198 Sundays: Putting Yourself On The Line

Something has been upsetting Michelle Malkin the past few weeks.  She uses the word 'sedition' to describe it, but I do not think it means what she thinks it means.  Regardless, it brings us to today's Method: 171. Nonviolent interjection.

The method of nonviolent interjection involves placing one's body between a person and the objective of his work or activity, or sometimes between a soldier or a policeman and his opponent, or on other occasions in the path of a vehicle.  This action is distinguished from [172. Nonviolent obstruction] in that the interjection does not constitute a sufficiently large or extensive physical obstruction that it cannot be overcome, removed, or surmounted.

For example, with nonviolent interjection, persons or vehicles could simply proceed over the bodies, while with nonviolent obstruction they cannot do so.  The aim of nonviolent interjection is to persuade or otherwise induce the persons being impeded (soldiers, drivers, etc.) that they should desist from the activity which the actionists regard as immoral or illegitimate, or at least that the activity should not be continued at the price of imposing human suffering on the people who have intervened to bring it to a halt.

Since the possible results of this method are not achieved by imposing an insurmountable physical obstruction, the numbers of actionists are not decisive.  A single person or small group of people may, for example, lie or sit in front of a tank or train carrying war supplies in an effort to induce the driver to refuse to move the vehicle instead of inflicting injury or death on those lying or sitting in front of it.

In fact, it has been argued that the fewness of numbers increases the psychological or moral impact of the interjection.  Bradford Lyttle distinguishes between individual nonviolent interjection (which he sees as running the greatest risk of injury or death because the individual may not be seen or may be thought to be bluffing) and group interjection (in which the risk of suffering or death for each individual taking part is less).  Lyttle therefore suggests that individual nonviolent interjection may be more powerful.
...
When, in late winter or early spring of 1943, it became known in Bulgaria that the first deportation of Jews were being planned, "revolutionary elements in Sofia" issued an appeal for people to intervene to protect the Jews:

Take your stand before your neighboring Jewish homes and do not let them be led away by force!  Hide the children and do not give them to the executioners!  Crowd the Jewish quarters and manifest your solidarity with the oppressed Jews!

...
In one small town in Slovakia during the Nazi occupation all the young men lay down on the railroad tracks to prevent a train from taking away Jews.
...
In 1953, when the Russians used tanks in Jena, East Germany, to disperse a crowd of 25,000 persons which were seeking release of eight demonstrators who had been arrested during the uprising in June, "the crowd refused to budge.  Women sat down in rows and forced the drivers to stop," Stefan Brant reports.  By this means, and by maneuvering streetcars to block tanks, the crowd held up the Russians for half and hour, at which time they temporarily withdrew.  Eventually, the Russians dispersed the demonstrators by shooting over the heads of the crowd.

Interjection as a tactic to prevent military shipments is part of a long tradition of nonviolent physical intervention as actionists escalate their efforts to stop bloodshed.  Malkin, who has a thing about hippies "using kids" as "props" or "shields", is up in arms that protesters would involve their children in trying to protect Iraqi children from becoming casualties of war (warning: very graphic).

Of course, part of the point is to increase that psychological/moral pressure by bringing the kids, so it's interesting to see Malkin's outrage about this.  I guess it's "cheating" to her somehow, and "unfair" because then it would be so easy to just run over the sniveling protesters--of course, she's far away from the situation and I'm sure she would react differently if she were a driver on the scene as all moral agents would.

ntodd

Covered on previous Sundays:

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION  

5. Declarations of indictment and intention
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
11. Records, radio, and television
15. Group lobbying
19. Wearing of symbols
21. Delivering symbolic objects.
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property.
34. Vigils
38. Marches
44. Mock funerals

THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION

57. Lysistratic nonaction
61. Boycott of social affairs

THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION

71. Consumers' boycott
90. Revenue refusal
117. General strike

THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION

120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities
148. Mutiny

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION

159. The fast: a) Fast of moral pressure; b) Hunger strike; c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
193. Overloading of administrative systems
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of "neutral" laws

Comments

[The Kenosha Kid]

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Mario Savio

[watertiger]

What TKK said.