Violence: The Police, the Militants, And the Rest of Us
Walzer, Michael
The Police, the Militants, and the Rest of Us OLITICS IS FIRST OF ALL the art of minimizing and controlling violence. It is a taxing and morally dangerous art be cause violence itself...
...It also creates conditions in which the state, in this case, the police, can be sure of widespread popular support when they do intervene and may have such support even if they intervene inefficiently and brutally...
...They have produced a counterimage to the violence of our time, not pacifist but pastoral: the picture of a "green America," themselves the rightful inhabitants, beset by technologically advanced barbarians...
...Nor do I know many people ready to pay the price of a more serious commitment...
...That's wrong, but it's not an error we should seek to correct...
...What the state does have and should have is control—in this country it has exclusive control—of the means of massive violence, both human and material: the army and police, planes, tanks, artillery, and so on...
...And the repression of the far Left since that time has been less organized and thorough (and the repression of terrorists considerably less efficient) than most of us expected, given the character of the national administration and all the opportunities it has had...
...I don't mean only (though this is important enough) that there is no mass party from which we can expel idiots, adventurers, and plain criminals...
...There is, nevertheless, a great deal to worry about: above all, the apparent readiness of the police themselves to engage in confrontation politics...
...The second moment was that of collegiate "trashing...
...In a more accurate metaphor: the margins of American society are wider than ever before...
...It was necessary also in order to show contempt for the art of cooking, to leave the kitchen as messy as possible, to revenge oneself against bourgeois omelet-lovers, and so on...
...Since it is utopian to hope for an American police force without guns, we must insist that armed men be carefully trained...
...All this leaves us ignorant of the responsibility (or lack of it) of elected officials...
...Mere law enforcement is not fearsome, and though revolutionaries may well object to it, they are unlikely to win much sympathy...
...I'm not sure if that reflects some murky residue of moral principle or a peculiar sociological sophistication...
...I suppose what we need is a domestic version of the theory of just war— a theory of "civil law enforcement," the appropriate parallel for civil disobedience, but necessary even when disobedience is uncivil...
...The worst effects of police power as we have recently known it (historically too, so far as I can discover) are those that stem from what might be called its "incidental" uses...
...How do we feel about the many local budgetary decisions that are providing more and more money for the police...
...And now young people from the local high schools, some of whom must have been working-class, joined the militants, without any discernible political (there may have been social) motives, in breaking the windows and looting the stores of petty MICHAEL WALZER bourgeois merchants...
...But perhaps freedom from moral inhibition is an end in itself: one acts violently in order to free oneself to act violently...
...There, people are not shocked but mobilized...
...They exercise discretion as to what laws they will enforce, with what degree of violence, in what parts of the city, and so on...
...The only trouble is that all this can be accomplished and no one satisfied...
...Despite the Left's flirtation with localist ideologies, it is protected largely by national forces and would be better protected were this country's politics still more "nationalized...
...But that is a tension best left unresolved...
...But after reading the polls on the work of the Guard at Kent State, we may be soured on citizens...
...There clearly are a surprising number of young Americans hiding, and there is undoubtedly a network of hiding places and a communications system of some rough sort for sharing information about how to do it...
...On the other side are all those groups that have tended toward one or another sort of Marxist (Trotskyist, Maoist) sectarianism, a tendency never free from puritanical impulses, but commited also to relate somehow to the "masses"—even to middle Americans...
...And that is true as well of confrontation and terror: they represent a dead end of meaningless militancy...
...every political temptation is yet to be encountered...
...Second, a police force that is well-paid: for the increasingly narrow social base from which police are recruited plays havoc with law enforcement...
...The Kerner Commission said so, but warned at the same time against supplying policemen with automatic rifles and machine guns...
...The greatest violence of the cultural radicals is expressive, not practical...
...Inevitably, the police will impose the discipline we have failed to build: the problem of law enforcement— not a problem we are at home with— has been moved onto the political agenda of the seventies...
...It is hard to see any other future for them: the cultural revolution is the only revolution they can hope to join...
...I have already described the actual results of this "strategy" in the U.S...
...Many of the most disgraceful incidents in the long history of official violence are the work of the National Guard...
...That we can only do for ourselves, through organizations in which we are actively involved and whose policies we share in making...
...with what (concrete) results...
...Confrontation and terror suggested a politics of unofficial violence toward which every leftist and liberal had to adopt a position...
...In fact, we have our greatest difficulties precisely with policemen who are little more than ordinary folks with guns...
...how many people were injured...
...It is, instead, the mirror image of political (and why not of economic...
...As putative victims, the cultural radicals are more appealing but no more helpful...
...The case for state control of the means of massive violence is so widely accepted that I need not review it here...
...In some cities, the extent of political control over such decisions is as unclear as is the extent of federal control over national defense...
...Now toward activities of these sorts, it's obviously not possible to engage in comradely criticism...
...That effort seems already to have collapsed, though it may continue to have an aftermath of casualties...
...Yet all this does not add up to a countrywide war against the Left...
...I have to stress instead that the existence of such control, however justified, also establishes the state as a threat to us all...
...Neither is a victory for the rest of us...
...But it does make it impossible to pretend that "the use of physical force to inflict injury" (the dictionary definition of violent behavior) is something other than violent whenever the users are uniformed officials, and it is equally impossible to argue that official violence is somehow presumptively legitimate...
...At what point do we want police called onto a university campus or sent into battle against political demonstrators or rioters...
...Yet it's worth setting out the record of those moments, even as it appears to an outside observer...
...Police violence obviously serves other purposes, but it also expresses ethnic, social, and political feelings—private feelings that ought to be repressed by professionals doing a job...
...They would reduce it, that is, to the precise quantity intended by whoever commanded the police and thereby make their responsibility a great deal clearer...
...Confrontation politics, especially when the police join in, makes every sort of Left politics more difficult...
...Most of the incidents that outrage us seem rather to be examples of local zealotry, reflecting the continuing and not the new weakness of liberal (and, needless to say, of far Left) politics in many parts of the country...
...There is some truth here, but questions need to be asked in each case—just as questions need to be asked of the police...
...They intend to ex VIOLENCE: THE POLICE, THE MILITANTS, AND THE REST OF US pose the "true character" of American society, it is said, to drive the authorities into an openly fascist posture, and so force the rest of us to resist...
...The position is worth restating not, I think, because of the Weathermen or the Panthers, whose future is dim, but because of the cultural radicalism with which we are likely to live for some time...
...Obviously, no guarantees are possible here...
...nothing has ever been achieved .. . etc...
...Given all this, talk of an American fascism seems only a particularly gruesome (and for some people, I suppose, entertaining) escape from the need to face honestly the extent of far Left failure—and the real, if more limited, dangers that failure always brings...
...The only difference between the two is that in the second case there are review boards and presidential commissions to condemn the waste, and in the first there are none...
...at least it would be more liberal right now...
...Do any of us really think that policemen are "pigs...
...What is there to say...
...Freedom through violence is not so egalitarian a doctrine...
...And then, do we want them to enforce the law (and collect people for punishment) or simply to keep the peace as best they can...
...nor is it certain that all our discontent has roots that governmental problem-solving can reach...
...It's one of the more peculiar notions of the far Left and of many of their liberal apologists that a community police would be better than what we have now...
...T T HE FAR LEFT HAS SPLIT so often, the tale of its internal wars is so tangled and so sad, that the rest of us can be forgiven if we allow ourselves to lose track of its various tendencies and their various ideological excuses...
...The 1970 elections suggest instead that far Left violence has not been exploited so as to enlarge the base of conservative support...
...Part of what happens when police come onto a campus is simply class war—to be sure of a curious sort, with radical students pretending to represent and the police more nearly representing the working class...
...Official violence is like unofficial violence, at least in this regard: it too inflicts injury, and it needs (in every case) to be justified...
...the general and apparently not unrealistic sense of being watched and spied upon...
...These will certainly need to be defended...
...I know of no historical cases...
...The end-state is some special sort of grace (or spiritual pride) rather than political effectiveness...
...The "movement"—for the moment—offers us no recourse...
...Is there some line to be drawn between people who can be spied upon and people (like us) who cannot be...
...or they hope to provoke police repression and so goad their potential but passive followers into revolutionary action...
...also the nighttime police raids...
...It doesn't mean what we are sometimes told by both radical ideologists and their critics: that the country has been dangerously polarized or that we are in the midst of or on the verge of fascist repression...
...That was not hard to do, and no one deserves any special credit for setting himself against it, though there is some discredit to be distributed among those who patronized unofficial violence or apologized for it...
...A national force would surely be more liberal (and better disciplined) than many local forces...
...Every practical decision lies ahead of them...
...None did join, so far as I know, during the first dramatic incidents...
...But it is not now and never has been even remotely supportive of a nonviolent politics, or indeed of any politics that requires organization and long-term planning...
...incidental" brutality is barred or punished...
...They must deal with them, as I have already argued, without "incidental" violence, without punishing the militants before they are brought to trial, without using far Left madness as a way of attacking other sorts of dissident politics...
...For example: —Are we in favor of a national police force or have we opted definitively for local control...
...Insofar as we defend state control, we have an obligation to watch over it...
...laissezfaire...
...So laissez-faire on the Left makes statists of us all, and our most immediate duty is to be honest about where we are...
...Nor does the political campaign for law and order seem likely to change any of VIOLENCE: THE POLICE, THE MILITANTS, AND THE REST OF US this...
...At the present time, and for the foreseeable future, massive repression simply does not have the support of national elites, nor can it be worked through national institutions...
...But one division seems to me important...
...By contrast, the failure of mobilization in this country suggests how far we are (even in the ghettos) from a colonial situation...
...However easy it may be to throw a brick, use a gun, plant a bomb, and however much the cultural atmosphere encourages—and publicists, editors, screenwriters, etc., applaud or "understand" —such activities, they are not likely to be engaged in by large numbers of people...
...They don't build a movement, because they don't commit men and women to daily work for the cause...
...The confrontationists, trashers, and terrorists have been among the tolerant, as well they might be...
...The police are most repressive not when they are used to prevent or control illegal political activities, but when allowed or encouraged to punish those activities—most often by beating up (or killing) the activists...
...Penultimate, because attacks on the police, for example, are often said to have the happy effect of liberating the attackers, and there must be some further reason for doing that...
...the large number of men and women under indictment, often for offenses whose precise character is very unclear...
...of their spokesmen, their press and movies, the fantasies of many of the cultural radicals are rich in violence...
...a man begins to be a politician as soon as he tries to get what he wants without hitting somebody...
...It is, however, easily cheapened: violence is an experience that can be enjoyed and is most often enjoyed by its advocates at a distance and vicariously...
...But if official violence often generates spasms of national anger and self-reproach and "radicalizes" (a word that grossly exaggerates what actually happens) hundreds or even thousands of people, there is no doubt that over time it has a deterrent effect...
...Unless the political base of the Left (near or far) is very strong, police brutality will erode it, for ordinary men and women, parttime activists and camp followers, will withdraw and seek shelter...
...into terrorist groups...
...Terrorism is not and cannot be a collective effort...
...But it is important here to establish a certain category of militant acts: those that one wants the police to deal with...
...Some of them seem already to have made that decision...
...The reports of one presidential commission after another—they must reflect someone's opinion—point as clearly as one could wish to the absence of any ideology of repression at the national level...
...Even "radicalized" citizens do not conquer policemen and soldiers...
...And fourth, a force answerable, within the limits set by that code, to elected officials...
...I doubt, again, that this is a serious intention, though it is a strategy that might conceivably work if (1) the true character of the U.S...
...Urban riots, street confrontations, terrorism: these claimed our attention, even if only our critical attention...
...It is not a formula for minimal vio lence...
...Or perhaps it is not a search for efficacy at all, but only an expression of hysteria, fury, and failure...
...Another example of class war, and again unrelated to any political struggle...
...So it is best to begin by worrying about them...
...Thus, the war against the Black Panthers looks sometimes like a political campaign MICHAEL WALZER (national or, more likely, local) and sometimes like a police crusade...
...often the mere threat is enough...
...A disciplined mass movement is much like a strong and legitimate state: it uses violence artfully and economically...
...That is not what they are officially told to do, nor is it what they need to do to accomplish their legal purpose...
...The last of these is the strategy most often attributed to contemporary militants...
...It is a taxing and morally dangerous art be cause violence itself and the threat of violence are two of its instruments...
...Nor has it taken very long to explore their farthest reaches...
...The career of domestic warfare has been brief and its various moments were so quick that they can hardly be said to constitute strategic choices in need of careful criticism...
...It is simply not the case that police powers will cease to be necessary and dangerous once a beginning is made toward solving whatever social problems lie at the roots of our present discontents...
...Terrorists end without comrades...
...I find it hard to credit reports that there is an underground movement...
...But social change, we are told, requires that somebody be hit...
...Here I want only to note how innocent their picture of the future is—vaguely anarchist, sternly ecological, sexually bountiful, depopulated—and how incredibly far those who hold it have to go before they can even think of acting it out...
...From the time of Thomas Hobbes on, the most successful efforts to justify the use of violence have undoubtedly been undertaken on behalf of the state...
...War, riot control, law enforcement, "maintenance of order," punishment: all these can involve violence...
...The liberation of the workers can come only through the workers themselves...
...But these efforts do not free us from the burden of asking ourselves, over and over again, what are the prospects for the use of military and police power...
...Nationally, however, things are not the same...
...Probably no such pattern can be developed without considerable aboveground support, and that the terrorists don't have...
...And if anyone does believe that, will he refrain from calling on them when faced with a riot or a bombing...
...Third, we want or should want a force committed to a fairly rigid professional and legal code (a code, obviously, that requires police to minimize violence...
...The intermittent violence of everyday law enforcement is more commonly questioned, especially since historians began to compile the record of police and militia brutality against labor organizers, radical agitators, ethnic and racial minorities...
...The country as a whole seems less divided than it was in 1968—I'm not sure how one ought to feel about that...
...The refusal, at least, brings them nearer to the near Left, and it calls to mind a political position on violence that I will try to restate briefly below...
...Indeed, nothing at all happened, except that the police, probably quite happily and certainly rightfully, fought back, and considerable numbers of young militants from the middle and upper classes were injured and arrested...
...The radicalism of "Do it...
...And with that the rest of us can live...
...In the seventeenth century, it was enough, according to certain antinomian sects, to fornicate, or at most to fornicate repeatedly, and so liberation was conceivably available to the millions...
...The sectaries have their own view of violence, which involves theoretical approval of it at some revolutionary moment sure to come but relatively far off and, at the same time, a refusal (mostly) to act violently here and now...
...And if they did, that would surely be a disaster and not a success for the Left...
...Religious zealots have often in the past set themselves such a goal, and I expect it is even possible to reach it, though there ap MICHAEL WALZER pears to have been some escalation in the IV necessary means...
...These last two requirements are not necessarily consistent or not easily maintained together: there is a tension (in the public school system too) between professional commitment and political control...
...yet at the same time it is the closest thing we have •to a citizens' militia...
...And what about mace and helicopters and other devices tested in Vietnam...
...The second would be more understandable, but also more frightening...
...Instead of polarizing the country, the militants and terrorists have succeeded only in isolating themselves...
...There is also no common forum within which strategic options can be debated, no "public opinion" that can exercise any restraint over individual enthusiasts, no stable body of leaders who can be held responsible for whatever happens...
...Sometimes this or that group of militants hopes to seize power all by themselves without waiting for anyone else, or to terrorize the country and win major concessions on behalf of the others...
...WE HAVE BEEN TERRIBLY RELUCTANT to face the unpleasant but critically important question: just what sort of law enforcement do we want...
...That is a very important reason for demanding a police force that won't join in...
...What do we think of the infiltration of police spies into far Left organizations...
...And it would be foolishly optimistic to imagine that largescale student demonstrations are going to be easy to organize in Ohio after Kent State 1970...
...today...
...government were fascist, and (2) the mass of the American people were already profoundly alienated from it...
...The first moment was that of street confrontations, direct attacks (though not with lethal weapons) on massed police...
...That's a good kind of repression, and it would make the police less repressive...
...But the existence of a movement implies what is not at all apparent today, a planned and coordinated pattern of activities...
...The liberation of the militants is a waste of violence, just as the beating up of the militants by the police is a waste of violence...
...The same response is standard in international affairs, where leftists generally see in this or that instance of military sadism only the necessary result of a failure to solve the problem of imperialism, capitalism, or war itself...
...And just as in the economy, so in the political arena, and even among radical entrepreneurs, the triumph of laissez-faire rapidly creates conditions which require state intervention...
...The libertarian struggles of the past decade, however, have been largely concerned with the establishment of judicial restraints on police action...
...11 T IS ALSO A REASON for condemning leftist provocations—like the recent mad campaign to "bring the war home...
...Even the justification of punishment, the most ordinary form of official violence, is uncertain and much disputed among philosophers...
...The far Left lives symbiotically with the "pigs," counting on each outburst of their brutality and then of our indignation...
...What kind of a police force do we (of the near Left) want...
...If they have to, will they be able to criticize, organize, resist, and still maintain their peculiarly peaceful vision...
...Do we want the National Guard abolished, or its members more widely recruited and better trained...
...but deal they must, and, I am afraid, with our support...
...Despite all the talk about repression, this largely legal "underground" life, typified by the "underground" press sold freely on Cambridge street corners and, I expect, in other cities, has been expanding rapidly...
...who used it first...
...As an art form the pastoral has hitherto been a specifically upper-class diversion, and it remains to be seen whether they can make it into anything else...
...The democratic state does...
...It is by no means an accurate picture of what it is sometimes said to represent: the state stripped naked...
...But there is escapism also on what might be called the "near Left"—a term I take to include not only democratic socialists like the editors and readers of DISSENT, but also many liberals, even those who apologize for far Left violence, since they are apologists at such a distance...
...Nor do strong and legitimate conservative regimes turn fascist in response to leftist provocation...
...Theirs is not the politics of the necessary murder...
...And the idea of training implies the existence of standards...
...These were intended, if that's not too strong a word, to open the way to full-scale white rioting, comparable to that of the blacks in the ghetto...
...I don't doubt that there is an inside story, too, more interesting than any I can tell...
...has no room for prohibitions on trashing or terror ism or anything else...
...Against the background of ex - travagance and fantasy that it provides, there is something attractive about the young sectaries, unlovely as they may be in other respects, who recognize that there are some things that ought not to be done—today, anyway...
...It enhances the self-regard of a militant elite, and then the members of this elite celebrate their psychic or moral liberation...
...These can be put to use with almost equal ease by the public authorities and by private men and women, but almost always more massively and more effectively by the authorities...
...It is, all in all, a policy of insanity compounded...
...The standard Left response is to attack police brutality while insisting that the proper focus of political energy is on those social problems which force public officials to rely on the police...
...We deny its monopoly every time we assert the right of self-defense or of collective resistance to tyranny...
...I am inclined to think, perhaps naively, that a police force better trained and controlled would be less available as an instrument of political repression...
...Though they themselves most often appear as victims, part of the fascination is with the possibility of striking back...
...But something happened in the last years of the 1960s that the militants and the rest of us ought to be concerned about...
...The reasons for the confusion are the same too: larger budgets, advanced weaponry, the freedom that necessarily exists under crisis conditions, and the emergence under these same conditions of the police and the military as political forces in their own right...
...they are cut off from any hope of a political base or of large-scale (even small-scale) popular support...
...I mean to call attention now to the problem of political control...
...But there is more to say about it, a classic leftist position to reiterate against it...
...Police power was significantly strengthened and government surveillance over political activity widely extended...
...And just as the state's use of violence is often cruel, needless, and illegitimate, so the state possesses no monopoly on legitimate use...
...A great deal of it never does come into view: that, at least, is what we suspect, and it is what makes the police so fearsome...
...The threat is simply that violence will be used, as it has been so often in the past, not to protect everyone's rights or to enforce policies democratically agreed upon, but to defend the privileges of some few of us or to interfere with or repress democratic liberties...
...It was never thought that this challenge could be successfully met, however, unless substantial sympathy had already been won among the police and within the ranks of the army...
...they win them over (or they don't...
...Working-class youths were supposed to join in, drawn by the machismo of the militants and their manifest readiness to break away from the fears and inhibitions of their own past...
...these features alone would considerably reduce the quantity of official violence...
...For it is clear that important political decisions have been and will continue to be made by police officials in areas where the courts cannot or will not interfere...
...The near Left must face up to the implications of its attack on police brutality: we want the police to act differently, but not to go away...
...every risk yet to be taken...
...In the last years of the sixties, laissez-faire triumphed on the Left...
...Neither of these conditions holds...
...At what point, in what (precise) circumstances was violence used...
...Not, I think, with the possibility of winning some specific struggle against oppression—the radicals may or may not be victims, but they are not oppressed—nor with the possibility of joining the ranks of the oppressors, temporarily, as has been done so often, for a "good cause...
...Judging from the rhetoric (and the tone, style, voice level, etc...
...Only the ownership of guns is legally the right of individuals in the U.S., and this is a right increasingly questioned—for very good reasons...
...The word itself calls to mind (to my mind, at least) a charging phalanx of helmeted police, an image fixed, I suppose, as much by the media as by recent events...
...Significant social and political change may well await its working out—may well await, that is, the restoration of a framework of civility within which the police, the militants, and the rest of us can live, more or less, together...
...Over and over again the line has been drawn (not always with the same people on the same sides) between those who are willing and those who are not willing to tolerate or encourage cultural marginality...
...But before that, confrontation and trashing already revealed the collapse of any sort of collective discipline on the Left...
...it has never been easier (though a prolonged recession would change this quickly) to pursue a marginal career...
...nor is there time for long-term political organizing...
...MICHAEL WALZER Recently, however, many of us have focused, except when talking about the Vietnam war, on unofficial violence...
...Now the ghetto imagery was acted out, not in any of our major cities, but in university towns like Cambridge and Madison...
...Nothing has ever been accomplished without violence"—this was the peculiarly debased slogan of the apologists, suggesting that it was not only in order to make omelets that one had to break eggs...
...The third moment brought urban terrorism, a surrender of any hope of mass participation, a search for efficacy in the Act rather than the Movement...
...Thus far, the attacks have been aimed at buildings rather than at people...
...No fascist regime has yet been overthrown by rapid revolutionary mobilization...
...They have, however, found a certain amount of sympathy within that curious American phenomenon, the above-ground underground, the highly publicized, perfectly visible subterranean world of the cultural revolution...
...What happens to the militants then...
...Surely a force that is, first, carefully selected, well-trained, and highly disciplined...
...But the rest of us have no reason to expect that if they were ever to seize power, they would be any different than the people they call "pigs...
...Instead, it sets the stage for once-a-month or once-a-year explosions, bursts of excitement shared through the media, with effects that no one even pretends to think about...
...American society, it may be thought, is built of steel and concrete rather than of men and women...
...The problem with the revived and already corrupted cult of experience is not that it is likely by itself to produce more violence than we can endure or the police can handle, but rather that it provides no support for everyday politics...
...That is the usual outcome of unofficial violence, but just what it means for our immediate future is not easy to figure out...
...It is significant also that the least bloody of our ghetto riots occurred in Washington, D.C., and, again, that federal courts often overturn the convictions won by local prosecutors...
...the flat ephemeral pamphlet, the boring meeting .. . so much as it is the cult of experience, with violence, for some of them, as the penultimate experience...
...The story may be different in colonial situations, where the mass of the population is already alienated from the authorities and where a particularly brutal incident may trigger a desperate resistance...
...Like other municipal employees, they have been badly underpaid, but have they also been underequipped...
...The new culture may indeed turn out to be as nonviolent as some of its friends and publicists suggest...
...they are already under attack...
...With the beginning of terrorist activities, they went underground, and there, wherever it is, they lead a life that I can only speculate about...
...A certain sort of occasional politics is one such career, and terrorism in its turn is marginal to that and might readily be assimilated or reassimilated to it were the terrorists ever to VIOLENCE: THE POLICE, THE MILITANTS, AND THE REST OF US decide that bombing is not the true and only way...
...Now the cultural radicals simply turn away from the violence of the American state and its enemies...
...The aftermath of Chicago 1968 was not mass movement, but silence, disillusion, collapse...
...P P OLITICS, ONCE AGAIN, is the art of minimizing violence...
...Clearly, it would be a purer instrument, its use less violent and more efficient at whatever task it was set, and so its effects more strictly limited to its legally appointed task...
...I don't want to suggest by any of these questions that we should be prepared to accept the erosion of civil liberties...
...It may even be thought that revolutionaries are created through such a process, but I know of no evidence for that claim...
...Violence always looks like the easiest shortcut...
...There was a kind of stolid commitment to brutality among Stalinists in the 1930s, but nothing like that exists in the varied ranks of the cultural revolution...
...It seems certain that no one would have died at either Kent State or Jackson State had the Ohio National Guard or the Mississippi State Police been under effective federal control...
...VIOLENCE: THE POLICE, THE MILITANTS, AND THE REST OF US At the same time, "incidental" violence is exactly the sort of police behavior that activists sometimes seek to provoke, knowing that insofar as it comes into view, it will be publicly condemned...
...The classic vision of the near Left is of such a movement, growing steadily over time, winning massive support by means almost entirely peaceful, but then because of its strength being challenged by the authorities and forced into strikes, demonstrations, perhaps even street fighting, and so on...
...but it would also give to the central government a kind of power that liberals and conservatives alike have always warned against...
...in the short run the militants would be dead...
...Hence violence is but one instrument of politics, and by no means so ready a choice for the Left as for the authorities...
...The one group is as unlikely as the other to liberate us...
...The Police, the Militants, and the Rest of Us OLITICS IS FIRST OF ALL the art of minimizing and controlling violence...
...But the movement grows slowly, and so the shortcut is the first and the perennial political temptation...
...But the police, like the army, are likely to be with us for a long time...
...the shooting down of student demonstrators...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
