RESISTANCE WITHOUT VIOLENCE

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison."
                                                                                                  Henry David Thoreau
                                                                                                  "Civil Disobedience"

"When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game."
                                                                                                  John Lennon

 
   In this age of alternative facts, we who commit thoughtcrime need to strengthen our efforts to make our point plainly, repeatedly, and peacefully.  Our enthusiasm for resistance to the neofascist policies of the current government of the United States must be expressed in strategies that are smart, effective, and above all (since violence is neither smart nor effective) non-violent.  Current outpourings of activism against the one-party state carry an optimism born of desperation that we (who are old enough) remember of the civil rights and anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies.  An encouraging rebirth of that confident commitment is essential, but we must learn from past mistakes.  Peace activists of the sixties and seventies allied with destructive revolutionary elements because it appeared we shared the same goals.  We were wrong, and our mistaken alliance meant death and burial of progressive politics for the next half-century.  The lesson is clear, now that we have a new chance:  we reject violence outright.

   Gandhi and King showed us that peaceful resistance leads to satisfactory redress of grievances, for those who persevere.  Peaceful assemblies of the cities and seventies began to fail when movement leaders collaborated with protesters who sought bellicose shortcuts:  urban rioting, militancy, robberies and kidnappings, destructions of universities and other public property.  The Chicago police riots of 1968 were enormously popular among average Americans, who saw that shocking brutality as necessary pushback to criminals who were destroying the society we had built over a couple centuries.  Most Americans, perceiving only two choices, preferred creeping fascism to chaotic revolutionary upheaval.  The establishment propaganda machine deserves praise for eliminating any third choices in the culture's perception.  "Our" fascism or "theirs" were the only alternatives most Americans could see.

   People like orderly existence.  Americans are blest with political and social systems which have provided order with reasonable liberty for most of us, in the long run--despite the wars, depressions, genocides and man-made tragedies we share with all mankind.  Now, finding ourselves facing government exclusively by corporate interests--real fascism--many of us are exercising our right "peacefully to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."  If we do not want to get used to fascism we have no choice but to resist--peacefully.

   Attendance at the "Women's March" of January 21 happily exceeded everyone's predictions.  Progressives were uplifted and energized.  Soon afterward came a protest at Berkeley against a rightwing speaker.  The speaker had a right to be there, as did the protesters against him.  Then anarchists entered the scene, breaking and burning.  Right-wingers instantly pounced on this news, associating the destructive elements with the peaceful ones.  We need to denounce this and all violence--going beyond words.  We need to routinely co-operate with police efforts to assure our demonstrations remain peaceful.  At the Women's Marches, police officers showed an unexpected tendency to co-operate with the marchers, to share our common humanity.  It is to our advantage to build on that understanding.

   Acknowledging that civil disobedience means that some laws will be broken, we know the difference between impeding traffic and burning down neighborhoods.  When protesters blocking bridges for civil rights are attacked by dogs or sprayed with fire hoses by the police, the general public is confronted with two choices:  Build enough jails to hold all trespassers, or ask why they risk arrest.  We find they seek for themselves the same rights we all want.  Instead of rigidly enforcing the letter of the law, we might look toward redressing their grievances.  But since most people (no American exceptionalism here) prefer rigid order to chaos, public attitudes change once peaceful protest turns violent, which helped ruin the hopes of the sixties--proving the means justifies the end.

   The prison boom of the past half-century, finally running down from its own inertia, can be revived if average citizens are frightened enough.  The rich and powerful skillfully use media to keep people scared, and to take advantage of that fear.  We need not help the plutocrats' cause by appearing to embrace or entertain violent resistance to the alternative facts.  Our only hopes for surfing this tsunami of neofascism and rebuilding afterward lie in staying focused and saving our strength.  To be fair, radical events of the Vietnam era:  takeover of public buildings, burning of storefronts, even the odd kidnapping of a rich man's offspring, are tiny compared to the enormous destruction our country committed on a foreign country in our name, or the wholesale violence committed by police on our citizens.  No matter--the need for order prevailed fifty years ago, as it will prevail now, and we who seek positive chance must work with that truth.  Besides, even if our side won a violent revolution, we would only be taking on fascism with a different name.

   Witness Russia a mere century ago.