PACIFISM AS PATHOLOGY: notes on an american psuedopraxis

ward churchill

It is the obligation of every person who claims to oppose oppression to resist the oppressor by every means at his or her disposal. Not to engage in physical resistance, armed resistance to oppression, is to serve the interests of the oppressor; no more, no less. There are no exceptions to the rule, no easy out. . . - Assata Shakur, 1984

Pacifism, the ideology of nonviolent political action, has become axiomatic and all but universal among the more progressive elements of contemporary mainstream North America. With a jargon ranging from a peculiar mishmash of borrowed or fabricated pseudospiritualism to "Gramscian" notions of prefigurative socialization, pacifism appears as the common denominator linking otherwise disparate "white dissident" groupings. Always, it promises that the harsh realities of state power can be transcended via good feelings and purity of purpose rather than by self-defense and resort to combat.

Pacifists, with seemingly endless repetition, pronounce that the negativity of the modern corporate-fascist state will atrophy through defection and neglect once there is a sufficiently positive social vision to take its place ("What if they gave a war and nobody came?"). Known in the Middle Ages as alchemy, such insistence on the repetition of insubstantial themes and failed experiments to obtain a desired result has long been consigned to the realm of fantasy, discarded by all but the most wishful or cynical (who use it to manipulate people).[1]

I don't deny the obviously admirable emotional content of the pacifist perspective. Surely we can all agree that the world should become a place of cooperation, peace, and harmony. Indeed, it would be nice if everything would just get better while nobody got hurt, including the oppressor who (temporarily and misguidedly) makes everything bad. Emotional niceties, however, do not render a viable politics. As with most delusions designed to avoid rather than confront unpleasant truths (Lenin's premise that the sort of state he created would wither away under "correct conditions" comes to mind),[2] the pacifist fantasy is inevitably doomed to failure by circumstance.

Even the most casual review of twentieth-century history reveals the graphic contradictions of the pacifist posture, the costs of its continued practice and its fundamental ineffectiveness in accomplishing its purported transformative mission.[3] Nonetheless, we are currently beset by "nonviolent revolutionary leaders" who habitually revise historical fact as a means of offsetting their doctrine's glaring practical deficiencies, and by the spectacle of expressly pacifist organizations claiming (apparently in all seriousness) to be standing "in solidarity" with practitioners of armed resistance in Central America, Africa, and elsewhere.[4]

Despite its inability to avert a revitalized militarism in the United States, the regeneration of overt racism, and a general rise in native fascism, pacifism - the stuff of the spent mass movements of the '60s - not only continues as the normative form of "American activism," but seems to have recently experienced a serious resurgence.[5] The purpose here is to examine the pacifist phenomenon briefly in both its political and psychological dimensions, with an eye toward identifying the relationship between a successful reactionary order on the one hand, and a pacifist domestic opposition on the other.

like lambs to the slaughter

I have never been able to bring myself to trust anyone who claims to have saved a Jew from the SS. The fact is that the Jews were not saved . . . no one took the steps necessary to save them, even themselves. — Simon Weisenthal, 1967

Pacifism possesses a sublime arrogance in its implicit assumption that its adherents can somehow dictate the terms of struggle in any contest with the state.[6] Such a supposition seems unaccountable in view of the actual record of passive/nonviolent resistance to state power. Although a number of examples can be mustered with which to illustrate this point — including Buddhist resistance to U.S. policies in Indochina, and the sustained efforts made to terminate white supremacist rule in southern Africa — none seems more appropriate than the Jewish experience in Hitlerian Germany (and later in the whole of occupied Europe).

The record is quite clear that, while a range of pacifist forms of countering the implications of nazism occurred within the German Jewish community during the 1930s, they offered virtually no physical opposition to the consolidation of the nazi state.[7] To the contrary, there is strong evidence that orthodox Jewish leaders counseled "social responsibility" as the best antidote to nazism, while crucial political formulations such as the zionist Hagana and Mossad el Aliyah Bet actually seem to have attempted to co-opt the nazi agenda for their own purposes, entering into cooperative relations with the SS Jewish Affairs Bureau, and trying to use forced immigration of Jews as a pretext for establishing a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine.[8]

All of this was apparently done in an effort to manipulate the political climate in Germany - by "not exacerbating conditions" and "not alienating the German people any further" - in a manner more favorable to Jews than the Nazis were calling for.9 In the end, of course, the Nazis imposed the "final solution to the Jewish question," but by then the dynamics of passive resistance were so entrenched in the Jewish Zeitgeist (the Nazis having been in power a full decade) that a sort of passive accommodation prevailed. Jewish leaders took their people, quietly and nonviolently, first into the ghettos, and then onto trains "evacuating" them to the east. Armed resistance was still widely held to be "irresponsible."[10]

Eventually, the SS could count upon the brunt of the Nazi liquidation policy being carried out by the Sonderkommandos, which were composed of the Jews themselves. It was largely Jews who dragged the gassed bodies of their exterminated people to the crematoria in death camps such as Auschwitz/Birkenau, each motivated by the desire to prolong his own life. Even this became rationalized as "resistance"; the very act of surviving was viewed as "defeating" the Nazi program.[11] By 1945, Jewish passivity and nonviolence in the face of the Weltanschauung der untermenschen had done nothing to prevent the loss of millions of lives.[12]

The phenomenon sketched above must lead to the obvious question: "[How could] millions of men [sic] like us walk to their death without resistance?"[13] In turn, the mere asking of the obvious has spawned a veritable cottage industry among Jewish intellectuals, each explaining how it was that "the process" had left the Jewish people "no choice" but to go along, to remain passive, to proceed in accordance with their aversion to violence right up to the doors of the crematoria - and beyond.[14] From this perspective, there was nothing truly lacking in the Jewish performance; the Jews were simply and solely blameless victims of a genocidal system over which it was quite impossible for them to extend any measure of control.[15]

The Jews having suffered horribly under nazi rule,[16] it has come to be considered in exceedingly poor taste - "antisemitic," according to the logic of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith - to suggest that there was indeed something very wrong with the nature of the Jewish response to nazism, that the mainly pacifist forms of resistance exhibited by the Jewish community played directly into the hands of their executioners.[17] Objectively, there were alternatives, and one need not look to the utterances of some "lunatic fringe" to find them articulated.

Even such a staid and conservative political commentator as Bruno Bettelheim, a former concentration camp inmate, has offered astute analysis of the role of passivity and nonviolence in amplifying the magnitude of the Holocaust. Regarding the single known instance in which inmates physically revolted at Auschwitz, he observes that:

In the single revolt of the twelfth Sonderkommando, seventy SS were killed, including one commissioned officer and seventeen noncommissioned officers; one of the crematoria was totally destroyed and another severely damaged. True, all eight hundred and fifty-three of the kommando died. But. . . the one Sonderkommando which revolted and took such a heavy toll of the enemy did not die much differently than all the other Sonderkommandos.[18]

Aside from pointing out that the Jews had literally nothing to lose (and quite a lot to gain in terms of human dignity) by engaging in open revolt against the SS, Bettelheim goes much further, noting that such actions both in and outside the death camps stood a reasonable prospect of greatly impeding the extermination process.[19] He states flatly that even individualized armed resistance could have made the Final Solution a cost-prohibitive proposition for the Nazis:

There is little doubt that the [Jews], who were able to provide themselves with so much, could have provided themselves with a gun or two had they wished. They could have shot down one or two of the SS men who came for them. The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the police state.[20]

Returning to the revolt of the twelfth Sonderkommando, Bettelheim observes that:

They did only what we should expect all human beings to do; to use their death, if they could not save their lives, to weaken or hinder the enemy as much as possible; to use even their doomed selves for making extermination harder, or maybe impossible, not a smooth running process ... If they could do it, so could others. Why didn't they? Why did they throw their lives away instead of making things hard for the enemy? Why did they make a present of their very being to the SS instead of to their families, their friends, even to their fellow prisoners[?] [21]

_Rebellion could only have saved either the life they were going to lose anyway, or the lives of others. . . . Inertia it was that led millions of Jews into the ghettos the SS had created for them. It was inertia that made hundreds of thousands of Jews sit home, waiting for their executioners._[22]

Bettelheim describes this inertia, which he considers the basis for Jewish passivity in the face of genocide, as being grounded in a profound desire for "business as usual," the following of rules, the need to not accept reality or to act upon it. Manifested in the irrational belief that in remaining "reasonable and responsible," unobtrusively resisting by continuing "normal" day-to-day activities proscribed by the nazis through the Nuremberg Laws and other infamous legislation, and "not alienating anyone," this attitude implied that a more-or-less humane Jewish policy might be morally imposed upon the nazi state by Jewish pacifism itself.[23]

Thus, Bettelheim continues:

_The persecution of the Jews was aggravated, slow step by slow step, when no violent fighting back occurred. It may have been Jewish acceptance, without retaliatory fight, of ever harsher discrimination and degradation that first gave the SS the idea that they could be gotten to the point where they would walk into the gas chambers on their own . . . [I]n the deepest sense, the walk to the gas chamber was only the last consequence of the philosophy of business as usual.[24]_

Given this, Bettelheim can do little else but conclude (correctly) that the post-war rationalization and apologia for the Jewish response to nazism serves to "stress how much we all wish to subscribe to this business as usual philosophy, and forget that it hastens our own destruction ... to glorify the attitude of going on with business as usual, even in a holocaust."[25]

an essential contradiction

have no intention of being a good Jew, led into the ovens like some sheep . . . - Abbie Hoffman, 1969

The example of the Jews under nazism is, to be sure, extreme. History affords us few comparable models by which to assess the effectiveness of nonviolent opposition to state policies, at least in terms of the scale and rapidity with which consequences were visited upon the passive. Yet it is precisely this extremity which makes the example useful; the Jewish experience reveals with stark clarity the basic illogic at the very core of pacifist conceptions of morality and political action.[26]

Proponents of nonviolent political "praxis" are inherently placed in the position of claiming to meet the armed might of the state via an asserted moral superiority attached to the renunciation of arms and physical violence altogether. It follows that the state has demonstrated, a priori, its fundamental immorality/illegitimacy by arming itself in the first place. A certain psychological correlation is typically offered wherein the "good" and "positive" social vision (Eros) held by the pacifist opposition is posed against the "bad" or "negative" realities (Thanatos) evidenced by the state. The correlation lends itself readily to "good versus evil" dichotomies, fostering a view of social conflict as a morality play.[27]

There can be no question but that there is a superficial logic to the analytical equation thus established. The Jews in their disarmed and passive resistance to German oppression during the '30s and '40s were certainly "good"; the nazis - as well-armed as any group in history up to that point – might undoubtedly be assessed as a force of unmitigated "evil."[28] Such binary correlations might also be extended to describe other sets of historical forces: Gandhi's Indian Union (good) versus troops of the British Empire (evil) and Martin Luther King's nonviolent Civil Rights Movement (good) versus a host of Klansmen and Southern cracker police (evil) offer ready examples. In each case, the difference between them can be (and often is) attributed to the relative willingness/unwillingness of the opposing sides to engage in violence. And, in each case, it can be (and has been) argued that good ultimately overcame the evil it confronted, achieving political gains and at least temporarily dissipating a form of social violence. To the extent that Eichmann was eventually tried in Jerusalem for his part in the genocide of the Jewish people, that India has passed from the control of England, and that Mississippi blacks can now register to vote with comparative ease, it may be (and is) contended that there is a legacy of nonviolent political success informing the praxis of contemporary pacifism.[29]

It becomes quite possible for sensitive, refined, and morally developed individuals to engage in socially transformative political action while rejecting violence (per se) as a means or method containing a positive as well as negative utility. The ideological assumption here is that a sort of "negation of the negation" is involved, that the "power of nonviolence" can in itself be used to supplant the offending societal violence represented in the formation of state power. The key to the whole is that it has been done, as the survival of at least some of the Jews, the decolonization of India, and the enfranchisement of Southern American blacks demonstrate.[30]

This tidy scheme, pleasing as it may be on an emotional level, brings up more questions than it answers. An obvious question is that if nonviolence is to be taken as the emblem of Jewish goodness in the face of nazi evil, how is one to account for the revolt of the twelfth Sonderkommando mentioned by Bettelheim, or scattered incidents of the same type which occurred at other death camps such as Sobibor and Treblinka.[31] What of the several thousand participants in the sole mass uprising of Jews outside the camps, the armed revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto during April and May 1943?[32] May it rightly be suggested that those who took up arms against their executioners crossed the same symbolic line demarcating good and evil, becoming "the same" as the SS?[33]

One may assume for the moment that such a gross distortion of reality is hardly the intent of even the hardiest pacifist polemicists, although it may well be an intrinsic aspect of their position. Worse than this is the inconsistency of nonviolent premises. For instance, it has been abundantly documented that Nazi policy toward the Jews, from 1941 onward, was bound up in the notion that extermination would proceed until such time as the entire Jewish population within German occupied territory was liquidated.[34] There is no indication whatsoever that nonviolent intervention/mediation from any quarter held the least prospect of halting, or even delaying, the genocidal process. To the contrary, there is evidence that efforts by neutral parties such as the Red Cross had the effect of speeding up the slaughter.[35]

That the Final Solution was halted at a point short of its full realization was due solely to the massive application of armed force against Germany (albeit for reasons other than the salvation of the Jews). Left to a pacifist prescription for the altering of offensive state policies, and the effecting of positive social change, "World Jewry" - at least in its Eurasian variants - would have suffered total extermination by mid-1946 at the latest. Even the highly symbolic trial of SS Colonel Adolph Eichmann could not be accomplished by nonviolent means, but required armed action by an Israeli paramilitary unit fifteen years after the last death camp was closed by Russian tanks.[36] There is every indication that adherence to pacifist principles would have resulted in Eichmann's permanent avoidance of justice, living out his life in reasonable comfort until - to paraphrase his own assessment — he leapt into the grave laughing at the thought of having killed six million Jews.[37] With reference to the Jewish experience, nonviolence was a catastrophic failure, and only the most extremely violent intervention by others saved Europe's Jews at the last moment from slipping over the brink of utter extinction. Small wonder that the survivors insist, "Never again!"

While other examples are less crystalline in their implications, they are instructive. The vaunted career of Gandhi exhibits characteristics of a calculated strategy of nonviolence salvaged only by the existence of violent peripheral processes.[38] While it is true that the great Indian leader never deviated from his stance of passive resistance to British colonization, and that in the end England found it cost-prohibitive to continue its effort to assert control in the face of his opposition, it is equally true that the Gandhian success must be viewed in the context of a general decline in British power brought about by two world wars within a thirty-year period.[39]

Prior to the decimation of British troop strength and the virtual bankruptcy of the Imperial treasury during World War II, Gandhi's movement showed little likelihood of forcing England's abandonment of India. Without the global violence that destroyed the Empire's ability to forcibly control its colonial territories (and passive populations), India might have continued indefinitely in the pattern of minority rule marking the majority of South Africa's modern history, the first locale in which the Gandhian recipe for liberation struck the reef of reality.[40] Hence, while the Mahatma and his followers were able to remain "pure," their victory was contingent upon others physically gutting their opponents for them.

Similarly, the limited success attained by Martin Luther King and his disciples in the United States during the 1960s, using a strategy consciously guided by Gandhian principles of nonviolence, owes a considerable debt to the existence of less pacifist circumstances. King's movement had attracted considerable celebrity, but precious little in the way of tangible political gains prior to the emergence of a trend signaled in 1967 by the redesignation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; more or less the campus arm of King's Civil Rights Movement) as the Student National Coordinating Committee.[41]

The SNCC's action (precipitated by non-pacifists such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown) occurred in the context of armed self-defense tactics being employed for the first time by rural black leaders such as Robert Williams, and the eruption of black urban enclaves in Detroit, Newark, Watts, Harlem, and elsewhere. It also coincided with the increasing need of the American state for internal stability due to the unexpectedly intense and effective armed resistance mounted by the Vietnamese against U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia.[42]

Suddenly King, previously stonewalled and redbaited by the establishment, his roster of civil rights demands evaded or dismissed as being "too radical" and "premature," found himself viewed as the lesser of evils by the state.[43] He was duly anointed the "responsible black leader" in the media, and his cherished civil rights agenda was largely incorporated into law during 1968 (along with appropriate riders designed to neutralize "Black Power Militants" such as Carmichael, Brown, and Williams.)[44] Without the specter, real or perceived, of a violent black revolution at large in America during a time of war, King's nonviolent strategy was basically impotent in concrete terms. As one of his Northern organizers, William Jackson, put it to me in 1969:

There are a lot of reasons why I can't get behind fomenting violent actions like riots, and none of 'em are religious. It's all pragmatic politics. But I'll tell you what: I never let a riot slide by. I'm always the first one down at city hall and testifying before Congress, tellin' 'em, "See? If you guys'd been dealing with us all along, this never would have happened." It gets results, man. Like nothin' else, y'know? The thing is that Rap Brown and the Black Panthers are just about the best things that ever happened to the Civil Rights Movement.

Jackson's exceedingly honest, if more than passingly cynical, outlook was tacitly shared by King.[45] The essential contradiction inherent to pacifist praxis is that, for survival itself, any nonviolent confrontation of state power must ultimately depend either on the state refraining from unleashing some real measure of its potential violence, or the active presence of some counterbalancing violence of precisely the sort pacifism professes to reject as a political option.

Absurdity clearly abounds when suggesting that the state will refrain from using all necessary physical force to protect against undesired forms of change and threats to its safety. Nonviolent tacticians imply (perhaps unwittingly) that the "immoral state" which they seek to transform will somehow exhibit exactly the same sort of superior morality they claim for themselves (i.e., at least a relative degree of nonviolence). The fallacy of such a proposition is best demonstrated by the nazi state's removal of its "Jewish threat."[46] Violent intervention by others divides itself naturally into the two parts represented by Gandhi's unsolicited "windfall" of massive violence directed against his opponents and King's rather more conscious and deliberate utilization of incipient antistate violence as a means of advancing his own pacifist agenda. History is replete with variations on these two subthemes, but variations do little to alter the crux of the situation: there simply has never been a revolution, or even a substantial social reorganization, brought into being on the basis of the principles of pacifism.[47] In every instance, violence has been an integral requirement of the process of transforming the state.

Pacifist praxis (or, more appropriately, pseudopraxis), if followed to its logical conclusions, leaves its adherents with but two possible outcomes to their line of action:

1. To render themselves perpetually ineffectual (and consequently unthreatening) in the face of state power, in which case they will likely be largely ignored by the status quo and self-eliminating in terms of revolutionary potential; or,

2. To make themselves a clear and apparent danger to the state, in which case they are subject to physical liquidation by the status quo and are self-eliminating in terms of revolutionary potential.

In either event - mere ineffectuality or suicide – the objective conditions leading to the necessity for social revolution remain unlikely to be altered by purely pacifist strategies. As these conditions typically include war, the induced starvation of whole populations and the like, pacifism and its attendant sacrifice of life cannot even be rightly said to have substantially impacted the level of evident societal violence. The mass suffering that revolution is intended to alleviate will continue as the revolution strangles itself on the altar of "nonviolence."

the comfort zone

Don't speak to me of revolution until you're ready to eat rats to survive... - The Last Poets, 1972

Regardless of the shortcomings of pacifism as a methodological approach to revolution, there is nothing inherent in its basic impulse which prevents real practitioners from experiencing the revolutionary ethos. Rather, as already noted, the emotional content of the principle of nonviolence is tantamount to a gut-level rejection of much, or even all, that the present social order stands for — an intrinsically revolutionary perspective. The question is not the motivations of real pacifists, but instead the nature of a strategy by which the revolution may be won, at a minimum sacrifice to all concerned.

This assumes that sacrifice is being made by all concerned. Here, it becomes relatively easy to separate the wheat from the chaff among America's proponents of "nonviolent opposition." While the premise of pacifism necessarily precludes engaging in violent acts directed at others, even for reasons of self-defense, it does not prevent its adherents from themselves incurring physical punishment in pursuit of social justice. In other words, there is nothing of a doctrinal nature barring real pacifists from running real risks.

And indeed they do. Since at least the early Christians, devout pacifists have been sacrificing themselves while standing up for what they believe in against the armed might of those they consider wrong. Gandhi's followers perished by the thousands, allowed themselves to be beaten and maimed en masse, and clogged India's penal system in their campaign to end British rule.[48] King's field organizers showed incredible bravery in confronting the racist thugs of the South, and many paid with their lives on lonely back roads.[49]

Another type of pacifist action which became a symbol for the nonviolent antiwar movement was that of a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on a Saigon street on June 11, 1963. Due's protest against growing U.S. involvement in his country was quickly followed by similar actions by other Vietnamese bonzes and, on November 2, 1965, by an American Quaker, Norman Morrison, who burned himself in front of the Pentagon to protest increasing levels of U.S. troop commitment in Indochina.[50] Whatever the strategic value one may place upon the actions of Morrison and the Buddhists - and it must be acknowledged that the U.S. grip on Vietnam rapidly tightened after the self-immolations began,[51] while U.S. troop strength in Southeast Asia spiraled from some 125,000 at the time of Morrison's suicide to more than 525,000 barely two years later - they were unquestionably courageous people, entirely willing to face the absolute certainty of the most excruciating death in pursuit of their professed ideals. Although the effectiveness of their tactics is open to question, their courage and integrity certainly are not.

In a less severe fashion, there are many other examples of American pacifists putting themselves on the line for their beliefs. The Berrigan brothers, Phillip and Daniel, clearly qualify in this regard, as do a number of others who took direct action against the Selective Service System and certain U.S. military targets during the late '60s and early '70s.[52] Cadres of Witness for Peace placed their bodies between CIA-sponsored contra guerrillas and their intended civilian victims along the Nicaragua/Honduras border during the '80s.[53] Members of Greenpeace, Earth First!, and Friends of the Earth have been known to take considerable chances with their own well-being in their advocacy of a range of environmental issues.[54]

The list of principled and self-sacrificing pacifists and pacifist acts could undoubtedly be extended and, ineffectual or not, these people are admirable in their own right. Unfortunately, they represent the exception rather than the rule of pacifist performance in the United States. For every example of serious and committed pacifist activism emerging from the normative mass of American nonviolent movements since 1965, one could cite scores of countering instances in which only lip service was paid to the ideals of action and self-sacrifice.

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," not only akin to what Bettelheim termed "the philosophy of business as usual" and devoid of perceived risk to its advocates, but minus any conceivable revolutionary impetus as well.[55] The intended revolutionary content of true pacifist activism — the sort practiced by the Gandhian movement, the Berrigans, and Norman Morrison - is thus isolated and subsumed in the United States, even among the ranks of self-professing participants.

Such a situation must abort whatever limited utility pacifist tactics might have, absent other and concurrent forms of struggle, as a socially transformative method. Yet the history of the American Left over the past decade shows too clearly that the more diluted the substance embodied in "pacifist practice," the louder the insistence of its subscribers that nonviolence is the only mode of action "appropriate and acceptable within the context of North America," and the greater the effort to ostracize, or even stifle divergent types of actions.[56] Such strategic hegemony exerted by proponents of this truncated range of tactical options has done much to foreclose on what ever revolutionary potential may be said to exist in modern America.

Is such an assessment too harsh? One need only attend a mass demonstration (ostensibly directed against the policies of the state) in any U.S. city to discover the answer. One will find hundreds, sometimes thousands, assembled in orderly fashion, listening to selected speakers calling for an end to this or that aspect of lethal state activity, carrying signs "demanding" the same thing, welcoming singers who enunciate lyrically on the worthiness of the demonstrators' agenda as well as the plight of the various victims they are there to "defend," and - typically - the whole thing is quietly disbanded with exhortations to the assembled to "keep working" on the matter and to please sign a petition and/or write letters to congresspeople requesting that they alter or abandon offending undertakings.

Throughout the whole charade it will be noticed that the state is represented by a uniformed police presence keeping a discreet distance and not interfering with the activities. And why should they? The organizers of the demonstration will have gone through "proper channels" to obtain permits required by the state and instructions as to where they will be allowed to assemble, how long they will be allowed to stay and, should a march be involved in the demonstration, along which routes they will be allowed to walk. Surrounding the larger mass of demonstrators can be seen others — an elite. Adorned with green (or white, or powder blue) armbands, their function is to ensure that demonstrators remain "responsible," not deviating from the statesanctioned plan of protest. Individuals or small groups who attempt to spin off from the main body, entering areas to which the state has denied access (or some other unapproved activity) are headed off by these armbanded "marshals" who argue — pointing to the nearby police - that "troublemaking" will only "exacerbate an already tense situation" and "provoke violence," thereby "alienating those we are attempting to reach."[57] In some ways, the voice of the "good Jews" can be heard to echo plainly over the years.

At this juncture, the confluence of interests between the state and the mass nonviolent movement could not be clearer. The role of the police, whose function is to support state policy by minimizing disruption of its procedures, should be in natural conflict with that of a movement purporting to challenge these same policies and, indeed, to transform the state itself.[58] However, with apparent perverseness, the police find themselves serving as mere backups (or props) to self-policing (now euphemistically termed "peace-keeping" rather than the more accurate "marshaling") efforts of the alleged opposition's own membership. Both sides of the "contestation" concur that the smooth functioning of state processes must not be physically disturbed, at least not in any significant way.[59] All of this is within the letter and spirit of cooptive forms of sophisticated self-preservation appearing as an integral aspect of the later phases of bourgeois democracy.[60] It dovetails well with more shopworn methods such as the electoral process and has been used by the state as an innovative means of conducting public opinion polls, which better hide rather than eliminate controversial policies.[61] Even the movement's own sloganeering tends to bear this out from time to time, as when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) coined the catch-phrase of its alternative to the polling place: "Vote with your feet, vote in the street."[62]

Of course, any movement seeking to project a credible self-image as something other than just one more variation of accommodation to state power must ultimately establish its "militant" oppositional credentials through the media in a manner more compelling than rhetorical speechifying and the holding of impolite placards ("Fuck the War" was always a good one) at rallies.[63] Here, the time-honored pacifist notion of "civil disobedience" is given a new twist by the adherents of nonviolence in America. Rather than pursuing Gandhi's (or, to a much lesser extent, King's) method of using passive bodies to literally clog the functioning of the state apparatus — regardless of the cost to those doing the clogging — the American nonviolent movement has increasingly opted for "symbolic actions."[64]

The centerpiece of such activity usually involves an arrest, either of a token figurehead of the movement (or a small, selected group of them) or a mass arrest of some sort. In the latter event, "arrest training" is generally provided - and lately has become "required" by movement organizers - by the same marshals who will later ensure that crowd control police units will be left with little or nothing to do. This is to ensure that "no one gets hurt" in the process of being arrested, and that the police are not inconvenienced by disorganized arrest procedures.[65]

The event which activates the arrests is typically preplanned, well publicized in advance, and, more often than not, literally coordinated with the police – often including estimates by organizers concerning how many arrestees will likely be involved. Generally speaking, such "extreme statements" will be scheduled to coincide with larger-scale peaceful demonstrations so that a considerable audience of "committed" bystanders (and, hopefully, NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN) will be on hand to applaud the bravery and sacrifice of those arrested; most of the bystanders will, of course, have considered reasons why they themselves are unprepared to "go so far" as to be arrested.[66] The specific sort of action designed to precipitate the arrests themselves usually involves one of the following: (a) sitting down in a restricted area and refusing to leave when ordered; (b) stepping across an imaginary line drawn on the ground by a police representative; (c) refusing to disperse at the appointed time; or (d) chaining or padlocking the doors to a public building. When things really get heavy, those seeking to be arrested may pour blood (real or ersatz) on something of "symbolic value."[67]

As a rule, those arrested are cooperative in the extreme, meekly allowing police to lead them to waiting vans or buses for transportation to whatever station house or temporary facility has been designated as the processing point. In especially "militant" actions, arrestees go limp, undoubtedly severely taxing the states repressive resources by forcing the police to carry them bodily to the vans or buses (monitored all the while by volunteer attorneys who are there to ensure that such "police brutality" as pushing, shoving, or dropping an arrestee does not occur). In either event, the arrestees sit quietly in their assigned vehicles - or sing "We Shall Overcome" and other favorites – as they are driven away for booking. The typical charges levied will be trespassing, creating a public disturbance, or being a public nuisance. In the heavy instances, the charge may be escalated to malicious mischief or even destruction of public property. Either way, other than in exceptional circumstances, everyone will be assigned an arraignment date and released on personal recognizance or a small cash bond, home in time for dinner (and to review their exploits on the six o'clock news).[68]

In the unlikely event that charges are not dismissed prior to arraignment (the state having responded to symbolic actions by engaging largely in symbolic selective prosecutions), the arrestee will appear on the appointed date in a room resembling a traffic court where s/he will be allowed to plead guilty, pay a minimal fine, and go home. Repeat offenders may be "sentenced" to pay a somewhat larger fine (which, of course, goes into state accounts underwriting the very policies the arrestees ostensibly oppose) or even to perform a specific number of "public service hours" (promoting police/community relations, for example).[69] It is almost unheard of for arrestees to be sentenced to jail time for the simple reason that most jails are already overflowing with less principled individuals, most of them rather unpacifist in nature, and many of whom have caused the state a considerably greater degree of displeasure than the nonviolent movement, which claims to seek its radical alteration.[70]

For those arrestees who opt to plead not-guilty to the charges they themselves literally arranged to incur, a trial date will be set. They will thereby accrue another symbolic advantage by exercising their right to explain why they did whatever they did before a judge and jury. They may then loftily contend that it is the state, rather than themselves, that is really criminal. Their rights satisfied, they will then generally be sentenced to exactly the same penalty which would have been levied had they pleaded guilty at their arraignment (plus court costs), and go home. A few will be sentenced to a day or two in jail as an incentive not to waste court time with such pettiness in the future. A few less will refuse to pay whatever fine is imposed, and receive as much as thirty days in jail (usually on work release) as an alternative; a number of these have opted to pen "prison letters" during the period of their brief confinement, underscoring the sense of symbolic (rather than literal) self-sacrifice which is sought. The trivial nature of this level of activity does not come fully into focus until it is juxtaposed to the sorts of state activity which the nonviolent movement claims to be "working on." A brief sampling of prominent issues addressed by the American opposition since 1965 will suffice for purposes of illustration: the U.S. escalation of the ground war in Southeast Asia to a level where more than a million lives were lost, the saturation bombing of Vietnam (another one to two million killed), the expansion of the Vietnam war into all of Indochina (costing perhaps another two to three million lives when the intentional destruction of Cambodia's farmland and resultant mass starvation are considered), U.S. sponsorship of the Pinochet coup in Chile (at least another 10,000 dead), U.S. underwriting of the Salvadoran oligarchy (50,000 lives at a minimum), U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta (perhaps 200,000 killed since 1954), and efforts to destabilize the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (at least 20,000 dead).[72] A far broader sample of comparably lethal activities has gone unopposed altogether.[73]

While the human costs of continuing American business as usual have registered well into the seven-digit range (and possibly higher), the nonviolent "opposition" in the United States has not only restricted its tactics almost exclusively to the symbolic arena denoted above, but has actively endeavored to prevent others from going further. The methods employed to this end have generally been restricted to the deliberate stigmatizing, isolation, and minimization of other potentials - as a means of neutralizing, or at least containing them — although at times it seems to have crossed over into collaboration with state efforts to bring about their outright liquidation.[74]

The usual approach has been a consistent a priori dismissal of any one person or group attempting to move beyond the level of symbolic action as "abandoning the original spirit [of North American oppositional politics] and taking the counterproductive path of small-scale violence now and organizing for serious armed struggle later."[75] This is persistently coupled with attempts to diminish the importance of actions aimed at concrete rather than symbolic effects, epitomized in the question framed by Sam Brown, a primary organizer of the November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam (when perhaps 5,000 broke free of a carefully orchestrated schedule of passive activities): "What's more important, that a bunch of scruffy people charged the Justice Department, or that [500,000 people] were in the same place at one time to sing?"[76]

Not only was such "violence" as destroying property and scuffling with police proscribed in the view of the Moratorium organizers, but also any tendency to utilize the incredible mass of assembled humanity in any way which might tangibly interfere with the smooth physical functioning of the governing apparatus in the nation's capital (e.g., nonviolent civil disobedience on the order of, say, systematic traffic blockages and huge sitins).[77]

Unsurprisingly, this same mentality manifested itself even more clearly a year and a half later with the open boycott by pacifism's "responsible leadership" (and most of their committed followers) of the Indochina Peace Campaign's planned "May Day Demonstration" in Washington. Despite the fact that in some ways the war had escalated (e.g., increasingly heavy bombing) since the largest symbolic protest in American history – the Moratorium fielded approximately one million passive demonstrators, nationwide - it was still held that May Day organizer Rennie Davis' intent to "show the government that it will no longer be able to control its own society unless it ends the war NOW!" was "going too far." It was opined that although the May Day plan did not itself call for violent acts, its disruption of business as usual was likely to "provoke a violent response from officials."[78]

Even more predictably, advocates of nonviolence felt compelled to counter such emergent trends as the SDS Revolutionary Youth Movement, Youth Against War and Fascism, and Weatherman.[79] Calling for nonattendance at the demonstrations of "irresponsible" organizations attempting to build a "fighting movement among white radicals," and wittily coining derogatory phrases to describe them, the oppositional mainstream did its utmost to thwart possible positive developments coming from such unpacifist quarters. In the end, the stigmatized organizations themselves institutionalized this imposed isolation, their frustration with attempting to break the inertia of symbolic opposition to the status quo converted into a "politics of despair" relying solely on violent actions undertaken by a network of tiny underground cells.[80] The real anathema to the nonviolent mass, however, turned out not to be white splinter groups such as Weatherman. Rather, it came from a militant black nationalism embodied in the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. After nearly a decade of proclaiming its "absolute solidarity" with the liberatory efforts of American blacks, pacifism found itself confronted during the late '60s with the appearance of a cohesive organization that consciously linked the oppression of the black community to the exploitation of people the world over, and programmatically asserted the same right to armed self-defense acknowledged as the due of liberation movements abroad.[81]

As the Panthers evidenced signs of making significant headway, organizing first in their home community of Oakland and then nationally, the state perceived something more threatening than yet another series of candlelight vigils. It reacted accordingly, targeting the Panthers for physical elimination. When Party cadres responded (as promised) by meeting the violence of repression with armed resistance, the bulk of their "principled" white support evaporated. This horrifying retreat rapidly isolated the Party from any possible mediating or buffering from the full force of state terror and left its members nakedly exposed to "surgical termination" by special police units.[82]

To cover this default on true pacifist principles - which call upon adherents not to run for safety but, in the manner of Witness for Peace, to interpose their bodies as a means of alleviating violence - it became fashionable to observe that the Panthers were "as bad as the cops" in that they had resorted to arms (a view which should give pause when one recalls the twelfth Sonderkommando); they had "brought this on themselves" when they "provoked violence" by refusing the state an uncontested right to maintain the lethal business as usual it had visited upon black America since the inception of the Republic.[83]

In deciphering the meaning of this pattern of response to groups such as the Panthers, Weatherman, and others who have attempted to go beyond a more symbolic protest of, say, genocide, it is important to look behind the clichés customarily used to explain the American pacifist posture (however revealing these may be in themselves). More to the point than concerns that the groups such as the Panthers "bring this [violent repression] on themselves" is the sentiment voiced by Irv Kurki, a prominent Illinois anti-draft organizer during the winter of 1969-70:

_This idea of armed struggle or armed self-defense or whatever you want to call it . . . practiced by the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen and a few other groups is a very bad scene, a really dangerous thing for all of us. This isn't Algeria or Vietnam, it's the United States . . . these tactics are not only counterproductive in that they alienate people who are otherwise very sympathetic to us . . . and lead to the sort of thing which just happened in Chicago . . . but they run the very real risk of bringing the same sort of violent repression down on all of us (emphasis added)._[84]

Precisely. The preoccupation with avoiding actions which might "provoke violence" is thus not based on a sincere belief that violence will, or even can, truly be avoided. Pacifists, no less than their unpacifist counterparts, are quite aware that violence already exists as an integral component in the execution of state policies and requires no provocation; this is a formative basis of their doctrine. What is at issue then cannot be a valid attempt to stave off or even minimize violence per se. Instead, it can only be a conscious effort not to refocus state violence in such a way that it would directly impact American pacifists themselves. This is true even when it can be shown that the tactics which could trigger such a refocusing might in themselves alleviate a real measure of the much more massive state-inflicted violence occurring elsewhere; better that another 100,000 Indochinese peasants perish under a hail of cluster bombs and napalm than America's principled progressives suffer real physical pain while rendering their government's actions impracticable.[85]

Such conscientious avoidance of personal sacrifice (i.e., dodging the experience of being on the receiving end of violence, not the inflicting of it) has nothing to do with the lofty ideals and integrity by which American pacifists claim to inform their practice. But it does explain the real nature of such curious phenomena as movement marshals, steadfast refusals to attempt to bring the seat of government to a standstill even when a million people are on hand to accomplish the task, and the consistently convoluted victim-blaming engaged in with regard to domestic groups such as the Black Panther Party.[86] Massive and unremitting violence in the colonies is appalling to right-thinking people but ultimately acceptable when compared with the unthinkable alternative that any degree of real violence might be redirected against "mother country radicals."[87]

Viewed in this light, a great many things make sense. For instance, the persistent use of the term "responsible leadership" in describing the normative nonviolent sector of North American dissent - always somewhat mysterious when applied to supposed radicals (or German Jews) — is clarified as signifying nothing substantially different from the accommodation of the status quo it implies in more conventional settings.[88] The "rules of the game" have long been established and tacitly agreed to by both sides of the ostensible "oppositional equation": demonstrations of "resistance" to state policies will be allowed so long as they do nothing to materially interfere with the implementation of those policies.[89]

The responsibility of the oppositional leadership in such a trade-off is to ensure that state processes are not threatened by substantial physical disruption; the reciprocal responsibility of the government is to guarantee the general safety of those who play according to the rules.[90] This comfortable scenario is enhanced by the mutual understanding that certain levels of "appropriate" (symbolic) protest of given policies will result in the "oppositional victory" of their modification (i.e., really a "tuning" of policy by which it may be rendered more functional and efficient, never an abandonment of fundamental policy thrusts), while efforts to move beyond this metaphorical medium of dissent will be squelched "by any means necessary" and by all parties concerned.[91] Meanwhile, the entire unspoken arrangement is larded with a layer of stridently abusive rhetoric directed by each side against the other.

We are left with a husk of opposition, a ritual form capable of affording a sentimentalistic "I'm OK, you're OK" satisfaction to its subscribers at a psychic level but utterly useless in terms of transforming the power relations perpetuating systemic global violence. Such a defect can, however, be readily sublimated within the aggregate comfort zone produced by the continuation of North American business as usual; those who remain within the parameters of nondisruptive dissent allowed by the state, their symbolic duty to the victims of U.S. policy done (and with the bases of state power wholly unchallenged), can devote themselves to the prefiguration of the revolutionary future society with which they proclaim they will replace the present social order (having, no doubt, persuaded the state to overthrow itself through the moral force of their arguments).[92] Here, concrete activities such as sexual experimentation, refinement of musical/artistic tastes, development of various meat-free diets, getting in touch with one's "id" through meditation and ingestion of hallucinogens, alteration of sex-based distribution of household chores, and waging campaigns against such "bourgeois vices" as smoking tobacco become the signifiers of "correct politics" or even "revolutionary practice." This is as opposed to the active and effective confrontation of state power.[93]

Small wonder that North America's ghetto, barrio, and reservation populations, along with the bulk of the white working class - people who are by and large structurally denied access to the comfort zone (both in material terms and in a corresponding inability to avoid the imposition of a relatively high degree of systemic violence) — tend either to stand aside in bemused incomprehension of such politics or to react with outright hostility. Their apprehension of the need for revolutionary change and their conception of revolutionary dynamics are necessarily at radical odds with this notion of "struggle."[94] The American nonviolent movement, which has labored so long and so hard to isolate all divergent oppositional tendencies, is in the end isolating itself, becoming ever more demographically white, middle-class, and "respectable." Eventually, unless there is a marked change in its obstinate insistence that it holds a "moral right" to absolute tactical monopoly, American pacifism will be left to "feel good about itself" while the revolution goes on without it.[95]

let's pretend

_Are you listening Nixon? Johnson refused to hear us, and you know what happened to that ol' boy . . ._ - Benjamin Spock, 1969

American pacifism seeks to project itself as a revolutionary alternative to the status quo.[96] Of course, such a movement or perspective can hardly acknowledge that its track record in forcing substantive change upon the state has been an approximate zero. A chronicle of significant success must be offered, even where none exists. Equally, should such a movement or perspective seek hegemony of its particular vision - again, as American pacifism has been shown to do since 1965 - a certain mythological complex is required to support its contentions. Generally speaking, both needs can be accommodated within a single unified propaganda structure.[97]

For proponents of the hegemony of nonviolent political action within the American opposition, time-honored fables such as the success of Gandhi's methods (in and of themselves) and even the legacy of Martin Luther King no longer retain the freshness and vitality required to achieve the necessary result. As this has become increasingly apparent, and as the potential to bring a number of emergently dissident elements (e.g., "freezers," anti-nukers, environmentalists, opponents to saber-rattling in Central America and the Mideast, and so on) into some sort of centralized mass movement became greater in the mid-80s, a freshly packaged pacifist "history" of its role in opposing the Vietnam war began to be peddled with escalating frequency and insistence.[98] It is instructive to examine several salient claims still extended by pacifist organizers.

The nonviolent mass movement against the war forced Lyndon Johnson from office when he failed to withdraw from Vietnam (picking up a theme topical to the antiwar movement itself). Actually, as has been conclusively demonstrated, it was "Hawks" rather than "Doves" who toppled Johnson.[99] This was due to the perceived ineffectiveness with which he prosecuted the war, brought about not by pacifist parades in American streets, but by the effectiveness of Vietnamese armed resistance to the U.S. military. The catalyst was the Vietnamese Tet Offensive in January 1968 after U.S. Commanding General William Westmoreland announced he had "broken their ability to fight," and the general's resultant request for another 206,000 troops to augment the more than one half million men already at his disposal.[100] At this point, the right wing decided that the war was lost and to begin a process of cutting losses, thereby forcing Johnson out.

To discern where the balance of power lay and begin to unravel who did what to whom, one need only look at the fact that the antiwar candidate of the 1968 campaign (Eugene McCarthy^?) was never in serious contention as Johnson's replacement, and that it was the choice of the right (Richard Nixon) who became the successor.[101]

The self-sacrifice of such nonviolent oppositional tactics as draft resistance seriously impaired the functioning of the U.S. military machine (picking up another topical theme). Actually, there was not much self-sacrifice or risk involved. Of the estimated one million American males who committed draft offenses during the Vietnam era, only 25,000 (2.5 percent) were indicted, and a total of 3,250 (0.3 percent) went to prison. As many as 80,000 went into voluntary exile in Canada where they noted the penalty of "being lonely."[102] The other 91.5 percent of these self-sacrificing individuals apparently paid no price at all, remaining in the comfort zone relative to both the military and the supposed consequences of evading it.

It may be that draft resistance on this scale somehow affected the reserve manpower of the military but not its main force units. What did affect the functioning of the military was the rapid disintegration of morale among U.S. combat troops after 1968 as a result of the effectiveness of Vietnamese armed resistance. The degeneration of effectiveness within the U.S. military, which eventually neutralized it in the field, included mass refusal to fight (approved, undoubtedly, by pacifists), spiraling substance abuse (ditto), and, most effectively, the assassination of commissioned and noncommissioned officers (well, that's going too far).[103]

The most effective tactic the nonviolent movement could have engaged in to impair the U.S. military was therefore the one thing it was most unprepared to consider: making the individual personal sacrifice of going into the military in a massive way in order to quickly subvert it.

The nonviolent mass antiwar movement's solidarity with the Vietnamese undercut the political ability of the U.S. government to continue and forced the war to an early close (a stated objective of the movement of the late '60s). This claim is obviously closely akin to the contention concerning Johnson, although it should be recalled that even U.S. ground forces remained in Vietnam for another four years after that "victory." Actually, there was no mass antiwar movement in the United States, nonviolent or otherwise, by the time the war ended in 1975. It had begun to dissipate rapidly during the summer of 1970 in the wake of sustaining its first and only real casualties - a total of four dead at Kent State University in Ohio that spring.[104] By the time the last U.S. ground troops were withdrawn in 1973, Nixinger had suspended the draft, and with the element of their personal jeopardy thus eliminated, the "principled" opposition fueling the mass movement evaporated altogether while the war did not.

That the war then continued for another three years with U.S. technological and economic support at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives but absent even a symbolic mass American opposition worthy of the name says volumes about the nature of the nonviolent movement's "solidarity with the Vietnamese."[105] And, as always, it was the armed struggle waged by the Vietnamese themselves - without the pretense of systematic support from the American pacifists - which finally forced the war to a close.[106]

It is evident even from this brief exposition of fact versus fantasy - and the analysis could be extended to much greater length with the same results - that a certain consistency is involved. As with earlier-developed mythologies concerning Gandhi and King (i.e., that their accomplishments were achieved through application of nonviolent principles alone), the current pacifist propaganda line concerning the Vietnam war reveals a truly remarkable propensity to lay claim to progress attained only through the most bitter forms of armed struggle undertaken by others (all the while blandly insisting that the "resort to violence" was/is "inappropriate" to the context of North America).[107]

This already-noted cynical mindwarp holds little appeal to those residing outside the socioeconomic limits of the American comfort zone, and can hardly be expected to recruit them into adhering to nonviolence. However, this in itself explains much about American pacifism's real (perhaps subconscious) agenda and reconciles a range of apparent contradictions in the postures of American pacifist strategists.

the buck is passed

We support the just struggles of the NLF in Vietnam . . . - David Dellinger, 1969

It is immediately perplexing to confront the fact that many of North America's most outspoken advocates of absolute domestic nonviolence when challenging state power have consistently aligned themselves with the most powerful expressions of armed resistance to the exercise of U.S. power abroad. Any roster of pacifist luminaries fitting this description would include not only David Dellinger but Joan Baez, Benjamin Spock, A. J. Muste, Holly Near, Staughton Lynd, and Noam Chomsky as well. The situation is all the more problematic when one considers that these leaders, each in his/her own way, also advocate their followers' perpetual diversion into activities prefiguring the nature of a revolutionary society, the basis for which cannot be reasonably expected to appear through nonviolent tactics alone.[108]

This apparent paradox erodes a line of reasoning that, although it has probably never been precisely formulated within the North American nonviolent movement, seems likely to have informed the thinking of its more astute leadership. Its logical contours can be sketched as follows.

Since at least as early as 1916, the importance of colonial and later neocolonial exploitation of the nonindustrialized world in maintaining modern capitalist states has been increasingly well understood by the revolutionary opposition within those states.[109] Today, it is widely held that removal of neocolonial sources of material and super profits would irrevocably undercut the viability of late capitalist states.[110]

Beginning in the late 1940s with the emergence of both decolonization mandates in international law[111] and the proliferation of armed liberation movements throughout what became known as the "Third World," it became obvious to the opposition within developed states - of which the U.S. had by then assumed hegemonic status — that precisely such an undercutting removal of profits and raw materials was occurring.[112]

It required/requires no particularly sophisticated analysis to perceive that the imposition of colonial/neocolonial forms of exploitation upon Third World populations entailed/entails a degree of systemic violence sufficient to ensure the permanence of their revolt until it succeeds.[113] Similarly, it was/is understandable that Third World revolution would continue of its own volition whether or not it was accompanied by overt revolutionary activity within the "mother countries" (advanced capitalist states).[114]

These understandings are readily coupled with the knowledge that the types of warfare evidenced in decolonization struggles were unlikely, under normal circumstances, to trigger superpower confrontations of the type which would threaten mother country populations (including their internal oppositions).[115] Instead, the existence of armed Third World liberation movements would necessitate a continuing range of (token) concessions by the advanced industrial states to their own populations as a means of securing the internal security required for the permanent prosecution of "brush fire wars.

It follows that it is possible for the resident opposition to the advanced industrial states to rely upon the armed efforts of those in the colonies to diminish the relative power of the "mutual enemy," all the while awaiting the "right moment" to take up arms themselves, "completing the world revolution" by bringing down the state. The question then becomes one of when to "seize the time," and who - precisely - it is who will be responsible for "picking up the gun" within the mother country itself.[117]

From here it is possible to extrapolate that when state power has been sufficiently weakened by the liberation struggles of those in the colonies (read: nonwhites), the most oppressed sectors of the mother country population itself (again read nonwhites, often and accurately described as constituting internal colonies) - which are guided by motivations similar to those in the Third World - will be in a position to wage successful armed struggles from within.[118] Such dissolution of the state will mark the ushering in of the postrevolutionary era.

It is possible then to visualize a world revolutionary process in which the necessity of armed participation (and attendant physical suffering) by white radicals is marginalized or dispensed with altogether. Their role in this scenario becomes that of utilizing their already attained economic and social advantages to prefigure, both intellectually and more literally, the shape of the good life to be shared by all in the postrevolutionary context; it is presumed that they will become a (perhaps the) crucial social element, having used the "space" (comfort zone) achieved through state concessions generated by the armed pressure exerted by others to the "constructive rather than destructive purpose" of developing a "superior" model of societal relations.[119]

The function of "responsible" oppositional leadership in the mother country - as opposed to the "irresponsible" variety that might precipitate some measure of armed resistance from within before the Third World has bled itself in diminishing state power from without (and who might even go so far as to suggest whites could directly participate) - is first and foremost to link the mother country movement's inaction symbolically and rhetorically to Third World liberation struggles. The blatant accommodation to state power involved in this is rationalized (both to the Third Worlders and to the movement rank-and-file) by professions of personal and principled pacifism, as well as in the need for "working models" of nonviolent behavior in postrevolutionary society.[120]

From there, the nonviolent American movement (by now overwhelmingly composed of white "progressives") can be steered into exactly the same symbolic and rhetorical "solidarity" with an emerging nonwhite armed revolution within the United States and - voila! - positive social transformation has not only been painlessly achieved (for whites), but they (being the prefigurative nonviolent "experts" on building postrevolutionary society) have maneuvered themselves into leading roles in the aftermath.[121]

All of this, of course, is predicated on the assumption that the colonized, both within and without, will ultimately prove equal to their part, and that revolutionary transformation will actually occur. In the event that the colonizing state ultimately proves the stronger of parties in such a contest, the nonviolent movement — having restricted its concrete activities to limits sanctioned by that same state - will have a natural fall-back position, being as it were only a variant of "the loyal opposition."[122] The result of the carefully-constructed balance (between professed solidarity with armed Third World insurgents on the one hand, and tacit accommodation to the very state power against which they fight on the other) is that North American adherents to nonviolence are intended to win regardless of the outcome; the comfort zone of "white skin privilege" is to be continued in either event.[123]

Or this is the outcome that fence-sitting is expected to accomplish. The range of tremendous ethical, moral, and political problems inherent in this attitude are mostly so self-evident as to require no further explanation or consideration here. Before turning to the purely pathological characteristics associated with such monumental (attempted) buck-passing, there is one other primarily political potentiality which bears at least passing discussion. It is a possibility typically omitted or ignored within discussions of "the praxis of nonviolence" in the United States, largely because its very existence would tend to render pacifism's pleasant (to its beneficiaries) prospectus rather less rosy (read: less appealing to its intended mass of subscribers). Undoubtedly, the oversight is also bound up in pacifism's earlier-mentioned arrogance in presuming it holds some power of superior morality to determine that the nonviolence of its relations to the state will necessarily be reciprocated (even to a relative degree) in the state's relations with pacifists.[124] Whatever the basis for generalized silence in this regard, due consideration must be given to the likelihood that the state, at some point along its anticipated trajectory of strategic losses in the hinterlands, will experience the need to reconstitute its credibility internally, to bring about the psychic consolidation of its faithful ("morale building" on the grand scale) by means of a "cleansing of national life" from within.

Such a transition from liberalistic and cooptive policies to much more overtly reactionary forms is certainly not without precedent when states perceive their international power positions eroding, or simply undergoing substantial external threat.[125] Invariably, such circumstances entail the identification (i.e., manufacture), targeting, and elimination of some internal entity as the "subversive" element undercutting the "national will" and purpose. At such times the state needs no, indeed can tolerate no hint of, domestic opposition; those who are "tainted" by a history of even the milder forms of "antisocial" behavior can be assured of being selected as the scapegoats required for this fascist sort of consensus building.[126]

While the precise form which might be assumed by the scapegoating involved in a consolidation of North American fascism remains unknown, it is clear that the posture of the mass nonviolent movement closely approximates that of the Jews in Germany during the 1930s. The notion that "it can't happen here" is merely a parallel to the Jewish perception that it wouldn't happen there; insistence on inhabiting a comfort zone even while thousands upon thousands of Third World peasants are cremated beneath canisters of American napalm is only a manifestation of "the attitude of going on with business as usual, even in a holocaust."[127] Ultimately, as Bettelheim observed, it is the dynamic of attempting to restrict opposition to state terror to symbolic and nonviolent responses which gives the state "the idea that [its victims can] be gotten to the point where they [will] walk into the gas chambers on their own."[128] And, as the Jewish experience has shown for anyone who cares to look the matter in the face, the very inertia of pacifist principles prevents any effective conversion to armed self-defense once adherents are targeted for systematic elimination by the state.

profile of a pathology

_I just came home from Vietnam where I spent twelve months of my life trying to pacify the population. We couldn't do it; their resistance was amazing. And it was wrong; the process made me sick. So I came home to join the resistance in my own country, and I find you guys have pacified yourselves. That too amazes me; that too makes me sick . . ._ — Vietnam Veteran Against the War, 1970

A number of logical contradictions and fundamental misunderstandings of political reality present themselves within the doctrinal corpus of American pacifist premises and practices (both as concerns real pacifism and relative to the modern American "comfort zone" variety). Matters of this sort are usually remediable, at least to a significant extent, through processes of philosophical/ political dialogue, factual correction, and the like.[129] Subscribers to the notion of pacifism, however, have proven themselves so resistant as to be immune to conventional critique and suasion, hunkering down instead behind a wall of "principles," especially when these can be demonstrated to be lacking both logically and practically in terms of validity, viability, and utility.[130]

The "blind faith" obstinacy inherent in this position is thus not immediately open to pragmatic, or even empirical, consideration. It might be more properly categorized within the sphere of theological inquiry (particularly as regards the fundamentalist and occult religious doctrines) - and, indeed, many variants of pacifist dogma acknowledge strong links to an array of sects and denominations - were it not that pacifism asserts itself (generically) not only as a functional aspect of "the real world," but as a praxis capable of engendering revolutionary social transformation.[131] Its basic irrationalities must therefore be taken, on their face, as seriously intended to supplant reality itself.

Codification of essentially religious symbology and mythology as the basis for political ideology (or the psuedoideology Weltanschauung) is not lacking in precedent and has been effectively analyzed elsewhere.[132] Although a number of interesting aspects present themselves in the study of any specific fusion of spiritualist impetus with political articulation/practice, the common factor from one example to the next is a central belief that objective conditions (i.e., reality) can be altered by an act of "will" (individual or collective). This is often accompanied by extremely antisocial characteristics, manifested either consciously or subconsciously.[133] The political expression of pacifism confronts us with what may be analogously described as a (mass) pathology.

As with any pathology, pacifism may be said to exhibit a characteristic symptomology by which it can be diagnosed. Salient examples of the complex of factors making up the pathology may be described as follows:

Pacifism is delusional. This symptom is marked by a range of indicators, for example, insistence that reform or adjustment of given state policies constitutes a "revolutionary agenda," insistence that holding candlelight vigils and walking down the street constitute "acts of solidarity" with those engaged in armed struggle, or - despite facts to the contrary — that such things as "the nonviolent decolonization of India" or "the antiwar movement's forcing the Vietnam war to end" actually occurred.

At another level — and again despite clear facts to the contrary - insisting that certain tactics avoid "provoking violence" (when it is already massive) or that by remaining nonviolent pacifism can "morally compel" the state to respond in kind must be considered as deep-seated and persistent delusions.[134]

Finally, it must be pointed out that many supposed "deeply principled" adherents are systematically deluding themselves that they are really pacifists at all. This facet of the symptoms is marked by a consistent avoidance of personal physical risk, an overweaning attitude of personal superiority vis-à-vis those who "fail" to make overt professions of nonviolence, and sporadic lapses into rather unpacifist modes of conduct in interpersonal contexts (as opposed to relations with the state).[135]

Pacifism is racist. In displacing massive state violence onto people of color both outside and inside the mother country, rather than absorbing any real measure of it themselves (even when their physical intervention might undercut the state's ability to inflict violence on nonwhites), pacifists can only be viewed as being objectively racist.

Racism itself has been accurately defined as a pathology.[136] Within the context of pacifism, the basic strain must be considered as complicated by an extremely convoluted process of victim-blaming under the guise of "antiracism" (a matter linking back to the above-mentioned delusional characteristics of the pathology of pacifism).

Finally, both displacement of violence and victim blaming intertwine in their establishment of a comfort zone for whites who utilize it (perhaps entirely subconsciously) as a basis for "prefiguring" a complex of future "revolutionary" social relations which could serve to largely replicate the present privileged social position of whites, vis-à-vis nonwhites, as a cultural/intellectual "elite."[137]

The cluster of subparts encompassed by this overall aspect of the pacifist pathology is usually marked by a pronounced tendency on the part of those suffering the illness to react emotionally and with considerable defensiveness to any discussion (in some cases, mere mention) of the nature of racist behaviors. The behavior is typically manifested in agitated assertions - usually with no accusatory finger having been pointed — to the effect that "I have nothing to be ashamed of" or "I have no reason to feel guilty." As with any pathology, this is the proverbial telltale clue indicating s/he is subliminally aware that s/he has much to be ashamed of and is experiencing considerable guilt as a result. Such avoidance may, in extreme cases, merge once again with delusional characteristics of the pathology.[138]

Pacifism is suicidal. In its core impulse to prostrate itself before the obvious reality of the violence inherent in state power, pacifism not only inverts Emiliano Zapata's famous dictum that "It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees"; it actually posits the proposition that is it best to die on one's knees and seeks to achieve this result as a matter of principle. Pacifist Eros is thus transmuted into Thanatos.[139]

While it seems certain that at least a portion of pacifism's propensity toward suicide is born of the earlier-mentioned delusion that it can impel nonviolence on the part of the state (and is therefore simply erroneous), there is a likelihood that one of two other factors is at work in many cases:

1. A sublimated death wish manifesting itself in a rather commonly remarked "gambler's neurosis" (i.e., "Can I risk everything and win?").

2. A desublimated death wish manifesting itself in a "political" equivalent of walking out in front of a bus ("Will it hit me or not?").

In any event, this suicidal pathology may be assumed to follow the contours of other such impulses, centering on repressed guilt neuroses and associated feelings of personal inadequacy (in all probability linked to the abovementioned subliminal racism) and severely complicated by a delusional insistence that the death wish itself constitutes a "pro-life" impetus. It is interesting to note that the latter claim has been advanced relative to European Jews during the 1940s.[140]

From even this scanty profile, it is easy enough to discern that pacifism - far from being a praxis adequate to impel revolutionary change - assumes the configuration of a pathological illness when advanced as a political methodology. Given its deep-seated, superficially self-serving, and socially approved nature, it is likely to be an exceedingly difficult pathology to treat and a long term barrier to the formation of revolutionary consciousness/action in the North America. Yet it is a barrier which must be overcome if revolutionary change is to occur, and for this reason, we turn to the questions of the nature of the role of nonviolent political action within a viable American transformative praxis, as well as preliminary formulation of a therapeutic approach to the pathology of pacifism.

toward a liberatory praxis

_The variegated canvas of the world is before me; I stand over and against it; by my theoretical attitude to it I overcome its opposition to me and make its contents my own. I am at home in the world when I know it, still more so when I have understood it._ - G.W.R Hegel

While standard definitions tend to restrict the meaning of the term "praxis" to being more or less a sophisticated substitute for the words "action" or "practice," within the tradition of revolutionary theory it yields a more precise quality.[141] August von Cieszkowski long ago observed, "Practical philosophy, or more exactly stated, the Philosophy of Praxis, which could influence life and social relationships, the development of truth in concrete activity—this is the overriding destiny of philosophy."[142] For Marx, the essence of praxis lay in the prospect that the ongoing process of changing circumstances (i.e., material conditions) could coincide with a human self-consciousness which he described as rationally conceived "self-changing" or "revolutionary praxis."[143] In a dialectical sense, this entailed a process of qualitative transformation at the level of totality, from practice (relatively unconscious world-making activity) to praxis (less determined, more conscious world-constituting activity); the distinction between practice and praxis Marx defined as being between something "in-itself" and something "for-itself."[144]

Thus, as Richard Kilminster has noted, for Marx:

_The famous 'cunning of Reason' in Hegel's The Philosophy of History[145] 'sets of passions' of individuals and the collective aspirations of nations 'to work for itself' in the process of historical selfrealization of what it essentially is, as comprehended and exemplified by Reason at its later stages. Strong teleological overtones are present in this conception as they are also in what we might analogously term Marx's implicit notion of a cunning of praxis, through which he discerned history had a consciously appropriable meaning in the blindly developing but ultimately self-rationalizing development of its successive social structures._[146]

In other words, praxis might be accurately defined as action consciously and intentionally guided by theory while simultaneously guiding the evolution of theoretical elaboration. It follows that any liberatory transformation of society is dependent upon the development/articulation of an adequate praxis by which revolutionary struggle may be carried out.[147]

There are a vast range of implications to the praxical symbiosis of theory and practice in prerevolutionary society, most especially within an advanced capitalist context such as that of the United States. To a significant extent, these implications are intellectual/analytical in nature, and the great weight of praxical consideration has correspondingly focused itself in this direction. Insofar as such concerns might rightly be viewed as "strategic," this emphasis is undoubtedly necessary. This is not to say, however, that such preoccupations should be allowed to assume an exclusivist dominance over other matters of legitimate praxical interest. In this regard, the short shrift afforded the more pragmatic or "tactical" aspects of praxis in contemporary dissident theory is, to say the least, disturbing.[148] Such uneven development of praxis is extremely problematic in terms of actualizing revolutionary potential.

A clear example of this tendency may be found in the paucity of recent literature attempting to explore the appropriate physical relationship between the repressive/defensive forces of the late capitalist state on the one hand, and those avowedly pursuing its liberatory transformation on the other. Little intellectual or practical effort has gone into examining the precise nature of revolutionary (as opposed to ritual) confrontation or the literal requirements of revolutionary struggle within fully industrialized nations. Consequently, a theoretical - hence, praxical - vacuum has appeared in this connection. And, as with any vacuum of this sort, the analytical default has been filled with the most convenient and readily accessible set of operant assumptions available, in this case with pacifism, the doctrine of "revolutionary nonviolence."

Predictably (for reasons already elaborated), the same situation does not prevail with regard to liberatory struggles in the Third World. In terms of both historiography and mythology, it is considered axiomatic that revolution in nonindustrialized areas all but inherently entails resort to armed struggle and violence.[149] This remains true whether one is considering the Bolshevik revolution, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Algerian revolution, decolonization struggles in Africa during the 1950s, the Nicaraguan revolution, the Zimbabwean revolution, or any other.[150] The same principle also holds with regard to Third World liberation movements such as the ANC in South Africa, SWAPO in Namibia, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Prestes Column in Brazil, Shining Path in Peru, and so on.[151] In each case, the fundamental physical relationship between armed struggle/ violence and liberatory posture is clear.

As a matter of praxis, this relationship has been clarified (even codified) by theorists as diverse as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Mao Tsetung, and Vo Nguyen Giap, to name but a few.[152] The accuracy of their articulations is so compelling that even such a devout (and principled) North American pacifist as Blase Bonpane has observed that, in the Third World, armed struggle is required because "passivity can coexist nicely with repression, injustice, and fascism."[153] Bonpane goes on:

_Unfortunately, we have been brought up on parlor games, where the participants discuss whether or not they are "for" or "against" violence. Can you picture a similar discussion on whether we are for or against disease? Violence, class struggle, and disease are all real. They do not go away through mystification . . . those who deny the reality of violence and class struggle - like those who deny the reality of disease - are not dealing with the real world._[154]

The "real world" of Third World liberatory praxis thus necessarily incorporates revolutionary violence as an integral element of itself. The principle is also extended to cover certain situations within the less industrialized sectors of the "First World," as is clearly the situation relative to the Spanish Civil War, Irish resistance to British colonial rule, resistance to the Greek Junta during the '60s and 70s, and - to a certain extent at least – within the context of revolutionary struggle in Italy.[155] Hence, only within the most advanced — and privileged — sectors of industrial society is armed struggle/violence consigned to the "praxical" realm of "counterproductivity," as when the pacifist left queues up to condemn the Black Panther Party, Weatherman, the Baader-Meinhoff Group, or its offshoot, the Red Army Faction.[156]

Aside from the obvious moral hypocrisy implicit in this contradiction, the question must be posed as to whether it offers any particular revolutionary advantage to those espousing it. Given the availability of self-preserving physical force in the hands of the state, within advanced capitalist contexts no less — or even more – than in colonial/neocolonial situations, the question presents itself "at the bottom line" as an essentially military one.

Within this analytical paradigm, three cardinal tenets and an axiom must be observed. The tenets are: (1) the Napoleonic credo that "victory goes to the side fielding the biggest battalions" (i.e., those exercising the most muscle tend to win contests of force); (2) that sheer scale of force can often be offset through utilization of the element of surprise; and (3) even more than surprise, tactical flexibility (i.e., concentration of force at weak points) can often compensate for lack of strength or numbers (this is a prime point of ju jitsu). The axiom at issue has been adopted as the motto of the British Special Air Service: "Who dares, wins."[157]

The first tenet is, to be sure, a hopeless proposition at the outset of virtually any revolutionary struggle. The "big battalions" — and balance of physical power – inevitably rest with the state's police, paramilitary, and military apparatus, at least through the initial and intermediate stages of the liberatory process. Consequently, Third World revolutionary tacticians have compensated by emphasizing tenets two and three (surprise and flexibility), developing the art of guerrilla warfare to a very high degree.[158] Within the more industrialized contexts of Europe and North America, this has assumed forms typically referred to as "terrorism."[159] In either event, the method has proven increasingly successful in befuddling more orthodox military thinking throughout the twentieth century, has led to a familiar series of fallen dictators and dismantled colonial regimes, and has substantially borne out the thrust of the "dare to struggle, dare to win" axiom.[160]

The hegemony of pacifist activity and thought within the late capitalist states, on the other hand, not only bows before the balance of power that rests with the status quo in any head-on contest by force, but also gives up the second and third tenets. With activities self-restricted to a relatively narrow band of ritual forms, pacifist tacticians automatically sacrifice much of their (potential) flexibility in confronting the state; within this narrow band, actions become entirely predictable rather than offering the utility of surprise. The bottom-line balance of physical power thus inevitably rests with the state on an essentially permanent basis, and the possibility of liberal social transformation is correspondingly diminished to a point of nonexistence. The British Special Air Force motto is again borne out, this time via a converse formulation: "Who fails to dare, loses ... perpetually."

It is evident that whatever the attributes of pacifist doctrine, "revolutionary nonviolence" is a complete misnomer, that pacifism itself offers no coherent praxis for liberatory social transformation. At best, it might be said to yield certain aspects of a viable liberatory praxis, thus assuming the status of a sort of "quasi-praxis." More appropriately, it should be viewed more at the level of ideology termed by Louis Althusser as constituting "Generalities I."[161] As a low level of ideological consciousness (i.e., dogma) rather than the manifestation of a truly praxical outlook, pacifism dovetails neatly with Ernest Gellner's observation that ideological "patterns of legitimacy . . . are first and foremost sets of collectively held beliefs about validity. The psychological ground of legitimacy is in fact the recognition of the validity of a given social norm."[162] Or, to take the matter further, we might turn to the conclusion of J. G. Merquoir:

_[A]s far as belief is concerned, ideological legitimacy is chiefly, though not exclusively, for internal consumption. Its function is really to act as a catalyst for the mind of the group whose interest it sublimates into a justificatory set of ideals. Outside the interest bound class circle, ideology consists primarily of unchallenged, normally tacit, valueorientations which, once translated into the language of purpose, amounts to the 'manipulation of bias' in favor of privileged groups. (emphasis in original)_[163]

This perception of pacifism as a self-justifying ideological preemption of proper praxical consideration, subliminally intended to perpetuate the privileged status of a given "progressive" elite, is helpful in determining what is necessary to arrive at a true liberatory praxis within advanced capitalist contexts. The all but unquestioned legitimacy accruing to the principles of pacifist practice must be continuously and comprehensively subjected to the test of whether they, in themselves, are capable of delivering the bottom-line transformation of statedominated social relations which alone constitutes the revolutionary/ liberatory process.[164] Where they are found to be incapable of such delivery, the principles must be broadened or transcended altogether as a means of achieving an adequate praxis.

By this, it is not being suggested that nonviolent forms of struggle are or should be abandoned, nor that armed struggle should be the normative standard of revolutionary performance, either practically or conceptually. Rather, it is to follow the line of thinking recently articulated by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) when he noted:

_If we are to consider ourselves as revolutionaries, we must acknowledge that we have an obligation to succeed in pursuing revolution. Here, we must acknowledge not only the power of our enemies, but our own power as well. Realizing the nature of our power, we must not deny ourselves the exercise of the options available to us; we must utilize surprise, cunning and flexibility; we must use the strength of our enemy to undo him, keeping him confused and offbalance. We must organize with perfect clarity to be utterly unpredictable. When our enemies expect us to respond to provocation with violence, we must react calmly and peacefully; just as they anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade._[l65]

What is at issue is not therefore the replacement of hegemonic pacifism with some "cult of terror." Instead, it is the realization 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. This should be conceived not as an array of component forms of struggle but as a continuum of activity stretching from petitions/letter writing and so forth through mass mobilization/demonstrations, onward into the arena of armed self-defense, and still onward through the realm of "offensive" military operations (e.g., elimination of critical state facilities, targeting of key individuals within the governmental/corporate apparatus, etc.).[166] All of this must be apprehended as a holism, as an internally consistent liberatory process applicable at this generally-formulated level to the late capitalist context no less than to the Third World. From the basis of this fundamental understanding - and, it may be asserted, only from this basis - can a viable liberatory praxis for North America emerge.

It should by now be self-evident that, while a substantial - even preponderant - measure of nonviolent activity is encompassed within any revolutionary praxis, there is no place for the profession of "principled pacifism" to preclude — much less condemn — the utilization of violence as a legitimate and necessary method of achieving liberation.[167] The dismantling of the false consciousness inherent in the ideology of "nonviolent revolution" is therefore of primary importance in attaining an adequate liberatory praxis.

a therapeutic approach to pacifism

_A reversal of perspective is produced vis-à-vis adult consciousness: the historical becoming which prepared it was not before it, it is only for it; the time during which it progressed is no longer the time of its constitution, but a time which it constitutes . . . such is the reply of critical thought to psychologism, sociologism and historicism._ - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1947

The pervasiveness of "pacifism" within the ostensibly oppositional sectors of American society appear grounded more in a tightly intertwined complex of pathological characteristics than in some well thought through matrix of consciously held philosophical tenets. To the extent that this is true, the extrapolation of pacifist ideological propositions serves to obfuscate rather than clarify matters of praxical concern, to retard rather than further liberatory revolutionary potentials within the United States. Such a situation lends itself more readily to the emergence of a fascist societal construct than to liberatory transformation.[168] Thus, the need to overcome the hegemony of pacifist thinking is clear.

However, as with any pathologically-based manifestation, hegemonic pacifism in advanced capitalist contexts proves itself supremely resistant - indeed, virtually impervious — to mere logic and moral suasion. The standard accoutrements (such as intelligent theoretical dialogue) of political consciousness raising/movement building have proven relatively useless when confronted within the cynically self-congratulatory obstinacy with which the ideologues of pacifist absolutism defend their faith. What is therefore required as a means of getting beyond the smug exercise of knee-jerk pacifist "superiority," and into the arena of effective liberatory praxis, is a therapeutic rather than dialogic approach to the phenomenon.

What follows, then, is a sketch of a strategy by which radical therapists might begin to work through the pacifist problematic in both individual and group settings.[169] It should be noted that the suggested method of approach is contingent upon the therapist's own freedom from contamination with pacifist predilections (it has been my experience that a number of supposed radical therapists are themselves in acute need of therapy in this area).[170] It should also be noted that, in the process of elaboration, a number of terms from present psychological jargon (e.g., "reality therapy") are simply appropriated for their use value rather than through any formal adherence to the precepts which led to their initial currency. Such instances should be self-explanatory.

Therapy may be perceived as progressing either through a series of related and overlapping stages or phases of indeterminate length.

Values Clarification. During this initial portion of the therapeutic process, participants will be led through discussion/consideration of the bases of need for revolutionary social transformation, both objective and subjective. Differentiations between objectively observed and subjectively felt/experienced needs will be examined in depth, with particular attention paid to contradictions - real or perceived - between the two. The outcome of this portion of the process is to assist each participant in arriving at a realistic determination of whether s/he truly holds values consistent with revolutionary aspirations, or whether s/he is not more psychically inclined toward some variant of reforming/modifying the status quo.

The role of the therapist in this setting is to be both extremely conversant with objective factors, and to lead subjective responses of participants to an honest correlation in each discursive moment of process. Although this portion of therapy is quite hypothetical/theoretical in nature, it must be anticipated that a significant portion of participants who began defining themselves as pacifists will ultimately adopt a clarified set of personal values of a nonrevolutionary type, that is, acknowledging that they personally wish to pursue a course of action leading to some outcome other than the total transformation of the state/liberation of the most objectively oppressed social sectors.

It would be possible at this point to posit a procedure for attempting the alteration of nonrevolutionary values. However, the purpose of a radical (as opposed to bourgeois) therapy is not to induce accommodation to principles and values other than their own. In the sense that the term is used here, "values clarification" is merely an expedient to calling things by their right names and to strip away superficial/rhetorical layers of delusion.

Reality Therapy. Those - including self-defined pacifists - who in the initial phase of the process have coherently articulated their self-concept as being revolutionary will be led into a concrete integration with the physical reality of the objective bases for revolution, as well as application(s) of the revolutionary response to these conditions. This phase is quite multifaceted and contains a broad range of optional approaches.

In short, this second phase of the therapeutic process will include direct and extended exposure to the conditions of life among at least one (and preferably more) of the most objectively oppressed communities in North America, for example, inner-city black ghettos, Mexican and Puerto Rican barrios, American Indian reservations or urban enclaves, southern rural black communities, and so on. It is expected that participants will not merely "visit," but remain in these communities for extended periods, eating the food, living in comparable facilities and getting by on the average annual income. Arguments that such an undertaking is unreasonable because it would be dangerous and participants would be unwanted in such communities are not credible; these are the most fundamental reasons for going - the reality of existing in perpetual physical jeopardy (and/or of being physically abused in an extreme fashion) precisely because of being unwanted (especially on racial grounds), while living in the most squalid of conditions, is precisely what must be understood by selfproclaimed revolutionaries, pacifist or otherwise. Avoiding direct encounters with these circumstances as well as knowledge of them is to avoid revolutionary reality in favor of the comfort zone.

This experience should be followed by a similar sort of exposure to conditions among the oppressed within one or more of the many Third World nations undergoing revolutionary struggle. When at all possible, a part of this process should include linking up directly with one or more of the revolutionary groups operating in that country, a matter which is likely to take time and be dangerous (as will, say, living in an Indian village in Guatemala or Peru). But, again, this is precisely the point; the participant will obtain a clear knowledge of the realities of state repression and armed resistance which cannot be gained in any way other than through direct exposure.

Finally, either during or after the above processes, each participant should engage in some direct and consciously risk-inducing confrontation with state power. This can be done in a myriad of ways, either individually or in a group, but cannot include prior arrangements with police in order to minimize their involvement. Nor can it include obedience to police department demands for "order" once the action begins; participants must adopt a posture of absolute noncooperation with the state while remaining true to their own declared values (e.g., for pacifists, refraining from violent acts themselves).

The role of the therapist - who should already have such grounding in revolutionary reality him/herself - during this phase of therapy is to facilitate the discussion of the process in both individual and group settings. The therapist must be conversant with the realities being experienced by participants to be able to assist them in establishing and apprehending a proper context in each instance.

Evaluation. For those who complete phase two (and a substantial degree of attrition must be anticipated in association with reality therapy, especially among those who began by espousing nonviolent "alternatives" to armed struggle), there must come a period of independent and guided reflection upon their observations and experiences "in the real world." This can be done on a purely individual basis, but generally speaking, a group setting is best for the guided portion of evaluation. A certain recapitulation/reformulation of the outcomes of the values clarification phase is in order, as is considerable philosophical/situational discussion and analysis coupled to readings; role-play has proven quite effective in many instances.

The point of this portion of the therapeutic process is to achieve a preliminary reconciliation of personal, subjective values with concrete realities. A tangible outcome is obtainable in each participant's formal articulation of precisely how he/she sees his/her values coinciding with the demonstrable physical requirements of revolutionary social action. Again, it should be anticipated that during evaluation a segment of participants will arrive at the autonomous decision that their aspirations/ commitments are to something other than revolutionary social transformation.

The role of the therapist during this phase is to serve as a consultant to participant self-evaluation, recommend readings as appropriate to participant concerns/confusions, facilitate role-play and other group dynamics, and assist participants in keeping their reconciliations free of contradictions in logic.

Demystification. It has been my experience that, by this point in the therapeutic process, there are few (if any) remaining participants seeking to extend the principles of pacifist absolutism. And among remaining participants — especially among those who began with such absolutist notions - there often remains a profound lack of practical insight into the technologies and techniques common to both physical repression and physical resistance.

A typical psychological manifestation of such ignorance is the mystification of both the tools at issue and those individuals known to be skilled in their use. For example, a "fear of guns" is intrinsic to the pacifist left, as is sheer irrational terror at the very idea of directly confronting such mythologized characters as members of SWAT teams, Special Forces ("Green Berets"), Rangers, and members of right-wing vigilante organizations. The outcomes of such mystification tend to congeal into feelings of helplessness and inadequacy, rationalization, and avoidance. Sublimated, these feelings reemerge in the form of compensatory rhetoric, attempting to convert low self-confidence into a signification of transcendent virtue (i.e., "make the world go away").

Hence, while few participants will at this juncture be prepared to honestly deny that armed struggle is and must be an integral aspect of the revolutionary interest which they profess to share, a number will still contend that they are "philosophically" unable to directly participate in it. Clarification is obtainable in this connection by bringing out the obvious: knowing how, at some practical level, to engage in armed struggle and then choosing not to is a much different proposition than refraining from such engagement due to ignorance of the means and methods involved.

Here, "hands-on" training and experience is of the essence. The basic technologies at issue — rifles, assault rifles, handguns, shotguns, explosives, and the like, as well as the rudiments of their proper application and deployment — must be explored. This practical training sequence should be augmented and enhanced by selected readings, and continual individual and group discussions of the meaning(s) of this new range of skills acquisition.[171] It should be noted clearly that this phase of therapy is not designed or intended to create "commandos" or to form guerrilla units. Rather, it will serve only to acquaint each participant with the fact that s/he has the same general information/skills base as those who deter him/her through physical intimidation or repression and is at least potentially capable of the same degree of proficiency in these formerly esoteric areas as their most "elite" opponents. At this point, nonviolence can become a philosophical choice or tactical expedient rather than a necessity born of psychological default.

The role of the therapist during this phase is unlikely to be that of trainer (although it is possible, given that he/she should have already undergone such training). Rather, it is likely to be that of suggesting the appropriate trainers and literature, and serving as discussion/group facilitator for participants.

Reevaluation. In this final phase of therapy, remaining participants will be led into articulation of their overall perspective on the nature and process of revolutionary social transformation (i.e., their understanding of liberatory praxis), including their individual perceptions of their own specific roles within this process. The role of the therapist is to draw each participant out into a full and noncontradictory elaboration, as well as to facilitate the emergence of a potential for future, ongoing reevaluation and development of revolutionary consciousness.

The internal composition of each phase of this therapeutic approach in resolving the problem of hegemonic (pathological) pacifism is open to almost infinite variation on the part of the therapists and participants involved in each instance of application. Even the ordering of phases may be beneficially altered; for example, what has been termed "reality therapy" may have independently preceded and triggered the perceived need for values clarification on the part of some (or many) participants. Or, independently undertaken evaluations may lead some participants to enter values clarification and then proceed to reality therapy. The key for therapists is to retain a sense of flexibility of approach when applying the model, picking up participants at their own points of entry and adapting the model accordingly, rather than attempting some more-or-less rigid progression.

In sum, it is suggested that the appropriate application of the broad therapeutic model described in this section can have the effect of radically diminishing much of the delusion, the aroma of racism and the sense of privilege which mark the covert self-defeatism accompanying the practice of mainstream dissident politics in contemporary America. At another level - if widely adopted - the model will be of assistance in allowing the construction of a true liberatory praxis, a real "strategy to win," for the first time within advanced industrial society. This potentiality, for those who would claim the mantle of being revolutionary, can only be seen as a positive step.

conclusion

In the contradiction lies the hope. - Bertholt Brecht

This essay is far from definitive. Its composition and emphasis have been dictated largely by the nature of the dialogue and debate prevailing within the circle of the American opposition today. The main weight of its exposition has gone to critique pacifist thinking and practice; its thrust has been more to debunk the principles of hegemonic nonviolence rather than to posit fully articulated alternatives. In the main, this has been brought about by the degree of resistance customarily thrown up, a priori, to any challenge extended to the assumption of ontological goodness pacifism accords itself. The examples it raises are intended to at least give pause to those whose answers have been far too pat and whose "purity of purpose" has gone unquestioned for far too long.

A consequence of this has been that the conceptualization of other options, both within this essay and in the society beyond, have suffered. As concerns society, this is an obviously unacceptable situation. As to the essay, it may be asserted that it is to the good. The author is neither vain nor arrogant enough to hold that his single foray could be sufficient to offset the magnitude of problematic issues raised. Instead, it is to be hoped that the emphasis of "Pacifism as Pathology" will cause sufficient anger and controversy that others - many others - will endeavor to seriously address the matters at hand. Within such open and volatile forums, matters of therapeutic and praxical concerns can hopefully advance.

In concluding, I would at last like to state the essential premise of this essay clearly: the desire for a nonviolent and cooperative world is the healthiest of all psychological manifestations. This is the overarching principle of liberation and revolution.[172] Undoubtedly, it seems the highest order of contradiction that, in order to achieve nonviolence, we must first break with it in overcoming its root causes. Therein, however, lies our only hope.

notes

1. On the matter of alchemy, at least as intended here, see Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Stein and Day, 1964) pp. 62-90.

2. V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International, 1932).

3. The tally of twentieth-century revolutions accomplished through nonviolent means is exactly zero (see the critique of the Gandhian "exception" in the section "An Essential Contradiction").

4. E.g., Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

5. Probably the best elucidation of the "oppositional praxis" at issue here can be found in Gene Sharp's 902-page trilogy, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973), "Part One: Power and Struggle"; "Part Two: The Methods of Nonviolent Action"; and "Part Three: The Dynamic of Nonviolent Action." Meanwhile, on the steady growth of native fascism, see Phillip Finch, God, Guts and Guns: A Close Look at the Radical Right (New York: Seaview, 1983); James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right (New York: Noonday, 1987); and Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic-Fascist Networks and Their Effect on U.S. Cold War Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

6. See, e.g., Gene Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980).

7. Virtually all extant literature on the subject, which is considerable, leaves the same impression on this point. William L. Shirer, "The New Order," The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), Chapt. 2, pp. 937-94, still provides as good a capsule view as any single volume.

8. On this point there are also numerous sources. For example, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 41-48; Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head, Richard Barry, trans. (New York: Coward McCann^?, 1970), pp. 346-47; and Helmut Krausnik et al., Anatomy of the SS State, Richard Barry et al., trans. (New York: Walker & Co., 1968), pp. 54-57.

9. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961), pp. 122-25, 297, 316.

10. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Raul Hilberg, "The Judenrat: Conscious or Unconscious Tool?," Proceedings of the Third Vad Yashem International Historical Conference, 4—7 April 1977 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979).

11. See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier Books, 1961); Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz (New York: Fawcett Books, 1960); and Terrance Des Pres, The Survivor: Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

12. The most careful recent estimates indicate that approximately 5.1 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, 1.1 million in Auschwitz/ Birkenau alone; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, rev. ed., 1985), Vol. 3, pp. 1047-48,1201-20. See also, Franciszek Piper, "The Number of Victims," in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 61—76.

13. The question is posed in a number of places by various authors. The particular version used here was framed by Bruno Bettelheim on p. ix of his Foreword to Nyiszli, Auschwitz, 1960, op. cit.

14. Again, the references on this point are quite numerous. As examples, see Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, op. cit.; Hilberg, Martyrs & Heroes Remembrance Authority, The Holocaust (Jerusalem, Palestine: Vad Yashem, 1975); and Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power & Mass Murder (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1976).

15. E.g., Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust as Historical Experience: Essays and Discussion (New York: Holmes and Meir, 1981).

16. But not, as assorted zionist propagandists such as Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt, Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz and Steven T. Katz would have it, to a degree unique in all history. Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and leftists shared a similar fate under nazi rule. Approximately two thirds of Europe's Jews were exterminated by the nazis, while at least the same percentage (and probably more) of all North American Indians were slaughtered by the United States and its colonial antecedents. The butchery of Armenians by Turks in 1915 also rivals the Holocaust in intensity, if not in scale, as does the genocide of East Timorese by Indonesia between 1975 and 1977, and - in some respects - the treatment accorded Palestinians by Israel today. See generally, Bohdan Wytwycky, The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell: A Brief Account of the 9- 10 Million Persons Who Died with 6 Million Jews Under Nazi Racism (Washington, D.C.: Novae Report on the New Ethnicity, 1980); Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990); and Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996).

17. Actually, to be fair, such accusations transcend zionism. A classic example occurred during the preparation of this manuscript. It was sent out for review and comments to a Denver-based anti-zionist Jewish organization, which was sharply critical of the use of the Holocaust to illustrate many of the points made herein. The very first objection raised was that using "'Like Lambs to the Slaughter' as a heading is just asking to be called anti-semitic, especially since the argument does not reflect the facts." Interestingly, among the materials sent along to "correct" my factual understanding of the extent and effectiveness of Jewish armed resistance to the Holocaust was a xeroxed excerpt from Lucy Dawidowicz's War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, 1975) containing the following passage at p. 423: "The only question facing the Jews [announced a zionist leader in 1943] was how to choose to die: 'either like sheep for the slaughter or like men of honor.' Among the Zionist youth in the resistance movement, 'like sheep for the slaughter' became an epithet of ignominy, divorced from its original [Hebraic] meaning of martyrdom. These young Zionists, in their statements and proclamations, [expressed] a feeling of anger against Jewish passivity." I may perhaps be forgiven for observing that this is exactly the argument I've been making. One can accept it or reject it, but one cannot do both at once (as my critics seek to do). And, to label as "anti-semitic" the application of an explicitly Jewish term to a context and in a fashion in which it has already been emphatically applied by Jews? Unto me giveth a break. This is not constructive criticism. Rather, it is the use of name-calling and factual distortion to foreclose on inconvenient discussion. One solace is that being subjected to such nonsense places me in some pretty good company; Jewish scholars like Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Arno J. Mayer have suffered similar indignities at the hands of their own community after raising comparably uncomfortable issues with respect to the Judaic response to nazism; see Dwight Macdonald, "Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Establishment," in his Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts (New York: Grossman, 1974); on Hilberg, see Michael R. Marrus, "Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust," Journal of Contemporary History, No. 30 (1995); and Arno J. Mayer, "History and Memory: On the Poverty of Remembering and Forgetting the Judeocide," Radical History Review, No. 56 (1993). For further, and entirely cogent, consideration of the "like sheep to the slaughter" phenomenon and its implications, see Robert G. L. Waite, "The Holocaust and Historical Explanation," in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987).

18. Bettelheim, op. cit., p. xiv.

19. It should be noted that similar revolts in Sobibor and Treblinka in 1943 were even more effective than the one at Auschwitz/Birkenau a few months later; Sobib6r had to be closed altogether, a reality which amplifies and reinforces Bettelheim's rather obvious point; Miriam Novitch, Sobibor: Martyrdom and Revolt (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980); Jean-Francois Steiner, Treblinka (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967); and Yisrael Gutman, "Rebellions in the Camps: Three Revolts in the Face of Death," in Critical Iss