by Chris Hedges
If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants, and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, then state violence can spawn reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls “terrorism.” Violent uprisings are always tragic, and violent revolutions always empower revolutionaries, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who are as ruthless as their adversaries. Violence inevitably becomes the principal form of coercion on both sides of the divide. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, swiftly descends into nihilism, terrorism, and chaos. It consumes itself. This is the minefield we will have to cross.
“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions,” wrote Thomas Schelling.
They can deny him most of what he wants—they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration. And he can deny them just about everything they want—he can deny it by using force at his command.… They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves.… It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins.33
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case, neoclassical economics and globalization—that sustain their structures of power. The process of understanding this can take years, but once people do understand it, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman explained. “Evolution becomes revolution.”34
I prefer the gradual reforms of a functioning, liberal democracy. I fear the process of massive social engineering. I detest the poison of violence. I would rather live in a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority and promote the common good, a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. We live in a system that is incapable of reforming itself. The first step to dismantling that system is to dismantle the ideas that give it legitimacy. Once that is done, though the system may be able to cling to power through coercion and fear for years, it will have been given a mortal blow.
“Many ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil,” Berkman wrote.
Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that they had “outlived their usefulness” and therefore they “died.” But how did they “outlive” their “usefulness”? To whom were they useful, and how did they “die”? We know already that they were useful only to the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings and revolutions.35
IV/Conversion
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.1
—THOMAS PAINE, THE RIGHTS OF MAN
Ronnie Kasrils, white, middle-class, and Jewish, was working as a twenty-two-year-old scriptwriter for a South African film company called Alpha Film Studios in March 1960 when the Sharpeville Massacre took place. Sixty-nine unarmed blacks who had been protesting the apartheid regime’s restrictive pass laws were gunned down by white South African police, with 180 seriously wounded.2 Many were shot in the back as they fled.3
He approached some black workers at the studio to commiserate. They told him: “This is South Africa. Amapoyisa yi’zinja. [The police are dogs].” Groups of white English and Afrikaans were also gathering in separate groups. The massacre, everyone knew, signaled the start of a new phase in blacks’ battle for liberation in apartheid South Africa. One of the white men told Kasrils: “Moe’nie [Don’t] worry, mate, you’ll be in the trenches with the rest of us. Ons wit ous [us white guys] have to sink or swim together.”4
But his white coworkers were wrong. Something snapped in Kasrils. He underwent a conversion—the rite of passage of all revolutionaries. During the next few days, he argued passionately with family and friends about the gross injustice that had taken place, but found that “outside my immediate circle, few whites showed any sensitivity—the general view being: ‘we should machinegun the lot of them.’ ”5
He watched enraged blacks burn their passbooks in defiance and get arrested. The apartheid government declared a state of emergency. It outlawed the African National Congress (ANC) and its rival, the Pan African Congress (PAC). British-made Saracen armored cars, with their mounted .30 caliber machine guns, rumbled down the streets of the Alexandra Township, where most of the black workers at the film studio lived. Kasrils was no longer able to be a passive accomplice in a system of such gross injustice. He took time off from his job and went to Durban, where he met Rowley Arenstein, a radical lawyer who was being hunted by the police. Arenstein urged Kasrils to join what he called “the movement,” predicting that the ruling National Party government would not last six more months in power—a prediction that was off by three decades. Kasrils became Arenstein’s driver. He chauffeured the lawyer to various safe houses around Durban. He met others also being hunted by the police.
Kasrils returned to his job, but at night he drafted and printed leaflets for the underground movement calling for the release of all detainees, the lifting of the state of emergency, and a democratic government for blacks and whites. He painted anti-apartheid slogans on walls at night. He eventually committed himself totally to the struggle. Turning his back on his job, his class, his government, and his race, Kasrils joined the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. He became a founding member, along with Nelson Mandela, of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the ANC. Kasrils became a rebel.
Such a decision to engage in open defiance, abandoning all that is safe, familiar, and secure for a precarious life of resistance, is often triggered by a singular traumatic experience. Lenin was radicalized when his older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, was executed after being involved in a plot to assassinate the Czar and he began to read his dead brother’s radical books.6 The trip taken by the twenty-two-year-old medical student Ernesto “Che” Guevara—like Kasrils and Lenin, a member of the middle class—into the poor backwaters of South America allowed him to place himself in the shoes of the oppressed. Such conversions have more to do with the heart than the head. Empathy is the most important asset. Guevara, like Kasrils and Lenin, would use his empathy to justify violence—a dangerous transformation when all action, even murder, becomes acceptable in the name of the coming utopia. But the sentiments engendered at the moment of conversion are real. Albert Camus said that no rebellion can take place without this “strange form of love.”7
When I met with Kasrils in New York, he spoke of an incident in 1984 involving a South African death squad led by the notorious killer and former police colonel Eugene de Kock. De Kock was the commanding officer of C1, a counterinsurgency unit of the South African police that in the 1980s and 1990s kidnapped, tortured, and murdered hundreds of anti-apartheid activists and ANC leaders. He and his hit squad had recently assassinated three of Kasrils’s ANC comrades. Kasrils tracked de Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil”—and now serving a life sentence in South Africa—and his squad of killers to a motel in Swaziland. Kasrils organized a group of ANC insurgents to gun down the members of the hit squad. De Kock and his men had left, however, before Kasrils and his armed group burst into the room where they had been. I asked Kasrils whether, should the situation be repeated today, he would organize a
n armed group to kill de Kock and his henchmen.
“I see this as similar to the French Resistance and the resistance in Europe against the Nazis,” he said. “So, you know there were the battles in the open, but most of the battles were by stealth. I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong in the battle of stealth against power when you are engaged in a war. They had killed, murdered in cold blood, three of our people in Swaziland. You’ve got to take harsh decisions at times, and this is in the context of an ongoing war there.… I put it within the context of a revolutionary war.”
Nevertheless, he said that “when I look back and I meet some of these people who we fought before, and I hear from them how they knew someone who died, I wish that that person didn’t have to die.”
Kasrils served as the commander of the Natal Regional Command and in 1964 underwent military training in Odessa in the Soviet Union. As a leader in the MK, Kasrils carried out sabotage and bombings of state infrastructure and industrial sites. The attacks took an inevitable toll on unarmed white civilians. A 1983 MK guerrilla attack left nineteen dead. A 1986 raid killed three and injured seventy-three.8 Kasrils was unrepentant. Blacks, he pointed out, paid a far higher price. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the apartheid state.
Kasrils, a stocky bull of a man, argued that all rebels are driven by an instinctive compassion, concern for others, and a tendency toward “standing up for the underdog.” These impulses are often present in children, he said, but they are muted or crushed by the institutions of social control, including the family and school. Kasrils, although an atheist, said he saw the rebel in Jesus Christ, as well as in the thunderous denunciations of evil and oppression by the Hebrew prophets of the Bible. He said that those who endure oppression, such as Mandela, and rise up to resist are better described as revolutionaries. The rebel, he said, is one who often enjoys certain “liberties” but who is “prepared to give up his class or her class, or tribe.” Rebels, he said, turn their back on their own.
Kasrils spoke about a discussion he had on the nature of the rebel with Jack Simons, a retired university professor who was teaching ANC recruits in Angola and who had been a leader in the South African Communist Party before it was outlawed in 1950.
“Unconventional thought is a force for development,” Simons told Kasrils. “It is wrong to suppress it. The likes of you and I were thrown to the lions in Roman times and burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages as heretics.”
It was in post-apartheid South Africa that Kasrils fully realized Simons’s wisdom. Kasrils’s relentless quest for political and economic justice eventually turned him into a fierce critic of the two organizations to which he had dedicated himself for fifty years—the African National Congress and the Communist Party. The failure of these two organizations to ameliorate the suffering of the poor, the rampant corruption that he said exists within the leadership of the ANC, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012, in which thirty-four striking miners were gunned down by the South African Police Service—the country’s most lethal single assault on unarmed civilians since the 1960 Sharpeville massacre—left him alienated, once again, from the centers of power.9 Camus observed that “every revolutionary [who achieves power] ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.”10
“I have to speak up,” Kasrils said. “It’s deep within me.”
Kasrils said that the ANC’s fatal mistake, which he concedes was partly his fault, was its decision during the transition to power in 1994 to shelve its socialist economic agenda, known as the Freedom Charter. Written in 1955, the charter had wide popular appeal. It demanded the end of the exploitation by the white oligarchic elite, who treated black laborers as serfs on farms, in mines, and on factory floors. It called for the right to work, freedom of expression, access to decent housing and land for all South Africans, and the sharing of South African wealth, especially its mineral resources. Banks, industries, and mines were to be nationalized.
Kasrils and other ANC leaders believed that they could deal with economic injustice later. They were fearful of defying Western imperialism and, as Kasrils put it, “neoliberal global economy market fundamentals.” But the ANC’s capitulation to global pressure to adopt a free market economy has proved to be a disaster. South Africa continues to be one of the most unequal societies on the planet. Whites, although they number less than 10 percent of the nation’s population, earn 7.7 times more on average than their black counterparts. Only a few thousand of the country’s 41 million blacks earn more than $5,000 a year. It is apartheid by another name.11 “[A] true rebel would not have accepted that,” Kasrils said.
The goal of the counterrevolutionary is to physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations, disrupt their communication, and shatter their organization. Counterrevolutionaries seek to dry up popular, financial, and material support for the revolutionaries. They hunt down and decapitate leaders. Counterrevolutionaries create rival organizations to discredit and purge the rebel leadership and infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries. They provoke the movement by forming front groups that carry out repugnant acts to alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Meanwhile, the counterrevolutionaries churn out shadowy propaganda that the mainstream press often runs uncritically. Finally, they offer a political alternative that appears reformist but is ultimately under the control of the state.
The tools to break resistance are similar whether those movements are violent or nonviolent. The physical eradication of the Occupy encampments, the attempt to marginalize the protesters from the wider society, the use of figures such as Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones to co-opt the language of the Occupy movement and funnel energy into a dysfunctional electoral process—all these strategies fit the classic outline of a counterrevolutionary agenda.
Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily, as in the old cliché, about hearts and minds. The goal is to win back, or at least render passive, a disaffected population. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar from those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. In fact, these operatives are frequently the same people.
But once violence is added to the mix, whether to defend the state or destroy it, something poisonous and insidious takes place. Violence is directed against society not to convert but to eradicate. All aspects of civic life are targeted—political, religious, educational, familial, economic, and traditional. The goal—as we see in Iraq and Afghanistan—is not to control territory but to control populations. Terror, assassination, imprisonment, and death become the glue that replaces the tissue of social cohesion. Society is mutilated. Civic life is destroyed. And in wartime each side uses violence to attempt to shape civil society to its own ends.
We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we unleash paranoia and fracture those who build movements. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets, we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons and demonize the movement to the public.
All we have, as Vaclav Havel wrote, is our powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The ability of the movement to overthrow the corporate state depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency, and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. These assets permit us, as Havel puts it in his classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth, we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and functions by deceit.
Havel, who would become the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993, reflects in the e
ssay on the mind of a greengrocer who, as instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World, Unite!” He displays the poster partly out of habit, partly because everyone else is doing it, and partly out of fear of the consequences for not following the rules. Havel notes that the greengrocer would not display a poster saying, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”12 This, for Havel, was the difference between the terror of a Joseph Stalin or an Adolf Hitler and the collective charade between the rulers and the ruled that by the 1970s had gripped Communist Czechoslovakia.
“Imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself,” Havel writes.
He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.13
This attempt to “live within the truth” brings with it ostracism and retribution. Punishment, Havel points out, is imposed in bankrupt systems because of the necessity for compliance, not out of any genuine conviction. And the real crime committed is not the crime of speaking out or defying the rules, but the crime of exposing the charade. “By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such, he has exposed it as a mere game,” Havel says of his greengrocer.
He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.14
