re: #246 wrenchwench

One could argue that non-violent protest is most (or only) effective when met with violence. And the violence has to be met with general outrage by the larger population that can make the change desired.

Go back to Gandhi himself espousing his concept of the Independence movement. Counter-protest violence was expected, and the discipline of the protestors was to neither defend themselves or back down.

Then again, the Mahatma’s specific ideas were a response to how the British tended to present their governance of colonial subjects: as stern but parental, and ultimately in the service of the interests of the colonized. The Satyagraha was quite explicitly built to show the lie of this claim: the issues addressed were not about the betterment of Indians, but the commerce flow between the subcontinent and Britain; since there was no violence, there could be no claim from the Raj that retaliatory actions were necessary as peace-keeping (as they did with both revolts and terrorism); and, most bitingly, the organization of the movement countered British claims that the peoples of Indian were neither civilized nor cohesive, and required an outside agent to maintain them.

Compare this to the rationalizations of Southern racism and Jim Crow, and one understands why Thurman and Rustin, and later King and his allies, saw something powerful in Gandhi’s ideas.

The flip side of this, though, is the critique of Gandhi’s very rigid position about nonviolence: there are contextual factors that color violence and oppression such that the violent force will not empathize with those suffering. Ergo, your passive resisters might not only all die, but also the moral force of their death would have missed its mark and achieved nothing.