Ahead of the May Day protests in London, the mass media
moved into establishment overdrive, promoting the idea that protesters are
naïve idiots given to mindless violence. On the day of the protests, despite
the media’s famed commitment to even-handedness, reporters held forth from
police and government headquarters, clearly reporting events from the
establishment point of view - there was no sense whatever that reporters were
‘in there’ with the protesters in the way that they were clearly ‘in there’
with the police. It is understood in the media that balance means balance in
expressing the views of powerful establishment groups – the views of people
outside, let alone challenging, those groups, are children of a lesser media
God.
Amid the Red Scare-style warnings of “foreign anarchists”
coming to torch central London, Guardian columnist George Monbiot had the good
sense to report that, while there are indeed violent elements in the movement
challenging corporate power, they are small in size and in fact opposed by the
majority of activists. He also argued, “Violence is our enemy... If we can’t
divide ourselves from violence, then violence will divide us from society.”
When considering this central issue of violence it is
important to recognise that concentrated power has a long history of
fabricating, and benefiting from, violent threats to society. In 1948, Lyndon
Johnson warned of the need to establish overwhelming military superiority if
the US was to avoid becoming “a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy
prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.” In March 1950, referring to this
“threat” posed by “international communism”, former Under-Secretary of State
and future Deputy Secretary of Defence Robert Lovett revealed the cynicism that
underlay the rhetoric: “If we can sell every useless article known to man in
large quantities, we should be able to sell our very fine story in larger
quantities”, he said.
But how did this benefit powerful interests? British
historian Mark Curtis notes that the crucial beneficiaries of the Cold War
rearmament programme generated by the selling of this “very fine story” were,
“the large corporations within the military-defence sector of the economy. With
guaranteed industrial production and a guaranteed market (the Department of
Defence) they were able to achieve high levels of output and reap large
profits”.
In May 1985 Ronald Reagan did his bit
by declaring a “national emergency” to deal with the “unusual and extraordinary
threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” posed
by “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua”.
Since the end of the Cold War, credible
threats have been depressingly thin on the ground (climate change - a genuine
threat, but also to profits - obviously doesn’t count). In 1996, Terry Taylor
assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based
in London, revealed how desperate the situation had become: “In Iraq they fitted
out a pilotless plane and were planning to put biological weapons and a spray
tank on it. Fortunately they didn’t get it working. That is the low end of the
scale and some people would not call that a cruise missile, but I would”, he
said.
Violent ‘threats’, then, have always
been essential for scaring the public into passive obedience and acceptance of
profit-maximising policies implemented at the expense of peace, human life and
social well-being. With an even more fanatically pro-business party now in
power in the US, we can expect concerted efforts to fabricate or provoke
threats as a form of profit making by other means. The utterly fraudulent “Son
of Star Wars” programme is the first salvo in this campaign. As the Union of
Concerned Scientists has pointed out, not only can the system not hope to cope
with the vast array of simple counter-measures available, it is helpless
against nuclear devices hidden by “rogue states” in, say, container ships
docked in US ports. There are, however, huge profits to be made from taking the
farce seriously.
In sum, activists who imagine that the
establishment is shaken and disturbed by acts of violence are exactly wrong –
all such acts +massively+ reinforce the status quo, as elites know only too
well. Raising costs for these groups does not mean raising financial costs
through material destruction; it means raising +credibility+ costs. When
hundreds of thousands of people are on the street demanding what mainstream
politics and media will not even discuss, then the veneer of democracy begins
to wear thin, and the system must react to maintain ‘credibility’. These are
the kinds of costs we should be trying to raise.
Violence and anger have extremely negative consequences on
many levels for people working for progressive social change. As activists
know, the truth about the role of state and corporate power in human rights
abuses and environmental destruction is largely hidden from the public by a
corporate media system which is part of, and has every interest in maintaining,
the status quo. C.P. Snow famously wrote:
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you
will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than
have been committed in the name of rebellion.”
You know this, I know this, but most
people do +not+ know this, because the corporate media and state education are
utterly determined to give the exact opposite impression. Consequently, while
the public are often profoundly impressed by anyone taking the trouble to protest,
many people cannot understand why it is that these protesters are so angry.
While peaceful protesting impresses the public, much of this positive impact is
therefore negated by ‘incomprehensible’ anger and violence.
Nothing could be easier than for the
press to use dissident violence to convince the public that the status quo
represents the only hope of sanity and order against a rising tide of insane
violence and mob rule. Past success in this demonisation is indicated by the
fact the word ‘anarchist’ cannot now be uttered in public without conjuring
images of the mad, bad and dangerous to know – a legacy of the bomb-throwing
adventures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the press
response to them.
It is no accident that politicians and media commentators
focus so much attention on violent incidents, and even angry outbursts, no
matter how few they may be in the overall context of peaceful protest. By
associating the rational arguments of protesters with anger and violence, these
ideas can be derided as irrational and emotional (see my earlier ZNet
Commentary, ‘To The Mad House With Them...’). The focus on violence also
provides a perfect excuse for media commentators to avoid engaging with
arguments with which they in fact cannot deal.
The fact that politicians and the media devote so much
attention to violence committed by protesters indicates that while smashing
windows and burning buildings might +seem+
superficially powerful, these are in fact much less effective in promoting
change than doing nothing at all, and are in fact comparable to acts motivated
by ardent supporters of the status quo.
While police violence has of course a marked tendency to
increase sharply when protesters retaliate, the sight of peaceful protesters
being attacked by police generates tremendous public sympathy, with this
sympathy massively increasing when the protesters refuse to retaliate. This
might seem an unacceptable sacrifice, but retaliating provokes even worse
violence (exacting a far greater sacrifice), while the lesser sacrifice of
restraining anger in the face of violence is profoundly damaging to
concentrated power, which depends on appearing to use violence legitimately -
hard to achieve when protesters refuse to initiate violence or to retaliate.
Anger not only destroys the relationship between protesters
and public, it also destroys the relationship between protesters themselves.
After all, if anger is a powerful tool for solving society’s problems, then it
must be a useful way of solving problems within activist groups. In fact, of
course, constant eruptions of anger make effective cooperation and organising
all but impossible. My own experience suggests that human rights and
environment groups have a marked tendency to build themselves up and then tear
themselves down again with anger, competitiveness and resentment. Most of this
is unnecessary: if anger were relegated in favour of tolerance and compassion -
and compassion is the prime motivation for most activists - then dissidents would
achieve far more than has currently been the case. The level of intolerance is
sometimes remarkable, and surely a function of anger. Anger has a tendency to
seek out and highlight faults in others; the result is that, for angry people,
even long-term friends can come to seem like enemies.
Finally, anger is also destructive of dissidents as
individuals. People campaigning part- or full-time, are continuously confronted
with the reality of human suffering, environmental degradation, hypocrisy,
lying and injustice. If we believe that anger is empowering and useful, then we
will be angry much of the time. Research suggests that chronic anger is simply
devastating to our physical and mental well-being. Psychologist Joe Griffin,
for example, has documented the long-term effects of indulging anger:
“Anger can become addictive over time. You come across
‘rageaholics’, emotional junkies, people who become addicted to the adrenaline
rush, and there literally is a form of addiction to their own biochemical
states. They have to take a step back and realise that, seductive and enjoyable
though getting angry is, there’s a huge cost to it. Not only a cost in terms of
their physical health, but a cost in terms of their lifestyles: they will have
in all probability lost friendships through it, they will have lost
relationships through it, they may have missed out on promotions, they are
damaging their children.”
Professor Redford Williams of Duke University reports
similar findings:
“We have found in
following up doctors and lawyers who took a psychological test when they were
in law school or medical school that measured hostility, that those who had
high scores at age 25 on this hostility scale, were four to seven times more
likely to develop coronary heart disease, or to die from all causes, compared
to those who had low scores. So, being hostile at age 25 - having a cynical
mistrust of other people, having frequent anger, particularly at everyday,
petty things - [means they] are more likely to develop life-threatening
illnesses and die by the time they reach age 50... or would have reached age
50.”
Changing political reality means changing our own and other
people’s minds. This, in turn, requires that we understand how people think,
and how powerful interests try to influence how people think. Anger and hitting
back at violence and injustice are seductive - they feel powerful, they feel
like we are ‘doing something’. But history, logic and personal experience
insist that this feeling is a truly disastrous delusion. Ultimately, we are
engaged in a struggle with institutionalised greed, hatred and ignorance, which
all feed on each other - our job is surely to combat, not empower, them.