political enemies, as well in coercing cooperation
with collective actions. It included the particularly gory practice
of necklacing.
Though much of the violence was conducted
by gangs and mobs, it was not for that any less politically important:
on the contrary, it was precisely the disorganized character
of the violence that made it so hard to contain. And history
of the period indicates that the South African government fell,
not under the moral weight of dignified, passive suffering, but
because the white rulers (and their friends in the West) felt
that the situation was spiraling out of control. Economic problems
caused by the boycotts and the administration of apartheid were
also a factor, but the boycott and the administrative costs were
themselves, in large measure, a response to violent rather than
nonviolent resistance.
In short, it is a myth that nonviolence
brought all the victories it is supposed to have brought. It
brought, in fact, none of them.
How does this bear on the Israel-Palestine
conflict? At the very least it should make one question the propriety
of recommending nonviolence to the Palestinians. In their situation,
success is far less likely than in the cases we have examined.
Unlike Martin Luther King, they are working against a state,
not with one. Their opponents are far more ruthless than the
British were in the twilight of empire. Unlike the Indians and
South Africans, they do not vastly outnumber their oppressors.
And neither the Boers nor the English ever had anything like
the moral authority Israel enjoys in the hearts and minds of
Americans, much less its enormous support network. Nonviolent
protest might overcome Israel's prestige in ten or twenty years,
but no one thinks the Palestinians have that long.
But the biggest myth of nonviolence isn't
its supposed efficacy: it's the notion that, if you don't choose
non-violence, you choose violence. The Palestinians, like many
others before them, find a middle ground. They choose when and
whether to use violence and when to refrain from it. Many many
times, they have chosen non-violent tactics, from demonstrations
to strikes to negotiations, with varying but certainly not spectacular
success. And their greatest act of nonviolent resistance is,
as Israel Shamir points out, their stubborn determination to
remain on their own lands despite repeated attacks from armed
settlers, which Palestinian farmers are in no position to counter.
The Palestinians will continue to choose,
sometimes violence, sometimes nonviolence. They will presumably
base their choices, as they have always done, on their assessment
of the political realities. It is a sort of insolent naïveté
to suppose that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons
of history and cut off half their options. The notion that a
people can free itself literally by allowing their captors to
walk all over them is historical fantasy.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
[*Even then, nonviolence was taken with
a grain of salt. Oliver Tambo, writing as Deputy President of
the ANC in 1966, said that "Mahatma [Gandhi] believed in
the effectiveness of what he called the "soul force"
in passive resistance. According to him, the suffering experienced
in passive resistance inspired a change of heart in the rulers.
The African National Congress (ANC), on the other hand, expressly
rejected any concepts and methods of struggle that took the form
of a self-pitying, arms-folding, and passive reaction to oppressive
policies. It felt that nothing short of aggressive pressure from
the masses of the people would bring about any change in the
political situation in South Africa."]
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