by Howard Zinn
conscripted soldiers, their subjugated civilians.
War is a class phenomenon. This has been an unbroken truth from ancient times to our
own, when the victims of the Vietnam War turned out to be working-class Americans and
Asian peasants. Preparations for war maintains swol en military bureaucracies, gives profits
to corporations (and enough jobs to ordinary citizens to bring them along). And they give
politicians special power, because fear of "the enemy" becomes the basis for entrusting
policy to a handful of leaders, who feel bound (as we have seen so often) by no
constitutional limits, no constraints of decency or commitment to truth.
Justice Without Violence
Massive violence has been accepted historical y by citizens (but not by al ; hence desertions,
opposition, and the need for bribery and coercion to build armies) because it has been
presented as a means to good ends. Al over the world there are nations that commit
aggression on other nations and on their own people, whether in the Middle East, or Latin
America, or South Africa—nations that offend our sense of justice. Most people don't real y
want violence. But they do want justice, and for that sake, they can be persuaded to
engage in war and civil war.
Al of us, therefore, as we approach the next century, face an enormous responsibility: How
to achieve justice without massive violence. Whatever in the past has been the moral
justification for violence—whether defense against attack, or the overthrow of tyranny—
must now be accomplished by other means.
It is the monumental moral and tactical chal enge of our time. It wil make the greatest
demands on our ingenuity, our courage, our patience, and our wil ingness to renounce old
habits—but it must be done. Surely nations must defend themselves against attack, citizens
must resist and remove oppressive regimes, the poor must rebel against their poverty and
redistribute the wealth of the rich. But that must be done without the violence of war.
Too many of the official tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr., have piously praised his
nonviolence, the praise often coming from political leaders who themselves have committed
great violence against other nations and have accepted the daily violence of poverty in
American life. But King's phrase, and that of the southern civil rights movement, was not
simply "nonviolence," but nonviolent direct action.
In this way, nonviolence does not mean acceptance, but resistance—not waiting, but acting.
It is not at al passive. It involves strikes, boycotts, noncooperation, mass demonstrations,
and sabotage, as wel as appeals to the conscience of the world, even to individuals in the
oppressing group who might break away from their past.
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Direct action does not deride using the political rights, the civil liberties, even the voting mechanisms in those societies where they are available (as in the United States), but it
recognizes the limitations of those control ed rights and goes beyond.
Freedom and justice, which so often have been the excuses for violence, are stil our goals.
But the means for achieving them must change, because violence, however tempting in the
quickness of its action, undermines those goals immediately, and also in the long run. The
means for achieving social change must match, moral y, the ends.
It is true that human rights cannot be defended or advanced without power. But, if we have learned anything useful from the carnage of this century, it is that true power does not—as
the heads of states everywhere implore us to believe—come out of the barrel of a gun, or
out of a missile silo.
The possession of 10,000 thermonuclear weapons by the United States did not change the
fact that it was helpless to stop a revolution in Cuba or another in Nicaragua, that it was
unable to defeat its enemy either in Korea or in Vietnam. The possession of an equal
number of bombs by the Soviet Union did not prevent its forced withdrawal from
Afghanistan nor did it deter the Solidarity uprising in Poland, which was successful enough
to change the government and put into office a Solidarity member as prime minister. The
fol owing news item from the summer of 1989 would have been dismissed as a fantasy two
years earlier: "Solidarity, vilified and outlawed for eight years until April, jubilantly entered Parliament today as the first freely elected opposition party to do so in a Communist
country."19
The power of massive armaments is much overrated. Indeed, it might be cal ed a huge
fake—one of the great hoaxes of the twentieth century. We have seen heavily armed
tyrants flee before masses of citizens galvanized by a moral goal. Recal those television
images of Somoza scurrying to his private plane in Managua; of Ferdinand and Imelda
Marcos quickly assembling their suitcases of clothes, jewels, and cash and fleeing the
Philippines; of the Shah of Iran searching desperately for someone to take him in; of
Duvalier barely managing to put on his pants before escaping the fury of the Haitian people.
In the United States we saw the black movement for civil rights confront the slogan of
"Never" in a South where blacks seemed to have no power, where the old ways were
buttressed by wealth and a monopoly of political control. Yet, in a few years, the South was
transformed.
I recal at the end of the great march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 when, after our
twenty-mile trek that day, coming into Montgomery, I had decided to skip the speeches at
the capitol and fly back to Boston. At the airport I ran into my old Atlanta col eague and
friend, Whitney Young, now head of the Urban League, who had just arrived to be part of
the celebration in Montgomery. We decided to have coffee together in the recently
desegregated airport cafeteria.
The waitress obviously was not happy at the sight of us. Aside from the integration of it, she might have been disconcerted by the fact that the white man was stil mud-splattered,
disheveled, and unshaven from the march, and the black man, tal and handsome, was
impeccably dressed with suit and tie. We noticed the big button on her uniform. It said
"Never!" but she served us our coffee.
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Racism stil poisons the country, north and south. Blacks stil mostly live in poverty, and their life expectancy is years less than that of whites. But important changes have taken
place that were at one time unimaginable. A consciousness about the race question exists
among blacks and whites that did not exist before. The nation wil never be the same after
that great movement, wil never be able to deny the power of nonviolent direct action.
The movement against the Vietnam War in the United States too was powerful, and yet
nonviolent (although, like the civil rights movement, it led to violent scenes whenever the
government decided to use police or National Guardsmen, against peaceful demonstrators).
It seemed puny and hopelessly weak at its start. In the first years of the war, no one in
public life dared to speak of unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam. When my book Vietnam:
The Logic of Withdrawal was published in 1967, the idea that we should simply leave
Vietnam was considered radical. But by 1969 it was the majority sentiment in the country.
By 1973 it was in the peace agreement, and the huge U.S. military presence in Vietnam was
wit
hdrawn.
President Lyndon Johnson had said; "We wil not turn tail and run." But we did, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. It was the right thing to do. Of course, the military impasse in
Vietnam was crucial in bringing the war to an end, but it took the movement at home to
make American leaders decide not to try to break that impasse by a massive escalation, by
more death and destruction. They had to accept the limits of military power.
In that same period, cultural changes in the country showed once again the power of
apparently powerless people. Women, a century before, had shown their power and won the
right to go to col ege, to become doctors and lawyers, and to vote. And then in the sixties
and seventies the women's liberation movement began to alter the nation's perception of
women in the workplace, in the home, and in relationships with men, other women, and
children. The right to abortion was established by the Supreme Court against powerful
opposition by religious conservatives (although that decision is stil under heavy attack).
Another apparently powerless group—homosexual men and lesbian women—encouraged
perhaps by what other movements had been able to accomplish against great odds, took
advantage of the atmosphere of change. They demanded, and in some places received,
acceptance for what had before been unmentionable.
These last decades have shown us that ordinary people can bring down institutions and
change policies that seemed entrenched forever. It is not easy. And there are situations that
seem immovable except by violent revolution. Yet even in such situations, the bloody cost
of endless violence—of revolt leading to counterrevolutionary terror, and more revolt and
more terror in an endless cycle of death—suggests a reconsideration of tactics.
We think of South Africa, which is perhaps the supreme test of the usefulness of nonviolent
direct action. It is a situation where blacks have been the victims of murderous violence and
where the atmosphere is tense with the expectation of more violence, perhaps this time on
both sides. But even the African National Congress, the most militant and most popular of
black organizations there, clearly wants to end apartheid and attain political power without
a bloodbath that might cost a mil ion lives. Its members have tried to mobilize international
opinion, have adopted nonviolent but dramatic tactics: boycotts, economic sanctions,
demonstrations, marches, and strikes. There wil undoubtedly be more cruelty, more
repression, but if the nonviolent movement can grow, perhaps one day a general strike wil
paralyze the economy and the government and compel a negotiated settlement for a
multiracial, democratic South Africa.
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The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under the military occupation of the Israelis since the war of 1967, began around 1987 to adopt nonviolent tactics, massive
demonstrations, to bring the attention of the world to their brutal treatment by the Israelis.
This brought more brutality, as hundreds of Palestinians, unarmed (except for clubs and
rocks), were shot to death by Israeli soldiers. But the world did begin to pay attention and if
there is final y a peaceful arrangement that gives the Palestinians their freedom and Israel
its security, it wil probably be the result of nonviolent direct action.
Certainly, the use of terrorist violence, whether by Arabs placing bombs among civilians or
by Jews bombing vil ages and kil ing large numbers of noncombatants, is not only immoral,
but gains nothing for anybody. Except perhaps a spurious glory for macho revolutionaries or
ruthless political leaders puffed up with their "power" whenever they succeed in blowing up a bus, destroying a vil age, or (as with Reagan) kil ing a hundred people by dropping bombs
on Tripoli.
People made fearful by politicians but also by real historical experience worry about invasion
and foreign occupation. The assumption has always been that the only defense is to meet
violence with violence. We have pointed out that, with the weaponry available today, the
result is only suicidal (South Korea against North Korea, Iran against Iraq, even Vietnam
against the United States).
A determined population can not only force a domestic ruler to flee the country, but can
make a would-be occupier retreat, by the use of a formidable arsenal of tactics: boycotts
and demonstrations, occupations and sit-ins, sit-down strikes and general strikes,
obstruction and sabotage, refusal to pay taxes, rent strikes, refusal to cooperate, refusal to
obey curfew orders or gag orders, refusal to pay fines, fasts and pray-ins, draft resistance,
and civil disobedience of various kinds.20 Gene Sharp and his col eagues at Harvard, in a
study of the American Revolution, concluded that the colonists were hugely successful in
using nonviolent tactics against England. Opposing the Stamp Tax and other oppressive
laws, the colonists used boycotts of British goods, il egal town meetings, refusal to serve on
juries, and withholding taxes. Sharp notes that "in nine or ten of the thirteen colonies,
British governmental power had already been effectively and il egal y replaced by substitute
governments" before military conflict began at Lexington and Concord.21
Thousands of such instances have changed the world, but they are nearly absent from the
history books. History texts feature military heroes, lead entire generations of the young to
think that wars are the only way to solve problems of self-defense, justice, and freedom.
They are kept uninformed about the world's long history of nonviolent struggle and
resistance.
Political scientists have general y ignored nonviolent action as a form of power. Like the
politicians, they too have been intoxicated with power. And so in studying international
relations, they play games (it's cal ed, professional y, "game theory") with the strategic moves that use the traditional definitions of power—guns and money. It wil take a new
movement of students and faculty across the country to turn the universities and academies
from the study of war games to peace games, from military tactics to resistance tactics,
from strategies of "first-strike" to those of "general strike."
It would be foolish to claim, even with the widespread acceptance of nonviolent direct action
as the way of achieving justice and resisting tyranny, that al group violence wil come
cleanly to an end. But the gross instances can be halted, especial y those that require the
cooperation of the citizenry and that depend on the people to accept the legitimacy of the
government's actions.
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Military power is helpless without the acquiescence of those people it depends on to carry out orders. The most powerful deterrent to aggression would be the declared determination
of a whole people to resist in a thousand ways.
When we become depressed at the thought of the enormous power that governments,
multinational corporations, armies and police have to control minds, crush dissents, and
destroy rebel ions, we should consider a phenomenon that I have always found interesting:
Those who possess enormous power are surprisingly nervous about their ability to hold on
to their power. They react almost hysterical y to what seem to be puny and unthreatening
signs of opposition.
For instance, we see the mighty Soviet
state feeling the need to put away, out of sight,
handfuls of disorganized intel ectuals. We see the American government, armored with a
thousand layers of power, work strenuously to put a few dissident Catholic priests in jail or
keep a writer or artist out of this country. We remember Nixon's hysterical reaction to a
solitary man picketing the White House: "Get him!"
Is it possible that the people in authority know something that we don't know? Perhaps they
know their own ultimate weakness. Perhaps they understand that smal movements can
become big ones, that if an idea takes hold in the population, it may become indestructible.
It is one of the characteristics of complex and powerful machines that they are vulnerable to
tiny unforeseen developments. The disaster of the giant space vessel Chal enger was due to
the failure of a smal ring that was affected by cold. Similarly, huge organizations can be
rendered helpless by a few determined people. A headline in the New York Times in the
summer of 1989 read: "Environmentalists' Vessels Sink Navy Missile Test." The story began, The Navy was forced to cancel a test launching of its newest missile today
when four vessels manned by protesters sailed into a restricted zone 50 miles
off the Atlantic coast of Florida and attached an antinuclear banner on the
side of the submarine that was to fire the missile.22
As al -control ing a government as that in the Soviet Union must stil worry about its
citizens' protest, especial y when large numbers of people are involved. The Soviet Union,
after unilateral y halting its nuclear tests for a year and a half and finding that the United
States did not respond, announced in February 1987, that it would now resume testing. And
it did. But suddenly, it mysteriously halted testing for five months in 1989. Why?
According to two American physicians connected with "Physicians for Social Responsibility,"
and in touch with Soviet doctors, the mysterious five-month absence of nuclear testing may
wel have been due, in their words, to "the rapid growth of a grassroots environmental
movement in Kazakhstan." It seems that two underground tests had released radioactive
gases into the atmosphere. This led a prominent Kazakh poet to cal a meeting of concerned
citizens. Five thousand people assembled and made a public appeal to close the test site in
