The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act

I reproduce here a Noam Chomsky's 1967 interview speech given how relevant it is in light of issues developing in the world regarding peace and non-violence. 


This was delivered as an entry in a speech contest organised by the Lions Club Woden.

The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?

If you'd listen carefully to the title of my speech, you will realise that there is a deliberate question mark appended to it. I have to attribute the idea to Noam Chomsky, from whom the reference question was the subject of an interview he gave in 1967. You may or may not have had much exposure to Noam Chomsky, but to me, he remains the most important intellectual alive. A linguist, political activist, philosopher and writer who's successfully written over 100 books, Noam Chomsky surely is a defining figure in advancing political awareness and perhaps to explain this phenomenon is this in his own words and I quote, “My political awareness begins with my earliest memories during the Depression -- pathetic people coming to the door to try to sell rags, riding on a trolley car with my mother past a strike at a textile plant and watching security forces beat women strikers, sensing the dark clouds of fascism spread over Europe, and a lot more. There was no defining moment. Just no alternative.”

The kind of question I had asked, The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? is one that can not be answered in any meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of political historical concrete circumstances and figures. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate an even greater evil.

Away from theory though, what one meets in the real world are shades of grey and obscure complex relations between means and ends and incalculable consequences of actions and so on and so forth. Practically, advocates of non-violence have a strong case because I think in all circumstances, they can very justly claim that there is a better way than to resort to violence. Let me mention a few concrete instances that exemplify my point.

The events leading up to the United States declaring war on Japan on December the 8^th 1941 come to mind. On November 6^th 1941, just a month before Pearl Harbour, Japan had offered to eliminate the main major factor that really led to the Pacific war, namely the Closed Door Policy in China. This offer came with one reservation though, they would only eliminate the closed door in China if it were also applied in, say Latin America, the British Dominions and so forth. This of course was considered absurd and ignored by the United States. That was one of the factors that led to the attack on Pearl Harbour and the war which as a matter of course, was politically impossible for United States not to declare, even when they knew that the blame was distributed. But again, we are talking about what is and what is moral, not what is a natural reflex. And the advocates of nonviolence are really saying that we should try to raise ourselves to such a cultural and moral level, both as individuals and as a community, that we would be able to control this reflex. According to Gandhi, non violence does not mean docile submission to the will of the evil, but it means the use of all of the soul’s powers against the will of the tyrant. And to quote Gandhi, “nonviolence is not an excuse for the coward, but is the supreme virtue of the brave. The practice of non-violence needs much more courage than the practice of arms. …Vengeance is a symbol of weakness as well... A dog barks and bites when it is scared.”

Now what were the consequences of striking back? On December 8^th, 1941, the United States struck back quite blindly and unthinkingly, and I'm not sure in retrospect that the world is any better for it. So even after Pearl Harbour, I would advocate for nonviolence, not as an absolute moral principle, but as conceivably justified in those particular historical circumstances. In short, there may well have been alternatives to the Pacific War.

The anti-war movement in the United States deserves recognition for it's argument for nonviolence. Tolstoy lends us interesting insights about civil disobedience in the context of the United States. To quote from one of his essays of 1897, “The Beginning of the End” he points out that until recently men could not imagine a world without slavery. Similarly, one cannot imagine the life of man without war. “...a hundred years have gone since the first clear expression of the idea that mankind can not live without slavery; and there is no longer slavery in Christian nations. And there shall not pass another hundred years after the clear utterances of the idea that mankind can live without war, before war shall cease to be. Very likely some form of armed violence will remain, just as wage labour remains after abolition of slavery, but at least wars and armies will be abolished in the outrageous form, so repugnant to reason and moral sense, in which they now exist.”

We live in an aggressive society, and we live under conditions of almost unparalleled freedom. We therefore have the opportunity to eradicate a good part of the illegitimate violence that plagues our lives and that is destroying the lives of many who are much less fortunate. I think we have no choice whatsoever but to take up the challenge that's implicit in this prediction of Tolstoy's. If we do not take up this challenge, we will help to bring about a very different state of affairs which was reportedly predicted by Einstein, who was once asked his opinion about the nature of a third world war and replied that he had nothing to say about that matter, but that he was quite certain that the fourth world war would be fought with clubs and stones.

The basic arguments that should surely lie the thought of violent reactions to rest are I think simple to conjure. Governments happen to be monopolies of power and efforts to retaliate violently almost always bring more harm to the oppressed and in most instances makes these governments to clench their fists even tighter. A perfect piece to fill this picture puzzle is events that are currently rolling in Libya. To the extent that you can compare the nature of the uprisings in Egypt and Libya, interesting observations can be drawn from what violent and nonviolent protests have a power to deliver. Egypt was able to non-violently oust it's political figure head, Mubarak, in a few weeks of campaigning while Libya's Gaddafi could potentially be anywhere! Because they haven’t yet captured him as they would like. And as Martin Luther King, the well respected advocate for nonviolence put it and I quote, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence . Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force”.

Another reason to avoid violence is that violence always tends to antagonise the uncommitted or otherwise called the 'swing' population. What any nonviolent movement wants is to enrol as much of its public as it can since peaceful active resistance only materialises when it is strongly backed by the a sizable populace. This case I believe is one to be made for the Hezbollah of Lebanon and Hamas of The Palestinian territories.

Refer to chomsky.info for the whole excerpt of the interview.