10 Nonviolent Options for Dealing with Violent People (6 of 7)

This is the sixth post in seven-part series called "A Pragmatic Case for Pacifism." For a link to the table of contents for the entire series, click here.

It’s been a few months since my last post in this pacifism series. If you recall, I had been arguing that violent solutions are not effective at bringing about positive change and that violence is not as powerful as most of us assume. I stand behind those posts, but I have always been annoyed with people who criticize the way things are without offering any constructive suggestions of how things could be done differently. [E1] Consequently, since I have been audacious enough to criticize the use of violence, even for good causes, I feel that it is my responsibility to offer some alternative ways that we could address some of the major challenges in the world. Specifically, I am going to focus in this post on how to deal with violent aggressors – people like terrorists, psychopaths, and tyrants who inflict violence on others. But before I get started, I need to be very clear about what I am not trying to accomplish in this post.

DISCLAIMERS:

First, I want to be clear that this is not a list of “10 things you can do that will stop violence in any situation.” This is not a step-by-step handbook that promises a positive result at the end, nor is it a comprehensive list of all the options that pacifists have at their disposal. [E2] My goal here is much less ambitious: I am simply trying to help my readers think about other ways that they could respond to violence, even in its most terrifying forms. When we are threatened, we tend resort to extreme, either-or thinking: fight or flight, either match force with equal force or run away and cower. Neither of these are acceptable responses for the pacifist. Therefore, by putting other options on the table, I hope to help us break out of that binary way of thinking, not necessarily recommend any of these specific responses. [E3]

Second, I want to be clear that these methods must be used selectively, based on the specific situation. For example, although it can be very effective for people living under an oppressive regime to use method #5 – expose their evil – against that dictator, it would be unsafe and unwise to ask a person in an abusive relationship to use that same method against their abuser. Remember, these are options, not absolute rules or principles that should be applied in any situation. At the end of the day, it’s the people who are actually facing violence who must decide what the most prudent and appropriate response is.

10 Nonviolent Options

1) Disarm Them

The most violent people in our world – psychopaths, terrorists, tyrants, and the like – use weapons in order to inflict violence on a massive scale. Without these weapons, they aren’t all that intimidating, and their ability to harm others is rather limited. [E4] So one pacifist response to violent aggression is simply to ruin or remove their weapons.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Wait… isn’t that violent? [E5] Not necessarily. Disarming people can come in many forms. It can be sneaky or subversive, by hiding weapons from someone or providing them with weapons that are defective, which is one of the tactics Oskar Schindler used to oppose the Nazis. It can be done through persuasion and compassion, in the mode of Antoinette Tuff, a hero who in recent years stopped a school shooter. There are even times when physically removing a weapon from someone’s hands falls within the bounds of nonviolence. In any case, disarming an attacker in the midst of an imminent attack is something that both pacifists and non-pacifists can agree upon as a goal.

2) Cut Off their Resources

Now let’s take a step back and think about this a little more broadly, can we? In addition to the weapons in their hands, violent aggressors depend on a large network of social support in order to carry out acts of violence. They need information about the people they intend to attack. They need a place to hide or a means of getting away with the act. They need food, water, clothing, shelter, and all of the other goods that all humans need to survive. And most likely, they depend on propaganda or some kind of moral support that encourages them to go through with their violent act, etc. A systematic approach to rooting out violence involves finding where all of these sources of support are coming from and cutting them off.

This option is especially useful in dealing with tyrants. Tyrants depend on large social apparatuses to control their populations: they need large companies to manufacture their weapons, farmers to feed their militias, media specialists to propagate their narrative, etc. Once a population realizes that tyrants actually depend on their complicity in order to rule, they can weaken and eventually overthrow the tyranny by refusing to cooperate. This is by no means easy, but it can be done, no matter how evil the tyranny is. [E6]

3) Coordinate Resistance

Consequently, the most important resource for dealing with aggressors is coordination. This may take the form of taking shifts in a neighborhood watch, or of organizing a political resistance that undermines the authority of a dictator, or of sharing information with each other via Amber Alerts, or of international cooperation, etc. Groups like ISIS that wreak havoc in the world today depend on division for their success. To whatever extent cooperation and coordination is possible, those who want to stop violence from spreading should engage in it.

4) Avoid and Endure

But let’s go back to the immediate threat that people face when a man with a gun and violent intent is approaching them. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to run away. Running away can be an instinctive response that emerges from fear, but it doesn’t have to be. It can also be strategic. When dealing with violent aggressors, it’s best to engage and/or confront them when they are least prepared, not when they have come ready to attack you. Thus, you may run away so that you can deal with them again when you are more prepared.

Military strategists are well aware that this is a constructive rather than cowardly tactic, and they make use of it as well. For example, during the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army did not have the military technology to defeat the British in a head-on battle, but they wore the British army by them to chase the Continental Army through the woods over the course of several winters. Their running away was paired with endurance: the conviction that they could outlast them in this battle for endurance.

5) Expose their Evil

In many situations, the best way to deter a potential killer is not with a gun but with a camera. Most people – including psychopaths and dictators – don’t want their deeds to exposed. If they are exposed for being irrationally or excessively violent, even their friends and allies will be reluctant to trust them. Furthermore, evidence of their action could get them convicted in a court or could galvanize communities to work together against them. This is why groups like the United Nations or Christian Peacemaker Teams often send witnesses to corrupt and violent societies. Like cameras, witnesses threaten to expose those who commit evil. Consequently, one of the best things to do in response to many threats is to observe what is happening a safe distance.

6) Expose their Weakness

This is a method that should be reserved for special circumstances. However, in the right setting, this can end the reign of violence, either through an individual or a regime: expose their weakness. Remember, people who use violence to control others depend on the threat of violence to manipulate them. Sometimes, they can carry that threat out, but if often times, bullies and dictators claim to have more power to inflict harm than they actually do. If you get to a point where you can call the bluff, where you can call a bully or dictator out either because you can “take the hit” or because you are convinced that they won’t follow through, that risky move could destroy the threat at its core: the ability to intimidate. [E7]

7) Undermine their Objectives

Most of the time, people who perpetrate violence do so in order to get something out of their victims. If you can figure out what this and make it clear that the perpetrator won’t get it, you have a good chance of demotivating them completely. For example, you may choose not to carry around money, so that people won’t have anything to steal from you. Or you may choose never to know the information that people would want to torture you in order to acquire. This can be extremely for individuals facing aggression, but it is powerful for communities that act in solidarity. If it becomes known that a community doesn’t negotiate with terrorists or in other ways, doesn’t give attackers the satisfaction they want, they’ll eventually learn that their threats are pointless.

8) Offer Nonviolent Resolutions

The vast majority of people who commit acts of violence don’t do it out of the sheer pleasure of hurting others. Instead, there is a deeper pain or desire that is driving the violence, and pacifists should always try to understand what this is before deciding how to respond. As Americans, we are surprisingly bad at this. We write our enemies off as “bad people” who act violently because it is inherent to their nature or religion or whatever, and pre-emptively eliminate the possibility of finding other solutions. But a pacifist should always seek to understand, for in doing so they may be able to come up with a solution for meeting the attacker’s needs that doesn’t compromise anyone’s integrity.

Listen to me carefully: I’m not suggesting that all people who commit violence are tragically misunderstood, and that aggressors will listen calmly to alternative proposals and say, “Why yes! I’m so glad you suggested that!” However, this method can be combined with other methods to compel aggressors to take nonviolent paths. For example, if we make it exhausting for them to achieve their goals through #4 and we undermine their objectives through #7, they may be open to considering alternative solutions.

9) Exploit their Paranoia and Exhaustion

The truth is that those who live by the sword have a heavy burden to carry. They know that people cooperate with them only to the extent that they fear them, so they always have to be looking over their shoulders They always have to stay at the top of their game. They must always remain suspicious even of their friends and allies, knowing they could at any moment go from watching their back to stabbing it. In short, the life of violence is exhausting.

There are several ways for pacifists to “exploit” this. When a dictator gets too paranoid, pacifists can reach out to their generals and bodyguards, urging them to defect by pointing out that they could become the victims of their leader’s paranoia. Or you can appeal to the aggressors themselves: even terrorists and members of hate groups have been known to turn themselves in out of exhaustion. Who are they most likely to turn to? Pacifists whom they know will not kill them out of retribution for their former lifestyles.

10) Humanize their Victims

I have avoided listing this option until the very end. I didn’t want to say it before, because it would feed into the stereotype that pacifists are naïve moralists who believe we can appeal to the hearts of even the most violent aggressors and convince them not to hurt their victims. We are well aware that in most cases, you can’t say a flowery speech or make a heartfelt appeal that would turn someone away from violence. That being said, we would be naïve to ignore the fact that human appeal is and can be a powerful tool for undermining violence.

Human beings have a deep instinct that tells us that we shouldn’t kill other humans. [E8] Professional and guerilla militaries around the world know this, and so they train their warriors not to think of their victims as human beings, but as foreigners, infidels, monsters, or “bad guys.” Propaganda is essential to creating a violent force, because our instinct not to kill other humans is so strong that it can inhibit our actions, even in the most intense of circumstances. [E9] Therefore, one of the most powerful tools for undermining violence is to humanize victims: to create friendships across enemy lines, to tell stories of love and family to our enemies, to force the perpetrators of violence to see what they are doing to people, etc. This has been known to deter rapists, to convert terrorist, and to cause the military leaders of dictatorships to back down or defect. It isn’t the only option pacifists have at our disposal, but it should not be ignored either.

Conclusion

So there you have it: a list of ten nonviolent ways to oppose even the most violent of aggressors without getting caught in the web of violence yourself. Can I guarantee that some combination of these tools could stop any possible threat? No, I can’t. But remember, gun owners, police officers, and military generals can’t guarantee that their methods will work to stop evil either. We all have to do the best we can with what we’ve got. But when we consider how ineffective violence is in the long-run, how it produces short-term results but almost always backfires, and when we consider how many other options there are for opposing evil – options which could be just as powerful if we really invested in them – then being a pacifist doesn’t seem so idealistic after all.

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Endnotes

[E1] It is appropriate to criticize words or actions that are harmful, even when you don’t have a better alternative of how to accomplish whatever goal those actions were set out to accomplish. However, we should always be moving toward solutions-based thinking.

[E2] In his influential book From Dictatorship to Democracy, Gene Sharp offers a list of 198 methods of nonviolent action that people who want to engage in nonviolent resistance to dictators can consider. I wouldn’t personally endorse every method on that list, but I mention it just to give you a sense of how much I am really just skimming the surface on nonviolent thinking.

[E3] Part of the reason that I have to say this is because many of you will immediately think, “Well that wouldn’t work” in response to many of these suggestions. That skepticism is understandable, but it becomes obnoxious when it is followed by a series of “What if” critiques. “What if the attacker is a martial arts master? What if they manufacture their own weapons from scratch? What if they feed off of the negative pressure put on them?” etc. Pacifists know that we can never win a debate in which we have to explain how pacifism can defeat a hypothetical villain who evolves to adapt to every proposal we make. Consequently, I am not going to defend any of these suggestions against hypothetical criticisms, but I would be happy to discuss or analyzes cases in which they have succeed or failed in actual situations, or in situations in which people are trying to decide whether to use them.

[E4] Compared to other species, human bodies aren’t all that intimidating. We don’t have sharp teeth or claws, scales or skin that protects us from attacks, or the ability to spray poison at the things that threaten us. What has made us powerful (and threatening) as a species is our ability to make tools and our ability to communicate. Despite the fact that there are some 7’ tall muscle men who have learned martial arts, it is ultimately our tools (weapons) and communication (with allies) that makes people threatening today.

[E5] My pacifist friends might be surprised that I start by recommending “disarming” someone, which has a ring of violence to it, instead of the methods we are really passionate about: communicating, compromising, educating, addressing the systemic injustices that spark violence in the first place, etc. In response, I’d like to say that this is a pedagogical choice. People who oppose pacifism are usually fixated on how to respond in the immediate situation, with less interest in the long term. And – to be fair – pacifists aren’t always very good about responding to concerns about how to respond to immediate threats.

There are exceptions, though. For this one, I was inspired to some degree by an interesting development in the Mennonite Church – something called “Mennonite Martial Arts.” Ultimately, its advocates have argued that 90% of martial arts is not about violence but empowerment, and that there are ways to learn how to protect yourself without throwing a punch at the end.

[E6] For more on this, I’d recommend the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.

[E7] By the way, this is one way for Christians to think about the atonement. Christ defeated the powers of evil in this world by offering himself to them, letting them “do their worst,” and proving them to be impotent in the face of the power of God. Consider Colossians 2:15, “[Christ] disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.”

[E8] Yes, there are exceptions like psychopaths and sociopaths. In these very rare cases, it would be pointless to use the “Humanize their Victims” method and we must rely instead on others.

[E9] http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm