“Yes, nonviolence is a noble ideal, but do you really think it would stop a Hitler?” Or a street thug, a dictator, a death squad?
Pacifists are long accustomed to these questions, mostly thrown up by self-proclaimed realists. And they get the put-down message: Nonviolence is a creed only slightly less trifling than hippies sticking flowers in soldiers’ gun barrels.
Readers whose minds are open to another view will be rewarded by A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. It is a comprehensive and lucidly written addition to the literature of peace. Its worthiness puts the authors, Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, in the high company of Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, Michael True of Assumption College and Richard Deats of the Fellowship of Reconciliation–all scholars of mettle who bring before the public the many historical examples where the force of organized, nonviolent resistance defeated oppression.
Ackerman and DuVall, deserving of praise for writing nonideologically when they might easily and self-indulgently not have (and thus lost readers looking for hard reporting rather than soft commentary), use fourteen chapters to document and analyze history-altering reforms created by nonviolent strategies. These include the early 1940s Danish resistance to the Nazis; Solidarity’s strikes in the 1980s, which eventually took down the Soviet puppet regime in Poland; the 1980s public demands for free elections that removed the Pinochet junta in Chile; the near-bloodless elimination of the Marcos government in the Philippines; the work of the Palestinian-American Mubarak Awad to rally nonviolent civil resistance against Israeli authorities in the occupied territories; and civil rights workers in Nashville in the 1960s.
These are the better-known examples. Ackerman and DuVall also explore the removal of autocratic governments in El Salvador (in 1944), Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Oddly, the authors omit the story of Le Chambon, the French village that was a leading center for hiding Jews in the early 1940s and whose pacifist citizens successfully faced down the Nazis with weapons of the spirit, not weapons of steel. (That story is told by Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.)
Ackerman and DuVall do not portray Awad, King Christian X of Denmark, Gandhi of India, Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, Reverend James Lawson of Nashville and others as willing martyrs for the cause. Instead, they were hard-thinking political strategists who built bases for citizen support that would not crack when the heat rose and the dogs snarled.
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“Nonviolent resistance,” the authors write,
becomes a force more powerful than the hand of an oppressor to the extent that it takes away his capacity for control. Embracing nonviolence for its own sake does not produce this force. A strategy for action is needed, and that strategy has to involve attainable goals, movement unity, and robust sanctions that restrict the opponent…. When the regime realizes it can no longer dictate the outcome, the premise and means of its power implode. Then the end is only a matter of time.
Debunking the prevailing image of pacifists as appeasers or well-meaning but addled dreamers who’ve read one too many biographies of St. Francis, Ackerman and DuVall provide ample details to dispel those errant notions. As portrayed here, organizers of successful collective, nonviolent opposition to oppressors tend to be self-disciplined, practical and dogged–traits commonly held up as military virtues, which is why Gandhi so admired soldiers. The authors write:
Nonviolent action is like violent combat in at least two ways. It does not succeed automatically, and it does not operate mysteriously–it works by identifying an opponent’s vulnerabilities and taking away his ability to maintain control. If a regime intends to remain in power indefinitely, it will require extensive, long-term interaction with those it rules–and that creates a dilemma: the broader the regime’s system of control, the more vulnerable it is, because it depends on too many actors to ensure that violence against resisters will always work. Once an opposition shows its followers that this weakness exists, it can begin to pry loose the support that the regime requires–its revenue, its foreign investments, or even its military…. Victory is not a function of fate; it is earned.
Tolstoy described pacifists similarly: “For us to struggle, the forces being so unequal, must appear insane. But if we consider our opponent’s means of strife and our own, it is not our intention to fight that will seem absurd, but that the thing we mean to fight will still exist. They have millions of money and millions of obedient soldiers; we have only one thing, but that is the most powerful thing in the world–Truth.”
Peter Ackerman, formerly a visiting scholar at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and Jack DuVall, who has worked in television and as a political speechwriter, also collaborated, along with producer Steve York, in a three-hour PBS documentary of the same title that played last September. The film quotes a postwar historian summarizing the Danish resistance to the Nazis by strikes, work slowdowns, hiding or helping Jews and not obeying orders to disperse: “Denmark had not won the war but neither had it been defeated or destroyed. Most Danes had not been brutalized, by the Germans or each other. Nonviolent resistance saved the country and contributed more to the Allied victory than Danish arms ever could have done.”
A Chilean leader said of the organized resistance against Pinochet in the 1980s and the successful call for fair elections: “We didn’t protest with arms. That gave us more power.”
Refreshingly, the authors offer compelling observations–almost as sidenotes–about the ineffectiveness of violence. Lech Walesa and Polish strikers taking on the Jaruzelski regime remembered that except for momentary glee nothing was accomplished by Polish workers in 1970 and 1976 when they burned down Communist Party buildings. “In the 20th century’s armed liberation movements,” Ackerman and DuVall write, “portraits of gunwielding martyrs–the Che Guevaras of the world–were often flaunted as symbols, but none of those struggles produced freedom.”
A Force More Powerful will likely stand as a book more powerful than any guts-and-glory war memoirs by generals or gun-toters, or any extollings of military might by one-note historians.
