Speaking of Words,
By MICHAEL FERBER

            The national movement in opposition to Donald Trump and his regime has been growing at great speed, with demonstrations of various kinds taking place nearly every day across the country.  Its discipline so far has been remarkable.  Seven million people have marched on a single day with no more than a handful of minor incidents and arrests.  In New Hampshire several thousand people have gathered several times with no uniformed police to be seen—because none have been needed.  The national organizing networks have been very clear in calling for nonviolence, and in every city there are training programs for monitors and “peacemakers” to make sure that nonviolence prevails.

            Since the words and phrases we use to talk about nonviolent social change are various and sometimes confusing, I am dedicating at least one column to them.  I have been studying nonviolent movements, and taking part in them, since I was in high school in 1960, so I think I can shed some light on their terminology.

            Nonviolence is the preferred general term, rather than unviolence, which we might reserve as a feature of the ordinary mechanisms of democracy: voting, running for office, calling meetings, lobbying, writing letters to the media, rallying in public spaces, boycotts and, in the case of labor unions, strikes and picket lines at workplaces.  Nonviolence will include those things but it embraces actions that go beyond routine politics, actions that are illegal, such as sit-ins at segregated lunch counters or blocking the entrance to a military base, refusal to pay taxes or serve in the army when drafted, and ultimately a general strike.

            Those who call any violation of “law and order” a violent act seem not to know what violence is, or else they believe that by calling such an act violent they can frighten others away from sympathising with it.  (It is part of an old playbook, going back at least to the secret police of Tsarist Russia, to infiltrate agents into a peaceful opposition movement to make it seem violent.  This scheme is certainly taking place in today’s America, though so far without much success.  Nonviolent actions may well be disorderly, they may well cause inconvenience to people and even disruption of normal activities for a considerable time, but unless these actions put life and health at risk they may rightly be called nonviolent.  Just where to draw the line, of course, can sometimes be difficult, but nonviolence forbids weaponry or any attempt to physically harm another person.  If anyone gets hurt, or killed, it will be the activists, not their opponents.  Damage to public property is another matter, and needs to be debated case by case.

            Nonviolence is not pacifism, and that is so for at least two reasons.  Nonviolence is a set of practices or tactics to bring about serious social or political change; it is not a set of moral or religious beliefs.  We are indebted to religious pacifists such as Quakers and Mennonites, in the West at least, for some of our history of nonviolence, such as bearing moral witness or maintaining passive resistance, the latter phrase now rather dated and sounding confusingly like pacifism itself.  But nearly all the great nonviolent movements of the past have been carried out by people who were not pacifists.  Most of them would take up arms if they felt they had to, if a regime became genocidal, for instance, and many of them are military veterans, but they practice nonviolence because they think it is the most appropriate and effective way to change their country or city.  And indeed we now have enough data to demonstrate that, even if we compare campaigns as far-reaching as the overthrow of a government, nonviolence has a much better track record than violence.

            Nonviolence is not passive, then: it is very active.  It is certainly resistance, but it does not just wait passively for an occasion to say no; it seeks occasions.

            A common phrase, civil disobedience, is somewhat puzzling.  We are familiar with it in America as the kind of thing that black “civil rights” activists undertook in great numbers and with great discipline and dignity, when they lined up to register to vote, for example, and refused to disperse.  The word civil here can mislead, however, as one of its senses is “polite”; a few years ago there was much talk of “civility” and how to bring it back during a time of fierce political partisanship.  In a nonviolent action, disobedient or not, civility may be the right mode, but for many actions, such as large marches, impolite sarcasm and humorous insults may dominate the chants and signs.  Laughter, in fact, is one of the first weapons of nonviolence: it punctures the balloon of charisma or omnipotence around a leader.   

            Civil is sometimes a synonym for “civilian,” and it is related to “civic.”  Those associations are more apt for civil disobedience.  The root is Latin civis, which meant “citizen” (“city” comes from civitas, via French): civil disobedience is the disobedience of citizens.  Since “city” in ancient times was nearly identical in meaning to “state,” a civil war (bellum civile) was a war within a state between its citizens.  The American Civil War was one of immense violence; it was hardly civil (polite) or civilized until Grant let Lee keep his sword.  So amidst the sliding connotations of civil, we should keep in mind that it has to do with citizens and civilians, not professional soldiers or officials, though of course they may take part in nonviolent campaigns as well, outside their formal roles.  We might promote the phrase civil courage, too, which is current in Germany (Zivilcourage)

            Some participants in such campaigns, especially pacifists, dislike the “violence” they hear in some of the language often used to describe them.  Organizers consider strategies and tactics, advances and retreats, strikes, the element of surprise, misdirection, spying—terms all too familiar from the long dismal history of military warfare.  Campaign itself is such a term.  Even Gandhi talked that way: about a satyagraha campaign in India he said that “An able general always gives battle in his own time on the ground of his choice.  He always retains the initiative in these respects and never allows it to pass into the hands of the enemy.”  He spoke of soldiers and generals, swords and shields.  Martin Luther King used the same language.  Gene Sharp puzzled some readers of his magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), when he devoted several pages of it to distilling the wisdom of the great military theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Basil Liddell Hart.

            My advice to purists about the “violence” of nonviolent language is to take a step back and admire the beautiful irony in how nonviolent theory and practice are stealing ideas from the wretched warmakers and retooling them for a very different purpose.  We need every idea we can get.  Someday, perhaps, we might be able to describe everything we need to do as a kind of play or dance, or carpentry or horticulture, but until we arrive at that blessed state we can hardly avoid the warlike terms that even religious pacifists have long adopted. 

            Nonviolent activists in America may well feel they are at war with a tryannical regime.  They fight the war, however, with different weapons.

            I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.