From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Marxism and Liber.. Now: Working with Non-Violent Freaks & Various Other Flora and Fauna
Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 13:47:24 -0500 (CDT)


    Non-Violent Freaks, actual pacifists, and coalition building.

    This is a narrower issue than those Yoshie and others have raised,
but clearly it has come up in the experience of many and it is worth
focusing on and perhaps exchanging tactical advice on it, because it
will come up again and again and, as Steve points out below, "Totally
distract people from real issues to that of 'nonviolence.'" I'm going
to begin in an anecdotal fashion to clearly isolate the precise phe-
nomenon I'm dealing with here.

    We in Bloomington-Normal did very well indeed in our mobilization
against the Gulf War--our final march and rally being larger than
anything we had achieved during the Vietnam war; we even had extemely
large (almost mass) turnouts for weekly planning sessions. Just one
of our events involved a forum held at a local Mennonite Church. One
of the speakers was this woman from the university (she was director
of the "International House" dormitory and miscellaneous foreign
student groups, offices, etc). The stupid woman spent most of her
speech talking about how "we" must non-violently resist the war. The
key point here, of course, is that *no one* had even made a joke about
so much as breaking a window someplace. Her speech was as out of place
as if she had devoted it to arguing whether or not infantrymen should
regularly brush their teeth. So the implicit suggestion always seems
to be something like "I know all you 'extremists' are just foaming
at the bit to go lynch a university president, and so it is necessary
to give everyone assurance that we are really good and beautiful people
capable of controlling those nasty people in our midst" or something
like that. It is a fairly exact parallel to the old "Have you stopped
beating your wife?" line. And, of course, in a more protracted struggle
like the Vietnam anti-war movement this sort of thing is even more
vicious because there is always an implied moral superiority to those
who *are* defending themselves in arms against the imperialists. And
one can't let that attack go by--and then, and then: almost the same
sort of thing we struggle with on this list when the number of crazies
reaches too high a point for some to stand.

   Note: Serious church-affiliated Christians, when they get involved
in various movements, usually (in my experience) act in a fairly
principled way, and don't engage in the kind of sheer obnoxious
filibustering that I'm focusing on here. The guilty ones tend to
be mere liberals with a touch of religiosity or other pompous asses.

    To illustrate the contrast. The Anti-Gulf war movement here did
involve a number of people from the Mennonite Church, which is historically
pacifist. Not one of them engaged in the sort of obnoxious filibustering
described above. At one of our mass planning meetings, one Mennonite
(working class, incidentally) did rise to suggest a change in the name
we gave ourselves which would have identified us as against "war" as
such. He spoke very calmly and with no pompous moralizing. Two or
three of us replied. My reply took the form of a statement that my
primary principle was solidarity, and that I did not wish to take
a position which would condemn (and hence break solidarity with) the
peasants of El Salvador fighting for liberation. The group voted
against the change, and the young Mennonite said O.K. and we went
about our business.

    But it would not be possible to have a debate, rational, clear,
and non-time consuming, like that in response to some vague maunderings
about the glories of non-violence and how violence would "turn people
off" etc, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

    Note another point: when violence, or even mild unruliness, is
*actually* called for by the situation, this filibuster doesn't work.
Probably some comrades from other parts of the world could illustrate
this better than I can, but the following two episodes should illustrate
the principle here at least. The first is second-hand, the second one
I participated in.

    A friend from Bloomington who participated in the (October? November?)
mass rally in Washington during the Moratorium, told of one side
demonstration there in which one of the pompous asses I speak of pulled
one of the archetypal tricks of such pompous asses: he stood up between
the demonstraters and the police and cried out, "If you want to throw
bricks at someone, brick me." So they bricked him. Debate concluded,
and the demonstraters went on about their business.

    The second episode involves Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Melvin
Laird, coming to Bloomington to give an after-dinner speech to a local
Republican group. I think it was in the fall of 1970 or the spring of
1971, but I can't recall for sure. Anyhow, "we" (formal organization
had been lost by then, so I don't remember who the "we" were) planned
a march beginning at the ISU campus in Normal (north of Bloomington)
to Illinois Wesleyan (in north Bloomington) to the center of Bloomington
and then back north on a major street which led to the Masonic temple
where the affair was being held. The pompous asses were mostly in
charge, and babbled on about how we must stay on the sidewalks and
not confront the police blah blah blah. "We" didn't debate them, but
when we got to the center of Bloomington and swung back north, some of us
simply stepped out into the street (this was during rush hour), more followed,
then more, and then everyone. Apparently *that* day the cops did not want
or were not prepared for confrontation, so they blocked off traffic on
side streets and gave us the right of way. No long filbustering debates
about "not turning people off."

    There is yet another, and perhaps more serious, objection to moralistic
"non-violent" types, another way in which the distract from real issues:
that is under circumstances when non-violence is correct *as a tactic.*
That, of course, is very often the case, even in the midst of full scale
armed struggle. The NLF made magnificent use of, with demonstrations of
hundreds or even thousands (mostly women and children), demonstrations
in which the actual use of violence would simply have been suicidal.
But it is impossible to debate non-violence *as a tactic* when the
debate is cluttered with those I call "non-violent freaks," that is those
who put the mere idea of non-violence ahead of every other question of
principle or practice or goals.

    Finally, I believe Yoshie's contrast below between "protest" and
"revolution" is only partly correct. That may occur, but I think the
contrast can be broadened, as suggested above: the contrast is between
those who are, first of all, committed to the goal of the struggle,
whether that be revolutionary or not) and those who are only committed
to their own sense of themselves as super-moral persons. The young
Mennonite construction worker I refer to above was really committed,
deeply, to pacifism (it is central to the church's history), but he
was also committed to stopping if possible *this particular war*,
and hence he could understand and honor, even if not agree with, my
principle of solidarity, and he had no need to build up his own ego
by holding forth on the glories of non-violence and the nastiness of
being violent. He also didn't engage in any baiting, suggesting that
those in disagreement with him were probably going to bomb city hall.

    But I ramble.

    Carrol


Yoshie wrote on May 13:

> Judging by what Carrol, Steve, and Doug wrote, it appears that one of the
> main problems that Marxists encounter when we try to work with the U.S.
> Christian left is their pacifism and ideology of "non-violence." Could it
> be that they are pacifist because they are mostly trapped in the mode of
> thinking only appropriate for "protest movements" as opposed to
> revolutionary ones?
>

>
> >On Sat, 10 May 1997, Steve wrote:
> >
> >This is exactly my experience.  Totally distract people from real issues
> >to that of "non-violence," about which of course noone agrees, even if it
> >is a non issue...
> >
> >steve

[Carrol Cox wrote:]
> >>     About those Christians (and non-Christians) who take a pacifist
> >> position: I've worked with them, but pacifism can really fuck things
> >> up--especially in contexts in which one's position on violence is
> >> totally irrelevant in any practical sense. There is something really
> >> offensive about someone at a rally getting up and making a speech
> >> about how we must be sure to be non-violent *when no one within
> >> 500 miles is even so much as making a joke about becoming violent.*
> >>
> >>     Frankly, I think that the vast majority of those (including the
> >> big Cheese himself, Gandhi) who make a fetish about non-violence
> >> are, at root, on a big ego trip, and operate out of an utter contempt
> >> for humanity ("Look how moral I am" etcetera, and by implication, "Look
> >> how immoral you are!")
> >>
> >>     Carrol
>
>
>
>
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