But during the last several months I became concerned by the appearance of writers and "teachers" attached to the ICNC who suggested that low-level violence (including property destruction!) could help a nonviolent movement succeed faster with better outcomes than strictly nonviolent resistance. Because of my previous readings on the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance and my understanding that autocrats and oppressors frequently try to inject violence into a nonviolent movement in order to undermine it, I could only conclude that the ICNC had been infiltrated by a person or persons working for Trump, Putin, or the regimes they represent. One example of my concern lies in the article written by Professor Tom Hastings in which he lays out his opinion of "when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign," as well as his own story of how he was arrested three times for destroying military property. From his article it is obvious that Mr. Hastings believes that there are times when property destruction is both justified and helpful to a movement.
The only thing is, Mr. Hastings is dead wrong. And the experience of the suffragette movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Britain and the United States proves it. According to a 2015 analysis by George Lakey, the British suffragette movement achieved much less than the American movement, and it did so even though it started earlier and many more women were involved. Why? Because the American women who agitated for the right of women to vote did so using entirely nonviolent acts, whereas in Britain (oh, such a staid and proper society!), women resorted to arson, blowing up post offices, and smashing windows. That's why, by 1920, while waging a nonviolent campaign that ran all the way through World War 1, the American suffragettes won equal access to the ballot box, while in Britain (where the women were forced to suspend their campaign during the war), by 1918 only women who were over 30 and owned property were granted the right to vote, even though they had begun their campaign five years before the American suffragettes. It wasn't until 1928 that British women gained fully equal access to the ballot box - eight years after this victory was won in the United States. Lakey asks what slowed the British women down, and the answer is that they undermined themselves and their movement by engaging in property destruction.
Mr. Hastings should maybe read the article by George Lakey. Or he might read the essay by Jack DuVall (formerly of the ICNC) which criticized the property destruction instigated by some supposed "anti-fascists" in the early days of the Trump administration. That violence played directly into the hands of Trump.
Thankfully, the protesters now facing down Federal troops in Portland do not seem to be listening to Tom Hastings.
(God bless the Wall of Moms! Now that shows innovation in tactics of protest! Compare what they are doing with what the Mothers of the Disappeared did to the Argentine military regime before it fell. They also did it to the Pinochet regime in Chile. And note: the Wall of Moms is spreading to other cities. How can Chump - er, I mean, Trump - call these women thugs?!)
As long as these protesters continue to remain nonviolent in the face of Federal violence perpetrated against them, they will continue to show the world that the real thug and violent actor is the one and only Donald J. Trump.
