Violent political protest works
Violent political protest works
3/17/2019
The mass protests against Donald Trump’s executive actions might subside – but based on the scale and intensity of what’s already happened, there’s probably more to come.
So far, most protesters have limited themselves to marching, placard-waving, and other “peaceful” methods. There has, however, been some violence, and some demonstrators have adopted “disruptive” methods that fall somewhere between the purely peaceful and clearly violent. Obstructing access to airport terminals or blocking highways, for instance, needn’t involve violence, but such tactics can all too easily be reframed in ways that can turn public attitudes against them. This in turn could help legitimise legal sanctions against protesters.
Because disruptive methods are ambiguous and vulnerable to political manipulation, difficult questions are never far away – and one of the thorniest is the question of what the word “violence” actually refers to.
There is a question to answer: even if violence is defined as the intentional infliction of physical harm against people or property, is it always absolutely unacceptable for protesters to commit acts of violence?
It is a mistake to overstate the case against violence. For one thing, the claim that violence is never permissible under any circumstances probably isn’t true – at least not if you’re committed to the sort of liberal, republican, and democratic ideas that the US’s founding fathers believed in.
Modern democratic thought has long held that individuals have a right to resist and rebel against tyrannical government and political injustices, and that defeating these great social evils may sometimes demand the resort to armed force.
Thomas Paine wrote in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, when struggling to defend rights against tyranny, “it is the violence which is done and threatened to our persons … which conscientiously qualifies the use of arms”.
This was the argument Nelson Mandela made to justify the ANC’s use of sabotage: given the intensity of popular anger and outrage in South Africa, he said, the question wasn’t whether violence would occur, but how to guide it. United States under Trump certainly crossed that point.
Emily
shared this idea