Questioning the Superiority of Non-Violence as a Political Strategy

A friend of mine shared a meme of a John Lennon quote on Facebook, and I wanted to dispute it, but I’ve tried to stop sharing memes for the purpose of disagreeing with them, because I expect that a lot of people scrolling through look at the meme and ignore my remarks, meaning I’ve just helped to spread an idea I disagree with. Also, when people click “Like,” in those situations, I never know whether they’re expressing approval of the meme itself, or my criticism of it.

So instead of sharing the meme, I’ll just embed the quote here.

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.” – John Lennon

Lennon was espousing the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was as though they felt that the government was an expert swordsman, and so if you wanted to challenge it to a duel, you had to be absolutely sure not to choose swords as the dueling weapon, or you’d be sure to lose. Lennon, speaking from Britain and the United States in the 1960s, was of the belief that, as long as you didn’t initiate violence, a government wasn’t allowed to use violence against you, but that once you opted into a contest of violence, it was certain that the government would win, because governments have large armies and are the sole experts in violence. Additionally, he believed that governments were incapable of “crying victim” or of using humor as a weapon.

I’d dispute all of that. Look at what’s happened since he made that statement.

The United States was at war in Vietnam, mainly fighting poorly equipped rebels and covert insurrectionists. The Vietnamese people who wanted communism used violence, and they won.

Russia has been fighting Chechen separatists for decades.

The United States was bogged down in Afghanistan for 20 years, using sophisticated weaponry against peasants who were hiding in caves and shooting rifles and RPG’s.

The US is still in Iraq.

Hell, the US is still in Germany and Japan.

So even when the gloves are off, even after these many decades of experience fighting against smaller, weaker forces, the US still hasn’t learned to make quick work of resistance fighters in asymmetrical warfare.

And that’s just when the gloves are off, and they can freely use their drones and bombs and cruise missiles and artillery and tanks and shoot people on sight. Here at home, the government has more restrictions, like that pesky Posse Comitatus rule that says they can’t use the federal military against civilians. The Waco siege could have been ended in a single airstrike or one night of shelling, but because domestic battles have to be fought by the police with one arm tied behind their back, it was a fair fight between two groups of people shooting small arms at each other. The standoffs at the Bundy Ranch and the Malheur Wildlife Preserve were shaping up to go the same way.

Civilian authorities also have to deal with the whole issue of due process. Before you can just shoot someone who isn’t trying to hurt anyone, you have to charge them with a crime (sometimes getting warrants or a grand jury indictment), then putting them on trial with counsel to represent them, then afford them appeals, etc., before you can finally say that they’re sentenced to death by firing squad…and then that can be delayed by further legal challenges to the particular method and how it’s done.

Sometimes, available forces for that kind of thing are simply overwhelmed. Look at the Capitol invasion of January 6^th, 2021. Police couldn’t hold back the protesters, and some of them didn’t even try. National Guard troops weren’t sent until afterwards. The FBI’s strategy seemed to be to just let it happen, and then hunt down the perpetrators afterwards. Suppose the protesters had had concealed handguns, kept them concealed until they got inside, and then pulled them out to murder the politicians and any guards who got in the way. The military would have responded, but by then, it would have been too late. The assailants would have achieved their goal through violence.

The 9/11 terrorists achieved their goal of striking a blow against America through violence.

Every socialist country in existence became socialist through violent revolution.

The United States, Mexico, Haiti, and many other former colonies achieved their independence through violence.

My point here isn’t to promote violence. I’m simply saying that Lennon was wrong when he said that governments are uniquely skilled at achieving their goals through violence. It’s not true. Other, non-state actors also achieve goals through violence, and often, governments that try to achieve their goals through violence fail. So his basic premise is faulty.

Another aspect has changed since Lennon said this. Countries (I’m looking at you, America and Russia) fighting insurrections and trying to manipulate the affairs of other nations may not have achieved full perfection just yet, but they have had a lot of practice trying, and they’ve gotten more skilled at it in that time. These two big ones, especially, are masters of manipulating public opinion through mass media.

Russia, for example, employs “troll farms” to flood American websites with comments supporting both sides of controversial topics, just to throw fuel on the fire of Americans fighting each other. It creates the illusion of greater division than there actually is, so those feeling attacked feel that the threat is even greater, and thus react with more vigor—effectively making the illusion a self-materializing reality.

So to think that only plucky, non-violent rebels could possibly use humor and claims of victimhood to discredit their opponents is shortsighted. Government actors can do the same. Particularly since non-violence as a political strategy became popular in Lennon’s day, we now have a “victim culture” in which conflicting factions will try to “out-victim” each other, each trying to portray the other as the more evil and dominating perpetrator of injustice. Why couldn’t an agent provocateur working for the government do the same?