Non-violent alternatives to military defence

In Germany in 1920 the military staged a coup against the elected government. The army seized control of the capital, Berlin, government officials fled the city, and a new regime was proclaimed. Then, however, there was a general strike: the entire workforce refused to go to work, massive rallies were held, trains and trams ceased running, electricity was cut off, and stores closed down. Typists refused to type the coup leaders’ proclamations and bank clerks refused to cash their cheques. After just five days, with the entire economy having ground to a halt, the coup leaders fled to Sweden and the army declared that it was now loyal to the elected government. Not a shot had been fired.

In 1944 in El Salvador the military had no trouble into putting down an armed anti-government revolt. Soon afterwards, however, there was a massive movement of non-violent resistance to the Salvadoran dictatorship.  A strike by university students was soon joined by high school students, then physicians, small business people, then large numbers of workers. Police shot and killed a protester, which led to massive rallies in the streets. The government dared not use troops – who were reliable in the face of a military revolt, but less so against mass non-violent resistance – against the crowds. Only six weeks after the beginning of the protest movement, the dictator, Martinez, fled the country.

In 1968 Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to bring the liberalisation of Communist rule there to a close. No military resistance was attempted, but instead there was a mass movement of non-violent resistance to te invasion. Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets to prevent the movement of troops. Non-cooperation with the invading forces was widespread, and troop morale was so low that soldiers had to be rotated every few days. The aim of the invasion had been to set up a puppet government, but this could not be achieved for eight months, as nobody could be found who would collaborate with the invaders. Even though ultimately successful in re-establishing Soviet control, the invasion backfired spectacularly on the USSR, discrediting its policies across the world and causing many foreign Communist parties to split from it.

Non-violent resistance

In each of these cases, attacks by an armed force, with an overwhelming superiority in guns, tanks, artillery, planes and troops, were defeated or greatly hindered by a completely unarmed group without the use of any violence. This points to an essential, yet almost totally ignored, dynamic in relations between ruler and ruled: that no ruler, no matter how awesome the means of violent control in their hands, can rule without the passive cooperation of the majority of the population - employers can’t run workplaces by themselves when all the staff stop obeying them; university administrations would be helpless if students and academics refused to cooperate; governments would crumble if large numbers of people refused to pay tax. Violence can effectively be used against small groups of resisters, but if the whole population stops obeying, it’s simply impossible to kill all of them and keep everyone under control at once.

So when this does happen – when employees go on strike and stop working, when students boycott classes and occupy buildings, when populations stop cooperating en masse with their governments – the results for those in power are usually terminal: their power, built on the obedience of all the people under them, crumbles. It doesn’t have to be blown up or attacked violently – it can just be non-violently taken away.

There are plenty of examples of this dynamic at work in Australian history. In the 1970s in Sydney, workers in the construction industry placed “Green Bans” on historically or environmentally significant buildings or sites that were scheduled for demolition. With almost 100% of the workforce united in the NSW Builders’ Labourers’ Federation and refusing to go to work on these demolition projects, it simply proved impossible to carry them out – no-one could be found to perform the work, and hundreds of sites around Sydney (the Botanic Gardens, for instance, part of which was due to be turned into a carpark) were spared from destruction. Similarly during the Vietnam War, so many people refused to cooperate with draft laws that conscription became impossible to enforce - draft-dodgers eventually stopped being prosecuted and the laws were repealed. 

Similarly, it’s inconceivable that Australia could be successfully invaded if the whole population refused to cooperate with the invaders and the economy came to a halt, as happened in Czecholslovakia. (Even so, the army’s own Defence 2000 white paper admits that “a full scale invasion of Australia… is the least likely military contingency Australia might face. No country has either the intent or the ability to undertake such a massive task.”)

To advocate non-violent resistance isn’t to suggest that people should not defend themselves from a knife attack in the street at night, or from domestic violence. Rather, non-violent resistance is primarily an effective weapon for attacking institutions, which depend on the cooperation of large numbers of people underneath them. By simply withdrawing from that relationship of cooperation and obedience, the institution can be defeated, and so largescale violence is not required. So non-violent resistance is merely a tactic for attacking a certain kind of target, not a universal way of life. 

Advantages of non-violent resistance

Resisting authority through the massive use of non-violence and non-cooperation has a large number of advantages over more violent techniques.

The most obvious is, as plainly suggested by its title, the general lack of largescale violence, death and destruction. The use of violence against clearly peaceful and non-violent groups of people can generate enormous outrage and backlash against the attacker, discrediting them and often causing large numbers of previously neutral people to support the non-violent party. In 1991, for instance, the Indonesian army gunned down hundreds of peaceful independence protesters in East Timor. Instead of intimidating people, the massacre led to a huge increase in support for the independence movement both in East Timor and overseas.

If activists use violence, on the other hand, it can often legitimise the use of violence against them on a vastly larger scale. Thus the British were forced to minimise violence against the largely non-violent Indian independence movement lest they outrage world opinion, but when, a few years later, the Kenyan independence movement began a guerilla war against the occupying British, the British waged a brutally violent military campaign against them, killing hundreds of thousands but appearing more legitimate and less outrageous in the public eye because both sides were using violence. Furthermore, members of the aggressors’ forces are far more likely to defect or mutiny when their lives are not being threatened – the first wave of Soviet troops sent to invade Czechoslovakia had to be rotated back home after only a  few days, so successful were Czech attempts to win them over through peaceful fraternisation. 

Non-violent resistance is also far more democratic than violence. Instead of being restricted to young, fit men, non-violence can include women, the elderly, people with disabilities and children. Instead of being highly secretive like military planning, non-violence can be organised quite openly. And instead of being organised exclusively by government and military elites, non-violence can be organised by the whole population, in a manner involving everybody.

This last point also suggests something fundamental about the nature of non-violent resistance: no authorities, from local employers up to national governments, want anyone to realise that the power of rulers is dependent on the cooperation of the ruled.  No authorities want those that they control to become better protesters. If governments were to disarm their militaries and instead instruct the population on means of non-violently resisting invasion through strikes, boycotts, rallies and the like, then they would undermine their own power, because exactly the same tactics can then be used against them. Governments have a vested interest in ensuring that their citizens don’t become effective in tactics of non-violent resistance. And furthermore, no government is going to disarm when armies are so useful – not just for extending and defending their power against other governments, but for defending their power from their own citizens, as we’ve seen in Australia when troops have been used against strikers, and as we’ve just recently seen in the Middle East where armies are being used by governments to kill hundreds of their own citizens. It may well be that peace is incompatible with the existence of corporate and government power itself…

UOW academic Brian Martin has produced a large literature on the subject of mass non-violence. His writings can be found at http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/peace.html