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Against Civil Disobedience |
Current rating: -3 |
by Jim Senyszyn
Email: jnsenyszyn (nospam) insightbb.com (unverified!) |
24 Aug 2003
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Peace activists must scrap their "aggressive strategy of sit-ins and social disruptions". Instead they should insist that plans be realistic and not engage in civil disobedience
fantasies. |
Sunday, August 24, 2003
Re: Against civil disobedience
Dear fellow peace activist,
Peace activists must scrap their "aggressive strategy of sit-ins and social disruptions". Instead they should insist that plans be realistic and not engage in civil disobedience
fantasies.
The Vietnam War dragged on 17 years due to the public's hostility toward brash and trashy tactics used by protesters. U.S. public opinion turned against the war in 1968 but the war lasted 7 more years during which most of its casualties and fatalities occurred. Opinion research showed that the public hated the demonstrators more than they hated the war.
Only after electoral efforts drove Johnson out of office in 1968 (he decided not to run again the weekend before the Wisconsin primary for which McCarthyites had done a thorough door-to-door canvass) and the McGovern nomination in 1972 demonstrated enough grassroots electoral strength for peace in many districts throughout the country, did Democratic congresspeople see the handwriting on the wall, fear for their own seats, and the House Democratic caucus voted to cut off funds for the Vietnam War after which Nixon signed the peace treaty.
Civil disobedience was a tremendous drain on peace movement resources: bail funds, legal fees, fines, court appearances, time in prison (instead of organizing on the outside), and, worst of all, the stigma in the public's eye of criminality and sabotage. It royally pissed off academics who had their offices occupied and ransacked--- launching the notorious "neo-conservative" movement.
Even today, the legal fees and fines for the 800 arrested March 20, 2003 in Chicago for blocking Lake Shore Drive, assuming at least $100 per person, wou1d amount to $80,000 as a lowball estimate. Instead, that could have easily have paid for full page ads in all three major Chicago newspapers explaining opposition to the war and more effectively have gotten the word out.
Furthermore, civil disobedience gives police and the military an excuse for exercising brutality against demonstrators. It turns off potential protestors for fear of being beaten up or getting arrested and thus significantly diminishes our numbers.
Also, "sit-ins" provide a bad example as a role model. They imply that sitting on your ass accomplishes something. During the Vietnam War one of my weekly columns in a daily university student newspaper had a headline, "Off Your Asses!"
Body blocking tactics may be suitable when you have only illiterate peasants to work with. But people who can read and write, and express themselves can do much more convincing work with canvassing, writing, distributing literature, speakers bureau outreach, and public access television shows to debunk lies. Bodies seem like a very crude instrument to me which can easily be circumvented and even perverted, witness the recent revelations that the CIA used "human shield" agents equipped with sensitive communications equipment to locate military targets in Iraq for the U.S.. Also, the revelations that the top echelons of the Iraqi military who were on the take from the CIA used "suicide raids" as a way to eliminate the most dedicated and spirited potential members of any possible
Iraqi resistance. Similarly the best, most spirited members of the peace movement are being siphoned off into ridiculous kami-kazi civil disobedience tactics.
Importantly other means of influencing public opinion have not been exercised: letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, calling in to radio talk shows, leafletting, tabling, "lit-dropping" door-to-door, body boarding with "sandwich" signs, buttons and bumper stickers, t-shirts, buying an ad in the newspaper, radio advertising, buying billboard advertising, phone banking, speakers bureau outreach, producing public access television programs, etc. Civil disobedience is a flashy short circuit around these other
more mundane and menial avenues of protest.
Many times protest organizers have failed to notify the press in advance to obtain coverage or failed to do "advance work" themselves to get the word out about an event and then blame "the system" which was supposed to do their work for them. Oftentimes they have only themselves to blame for their failures. Sometimes I have even felt that they cynically want to fail and are inveterate losers.
Don't be fooled by Trotskytes and anarchists who couldn't care less about the war and only see it as a great on-going recruitment gimmick with civil disobedience as a manipulative technique to "radicalize" people into the revolutionaries that they are looking for.
And, of course, the religious nutjobs are just itching to practice their useless religious symbolism and exercise their Christian martyr syndromes.
In the sixties the Ford Foundation paid air fare and living expenses of radicals from Berkeley to purvey such useless tactics across the country. On the campus I was at the Berkeley radicals were worshipped--- "they are so smart, they are from Berkeley." To which I replied, " Well if they are so smart since they are from Berkeley, how come they have Reagan for a governor?"
Jim Senyszyn
Peoria, IL
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