The philosophy of nonviolence may be exploited to prevent reform

Nonviolent Satyagraha purists often point to the domestic US protests and demonstrations against the Viet Nam War as an example of a successful nonviolent peaceful protest movement. However, that is mythmaking and revisionist history, because the US anti-War protesters did not end the Viet Nam War with their peaceful demonstrations.

The leaders of the US government, including Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, McNamara, Agnew, Westmoreland, Dulles, and many others, repeatedly stated that the anti-War protesters never influenced their prosecution of the Viet Nam War, and history shows that they were speaking truthfully about that. The Viet Nam War ended because the long-suffering and resilient Viet Namese people, who lost three million of their population during the War, finally drove the US Imperialist aggressors out of their country.

The American civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King was an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, and King visited the Gandhi family in India in 1959, a visit that convinced King that Gandhi’s Satyagraha philosophy of nonviolent peaceful protest would be applicable and effective in the USA. Under Martin Luther King’s leadership, the American movement for civil rights applied the philosophy and methods of nonviolent protest and they made great headway for the advancement of civil rights, in spite of frequently violent opposition by racist groups and the police in many communities. In 1968 a team of US military assassins killed Martin Luther King, and without King’s leadership the civil rights movement lost its forward momentum for nonviolent peaceful protests and demonstrations. A period of popular militancy, characterized by groups like the Black Panthers, followed.

An obsession with, and the idealization of, nonviolent peaceful protest as the only valid form of political action can emasculate and render ineffective a movement for political reform. Dictatorial governments know this quite well, and it is very much in their own interest to encourage a rigid philosophy of non-violent peaceful protest as a way of emasculating, disarming, and rendering futile a reform movement. A strict adherence to a policy of nonviolent peaceful protest allows the government to continue its own corrupt and violent ‘business as usual’ without the threat of serious disruption.

The foreign policy behavior of the US government is violent in the extreme, as is demonstrated by the USA’s murderous aggression and genocides in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The average US citizen’s unresisting cooperation with the US government is effectively a willing cooperation with, and an acquiescence to, the extreme State-sponsored violence committed on a daily basis by the US government. A strict adherence to nonviolent peaceful protest as the only method of political action often masks a political ‘cop-out’ -- an inclination to maintain the existing socio- political status quo and to do nothing really serious or substantive to bring about reform.

Anyone who cooperates with the US government is cooperating and collaborating with the most violent institution on earth. It is sheer hypocrisy that anyone would support or cooperate with the US government and then claim to believe in nonviolence. The question must be asked of those US citizens who espouse a philosophy of strict nonviolence, “If you truly believe in nonviolence, why do you support the US government? And if you truly believe in reform, why aren't you putting your own life on the line in support of reform?”

Whenever I see nonviolent protesters standing in open confrontation before armed policemen, offering their naked skulls to the policemen's batons, I may feel sympathy for the protesters because we share the same cause and the same goals, but I do not share their philosophical preference for strictly nonviolent protest, and I would never willingly submit myself to potential harm by the authorities. The nonviolent protesters may choose to assume the role of martyrs, emulating their heroes -- Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Jesus – but that is not at all the kind of choice that I, personally, would make.

If I believe that the authorities are wrong and I oppose them, I see no good reason to willingly submit myself to their clubs, to their guns, to their arrest of me, or to their jails. I oppose injustice and tyranny, but I am not willing to let the tyrants and their henchmen freely abuse me, because I am not a proponent of strict nonviolence; I am simply an opponent of injustice and tyranny.

In 1919 at Amritsar in the Indian Punjab, Indian troops, following the direct orders of their British officers, fired on a gathering of 5,000 peaceful, unarmed protesters who had assembled in a park with only one narrow lane from which they could exit. It is estimated that as many as 1,000 people were killed and 2,000 wounded by the British- led troops in what became known as the ‘Jallianwala Bagh Massacre’ or the ‘Amritsar Massacre’. A subsequent investigation revealed that the orders to fire on the crowd were not a response to any threat or provocation from the crowd, but were a preplanned strategy and policy of the British colonial authorities.

Some advocates of nonviolent protest may consider such injuries and losses of life as occurred at the Amritsar Massacre to be an acceptable outcome that does not justify an escalation from nonviolent protest to violent direct action, but I do not agree with them.