CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" -A Symposium: Civil Disobedience but Not Violence
Pickus, Robert
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE should pose no problem for the antiwar movement. The problem is insurrectionary violence (and the attempt to create a climate for insurrectionary violence) masquerading as...
...When allied to concrete foreign policy proposals which speak to international realities, such acts energize, free, and strengthen the over-all antiwar movement...
...Who knows," one reads in the Berkeley Barb, "some night a draft board may just disappear...
...19 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" priate an exemplar of civil disobedience than Thoreau...
...They take us to the principled heart of antiwar politics...
...It is the morality and politics of war—the other side in the war...
...But accepting the importance of a climate of respect for law does not require rejecting genuine civil disobedience...
...But I am discussing genuine civil disobedience...
...The codirector of the October 21 Pentagon mobilization, Jerry Rubin, declares in the Berkeley Barb that he is committed to "total alienation from the system...
...For civil disobedience is at the opposite pole from insurrectionary violence...
...Our country needs civil disobedience...
...Both are clearly needed and, properly related, strengthen and reinforce each other...
...A peace movement in which the basis of coalition activities is cooperative relations and which allows no public criticism of such a Left will never conduct that discussion...
...action which does not reject violence, but is instead consciously and publicly based on preparation for violence, or designed to further a climate that will engender violence...
...What if such action is absorbed in and dominated by its opposite: action set in an alienated context and conducted as an act of dissociation from, not committment to, a society...
...In my experience the withdrawal of consent in acts of civil disobedience helps build the antiwar movement...
...That is why Socrates, who did not place himself above the law or outside its jurisdiction, even when refusing to comply, is so much more profound and appro* New York Times Magazine, Nov...
...Any issue of the student, Left, and underground press confirms that...
...Insurrectionary violence, even as fantasy, can deeply damage this country...
...The would-be insurrectionists have their morality and their politics...
...When clearly distinguished from and opposed to insurrectionary violence, civil disobedience poses no threat to the antiwar movement or to a democratic polity...
...Harris Wofford's "A Lawyer's Case for Civil Disobedience" is another brief, excellent statement of this view...
...Our nation is founded on the principle that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny . . . Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law, but not to disobey it...
...How does he see the Pentagon affair...
...There are 10,000 of us ready to burn this country down," shrieks one seventeen-year-old, explaining what she'd learned in the antiwar movement...
...I SHARE AND SOMEWHAT EXTEND Michael Walzer's conception of civil disobedience in a democracy, but I do not share his uncertainty as to its tactical usefulness in the antiwar movement...
...Far from a threat, it is a requisite of democratic government...
...The problem is insurrectionary violence (and the attempt to create a climate for insurrectionary violence) masquerading as civil disobedience...
...It cannot help establish the understanding or the institutions essential to a stable peace...
...It is where we now are...
...A peace movement dominated by a Left that defines itself and virtue by the intensity of alienation from, or hostility to America, rather than by the character of values held and goals pursued, is not wellsituated to conduct that discussion...
...In this perspective, civil disobedience is needed not just now and in response to current failures of our national community, but as an expected and essential part of that process by which a democratic polity fulfills its central values...
...It is one necessary form of action if we are to keep such a government true to the values and procedures it proclaims...
...to continue to slaughter people in other countries as well as in the ghettos at home" (from the National Guardian...
...It is justified most easily in those traditions that rightly, I believe, posit an authority superior to the state and lay on the individual conscience imperatives by which the policies of the state are to be judged...
...Daily Cal...
...or to be more accurate: for the politics and morality of insurrectionary violence so successfully to capture its opposite...
...It is incapable of civil disobedience...
...That is why civil disobedience rejects violence...
...They are arguments about what deserves to be described as an antiwar movement...
...we are talking 20 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" about the morality and politics of "accepting any and all means necessary, including sabotage and armed resistance, to make it difficult if not impossible for the U.S...
...They are not arguments about alternate forms of action but about differing ends...
...President Kennedy's case is weighty, familiar, and wrong...
...What if this action which teaches not respect for law but the most extreme hostility to it and to those responsible for its enforcement, is clearly an attempt to impose a minority's will rather than to persuade a majority...
...And such statements were the commonplace of planning meetings, visible in bulletins, and confirmed in the hate-filled Washington reality which Dwight Macdonald reports as "mixing it up with M.P.'s...
...The speaker was President Kennedy commenting in 1962 on the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi...
...within the framework of the existing system . • . Civil disobedience is a form of persuasion whose success depends on awakening latent moral forces in society...
...They, with eloquent defenses of the genuine civil disobedience to which they are committed, are effective shills for uncivil activity that strengthens every evil they would resist: hatred, violence, the resolution of conflict by competing armed camps, each seeking to kill its way to power...
...But it is also justified in democratic political theory adequate to the realities of twentieth-century mass societies...
...I've worked on too many civil disobedience projects and programs in American communities to underestimate their capacity for so changing the quality of the discussion that for the first time a new majority consensus, and not enlarged minority protest, becomes a possibility...
...Those committed to democratic values and procedures will not lightly ignore this argument...
...Those who hold the mask but do not in fact accept the morality or politics of insurrectionary violence make the most serious mistake and bear the heaviest responsibility for activity that is damaging the antiwar movement...
...T 0 BE CLEAR: In discussing much "antiwar activity," we are not talking about this country's finest tradition of personal responsibility for moral action...
...Such a peace movement can help defeat America...
...They are refusing as citizens to comply with, or acting as citizens to change, a law or a policy they believe to be intolerably evil and fundamentally contradictory to the value commitment that is the spiritual base of their citizenship...
...That is why civil disobedience cannot involve attempts to evade the law's consequences but requires acceptance of the law's penalty...
...It is, I believe, a mistake to oppose radical civil disobedience and more moderate forms of political action...
...Insurrectionary violence limits and weakens the antiwar movement by robbing it of its moral foundations and the confidence of its fellow citizens...
...I mean men, for example, as valuable as Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, who are rightly committed to civil disobedience but make common cause with those committed to insurreactionary violence on the latter's terms, thus robbing civil disobedience of its moral force and desired practical effect...
...action which seeks to evade, not accept, the law's penalty...
...In such a situation discussions of civil disobedience and the antiwar movement are not "primarily tactical" arguments...
...And what of the young people they draw into the movement...
...Or worse: we're talking about confusing the two...
...Unlike revolution which denies the legitimacy of the very system itself, civil disobedience [acts...
...We organized in advance .. . our plan took the form of a military action, against the cops," writes Jeff Segal, Steering Committee of Stop the Draft Week, in the U.C...
...What I describe here as a possibility is, in my experience, the reality...
...It can deliver it into the hands of a repressive military nationalist Right (or into a violent contest for power between mutually antidemocratic forces...
...But what of those committed to ending the killing who do not wish to join one side of the war and who therefore reject that morality but make common political cause with such leaders...
...Those engaging in civil disobedience in this country are not attempting to avoid, deny, or overturn the law...
...26, 1967...
...It takes an extraordinarily troubled political climate, one of surpassing unreason, for insurrectionary violence and civil disobedience— two radically different forms of social action—to become so enmeshed...
...Herb Kelman put it well: Civil disobedience does not represent a disassociation from society, but is, rather, an act of profound commitment to it . . the term "disobedience" has meaning only if one assumes that, in general, the system is entitled to obedience...
...Thousands of angry young people who had come to tear the place up . . . we're angry . . . we're angry like Che...
...The most thoughtful bibliography I know on the subject is available from the World Without War Council, 1730 Grove Street, Berkeley, California, 94709...
...That is why civil disobedience requires the public announcement of the illegal act...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
