Behind Every Peaceful Protester . . .
. . . is someone who is willing to fight for it.
I don’t mean disrespect to peaceful protest. There is a great value in it, and in civil disobedience, though civil disobedience has been somewhat tamed since the days of Martin Luther King. When I was stationed at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, a protest leader told me that she informed the security police before a nuclear protest about how many would be there, and how many would cross over the line onto the base. That way the SPs could have the right number of vehicles along with lunches to feed the protesters before they received whatever letter they were going to get or they were charged. Gandhi and Martin Luther King never had it so good!
Nonetheless, such protesters do have a definite role in holding our feet to the fire on a variety of moral issues. The desire to protest is not limited to the left or the right, though the causes are different. Neither is the impulse to move toward violence if things don’t change, or don’t change fast enough.
What is often missed, I believe, is the fact that peaceful protest requires an ally: The conscience of the people one is protesting against. If those people are without consience, then the peaceful protester quickly becomes a dead protester. Gandhi was successful because whatever their faults, the British had limits beyond which they would not officially go. Certainly there were atrocities, but those were embarassments to the administration. I know some will say that it’s simply the shame that makes this work–the rulers don’t really have a conscience, they just don’t want to get caught. But even the fact that they don’t want to get caught indicates some conscience.
If you don’t believe me, consider nations such as Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There is a simple point here. Peaceful protest is good, but it requires a certain context in which to work, and that context assumes some level of conscience on the other side. Otherwise, peaceful protest will not succeed. Protesting peacefully against rulers who are evil to the core simply gets one dead, often slowly and painfully dead.
I think about this when I think about pacifism as well. I have encountered only a few true pacifists in my life. By “true pacifist” I mean a person who will not engage in violence even in defense of himself or his family against a criminal attack. My father was generally anti-war, and as a Seventh-day Adventist took a non-combatant stance. He spent World War II in a conscientious objector’s camp in Canada. He then lived to see both of his sons serve in the U. S. Military, though my older brother served in a non-combatant role. I, on the other hand, did not.
The Bible does not tell us of early Christians engaging in violent self-defense. But read through the book of Acts, and see how many times the authorities came to rescue Paul–whenever they weren’t the ones attacking him! Non-violence is great, but in a world in which evil people exist and practice, violence in self-defense is a requirement. That is why I am proud to have served in the armed forces (U. S. Air Force). Without those who are willing to put their lives on the line, or more importantly who are willing to put the other guy’s life on the line (with apologies to General Patton), peaceful protests would not be able to accomplish the things that they do.
At the same time, I am thankful for the peaceful protesters who have braved the confrontation with evil unarmed and determined to live non-violently. I’m glad to have been a very, very small part of making this a nation in which freedom can be advanced by their actions. I am even glad to have helped keep the country free for the protesters I had to avoid in order to go to work at the base where the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command was located. They inconvenienced me, but they were a critical part of what I served in order to protect.
I am angered by one thing involving discussions of the Iraq war. Readers of this blog should know by now that I oppose the war in Iraq. Some have made the assumption that I oppose war as such, or any act of war in opposition to terror. That is not the case. I oppose this war, because I believed it was ill-conceived. I continue to believe it was ill-conceived, but now I must add that I believe it was badly executed at the political level. But we need to thank the men and women who are over there. It’s not their fault that politicians can’t get their act together. More importantly, we all get to sit back here and blog about all this because people like them have served, and continue to serve.
At times, good needs some artillery, and I’m glad we have it.
Peaceful protest is good, but it requires a certain context in which to work, and that context assumes some level of conscience on the other side. Otherwise, peaceful protest will not succeed. Protesting peacefully against rulers who are evil to the core simply gets one dead, often slowly and painfully dead.
I don’t think I agree. Of course individuals are not going to succeed alone against really evil rulers. But when the peaceful process, perhaps initially inspired by an individual, becomes a mass movement, even the ruler with no conscience at all has to take note. For one thing, the ruler has a vested interest that his or her country should continue to function smoothly and prosper economically, and mass protests which threaten that have to be taken seriously. Also, even if the ruler has no conscience, sometimes the security forces do, and when the forces start to sympathise with the mass protest the ruler’s days are numbered. The wise despot makes gradual minor concessions and manages to preserve his or her rule. The foolish despot often comes to a bloody end; the blood is not inevitable, but the end is.
I see, and kind of expected, your objection. But I would note that you mention the security forces having a conscience as one possibility. I agree. Sometimes it’s people in other countries that have the conscience. But in those places where outside pressure is either minimal or non-existent, peaceful movements get crushed. Consider China and Tien-an-men Square. While there is marginal civil rights improvement in China, that was a fairly effective suppression. It was delayed by military officers with consciences who didn’t want to do it, but eventually the government overcame. I would suggest that the level of success indicates the potential conscience available to be awakened.
To harp on India again, while the UK built quite an empire, you guys are simply not that ruthless. As a nation you have a fairly sensitive conscience (ignoring our mutual transgression with regard to Iraq), and I think you did in India. What other nations might have seen as minor transgressions touched the English conscience.
Now I don’t ignore economic and practical factors. They play a role as well. I just think there has to be that unwillingness to be completely ruthless in there somewhere. Historical regimes that lack that element have been quite successful and eradicating peaceful protest. The Russian communists, for example, would have executed Gandhi before he got popular.
Well, Henry, you are right that we Brits have a conscience. It’s a shame that our current leaders don’t, concerning Iraq, or at least their only conscience is Bush. I suppose Burma/Myanmar is a good current example of a regime which has not been toppled by continuing peaceful and not so peaceful dissent, because the regime doesn’t have a conscience. But the Soviet communists were not a good example in later years; maybe Stalin would have simply executed Gandhi and anyone who supported him, but in the end a lot of what brought about the final collapse of the Soviet Union was peaceful mass protest, and the authorities’ realisation that they couldn’t get away with repression indefinitely. Remember Yeltsin climbing on a tank?
Indeed I was watching TV at the time of Yeltsin’s adventure. But I would say there that the later Soviet rulers, and more particularly the Soviet troops at that point did have a conscience, which was the ally of peaceful protesters.
I’m certainly not arguing against peaceful protests. I think that Gandhi and MLK, amongst others, did marvelous things for the world by showing what could be accomplished peacefully. What I’m arguing is that there are truly evil people on whom one must use force, or people who are so far gone that one cannot get their attention without force. We need to combine the factors.
On the Iraq war all I can say is that it seems to me both a moral failure and also a massive failure of good judgment. My problem in looking at it is that it looks so obvious to me that the Iraq war was a bad idea that I have a hard time understanding how supposedly intelligent, educated people could assume that the Iraq war was going to produce a good result. I also must note that I didn’t come to this conclusion by observing what happened in the war and becoming disillusioned. I was opposed to the war before it started. It has actually gone marginally better than I expected. I’m baffled by people who think there can possibly be any good result. Without the possibility of a good result, the expenditure of life is apalling. I’m willing to see life expended, and as a military veteran I was willing to put my life on the line. But I ask political leaders to spend those lives with at least a minimum of wisdom.
Henry, you and I are one on the Iraq war, and have been since before it started. And I don’t go as far as saying that force should never be used, although I don’t have a really consistent position on this. So there is not really much between us here.