Social Movements need to be nonviolent

Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 19:15:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: bill moyers
Subject: Social Movements need to be nonviolent; Genoa email-3

Dear Brit,

Someone passed along your email from \"Eddie,\" dated Jul 29, 2001, in which
he describes the police violence in Genoa and then gives a strategic
analysis of what happened both from the movement and government-police
perspectives and what strategies the movement should and should not
undertake next. I have attached Eddie\'s email.

I include below my comments on Eddie\'s analysis and copy of an email I had
sent out on Thursday, July 26th regarding violence and nonviolence in the
anti-corporate globalization movement.


A few responses to Eddie\'s email:

I, of course, totally agree with Eddie\'s abhorrence of the fascistic
Italian police violence and the government that planned and ordered it,
sympathize with all the victims, including Eddie, and that everyone should
put pressure on the Italian government to \"end the terror and release the
prisoners.\"

As I state in the letter below, the real issue in social movements is the
struggle between the movement and powerholders to win the support of the
general public, which the ultimate source of democracy and also the
legitimacy and power for both the movement and the government. Since
Gandhi & King, militant nonviolent action-campaigns have proven to be a
powerful means for awakening, educating and winning over the public to
create grass-roots-based democracy and support the cause of the movements
and against violent resistance of the state, especially in Western
industrialized \"democracies\". That is why a chief strategy by powerholder
governments is to create and provoke violence from within social movements;
they know that violence of social movements scares the public,
delegitimizes the movement in the eyes of the public, takes the focus off
of the real issue, chases away most people from joining the movement, and
thereby ultimately destroys the movement. To achieve this end, the
powerholder\'s strategy, thereby, has for a century, at least, to allow,
promote and create violence from within social movements.

Consequently, social movements cannot be both nonviolent and violent (even
if it is \"good\" violence that is selectively used against the police, big
corporations and the government). There is no such thing as a social
movement that is \"partially\" violent or \"partially\" nonviolent, as has been
demonstrated from Seattle to Genoa.

This leads into a contradiction of those promoting violence in the
anti-coporate globalization movement. The black bloc is against a powerful
minority (the coroporations, police, government and rich) who dominate the
overwhelming majority of ordinary people. Yet, it is the tiny minority of
activists that includes the black bloc who promote violence against the
wishes of the overwhelming majority of activists. Moreover, if their
unilateral violent behavior is based on the ethic of radical freedom, that
everyone should be free to do their own thing, they are preventing the
great majority of activists from doing their own thing of holding
nonviolent demonstrations.

Eddie seems naively surprised that the government used \"fake black bloc
provocateurs in Genoa\" and that \"the movement must now deal with the
question of police provocateurs.\" And that \"the police initiated the
violence in the time and place of their choosing, sometimes using a fake
black bloc...\" and that this was set up with several weeks of fake
\"anarchist\" bomb scares and that this all was used to create \"an even more
frightening pretext for a crackdown on radicals.\"

But Eddie still does not understand that movement violence is the strategy
of both the black bloc (and others) AND the fascistic government,
corporations and police. The difference is in motive: the black bloc
thinks that it is challenging and attacking the oppressive government and
corporations while the government thinks that their promoting violence from
within the movement is a good way of undercuting public support and
destroying the movement, as this strategy has been a most time-proven
successful fascist powerholder strategy. The irony of the black bloc
strategy of violence is that by so doing they are carrying out the strategy
of the oppressive government and corporations they claim to hate.

But Eddie still believes that there is good, mindful violence by activists.
He states that \"...the black bloc did not engage in mindless violence or
actions that endanger other demonstrators. While most activists may
disagree with them, the BB consistently targets police, chain stores, jails
and banks...\" and that \"the BB in north America has defended other
protestors with their bodies...\" Eddie does not seem to understand that
it is the BB\'s violence, even mindful violence, that has set up the
legitimacy of the police violence and the bloodbath that he and all of use
abhor. Rather than protecting nonviolent activists, the BB violence has
set them up for horrendous physical beatings. And I have not heard of any
nonviolent demonstrators asking the black bloc play the macho-hero rescuer
role to \"protect\" them.

The only way to undercut the powerholder violence against demonstrators is
to be totally nonviolent. This is a very practical lession in social power
that Gandhi and King learned and used. While nonviolence might be a moral
and ethical belief of some, it is a necessary, practical, political and
strategic means for social activism to restore and protect democracy.

It has not been the police violence against the movement that has split the
movement, as Eddie implies, but it is the dangerous and naive method of
violence unilaterally used by a relatively small portion of activists
against the wishes of the great majority.

Eddie concludes that because of police provocateurs \"the Black Bloc
strategy (of violence) is obviously finished.\" But this has been a
predictable ending all along. Now Eddie, rightly I think, worries about
the typical next step -- for a few \"militants\" to go underground and enact
acts of increasing violence, ala the 70s SLA and Weathermen. I\'m afraid
that this is all too likely, as it is a typical result of black bloc-type
violent activism. This is history all over again, as Yogi Berra might say.

Finally, I agree with Eddie, that the spirit of the movement is not broken.
But I believe that it can only be rekindled into a full majority citizens
movement against corporate-dominated globalization and for a democratic,
just, equitable, and sustainable world by the clear method of totally
nonviolent social activism.

Bill Moyer

P.S. Much of my view can be found in our new book, DOING DEMOCRACY: The MAP
Method For Organizing Social Movements, to be published August 15 by New
Society Publishers.


MY EMAIL OF Thursday, July 26, 2001

Dear Friends,

Last Friday, the overwhelming forces of the Italian police in Genoa stood
aside and watched as they allowed the black bloc to do enormous
destruction. Then, on Saturday, they used this black bloc violence as an
excuse to brutally attack the nonviolent Genoa Social Forum activists
sleeping in school buildings on the pretext that they were looking for the
violent black bloc, when they and everyone else knew that the black bloc
was camped together at a car park miles away