Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Ineffective [Part 2: Vietnam, the Holocaust] Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press
I feel like I've read more of these books that Peter did at the point in time he wrote this book (and I literally started reading some of them in the middle of reading this fucking book). Anyway, moving on to the US peace movement to end the war against Vietnam.
The claim that the US peace movement ended the war against Vietnam contains the usual set of flaws. The criticism has been well made by Ward Churchill and others, so I’ll only summarize it.
Just to note: Ward Churchill did this better 20 years before Peter did.
Anyway, as Peter says, practically the entirety of it is a summary coming from Ward Churchill's essay, and I don't want to put more here because that's less engaging with Peter's points and engaging with Ward's... Which I already did. All of the whole third edition, even. And honestly, there's no point engaging with something where he's basically rehashed someone else's work. (Also, I don't understand why even the author of the work he literally summarised finds this piece to be so valuable, as stated in the fucking third edition of that old ass essay that Peter's rehashing! Ugh, it's so absurd. Whatever.)
Some pacifists will point out the huge number of “conscientious objectors” who refused to fight, to salvage some semblance of a nonviolent victory. But it should be obvious that the proliferation of objectors and draft dodgers cannot redeem pacifist tactics. Especially in such a militaristic society, the likelihood of soldiers’ refusing to fight is proportional to their expectations of facing a violent opposition that might kill or maim them. Without the violent resistance of the Vietnamese, there would have been no need for a draft; without a draft, the self-serving nonviolent resistance in North America would hardly have existed. Far more significant than passive conscientious objectors were the growing rebellions, especially by black, Latino, and indigenous troops, within the military. The US government’s intentional plan, in response to black urban riots, of taking unemployed young black men off the streets and into the military, backfired.
I'm not going to get into the whole thing about conscientious objectors here (I don't have an opinion on whether it a good tactic, but I can acknowledge that it was an available tactic). I just want to point out the weirdness of Peter's whole “if this thing wasn't happening, these self-serving nonviolent resisters wouldn't have existed.” The fact is that it did exist, and this is also collapsing the work of draft dodgers into a nonviolent movement. This would be like if I assumed all draft dodgers were the same as Bush II (who “avoided” the Vietnam War), but I know they weren't all the same. I don't think we should look down on people who are objecting to being drafted and facing consequences for it, especially in the face of trying to figure out how to solve the problem at hand. (And amongst us, who knows how to perfectly halt a military?)
I'd also like Peter to examine what options were available to many people and why certain actions happened. Yeah, there were rebellions in the military (often done by non-white people), but why were those rebellions taking place inside the military in the first place? This isn't to look down upon those people, but it is worth investigating because it's a valid question. What was happening to push more non-white people into the military (both at home and abroad), what were their reasons for initially not pushing back (because there were many who didn't), and what causes were prompting rebellions (because not every rebellion is the same; some could've been over internal treatment, such as racism within the military, while others could've been actual objections of what they were being coerced to do)?
I mean, context is key. We can't just assume that all rebellions were the same, but we can analyse how those rebellions impacted military structure, leadership, and success. (e.g., Even if the rebellion was mostly about racist treatment by white military officers toward non-white soldiers, what impact did that have on the whole of the military campaign and decreasing its success?)
Peter doesn't do this, which is detrimental to the argument. I also think it's at least a valuable understanding that is necessary in order to recognise how things can function or why things happened the way they did, giving us a better understanding of how to do these things now or what kinds of things might be more viable. Which is weird, because another of the sources he almost exclusively uses throughout this section does just that. From False Nationalism, False Internationalism:
The Vietnam War posed a new crisis for the Black petty-bourgeoisie, many of whom were anticipating the fruits of Federal Civil Rights patronage. Traditionally the Black petty-bourgeoisie had welcomed the U.S. Empire's foreign wars. Wartime was viewed as an exceptional opportunity to “advance the race.” During wartime the need for New Afrikan labour and men at arms gave the Black leadership a chance to demonstrate their useful loyalty to the Empire—and ask for concessions in return. W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP supported the U.S. war effort during World War I (a position DuBois soon regretted). In World War II A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell and the NAACP gave all-out support for the US conquests in Europe and Asia.
... And they continue from there to explain the history of the moment (which includes resistance to the draft by Black people, along with a related anti-draft movement that happened in 1948). And a continued point that they make is that the petty-bourgeoisie kept selling people out. They'd get some of the concessions they wanted because the Government gave it to them, and then they'd give in; it's interesting that Peter so often ignores the way that leadership in certain movements abandoning their followers is the most likely cause of failure. The hints are all right there, but he keeps overlooking it.
Not to mention they also highlight that people being anti-draft (who would also be considered draft dodgers and conscientious objectors) were working on other fronts. Again from False Nationalism, False Internationalism:
Propaganda campaigns took place around the 1965 draft refusals of General Gordon Baker in Detroit and Ernie Allen in California.
They also bring up how Muhammad Ali's draft refusal made opposition to the Vietnam War very obvious and unable to be hidden, too. Meanwhile, rather than contextualising a variety of contexts, Peter generalises it. Is he right? Well, only if we choose a context from our own understanding that fits his generalisations. But if I've had a lot of knowledge of other historical events that have involved a range of tactics, including nonviolent ones that were used in tandem with other tactics, then it doesn't work. But he just doesn't do the work to point directly at the people of whom he speaks, which means the audience gets to basically infer whoever they think it is that he's critiquing.
He also then starts referencing this... article? by Matthew Rinaldi, though he's apparently got a book version somewhere (maybe it's a zine?). The quote he pulls is from the opening (surprise), and it's also an uncited polemic piece. The “uncited” aspect is more frustrating for it creating a lack of being able to verify things that I might not immediately recognise. However, that source also provides more evidence that nonviolent actions helped spark other actions in relation to movements against Vietnam:
The majority of these early instances of resistance were actually simply acts of refusal; refusal to go to Vietnam, to carry out training, to obey orders. They were important in that they helped to directly confront the intense fear which all GIs feel; they helped to shake up the general milieu of passivity. But they still focused on individual responsibility. In a sense they were a continuation of civilian resistance politics transferred to the military setting, the notion that individual refusal would shake the system. But the military was quite willing to deal with the small number of GIs who might put their heads on the chopping block; to really affect the military machine would require a more general rebellion.
And they also go through a lot of nonviolent (by definition) resistance that was done, even by enlisted soldiers. Not to mention, this is right there in that same source, too:
For another thing, they went in with some expectations, generally with a recruiter's promise of training and a good job classification, often with an assurance that they wouldn't be sent to Vietnam. When these promises weren't kept, enlistees were really pissed off. A study commissioned by the Pentagon found that 64% of chronic AWOLs during the war years were enlistees, and that a high percentage were Vietnam vets.
Which also highlights yet another reason why Peter needs context for what he's discussing. There's a lot of context that genuinely matters.
And also, a lot of this context here is sort of frustrating? Like, I don't want to be awful towards veterans, but I also think that many veterans—particularly those who willingly chose to volunteer, though there are subsets of drafted/conscripted soldiers who I would also have similar frustrations with—need to come to terms with the harms they've done. I also think they need to understand why there are people who are hostile, cautious, or defensive towards them; there are a lot of people who've been hurt by the military both internally and externally, and veterans need to understand what they represent and vehemently work against it.
But I also think we need to weaponise against these colonial/imperial forces when we recognise their dissatisfaction, so recognising that as a tactical moment is necessary. If they're unhappy about something (see: people who joined ICE for that $50k bonus but failed to read the fine print), then maybe we can weaponise that to our own advantage. But that doesn't mean we need to work with them unless they actively repudiate and work against those systems. People don't have to trust them (and that's kind of something in that Libcom piece that keeps coming through, about how GIs were upset that non-GIs were initially hostile towards them—again, the context of Vietnam is much different than the context of Iraq, so I can understand veterans of Vietnam feeling upset by it to a degree, but I'd also like to think they recognise the pain they caused a lot of people).
... And now I'm arguing with Rinaldi's framing, so let's just get back to Peter:
The Pentagon estimated that 3 percent of officers and noncoms killed in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972 were killed in fraggings by their own troops. This estimate doesn’t even take into account killings by stabbing or shooting.
Here's a fun bit. Peter has been citing things for a bit, but this one didn't come with a citation. And I thought it sounded... idk, it at least sounded like something that needed a citation? So I looked around a bit and found this:
“The Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970 (209 killings) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96 killings). Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.” Congressional hearings on fraggings held in 1973 estimated that roughly 3% of officer and non-com deaths in Vietnam between 1961 and 1972 were a result of fraggings. But these figures were only for killings committed with grenades, and didn’t include officer deaths from automatic weapons fire, handguns and knifings.
Which uh... Interesting paraphrasing of something, at least. It's also worth highlighting, once again, that these statistics are are uncited (which is strange because why not say where that information came from) and have been difficult to verify? Rather, I've been having trouble verifying them at the moment. Like, I know fraggings happened, but how common they were is up for question (also, Peter tries to create the assumption that these many of fraggings were happening because people were upset with the military's existence in places like Vietnam, but there are stories about people like this guy who was just tired of his superior officer's bullshit and thought he deserved to die).
... I had to hunt for something else by the same guy that's supposedly in the same book, which made me find this PDF. Trying to follow Peter's sources is a pain in the ass. From that piece:
A number of years ago, in a deceitful article in Mother Jones magazine, corporate liberal historian Todd Gitlin claimed that the peaceful and legal aspects of the 1960’s U.S. anti-war movement had been the most successful opposition to a war in history. Gitlin was dead wrong; as a bourgeois historian, Gitlin is paid to render service unto capital by getting it wrong, and get it wrong he does, again and again. The most effective “anti-war” movement in history was at the end of World War One, when proletarian revolutions broke out in Russia, Germany and throughout Central Europe in 1917 and 1918. A crucial factor in the revolutionary movement of that time was the collapse of the armies and navies of Russian and Germany in full-scale armed mutiny. After several years of war and millions of casualties the soldiers and sailors of opposing nations began to fraternise with each other, turned their guns against their commanding officers and went home to fight against the ruling classes that had sent them off to war.
This piece also does a better job at critiquing what Peter wants to critique. It does exactly what Peter's been missing, though I'd suggest a few more lines to highlight it (e.g., What is the role of Mother Jones in the grand scheme of things?). It at least highlights what Todd Gitlin's role is, why he wrote what he did, and what the purpose of his writing is. It's like understanding where the propaganda is coming from, why it's coming from there, and being able to recognise the role of those institutions (and the people who participate within them) is key.
Whereas millions of peaceful activists voting in the streets like good sheep have not weakened the brutal occupation in any measurable way, a few dozen terrorists willing to slaughter noncombatants were able to cause the withdrawal of more than a thousand occupation troops.
I am extremely uncomfortable with Peter's ability to coldly look at the murders of noncombatants, and this framing is so bizarre for what he's even talking about.
Also, his book was published in 2007? Did no one stop to check the news in 2006 or so? Because people were talking about how there was no evidence to link these bombings to Al-Qaeda then. Maybe this is a missed detail, but it's still interesting to see him blatantly state it as fact... and also let the socialists get away with some racism while having utilised Islamists in their calls after the bombing... which he doesn't do for the conservatives at their ethnic hatred toward the Basque by weaponising ETA. (Personally, I think both are gross.)
The actions and statements of cells affiliated with Al Qaida do not suggest that they want a meaningful peace in Iraq, nor do they demonstrate a concern for the well-being of the Iraqi people (a great many of whom they have blown to bits) so much as a concern for a particular vision of how Iraqi society should be organized, a vision that is extremely authoritarian, patriarchal, and fundamentalist. And, no doubt, what was possibly an easy decision to kill and maim hundreds of unarmed people, however strategically necessary such an action may have seemed, is connected to their authoritarianism and brutality, and most of all to the culture of intellectualism from which most terrorists come (although that is another topic entirely).
I don't know, I think it's worth exploring how this kind of violence is actually perpetuating negative systems and maintaining hierarchies. I think it also fits within the scope of this kind of book, where we have to actually engage with the nuance of violence and what kind of violence is acceptable and what kind of violence is unacceptable.
But I can't say I find it surprising that someone who is so skittish of KYLR discourse and who thinks all abusers should go to therapy (despite evidence of therapy helping abusers to be better at hiding their abuse and obfuscating it behind therapy-speak rather than stopping abuse) would want to avoid such a topic. I do find it weird because the kind of violence named by KYLR (and other anti-abuser violence) would actually fit very well into the discussion here.
Being able to discern between how people utilise tactics and for what purpose is actually very necessary, but he weirdly shies away from that. It's also interesting because he then follows that paragraph with this:
The morality of the situation becomes more complicated when compared to the massive US bombing campaign that intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan during World War II. Whereas this campaign was much more brutal than the Madrid bombings, it is generally considered acceptable. The discrepancy that we may entertain between condemning the Madrid bombers (easy) and condemning the even more bloody-handed American pilots (not so easy, perhaps because among them we may find our own relatives — my grandfather, for example) should make us question whether our condemnation of terrorism really has anything to do with a respect for life. Because we are not fighting for an authoritarian world, or one in which blood is spilled in accordance with calculated rationales, the Madrid bombings do not present an example for action, but, rather, an important paradox. Do people who stick to peaceful tactics that have not proved effective in ending the war against Iraq really care more for human life than the Madrid terrorists? After all, many more than 191 Iraqi civilians have been killed for every 1,300 occupation troops stationed there. If anyone has to die (and the US invasion makes this tragedy inevitable), Spanish citizens bear more blame than Iraqis (just as German and Japanese citizens bore more blame than other victims of World War II). So far, no alternatives to terrorism have been developed within the relatively vulnerable belly of the beast to substantially weaken the occupation. Hence, the only real resistance is occurring in Iraq, where the US and its allies are most prepared to meet it, at great cost to the lives of guerrillas and noncombatants.
Generally considered acceptable by whom, Peter? While this bit of information is beyond the scope, views about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shifted immensely (at least according to 2025 Pew research). It's also interesting to note that they found that, even today, men are more likely to view these things as justified. To me, this suggests that the views on violence here are quite masculinist and refuse to acknowledge the perspectives and nuance that often exists within other spheres of understanding.
And while this blog post is from 2020, it's still worth exploring the sources that it references. Like this article from Harper's Magazine that was republished in 2006.
I think we need to also engage with propaganda and actually explore how certain things can be considered acceptable. But I also think that this whole thing is nonsensical framing of an issue. “People protesting did nothing, but terrorists succeeded” is just truly bizarre analysis of a situation, and it's just incredibly superficial in every conceivable way possible.
So much for the victories of pacifism.
It would also help to understand the extent of the idea’s failures
Let's highlight the fact that Peter originally stated this at the beginning:
I could spend plenty of time talking about the failures of nonviolence. Instead, it may be more useful to talk about the successes of nonviolence.
He has spent plenty of time talking about the failures. That is all he has done, in fact. At no point has he engaged with any successful aspects of pacifism, pacifists who work within other movements and recognise the value of their allies, pacifists who've understood that self-defense isn't violence (and that engaging in self-defense doesn't deny their pacifism)... Here's another fun thought: Just like not all anarchist texts represent all anarchists, not all pacifist texts represent all pacifists. (Even they have had a lot of philosophical discussion around what tactics are available.)
He's done literally nothing of the sort to look at the way that nonviolent tactics have to be utilised alongside other tactics, regardless of level of violence. If it weren't for varying support networks behind the scenes (often ignored, particularly by white men), would the “violent” people who've succeeded... actually done so? Could that level of apparent violence actually have been sustained?
Have we noticed that so much of the discussion around anarchist tactics often leaves out things like mutual support, mutual care, carework, and all the things people don't get upheld for because it's just expected that someone does it without complaint (usually the most feminine among us)?
This cute quippy ~sarcasm~ is really obnoxious, and it does nothing for his analytical capabilities. If anything, it makes it seem like he's analysing something when he actually isn't. Cool rhetorical tool, but it's useless all the same.
A controversial but necessary example is that of the Holocaust.
Footnote: Churchill’s own contributions to the topic, which informed my own...
Cool. Rehashing Ward Churchill again. I already read that essay, and I didn't do it so I could re-read it in Peter's fucking book.
Some pacifists have been so bold as to use examples of resistance to the Nazis, such as civil disobedience carried out by the Danes, to suggest that nonviolent resistance can work even in the worst conditions. Is it really necessary to point out that the Danes, as Aryans faced a somewhat different set of consequences for resistance than the Nazis’ primary victims?
Footnote: The example of the Danes during the Holocaust was used by pacifist anarchist Colman McCarthy at his workshop “Pacifism and Anarchism” at the National Conference on Organized Resistance, American University (Washington, DC), February 4, 2006.
I think it's easy to read anything about or from Colman McCarthy and realise that he's a fool. But I also don't think he represents all anarchists or all pacifists or all anarcho-pacifists or whatever. (He also frequently published in Christian/Catholic outlets, so I think it's worth analysing his version of pacifism and how it interconnects to those things. Critiquing the ways religion, especially something as dominant and hierarchical as Christianity, creates passivity (not peace) is helpful, but this isn't something engaged with.)
The Holocaust was only ended by the concerted, overwhelming violence of the Allied governments that destroyed the Nazi state (though, to be honest, they cared far more about redrawing the map of Europe than about saving the lives of Roma, Jews, gays, leftists, Soviet prisoners of war, and others; the Soviets tended to “purge” rescued prisoners of war, fearing that even if they were not guilty of desertion for surrendering, their contact with foreigners in the concentration camps had contaminated them ideologically).
To me, if this is the framing we're to understand, it doesn't make sense that the violence of oppressive forces who seek to oppress other spaces that happen to... also “solve” a problem (without truly solving it but rather perpetuating it into other contexts, like the 1948 Nakba and everything that followed against the Palestinians)... is being used as examples of how nonviolence protects the state while violence disrupts it. These aren't really successes of violence, either. If anything, it's a relocation and a reshaping of the same oppressive forces, delaying and shifting their violence to others.
... For a few paragraphs, he's basically rehashing another book: Yehuda Bauer's The Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust. I say rehashing because, though he cites it, it feels like I may as well... read that book instead. (I tried, but I can't find it. I did find other Yehuda Bauer books, so maybe there'll be interesting things there... Granted, I also don't know that Bauer would be my go-to. I can't imagine that, for him, that's a new view; in fact, I went to go find how he had talked about Gaza prior to his death in 2024 because, in reading just a bit of Jews for Sale?, his flattening of Zionism was raising some red flags for me.)
Even where they did not personally take part in violent resistance, they multiplied their effectiveness immensely by supporting those who did.
Skipping over things I don't feel like fact-checking or finding deeper context on (for the time being), but I'm going to highlight this sentence... which is precisely what I've been saying for a lot of nonviolent action... which Peter still won't analyse as being interconnected. (But also, everything described prior are nonviolent acts of resistance... and he doesn't describe any violent acts of resistance. It's just bizarre framing, like saying that you've done a bunch of things to save a plant but giving it more water is what really did the trick.)
... It's kind of tiresome reading someone else's words in Peter's paraphrasings. At some point, it'd be nice to see him actually engage with other sources of information about the same thing so that he can do this weird thing that writers often try to do called analysis. This is like reading a school report where a student has found one source and never deviated, rewriting everything that source already said into their own work. (Except this isn't coerced; he chose to write this.)
Also funny is that his favourite Ward Churchill essay (which is what this feels based on) includes a citation that calls Yehuda Bauer a “zionist propagandist.” In another footnote in Churchill's essay, he even says this (and mentions Bauer's work as being part of it):
It is apprehension of precisely this point, whether concretely or intuitively, which seems to be guiding a school of revisionism which seeks to supplant images of the passivity of the preponderance of Jews during the Holocaust with a rather distorted impression that armed resistance to nazism was pervasive among this victim group... These efforts, and others like them, perform an admirable service in fleshing out the woefully incomplete record of Jewish resistance—and perhaps to counter notions that Jewish passivity resulted from congenital or cultural “cowardice,” misimpressions which should never have held currency anyway—but they do nothing to render the extent of Jewish armed struggle greater than it was.
So I find it particularly interesting that this is the primary (and often only) source being referenced in the entirety of Peter's work. If Churchill's work was so influential, why not heed what he says and maybe delve a bit deeper than one whole book? And yeah, the fact that this is premised on an entire one book is a relevant criticism because it does nothing to flesh out the realities of those events.
All of these violent uprisings slowed down the Holocaust. In comparison, nonviolent tactics (and, for that matter, the Allied governments whose bombers could easily have reached Auschwitz and other camps) failed to shut down or destroy a single extermination camp before the end of the war.
... Okay, but what. He already argued that the point of the Allied forces was for a redrawing of Europe and not to save people (as has been the popular narrative, despite how incorrect it is), so... Why mention that they could've gotten there when that's not the point, and you've already said as much?
I also don't think he's entirely wrong, but I also don't think he actually examines what violent uprisings did and what the whole situation was.
In the Holocaust, and less extreme examples from India to Birmingham, nonviolence failed to sufficiently empower its practitioners, whereas the use of a diversity of tactics got results.
You literally changed your argument and have not even been talking about actual diversity of tactics for the whole thing. In fact, you've ignored how the two things interconnect and rather than argue for people actually working towards merging ideas via diversity of tactics... have focused almost exclusively on violent aspects of uprisings. This has also neglected the ways in which a lot of nonviolent actors tend to function in support roles.
In the world today, governments and corporations hold a near-total monopoly on power, a major aspect of which is violence. Unless we change the power relationships (and, preferably, destroy the infrastructure and culture of centralized power to make impossible the subjugation of the many to the few), those who currently benefit from the ubiquitous structural violence, who control the militaries, banks, bureaucracies, and corporations, will continue to call the shots. The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience. Individuals who do change their minds and find a better morality will be fired, impeached, replaced, recalled, assassinated.
Not... wrong, but c'mon. At no point does he even engage with what has helped promote this. We've been fed steady diets of propaganda in a range of places, from school to media to other institutions. Is there a reason he ignores this? Is there a reason that these are overlooked? Like, there's no questioning of where these things come from, even when he accidentally highlights it (e.g., when talking about India and how the British media basically uplifted Gandhi and... seriously, he said it and then ran away from it).
ANYWAY... That chapter is finished.
It's really weird how Peter pulled from sources that did far better critique to effectively rewrite (“update”?) a Marxist essay... but it's somehow worse than what likely inspired it. Yet everyone gives him hype for it (still!) despite the fact that it's kind of lazy as a creation. It's probably because he was known for ~anarchism~, despite the fact that a lot of this pulls almost exclusively from Marxists (not an inherent problem because you can learn from Marxists, but there's not a lot of actual anarchist critique or even explicit engagement with anarchism).
So it's not even like he's totally wrong in his chapter-wide argument with Houser, but he's just running through some of the points brought up in that readers' forum commentary.