In my view, the claim to separate nonviolent and pacifist commitments falls under such an argument.
1 Like
Where the pacifists are a priestly elite, following a creed that is impossible for the masses? Or am I misunderstanding?
Got to run to a doctor’s appointment, will respond at more length when I’m back.
3 Likes
I think that is probably the understanding, but I myself am not completely organized.
So what do you think of my claim?
1 Like
Jews and Roma in occupied Poland were exterminated by Nazis almost entirely, and the only survivors were the “lucky ones” who managed to do not die in death camps or were in hiding. Arguing for only non-violent resistance in situation like this is just extremely immoral to me.
People in occupied Poland tried to resist non-violently, there was a ton methods and ideas how to do that provided by civilian structures of resistance, the most mundane example being “work slow for German”. But it wasn’t enough, it couldn’t be because there was ongoing genocide and Nazi soldiers and law enforcers did not cared about your feelings and shortages in production didn’t make them kill less innocent people.
My take is that pacifism as you guys explain it is impossible to have positive effect on society, even in long term, if the society is one of this:
a) society is largely supportive of regime, because of propaganda, traiditions and/or lack of information
b) society is largely supportive of regime because of idea
c) there are two societies in one state, one is a society of invaders that believes their regime cause, and the other is society of people from defeated state
7 Likes
thank you. I think the points you raise explain why I said that nonviolent movement is against the principle of harm minimization and that it is an affirmation of genocide. I believe that non-violent movements have many good tactics, but they also have many flaws as a strategy.
So I have no intention of martyring myself or compromising my moral principles in resisting totalitarianism. It means “win the battle and lose the war”.
In other words, unless the non-violent movement is an absolute pacifist with a willingness to commit suicide, it is impossible to change society, but such social change is not a defeat but a victory for totalitarianism.
4 Likes
There may be some misunderstandings about my thoughts, so let me explain. I believe that violence cannot be denied or justified. I also believe that society should ultimately undergo major change, but through a credible gradualist approach based on improving existing methods.
1 Like
I do hope that doesn’t mean that you are going to try to make the violent paths less satisfying or have less content compared to the more peaceful ones on purpose 
So for those who can’t access the original post on the more restricted thread, there are three major strands or influences in my personal commitment to nonviolence:
-
Jesus. I think the peace church tradition, as represented by recent thinkers like Yoder and Hauerwas, is right in seeing nonviolence as a core aspect of the Way of Christ. It’s not just a matter of Jesus’s explicit teaching (turn the other cheek, love your enemy) but an implication of the narrative heart of the gospels: Jesus’s crucifixion, his triumph over the Powers by accepting his unjust execution rather than mustering his own powers to fight back. As a lifelong evangelical Christian, I’m committed to following this uncomfortable and dangerous example (and rejecting the plentiful examples of Christianities that have chased power and security through violence).
-
Levinas. I can’t claim a deep understanding of his work – I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to philosophy – but since I first encountered it I’ve been drawn to the idea of an ethic whose starting point is not rules or propositions but the experience of face-to-face encounter with another vulnerable human being. I think Levinas is right that if we dare to really let ourselves feel the ethical demand embedded in such a moment, we’ll find that it’s unconditional and infinite, a reality of which the Golden Rule in all its forms is a partial and inadequate articulation. Most ethical discourse, I fear, loses sight of that. It’s too eager to start from what someone else might reasonably demand of us and doesn’t stay alert to challenges beyond our self-protective limitations; it takes as axiomatic that the ethical way must always be possible, and doesn’t let itself be shaken and dissatisfied by impossibilities. Such an ethics, I think, is impoverished and too easily accommodates itself to unjust social structures. It’s important for us to grapple with what’s possible and reasonable, of course – an essential part of ethics – but if we make it the whole project, we’ll end up closing our ears to people in suffering in a way I find deeply unethical.
-
Popovic. (I’ve talked about Erika Chenoweth’s academic work a lot, because she musters a strong comparative case drawing on hundreds of examples, but Srdja Popovic and Otpor are the ones who actually exemplify how to make this work against a genocidal dictatorship.) This is the practical rather than moral case for nonviolent resistance. Do it because it’s more likely to bring down an unjust regime or change an unjust law than a violent revolution is. Do it because tens of thousands of people withholding their cooperation in strategic ways is more damaging to a regime than a few thousand people taking up arms against it.
These are three distinct approaches, at tension with each other in several points, and you could accept one without being committed to either of the others. I’ve been open about my attraction to all three, but Popovic would be the first to insist that you can adopt nonviolence as a tactic without the kind of radical moral views of a MLK (taken from Jesus) or Gandhi (drawing on equally sweeping and deep-rooted values of ahimsa). The approach Popovic exemplifies is practical and empirically grounded rather than fundamentally values-based.
Some critics of nonviolence write as if identifying any situation where violence is necessary disproves the whole approach. While this might perhaps be problematic for the ethics of Jesus, Gandhi, or Levinas, it certainly doesn’t apply to the tactical nonviolence of Popovic. Let’s accept for the sake of argument that violent self-defense is the only tolerable option in a Nazi-style exterminatory genocide. That’s irrelevant to Popovic’s (or Chenoweth’s) claim that most resistance movements against dictators would be better served by adopting nonviolent tactics.
Nonviolent resistance has worked in states where a majority of the population started off supportive of the unjust regime. It has worked in states with a pervasive ideology. It has worked in occupations, where an invader population governs a defeated population. It has worked in states that ruthlessly assassinated the leader of the nonviolent resistance, states that killed thousands of dissidents, states that were willing to resort to genocide.
It’s not guaranteed to work in any case, but of course nor is violent resistance – and regime type or ruthlessness don’t seem too high on the list of factors that explain why nonviolence succeeds or fails. A lot has to do with the strategic choices of the resistance (happily for an author wanting to write a game focused on said choices). The ICNC FAQ captures a lot of good thought on this topic in relatively condensed form.
You might want to revisit your wording here. Killing the enemy before they harm you may not be justified, but most people would say that “killing the enemy before they kill you” is – that’s practically the definition of self-defense. And I don’t know of any pacifists who think that “killing yourself before the enemy kills you” is a good idea. A consistent refusal to respond with violence results in, at worst, the enemy catching and killing you while you’re trying to bring them down by nonviolent means – not in some kind of proactive suicide.
I agree that we shouldn’t take an overly idealized view of non-state arrangements or the coercion that they can entail. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that the state’s institutionalization of violence was originally for elite extractive purposes rather than any sort of general protection. Through liberal techniques and institutions, we’ve adapted the state to increase most citizens’ protection from some kinds of violence while keeping ourselves permanently subject to violence from state institutions. It’s possible that all in all, the liberal state is the ideal harm-minimizing solution for humanity, with only incremental progress possible in further reducing violence… but that feels a little too end-of-history for me to swallow it easily!
There have been Christianities that suggested that true nonviolence was an option only for a monastic or priestly elite – but that’s not at all what I’m suggesting. All of Jesus’s teaching applies to all his followers; none of it is for an elite. Turning the other cheek is hard, no doubt, and not everyone will live up to it, any more than everyone will live up to Jesus’s teaching about anger, generosity, forgiveness, or total dependency on God as loving parent. But to anyone who thought keeping his moral teaching had made them into “morally superior priests,” I reckon Jesus would have a parable to share.
I do ultimately think that the radical nonviolence of Jesus only really makes sense within a bigger theological framework. Like much of the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, it’s offered as a way of life for those willing to trust that the love of the Father is greater than the worst the world has to throw at you. It’s not a purely philosophical ethic that aims to make sense independent of other aspects of your worldview. To that extent, I don’t expect non-Christians to accept “love your enemies” as an overriding ethical principle – though as Levinas and Gandhi show, you don’t have to be a Christian to arrive at a similar endpoint by a different road.
It may well be possible, but this is a terrible example. The Soviet attempt to resolve the factional crackup of its Afghan client government by killing Amin wasn’t a quick and minimally bloody “decapitation”. It solved nothing, just drew the Soviets in further, and ultimately led to the massive-scale bloodletting that hasn’t stopped even today.
To close, let me offer a word of reassurance to anyone worried that XoR is going to turn into a screed for my eccentric views. The world is a complicated place where the most important things can’t be proven and we have to commit ourselves with the knowledge that we might be wrong (if we’ve not blinded ourselves with certainty-promising ideologies, anyway). My bedrock conviction is that just about everything people believe, they believe for at least a decent (and often good) reason, and I’d like to do justice to those reasons as best I can, even the ones that I’ve not been swayed by at the end of the day.
So yes, there will be
as well as more restrained but consistent violence. XoR will if I succeed include a plausible counter-story to the widely shared idea that nonviolent resistance could never bring down an evil empire; but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to offer the story of bringing it down violently, that nonviolence will be without its tradeoffs and downsides, or that any pathway through the story will be boring or light on event. (Hopefully! I’ll do my best.)
19 Likes
I think I can commit to your third idea. But that does not lead to conviction that nonviolent movements are morally superior.
In other words, in my opinion, non-violent movements are a kind of war, not non-resistance. And in many cases it is more effective than violent struggle. But it does not deny that there are exceptional cases where violent struggle is effective but nonviolent movement is not.
A more fundamental problem is that it can mobilize people for war while hiding the war and its attendant immorality. In other words, it may be an insane idea, but I think that Hitler is a bad guy, but Gandhi is even worse than that.
1 Like
As far as I know, authors Louis Fischer and George Orwell claim that Gandhi said so about the persecution of Jews. And that’s one of the reasons I don’t embrace absolute pacifism.
Assuming Gandhi did in fact say that, it’s still not a particularly good example of “absolute pacifism”. There’s nothing in the logic of pacifism per se that suggests suicide is helpful, unless you wed it to a particular theory of “awakening conscience” which is distinct from refraining from violence.
It’s an idiosyncratic response from a man trying and failing to come up with an adequate response to an unparalleled crime.
5 Likes
I understand Let’s change the question. What exactly do you mean by “awakening conscience”? How does that counter my argument that it is totalitarian to recklessly endanger human life and liberty for political or religious reasons, whether through violent struggle or non-violent movement?
In other words, my view is that if we question the claim that violence is a superior means of self-defense as a common sense but non-trivial axiom, we need to question the axiom that nonviolence is morally superior to violence at least to the same extent. Otherwise, I think we risk getting lost in false thinking.
Also, how do you draw a clear moral line between the cost of killing an enemy and the cost of being killed by an enemy, the crusade by individuals and crusade by nations? Without that, I don’t think I can accept absolute pacifism.
1 Like
Do you think a combination of the two is needed for maximum effectiveness? Its seems like the contrast between a non-violent “lay flat” type of resistance can extract more concessions from a hostile elite with they are compared with an alternative violent movement with similar policy goals.
In game I’d think the MC could seem like a reasonable arbiter with existing power structures when contrasted with high anarchy rebels like K if they pursue the non-violent low anarchy path.
Something else that might be interesting would be high anarchy non-violence. I’d think a religiously motivated movement might be able to achieve that by game 5.
8 Likes
Today is another day, and there’s a lot to unpack.
Violence of the oppressed against the oppressors
It’s a difficult thing to call for forgiveness and self-sacrifice when all that They have sacrificed is their own conscience, and the price that We paid is so much more than that, in blood and destruction and lost futures. This is, I think, one of the purest manifestations of our human intuition to self-defense: that we want to exist, free and in peace, and that to do so, you have to break the power of the oppressor to the point that they cannot hurt us anymore.
And that those who fight for the oppressor are guilty of drinking from the oppressor’s cup, a bystander, if not beneficiary, to the injustices they’re perpetuating through violence – and the power that comes from that violence.
This is a revolution writ small in itself, and there are paths where the oppressor might be unable to pull the trigger and lay down their arms, understanding the suffering and horror that they’re letting loose on the world. But that’s not a bet I’d be able to take, and I’d not ask it. For me, at least, the ethos of protecting and being protected wins out over the ethos of self-sacrifice for a deeper cause, even if that protection walks a far darker and cloudier road.
Now, I had been planning to continue writing some general thoughts, but I felt compelled to respond granularly to some posts on the thread:
It reads to me that you’re objecting to the concept of mass resistance altogether, insofar as resistance against oppression is inherently dangerous – not just against a state empowered to wield violence against its enemies, but against violent people. And that’s just absurd to me. There is not a moral equivalency between perpetuating cruelty and resisting cruelty. There are causes worth fighting for. There exist injustices that demand change, and the weight of living under them easily justifies resistance. Slavery and genocide are two that I think everyone can agree fall under that category, and are at the forefront of χοR. Resisting colonialism and imperialism is another one. People do not suddenly wake up one day and decide to dedicate themselves to resistance; it is not arbitrary. Resistance arises because there is already danger and a wish for a world free of that danger.
Under the principle of “harm minimization” that you espouse, it’s leaving the area around a local optimum in pursuit of a better one, because that local optimum is simply unacceptable. It’s reaching for a better world than the one we have now: for us and for the future, and to leave a better legacy than was left for us. You can’t ask an oppressed people to bend over and trust that gradually life might be better for people like them some indeterminate time in the future – to circle back on an earlier quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter from Birmingham Jail (which, perhaps not coincidentally, foreshadows Galtung’s description of positive and negative peace):
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
And the notion that nonviolent resistance is morally equivalent to war because of some “attendant immorality” or “logic of total war” is, to me, is an absurd proposition. Let’s imagine a bully beating up a kid in, idk, a playground or schoolyard or whatever. The attacked refuses to fight back, maybe they slip away as soon as they can, and they start going everywhere with a friend or two for protection. Then not only are they punished for being involved in a fight, but they’re considered worse for getting their friends involved. I would consider that absurd. It’s clear that responsibility for the fight – the chain of causation – goes most directly to the bully and the environment of violence that has interpolated them.
There is a pearl in this argument, though, that I want to address, because it is real and crucial to bear in mind. Not everyone is a rebel. People are crushed by the weight of oppression and become numb to it. It might be a weak, gasping breath, but we can still breathe, and that’s what matters. It’s easy to call this cowardice – because, frankly, it is. But cowardice is as natural as violence. And an excess of bravery can easily become stupidity.
A suicidal charge into the jaws of death is hardly a pacifistic phenomenon. Imperial Japan, for example, was the antithesis of non-violent action. History shows us military actions where soldiers sacrificed their lives for the battle – sometimes for victory, but many times utterly meaninglessly. What it represents is being consumed by some higher calling, and this is (in my opinion) rarely desirable. We ought to value people, and not throw them away lightly. But that’s a matter of tactics and operations, applicable to both violent and nonviolent resistance.
There’s a nuance here that I think is missing, and it’s introduced right here in your own post.
The fault of the Holocaust rests firmly in the Nazi leadership, but those Germans and collaborators who stood by and chose to shut their eyes to their neighbors being openly rounded up and deported, to not questioning the Nazi Party, to feeding the war machine – they share in that guilt.
And yet there are people who took a stand with what little power they had, to protect friends and strangers from genocide, even at immense risk. Take the Righteous Among Nations, for example, among many others. Thousands escaped near-certain death because of that nonviolent resistance. It was not enough – but it was something, and crucially those were lives that could not be saved solely by Allied bombs or tanks or boots on the ground. It had to come from within.
So when looking at nonviolent resistance (or rather, resistance in general), it’s crucial to undermine exactly what you point out: mass support of the oppressive regime. And that can fail. But ideology, tradition, propaganda, ignorance – these can all be fought. Solidarity can exist between the oppressed and the bystanders. It’s not the duty of the oppressed to fight alone (though, of course, it’s also not the duty of the oppressed to play nice either). When we limit the scope of our resistance to those already with a gun to our head, who the regime would slaughter like animals, violence becomes the clear path forward. But a regime relies on its people to carry out its will, and there has to be a breaking point where the people refuse.
Again, mass resistance might not manifest; it didn’t in Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. That, to me, is a condemnation not just of the nation, but of the people; and likewise, I feel the justice and righteousness in the violence it took to end their atrocities. But even in those failures, we needn’t downplay the good that the nonviolent resistance of a few did accomplish.
All in all, though, bringing it back to χοR, hopefully these conversations have provided interesting fodder for Tamran. Our rebellions make for an interesting laboratory to explore these ideas, and that’s the point.
13 Likes
You are seriously misunderstanding my claim. I have never opposed civil resistance. It only argued that it should be done for existential individuals rather than vague “heavenly kingdoms” or “causes” or “future generations”, and that civil resistance was a necessary evil.
In other words, I want to be a true individualist.
1 Like
I don’t know if that’s going to be a confirmed feature for us playable characters during future games, but it certainly sounds very fun/exciting to imagine. 
@Havenstone
Are there any “gods of war” in the Whendish and Halassurq pantheons?
As exciting/cathartic it would be to shatter the Hegemony’s symbol of pride/Theurgic dominance, why recklessly destroy that which could be (instead) repurposed? (especially if an INT MC had dreams of becoming the new Thaumatarch, thus wishing to co-opt as many elements of the Hegemony (Floating Palace included) as possible for their envisioned new world order)
Conversely, I wonder how a super-violent low anarchy path might play out? (if at all possible)
Anarchy stat-wise seems to be targeted at institutional teardown in the Hegemony. I suppose you could be violent with helots and yeomen without really attacking the institutions of power. I think that would just make you more of a bandit than a rebel though.
4 Likes
as you say ,Based on my logic, I don’t think it changes the fact that King should have taken action. Because it removed the structural violence that inhibited the freedom of both whites and blacks. But that doesn’t mean King’s act was moral. And none of us can be moral. It is the realm of the Absolute called “God” or “human reason”.
And the realm that should be dealt with by the Absolute should not be dealt with by an imperfect real person.
And yet, even these in hiding would die if enough time was given, but it wasnt, thanks to brutal, industrialized warfare. It’s also crucial to mention that the end stage of holocaust during ladt years of war was a race against time and that restraining for violence then, or calling for peaceful solution would cause another village to be cleared from map, another part of death camp prisoners gassed or executed otherwise, another great amount of people dead.
And yet these people didn’t care in case of totalitarian regimes of WW2. They started feeling regrets only when their own homes were burning and there was a mass of enemies on all fronts marching on them.
If there wasn’t this kind of pression, numerous nations and ethnicities, and just groups of people would vanish forever. If they adopted non violent resistance what would it give them? I can only see some grasp on guilt in future generations, like people today have over native Americans, but that doesn’t matter to long dead people.
XoR challenges us with a different kind of question though though. What if the the fascist are on to something, and our doom really does await us just outside the walls they man? With the recent experience with the malevolent intelligence behind Vigil can we dismiss the internal logic of the Hegemony so readily?
I think the answer we hope for is “yes,” but I’m afraid when all the tradeoffs are revealed it might be closer to “no” than most are comfortable with.
2 Likes