Wanted: Change of tactics in Ukraine

columnist

What you need to know:

We don’t know if non-violent tactics would be successful in thwarting the Russian advance and occupation, but they would have more of a chance than any violent activities.

Look at Martin Luther King. For decades blacks had tried to protest, sometimes with modest success. But what changed with King’s leadership was that non-violent protest became weaponised. His disciplined followers confronted the forces of “law and order” time and time again. King was imprisoned along with many followers. Some of his followers were murdered by white southern racists. The police beat his marchers on nearly every march. In the end King massed hundreds of thousands of supporters, black and white, in Washington and that turned the tide. President Lyndon Johnson forced through Congress the civil rights act outlawing discrimination in public places. Two years later, King repeated his success with marches that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act which gave disenfranchised blacks in the South the right to vote.

Look at World War II. After the war the interrogation of captured German generals was put into the hands of Britain’s most respected military strategist, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. He told me that after the war he became increasingly impressed with the limitations of warfare and the power of non-violence. During his interrogation of the generals, he became aware of the difficulties they had had in surmounting non-violent resistance, particularly in Denmark, Holland, and Norway, and to some extent in France and Belgium, whereas the violent forms of resistance had posed few problems. He told me: “It should be recognized, more fully than it has been, that the German generals by and large were handicapped by the relatively humane tradition in which they had been brought up. They found it difficult to be as ruthless as military logic and military theory tended to demand. Such inhibitions have to be borne in mind when assessing the prospects of non-violent resistance”.

At the moment many parts of Ukraine are being reduced to ashes. Strategists talk about the war stretching into winter, even next year. The present policy of violent confrontation is clearly not working. We don’t know if non-violent tactics would be successful in thwarting the Russian advance and occupation, but they would have more of a chance than any violent activities. It’s not too late to change tactics. As this war progresses, worse by the day, “an eye for an eye”, as Gandhi said, “makes the whole world blind”. As Martin Luther King preached, “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is pre-existent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

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Wanted: Change of tactics in Ukraine

What you need to know:

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