One of the arguments that is being forwarded by proponents of military intervention in Libya is that Qaddafi is literally crazy and therefore cannot be reasoned with or expected to step down without force.
In an article for Tikkun, entitled “Libya: Acid Test for Nonviolence?,” Metta Center for Nonviolence president Michael Nagler, who I deeply respect and have personally learned a great deal from, makes an argument for war along these lines:
We in the nonviolence field will recognize this as a “madman with a sword” analogy. Gandhi said flatly that if a madman is raging through a village with a sword (read: assault rifle — or Glock Automatic) he who “dispatches the lunatic” will have done the community (and even the poor lunatic) a favor. Here are Gandhi’s exact words, from The Hindu, 1926:
Taking life may be a duty…. Suppose a man runs amok and goes furiously about, sword in hand, and killing anyone that comes in his way, and no one dares capture him alive. Anyone who dispatches this lunatic will earn the gratitude of the community and be regarded as a benevolent man.
Later in the piece, he goes on to say essentially that in this “acid test” for nonviolence, nonviolence has come up short.
Our options are very thin because we have not explored more creative options than brute force, which always operates after conflict has already flared. Military intervention is now the least bad solution from the point of view of nonviolence, but it is bad. What else is left to us?
To be honest, I was very disappointed to read this. Military intervention can by definition never be a solution from the point of view of nonviolence. Killing people is not nonviolent.
It has truly been amazing that so many progressives, even in the nonviolence world, have given up on nonviolence so quickly, especially on the heels of the incredible victories for nonviolent action in Tunisia and Egypt. Can anyone argue that Libyans or the international community really exhausted every nonviolent alternative in the last few weeks?
“People try nonviolence for a week,” as Theodore Roszak says, “and when it ‘doesn’t work’ they go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.”
To address Nagler’s argument more directly, however, there is a major flaw with the “madman with a sword” analogy that seriously undercuts its applicability to the conflict in Libya.
While I’m thankfully not in Qaddafi’s head, I don’t doubt that he could be crazy. And he has obviously proved to be willing to use great violence against his own people to hold on to power. But just because Qaddafi may be crazy doesn’t mean that those who are following him or carrying out his orders to use violence are crazy. In fact, I would bet that the vast majority are regular people who signed up to be a part of Qaddafi’s security apparatus because it was where they could find work.
This is true not only in Libya, but of the vast majority of folks who take up arms in any conflict, whether they be with the US military or the Taliban, as I was told by Afghans while I was in Afghanistan in December. As Srdja Popovic, one of the leaders of Otpor, the student-led movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, told Waging Nonviolence, we must remind ourselves that “policemen are just men in a police uniforms.”
The opposition in Libya, therefore, does not need to try to reach Qaddafi’s heart per se, but should be taking steps to create a wedge between him and his armed forces. If more of the security apparatus decided that it will not use force or follows orders, it wouldn’t matter how crazy Qaddafi is or how much blood he is personally willing to spill. He would not have the authority to carry out his will. This understanding of political power is basic to nonviolence.
The problem in Libya is that both the indigenous opposition and now the international community have turned to violence, which plays to Qaddafi’s strengths and has an incredibly poor track record in creating such defections within the opponents’ ranks. In On Killing, for example, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes that in World War II massive aerial bombings of cities were:
…surprisingly counterproductive in breaking the enemy’s will… Indeed, bombings seemed to have served primarily to harden the hearts and empower the killing ability of those who endured it.
As Otpor’s Popovic explains, the bombing of Serbia by NATO had a similar effect:
Attacking a country from the outside always results in rallying people around leadership. That happened during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, clearly strengthening Milosevic… So whoever in the US administration had the idea that bombing Serbia would weaken Milosevic was absolutely wrong. It only ended up hurting the country and its civilians. Even worse, Milosevic used it to attack and destroy whatever was left of the opposition under a state of emergency (martial law was proclaimed during the bombing!).
Why will the bombing of Libya be any different?
Nonviolent action, on the other hand, has proven to be the most effective way to divide repressive regimes’ security forces and ultimately dissolve their power. Nonviolent movements have brought down some of the most brutal dictators in the world over the last several decades, including Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Milosevic in Serbia and now Mubarak in Egypt, to name but a few.
All of these rulers clearly demonstrated that they had no qualms in taking the lives of their own people. Is Qaddafi so much more powerful than these other brutal regimes that nonviolent resistance would be futile? Why should he of all people be an exception?
This is an excellent article. Like you, I have been influenced in my thinking by Michael Nagler: I read his book “Is There No Other Way?” and listened to his classes on nonviolence on my iPod a few years back. There are many, many things wrong with our assault on Libya, and while I have no desire to have seen Quaddafi’s forces kill people in a civil war, I equally don’t wish to see anyone killed by American missiles and guns (or any missiles and guns!) There are a lot of other alternatives that could have been tried, including putting UN peacekeeping forces on the ground inbetween Quaddafi’s soldiers and the city they were vowing to destroy. Howard Zinn pointed out that war always, ALWAYS, has unpredictable consequences. By involving ourselves in yet another war, God only knows what will grow from this violence. As MLKJr. said, wars are poor chisels for carving peaceful tomorrows.
Michael
“UN peacekeeping forces on the ground inbetween Quaddafi’s soldiers and the city they were vowing to destroy”
By “UN peacekeeping forces” you are saying “largely US force with the blessing of the UN” No thank you. Libya is not in the US national interest, so we should not be there. If the Europeans want to protect economic interests in Libya, let them go right ahead.
I read the full article and there is more to what Nagler says, that a “nonviolent” military intervention has to be done without anger or fear, and that it can’t be viewed as solving the problem but only as the first step. He is skeptical that any intervention would be in this spirit so I don’t think he would support the way this action is being conducted. He also wrote this weeks ago, before the Western powers expanded the “no-fly zone” into bombing of tanks and taking sides. I learned about nonviolence from Nagler also, and I too am surprised/disappointed at the article, but I don’t think he has abandoned nonviolence.
Thanks for the comment Jim. I personally don’t think a military intervention can be done without anger or fear and that even if it could it wouldn’t really matter. As Fr. Daniel Berrigan wrote in response to priests who took up arms in Central America on behalf of the poor and claimed they were using violence and killing without hate: “this must be cold comfort to the dead.”
(Given what we’re now going through, the whole letter is really worth a read if you have the time: http://www.salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv6-5.html)
Yes Nagler did write it before the intervention, and he may not support the way it has been conducted, but he clearly endorses violence in this case.
And I totally agree that he hasn’t abandoned nonviolence, which he has clearly given his life to promoting.
Nagler’s reflexive support of a military intervention in Libya – which he refers to as an “extreme emergency” – highlights a major weakness in his theorizing on nonviolence. Given that we do not yet live “in a more nonviolence-aware world” (his words) it is imperative that revolutionary activists strive to fully familize themselves with the strengths and weaknesses of all the available options to bring an end to the escalating (extreme) violence of our capitalist world order.
Nagler suggests that his readers should: “Remember that the literal meaning of ahiṃsā (nonviolence) is actually ‘the absence of the desire to injure.’ In other words, if one really acts to protect and not to punish, one is being nonviolent even while using coercive force.”
A well-known critic of pacifism appears to share some common ground with this approach, as the critic counsels that: “in order to be effective and ultimately successful, any revolutionary movement within advanced capitalist nations must develop the broadest possible range of thinking/action by which to confront the state.” Thus to restate the point, this means that given that we don’t live in peaceful world, all humans must gain a familiarity with the potential uses of both violent and nonviolent strategies (with peaceful intent) for emancipatory social change – although Nagler’s own comments in his article confuse this issue somewhat.
Unfortunately: “The question central to the emergence and maintenance of nonviolence as the oppositional foundation of American activism has not been the truly pacifist formulation, ‘How can we forge a revolutionary politics within which we can avoid inflicting violence on others?’ On the contrary, a more accurate guiding question has been, ‘What sort of politics might I engage in which will both allow me to posture as a progressive and allow me to avoid incurring harm to myself?’ Hence, the trappings of pacifism have been subverted to establish a sort of ‘politics of the comfort zone’…”
Hence Nagler’s strange leap of faith in the “extreme” case of Libya.
In the case of Libya, another writer makes a more sane suggestion for where such radical interventionist activism might be directed (and the answer is not Libya):
“So what should we do? Rather than helping (however minor the help may be) to unleash destructive forces we do not control, we should be trying to hold our own leaders accountable for their crimes – in other words, get control over them. Among many other things, we need to put the arms manufacturers (overwhelmingly located in the self-proclaimed ‘civilized’ countries where we live) out of business. That is hardly a short term project. It’s a daunting task and there is an understandable appeal in getting behind polices (like a no-fly zone) that our governments are willing to do now. However, expanding the range of what our governments do to include civilized policies means we must not let the corporate media control what we think. Even when the corporate media fails to impose its worldview, it often succeeds in controlling what we think about, and in severely limiting our focus.”
Thanks for the article and comments. What is apparent to me is the vaccum of nonviolent strategies being promoted and tried, both before and after the ‘no fly zone’. I posted with peace friends on facebook, and as you say almost all have given up on nonviolence because Gaddafi is that so-called crazy villager. Perhaps at the village level where there truly is just one person involved the choice to use violent protective force is defensible, but you rightly highlight the complexity of a national context. I’ve appreciated WNV’s facebook conversation on what tactics could be used, but I feel very cautious posting anything of much substance. I’m too distant from the ground and living in rural Cambodia only have intermittent access to information. Yet think and propose we must or the military intervention becomes the only “rational and moral” option out there. Gandhi is also famous for saying that if you have a choice between violence and cowardice choose violence. Again, the context is too complex for this to excuse international intervention and there seems to be the obvious solidifying of allies behind Gaddafi in response to the bombings. Are there groups on the ground who know and use nonviolence in Libya? Surely. Are we the nonviolence community in communication with them? What realistic options can be promoted in the media using reasoning non experts can understand and “believe” in? How do we counter the Nazi / crazy man myths? What historic precedents can we look to to say, “this is a similar situation that successfully used nonviolence?” Is the call to a longer term plan for success enough and “moral”? And can we counter the fear-mongering of a new Darfur by groups like Avaaz.org who should know better than that? Peace groups speak out against the politics of fear, what are those same groups using fear to vote for violence in this situation? Is there something lacking in our nonviolent imagination or in our analysis of the specific situation?
But who are the rebels? Here is (gruesome – be warned)of the rebels interogating prisoners of Gaddafi`s army before “executing” them. The rebels portrayed Gaddafi`s “mercenaries” as the murderers and the Western media swallowed the lie whole. I now can`t believe any of the anti Gaddafi propaganda I read or see. I believe the rebels, far from being the mass of doctors and social workers portrayed in the West, are members of The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Check them out on google.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8POHluG86IU
This debate wouldn’t be complete without considering Juan Cole’s analysis posted today: http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/an-open-letter-to-the-left-on-libya.html His argument is persuasive to me, and in any event has to be answered by those who dismiss the utility of the intervention out of hand, or on the basis of anything other than pacifism (which Cole credits as a responsible position but nevertheless does not accept): “If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule…The arguments against international intervention are not trivial, but they all did have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds just exercising their right to peaceful assembly and to petition their government.” In short, Cole’s pragmatism about avoiding a greater loss of life absent intervention and supporting an authentic indigenous nonviolent resistance goes beyond Nagler’s exigent argument about removing a lunatic from the scene.
This at Democracy Now! between Juan Cole and Vijay Prashad.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/29/a_debate_on_us_military_intervention
Anyone who believes that the US military is capable of bringing about positive change in Libya needs to spend a week in Afghanistan. Seriously.
Nagler is naive. Cole is disingenuous.