Breda O’Brien: Why US needs militant, powerful non-violence

Donald Trump was wrong to imply a moral equivalence between the white supremacists and those who gathered to oppose them in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The ideology espoused by the white supremacists is utterly repugnant. Their embrace of symbols used by Nazis deserves nothing but condemnation.

There were peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, many of them religious leaders, who condemn this kind of hate-mongering.

But some members of the Antifa, the anti-fascist movement, in their eagerness to spit in the face of fascism and to engage in hand-to-hand fighting, only intensify division and probably help recruitment by a vile movement.

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There is another answer. Militant, powerful, massive non-violence. That was what Rev Martin Luther King jnr advocated in a school auditorium on a night of tension in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, three weeks before his assassination in 1968.

He was speaking to thousands of high school students, virtually all of them white. The school had had to take out a $1 million insurance policy, so great was the perceived danger.

When he arrived, the local police chief sat on King’s lap as a human shield in order to protect him from any potential assassination attempt.

There were right-wing groups protesting outside and, although he was greeted by rapturous applause by the audience, King was also heckled and frequently interrupted.

Destructive riots

The previous July, some of the most destructive riots in US history had happened in nearby Detroit, although scholars dispute if they were classic race riots, given that there was significant white participation in them.

They began when police raided a “blind pig”, an unlicensed drinking club. It was packed with 82 African-Americans. A crowd rapidly formed and after the police departed, looting began, followed soon after by fire-setting.

Over the next five days, 43 people died, nearly 1,200 were injured, more than 7,200 were arrested and 2,000 buildings were destroyed.

King condemned rioting, but in Grosse Pointe he also said: “a riot is the language of the unheard”. He said that he had “been searching for a long time for an alternative to riots on the one hand and timid supplication for justice on the other and I think that alternative is found in militant massive non-violence”.

This does not imply passivity in the face of evil, but courageous community action.

His opposition to the Vietnam War and his embrace of non-violence stemmed from his belief in the radical equality of all human beings as children of God.

He had been heavily influenced by Gandhi’s practice of civil disobedience, which stemmed from the Hindu concept of ahimsa, that is, respect for the spark of divine energy in every human being.

Militant, powerful, massive non-violence is exemplified by Gandhi’s salt marches, by the March on Washington, and the marches from Selma to Montgomery.

Today, pacifism may not always be the answer, but violence from the Antifa is no answer at all. The alt-right have committed significant violence since the turn of this century, far more than the Antifa, but the opposition cannot stoop to the same kind of tactics and retain any kind of moral authority.

Bernie Sanders showed the way when he condemned James Hodgkinson in the strongest terms when the left-wing activist shot and seriously injured house majority whip Steve Scalise at a baseball practice. (Hodgkinson had been a local volunteer for Sanders during his presidential campaign.)

Innocent people targeted

There is a danger of violence, too, in what is called doxxing, that is, identifying alt-right marchers from photographs and videos and trying to get them fired. Already, innocent people have been targeted.

Aside from that, the last thing you want to do is to close the exit door for people who begin to see the evil of being involved in white supremacy. They need to know that they will not be excluded from civil society if they repudiate the movement. Doxxing just leads to a greater sense of victimisation.

People are cynical about non-violent action, but in their 2012 book Why Civil Resistance Works Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan analysed 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns between 1990 and 2006 and found that the non-violent campaigns were twice as effective.

They even describe two instances that were partially successful against Nazism, which is always cited as impervious to civil resistance.

The Danes used sabotage and strikes to stand up to the Nazi occupation, and even more importantly, succeeded in smuggling more than 7,000 Jews into Sweden to protect them.

The Rosenstrasse protests happened in Berlin in February and March 1943, when non-Jewish women protested for weeks outside the centre where their Jewish husbands were locked up, even when threatened with lethal force. Their husbands were eventually released. Non-violence works.

And in countries where the media is not controlled by a totalitarian regime, it is likely to be even more successful.

Both Martin Luther King and Gandhi died for their beliefs. Both knew that their non-violence was likely to be met with lethal violence, but they still did not return hate for hate.

The US desperately needs courageous leaders, women and men such as Mahalia Jackson and Martin Luther King, who will embrace militant, massive non-violence. Instead, they have Trump.