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“Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.”[1]
--Dr. Nafeez Ahmed (2013), executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development
Violence—from the local to the state to the transnational—requires secrecy, which is part of the definition of security. That is, information and intent are kept secret, secrets are defended with more violence, and trust is virtually nonexistent. “Trust no one” is the motto of the military, lawyers, politicians, law enforcement, many journalists, and even educators and health care workers. Perhaps a last bastion of some trust is religion—and in that case the trust is usually reserved for members of the same religion. Mistrust and distrust permeates, slows, and contaminates the US system, leading to a far less productive and non-collegial professional life for more workers every year.
One of the most crippled sectors of civil society in this regard is the activist community of dissenters from many official policies. The contagion of mistrust and security culture leads to movements that stall out because—even though they would love to be serious, even though they would love to feel like a ‘people’s movement’—they play their activism so close to the vest that potential activists are ignored, rebuffed, or alienated. Recruitment suffers.
Many believe that the Bush years were extreme and that the government is softer and more attuned to traditional American values enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Sadly, this has proven untrue, and the reasons are many and varied for this steady erosion.
One is the phenomenon of path dependency that tends to recreate a problem due to institutional inertia and the natural human tendency to simply use systems already in place, already functioning. Spying on Americans, domestic militarization of police departments, and the decrease in the robustness of civil rights had been an ongoing direction for some time, almost always related to the synthesis of activists’ poor choices combined with propaganda manipulations by corporate media and officials representing the elite owner class.
And so, as Ahmed categorized, the steady development of justifications for more suppression of civil society using increasingly violative and militaristic methods is the result. In the US, this has involved commissioned reports, Congressional inquiries, invasive intelligence, and new laws exculpating government agents who violate civil rights and possibly even human rights. He cites language from the 2006 US National Security and the 2008 US Army Modernization Strategy report, which connect worsening environmental conditions to civil society unrest to military response to civil society, including “peaceful” demonstrators—and the NAS Prism program linked to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance harvests massive amounts of data from virtually all Americans, tapping into data from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and many more major US information-moving tech corporations. In May 2013 the US Congress granted the Pentagon unilateral powers to suppress civil unrest domestically in the US.
Related to this is the endless attack on liberties, almost always framed as protecting liberties. Thus, for example, we note the historical tension between the freedoms gained by equal opportunity and the freedom to deny it to anyone we don’t like. Or the tension between the idea that persistent problems require certain forms of escalation of conflict management methods and the opportunity those forms of escalation—usually violent—offer to an invested owner class defending the status quo.
The cure for this problem, generally, is to be nonviolent in word, deed, affect, attitude, comportment, discipline, and all communication. Technical nonviolence—“yes, we called the police ‘pigs’ but we never threw anything at them”won’t work and never would. Only dedicated, educated, trained, drilled and disciplined nonviolence inoculates against the tendency of power to become corrupt.
Is this fair? Of course not. The violence of the state should be never violate innocent or peaceful people. Even for those who are not pacifist, it should be clear and reliable that the response of the agents of the state to any illegal action should be completely proportional. It is ethically wrong, even for nonpacifists, to shoot a suspect fleeing from a crime that involved no violence. Any violence in response to nonviolenceeven nonviolence that is undisciplined and ragingshould be condemned by all decent standards.
However, the real crux of the matter is: What is the result to the movement? To worry about who is to blame, about technicalities, is to ignore the damage done to recruitment when police crack down violently and the general public feels afraid to join the movement. That movement, however convinced that it is ‘peaceful,’ is a loser. It will remain ineffective until it lowers the barriers to recruitment even as it draws the sympathies of the larger public.
Mohandas Gandhi was devoted to Hindu-Muslim comity and based on that, he launched the notion of what he called a 'peace army.' His love of Muslim-Hindu siblinghood is indeed what signed his death warrant.
As is often the case, his desire to get along with others caused those of his own group the most consternation. He was murdered not by jihadis but by a fellow Hindu who was acting on behalf of a larger Hindu fundamentalist organization. Yitzak Rabin was murdered by an Israeli for his role in the Oslo peace with Palestinians. Nonviolence is a very threatening concept to some, as is one element of nonviolence, forgiveness.
So Gandhi founded the Shanti Dals to try to bring peace to rioting Hindus and Muslims in India (Weber, 1996). Individually, he achieved remarkable success, going door-to-door in the poorest, most violent, most fundamentalist neighborhoods of both groups and begging them to abstain from further violence.
It is likely that Gandhi's final project, the formation of a Shanti Sena, or peace army, would have served two functions; it would have been organized toward providing internal peace in India and would have been a sort of civilian-based defense of the country from foreign forces. He may have also hoped that Shanti Sena would have been an international world police force designed to prevent war.
It is possible. It is the dream of those who believe in nonviolence. On a small scale, it is underway in some ways already, with valuable organizations like Nonviolent Peaceforce, Sri Lankan Sarvodaya, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Muslim Peacemaker Teams, and so forth.
[1] Ahmed, Nafeez (14 June 2013). Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks. UK Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism Accessed 23 December 2013.
