Nonviolent Resistance

Nonviolent Resistance

I just finished reading Jim Wallis's God's Politics, which was published in 2005. It's hard to articulate my response, which ranged from highly positive to deep despair. On the one hand, the book provided irrefutable evidence that a large number of influential religious leaders, especially Christians, have, in fact, been actively attempting to stem the descent of our culture into savage social and economic injustice; on the other hand, current reality provides overwhelming evidence that their efforts have not only been ineffective, but apparently counter-productive, since things just keep getting worse.

These efforts chronicled by Wallis date back to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and extend right up to the time the book was published. One must assume that they have continued since. Yet, to reiterate, things just keep getting worse. As Frank Rich recently wrote in The New York Times Week in Review (“What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?” 10/24/10), the election of Obama has not created the “Change” we were expecting: if anything, it has exacerbated the downslide, fueling ignorance and demagoguery.

The obvious question is: what, if anything, can be done? Is the march of injustice unstoppable, inevitable? I'm not particularly sanguine that any of you who receive this message will even trouble to acknowledge it, much less respond. To be honest, I have been complaining to anyone who will listen since the election of Ronald Reagan made it clear to anyone with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a brain to understand, that Reactionary elements had assumed control and were unlikely to relinquish it, ever, unless forced to. Except for a few published letters and one essay in The Progressive Christian (asking the rhetorical question, What Would Martin Luther King, Jr. Do?) my repeated efforts to communicate with all of you have elicited a profound silence. And we know what Martin would be doing: he would be organizing massive nonviolent civil disobedience.

Now, lest there be any confusion, I have never and will not ever advocate violent force. But Wallis did include in his book a quote from, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall. It's rather long, but defines “nonviolent resistance” better than anything I have ever seen. I am including it because it would seem, based on the rest of his book that neither he nor other advocates for social and economic justice (except for MLK Jr!) have ever taken it seriously. Here it is:

“The reality is that history-making nonviolent resistance is not usually taken as an act of moral display; it does not typically begin by putting flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions – strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage – in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars of support. It is not about making a point, it's about taking power.

'“Regimes have been overthrown that had no compunction about brutalizing their opponents and denying them the right to speak their minds. How? By first demonstrating that opposition is possible, peeling away the regime's residual public and outside support, quashing its legitimacy, driving up the costs of maintaining control, and over-extending its repressive apparatus. Strategic nonviolent action is not about being nice to our oppressor, much less having to rely on his niceness. It's about dissolving the foundations of his power and forcing him out.”'

My purpose in writing this is to learn if there is anyone else out there who cares about stopping this juggernaut enough to join me in organizing the kind of civil disobedience just described. The key phrase, which exposes the ultimate failure of “liberal” attempts to stop in-justice throughout human history, is the next-to-last sentence in the quote. We have to stop projecting our own “niceness” onto those who are anything but “nice,” those for whom enough is never enough, whose existential cowardice leads them to espouse “conservative” authoritarian models about our personal behavior while simultaneously doing their best to create and preserve economic anarchy (under the false rubric of the “Free, Unregulated Marketplace”).

Sooner or later, it must become obvious to the Liberal Establishment that articles, books, documentary movies and TV programs not only fail to create significant change, they actually seem to provide a moral relief valve: well, we've done what we could, we've explained the problems so that anyone should be able to understand them, certainly “reasonable people” should respond eventually with the necessary reforms. I'm sorry to be the one to break the news to you, but we are not dealing with “reasonable people.” We are dealing with people who are mentally ill behind money and power. Lao Tse said it best a few millennia ago: “One who knows that enough is enough always has enough.” As I noted earlier, those who do not know that enough is enough, never have enough. And they take our good nature for weakness and stupidity, as a green light for continued predation.

If any of you actually take the trouble to read this and wish to establish a dialogue about how we can organize, just hit “reply” and acknowledge your agreement. As you may imagine, over the last 40+ years, I have prepared myself to contribute to this effort.

I will close this as I always do, by asking: How bad does it have to get?