|
By Mary King
Editors note: The following is an excerpt from chapter two of A
Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent
Resistance (New York: Nation Books, 2007; London 2008).
Revolutionary
violence was once considered the only way for oppressed peoples to
change draconian circumstances....Bloodshed often seemed warranted,
especially when justified by the widely held judgment that what was
taken by violence can only be retrieved by violence. It has become
clear in recent decades, however, that armed insurrection is not the
only route available for aggrieved groups and societies.
Nonviolent movements across the world today...have brought down
communism, oligarchies, and totalitarianism....Yet lack of
understanding of nonviolent resistance as a category of struggle, or
defense, is widespread. This gap in knowledge not only led to
misconceptions about the first Palestinian intifada, creating
missteps in policy responses, but it also hampered the fullest
possible implementation of nonviolent struggle by the Palestinians
after the mass movement took hold in 1987 in the Israeli-occupied
territories.
Not All Conflicts Can Be “Solved”
When disputing parties possess severely asymmetrical
power, the smaller, weaker side may find it difficult to obtain a
hearing apart from staging a nonviolent struggle, which has the
potential to bring parity to the unbalanced relationship....Without
such an undertaking, negotiations may eventuate, but would be
ineffective on their own. Or, nonviolent resistance may be the only
way to reach negotiations.
This insight evolved as commonplace wisdom during the 1960s U.S.
civil rights movement. In even the most remote hamlets,
sharecroppers understood that nonviolent struggle might be the only
way to effect negotiations.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., articulated this
realization in 1963:
“Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a
better path? You are exactly right in your call for negotiation.
Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct
action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative
tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is
forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue
that it can no longer be ignored.”
The technique of nonviolent action carries within it the potential
for benefiting both parties to a conflict, because it does not seek
to accomplish its goals by wounding or harming the adversary except
politically. By the 1970s, Boston scholar Gene Sharp had
demonstrated that a move...to nonviolent struggle improves the odds
of reaching negotiations and can lay the groundwork for
reconciliation....[N]onviolent struggle in the twentieth century has
tended to rely strategically on clearly enunciating ultimate goals.
This approach flows from a basic insight that one cannot expect the
antagonists to see the dispute from the point of view of the
nonviolent protagonists and to change behavior or alter policies and
practices without full light being cast upon the underlying
grievance. In nonviolent conflict, it is preferable that the
adversary change from within—having become persuaded of the validity
of the dissenters’ perspective or the cost of inaction —and accept
or come to terms with the nonviolent challengers’ view....
Long History of Nonviolent Struggle
Nonviolent
resistance predates the time of Christ. In 411 B.C.E. in an Athens
depleted by the... Peloponnesian War, Athenians paused for a
theatrical festival. The sensation of the fęte was Lysistrata, a
mirthful and topical farce in which the comic genius Aristophanes
devises a sex strike by the war-weary women of Athens to end
hostilities. In the Roman Empire, Jews and Christians disobeyed the
orders of the Caesar and his army....Peasants have long used
“go-slows,” underreported harvests, rumors and communications in
covert language, evasion of taxes, and work stoppages....They
carried out these actions despite their illiteracy and isolation....
Entitlements now considered to be universal human rights had first
to be fought for through nonviolent struggle, for example, freedom
from slavery and enfranchisement for the vote. Nineteenth-century
movements on both sides of the Atlantic fought to abolish the slave
trade with nonviolent action methods. Historian Carleton Mabee
believes the first support for sit-ins and protest rides in the
United States may have been in 1838, when the Antislavery Convention
of American Women adopted such a policy for their work on abolition
of slavery....[A]s the twentieth century began women’s rights
movements gained strength and fought for women’s suffrage with
nonviolent action—utilizing petition drives, demonstrations,
marches, and sit-ins—around the world....The practice of nonviolent
action developed during the twentieth century into a means of
projecting immense and effective political power.
Although labor unions have used strikes throughout recorded history
as nonviolent measures of economic non-cooperation, countless
indigenous struggles for justice with nonviolent means have gone
unrecorded. Possibly because of deficiencies in comparative
political analysis or linguistic barriers in understanding the
history of ideas, extraordinary holes exist in the writing of
history on nonviolent struggle....For example, no English-language
book offers an anatomy of the Norwegian nonviolent struggle that won
the Nordic nation its independence from Sweden in 1905. The first
extensive work on the various forms of nonviolent resistance against
Hitler did not appear until 1985, when Jacques Semelin analyzed
nonviolent resistance to the Nazis by teachers and church leaders in
Norway, physicians in Holland, church leaders in Germany,
academicians in Poland, Czech and Slovak students and professors,
and strikes by industrial workers and miners in Belgium and France,
during World War II.
A preference for military chronicles has greatly overshadowed the
national European nonviolent mobilizations in opposition to the
Nazis that required widespread involvement of the citizenry. The way
Danish society unified to save its Jewish citizenry from Nazi
removal and death led social philosopher Hannah Arendt to observe,
“One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in
political science for all students who wish to learn something about
the enormous power potential inherent in nonviolent action and in
resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of
violence.”
The Boston Tea Party and resistance to the Stamp Act were only part
of the political defiance of the British Crown by American
colonists, but what happened in Boston harbor and the refusal to pay
the importation stamps required by London are usually not explained
to schoolchildren as nonviolent struggle— as civil disobedience or
tax resistance....
Two centuries later, from the 1980s into the twenty-first century,
the televised spectacle of dictatorships hemorrhaging fascinated
onlookers. Peoples everywhere watched authoritarian regimes tumbling
or the populace refusing to obey the tyrant: the Polish Solidarity
union 1980–89, the Philippines democracy struggle in 1986, the
“mothers of the disappeared” in Argentina, the fall of the Berlin
Wall, and the struggles against political oppression in Serbia in
2000 and Ukraine in 2004....
When constitutional measures fail, protection of representative
democracy categorically demands a way of fighting without resort to
violence....When liberal democratic principles are threatened or
grievances rub raw in representative systems, the people may turn to
extraparliamentary nonviolent demonstrations, picketing, civil
disobedience, strikes, and tax resistance. More than 3 million
persons repeatedly marched in cities throughout France in April 2006
to protest a law that allowed the firing of workers aged twenty-six
years or younger for any reason; under intense pressure, the
government yielded. In Thailand that same spring, the premier
surrendered his post after two months of large demonstrations,
including round-the-clock gatherings of 100,000 citizens protesting
corruption. In the United States, also in April, festive
demonstrations in dozens of cities rallied millions in asking for
fairness in immigration policy....Such action techniques are not the
possession of any ideology, nor are they the domain of the Left or
the Right.
Little is known about what actually happens inside nonviolent social
campaigns....Take for example the U.S. civil rights movement. This
was in fact a movement of movements, as each county, city, or region
of a state produced homegrown community mobilizations with local
leaders and organizers. Yet fewer than a dozen credible firsthand
accounts from within the upheaval have appeared. Most studies by
historians emphasize the leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., an eminently worthy subject, but not illuminating
on questions of why local leadership was exceptionally strong in
some places; how decisions were made; why distinctive action methods
were newly developed....
Despite deficits in documentation, it is now the case that concepts,
knowledge, and skills related to nonviolent struggle are spreading
more swiftly and widely than ever....[E]lectronic technologies have
opened the sluice gates of translation and circulation....
Defining Nonviolent Movements: Behavior,
not Belief
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi...never expected that a mass
nationalist movement could be built on a credo of nonviolence.
Drawing heavily from other historical examples of nonviolent
struggle, Gandhi was a shrewd political operative, and saw
nonviolent resistance as practical—the best way to reach popular
national goals. He did not expect that all, or even most,
individuals would be able to adhere to the intense commitments that
he demanded for himself. Jawaharlal Nehru and members of the working
committee of the Congress Party viewed nonviolent struggle not as a
spiritual persuasion or ethical conviction, but as a pragmatic
method for achieving the political goal of
independence....Gandhi—with few colleagues accepting his severe
political, religious, and personal self-discipline—sought agreement
on a policy of nonviolent action not as an ethic, but as a
strategy....The adoption of a policy of nonviolent action by those
who did not share Gandhi’s personal spiritual beliefs and regimen
was paramount for the successes of the decades-long mobilization....
Offering the choice of action rather than inaction, and nonviolent
rather than violent means of contention, nonviolent struggle
balances political responsibility and ethics with the ultimate in
efficacy and pragmatism....
The supposition that nonviolent resistance only works against mild
repression or with “gentlemanly” opponents, such as the British in
India, holds no validity whatsoever. The British colonial
authorities in Mandate Palestine made mass arrests and introduced
the demolition of homes as punishment of suspected dissidents,
practices that the Israelis now use. In some cases British troops
fired at unarmed Palestinians. During roughly the same period in
India, on April 13, 1919, soldiers under the orders of British
Brigadier General Reginald E. Dyer fired on more than 20,000 unarmed
Indian peasants celebrating a Hindu festival in a sequestered walled
garden in Amritsar. They killed 379 people and wounded more than
1,000.
As a point of comparison, the Amritsar massacre resulted in more
deaths and casualties than when, in 1960, South African troops under
the apartheid regime opened fire on unarmed peaceful demonstrators,
killing 72 (of whom 40 were women, and 8 were children) and wounding
186. The incident, known as the Sharpeville Massacre, led to
militant uprisings across the country that in turn resulted in the
government banning antiapartheid organizations. The ban marked the
end of decades of disciplined nonviolent action against apartheid
that began after 1912. The methods of the antiapartheid movement
then became “mixed,” with Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, or
MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC),
attempting armed struggle....
Yet reverberations from Sharpeville and its aftermath led to South
Africa’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth, severance of
diplomatic ties with South Africa by European nations, Canada, and
the United States, and boycotts of South African products. According
to theologian Walter Wink, who conducted extensive interviews in the
antiapartheid movement in South Africa in 1986, the most surprising
result was that “a great many of the people simply do not know how
to name their actual experiences with nonviolence.” A typical
response to an inquiry about the action methods employed was “we
tried [nonviolent resistance] for fifty years and it didn’t work.
Sharpeville in 1960 proved to us that violence is the only way
left.” As Wink continued examining the most effective approaches in
challenging the apartheid government, he discovered that his
respondents produced a remarkably long list of nonviolent actions:
labor strikes, slowdowns, sit-downs, stoppages, and stay-aways; bus
boycotts, consumer boycotts, and school boycotts; funeral
demonstrations; noncooperation with government appointed
functionaries; non-payment of rent; violation of government bans on
peaceful meetings; defiance of segregation orders on beaches and
restaurants, theaters, and hotels; and the shunning of black police
and soldiers. This amounts to what is probably the largest
grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single
struggle in human history! Yet these students, and many others we
interviewed, both black and white, failed to identify these tactics
as nonviolent and even bridled at the word.
Armed might and nonviolent action are often presumed not only to be
distinct from each other, but also to be opposites. The relationship
between them, however, is sometimes complex. This is not to advocate
the “mixing” of strategies, a strategic liability of some
Palestinian factions during the intifada. Violent struggle and
nonviolent action work in different ways; the two are not
supplementary or complementary and cannot be blended. The injection
of violence into a struggle destroys the potential for involving an
entire people in self-reliant civil resistance, and thus affects
mobilization and recruitment. Their combination also defeats the
strategic advantage of a disciplined nonviolent movement, whose
restraint can stand in sharp contrast to violent reprisals from the
target group....A British theoretician of military strategy, Captain
Sir Basil Liddell Hart, interrogated German military generals after
World War II and found “violent forms of resistance had not been
very effective and troublesome to them.” Yet the generals found it
difficult to cope with the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance as
practiced in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. “They were
experts in violence, and had been trained to deal with opponents who
used that method. But other forms of resistance baffled them—and all
the more in proportion as the methods were subtle and concealed. It
was a relief to them when resistance becomes violent, and when
nonviolent forms are mixed with guerrilla action, thus making it
easier to combine drastic suppressive action against both at the
same time.”
If nothing else, the target group of the nonviolent challengers in
an acute conflict is more likely to concentrate its attention on
their actual grievance when not under the threat of violent attack.
Transmission of Knowledge
Historian David Hardiman asks how to explain that on
virtually every continent nonviolent movements for social and
political change are at work..., all based at least in part on a
body of knowledge consolidated in India during the first half of the
twentieth century?
That body of knowledge was itself infused with methods from India’s
past. Gandhi borrowed traditional cultural and religious customs,
knowing the echo and resonance that they would have for the
population. He reached back in time for the raw material of forms of
mass collective action from India’s past in formulating his
techniques of struggle, including a nineteenth-century indigo
revolt, movements against landlords, and tax resistance
campaigns—peasant rebellions that had won support from members of
the elite....
Historian Sudarshan Kapur shows a steady flow of African-American
leaders traveled by steamer ship to India during the 1930s and 1940s
to learn the theories and methods of the Indian independence
movements. Upon their return to the United States, they gave
lectures, wrote articles, preached, and passed key documents from
hand to hand, to be studied by other black leaders. Their path
exemplifies how the spread of knowledge concerning nonviolent action
is often person to person.
Krishnalal Shridharani’s War without Violence is particularly
significant among the books circulated by the African-American
leaders. Shridharani, a Brahmin associate of Gandhi’s, was one of
the original 79 adherents who trained with him for the 1930 Salt
March and walked with him the 241 miles from Ahmedabad to the
seacoast at Dandi. Derived from Shridharani’s doctoral dissertation
at Columbia University and first published in 1939, War without
Violence is a firsthand analysis of Gandhian theories and methods.
During the 1940s, such notable U.S. black leaders as A. Philip
Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and James Farmer
studied War without Violence....Martin Luther King, Jr., studied
Shridharani’s book during the Montgomery bus boycott, making it
probably the single most influential document in the diffusion of
knowledge from India to the United States and thence to the entire
globe.
Transmission of knowledge from India by American black leaders is
straightforward and indisputable. After King’s death, his own
voluminous writings combined with Gandhi’s then-ninety volumes of
mostly newspaper articles comprised a large collection, portions of
which quietly spread into Latin America and the Philippines in the
1970s and into Eastern Europe and elsewhere during the 1980s to be
translated into dozens of languages....It is now obvious that
nonviolent resistance is not a Hindu specialization or technique
solely effective in a Christian ethos; it has been practiced in many
parts of the globe by atheists and Muslims and peoples of many other
faiths, or none at all.
As access to the Internet broadens, wisdom is more accurately and
exponentially spreading on how to plan and strategize the use of
nonviolent sanctions....
During the late 1990s in Eastern Europe, the Serbian people
(especially students) employed in their struggle against the
dictatorial Slobodan Milosevic the lessons learned and shared with
them by the Czechs and Slovaks’ in their 1980s “Velvet Revolution.”
Toward the end of the 1990s, the Serbian students had begun studying
the academic writings of Gene Sharp in skills-training workshops led
by Colonel Robert L. Helvey, a retired U.S. military officer. During
2002–3, the Serbian activists passed their knowledge and skills on
to those in the Republic of Georgia (formerly Soviet Union)
preparing for what would become the “Rose Revolution.” Azerbaijanis,
Kazaks, Ukrainians, and Zimbabweans, among others, are scrutinizing
what their Serbian and Georgian counterparts studied and learned.
In virtually every part of the globe, the period since the 1980s has
seen major nonviolent struggles produce political results. Such held
to be true in the Baltic states, what is now the Czech Republic, the
former East Germany, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Latin America,
the Philippines, Poland, the former Soviet Union, and South Africa.
Struggles in recent years have also been efficacious, and without
large numbers of fatalities.
Mary King is Professor of Peace
and Conflict Studies, University for Peace. She is also
Distinguished Scholar, the American University Center for Global
Peace, Washington, D.C. and a contributor to Foreign Policy In
Focus. |
|
|
