The High Price of Pacifism:
I
don't know how it happened, but this past Spring at the
Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon I found myself on
a workshop panel on police brutality. I have been on the
receiving end of police brutality before, but in general, I avoid
direct confrontations with law enforcement authorities and do not
believe in confronting a militarily stronger opponent face to
face. That is why I personally engaged in ALF activity, because
when it comes to fighting an enemy much larger than yourself, the
hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare can create an advantage
impossible in conventional warfare.
Too often I hear of
nonviolent protesters becoming the victims of violence when they
place themselves in the path of opponents who demonstrate a total
disregard for their adherence to Gandhian principles of
nonviolence. So as I listened to each panel member recounting the
instances when police terrorized them and the subsequent legal
battles they became encumbered with as a result, I couldn't help
but feel that it was sometimes strategically unwise to pursue
this avenue of action.
I am not a pacifist. Yet at the
E-Law Conference I got the feeling that the majority of attendees
believed more in passive nonviolence than aggressive
self-defense. So I knew it wouldn't be with wide support for me
to say what I believed about my misgiving towards nonviolence in
the political climate we find ourselves in today. I told the
folks in Eugene that I came from a long line of cop killers. I
told them that had it not been for my ancestors' willingness to
kill their oppressors I might not be alive today.
In the
1800s and early 1900s to not take up arms against the Spanish and
then Mexican military often meant the loss of your land, liberty,
cultural identity, and even your life. A Yaqui seen was a Yaqui
killed, imprisoned, raped or deported and without a willingness
to defend yourself, you surrendered control over your own life
and that of your family to your oppressor. In a similar fashion,
albeit a lot less extreme, I see activists doing the same thing
when we religiously adhere to nonviolence and the tactics of
civil disobedience in the face of increasingly violent attacks by
police.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer the path of
nonviolence and it saddens me to see societal attention and
change primarily in response only to aggression, but
unfortunately, we don't make the rules, we just play the game.
Governments rarely respond to whispers, but almost always hear a
scream. In such times it becomes necessary for political
struggles to reevaluate their tactics and strategies and choose
those that result in the least amount of physical violence, not
only against our opposition, but equally against ourselves.
To
not adapt strategy to changing times becomes counterproductive
and when we fail to do so we become partially responsible for the
violence that occurs when our nonviolent protesters are
encouraged to place themselves in the path of violent prone
police. No matter how many nonviolent training sessions you go to
or how many books on Gandhi you read, nothing is going to change
this police state's policy of using violence against peaceful
protesters when they know they have the law on their side and
will always get away with it. Which leads to my next point. If we
do continue to use nonviolent civil disobedience as a tactic,
then we should react appropriately when that tactic is responded
to violently. What I mean is self-defense. There is nothing
immoral, unethical or wrong with defending oneself. It is the
most instinctual response in the natural world. It's genetically
built into most every animal and plant and the only thing that
prevents us from using it is an institutionalized belief that all
physical violence is bad.
Each time we allow violent
attacks on us to happen without defensive action we give strength
to a dangerous precedent that tells the police that they can get
away with literal murder. You need only see what happened to
Earth First!er David Chain to believe that. The Pacific Lumber
employee who felled a redwood tree on David was never even
arrested for the death of this nonviolent forest defender, let
alone spend one night in jail like so many nonviolent protesters.
In the 1980s while sabotaging fox hunts in Britain our
group was attacked by hunt supporters. I thought I was a
pacifist, but when I saw hunt saboteurs defending themselves and
the effect it had in showing our attackers that we would not
passively take a beating, I abandoned that philosophy for a more
pragmatic belief that allowed self defense. When the hunt
supporters realized that we'd fight fire with fire they
retreated. Their power over us was dependent on our refusal to
defend ourselves.
Likewise, whether it during a protest
against the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund
or any other target within the evil empire, when police take
advantage of our commitment to nonviolence and victimize innocent
young activists exercising their supposed constitutional right to
protest, we must retaliate. Maybe not when such a response would
further endanger activists, but whenever peaceful protesters are
beaten, pepper sprayed, and their civil and human rights
violated, we have every right to demonstrate our right of self
defense and target the property of our attackers.
Every
time a protester is beaten cop cars should burn. Every time an
activist is pepper sprayed tires should be slashed and windows of
the offending agencies should be broken. These agencies obviously
have a total disregard for life, but they sure as hell care about
their property. In such a way we are able to preserve our belief
in the sacredness of all life while still retaining the ability
to defend ourselves.
We must demonstrate our own power
instead of always witnessing theirs being used against us and all
of natural creation. Even Gandhi said that nonviolence was only
appropriate when used against an opponent who respects it. In
Northern Ireland it was state violence against nonviolent
protesters that forced the resurgence in the Irish Republican
Army. In South Africa it was state violence that forced the
African National Congress to form the guerrilla army, Spear of
the Nation and in the United States it was state violence that
encouraged the growth of the Black Panthers. As Malcolm X said,
nonviolence is appropriate with nonviolent people, but if someone
attacks you, self-defense is justifiable.
The struggle
for animal liberation and environmental defense is about
preserving the lives and rights of others, it's not about our own
morality, it's about ending a war. To apply tactics that result
in long and costly court battles that serve only to divert
attention away from animals in labs, fur farms, circuses and the
wild and instead see us defending our own rights are
strategically a failure. We must only engage in tactics and
strategies that focus attention on the truly oppressed, the
animal people and their natural homelands.
It's not about
feeling good while preserving our privileged philosophies that
further separate us from other humans resisting oppression by all
means necessary, this fight is about stopping the wholesale
slaughter of billions of innocent beings who depend on us for
their survival. Let's get over our moral hang-ups and recognize
that the fate of the earth and all life upon it calls on a
continued escalation in direct action.
Rod Coronado
First published in 'No Compromise' magazine
www.nocompromise.org