Could Nonviolence Stop Nazis?
Once again, yesterday, I came across the tired old canard that the only way to fight bad things and bad people is to put weapons in the hands of good people. We hear it after every mass shooting.
And not only is it not true, it’s a very destructive thought pattern. Too often, when good people get guns, they turn into not-so-good people. Lord Acton’s famous dictum, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely” seems to hold very true. Dictators were often first hailed as liberators; as one of hundreds of examples, think about Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Gandhian techniques were actually very effective against the Nazis. The scholar Gene Sharp documented this extensively in The Politics of Nonviolent Action trilogy. And frankly, the Brits in India were no saints. They were brutal and violent, though lacking the organized killing machine (gas chambers, etc.) the Nazis built. You may be familiar with the King of Denmark very publicly wearing the yellow star. That’s just one example of hundreds. Many of these incidents had better outcomes than a lot of gun-based responses. And even when they didn’t, the reprisals were directed against those who acted, and not—as so often happened when partisans killed Nazis—the entire community.
The segregated American South was also quite brutal and violent, as shown very effectively in the recent movie, “Selma.” Martin Luther King considered Gandhi a mentor. Gandhi in turn learned from (and actually corresponded with) Tolstoy. Mandela, I’m sure, studied both Gandhi and King, and in turn influenced the Arab Spring.
None of this happens in a vacuum. We can trace nonviolent resistance in a reasonably straight line at least back to Christ, and of course there are several incidents of Gandhian tactics in the Old Testament. My personal favorite is the refusal of the midwives Shifra and Pu’ah to carry out the Pharaoh’s command to kill all the Hebrew boy babies, though Abraham’s argument with God over the coming destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a close second.
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
The Danes had a very active armed resistance as did Norway.
Kate Lorinczi Soukonnikov liked this on Facebook.
You can fight or flee threats. Fighting can be done physically or psychologically. Whether or not one approves of bull fighting, it illustrates the latter strategy, as the primary weapon of the human is psychological, wearing out the bull by making it repeatedly charge at the cape, and hit nothing important. But obviously, the person also has a physical weapon along with that, and it gets used at the end. But one could just as easily put a chain on the exhausted animal…
But this combination of physical and psychological approaches, is a good one, I think. It is more important to do what works when it logically is best, I think, than to get trapped in ideology that insists on doing things only one way, and everything else is bad. Thinking of Hitler, this has been seen by the US military, as a major part of his physical military defeat, as over and over he chose ideology as more important than pragmatic military strategy. Many of his exchanges with his generals were recorded and we have the records. He repeatedly overrulled his generals on grounds of ideology. Refusing to be flexible about what works, is a path to disaster.
Power corrupts a lot of people, but there are instances where people have voluntarily given up power. Rare, but it happens. I don’t think it is right to say that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nobody has absolute power, for one thing, and for another, we have these examples of people turning their back on considerable amounts of it. That would not be possible if everyone was completely corrupted by it.
Physical weapons can be behind power, or the weapons can be psychologically based, like telling lies, or money- which gets its power from psychology, from a common respect for it and thus respect for people who have a lot of it. And all of this often gets combined, of course. Psychological weapons of lies combined with powerful physical weapons. But just as the bull is physically powerful, that power has a serious weakness with the relatively poor senses and mental capabilities directing it. Lies can be countered with the psychological weapon of truth. And if people love the lies for some reason, truth combined with reality can slowly whittle that down, like the strength of the bull being whittled down with useless exertions. In denial, people make repeated “charges” at making things work the way they think they will work, and if they don’t work, that slowly wears them out. Or that kind of behavior may be self destructive very fast, as well. If a bull charged at a cape being waved by a man on the edge of a deep hole or cliff, for example… Or two or more bulls may ignore larger dangers in fighting with each other, unaware or in denial of these dangers, like two bulls fighting on the edge of a cliff…
Fleeing can sometimes be an easy and valuable way of dealing with a threat, or it may be difficult. The lies behind it being ok for society to grow huge on unsustainable resource use has made fleeing difficult. No large group of people can flee anywhere. Small groups could flee various places, but could not stay in a lot of such places for very long.
But of this huge society, who really cares about truth, and who wants lies? Who is the enemy? My answer to this is to put out observations that appear to have no evidence based rebuttal, and those who also have no evidence based rebuttal, but simply deny these observations and continue to try to make things work based their non evidence based ideology of reality, are the enemy, and those who recognize that they have no argument and it is better to behave on evidence and logic, become friends, allies.
And unsustainable resource use has put humanity on an unstable “cliff”, where people driven by simplistic ideology about violence being a solution to growing problems caused by this, could make that “cliff edge” crumble, and those too close to the edge with them, all fall off. The larger war being threatened in Syria, by the two large “bulls”, the US and Russia, being drawn in with conflicting beliefs about who to support, could disrupt long distance trade and send billions who depend on it, crashing. This danger looks obvious to a lot of people, I’m sure. But who is taking serious action to step away from the cliff edge they stand on? People have their niche in society, which can involve money, land, houses, etc, their jobs, families and friends- they believe in the basic stability of the system they live in, in spite of all evidence and logic to the contrary, and won’t leave it.
A very large number of Jews had the same reaction to the potentials of Hitler and his followers, before WWII.
Hi, Arthur, thanks for your long post, which for some reason I didn’t see when it was new. You make several good points, among them the truth that more than a few people have voluntarily stepped away from substantial power—some because of threats form others apparently more powerful, but plenty of others for reasons ranging from love (the abdicating Edward) to protecting their society and ensuring a peaceful transition.
Michelle Neumann liked this on Facebook.
Lisa Torba liked this on Facebook.