Mahatma Gandhi, a lawyer, dons the garbs of a poor man in India and speaks to the world of non-violence. Popular accounts of India’s “Independence” Movement credit the philosophy of non-violence. But, as thinker and writer Ward Churchill explains, non-violence, the praxis of pacifism, did not destroy the Empire’s ability to forcibly control its colonial territories (and passive populations) (“Pacifism as Pathology,” The Pathology of Pacifism).

The “general decline in British power,” writes Churchill, “brought about by two world wars within a thirty-year period,” gave the appearance that “non-violence” had won a victory over tyranny. Success was also limited in the Civil Rights movement lead by Dr. Martin L. King’s interpretation of non-violence.

Churchill argues that the “armed self-defense tactics” of rural Black leaders such as Robert Williams and the actions of SNCC and its non-pacifist leadership (Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown) and the “eruption of black urban enclaves in Detroit, Newark, Watts, Harlem and elsewhere)” forced the State’s power to take another look at King’s civil rights demands and largely incorporate them into law rather than contend with the likes of “Black Power Militants,” the most threatening power to State power, designated as targets for the State “neutralization” program.

There simply has never been a revolution brought into being on the basis of the principles of pacifism…

Churchill continues: The praxis of pacifism renders its adherents ineffectual and non-threatening “in the face of state power.” Believers in pacifism can be “ignored by the status quo” while engaged in “self-eliminating” behavior “in terms of revolutionary potential.”

We should remember that King had to be eliminated when he connected the dots and linked poverty in the U.S. and around the world with U.S. killings of Vietnamese. He threatened massive protests and refused to chastise urban “rioters.” In fact, King, unlike today’s selected leadership, sought to educate Americans about the conditions Black youth faced and why their anger made them take to the streets and target the symbols of capitalism. King linked racial inequality in the U.S. to imperialism - and there is nothing passive about imperialism. King’s denouncement of the U.S. pointed to its deployment of violence: The U.S., he stated, is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” And for that, King had to be eliminated - non-passively!

Strategy! What is our strategy, Churchill asks. Forty years later, our strategy for action against a corporate-military State has been co-opted. The “Movement” has been co-opted by those who serve the state. What strategy can the “Left” employ if a significant and prominent contingency rejects much if not all that the “present social order stands for” (“a revolutionary perspective”), yet adheres to the philosophy of non violence?

Here is where we put down the I Pods and turn off the computers. Turn our backs on the Nobel Peace Price winner, and let us not worry about whether or not Dennis Kucinich or John Conyers politely asks the Speaker of the House for an opportunity to speak - on behalf of the “American people.” Let us not wait for the articulations of reform and opportunism from Reverends Jackson or Sharpton.

We have heard and seen enough for 45 years, and we are sick and tired of being sick and tired with go-along, get along performers.

Here is where we must pause and critically think and understand that times has been wasted, and many lives have been eliminated or destroyed and Mother Earth is sick and tired too! The headlines today, tomorrow, and in the near and distant future will feature, if the corporate media bothers at all, more dead, more assignations, more arrests, more detentions and lives spent in hell holes, more extinctions of wild life and vital resources, and more contamination of land, water and air.

We are dying and the capitalist corporations are sailing the U.S. Empire to the bottom of an abyss while Black and white collaborators play their pacifist violins for pay and awards, recognition for a good job done - turning all eyes on them rather than on the sinking ship’s captains of capital. To return to Churchill, pacifists, he writes, have not insisted on formulating the question about strategy. Instead, pacifists, he argues, pose this question: “In what sort of politics might I engage which will both allow me to posture as a progressive and allow me to avoid incurring harm to myself?”

So how do we formulate a strategy that goes beyond the pacifists’ “politics of the comfort zone”? Where is the risk? Where is the “revolutionary impetus”?

How many more demonstrations, Churchill asks, where thousands assemble “in orderly fashion” to listen to

How orderly is war?

What is passive about famine and the laying off of workers and the corporate abuse of slave workers in U.S. prisons and in overseas factories?

In the end, at these orderly demonstrations, protesters’ “self-policing” assists the police who find themselves “serving as mere backups (or props).”

Theatre of the absurd!

The American Revolution could not have happened if the pursuers of freedom had obeyed the instructions of the Red Coats. Yet, what did these pursuers of freedom do once they were victorious? The victors attempted to stamp out other pursuers of freedom, historian and author of A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn writes (“Big Government for Whom?” The Progressive, April 1999).

The pursuers of freedom denounced the protest and dissent of the 99%! The people, the economically poor, farmers, works, Blacks and Indigenous, were a threat to the establishment of a State for the benefit of the wealthy! The newly formed government had a problem: the protest and dissent of the 99% was the problem!

The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia for 1787 called for the establishment “big government” to “protect the interests of merchants, slave-holders, land speculators, establish law and order, and avert future rebellions like that of Shays” writes Zinn (“Big Government for Whom?”).

“A strong central government was needed to curb the potential demands of a ‘majority faction’ for ‘an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked object.”

To “defend the interests of the wealthy classes”!

What is non-violent in a plutocracy!

The history of the ruling class’ use of violence in the U.S. to maintain control over resources and enforce political power in the world is long and it has evolved - for the worse! The President of the U.S. presides over a “whole new apparatus of repression available to the Executive Branch” (“More Repressive at Home,” The Progressive, September 10, 2011). The Military Commissions Act gives the President “the right to deem anyone, including a U.S. citizen, an ‘enemy combatant’ and apprehend that person. If you’re not a U.S. citizen, the President can deem you an ‘alien enemy combatant’ and deprive you of your rights under the Geneva Conventions.”

Yet, in the last 40 years, we have witnessed new trends in the non-violence movement that can be characterized as a movement to appease the dominant class. Take a look at the new image of “civil disobedience.”

“Civil disobedience,” Churchill writes, has become a series of “symbolic actions.” Rather than literally “clogging” the “functioning of the state apparatus,” as Gandhi and King did with “passive bodies,” it now consists of a series of staged arrest of celebrities. Camera, lights, action! This is great for business as usual! A people’s “Movement” is nothing more than a lump of lard, fat with selected political and civic leaders and Hollywood celebrities (and I am not referring to the long-time commitment of a Harry Belafonte and a Danny Glover, citizens-activists in the tradition of a Charlie Chaplin or a Paul Robeson). These “protesters,” as Churchill notes, “plead not guilty to the charges they themselves literally arranged to incur” while clogging the protest and stifling the real protesters (everyday people) by functioning, Churchill writes, to stigmatize, to isolate, and to minimize, in other words, to neutralize protest against the evolution of a powerful corporate-military State in the U.S.

Is this not a strange cabal of the “Movement,” the “Protesters,” and the State?

And the people continue to die and the political prisoners spend one more day, month, year in solitary confinement.

Even stranger, the 1% selects Mr. Cool to represent the premiere “protester” of the “Movement” in 2008. What a campaign Wall Street advertisers conducted to harness the spirit of the young and old, Black and white.

The “Movement” for “Change!”

Even the co-opted anti-war movement, mesmerized by Mr. Cool’s articulation of non violence, was deaf to his articulation of the philosophy of “just wars.”

Mr. Cool, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize, non-violent presidential candidate, Barack Obama, sailed into Washington D.C. on the waves of Wall Street capital, and the non-violent adherents wept tears of joy the night he co-opted the Struggle for freedom, economic equality, and justice in the U.S.!

The premiere “protester” in the “politics of the comfort zone,” Mr. Cool, as President of the U.S. Imperialist State, deports more human beings (as opposed to “alien beings - not Martians or nuclear bombs or financiers on Wall Street - than his predecessor, George Bush II, and he sends drones to kill and troops to occupy and surveillance agents to repress, everywhere around the world.

And Mr. Cool is not hesitant to use his new-found powers to crush protest and dissent any- and everywhere around the world in order to protect the good folks, the 1%!

What is passive about Barrack Obama, Mr. Cool?

Considering Barack Obama’s and his fellow corporate “protesters’,” and “community organizers’” attempt to mock the Struggle for Justice and economic equality, even Dr. King would spit in his face! But perhaps the Sprit of Ernesto is doing just that as the uprising of the 99% is spreading throughout the U.S. and around the world.

In a plutocracy, to organize and to educate is to violate the institutionalization of chaos and ignorance.

But we have Right on our side!

We have the right to violate the comfort zone and revolutionize political thought and action!

We have the right to dismantle legalized injustice!

We have the right to occupy Wall Street, occupy hundreds of cities around the world to put an end to an oppressive economic system!

We have the right to assemble, develop, and execute a strategy to accomplish a more civilized world, according to the Declaration of Independence,

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.