 aving
tried to give some of the background of nonviolence - and I am
just going to have to assume you have read the four earlier
installments - how is it possible that unarmed people can hope to
liberate themselves?
First, there is no guarantee nonviolence will work
in every case.
This puts nonviolence in precisely the same place as
violence. No one picks up a gun to liberate their country
- as the Vietnamese did - with a guarantee of victory. History is
a bleak record of countless valiant battles for justice - ending
in defeat. One case worth mentioning was the struggle in South
Africa led by Gandhi's son, Manilal Gandhi, in the 1950's in an
effort to force a change in policy by the regime. The struggle
ended in violence and defeat. In our own country there are
thousands of cases where oppressed people have tried to deal with
injustice peacefully and have lost.
The first instinct of every sane person is to find a
"safe" way to resolve a conflict. The closer you are to
a serious conflict - racial, labor, human rights - the more aware
you become that people who are already hurting would prefer not to
get hurt still more. So a peaceful - nonviolent - solution is
almost always the first way chosen. People turn to violence when
they feel the oppressor "only understands violence." As
this is being written there is a tragic situation unfolding in
Kosovo, where a long and remarkably nonviolent struggle by the
Albanian ethnic majority (about 90% of the population of Kosovo,
which is a province under Serbian control in former Yugoslavia) is
turning violent because a handful of courageous, angry young
Albanians started killing Serbian police, the Serbs in turn have
killed a number of them, and hopes for a nonviolent resolution may
be fading as both sides in this conflict take the position
"they only understand violence."
Pacifists try to create conditions under which the opponent is
"free to try different behavior". There are three
examples that can be used (and a lot more waiting for the history
student, all the way from Finland to Cambodia). One is India. A
second is the Montgomery Bus Boycott which began the Civil Rights
Revolution in this country. The third is the Farm Workers under
Chavez.
Mahatma Gandhi did two things which were crucial to victory.
The first was to give the Indians a pride in themselves, a sense
that they were not weaker than the British. (It is common when you
are in an oppressed group to feel that perhaps the reason you are
oppressed is because you deserve it - the old pattern of self-
hatred or a lack of self-respect common to the oppressed, whether
black, gay, women, etc.). When Gandhi led the famous Salt March to
the sea (to protest the British tax on salt). This simple act - so
simple it would have made the British look foolish to try to stop
it - let all of India see this man with a handful of followers
walk from his "Ashram" across India to the sea. With
every step he took all India began to feel a new pride. When he
reached the sea and began the process of collecting the salt
(which could be had at low tide when the salty sea water had
evaporated and left deposits of "raw salt"), he was
arrested and jailed. But not before some of his followers had
begun to send the collected salt across India where it was
auctioned for money for the Congress Party.
At every auction new arrests were made until thousands were in
jail. A foreign correspondent talking to a high caste Indian asked
if he didn't find it embarrassing that someone of his social
standing faced prison, to which he responded "Oh no, all the
best people are in prison." That was the first step - an
open, public defiance of the law. A proof that Gandhi and his
followers were not afraid of the British prisons.
The second step - both in this campaign and in the many others
Gandhi led - was to create such disorder that the British were
forced to negotiate. One of the actions Gandhi urged on his
followers was the weaving of their own cloth, so that they would
not depend on the British for imported cotton. (Up to that point
the British bought the Indian cotton at a low price, then milled
it and made garments in England, which were sold back to the
Indians at a much higher price).
For Gandhi, it was important to have a "Constructive
Program" which would involve all Indians in the movement. His
use of the spinning wheel was a symbol of "self
reliance". Gradually the British mills began to face
bankruptcy as their exports to India fell. As we will see in
looking at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Gandhi was creating a new
reality, was "changing the political facts" so that the
British either had to engage in massive violent repression, or
negotiate. There were many ways in which Gandhi created such facts
- massive sitdowns in front of trains, general strikes, the famous
"passive resistance" which so fascinated the West in the
1930's. Here was a little man in a loin cloth, unarmed, and yet
able to bring the British Empire in India to a standstill. He
could, simply by issuing the call, stop trains from running. (There
is an interesting, little known bit of history from the early
Bolshevik Revolution, when the Revolution was saved not by force
of arms - in the early days after October 25 the Bolsheviks had no
armed forces - but by a "battle of the trains". The
White Russians were trying to move their troops to Petrograd, the
center of the Revolution, but because the Bolsheviks had the
support of the workers running the railroads, the trains carrying
the White Russian troops kept having mysterious delays, or were
shunted down the wrong tracks. Hannah Arendt documents similar
actions by the Italians when, late in World War II, Hitler tried
to deport all the Jews from Italy to make sure they were killed -
he had lost confidence in the Italians to do the job properly. It
was, again, a battle of trains, with the Jews never arriving at
the same place as the Nazi transport. (It would have been funny -
if the whole event had not been so horribly tragic).
When the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December of 1955 it
seemed hopeless, but it was all the black community could risk.
They had no support from the Federal government at that point, and
they faced the armed force of the local (and state) police. No one
had successfully defied the white power structure in the South -
resistance was suicidal. But the black community felt the police
would have a hard time coping with something as simple as . . .
NOT riding the bus. What could the police do if people chose to
walk instead of ride? And in Montgomery that winter, and that
spring, black folks walked. They walked if they were young, they
walked if they were old. They walked if they were tired and they
walked if they were sick. If they couldn't walk, the Montgomery
Improvement Association arranged for some transport by car.
At first the whites laughed. They weren't threatened by black
people walking!! But King and his co-workers were creating new
facts. One of the first facts was that blacks were learning that,
even if they were still afraid, they could act. Every step they
took was seen as a step forward to a new goal. One of the white
women asked her maid, who was arriving at work by walking a great
distance, if she weren't tired to which the maid said "my
feet are tired, but my soul is rested". A change began to
occur within the white community, similar to the change Gandhi had
been able to achieve in the British community - people who had
looked on the Indians or the blacks as barely human, suddenly saw
them emerge as people with dignity. With each passing day, the
white community grew more restless and uneasy. No bullets had been
fired by King's people. Yet the community in the heart of the
capital of the Confederacy sensed something was changing forever.
One of the changes was that the bus company said it was losing so
much money it would have to go bankrupt - and this meant that no
one, black or white, would have public transportation.
Faced with this fact, the white community negotiated a a
settlement. Long weeks after it had begun, blacks and whites were
no longer segregated on the buses. Glenn Smiley (an old friend and
mentor, who ran the Fellowship of Recon-ciliation office in Los
Angeles when I was a student at UCLA), was the first white man to
board the buses arm in arm with Dr. King, as they sat together on
a day of victory.
In 1962 Cesar Chavez, himself a migrant worker, began
organizing largely Mexican farm workers in California. As with
Gandhi and King, Chavez was struggling with the sense of defeat
the farm workers had. Migratory, many unable to speak English and
illiterate in Spanish, some illegal aliens, the Mexican community
in California was considered impossible to organize - a source of
cheap, compliant labor. Chavez did what the powerful AFL-CIO had
failed to do - he gave the farm workers a sense of dignity and
showed them it was possible to struggle and win. At great cost,
and against the prejudice of the police and the public, he made
the grape boycott into such a powerful symbol that he forced the
growers to the bargaining table. In the face of beatings and
shootings, he responded with fasts, boycotts, and peaceful
marches.
This will have to go to a sixth and perhaps seventh
"chapter", so I will close this "why it works"
by emphasizing that nonviolence succeeds because through organized
disruption of the existing social structure (sit downs, sit ins,
boycotts, etc.) the old order cannot continue to function.
It must choose between violent repression and negotiation.
Nonviolence doesn't work because it appeals to the "best in
the enemy", (though it certainly always does make that
appeal). It works because the "enemy" is not only
treated as a brother or sister, but also because our tactics
absorb the pain and suffering even as we create social
disorder so great that something must yield. By behaving,
always, with dignity we compel our opponent to see us in new ways,
making it hard for him to use violence (though violence will be
used - nonviolent social changes does not mean no violence -
it means we will not use violence but it is certain it will
be used against us).
And it works because it changes how the oppressed think of
themselves - it gives them pride and confidence. And nonviolence
empowers the whole community - it can be used by old
and young, weak and strong, professors and those still illiterate.
This is in contrast to armed struggle which is usually limited to
the young and healthy.
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