Nonviolence (21 page)

A. J. Muste, borrowing an idea from Thoreau, refused to pay his taxes starting on January 1, 1948, in protest of the U.S. nuclear program. But unlike the nineteenth-century New England dissident, Muste was not immediately thrown in prison. Each year he sent the Internal Revenue Service a letter explaining why he was neither filing nor paying. The IRS did not even respond the first three years, and did not charge him until 1960, at which point they said he owed $1,165, plus penalties. Finally the court ruled that he could not be charged the penalties as he was following his conscience, though he did owe the taxes. But they had no way of collecting, since Muste owned nothing and did not even have a bank account.

The generation raised on the Cold War, rather than World War II, saw the world very differently than their parents did. When youth movements of the late 1960s all over the world were asked about the road that led them to rebellion they often mentioned the week in 1962 when the superpowers played that “apocalyptic chess game.” Youth in both countries watched in horror as the exciting young president John F. Kennedy played moves and bluffs against
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet reformer responsible for sweeping away Stalinism. It was called “nuclear brinkmanship,” and the two held everyone's lives like pawns.

While the conventional thinking of the World War II generation was that their war had secured the peace, albeit at a tremendous cost, those who grew up in the postwar period understood that there was no peace, that World War II had simply laid the groundwork for the Cold War, which was an umbrella term for more than one hundred shooting wars between 1945 and 1989. In the early 1980s, György Konrád, a Jew who had survived the Nazis in Hungary, counted approximately 130 postwar wars. “To find the main reason for today's threat of war,” he asserted, “we must go back to the year 1945, to Yalta…. What a dirty trick of history! The Allies who were defending mankind from fascist inhumanity hastened, on the very eve of victory, to strike an imperialist bargain, a pact between Anglo-Saxons and Soviet imperialism.”

The first global generation was coming of age more antiwar (and more anti–cold war) than their predecessors, but they were notably less nonviolent. This first became clear in the civil rights movement. In 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was openly critical of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. SNCC had been organized in 1960 to bring in students for the purpose of carrying out more sit-ins after the success of a lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. The organization later became involved in efforts to register black voters in the Mississippi Delta. By 1965, after enduring countless beatings and imprisonments, and numerous white and black volunteers killed, young SNCC activists started feeling that the charismatic Dr. King, whom they sometimes jokingly referred to as “de Lawd,” was taking all the bows while they had all the ideas and took the punishment.

This was at a time of growing bitterness about the progress of the civil rights movement. SNCC took representatives of the newly registered black population of Mississippi to the Democratic Convention in 1964; but the Democrats, fearing an alienation of white
Southern voters, refused to seat them. Instead they alienated an important part of the civil rights movement.

SNCC, no longer “student” or “nonviolent,” began emphasizing Black Power: self-reliance and the principle of meeting violence with violence. In 1966, the year Stokely Carmichael, a leading advocate of Black Power, took over SNCC, the Black Panther Party, which also advocated violence, was founded. The Black Panthers, like many a nonviolent activist, had an intuitive sense of street theater, but they used it to project a menacing violence. They posed dressed in black, with weapons, and used slogans such as “Off the pig!”—kill policemen. King's speeches were now sometimes booed by black activists or shouted down with cries of “Black Power!” In 1967, King said, “I'll still preach nonviolence with all my might, but I'm afraid it will fall on deaf ears.”

The student anti–Vietnam War movement was also growing weary of taking beatings and was losing enthusiasm for nonviolence. Students had become fascinated by the anticolonialist liberation movements of the world—the Algerians and the Vietnamese, among others. One of the most popular books on college campuses in the late 1960s was Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth,
originally published in French in 1961. Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who studied in Algeria and became enamored of that country's fight for independence. Fanon at points appeared to glorify violence as the romantic and necessary element of the independence struggle. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” Fanon wrote in the often-quoted opening paragraph of his book. He viewed colonization as a destructive violence and stated that “violence like Achilles' lance can heal the wounds it has inflicted.” Hannah Arendt suggested that the problem was that students did not read past the first chapter, which is on violence. That is an exaggeration, since in the following chapter he writes, “Violence committed by the people … makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths.” But he also warned that hatred and revenge “could not sustain a war of liberation” and that “un-mixed and total brutality if not immediately combated, invariably
leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks.” That is exactly what happened to the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, in the early 1970s.

SDS had been a leading force in organizing campuses against the war in Vietnam throughout the 1960s and at its height toward the end of the decade had 100,000 members around the country. To explore a linguistic absurdity, while not nonviolent, they were “not violent.” Tom Hayden, a central figure in SDS during most of its ten-year history, said in a recent interview: “Nonviolence as a tactic is always to be preferred, but violence as either a threat or a real thing becomes inevitable in certain oppressive situations and has contributed to political or social change.” David Dellinger, one of the principal organizers of the anti–Vietnam War movement, worked with Hayden and was somewhat distrustful of his commitment to nonviolence especially after the beating they took from Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968. As Stokely Carmichael observed decades later, nonviolence is “a very stern discipline.”

Despite the participation of some sincere pacifists, such as Del-linger, the anti–Vietnam War movement was not specifically an antiwar movement. Many, probably a majority, of the protesters accepted war as a legitimate way to conduct business but felt that the motives of the United States in this particular war were immoral and that it was not a “just war.” Some protesters openly supported the North Vietnamese side, which was certainly not nonviolent, apart from a minuscule nonviolence movement led by Buddhist monks that had failed to attract popular support in Vietnam or from the Western “antiwar movement.” But SDS did refrain from violence even when attacked, until the group was taken over by the so-called Weatherpeople faction, a name change from the original politically incorrect Weathermen. This group, under the slogan “Bring the War Home,” planned to terrorize the corporate establishment with a series of bombings. They had a change of heart after three of their own died in an accidental explosion, and, by design, they never hurt anyone in a series of late-night bombings.

Dellinger thought these young activists ranged from sincere but
misguided to those with “deep-seated neurotic drives to violence. It would not be hard to imagine,” he wrote, “that in a slightly different setting they could have been gauleiters, colonial police, or Green Berets.”

Mark Rudd, one of the Weathermen founders, had led an essentially nonviolent movement that occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University in 1968. He began to contemplate violence after his group was attacked and beaten by a thousand rampaging New York City police. “The thinking was classic Marxism,” said Rudd. “That the ruling class would never yield power without a fight. Also the act of fighting was itself liberatory, as in the writings of Frantz Fanon.” At the time, police were assassinating Black Panthers, students were being beaten on campuses, and U.S. military forces were killing more than five thousand Vietnamese every week.

There is more than one lesson to be learned from the SDS experience. First, there is the lesson that violence always comes with a rational explanation and that explanation, usually expressed in lofty terms, is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails. Rudd said:

The people of the Third World, including the Vietnamese and the blacks at home, were fighting to get out from under American control. How could we as white Americans just stand by and cheer them on? It would be racist to only do that. So we had to bear some of the costs by “picking up the gun.”

How much this sounds like John Kennedy's Cold War pledge, from his January 1961 inaugural address—“We shall pay any price, bear any burden … in order to assure the survival and success of liberty”? How far is this from answering the call to free the slaves, smash the Hun, rid the world of fascism? Is this not another Urban II speech about our obligation to take up arms to drive out evil?

But another lesson from the Weather Underground is that violence is a virus that infects. Both the movements and their enemies understood that if violence could be planted in a group, it would
spread and eventually destroy the movement. Richard Gregg had warned: “Every ‘blood and iron' type of governor fears nonviolent resistance so much that he secretly hires so-called ‘agents provocateurs' who go among the nonviolent resisters pretending to be of them, and invite them to deeds of violence….” SDS and the other movements of the 1960s were laced with these undercover agents urging violence, trying to infect the movement with it. In Mexico City in 1968 the government filled trash barrels with rocks and planted them at the sites of demonstrations. In the movements in most countries, when someone proposed violence that person was immediately suspected of being an undercover agent.

But in the end, the civil rights movement, SDS, and many other nonviolent movements around the world were attacked, seduced, and destroyed by what Gandhi called the
goondah raj,
the rule of thugs. They could have learned from the thirteenth-century Cathars. Only if the nonviolent side has the discipline to avoid slipping into violence does it win. It is the tactic of state thuggery to reduce the dialogue to the level of thugs. That is why the police kept beating Bayard Rustin in 1942, to lure him into responding, thereby defeating him. The moment the nonviolent adversary accepts violence, as the Black Panthers did when they announced that they would respond to violence with violence, then it has been conceded that violence is acceptable, and it is only a question of who has the greater physical force. Hannah Arendt wrote: “The practice of violence changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.”

Rudd now sees the entire Weathermen adventure as “self defeating”:

We played into the hands of the FBI by destroying the above-ground organization we had come to control, SDS, and by isolating ourselves as “terrorists.” We also helped create division in the anti-war movement. We might as well have been FBI agents, we did their work so well.

In 1968, before the Weathermen were even founded, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States, beginning a
backward march from civil rights and progressive ideas that has continued for almost half a century. The main thrust of his election campaign was law and order, a nakedly cynical appeal to the fear that was gripping Americans. They were afraid because of the violence that had pervaded, a violence that the state itself had played a huge part in. But the lesson remains that violence provokes fear, and people who are afraid will rarely act well.

In 1988, Rudd got another remarkably concise lesson on the subject, from the poet Allen Ginsberg. They were sharing a car ride after a radio interview about the twentieth anniversary of the Columbia University student uprising, and Rudd asked Ginsberg where he thought the Weathermen had gone wrong. Ginsberg, the Jewish Buddhist, said, “A lack of
rachmonis
”—the Yiddish word for compassion.

The world in general, and especially the U.S. military, learned many lessons from Vietnam. Feeling that its ability to make war was in jeopardy, the U.S. government labeled its failure a syndrome, the “Vietnam syndrome”—as though it were a disease. The “Vietnam syndrome” was, and it still exists in the military, a healthy hesitance to go to war. Most films and books about the Vietnam War neither romanticized nor glorified war, the way World War II movies did. It is clear that movies play a role in shaping attitudes about war. In Vietnam, American noncommissioned officers often complained that they lost men because they would kneel rather than staying down low in a firefight, as they were trained to do. The reason some young soldiers ignored their training was that years of World War II movies had trained them otherwise. They came to call this often fatal firing position “John Wayneing,” after the famous war-movie actor who had never been in combat.

After seeing Michael Cimino's painful 1979 film
The Deer Hunter,
Jan Scruggs, a wounded and decorated Vietnam veteran, was inspired to form a veterans' organization to raise money for a Vietnam War memorial monument in Washington, D.C. The monument they erected, like most of the Vietnam War films themselves, represents a break with the tradition of celebrating warfare. The selected
design, by Maya Ying Lin, was simply a wall of polished stone with the names of the more than 58,000 people who were killed in that war. The simple realities of presenting all those names in the order they were killed stated the painful reality that this is what war is, the large-scale killing of individuals.

But by the time the veterans' group had the design ready, Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan didn't like the “Vietnam syndrome” and he didn't like the monument design. Critics, including some veterans, complained that it was “flagless.” Secretary of the Interior James Watt refused to issue a building permit until a traditional romantic statue of three servicemen was allowed to be erected next to it. Not everyone was ready for Vietnam's lessons.