Not surprisingly, the conservative National Review does not get what nonviolence is all about. In a commentary on the killing by Syrian security forces of Ghiyath Matar—a young activist nicknamed “little Gandhi,” who pioneered the tactic of handing out flowers and water to soldiers—Mark Krikorian writes that his death “highlight[s] the limits of nonviolent resistance.”
I have a couple issues with his analysis, if you can call it that. First, while it’s tragic that Matar was killed, his death doesn’t show the limits of nonviolence. The fact is that people die in nonviolent struggle, just as they die—almost always in far greater numbers—in violent conflict. To really illustrate the hypocrisy here: Would Krikorian argue that every US soldier that’s killed shows the “limits of war or violence?” I highly doubt it.
What Matar’s death shows is that nonviolent struggle requires sacrifice and it may highlight the need for the Syrian opposition to consider shifting to tactics of dispersion, like strikes and boycotts, that would be more difficult for the security forces to repress.
Loved the quick and dirty analysis.
Great post, very important, vastly misunderstood. To fail to understand this very simple, readily available point shows up the importance of the work of developing the prima facies concerning nonviolence. In other words, while it’s distasteful to say that the NR should understand this, they should. The nature and conditions of these prima facies — that is, the idea that a certain truth is already available to us if we are able simply to think — are themselves infinite issues concerning the truth of nonviolence, for which an infinite spinning, like the infinitized nonviolence that endures beyond a given actor, remains possible. I refer to spinning with reference to Gandhiji’s “spinning”, albeit in another sense: a spinning of a text(ile) of truth, which your post here has done quite nicely in few words. I would invite you to spin with me in words sometime should you like. You may find it interesting.