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Jesse Walker talks strategy with the 21st century's groundbreaking nonviolent activists, who believe political change can be forced at Powerpoint.
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Larry A|9.21.06 @ 10:48AM|#
Nonviolent resistance can be a powerful tool in the right environment. In the wrong one it can be suicide.
Read "The Last Article" by Harry Turtledove, an alternate history where Nazi Germany wins WWII, takes over India, and subjects Nehru and Ghandi to a final solution.
Jesse Walker|9.21.06 @ 8:34PM|#
Nonviolent resistance can be a powerful tool in the right environment. In the wrong one it can be suicide.
Yep. Of course, the same goes for violent resistance.
Read "The Last Article" by Harry Turtledove, an alternate history where Nazi Germany wins WWII, takes over India, and subjects Nehru and Ghandi to a final solution.
There's a misconception floating around that the point of nonviolent action is to persuade the rulers to give in out of the goodness of their hearts, and that it therefore can't be effective against really brutal regimes. But the actual point is to make it impossible for the government to enforce its orders. That doesn't require a relatively benign overlord like the British. It just requires an understanding of the weak links in the system.
Which isn't to say that nonviolent resistance always works or violent resistance never does. Just that the glib position that Gandhi was lucky to have the British as his foes betrays more familiary with movies like Gandhi than with Gandhi's actual approach to conflict.
|9.22.06 @ 9:59AM|#
Jesse,
Gandhi's methods could have worked in even an oppressive regime, provided that the people were willing to be hurt or killed in their efforts at nonresistance. If the Jews had used such methods (and I'm not blaming them for not doing so), the Nazis would've had much more trouble transporting people to concentration camps and would've been forced to kill a lot of people in front of German civilians--something they tried to avoid doing. Those same civilians would've been forced to face what was happening much more directly than they were as things actually occurred. Rationalization is tough when some goon is murdering your neighbors on your street.
The Gandhi approach is extremely tough on those doing the resisting, and I think it's only appealing to people who feel that they have nothing left to lose. The Jews in Germany had been caught off guard, for the most part, and probably thought for quite some time that the Nazi oppression was just a storm to weather, not a death sentence.