April 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Violent Disobedience and Civil Resistance

Robert A. Irwin (irw@mit.edu) is the author of Building a Peace System. His "Why Nonviolence?" can be found at <www.vernalproject.org>

When an extremist government violates widely-held values, conscientious citizens feel impelled to take action. When a long series of warnings, objections, and protests, not only from progressives and humanitarians but from liberal and conservative elite voices, are swept aside by the mailed fist of rulers bent on war, people wonder what they can do next. It surprised some when a former US Air Force pilot, recently head of the Pacific Stock Exchange, pledged to commit civil disobedience to escalate his own opposition to invading Iraq. But it is an option I suspect tens of thousands of Americans are considering.

"Civil resistance," J.F.K. Federal Building, Boston, March 14 © Marilyn Humhries

How can we resist, not just with voice and vote, but with a greater part of our "whole weight," as Thoreau said? In greater Boston in less than a month more than 300 people have participated in four-hour nonviolence training sessions about the option of civil disobedience in opposition to the invasion. Today "civil disobedience" is arguably the wrong term. Since the adoption of the UN Charter (a constitution for the world) and the Nuremberg Principles (establishing individual responsibility in relation to crimes by one's own government), we live in a new era. By Article VI, section 2, of the US Constitution, the UN Charter (being a treaty the US ratified) is part of "the supreme law of the land."

A new era

Consequently, as law professor Richard Falk has written (in F. A. Boyle's Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law), "a government that flagrantly violates international law is engaged in criminal behavior even on a domestic plane.... To disobey is no longer, as with Thoreau, to engage in 'civil disobedience,' an initiative designed to point up the discrepancy between 'law' and 'morality' and the priority of the latter for a person of conscience. Such a tension no longer exists. To resist reasonably a violation of international law is a matter of legal right, possibly even of legal duty if knowledge and a capacity for action exists. Our resisters who properly invoke the authority of Nuremberg stand on firm legal ground, and should not be sent off to jail, but should be exonerated." This might seem merely theoretical and practically irrelevant, were it not that precisely such arguments, when heard by juries in a lengthening chain of cases, have won acquittal for defendants acting to oppose US government crimes on issues ranging from war making in Central America to threatening genocide with nuclear weapons. (See Boyle and mcli.org for particulars.) Such defendants have been offering "civil resistance" (the preferred term for such arguably legal nonviolent resistance) to criminal policies.

The percentage of acquittals in such civil resistance cases rose through the 1980s and may in the months ahead rise much faster, after unprecedented US media attention to the question of whether UN Security Council authorization was needed to "legitimize" war on Iraq. Yet this does not make such resistance something to undertake lightly. With a president who proclaims himself not bound by the world's legal order, mass media that do not correct this misinformation, and many judges who put service to the people who appointed them above disinterested service to the rule of law, we cannot assume any particular judge will permit a jury to hear our arguments.

Real risks, realistic fears

We live and die as individuals as well as members of movements. We may lose friends who find our actions too uncomfortable. We may pay an economic price. Rosa Parks is celebrated today, but even though the Montgomery Bus Boycott was victorious, she had to move out of town. (She went to Michigan.) A seamstress, most of whose customers had been white, she had become too notorious to any longer earn a living in Montgomery.

Even with today's broad movement, there is a still a need to "cast off fear." Fear based on ignorance can be relieved by knowledge. Lawyers and experienced people can clarify legal options and probabilities, providing realistic perspective and a basis for calm decision-making.

Risking arrest on Peace Abby walk to Army Research Center, Natick, MA, March20 © Skip Schiel

Fear and worry based on genuine risks, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities require a different approach. We need friends, comrades, organizations, affinity groups, and practices like group discussion, listening, worship, and (by no means least!) singing. These offer us both tangible, face-to-face solidarity (hugs and literal hand-holding) and also another kind of fear-taming knowledge: a sense of whom we can count on, a stronger sense of what our shared and unique values are. Such social practices add crucial elements to decision-making about actions. Knowing ourselves better and being better known by trusted others helps us to reduce the chances of making choices we would regret; they help us to sustain our activist involvement over the time span needed for fundamental change. War and oppression won't be ended by throwing ourselves headlong and heedlessly into the very next action; but keeping on can help to end them.

While nothing can guarantee safety for an individual, there is an interdependence between safety and the progress of the movement. As Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert recently (3/20; zmag.org/weluser.htm) wrote, "If we allow repression to silence us, our ability to protect ourselves will diminish and the repression will grow. If we continually talk to our neighbors, our classmates, our fellow workers, discuss the war with them, expose government lies to them, point out how the liberties of all of us are in danger, we can create an environment within which the government cannot get away with repression. . . . [O]ur response [to repression] should be no different than our response to war policies themselves. It is to enlarge the movement, to increase the ties between the movement and the publicÐand at the same time to enlarge the more militant sectors of the movement and increase the ties between them and other dissenters."

I agree. But one pitfall threatening the growth and deepening of today's peace is confusion about what "more militant" means. Gandhi had no problem with military-derived terms like "campaign" or "soldiers" (milites in Latin). If "militant" means bold, forceful, shrewd, persistent, able to win good results, we want a more militant movement. But in a violence-saturated society whose destructive powers are on display in Iraq, we must beware of how we are influenced by the system we should be seeking to transform.

Militance defined as smashing windows or destroying other property shifts our struggle to a material level where the government can easily triumph. Carefully controlled physical destruction can sometimes be made consistent with transformative ends: consider the 1960s' destruction of draft files by Catholic pacifists using blood or napalm, or 1980s Plough-share activists' smashing of nuclear weapon components. But these are remote from street tactics intended to outwit or intimidate police, and which place other protesters in jeopardy.

Winning public support

A fundamental issue of strategy is at stake. What does it take to win the public's allegiance? You the reader, like me, may have no doubt that Bush & Co. are violent undemocratic extremists who are attacking human society in multiple ways; we can feel clear that you and I, in contrast, stand for freedom, democracy, and human rights. But the average TV-watching citizen, tired from long working hours, does not know this. He or she sees a sign (maybe unrepresentative), hears shouted chants (ditto), and sees angry faces and "violent" turmoil (maybe people being dragged). Reporters (not to mention critics) often misstate our positions. We can and do importantly reach people other than via mass media. But if we are to reach large numbers persuasively through mass media, competing with well-dressed, capable administration spokespeople allowed to make their case at length, we need actions and images clear enough to communicate our intentions through the static of media bias.

Protest march and rally, March 20, Boston © Ellen Shub

Our aim should not merely be to make noise--to "raise the cost" to the warmakers by shattering "domestic tranquillity." At first this communicates that opposition exists and puts a question mark by the policy being protested. But disruption of normal life is a means, not an end. It is an undiscriminating sanction. We cannot punish the elite by messing up our society. Instead, our aim must be to permanently change policies and the structures that produce them. We must respond to the way the warmakers are so monstrously "disturbing the peace" by projecting alternatives that are worthy of our whole society's support.

Minor vandalism, harassing elites, playing cat-and-mouse with police, and the like are neat adventures--a new "extreme sport"-- for newcomers to protest. But they are not militant or radical as such. Indeed, it is enlightening to learn from memoirs of the '60s like Dave Dellinger's More Power Than We Know just how much our images of "militant" and "radical" have been shaped by actions instigated by paid police agents posing as movement participants.

The new anti-war movement has developed rapidly, compared with the Vietnam anti-war movement, and we should not be surprised to find paid government agents ("provocateurs") already assigned to promote property destruction, and even attacks on police, to shift the movement's public image toward the "small, violent minority." To mention this possibility will shock many newcomers, but students of social movements know that promoting violence and destruction is standard procedure for regimes threatened by growing opposition.

In Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism, psychologist Bob Altemeyer has shown how fearfulness about a world that seems dangerous and confusing underlies much support for punitive authorities. People who disrupt the predictability of everyday life (e.g., by blocking traffic) and whose motives are (thanks to the media!) unclear can easily be targeted as menacing enemies of order. Those raised to be authoritarian can find some relief from worry by supporting efforts to suppress the disrupters. Altemeyer concludes that "the cards are stacked in favor of right-wing extremists if social order dissolves and organized violence and terrorism erupt in the street--especially if the demagogues on the right can blame their excesses on the radical left, which would happen quite naturally. Thus leftists who resort to such tactics would seem to be playing into their enemies' hands. I would call this the 'Nixon trap.'"

Actions perceived as protester "violence" (whether violent or not by reasonable definitions), strengthen the perceived legitimacy of government repression. Even moderate repression in a few localities risks reversing the current expansion of antiwar protest. How much tear gas and pepper spray does it take to make war opponents who are parents decide to keep their kids and themselves home next time?

But all who feel the need to go beyond simple protest and to challenge "business as usual" have a wiser path open to us. The ethos of nonviolence inherently counters authoritarianism and repression. Barbara Deming writes that we "must always be saying with the actions that we take two things." First, that "things are not going to stay as they are," and second: "Don't be afraid of us." We must at the same time challenge and reassure. Amazingly, this can actually be done. One of the jurors who in 1986 acquitted Abbie Hoffman, Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy, and others charged for blocking campus CIA recruiting used (somewhat oddly) the phrase "in good hands." We do indeed want the public to feel safer siding with us than with the opponents of peace and the UN.

After describing the "Nixon trap," Altemeyer (who displays no adherence to any ideology of nonviolence) writes in his final chapter, "Protecting Ourselves from Authoritarianism," that "nonviolent protest may be the trump card of left-wing reformers . . . . When governments try to suppress peaceful protest movements with force, they appear to trigger a backlash against themselves. This might be called the 'Gandhi trap.'"

Escalate morally, not destructively

Our challenge now is this: Escalate morally, not destructively. Along with large demonstrations that permit new recruits to the movement to take an "entry" step, we need creative and carefully conceived actions, carried out by numbers that need not be large, that communicate with symbolism of maximum clarity the values and policies we are for and against while risking arrest for violating short-range "lesser-evil" legality (i.e., actions that might win acquittal under international law, "necessity," or "competing harms" defenses). Well-defined and targeted actions need not remain small--think of the annual actions to close the School of the Americas (where the number of those arrested has grown over the years from a few dozens to hundreds). Our control of media coverage is even at best never total, but in history's best actions and campaigns the campaigners' influence has achieved dominance. We must seek to seize the moral high ground from the warmakers and never let it slip away.

Experience suggests that what is best for strengthening the movement in both breadth and depth is to nest nonviolent actions of greater risk and moral intensity inside larger, "mass" support settings. This has several benefits. First-time demonstrators can see for themselves what nonviolent direct action (and "C.D."--civil disobedience) look like. Dellinger writes: "Their presence as outside, semi-respectable observers can be crucial in restraining the police; their proximity as sympathizers and potential recruits can also have a salutary effect on the protesters, [helping] some of them [feel] part of a larger, broader movement" and also restraining them from actions that would look bad to both their fellow protesters and the wider public. The tensions and mutual influences can be positive and creative.

There is unusual potential at this historic moment. The Bush administration's crude extremism, "arrogance," and "unilateralism" (to quote several corporate CEOs, no less), disrespecting and alienating world and even NATO opinion, has split the unity of the US domestic elite and is helping maintain space, even in wartime, for thorough-going criticism, opposition, and opinion change.

Bush is committing "violent disobedience" against the global legal order. He is disrupting the lives of soldiers (and their families and friends), putting them at risk of death, injury, and capture, while increasing worries that the war will provoke future attacks on US soil. Our own actions should be strictly nonviolent, should uphold the imperfect but evolving global legal order, should threaten nobody's life or limb, and should point a path toward a more peaceful world. In other words, as unmistakably as possible, they should show that the contrast with Bush's policies is one of violence versus nonviolence.

Bibliography available on request.

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