Topic: Violence vs. Non-Violence.

[Chew]

WWII was far, far worse. The Dresden bombings alone, today, would have resulted in massive public outcry and lost the war for the Allies.

Would that be based on the real death toll or the death toll according to Holocaust deniers?

[goodthink]

Huh?

[Chew]

The death toll of the bombing of Dresden was ~25,000. Holocaust deniers claim 200,000~500,000.

[goodthink]

No, I was going more for the sheer inhumanity of firebombing the city and targeting civilians to break German morale.


Had no idea Dresden was part of a holocaust denier thingy.

[Karyn]

Follow up question:  Is the Occupy movement accomplishing it's goals, or do we need to start resorting to violence to take our democracy back from giant corporations?  (yes this question is slanted)

[Karyn]

2nd follow up question:  Have violent revolutions actually solved the problems being revolted against?  For instance, will Egypt be any better off under the Muslim Brotherhood, or did France do better after the Revolution?

[seaotter]

I'm not sure what the occupy ws folks goal is, so I suppose that's a no, and big no on the last one. Jesus that's the destruction of democracy.

[Karyn]

WWII was far, far worse. The Dresden bombings alone, today, would have resulted in massive public outcry and lost the war for the Allies.

Would that be based on the real death toll or the death toll according to Holocaust deniers?

I'm not talking about all out war.  I'm talking about the average person on the street rising up and committing acts of violence against their own government's policies.  1930s Germany isn't really a good example, as most people at the time (that weren't jews and gypsies) were fine with the way their government was behaving.

[seaotter]

Depends on who you are as to which is better. I'd say the jury is still out, but maybe Iran is a more settled question.

[Jordan]

Follow up question:  Is the Occupy movement accomplishing it's goals, or do we need to start resorting to violence to take our democracy back from giant corporations?  (yes this question is slanted)

Neither.

I'd say we need better/more nonviolent action.

While I do have some moral qualms with violence (particular with violence or threatened violence against other people), my main objection is that there is simply no way that a violent movement could win change in the US. The government has a monopoly on violence: they have the guns, the teargas, the pepper spray. They have the cops, the private security forces and the soldiers. They have the best weaponry and machinery and "crowd control techniques." They have the law on their side. They can lock up a violent (or possibly violent) protestor for much longer than a non-violent one (usually). Being violent here and now will not achieve the goals that any social movement is after.

We simply can't compete. Instead, resistance movements need to use the "currencies" that they have a lot of: passion, people, facts, moral superiority, whatever. I'm not a strict pacifist and I do think that violence has been justified on occasion, but this is not that time. Violence will just turn people against you.

Occupy has been wonderful, and just what we need to get things moving--but we need to keep growing, expanding and improving on it with creative nonviolent action.

[seaotter]

Ironically btw the reason we insisted on daytime bombing at the beginning of the war was because we were under the misconception that our glorious bomb sights could deliver pin point accuracy and decrease calatoral damage. When we realized this wasn't the case and that strategic bombing couldn't do what it was cracked up to do, we started terror inning, which seems like the right thing for the utilitarians to do in a war stituation.

[Cowtown Cody]

I'm going to refer back to one of my favorite political scientists ever, because he makes a very clear case that's backed up with some remarkably accurate predictions made with a model based on the theory.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita calls it Selectorate Theory.  In any country, the people competing for power need a certain group of powerful people on their side, called "the winning coalition."  In democracies, that coalition is bigger, but it's not the whole electorate by any stretch.  In dictatorships, it's much smaller, sometimes only a handful of people in key positions.  To get the winning coalition behind you, you have to give them large doses of the things they want: money, opportunities for corruption, important positions when the winning coalition is small.  When its larger, you still need to give the coalition what it wants, but it becomes more efficient to do so through policy measures; promising the winning coalition that you'll give them the legislation they favor if they back you.  And once they do, you have to keep giving it to them or they'll find someone else who is more likely to get them what they want in return for their support.

For this theory, dictatorships and democracies are only different in the size of the population getting paid off in return for their political support.  When the winning coalition is small, the dictator could care less what happens to the rest of the population because he gets literally nothing out of being nice to them.  Whatever you do, don't make your coalition suffer because you're being nice to people who don't matter.  They'll just get rid of you and replace you with someone more ruthless, who will protect their interests better.

Nonviolence here is transparently useless unless it's a ploy to get a third party to intervene on your behalf - which they will only do if it's in their own interests, but making your struggle look noble will make the decision easier for their public to digest.  Being violent has a slim chance of success, but it's much better than non-violence.  That's obviously not the point of the Occupy movement, and it's also not the context.

If you're in a democracy, then democratic leaders do have to care more, but again, they don't have to care much about people outside their winning coalition, and being nice to those people at the cost of their coalition may hurt them.  However, depending on how close the competition is for that winning coalition, coming across as brutal can do real damage to your ability to hold on to the coalition.  The public actually does matter here (not as much as we tend to think, but it still matters), and losing enough of their support by looking ruthless will cost you.

This goes for both players (Occupy and Status Quo, say).  The current coalition has to take care not to be obscenely brutal to the Occupy movement lest that start to cost them important backers within the public, and the Occupy movement has to take care not to overplay their hand, lest they start to look over-aggressive themselves.

With that in mind, since many in the Occupy movement believe that big corporations are a key part of the winning coalition, they can be as anti-corporate as they want, but they cannot possibly break enough chain-store windows to force a corporation out of that coalition.  And anything more than breaking windows - say, arson, or planting bombs at corporate buildings - is far more likely to lose them critical support than force an undesirable member out of the winning coalition.

I think, based on this logic, that violence and vandalism have no place in the Occupy movement if they'd like to be as successful as they can be.   They're already struggling for support, and engaging in violence in a serious, directed way will absolutely, positively cost them more than they could possibly gain from doing it.  Until you no longer need the support of the public or are no longer competing for it, violence is a pretty dangerous idea to the survival of your movement.  There is a time and a place where it can win, and be a better idea than nonviolence, but Occupy isn't in that position.

[Cowtown Cody]

The government has a monopoly on violence: they have the guns, the teargas, the pepper spray. They have the cops, the private security forces and the soldiers. They have the best weaponry and machinery and "crowd control techniques." They have the law on their side. They can lock up a violent (or possibly violent) protestor for much longer than a non-violent one (usually). Being violent here and now will not achieve the goals that any social movement is after.

We simply can't compete.

Well, let's be clear.  The government in the US has a monopoly on

legitimate violence

, which is to say that nobody else can do violence and expect that most of the public will be okay with it.  When the US government engages in limited domestic violence - police actions, etc. - the public is largely supportive unless something goes badly wrong.

It could become the case, with enough time and political change, that the government can no longer exercise legitimate violence, or loses their legitimacy with regard to a particular kind of violence, or some other group rises to be regarded as being significantly legitimate when it comes to violence as well - not necessarily by the majority, but by enough people to raise hell. I like the completely unproven and untested 30% mark.  That's usually called "revolution" when it happens within one country.

And we should also take a lesson from that, which is that effectively using violence to get what you want doesn't necessarily mean "winning battles."  Terrorism wins few battles but has historically done fairly well in compelling policy changes under specific circumstances.  Sometimes violence can win you support, and that's what you really need to get what you want in terms of policy.  Apologies to Clausewitz, but it's often policy by other means.

[Cowtown Cody]

2nd follow up question:  Have violent revolutions actually solved the problems being revolted against?  For instance, will Egypt be any better off under the Muslim Brotherhood, or did France do better after the Revolution?

I think that's the wrong question.  There are too many other things that go into becoming better off to attribute your success or failure to your means of revolution.  Judgement can be wrong, mistakes can happen, external factors can come into play in ways that weren't forseen or expected.  The only Natural Law of statecraft is that building a state is treacherous business and everyone is bad at it.

All you can really ask is, "do violent rebellions get the rebels what they say they want in the moment of rebellion?"  There's too much that can happen afterward, from changing minds to changing circumstances, and you can't necessarily trace it all back to whether or not you hucked molotovs or had sit-ins.  Sometimes the revolution isn't as philosophically consistent as all that - and neither are the participants.

The answer is that very often, violence does get the rebels what they want.  Violence made the French Revolution work.  Violence made the American revolution work.  It made the Libyan revolution work.  It made the Syrian revolution a revolution instead of a one-sided massacre (ok, it still kind of is, but you get what I mean).  To some degree, the credible threat of violence made the Egyptian revolution work.  They all worked in that the ousting of the status quo government to one degree or another was effected.  What happened after that varies, but it doesn't by definition have to do with the methods of rebellion.

I actually don't know why people try to make that connection.  It doesn't really work, and I don't understand what the mechanism would be.

On the other side of the coin, by which I mean the revolutions that we call "coups", those often achieve their stated goals due to violent means.  That much isn't even controversial.  So there's one more count by which I don't see why we'd imagine that "violence doesn't work."  Sure it does.  Just not all the time.

[TheIrreverend]

For Americans who aren't familiar with what's going on in Quebec, there are massive student protests going on with fairly significant amounts of violence.  They are, in this case, about something I don't understand (tuition is being increased over the next 5 years, but they will still have the lowest post-secondary tuition in the country), but the violence itself is a) turning public opinion against them and b) actually helping the government that they are fighting against.  Most pundits agree that Charest comes off positively either way - he has shown a willingness to negotiate (positive) but has also condemned the violence (positive) and his police response has been measured (positive).  He gets reasonableness twice and strength once.  Frankly, I think this shows that violence itself is not a positive thing and is not, in Western society, the right response.  While I agree with some of the anger motivating the Occupy people, if they turned violent I would turn against them pretty quickly (I'm a pretty hardcore pacifist).

The aforementioned Arab Spring, however . . . could the change (as much as there has been change) have taken place without violence?  Perhaps, but I think probably not.  Mubarak/Gaddafi/Ben Ali/al-Asaad don't seem like the kind of leaders who respond well to dissent and other opinions.

Basically, I think two things determine whether or not violence is necessary/positive: 1) public opinion - if the public are behind the protesters and the issues are difficult enough, then violence may help the cause, but if the public support isn't strong enough to support violent action, then I think it only hurts; 2) the reasonableness of the government being protested against - if there is a real chance of change without violence, then I think violence again only hurts the cause (see: The Troubles).