Why Are These Weapons Strong?

I've been scanning recent news articles that deal with nonviolent resistance.  As is to be expected, almost all of these recent articles deal with the ongoing protests against police brutality and the murder of unarmed people of color in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.  Some of these articles are misleading - perhaps unintentionally or perhaps not.  So I thought it good to write a post clearing up a few misconceptions regarding nonviolent resistance.

As I have come to understand nonviolent resistance in the light of the literature I've been studying from the end of 2016 until now, I've come to my own definition of the term, stated below:

Nonviolent resistance: a system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction.

This definition comes from my reading of histories of those who have used nonviolent resistance to defeat oppression including conflicts with some of the most repressive regimes the world has seen within the last 120 years.  Because nonviolent resistance is a system of means employed by the oppressed, it is not passivity or inaction.  Below are some other things that nonviolent resistance is not:

• Nonviolent resistance is not just nonviolence.  (However, nonviolent resisters are nonviolent!)  Why make this distinction?  Because oppressors (along with some misguided members of the oppressed) frequently equate nonviolent resistance with the kind of "nonviolence" that consists only of being passive in the face of oppression, or of trying to "rise above" your oppressor by showing him or her that the oppression doesn't bother you, or by finding creative ways to continue to turn the other cheek or to learn to "live gracefully" under ongoing oppression.  The term "nonviolence" has come thus to have almost New Age "spiritual" connotations.  But if you are an African-American mother whose children were exposed to heavy metals in Flint, Michigan, when Republicans destroyed the safety of the city's water supply, or if you are a relative of the unarmed African-Americans who were murdered by police, or if you are a Latino U.S. citizen whose relatives were wrongly deported, don't you have a right - even a duty - to be bothered?

• Nonviolent resistance is not weak.  Moreover, it is not weaker than violence.  Oppressed populations who rely on nonviolent struggle are twice as likely to achieve their aims as those who use violence, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  In that book, Chenoweth and Stephan present the results of a statistical analysis of both nonviolent and violent conflicts which shows that nonviolent struggles achieved an outright success rate of 52 percent.  The rate of partial success was even higher.  Those who used violence succeeded only 26 percent of the time.  As for those violent actors who failed...well, let's just say that many of them did not get a second chance! 

• Nonviolent resistance is not just protest. Scholar Gene Sharp identified 198 methods of nonviolent action, which he grouped into three general categories.  While I am heartened by some of the recent tactical victories I have seen in the recent anti-racism protests, I have to repeat once again that the methods of protest and persuasion are actually the weakest of the categories of methods of nonviolent action, because they have only limited power to apply pressure to an oppressor.  Strategic nonviolent resistance can be used successfully even against oppressors who don't have any better angels to appeal to, because strategic nonviolent resistance relies on more than just protest.

Nonviolent resistance is a set of means by which the oppressed can assert their humanity and dignity in the face of their oppressors in a way that effectively disrupts the power of their oppressors.  And it has an impressive track record, as seen in a brief survey of examples:

• The Philippine "people power" revolution that deposed Ferdinand Marcos was waged nonviolently.  It succeeded after the repeated failure of violent Communist insurgencies.
• The South African struggle which ended apartheid succeeded because its practitioners learned to skillfully apply strategic nonviolent resistance.
• The Polish Solidarity (Solidarność) movement toppled the Communist Jaruzelski regime without violent combat.
• The Serbian OTPOR! (ОТПОР!)movement was part of the Serbian nonviolent resistance that toppled strongman and genocidal maniac Slobodan Milosevic in 2004.

Nonviolent resistance does depend on the participation of large numbers of people.  As more and more people decide to participate, the oppressor's psychological and social pillars of support begin to crumble.  However, there is one weakness of civil resistance: if the resistance turns violent, the number of people willing to participate drops drastically.  And the more violent the resistance becomes, the greater is the ability of the oppressor to justify violent repression against the resisters.  This is why when a nonviolent liberation struggle begins in an oppressed population, the oppressors almost always try to inject violence into it so that they can more easily crush it.

So now we come to the articles I read this week, some of which raised my eyebrows, articles like this:

• "The Limits And Dangers of a Fixation on Nonviolence", Rebecca Pierce
• "In Defense of Destroying Property", R. H. Lossin

Rebecca Pierce claims to be both Black and Jewish, and her essay appears in the New Republic.  Let me just color her misinformed both about nonviolent resistance as a strategic toolkit and as a strategy which works best when not mixed with violence.  R. H. Lossin is white, and does not have to face the sort of demonization which a Black person would face for even suggesting that property destruction is an acceptable way to advance a social movement.  Her article appears in the Nation.  Both the New Republic and the Nation are prominent magazines.  How is it that these people were given the permission to publish such pieces?  Who gave them that permission, and why?  Who benefits from teaching the oppressed to believe that including violence and property destruction in their "variety of tactics" is helpful to those involved in a liberation struggle against a more powerful oppressor?  (What kind of doofus would try to persuade a child to challenge a grizzly bear to a bare-knuckle fight???)

Two last things.  First, in my writings on nonviolent resistance, I have studiously avoided any mention of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King.  I could leave it to you, the reader, to guess all my reasons for leaving him out of my discussion, but I will help you by giving you one reason.  King has been flattened by public school history books and popular culture into a character who fits the description of "nonviolence" I mentioned in my first bullet point above.  So if one goes to communities of the oppressed saying, "We need to practice nonviolent resistance like King did," there will be voices both within and outside the communities of the oppressed who question whether it is realistic to try to convert the oppressor or to build "beloved communities" between oppressor and oppressed, or to ask the oppressed to keep trying to "love their enemies," blah, blah, blah.  In other words, these voices will set up King as a straw man who is easily knocked down, thus hindering the oppressed from seeing the real power and aims of strategic nonviolent resistance. King has therefore become a distraction.

Second, it is instructive to consider the history of Syria over the last ten years or so.  You might be surprised to know that the civil war which started in Syria several years back began as a peaceful nonviolent resistance movement.  In this form, it posed the greatest danger to the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and was beginning to seriously weaken the pillars of support of his regime.  Assad correctly concluded that if the nonviolent struggle were allowed to continue, it would force him out of power (thus bringing Syria into the list of countries which experienced regime change during the Arab Spring).  To prevent that from happening, Assad injected violence into the nonviolent movement by committing outrageous atrocities against the resisters, in order to provoke them to violence.  He also planted caches of weapons in the hopes that the resisters would find them and try to use them against the regime.  (See this also.)  Assad's hope was that by turning the resistance violent, he could shift the resisters onto a battleground in which the State held a decisive advantage.  The only reason why the resulting civil war lasted as long as it did and came close to ousting Assad was that the violent resistance was able to obtain outside sources of funding and supply.  Had that not been the case, the Assad regime would have quickly crushed the resistance movement.  Let that be a warning to those who have a cavalier attitude toward the use of violence in the current struggle against racist oppression in the United States.