On protest and violence. Is Ward Churchill right?

[mdhunter]

I wanted to share this exerpt of a publicly available interview with Churchill (author of the now infamous 9/11 essay), because I find it very thought provoking. This is available at http://www.satyamag.com/apr04/churchill.html. Give it a read, and chime in if you tend to agree... part of me does, part me doesn't - and I'm afraid that part that doesn't just isn't ready to admit to it.

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"Your recent works detail the documentable history of the consequences of U.S. imperialism. After reading On the Justice of Roosting Chickens and listening to your two CDs, what do you want your audience to walk away with?

A fundamental understanding of the nature of their obligation to intervene to bring the kind of atrocities that I’ve described to a halt by whatever means are necessary.

The predominating absurdity in American oppositional circles for the past 30 years is the notion that if one intervenes to halt a rape or a murder in progress, if you actually use physical force as necessary to prevent that act, somehow or other you’ve become morally the same as the perpetrator.

What do you think those oppositional circles need to do to really effect change?
Stop being preoccupied with the sanctity of their own personal security, on the one hand, and start figuring out what would be necessary. That might require experimentation with tactics and techniques. Not how, like an alchemist, you repeat the performance often enough to make yourself feel good in the face of an undisturbed continuation of the horror you’re opposing. If your candlelit vigil doesn’t bring the process you’re opposing to a halt, what do you do next, presuming you actually desired to have an effect.

Let’s just presume that, in this case.

That’s not a safe presumption. There’s a whole feel-good ethic out there. It’s not effect any substantive change. It’s to bear moral witness to make the person feel good, to assuage their conscience in exactly the fashion you were talking about: they can then posture as good and decent people, while engaged in active complicity in the crimes they purportedly oppose. Complicity of acquiescence: that’s the “Good German Syndrome.”

You move on. Rather than a vigil, you hold a rally. When that doesn’t do it either, you march around, do petitions, letters, you hold alternative educational fora, you try to build bridges with people; you do whatever. None of that works.

The obligation is not to be personally pure. The obligation is to effect a measurable change.

Some argue that the ten million people who gathered last year on February 15th to stop a U.S. invasion of Iraq didn’t really amount to much in terms of tangible results. Is there a precedent of experimentation you think people are not looking at?

If you conduct your protest activities in a manner which is sanctioned by the state, the state understands that the protest will have no effect on anything.
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Question.

Is he right?

[Zensea]

1. It looks like it depends what he means by "understands"

I think there's some truth to what he's saying.

The state is unlikely to sanction something unless it believes that it will not threaten the state. If he means understands in the sense of believes, then I'd say the statement is true.

Think I'll go look at the article to see how means this.

edit -- ok, I read the article.
The rest of his answer to that question is relevant.

You can gauge the effectiveness—real or potential at least—of any line of activity by the degree of severity of repression visited upon it by the state. It responds harshly to those things it sees as, at least incipiently, destabilizing. So you look where they are visiting repression: that’s exactly what you need to be doing.

People engaged in the activity that is engendering the repression are the first people who need to be supported—not have discussion groups to endlessly consider the masturbatory implications of the efficacy of their actions or whether or not they are pure enough to be worthy of support. They are by definition worthy. Ultimately, the people debating continuously are unworthy. They are apologists for the state structure; in , try to convince people to be ineffectual.

Nonviolent action can be effectual when harnessed in a way that is absolutely unacceptable to the state: if you actually clog the freeways or occupy sites or whatever to disrupt state functioning with the idea of ultimately making it impossible for the state to function at all, and are willing to incur the consequences of that. That’s very different from people standing with little signs, making a statement. Statements don’t do it. If did, we would have transformed society in this country more than a century ago.

Looks like he's correct to me.

[intheflow]

2. This is the struggle between civil disobedience and anarchy.

Civil disobedience works within the framework of the law, accepting its consequences under the law. By staging peaceful demonstrations, people engaged in civil disobedience accept (to a certain extent) the need for a structured and civil society; they are, in fact, working within the dominant social structure.

Anarchy attempts to subvert the dominant culture by engaging in violent acts against the dominant corporate/military/governmental agencies that perpetuated systems of oppression. So they smash windows at McDonalds hoping to somehow hurt the megacorporation that is McDonalds. While they might also be arrested, they do not see themselves as working within the dominant social structure, but attempting to effect change from without.

But both forms of resistance ultimately encounter the same problem of not effecting change in the systemic structure of society because the state can write off both as fringe elements, extremists in their camps. A new way has to be imagined. I only wish I could imagine what the way might be! <sigh!>