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Book Reviews
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Pacifism As Pathology: Reflections on the Role of
Armed Struggle in North America
by Ward Churchill, Mike Ryan, Ed Mead (Introduction)
(Arbeiter Ring; 1998)
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In “Pacifism as Pathology,” Ward Churchill lays out his case against white progressives. He indicts them for a phony pacifism that seeks not to embrace risk in a confrontation with state power, but rather, to avoid risk entirely in an effort to substitute feel-good symbolism for real change. He points out that the reigning question has been, “What sort of politics might I engage in which will allow me both to posture as a progressive and avoid incurring harm to myself?” A true pacifist, on the other hand, would ask, “How can we forge a revolutionary politics within which we can avoid inflicting violence on others?”
Churchill says white progressives are hysterically afraid of guns, and they gloss over their skills deficit with an illusory “moral virtue” that precludes them from considering armed self-defense. He says progressives endlessly reiterate the bankrupt idea that transcendence of state power can be achieved by purity of purpose and good feelings rather than by resort to combat. He characterizes this idea as a political version of alchemy and says that progressives’ presumed moral superiority to the status quo represents and fosters good vs. evil dichotomies that reduce complex social dynamics to a morality play while doing nothing to transform society.
He insists that “there simply has never been a revolution, or even a substantial social reorganization, brought into being on the basis of the principles of pacifism.” Violence, he says, has been integral to every instance of transforming state power. The rituals of marching in circles, “demanding” change by carrying signs, and lighting candles for peace are impotent without force being exercised somewhere else. Typically this means that Third World and indigenous peoples are required to do the bloody work of real confrontation, while white progressives refine their “analysis” and prepare to carry their privileges over into the post-revolutionary society when and if it emerges. In short, most of them are kidding themselves that they want revolutionary change. Their politics are delusional and represent a mass pathology.
In the interest of moving towards cure, Churchill proposes a kind of revolutionary therapy for white progressives, starting with values clarification and moving on to real revolutionary confrontation for those who are truly willing to endure the risks and sacrifices of such a struggle. They would first undergo training in firearms, then they would spend time in a cruelly oppressed outpost of empire, living as the truly exploited do and absorbing whatever wrath from the locals that might be owed to privileged people who hold themselves above the fray, and finally would carry out some risk-taking action in defiance of state authority, such as engaging in a firefight on an Indian reservation or in some other oppressed corner of the imperial world.
Churchill does not call for the abandonment of nonviolent action, merely for the recognition that without force being part of the equation, other tactics are doomed to failure. He calls for “an array of component forms of struggle . . . a continuum of activity stretching from petitions/letter writing and so forth through mass mobilization, onward into the arena of armed self defense, and still onward into the realm of ‘offensive’ military operations (e.g. elimination of critical state facilities, targeting of key individuals within the governmental/corporate apparatus, etc.)”
I can’t dispute the essence of what Churchill says but think he overplays the violence angle. While not due to pacifist action per se, we do nevertheless have examples of sweeping social change occurring without violent revolution, such as the Iranian revolution (1979), the collapse of the USSR (1991), and the end of apartheid. For me, Arundhati Roy got it right in her speech in New York just after the Iraq slaughter began. She frankly conceded that there was no way to defeat the Empire by force, but that its component parts could and should be isolated and paralyzed one by one.
The following quote from Noam Chomsky from the late 1960s also strikes me as still very much on the mark:
“It is far from clear that the alternatives are sensibly to be posed as ‘reform or revolution.’ There is also the possibility of working towards what André Gorz calls ‘structural reform’: namely, ‘a decentralization of the decision-making power, a restriction on the powers of State or Capital, an extension of popular power, that is to say, a victory of democracy over the dictatorship of profit.’ As Gorz argues, such reforms may have a potentially revolutionary content. It is impossible to predict whether an attempt to extend democratic decision-making will, if it ever develops on a mass scale, face such repressive force that it leads to a revolutionary confrontation, or whether it will be able to proceed peaceably. The goal of a movement for social change should be to introduce meaningful structural reforms, in this sense, avoiding unnecessary confrontations but remaining committed to the defense of democratic values against repression, if it arises.”
Michael K. Smith is the author of “Portraits of Empire,” and “The Madness of King George” (with Matt Wuerker,) from Common Courage Press.
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