On non-violence, and on what is possible

Iranian blogger Pedestrian writes today in reaction to a TV report on how Egyptian demonstrators organised and prepared for protest:

Of course, I couldn’t help but compare their situation to Iran, when actions of this sort would never be possible. (Ahmed would have been imprisoned and tortured for attending the workshops, for “treason and attempting to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran” long before he could put what he learned to use).

But the very interesting methods they employ during protest: they set up first aid centers, they give out food, they prepare eye drops for the tear gas, they hug militias, they have a functional group which stands strong even when one or two of them are taken into custody, etc, etc, … none of this would ever be barely imaginable in Iran or in any place where the state killing machine is leagues more lethal and vicious.

You see, it’s not just the protesters who were nonviolent, the militias stopped attacking during prayer. Fighting, like shopping in a bazaar or a first date, is a social negotiation first and foremost where conflicting worldviews translate to physical maneuvers.

This isn’t to say that outright violence is going to get anyone anywhere. But rather, quite the opposite, in what sort of setting does nonviolence as a strategy even make sense? Does it in the case of Iran?

More.

Related, The New York Times on Gene Sharp, Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution. See also comments at the Small Wars Journal.

Earlier on this blog, a post on John Runnings, an American peace activist strongly influenced by him, and a second post also mentioning Gene Sharp.

As the SWJ is paying attention to Gene Sharp, will the next big thing after COIN for the US military be training in use of non-violent strategy and tactics? It surely has a place if a force is to have full spectrum capability.

Non-violence does not necessarily indicate virtue. It is possible for organisations to adopt tactical non-violence without signing up to to a pure non-violence strategy, just as it’s possible for organisations like Hamas or previously the IRA to use both democratic and terrorist methods. From John Runnings’ writing:

There is a form of non-military strife that can register outrage that is no physical threat to the opponent. This means is overlooked by those who assume that resistance must be passive when applied to resistance to the military. This form of non-military strife was used by Tshombe in 1962 when he was trying to secede Katanga from the Congo, as reported by U. Thant in his book, VIEW FROM THE U.N. (pg. 140).

“It was in Finland, where I arrived on the night of July 11, 1962, that I received the most disturbing news from the Congo. The message was to the effect that Mr. Tshombe had changed his tactics.

On that day, a planned and viciously conceived assault by thousands of Katangese women and children was made on Indian troops at a roadblock in Elisabethville. These troops - cursed, abused and spat upon by the Tshombe-organized women and children - displayed a most remarkable restraint and discipline under extreme provocation, and never fired on the mob. I also received report from Robert Gardener, United Nations representative in the Congo, that Mr. Tshombe had informed him that he would employ civilian demonstrations, especially women and children, instead of troops, to provoke the United Nations force, in cynical contempt for the safety and well-being of his own people. This change of tactics posed new problems for the force and put a very great strain on the troops.”

I was disappointed in U. Thant that he failed to admire the courage displayed by the women and children that were able to stand up to armed threat of the United Nations of the world and defy them. He later spoke of Tshombe and his colleagues as “a bunch of clowns”. (I would propose that some of the attributes of the clown might be encouraged in anti-warriors. The charm of the clown is that they do the unconventional with elan, to make people laugh, in contrast to the military whose efforts are seldom amusing.)

And suppose Saddam Hussein had withdrawn his military, and sent women and children to occupy the Iraq-Kuwait border to get in the way and to spit upon the American tanks and soldiers. Would Clinton have had the political climate to fire on them? What fun the world media could then have had, showing the United States military in confrontation with little boys trying to spit on the tanks, though they had not yet learned to spit over their chin?

This is not to play down the many virtues of Gandhi’s more pacifist approach. But it is important to know that vulnerable challenge may be successfully used by people who are not saints(...)

Added: Nonviolence in the Arab streets, with Gene Sharp, Sherif Mansour & Mubarak Awad, from Radio Times on WHYY. Mubarak Awad is a Palestinian campaigner promoting non-violent methods. He’s also a supporter of Iran’s Green Movement: see this earlier post for more.

Iran, Israel, Palestine

(image from Raye Man Kojast)

The Guardian News Blog is covering today’s Green Movement protests during Quds Day in Iran.

The Guardian's former Iran correspondent Robert Tait is monitoring events from Istanbul. He writes: Ahmadinejad was giving a live interview on IRIB's Channel Two from the scene of Quds Day. As he spoke, viewers could clealy the chants of "Ahmadi, Ahmadi, resign, resign" - this all over live TV. Apparently Ahmadinejad was aware of the chants and their effect on the interview. He is said to have become flustered and quickly wrapped up the interview.

Much more, including snippets of Ahmadinejad’s speech today blaming the formation of Israel on the British (huh?) and again denying the Holocaust.

New York Times News Blog coverage.

BBC News on today’s events.

From Raye Man Kojast, Moussavi’s recommended slogan for Quds Day demonstrations:

Put down your gun For I am weary from seeing this bloodshed Whether in Lebanon or Gaza Whether in Quds or Iran

Lots more today from Raye Man Kojast.

From Pedestrian, chants heard today in Iran:

argh bar Roosiyeh - Death to Russia Roosiyeh Haya Kon, Keshvaremoon ro raha kon - Russia, leave our country alone! Na Ghazeh, na Lobnan, janam fadayeh Iran - My life belongs to neither Gaza nor Lebanon - but Iran Che Ghazeh, che Iran, margh bar zaleman - Whether in Gaza or in Iran, death to tyrants

More. Also from Pedestrian, Today, and What We Are After, while her friend Naj has a laugh at the official version, and shows the early editions of tomorrow’s front pages.

From Tehran Bureau, Co-opting Quds Day, and Quds Day Updates.

Via Azarmehr, a message of solidarity to the people of Iran by Mubarak Awad:

My Dear People of Iran, For the past thirty years, the Iranian regime has used the cause of the Palestinian people as a way to distract from its own oppressive rule. I thank the people of Iran for showing their support over the years with the people of Palestine, especially because on this day of Qods, the people of Iran suffer under the kind of unelected oppression that is comparable in some ways to that suffered by Palestinians. As a Palestinian, life-long fighter for the freedom and independence of Palestine and a leader of the first Palestinian intifada, I strongly condemn the Iranian regime’s violations of human rights and repeated use of violence against the nonviolent Iranian protesters, activists and prisoners. I stand in complete solidarity with and support for the Iranian people and am confident that with their resilience, they will achieve a free and democratic Iran to raise their children in and have a good life. In unity, Mubarak Awad

More on Mubarak Awad at Nonviolence International, International Peace & Conflict Resolution at American University, and Wikipedia.

Azarmehr also links to videos of today’s events, here, here, here, and here.

The Times has a report today on the degree of violence unleashed by the regime in response to the post-election protests:

The Times has been given access to 500 pages of documents - a small fraction of the total - that include handwritten testimony by victims, medical reports and interviews. They suggest that security forces have engaged in systematic killing and torture to try to break the opposition.

[...] The documents suggest that at least 200 demonstrators were killed in Tehran, with 56 others still unaccounted for, and that 173 were killed in other cities. These are several times higher than the official figures. Just over half of the 200 were killed on the streets. They were beaten around the head or shot in the head or chest as part of an apparent shoot-to-kill policy - there are no reports of demonstrators being shot in the legs.

The rest here.

More posts on today’s protests at From Tehran With Love, ModernityBlog, Harry’s Place, Francis Sedgemore, Fat Man on a Keyboard, Enduring America.

Update: for morning after coverage in english language mainstream press, see the SWJ Roundup for 19 September, with 68 matches for the word ‘Iran’.

Update 21 September: Harry’s Place points to a video of demonstrators in Iran tearing down a Hezbollah banner with the headline Hezbollah: More Popular With Elderly British Trots Than With Young Iranians.

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Some interesting background on the ongoing issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, and the question of whether Israel might attempt military action to impede it:

Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk puts together a brief history of military missions to prevent nuclear weapons development, beginning with World War II actions in Telemark, Norway, and including Iranian and Israeli air attacks on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in 1980 and 1981, and Iraqi attacks on partially complete Iranian nuclear power plants at Bushehr in 1984, ’85, ’86 and ’87.

A commenter on that post gives a link to a detailed story from Air Enthusiast (issue 110, March/April 2004) which maintains there was a high degree of co-operation between Iran and Israel in their attacks on Osirak.

They’re all the bloody same over there

A recurring theme in comments on the latest Russian invasion of Georgia is a concern that Georgia is not a pure and innocent victim, that by backing Georgia one might be falling into the trap of backing a bastard just because he’s our bastard. See greater or lesser examples in posts by Gene at Harry’s Place, by Francis Sedgemore, by Bob from Brockley, by Flesh is Grass, by History is made at night.

There are good grounds for some of this caution, but I think that there are also reasons for this caution to diminish as the nature of the Russian operation becomes ever clearer, with their occupation of Gori, the crossroads of the country,  their occupation of the Black Sea port of Poti, and with Human Rights Watch raising serious questions about Russian propaganda on casualties. Today from the New York Times:

Meanwhile, investigators began to look into allegations of atrocities committed in the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, where the war erupted on Aug. 8. Human Rights Watch reported that researchers witnessed “terrifying scenes of destruction” in four deserted ethnic Georgian villages, and said they the villages had been looted and burned by South Ossetian militias.

Anna Neistat, one of the researchers, said by telephone from Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, that they had found no evidence so far to substantiate Russian claims of widespread brutality by Georgian troops.

Human Rights Watch has been able to confirm fewer than 100 deaths — a far cry from the death toll of 2,000 regularly cited by Moscow.

“If the Russian government continues to claim that 2,000 people were killed as the result of the conflict, it’s time to provide some evidence, it’s time to provide some data, name, age, gender, the circumstances of death,” Ms. Neistat said.

(The above story has since been updated on the New York Times site, with the quoted passage slightly shortened.)

It has been widely reported that Russia had been escalating its military presence and activity within the contested Georgian regions in the months prior to the invasion. Its separatist proxies had escalated attacks against Georgia, and the Russian military had carried out direct attacks against Georgia in that time.

Now I’m a lousy chess player, but from what I read it looks to me as though Russia has been advancing its pawns in the hope that one of them would be taken, allowing its main force to attack. Georgia was facing losses either way, whether at the hands of the advancing pawns, or in risking confrontation with the main Russian forces. I’m not yet convinced that Georgian actions were wholly unreasonable. If they hadn’t responded, the Russian reaction to weakness would have undoubtedly have been an even greater buildup of their forces within the contested areas, and a continuation, if not escalation, of actions by its proxy separatist forces.

The effect would have been for Georgia to cede its claim to the contested territory, and to have an increasingly powerful Russian military force on Georgia’s side of the Caucasus mountains, within touching distance of the main cities and road and rail routes.

So what has Georgia gained by Russia achieving those same objectives through open warfare rather than by stealth? It has at least ensured that Georgia doesn’t sink quietly under the Russian imperial deluge. Russia’s rapaciousness is now clear to the world.

James Traub of the New York Times wrote earlier in the week that Czechlosovakia 1938 was foremost in the minds of President Saakashvili and other Georgians. They had evidently taken the lesson to heart that giving a little to an insatiable predator can mean losing the lot. Making the predator fight for it may not work, but it might yet give Georgia a better chance if the carnage attracts the solidarity of the West.

As well as concern over Russian accusations that Georgia had indiscriminately attacked civilians in South Ossetia, and concern that Georgian actions had been unjustified and reckless, another reason for caution in supporting Georgia has been worry that the government is less than fully democratic. I have no direct knowledge of Georgia, but it seems to me that whatever the shortcomings of the current government, their ambition is to place themselves firmly in the company of the democracies. As others have pointed out, opening negotiations for Georgian membership of Nato would give Western democracies greater ability to ensure that democratic and legal institutions are strengthened. They certainly won’t be strengthened by abandoning Georgia to the new imperial Russia.

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The issue of oil and gas pipelines has been raised a number of places, by Francis Sedgemore, in the NY Times Q&A on Georgia, and in news stories and comment box responses to posts all over the place.

I agree with the talk of the necessity of Western Europe freeing itself of energy dependence on Russia. I notice that less emphasis is placed on the need for energy security in the states on Russia’s borders, states which have more often experienced the direct impact of Russia’s strong-arm energy tactics.

A few thoughts I’d had on this were addressed in the Times Q&A. One reader raised the question of whether Russia’s strength as a supplier of fossil fuel might not also be its weakness in the longer term, and in response to the question ‘is it all about oil’, Moscow bureau chief Clifford J Levy responded:

Pipelines may have played a role, but I doubt it was a determinative one. There is a lot going on in this conflict: lingering resentment in the Kremlin about Russia’s loss of influence in the 1990s, and a resulting desire to prove that the country is once again a power and can stand up to the West; personal animosity between the Georgian president and the Russian leadership; longstanding territorial disputes; historical relationships between Moscow and the former Soviet republics; ethnic conflicts, and so on. It’s hard to isolate just one factor.

In the James Traub piece quoted earlier, he writes:

But economic considerations alone scarcely account for what appears to be an obsession with Georgia. The “color revolutions” that swept across Ukraine, the Balkans and the Caucasus in the first years of the new century plainly unnerved Putin, who has denounced America's policy of “democracy promotion” and stifled foreign organizations seeking to promote human rights in Russia.

Georgia, with its open embrace of the West, represents a threat to the legitimacy of Russia’s authoritarian model. And this challenge is immensely compounded by Georgia's fervent aspiration to join NATO, one of Russia’s red lines.

This touches on another topic that has been kicking around some of the blogs I read regularly: non-violence. The New Centrist recently quoted a post by Sultan Knish attacking the ideology of non-violence. I piped up in the comments to TNC's post, mentioning my favourite fancy-dress peace campaigner, and also bringing up non-violence theorist Gene Sharp. Bob from points south of London Bridge then posted on how Gene Sharp has been making Hugo Chavez nervous. And perhaps with good reason, as Sharp’s writings were apparently essential reading for many of those organising the colour revolutions.

The point I take from this is that Putin & Co. find the non-violent tactics of Gene Sharp as much of a threat as the military deterrence of Nato. Non-violence offers little defence against artillery, but given half a chance non-violence can be an effective weapon against authoritarian regimes. Putin & Co. are determined not to give it half a chance, but their fear of it shows that we should not dismiss using the option where appropriate.

UPDATE 14 AUGUST: A military response, or a non-violent response, or a non-violent military response? The difference here is that when these currently non-violent peace campaigners place themselves before the invading force, the invaders know they won’t stay non-violent if attacked.

ALSO: Editorial in today’s Washington Post: Blaming Democracy.

UPDATE 15 AUGUST: Human Rights Watch on civilian deaths, and more on Georgia to be found via the HRW main page.

Two Quakers

JOHN RUNNINGS

A few posts ago I referred to John Runnings, a Quaker and peace campaigner. He began his activism in the 1960s campaigning against the Vietnam War and against nuclear weapons.

In the late 1970s he first became involved in non-violent civil disobedience as part of the campaign against the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington. During this time he met Gene Sharp, author of The Politics of Nonviolent Action and other related works, who helped give shape to some of John Runnings' growing doubts about the peace movement. In his pamphlet Discovering the Obvious he quotes at length from Sharp, including this passage:

Peace groups have been willing to settle for things far short of abolishing war: witnessing to one's piety and purity – and the stupidity of everybody else; witnessing to being a "holy remnant" or the only sane people around; struggling for the rights of conscientious objectors to war. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these things. The point is not that. But they serve as substitutes for serious efforts to abolish war as such. Peace groups oppose a particular war and try to speed up its end with no confidence whatsoever that, even if successful, the military systems will thereby be weaker. Peace groups oppose the development of a particular weapon or a particular piece of technology – without that necessarily being a vehicle for reversing the whole dependence upon military hardware and military weapons. Or advocates of peace support giving all of the world's weapons to one government – a world government – or support the army of the other side – and call that anti-war activity!! Or peace workers support universal negotiated disarmament when there is no historical evidence that that has ever worked or ever will. Or peace workers settle for some measures of arms control and arms regulation which – although they may help and may prevent a particular outbreak, or destruction, or attack under certain circumstances – can easily be broken and leave the military system more or less as it is.

John Runnings described his own doubts about the strategy of the anti-war movement as follows:

During the years with the peace community I had occasion to pass out anti-war literature on the streets of Seattle. And it was not uncommon to have someone respond to what I was doing this wise, "It is all right for you to take advantage of the freedom of speech that we enjoy in this country to disparage the United States for their part in the arms race, but the Russians are going all out to match and exceed our arms build up. Who is protesting in Russia? Why aren't you there?

And I had a tendency to read into this protest an implicit expectation that if I were to do such a protest in Russia that I would be sent to Siberia for a long, long time and that my loyalty to the U.S. was questionable, and that I had a partiality for the communist philosophy.

The easy answer was that it was more convenient to protest in Bremerton than in Moscow and that we were responsible for our government and the responsibility for protesting arms in Russia was with the Russians.

But I was not at all satisfied with this answer. I felt that the conservatives had a point here that we were refusing to look at, that we were making a political contest between Americans and Americans on how to reduce the military threat between Americans and Russians.

Runnings' conclusion was that anti-war activists should seek to implement an alternative to war by challenging military borders through non-violent direct action. He viewed war as the inevitable result of there being no global civil law, only treaties between military states.

He was as good as his word, and in 1985 went on to leaflet on the streets of Moscow before being deported, (in a 100 seat Aeroflot jet with no other passengers,) then to physically attack the Berlin Wall several times, and carried out repeated "political invasions" of East Germany, entering the DDR without permission, and with as much publicity as he could organise. On an early attempt he was injured by East German border guards and jailed for three months. During later events he found that East German forces treated him with increasing care and expeditiousness as they sought to rid themselves of him with the minimum of fuss.

JAN DE HARTOG

I first came across John Runnings' writing when looking for online material on another Quaker, author Jan de Hartog.

In Discovering the Obvious, Runnings writes at one point about de Hartog's novel The Captain. The title character is Captain Harinxma, skipper of a Dutch ocean-going tug in the Murmansk convoys during the Second World War. From the brief claustrophobic description of London during the Blitz to the relentless brutality of the Nazi attacks on the convoys, the book is a powerful account of overwhelming fear.

John Runnings obviously admired the novel greatly, as did I when I read it, but when it comes to de Hartog's pacifist conclusion, Runnings the peace campaigner parts company with him. He writes:

[De Hartog] knows certainly that civilization is an ongoing commercial and political contest for the goodies of civilization, and it's also lawsuits, black eyes, spitballs and cheating. Nor is it an issue of peace and war. If we define war as contest, all life is war. We are at battle from the time the doctor slaps us on the rump to the time we wrestle with the diseases of old age. Peace, the absence of strife, is not an achievable goal. There can never be an end to war defined as strife, until there is an end to breathing. Life, in a sense, is an anti-peace campaign to escape death and boredom. At issue is the kind of war. We have a form of non-military war that is so much a part of us that we do not recognize it as such, and this, of course, is civil law. In contrast to military war it is called peace.

Runnings finds Captain Harinxma's solution to the unmitigated brutality of war, his decision to disengage, unsatisfactory. He continues:

In the natural world there is no such thing as fairness, justice, mercy or murder, or lunacy for that matter. And while some other species may share with us the emotions we call love and hate that may prompt them to violence or accommodation, they are subject only to the rewards and penalties of natural law. So if you disengage when you are being pursued by a bear in the natural world you accommodate to the bear's right to eat you for lunch. The military contest is a contest in natural law and the victorious state is going to eat lunch. And the defeated state, having been forced to disengage from the contest, is going to be the lunch.

We can have an end to military war and natural law as soon as we bring the rules of civilization to the militarily imposed divisions that define international states. War, as I have insisted before, is a contest in the terror of slaughter and destruction to determine, when all other means of conflict resolution have failed, which of the political entities so engaged will write the terms of the peace. If it could be determined at the beginning of the fight who would win, those that were sure to loose could surrender at the beginning of the contest and save the cost of the war and avoid the slaughter and destruction entailed. There is no doubt an untold number of wars that have been avoided when a nation faced with superior strength surrendered before the war started. Any war can be stopped as soon as one side is prepared to take the penalties of disengagement. The penalty is that by so doing one says loudly that one can be pushed around. And there are those among us who would rather die than be pushed around by military threat.

(...) if all of the members of the Allied Forces became offended by the slaughter and destruction and disengaged from the war, it would be the German High Command who would levy the penalties. The Allies suffered six years of the carnage because they did not want to take the penalties of disengagement and slaughter and destruction as de Hartog's story suggests. For a while it might be said it was a choice between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as opposed to Oranienburg, Buchenwald, and Dachau, more importantly it was a contest between invading dictators and defending democracies in the context of natural law. We do not need to see peace in terms of de Hartog's poetry to find disengagement to become lunch for the Nazis an intolerable option.

Many years after Harinxma's decision, "not to shoot back" whatever the consequences, he is writing to his son who is now contemplating joining the Air Force. And because Harinxma's author is culturally programmed to see the slaughter and destruction of war as the problem, rather than the absence of civil alternatives to natural law, he steers his son into the labyrinth of moral considerations, detached as they are in war from the supporting institutions of civil law for moral behavior as follows:

"So I cannot sit mutely by while you try on your first Air Force uniform in front of the mirror blissfully unconscious of the fact that to volunteer for the military training is to sign a pact with violence, and hand the ultimate moral decision - to kill or not to kill - over to a faceless committee of men who, by their very training and indoctrination, consider genocide a legitimate means of settling human disputes."

With apologies to Jan de Hartog, I think this is inaccurate and unfair. Hitler was using illegitimate means of conflict resolution. And the "faceless committee" is in charge of the illegitimate response that is the only option, since there is no legislature at the international level by which a legal, or a legitimate, response might have been pursued.

We are not charged with murder if we can show reasonable proof that we had to kill to avoid being killed. The protection of civil law not being available we are allowed to protect ourselves as best we may. The state of war is evidence that protection of civil law is unavailable. And had the Allies disengaged because of their repugnance to the horrors of war it would have been Hitler's concepts of peace and justice that would have prevailed rather than those of Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and other Allied leaders.

Here the issue that de Hartog raises is not how to change natural law into civil law, but rather on how the individual may avoid getting into a situation where doing violence to another person is required by the situation. It is clearly the fault of our cultural heritage that this marvelous intellect writes a superb portrayal of war, and the horrors of war, to conclude with so paltry a solution. For there are vast quantities of literature, ancient and modern, authored by persons of undeniable intellect and integrity in support of this pathetically inadequate approach to the abolishment of military threat and military strife between peoples.

It would have been interesting had there been a conversation between these two. I suspect that Jan de Hartog would have had some sympathy with John Runnings' point of view, for his books do not shy away from the primitive and visceral qualities of life that Runnings points to. Despite his pacifism, he wrote about war with power and imagination. He matched spirituality with feverish sensuality and sexuality, and described religious faith as much in terms of psychology as of divinity.

I wrote a few words in praise of de Hartog in my contribution to Normblog's Writer's Choice series. More Jan de Hartog posts here.

The top illustration on the theme of Roman gladiators is from the Times Higher Education Supplement, April 1, 1994. The lower image is a dustjacket for The Captain, illustrated by John O'Hara Cosgrave II.