CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" -A Symposium: The Movement Is The Message
Pachter, Henry
IN A RECENT New Yorker, Richard Rovere made these points: 1) there is no basic difference between the Korean and the Vietnamese wars; 2) nor is the different reaction to both due to the more...
...The generation that has grown up since the 40's rejects both ideological wars and Realpolitik, and it overreacts against 23 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" the conformism of the 50's...
...THE POINT TO BE DECIDED, then, is this: when does the government forfeit its legitimacy and does disobedience become a moral obligation...
...Had Themistocles not resisted the Persians and had Churchill not resisted Hitler, I would not be alive, and even the most doctrinaire pacifist must concede that I have a right to live...
...It is the definition of the martyr that he does not expect quarter from the enemy...
...It is inconsistent to demand special status of C.O., or to complain about police brutality, or to demonstrate against the illegal methods of suppression if one's proclaimed aim is to overthrow the government...
...But then, why confuse the issues...
...Between the expression of dissent and the proclamation of acts leading to revolution, there remains little ground for "limited civil disobedience...
...Are our troops in Vietnam more cruel and less moral than the English were in Malay...
...Equally naive is the view, encountered frequently among New Left students, that their actions should lead to immediate reversal of government policy...
...The action was "limited" neither in form nor in purpose...
...Socrates recognized the right of his judges to send him to death...
...The antics of the flower children are childish and purposeless...
...One has declared war, and one has to take the consequences...
...To oppose one war means to oppose all...
...Individuals may refuse cooperation, for moral or even for aesthetic reasons, but a movement cannot decide such a fundamental question on the mere basis of tactical impact on the larger community...
...2) nor is the different reaction to both due to the more developed techniques of reporting...
...While the war offers an ideal target for protest, it is not the cause of that protest but its occasion...
...If there were no war in Vietnam, this generation would find other issues on which to disagree...
...It is easy to say that we should not have stumbled, but even if this stricture is accepted, it is a stricture against the judgment of three Presidents, not a judgment on their morality...
...Undoubtedly, the demonstrations are much more than a protest against a particular war...
...Or your actions may simply be designed to provoke the government into illegal, brutal acts of suppression, thus revealing its basic badness...
...It has to declare whether the authority still must be considered as legitimate or has forfeited the title, through abuse of its mandate or for other reasons...
...Your actions are designed either to make it impossible for the government to execute its purposes, or to draw attention to your point of view irre24 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" spective of the consequences which may ensue for the action...
...The law may be hostile to unions but is not for that reason "immoral...
...However, without any doubt, the movement directs its effort against LBJ's morality...
...yET, HE WHO PROCLAIMS REVOLUTION certainly has no right to expect quarter from the Establishment...
...Finally, if all other arguments are exhausted, you have to resist the violation of peace...
...A sit-in that does not really disturb any order and such antics as were seen at the recent wake before the Pentagon are basically unserious...
...Expediency will not do in such serious matters...
...Is the Thieu government less representative than was the government of the late Syngman Rhee...
...If the end justifies the means, limited aims cannot justify extreme measures, and still less can desperate means justify a limited end...
...I must reject the view of Mac Bird that we are in Vietnam because LBJ is a vicious man or because American civilization is so depraved it can survive only by applying violence throughout the world...
...when freedom riders "sat in," they meant to disrupt orderly service in segregated restaurants...
...no war ever settles anything...
...you are in a universe of discourse with your opponent and you cannot deny him your cooperation in case the jury decides in his favor—if a majority supports LBJ, you must not try to frustrate his action, that is, you must give him the chance of testing his view...
...When the workers "sat in" in the great strike wave of 1937, they meant to disrupt business...
...In other words, you are engaged in revolution...
...No network would have offered pictures from the Korean war front like the ones we have seen recently, and the reporters themselves tended to stress the idealistic features of that war as against its realistic grimness...
...There always are justifications for going to war...
...the other side will never be short of arguments— you have to resist an obnoxious ideology, a brutal system, the expansion of an irresponsible power, the extermination of a race, religion, or other group that is especially worthy of our protection...
...3) but there is a difference in feeling between the present younger generation and that of 20 years ago...
...All "civil" disobedience must turn into "uncivil" disobedience...
...Either the civil disobedience is revolutionary or it is merely a stronger form of demonstration...
...But to be revolutionary means precisely to doubt that this can be done without changing other things too...
...it is not any particular message of pacifism or humanism that now makes people think about society, but it is the massive desire to drop out of society that makes people react against the war...
...We are no longer afraid to disturb the unity of the country in time of war...
...Though I tend to sympathize with a movement of alienated people, I regret the refusal to clarify its aims...
...Let's be frank: civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance are neither civil nor nonviolent in intention: they always are designed to reveal the opponent's inability to maintain civility and nonviolence...
...agreement with any authority has become suspect, and strong gestures of autonomy are a psychological need...
...Whoever starts a civil war and thereby gives the Establishment a pretext for suppression must justify his action in terms of aim and means...
...A minority which recognizes the legitimacy of the constituted authorities and "despairs" of becoming a significant veto group has no right to decide for itself that it must disrupt the conduct of action—this would be authorizing the Ku Klux Klan...
...You are not conversing within one universe of discourse, and hence you are not obliged to cooperate...
...All wars are ugly and cruel...
...You can argue against a judgment, but in arguing you admit that the judgment may be either correct or incorrect...
...I don't think that all these justifications are necessarily hypocritical...
...but civil and uncivil disobedience merely as a means of expressing one's discontent with civilization— No...
...THERE ARE ALWAYS TWO SIDES to a question, and if we concede the right of the pacifist to resist all wars, we also must concede the right of all states to rely on physical power in the defense of what they consider their individual and/or collective interests...
...Whatever the cause of our intervention in Vietnam, all fair-minded historians agree that it was by stumbling rather than by design that we entered this trap...
...In a revolutionary situation (or a situation which one believes he can turn into a revolutionary situation) the important consideration is not tactical but strategic, and it is strategic that there be martyrs and "thousands of Vietnams...
...all wars are unjust...
...Civil disobedience as part of a revolutionary strategy or as a means to stop the war, yes...
...But one must not confuse legitimacy with morality...
...With apologies to McLuhan: the movement is the message...
...Have the same arguments and indeed the same words that are being used against the present war in Vietnam not been used to justify the capitulation of Munich, to discourage resistance against Hitler's war...
...If your opposition is based on moral grounds, or if his action threatens irrevocable doom, then your conscience may direct you to oppose the action by all available means—disobedience, civil and uncivil...
...history may still justify them...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
