Veiled C & B--what are the hidden costs and benefits?

Is violence effective? Well, sure. Any schoolchild can tell you that. I remember my sister teasing me until I punched her in the upper arm. She would stop teasing me and start crying. I would not have to deal with the teasing for a minute--but that minute was spent trying to explain my frustration to my Mother. It was uncomfortable no matter what until I learned how to deal with her in a bit more mature fashion. Nonviolence worked much better, and was ultimately much faster because there was no period of escalation once my sister learned that I now was immune to her teasing.

But of course violence makes things happen. Sometimes they get much worse much faster, sometimes things get better over time, and there are times when violence seems to solve all problems instantly. However, there are almost always upcoming costs to the instant success of violence, whereas the hidden costs of pure nonviolence are, for the most part, nonexistent or negligible. Nonviolence can cause a crackdown of sorts but that actually diminishes in the face of nonviolence rather than increases. Some costs of violence are not so immediately apparent, nor are some benefits of nonviolence.

When, in 1996, the IRA broke its ceasefire and bombed Canary Wharf, that appeared to move the Brits off the dime and in a couple of years there was the 1998 Belfast Accords (Woodworth, 2007). Other IRA attacks included civilian areas in England, though warnings were given in order to claim that the targets were economic, not people. 

In March 1993, the IRA killed two children in Warrington, Cheshire- three-year-old Jonathan Ball and twelve-year-old Tim Parry after placing bombs inside several bins.

On the other hand, what if? Can we apply any number of counterfactuals to suggest alternatives to that bombing that might have also driven the UK to release IRA prisoners and sign an agreement?

What if:

• the IRA permanentized its ceasefire in 1996 and swore to abjure violence unilaterally?
• the IRA lobbied to apply the Sullivan Principles that had helped end apartheid to gain freedom for Northern Ireland?
• the IRA had engaged in mass action recruitment that proved it could shut down Irish society for a day, or a week, or a month, and grind the economy to a halt until all IRA prisoners were released and a peace accord was signed?
• the IRA had shown that beyond a civil society shutdown of Northern Ireland, it could convince a substantial portion of civil society in the rest of the island and in Scotland and in Britain itself to engage in work slowdowns, boycotts, and other economically punishing actions against British rule?

The costs of such nonviolent measures would be quite a bit lower than the draconian responses to bombings, even the bombings that sparked renewed interest in finding a solution. This is really the idea, isn't it?

One major problem for violent insurgents and terrorist separatists is that any violence is often assumed to be their work, even when there is no connection. Of course, this is true for any violent actors. Why is it so common and so easy to blame the CIA or Dick Cheney and his neocon buddies for 9.11.01 attacks? Why was it so easy to initially smear the Basque separatists with the Madrid train bombings?It's natural. Those people engage in sneaky violence, and sneaky violence just occurred, so of course the logic is to ascribe as much culpability as possible to known violent actors. Indeed, some factions in Spain still claim the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom) (ETA) conspired with the Islamicists on that terrible attack. Any reputation for violence opens that vulnerable exposure.

That is lovely when it happens to us on the nonviolent side. "Oh, that labor strike is probably the work of those papist Catholic Workers and leftover United Farmworkers!" Sure, attribute away! That gives us a chance to highlight our nonviolence and explain it to others. Traducement by the authorities when we know we have the evidence and answers is a gift of a news peg on which to hang our story.

The really funny attributions are those that attempt to smear disciplined nonviolent actors and campaigns with violence. I've been called a terrorist on local TV in Minnesota and Wisconsin after engaging in a nonviolent act of dismantling a portion of a nuclear command facility. We laughed. Nonviolence gives that protection. The Serb kids paid a high price in spring of 2000 when they were called terrorists--there were beatings and arrests--but they overcame that quickly and decisively through discipline and humor. 

Peeling back the veils that can conceal all the costs and benefits of our chosen methods of conflict management can help us think through the choices with greater clarity and, we hope, some wisdom.

References

Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Woodworth, P. (2007). The Spanish-Basque Peace Process How to Get Things Wrong. World Policy Journal, 24(1), 65-73.

End poverty or I'll shoot!

Hard times, hard times come again no more...

Ending extreme poverty (starving, sick, homeless without a social safety net) on Earth, said Jeffrey Sachs, could be done for about $175 billion per year for 20 years, after which humankind could work on garden variety poverty.

The 34 nations of the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) could handle this by devoting a small percentage of their gross domestic products to this world-changing project. Of course that 34 includes some sketchy ones, such as Italy.
or
The US could handle it by eliminating nuclear weapons and overseas military bases and bring US military members home to defend the US (for those who like a violent defense). Nuclear weapons themselves are not so expensive--a "mere" $11 billion per year--but their delivery systems are ginormously costly to research, develop, procure, and operate and plans to spend much more, not less, on more and more nukes. Each Trident submarine costs about $3 billion, plus $77 million to maintain each year. Each B61 bomb costs more than 1.5 times its weight in gold. Virginia-class cruise missile-carrying submarines (30 planned) are more than $2.7 billion each, plus operational $50 million annually each. Overseas military bases and operations run more than $90 billion annually (not including warfighting supplements, which were many hundreds of $billions each year from 2002 until the Iraq drawdown).
or
The US could simply whack the $175 billion from the total military budget in some way that matched what the American people felt was appropriate. Look at it and see what you think:

Really, are we better off trying to be boss of the world or maybe earning the love and gratitude of humankind? We cannot do both. The legacy of the US military right now is generations of radicalized Muslims hoping for revenge, general antipathy from the Americas south of Texas, the greatest contributor to global climate chaos, the largest number of Superfund sites, and a flood of US weaponry fueling conflict everywhere. What if we turned off all those spigots and ended extreme poverty instead on planet Earth? Think it would make a difference? Think folks might notice? Think we'd feel better? Think your God would be happy?

Justice v reality and the nonviolent fix

In 1837, 1842, and 1854 the Anishinabe (Ojibwe, or Chippewa) chiefs signed a series of peace treaties with the encroaching hegemonic US government. Those treaty rights all gave up a great deal of land to the US, reserved some land for the tribes, and reserved usufructuary rights for tribal members. Of course these rights were immediately abrogated. Seven generations later, two college kids from the Lac Court Oreilles reservation in Wisconsin conducted a civil resistance action, fishing off-reservation but in the ceded territory protected by those treaties. They were cited and they took that case to court, winning eventually in 1983, in a case that legally reaffirmed those treaty rights. Tribal members were still not able to practice those rights because the state was obstructing them and the white citizens obstructed them. So the tribes began a campaign to openly practice those fishing rights and were met with virulent racism.

It took three years of disciplined nonviolent action by tribal members to finally win the hearts and minds of the people of the state and the elected officials. So the law might have been on the books, but it took a great deal of direct action and nonviolent persistent public action to finally conjoin the law with reality. Nonviolence fixed it.

In 1960 the college kids in Nashville, Tennessee conducted a sit-in campaign to bring local and state laws into compliance with federal laws. They won. Nonviolence fixed it.

In 1961 the college kids from across the south joined the Freedom Rides with others who "proposed to send an integrated team of activists rolling across the South on commercial bus lines, to have them test compliance with a recent Supreme Court ruling that required the desegregation of interstate buses and terminals" (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000, p. 329). It was a rough campaign, with many beatings and arrests. They won. Nonviolence fixed it.

One of the components of each of these struggles was the discipline of the nonviolent activists, coupled with the open oppression by the racists. These public actions showed the contrast between the demonstrating victims and the hate and violence of the oppressors. It created backfire, which helped lead to victory. There were efforts on the part of the brutal oppressors to squelch the backfire through the methods found in Brian Martin's research:
1. Cover up the action or situation.
2. Devalue the target.
3. Reinterpret what happened.
4. Use official channels that give the appearance of justice.
5. Intimidate or bribe people involved. (2007, p. 206)

In all these cases, the campaigns for justice were able to counter the five methods attempted by the oppressors. This was done by a combination of nonviolent discipline and competent messaging.

Perception thus becomes reality, and reality catches up to the law, but only via education, training, courage and persistence. Nonviolence makes the law worth more than the paper on which it's written.

References

Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Martin, Brian (2007). Justice ignited: The dynamics of backfire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 

Robocops love roboresisters

In his studies of the 'Lucifer Effect,' Philip Zimbardo finds that anonymity is a concomitant to evil. In other words, if we feel anonymous, we more easily access our inner devil and can feel more disinhibited in our conduct, more likely to engage in evil behavior.

How does this work out for those who might like to run a nonviolent campaign?

There are two essential conditions for a backfire. First, something occurs that some people think is unjust, unfair, disproportionate, disgusting, disquieting, or upsetting...The second essential condition for backfire is communication to receptive audiences. This can be by directly witnessing the event or via reports, photos, and the like.
--Brian Martin, 2007, pp. 205-206

When riot geared-up police beat down nonviolent, peaceful protesters, that is often communicated to a public that becomes upset and supportive of the protesters. The face masks and thickly protective padded riot uniforms elicit the pejorative "robocops."

When resisters in Guy Fawkes or V for Vendetta Anonymous masks, or face-covering bandanas run through protests and fling a few rocks or bottles at the cops, that is also often communicated to a public that then becomes upset.

So the link between disinhibited behavior that can be regarded as evil and the backfire effect that erodes public support are linked and apply equally to everyone. This is usually lost on protesters who are so convinced of their correctness that they believe anything is justified. Those are the ones who usually descry nonviolence as a waste at best and in service of the state at worst. They can corrode all public sympathy for a movement and retard forward progress until they are dealt with.

Even if the movement has successes with this radical flank, that anonymity-driven evil will interfere with gains.

 We see that right now in Ukraine, with the violent fascists smearing the reputation of the vast majority of nonviolent activists. Russia has an excuse to pull a promised fiscal bailout as a result and the general hue and cry is that the violent fascists proves the backing of the US and EU, clearly a plot hatched by the West. This takes away the idea of agency of the people of Ukraine, but it's a handy conspiracy idea for those who love those sorts of conspiracies. Thanks, rightwing fascists!

There is no substitute for accountability and transparency. Open identification helps all movements to establish movement identification as nonviolent and noncombatant, something to support, or at least protect. Why would we toss that advantage away?

References

Martin, Brian (2007). Justice ignited: The dynamics of backfire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Pushback against nonviolence

For those of us who advocate nonviolence, we get pushback all the time, which comes from a variety of sources.

• Students who are products of standard curriculum, which is often utterly bereft of any meaningful information on nonviolence.
• Members of the public who are products of a media saturated in violence as the ultimate solution to everything short of gum disease (even then...?).
• Ultra rightwingers who know that violence is the only man-up way to handle conflict. They are often countryfolk. 
• Ultra leftwingers who are more enamored of street violence than actual victory. They are often city/suburban folk.

Ironically, I get less pushback from many military vets, especially those who have seen combat. Most of the romance of violence is gone for them. They are much more likely to support a violent defense of the country and less excited about supporting foreign adventures. For decades I've suspected much of the pushback I get is from those outside the four groups listed above, people who might actually see that nonviolence has worked perfectly but are too afraid to step up so they instead construct rationalizations for their disavowal of nonviolence. Hey--it does take work and it can be risky. Some folks like the self-justified mask over indolence or cowardice. My challenge to them is that I have a long history of effective nonviolent activism and I am the most indolent and cowardly dude ever!

So how tricky is this? Gene Sharp wrote:

Nonviolent struggle does not require acceptance of a new political doctrine or of a new moral or religious belief. In political terms, nonviolent action is based on a very simple insight: people do not always do what they are told to do, and sometimes they do things that they have been forbidden to do. Subjects may disobey laws they reject. Workers may halt work, which may paralyze the economy. The bureaucracy may refuse to carry out instructions. Soldiers and police may become lax in inflicting repression or even mutiny. When all these events happen simultaneously, the power of the rulers weakens and can dissolve. 

So we can see that society has constituencies worthy of focus. First, however, do no harm. Be certain the general image of your campaign is sympathetic and non-alienating. That needs to be maintained or much of the other work will falter. Recruitment generally involves three major steps:

1. Gaining sympathy
Understand what your constituencies want that you can frame so they will understand that this is what you want. Point to those who are suffering and can elicit the most sympathy. Be completely nonviolent so you don't commit infractions that lose sympathy, and carry it to the level that avoids both rage and whining.

2. Gaining support
Note what is needed. Get sympathetic people to ask for you. Can you find some moral leader or well loved celebrity or other person of status to announce her support and urge others to do so as well? Money, in-kind, letters to decision-makers, and other support roles are critical.

3. Gaining participation
Encourage those who have taken the first two steps to consider taking action with you. Stay at home for a day. Stop buying something in particular. Show up at a demonstration. Hand out flyers. Carry petitions and get signatures. Testify at a public hearing. Even carry a sign or risk arrest.

When a movement achieves the state that Gene Sharp describes, it wins.

It may not win in a day, but neither does blood-in-the-streets violence. Open minds grasp this and most people have more open minds than we know. If they aren't open, work on prying them. Expect that pushback and try to be patient. Americans in particular are in a general state of deep denial about nonviolence, which is to be expected, after all, from people whose government has the biggest empire of military bases the world has seen, the largest military budget in the world by far, and the biggest movie industry cranking out box office smashes that portray radically unrealistic violence. So promoting nonviolence is an uphill struggle and worth every step and push.

References
http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/WNS_excerpts_for_Self_Lib.pdf

Staring into the water at the bottom of the cliff: When to dive

You know what the problems are, right? You know various organizations are struggling to solve them. Your organization is addressing some grievance and wants a policy change. You've tried an appeal to the decision-makers. You've done a great deal of public education on the issue. You have lobbied in the halls of those who make the decisions. You are doing as much media outreach as you can.

But it all seems stalled. At what point do you consider direct action, possibly nonviolent resistance?

This is a tough calculation for groups that really do want to win and not merely go on record as being fashionably radical. Seriously. What happens when the decision-makers make a move against you? Do you think the law enforcement system is going to go easy? Are young people going to destroy their lives by getting involved?

These were thorny issues in 1959, when Reverend James Lawson was trying to initiate some interest in applying Gandhian nonviolence to the problem of Jim Crow segregation in the American South, and in particular in Nashville, Tennessee. He saw clearly from his own training in India and from his analysis of the locus of power and latent power in society that "Nonviolent action was more than a technique of social action for Lawson; it was a means of tapping more fundamental sources of power" (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000, p. 314).

In other words, there are times when, to the conflict forensics analyst like Lawson, the potential power of civil society might be much more available than at other times, and he had calculated that this was one of those times. Perhaps in another atmosphere and set of social conditions he might not have urged people to consider organizing to take risks--certainly the parents of black college kids in Nashville were not happy to learn that their child had been arrested by a Southern police force and thrown in jail. They had worked all their lives to provide this opportunity for their child to do much better than they had been able to do in racist America--and it looked to them as though this upstart movement might rob their child of a future. Indeed, there was great logical fear for the very physical safety of these youth, not to mention the danger of being tossed out of college, getting poor marks on a transcript, and getting a police record. Black kids already started from a profoundly disadvantaged position.

But Lawson persisted and others joined him. And they won. The result was that the disadvantages diminished, giving the black students a new starting point a bit closer to equal opportunity. Lawson had analyzed the potential correctly and had set in motion a series of struggles that changed history.

Jean Wynona Fleming, a Fisk University student, sits in a Nashville, Tenn. city jail cell on March 25, 1960, after her arrest at a downtown Moon-McGrath drugstore lunch counter. Blacks swarmed into the downtown area and resumed their protests against segregated eating facilities with sit-in demonstrations at nine restaurants.

(Photo: Jimmy Ellis, The Tennessean)

These are not easy factors to understand as you contemplate taking the step of nonviolent civil resistance. The consequences can be rough. Some factors to consider might include but not be limited to:

• numbers
• timing
• opposition
• potential for change
• public mood
• political environment
• potential support
• potential recruits
• likely consequences
• available lawyers, media workers, funders, political allies, sympathetic leaders
• likelihood of success

No one can predict it all, and the chain of effects of one small act of resistance can lead to a change (or no change) in the strength of any of these characteristics. So what Gandhi did, and what Lawson did, was to methodically assess, think hard, and then make a move or not. Making your decisions using a strong sieve of many assessed factors will give you extra resolve and resilience in your struggle. We see that when it's done right and we see the downside when it's done without much forethought. Anger is a good motivator and a lousy strategic planning shortcut. Controlled anger is useful and it can be harnessed and used to pull many forward with you toward victory. Jumping off that cliff without knowing how deep the water is, how far down it is, and where the rocks are is a poor program; learn as much as possible, test it hypothetically and decide when the dive will be as clean and successful as possible.

References

Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Empirically an empire

Is the US an empire? Well, since we emerged as a nation rejecting the status of colony of an empire in favor of freedom, our historical rhetoric has been anti-empire. Crunch the numbers, however, to show how we are crunching others into the evolving US empire, packing more and more of them into a creaky, groaning crate.

We have troops stationed in most countries on Earth. WTF!? Even if we omit the nations where 'only' US covert operations are in progress, take out the nations in which 'only' armed contractors--mercenaries--are operating paid by you and me, and don't consider the nations with small armed US teams of fewer than 100 members total are engaged, the US still has at least 100 military personnel in more than 150 of the world's 193 nation-states.

Give me an "E!" Give me an "m!" "p!" "i-r-e!" What's that spell? Watch it swell!

There are two serious aspects to this, at least. One, most people hate seeing armed--or even 'just' uniformed--troops from other countries on their sovereign soil. I have a hard enough time see uniformed military personnel amongst civilians in my own land--of course, I'm a pacifist and I would--but I can scarcely imagine seeing a uniformed and armed member of any other military in my country. Try thinking of a Chinese unit, armed in uniform, in your town. Do you feel your blood rising and an urge to tell them to leave and go home? Imagine how the rest of the world feels with the US there, armed and dangerous and acting like it's Just Fine to be in their country. We are breeding generations of hatred for our nation by acting like an empire even if most of us don't want to believe we act that way. Two, it's ungodly expensive and a massive drain on the US economy and on each US taxpayer.

Let's fix this. We hear mutterings of hope now and then, but little is actually done. In 2012, President Obama was going to start this (even that liberal bastion, Fox News, was mostly in favor), but instead the numbers above reflect reality from a year later, from summer 2013.

Support those who want to see this slowed, stopped, and reversed--even the closest US ally, the UK hates this. Let's start building more affinity and love for the US, not resentment and rage.