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Nonviolence: Its Histories and
Myths
Professor Michael Neumann,
Trent University in Ontario, Canada
8 February 2003 in Counter Punch
 "...I have neither the moral
standing nor the slightest desire to disparage the
courage of those who engage in non-violence.... But,
non-violence, so often recommended.. has never 'worked'
in any politically relevant sense of the word, and
there is no reason to suppose it ever will. It has
never, largely on its own strength, achieved the
political objectives of those who employed it... There
are supposedly three major examples of successful
nonviolence: Gandhi's independence movement, the US
civil rights movement, and the South African campaign
against apartheid. None of them performed as
advertised. The notion that a people can free itself
literally by allowing their captors to walk all over
them is historical fantasy..."
Comment by
tamilnation.org see
also
1."...The Indian Army in India is not obeying
the British officers. We have recruited our
workers for the war; they have been demobilised after
the war. They are required to repair the factories
damaged by Hitler's bombers. Moreover, they want to
join their kith and kin after five and a half years
of separation. Their kith and kin also want to join
them. In these conditions if we have to rule
India for a long time, we have to keep a permanent
British army for a long time in a vast country of
four hundred millions. We have no such
army...." Sir Stafford Cripps,
intervening in the debate on the motion to grant
Indian Indepence in the British House of Commons in
1947 quoted in 'The Freedom Struggle and the
Dravidian Movement' by P.Ramamurti, Orient Longman,
1987
2 "..Apart from
revisionist historians, it was none other than Lord
Clement Atlee himself, the British Prime Minister
responsible for conceding independence to India, who
gave a shattering blow to the myth sought to be
perpetuated by court historians, that Gandhi and his
movement had led the country to freedom. Chief
Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of Calcutta High Court, who
had also served as the acting Governor of West Bengal
in India, disclosed the following in a letter
addressed to the publisher of Dr. R.C. Majumdar's
book A History of Bengal. The Chief Justice wrote: '
My direct question to him (Atlee) was that since
Gandhi's "Quit India" movement had tapered off quite
some time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling
situation had arisen that would necessitate a hasty
British departure, why did they have to leave? In
his reply Atlee cited several reasons, the principal
among them being the erosion of loyalty to the
British Crown among the Indian army and navy
personnel as a result of the military activities of
Netaji
[Bose]. Toward the end of our discussion I asked
Atlee what was the extent of Gandhi's influence upon
the British decision to quit India. Hearing this
question, Atlee's lips became twisted in a sarcastic
smile as he slowly chewed out the word,
"m-i-n-i-m-a-l!" " Subhas Chandra Bose, the
Indian National Army, and the War of India's
Liberation - Ranjan Borra, Journal of Historical
Review, no. 3, 4 (Winter 1982)
Sometime in the early 1960s, I decided I
was too scared to participate in the Freedom Rides. I
have neither the moral standing nor the slightest desire
to disparage the courage of those who engage in
non-violence. But non-violence, so often recommended to
the Palestinians, has never 'worked' in any politically
relevant sense of the word, and there is no reason to
suppose it ever will. It has never, largely on its own
strength, achieved the political objectives of those who
employed it.
There are supposedly three major examples of successful
nonviolence: Gandhi's independence movement, the
US civil
rights movement, and the South African campaign against
apartheid. None of them performed as advertised.
Gandhi's nonviolence can't have been successful, because
there was nothing he would have called a success.
Gandhi's priorities may have shifted over time: he said,
that, if he changed his mind from one week to the next,
it was because he had learned something in between. But
it seems fair to say that he wanted independence from
British rule, a united India, and nonviolence itself, an
end to civil or ethnic strife on the Indian subcontinent.
What he got was India 1947: partition, and one of the
most horrifying outbursts of bloodshed and cruelty in the
whole bloody, cruel history of the postwar world. The
antagonism between Muslims and Hindus, so painful to
Gandhi, still seems almost set in stone. These
consequences alone would be sufficient to count his
project as a tragic failure.
What of independence itself? Historians might argue about
its causes, but I doubt any of them would attribute it
primarily to Gandhi's campaign. The British began
contemplating--admittedly with varying degrees of
sincerity--some measure of autonomy for India before
Gandhi did anything, as early as 1917. A.J.P.Taylor says
that after World War I, the British were beginning to
find India a liability, because India was once again
producing its own cotton, and buying cheap textiles from
Japan. Later, India's strategic importance, while valued
by many, became questioned by some, who saw the oil of
the Middle East and the Suez canal as far more important.
By the end of the Second World War, Britain's will to
hold onto its empire had pretty well crumbled, for reasons having little or nothing to
do with nonviolence.
But this is the least important of the reasons why Gandhi
cannot be said to have won independence for India. It was
not his saintliness or the disruption he caused that
impressed the British. What impressed them was that the
country seemed (and was) about to erupt into a slaughter.
The colonial authorities could see no way to
stop it. What they could see was the increasingly
violent antagonism between Muslims and Hindus, both of
whom detected, in the distance, the emergence of a power
vacuum they rushed to fill. This violence included the
"Great Calcutta Killing" of August 1946, when at least
4000 people died in three days.
Another factor was the terrorism--and
this need not be a term of condemnation--quite regularly
employed against the British. It was not enough to do
much harm, but more than enough to warn them that India
was becoming more trouble than it was worth. All things
considered, the well-founded fear of generalized violence
had far more effect on British resolve than Gandhi ever
did. He may have been a brilliant and creative political
thinker, but he was not a victor.
Well, how about the US civil rights movement? It would be
difficult and ungenerous to argue that it was
unsuccessful, outrageous to claim that it was anything
but a long and dangerous struggle. But when that is
conceded, the fact remains that the Martin Luther King's civil rights movement was
practically a federal government project. Its
roots may have run deep, but its impetus came from the
Supreme Court decision of 1954 and from the subsequent
attempts to integrate Central High School in Little Rock,
Arkansas. The students who braved a hell to accomplish
this goal are well remembered.
Sometimes forgotten is US government's
almost spectacular determination to see that federal law
was respected. Eisenhower sent, not the FBI, not a bunch
of lawyers, but one of the best and proudest units of the
United States Army, the 101st Airborne, to keep order in
Little Rock, and to see that the 'federalized' Arkansas
national guard stayed on the right side of the dispute.
Though there was never any hint of an impending battle
between federal and state military forces, the message
couldn't have been clearer: we, the federal government,
are prepared to do whatever it takes to enforce our
will.
This message is an undercurrent throughout the civil
rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Though Martin
Luther King still had to overcome vicious, sometimes
deadly resistance, he himself remarked that surprisingly
few people were killed or seriously injured in the
struggle. The surprise diminishes with the recollection
that there was real federal muscle behind the nonviolent
campaign.
For a variety of
motives, both virtuous and cynical, the US government
wanted the South to be integrated and to recognize black
civil rights. Nonviolence achieved its ends
largely because the violence of its opponents was
severely constrained.
In 1962, Kennedy federalized the National
Guard and sent in combat troops to quell segregationist
rioting in Oxford, Mississippi. Johnson did the same
thing in 1965, after anti-civil rights violence in
Alabama. While any political movement has allies and
benefits from favorable circumstances, having the might
of the US government behind you goes far beyond the
ordinary advantages accompanying political activity. The
nonviolence of the US civil rights movement sets an
example only for those who have the overwhelming armed
force of a government on their side.
As for South Africa, it is a minor
miracle of wishful thinking that anyone could suppose
nonviolence played a major role in the collapse of
apartheid.
In the first place, the ANC was never a nonviolent
movement but a movement which decided, on occasion and
for practical reasons, to use nonviolent tactics. (The
same can be said of the other anti-apartheid
organizations.) Much like Sinn Fein and the IRA, it
maintained from the 1960s on an arms-length relationship
with MK (Umkhonto
we Sizwe), a military/guerrilla organization. So
there was never even a commitment to Gandhian nonviolence
within the South African movements.
Secondly, violence was used extensively throughout the
course of the anti-apartheid struggle. It can be argued
that the violence was essentially defensive, but that's
not the point: nonviolence as a doctrine rejects the use
of violence in self-defense. To say that blacks used
violence in self-defense or as resistance to oppression
is to say, I think, that they were justified. It is
certainly not to say that they were non-violent.
Third, violence played a major role in causing both the
boycott of South Africa and the demise of apartheid.
Albert Luthuli, then president of the African National
Congress, called for an economic boycott in 1959; the
ANC'S nonviolent resistance began in
1952.1
But the boycott only acquired some teeth starting in
1977, after the Soweto riots in 1976, and again in
1985-1986, after the township riots of 1984-1985. Though
the emphasis in accounts of these riots is understandably
on police repression, no one contests that black
protestors committed many violent acts, including attacks
on police stations.
Violence was telling in other ways. The armed forces
associated with the ANC, though never very effective,
worried the South African government after Angola and
Mozambique ceased to function as buffer states: sooner or
later, it was supposed, the black armies would become a
serious problem. (This worry intensified with the
strategic defeat of South African forces by Cuban units
at Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, in 1988.) In addition,
violence was widespread and crucial in eliminating police
informers and political enemies, as well in coercing
cooperation with collective actions. It included the
particularly gory practice of necklacing.
Though much of the violence was conducted by gangs and
mobs, it was not for that any less politically important:
on the contrary, it was precisely the disorganized
character of the violence that made it so hard to
contain. And history of the period indicates that the
South African government fell, not under the moral weight
of dignified, passive suffering, but because the white
rulers (and their friends in the West) felt that the
situation was spiraling out of control. Economic problems
caused by the boycotts and the administration of
apartheid were also a factor, but the boycott and the
administrative costs were themselves, in large measure, a
response to violent rather than nonviolent
resistance.
In short, it is a myth that nonviolence brought all the
victories it is supposed to have brought. It brought, in
fact, none of them.
How does this bear on the Israel-Palestine conflict? At
the very least it should make one question the propriety
of recommending nonviolence to the Palestinians. In their
situation, success is far less likely than in the cases
we have examined. Unlike Martin Luther King, they are
working against a state, not with one. Their opponents
are far more ruthless than the British were in the
twilight of empire. Unlike the Indians and South
Africans, they do not vastly outnumber their oppressors.
And neither the Boers nor the English ever had anything
like the moral authority Israel enjoys in the hearts and
minds of Americans, much less its enormous support
network. Nonviolent protest might overcome Israel's
prestige in ten or twenty years, but no one thinks the
Palestinians have that long.
But the biggest myth of nonviolence isn't its supposed
efficacy: it's the notion that, if you don't choose
non-violence, you choose violence. The Palestinians, like
many others before them, find a middle ground. They
choose when and whether to use violence and when to
refrain from it. Many many times, they have chosen
non-violent tactics, from demonstrations to strikes to
negotiations, with varying but certainly not spectacular
success. And their greatest act of nonviolent resistance
is, as Israel Shamir points out, their stubborn
determination to remain on their own lands despite
repeated attacks from armed settlers, which Palestinian
farmers are in no position to counter.
The Palestinians will continue to choose, sometimes violence, sometimes nonviolence.
They will presumably base their choices, as they have
always done, on their assessment of the political
realities. It is a sort of insolent
na�vet� to suppose
that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons of
history and cut off half their options. The notion that a
people can free itself literally by allowing their
captors to walk all over them is historical fantasy.
[1. Even then, nonviolence was taken
with a grain of salt. Oliver Tambo, writing as Deputy
President of the ANC in 1966, said that "Mahatma
[Gandhi] believed in the effectiveness of what he
called the "soul force" in passive resistance.
According to him, the suffering experienced in passive
resistance inspired a change of heart in the rulers.
The African National Congress (ANC), on the other hand,
expressly rejected any concepts and methods of struggle
that took the form of a self-pitying, arms-folding, and
passive reaction to oppressive policies. It felt that
nothing short of aggressive pressure from the masses of
the people would bring about any change in the
political situation in South Africa."]
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