Heavy Casualties and Nonviolent Defense

 

 

 

Gene Keyes

 

 

This paper establishes a principle of strategic nonviolent defense called "sacrifice": Expect the worst and tolerate heavy casualties. It chides a tendency in nonviolent defense literature to underestimate potential loss of life, were indeed a Polity to wage serious unarmed struggle against a ruthless Foe-Polity.

Nonviolent defense planning must be imbued with worst-case analysis regarding the possible duration and magnitude of suffering. A populace must be ready to overcome exemplary terrorism and brutality, including nuclear extortion. It is more prudent for defenders to assume that casualties will be heavy, rather than admit they might be. Such a posture raises moral questions and religious ultimates which have been discounted by modern exponents of nonviolent defense. But extreme consequences and moral wherefores cannot be wished away.

 

Preface

For the ultimate question is always this: What do we do if the passive resistance ends by really getting on an adversary's nerves and he takes up the struggle against it with brutal strong-arm methods? Are we then resolved to offer further resistance?  If so, we must for better or worse invite the gravest, bloodiest persecutions. — Adolf Hitler, 1926[1]

 

. . . the point . . . to consider is not how to avoid the extreme penalty, but how to behave so as to achieve the object in view. — Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1939[2]

 

If a nation disarms, can it wage strategic nonviolent defense against a ruthless foe?  In discussing this issue, I use the general terms Polity and Foe-Polity.  A Polity can be thought of as a nation-state, but it could also be a city-state, a non-state nation, a region, an alliance, the United Nations, a world government, or the like.  A Foe-Polity is any of the above, and one that threatens, invades, or occupies another Polity.

Elsewhere, I have identified morale as the center of gravity in the combat between a Polity and a Foe-Polity; national integrity among the preeminent political goals of a nonviolent defense effort; and dislocation/demoralization/departure as the sequential wartime purposes of "us" versus "them".[3]  The Foe-Polity, the Polity, and its Strategy of nonviolent common defense could each be discussed in terms of their respective Particulars, Parties, Principles, Purposes, Policies, and Programs.  I have sought to identify some dozen Principles for the Strategy of nonviolent common defense, in seven words each.  For example, "Defiance":  There is no surrender in nonviolent defense.  This paper will consider a concomitant Principle called "Sacrifice":

 

Expect the worst and tolerate heavy casualties.

 

Argument

In the first place, this is not an advice only to a commander, a general, a chief of state.  This is a Principle addressed to the entire Polity, to be fully assimilated and appreciated by all its members.  It is nauseating to hear leaders or strategists talk about "accepting" casualties of any magnitude, if they are not talking about themselves as well.  All too often "accepting casualties" means you and you and you are going to die; and all too often, "you" means youth.

In the second place, we have another deadly principle here, only this one is more so.  Presupposition of deaths in the course of struggle has always been a part of nonviolent defense thinking — to an extent.  Some writers on nonviolence bravely steel themselves to admit that hundreds, yes, even thousands, may perish.  Beyond that, they may vaguely cite casualties of less than a nuclear holocaust.  In my opinion, this reality, although frequently given its due, nonetheless tends to be understated and underestimated.

(Of course that is a common political shortcoming; leaders will seldom want to announce or even face up to how many might die — or will have died — in any war: limited; protracted; nuclear.  Sometimes there are exceptions, as in Middle-Eastern-type braggadacio.)

I say that the twentieth century, being what it is, requires the nonviolent war strategist to move the decimal point four or five places,[4] so as to entertain casualty figures anywhere from five to nine digits; possibly ten if there is nuclear insanity by others.[5]  This leaves some nations out of the running; therefore percentage figures might be a more meaningful index of potential sacrifice.  Two digits should suffice.[6]  Let us say that in principle a nation must be prepared to pay very, very heavily in lives to preserve its freedom.  This holds true whether your nation is influenced by Joseph Stalin or Herman Kahn, Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi.

It is in the nature of risk that the worst doesn't necessarily happen, and so risk often partakes of bluff, imprudence, hubris, or paranoia.  However, when these elements are filtered out, we must still anchor the risky principle of Sacrifice on three sepulchral assumptions:

l) A high order of magnitude for potential deaths;

2) Worst-case planning for possible duration, extent, and amount of suffering;

3) Readiness to ride out exemplary terrorism.

That said, we do not forget that strategic nonviolence does its utmost to inhibit violence by the adversary and exerts all efforts to minimize casualties.  But the Polity using strategic nonviolence will not shrink from withstanding the most awful degree of death and desolation.  How can it differ in that respect from what happens in the real world?  Take, for instance, the words of Pham Van Dong, Premier of [North] Vietnam, who told James Cameron in December 1965:

 

But it is costing us terribly dear.  I'm not acting when I say that I am obliged to cry — literally cry — at the suffering and the losses.   And they will get worse, make no mistake . . . .[7]

 

What I am proposing is to remove any taint of utilitarianism from the question of casualties in nonviolent defense versus those of nuclear and conventional war.  We would accept in principle that unarmed defense may result in body counts exceeding any in ordinary war.  Thus, as Gandhi put it in April 1939, while urging the British to undertake a nonviolent defense against Hitler, ". . . the point. . . to consider is not how to avoid the extreme penalty, but how to behave so as to achieve the object in view."[8]

Even that is a somewhat pragmatic viewpoint for Gandhi, who was an eminently pragmatic person.  His larger perspective is more apparent in this comment which he made the following month:

 

It is highly probable that . . . "a Jewish Gandhi in Germany, should one arise, could function for about five minutes and would be promptly taken to the guillotine." But that would not disprove my case or shake my belief . . . I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands . . . Sufferers need not see the result during their lifetime.[9]

 

Granted; but as I was saying, add a few more zeroes to that.

In the nonviolent defense literature, here is how some of the writers have treated the problem of what we could call the logical consequences of the non-surrender principle.  Elihu Burritt in 1852:

 

Now, then, let us suppose the same people, with the same deep sense of right and the same unanimous will to maintain it, at the cost of any amount of suffering, shake off the yoke of the oppressor, and oppose to his power the mere moral or passive resistance of that will.  Simultaneously, as at the declaration of war, every man, woman and child secedes from obedience to the despotic Government, and prepares for the consequences . . . National independence!  'tis more than gained and guaranteed;   . . . Democracy!  that term falls below the dignity of this people's prerogative and power, even while the . . . block drips with the blood of their patriots and heroes, in every town and village of their land.[10]

 

What gorgeous rhetoric, misplaced in just one particular: he estimated only "dozens" of hangings per sizable town.  Oh well.  As Stalin was saying, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."[11]

In 1909 Gandhi exhorted India:

 

. . . no nation has risen without suffering; . . . even in physical warfare the true test is suffering and not the killing of others, much more so in the warfare of passive resistance; . . .[12]

 

In 1924 Gandhi warned that a people waging nonviolent struggle must "possess the capacity for unlimited suffering for any length of time . . ."[13]  In 1934 Richard Gregg warned that:

 

If the struggle is against a powerful . . . government, and is prolonged, the resisters may have to suffer horrible tortures and bestial treatment.  "War is hell," and in a big long struggle soldiers and police abandon all restraints.[14]

 

This offsets somewhat a preceding statement he made that nonviolent resisters face a "fair probability" of "sooner or later" having "to suffer hardships, and perhaps wounds, imprisonment and even death.''[15]  What I ask is that we rub our hard noses a little harder into that "fair probability".

       In 1939, Jessie Wallace Hughan stated the following as one of her four "Principles of Unarmed Defense":  "4.  All public officials pledged to die rather than surrender."[16]  Although later writers scorned the over-simplicity of some of her ideas, this one has been retained by them to a greater or lesser extent.  (Lesser, in my case.  I have discussed the idea of a "sacrificial goat" authorized by a Polity to sign pro-forma surrenders, until repudiated by the Polity.[17])

In 1955, a Quaker panel, addressing themselves to the realities of power politics, made this point about nonviolent resistance:

 

. . . readiness to accept suffering — rather than inflict it on others — is the essence of . . . nonviolent defense . . . we must be prepared if called upon to pay the ultimate price.[18]

 

Again, "if called upon" sounds distantly iffy.  But the pamphlet continues, in phraseology from A.J. Muste:

 

Obviously, if men are willing to spend billions of treasure and countless lives in war, they cannot dismiss the case for non-violence by saying that in a non-violent struggle people might be killed!

 

(Might be?  No, will be!)

 

It is equally clear that where commitment and the readiness to sacrifice are lacking, nonviolent resistance cannot be effective.[19]

 

In fact, this pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power, was a serious effort to launch a dialogue on nonviolent resistance with foreign policy realists.  Among its prime movers was Robert Pickus, a "realist" pacifist par excellence.  He and Stephen Cary defended the pamphlet in a symposium published in the October 1955 issue of The Progressive.  Among the critics were George Kennan, Hans Morganthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, and Dwight Macdonald.  Oddly enough, in the original magazine, Pickus and Cary sidestepped an oft-heard criticism, here voiced by Macdonald, that Communist invaders "would not shrink from whatever measures of extermination seemed necessary."[20]  But in a reprint version of the symposium, four paragraphs were added, coming to grips with that poser.  As part of the addendum, Pickus and Cary conceded:

 

This is not to suggest that non-violent resistance could be carried out without suffering.  Against a totalitarian opponent it would clearly receive a far sterner test than against one imbued with an ethical tradition of the sacredness of human life.  Indeed, the prospect of suffering that would be involved is appalling to contemplate.[21]

 

Compare that to Pham Van Dong's 1965 premonition quoted earlier[22].

Cecil Hinshaw was another member of the 1955 Quaker panel.  In his own pamphlet the following year, he made this assessment about the consequences of U.S. nonviolent defense against Soviet occupation:

 

At the worst, it would be a long and costly struggle over a generation or two, hurting the economy of the country badly . . . and resulting perhaps in the liquidation of thousands of our best people.[23]

 

Thousands . . . ?  Perhaps . . . ?  That's almost nothing, next to U.S. traffic deaths, Vietnam losses, etc.

In 1958, Bradford Lyttle looked the Gorgon a little more closely in the eye, and made a somewhat higher forecast:

 

If, under a nonviolent resistance defense program, the United States . . . were invaded, it is likely our casualties would be considerable before the invaders withdrew.  I . . . estimate . . . our total killed would not exceed our military losses in the Second World War.[24]

 

These were in the vicinity of 300,000.  (Lyttle also used the picturesque phrase "eugenic insanity" for characterizing the casualties of World War I, and war in general.  It is said by him and others of nonviolent defense that the burden of dying would not be skewed to the healthiest classes of youth, but would be more generally shared, especially among older leadership groups.)

Without referring to death totals, Richard Gregg in the 1958 edition of his book did make this significant point:

 

If freedom is worth anything, it is worth fifty or a hundred years of unstinted effort in rigid adherence to the nonviolent method.[25]

 

Ralph Bell has been one of the more funereal analysts of what may be expected in the ordeals of nonviolent combat.  He offered this prognosis in 1959:

 

I fully realize that a struggle with Russia fought out by Active non-violent Resistance methods would be a costly business, calling for moral courage, rigid discipline and a willingness to die for the cause, but I am not prepared to say it is unworkable . . . . It would mean heavy casualties, possibly very heavy casualties . . .[26]

 

Yes; but only "possibly"?  In 1966 and 1968, Bell devised a plan for British and Commonwealth intervention in the Rhodesia struggle, including these provisos applicable to unarmed defense generally:  "Casualties ought to be expected and planned for," he wrote.[27]  He also cautioned as follows:

 

It is no part of nonviolent tactics to provoke the opposition to violence so that political capital can be made out of the deaths of nonviolent volunteers.  But a nonviolent force must expect some casualties and cannot hope to be successful unless its members have trained themselves to accept those casualties without bitterness and without retaliation . . . .  It is when casualties are suffered that the nonviolent force has within its grasp the satisfactory solution of the conflict . . .[28]

 

"Some" casualties — but here Bell was discussing a limited conflict.

In 1967, Adam Roberts mentioned that "readiness to face . . . repression must be a central feature of civilian defence policy."[29]  In 1973, Gene Sharp put it this way:

 

Facing repression with persistence and courage means that the nonviolent actionists must be prepared to endure the opponent's sanctions without flinching.[30]

 

Then in a later passage, Sharp echoed Gregg's semi-acumen: citing the hazards, but downplaying them with connotations of rarity:

 

There must be no illusions.  In some cases nonviolent people have not only been beaten and cruelly treated but killed, not only accidentally or as isolated punishment, but in deliberate massacres.[31]

 

You don't say!  And in only some cases?

In 1962, Mulford Q. Sibley put a similar veneer of improbability on otherwise harsh consequences:

 

At all points, it would be emphasized that actual physical suffering and even death might be entailed.[32]

 

Sibley was also on a subsequent Quaker panel whose study of nonviolent defense appeared in 1967, and this one too seemed to have it both ways:

 

The number of casualties could be large, though certainly far less than in the event of a thermonuclear war.

We must be prepared for ruthless reprisals. . . .[33]

 

My point is this:  Without getting trapped in self-fulfilling prophecy, I think it is more prudent to assume that casualties would be extremely heavy, instead of admitting that they might be.

Should events turn out not so bad after all, let that be a pleasant surprise.  But let there be no unpleasant surprise when worst comes to worst.  Consider the non-surrender principle, and a nuclear ultimatum.  Now what?  If these principles, non-surrender and sacrifice and all of them, are accepted as the determinants of nonviolent common defense strategy, the implication must also be accepted that thousands and millions of deaths must be anticipated, either at one fell swoop, or in a very protracted struggle.  Does that sound lugubrious, fatalistic, and fantastic?  Let me just ask:

 

Where were you on October 24, 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union nearly engaged in nuclear war over missiles in Cuba?

 

So far I have dwelled on the first two aspects of this principle:  staggering casualties and maximum suffering.   They lead to a third aspect, which is a prediction, a hope — I will not say a certainty — that if the Polity can bear with and ride out such extreme mass terrorism (and if the slaughter is less than 100%), then the storm may subside, and the battle will have been won.  Hinshaw phrased it like this in 1956:

 

... an invading army as we have posited would have instructions to use cruelty and even barbarity on a considerable scale if necessary and if it appeared to offer any hope of breaking the resistance . . . hostages would be tortured and killed . . . For the tyrant, the chief value in such killing . . . is the expectation that others will obey more readily thereafter.  If the brutality does not accomplish this intended result, the danger of its indefinite continuance is not as great as it first appears.[34]

 

In 1964, Theodor Ebert construed this expectation still more explicitly:

 

In so far as nonviolent resistance steels itself for the initial Machiavellian wave of terror and is prepared to meet the second onslaught, there must be a limit to further terror because of a dwindling belief of the invaders in the invincibility of their ideology and its capacity to bring happiness to all mankind.[35]

 

That is good news, but it is not the key part of the principle; suppose indeed a foe aims at a 100% wipe-out?  Such a situation would have be examined for the particulars of a given Polity and Foe-Polity.  The "Sacrifice" Principle only says that heavy casualties must be expected — not how to prevent them.  Also, without evading this kind of worst case, I think it can be said that total extirpation is an exceptional — yes, extremely exceptional — political aim.  It has been tried.  We should beware.  But attempted subjugation via extravagant brutality is the far more common danger.

We do not want to inculcate a national death-wish.  We do not expect the populace to be lambs for slaughter.  What is important here is the Polity's stoicism and morale — that it not be caught off balance when the Foe-Polity goes all out with those "brutal strong-arm methods".  Or much less than all out.  Ill-prepared resistance can be deflated by a whiff of grapeshot.  Consider the massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa in 1960, the effect of martial law in Poland on Solidarity in 1981, or the Tiananmen Square crackdown in China, 1989.

 

With this principle — as well as the others — I have stressed that nonviolent defense must entail a readiness to bear with massive suffering and dying, and that personal death or national annihilation must in the long run be viewed in a philosophic or religious context.  But a certain type of commentator — sometimes an apostate pacifist, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Dwight Macdonald, or Norman Thomas — will argue against this: against what Macdonald called an "ultimatist" perspective, or against what the Quaker group in 1955 called "the politics of eternity"[36]  A statesperson (or revolutionary) must make here-and-now decisions, and cannot, rhetoric aside, rely on divine assistance, or so the argument goes.  The gun is almightier than God.  (Meanwhile, a cross-fire is set up by those [e.g., William F. Buckley] who sneer at peace activists for supposedly seeking 'mere biological survival': hardly the case in this paper.  Such critics would be aghast at laying down so many lives without shooting back.)

Obviously it is unfair to assume that only a nonviolent defense strategy would risk megadeath and destruction.  The nuclear facts of life today are not so shocking as in the late 1950s when Herman Kahn scandalized audiences by mentioning out loud how many million deaths would be "acceptable" in order to, say, prevent the "loss" of Berlin.  Now that is all but taken for granted.

At the same time, nonviolent strategy options are the least known and the least tried, or else tried with the least tenacity.  Let there be a minor massacre at Sharpeville, something less than a hundred dead, and that is said to be the end of the line for nonviolence.  No more Mr. Nice Guy.

So the moral value of nonviolence is liable to be scorned not only by rebels and nuclear strategists.  It is also dismissed by ex-pacifists who say we cannot count on God to bless the self-sacrifice of a nonviolent nation.  And, as we shall see, modern exponents of nonviolent defense themselves tend to downplay the moral element of their argument.

But there is no need to derogate a moral concern about killing, and the consequences of refusing to do so.  In the totality of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, it may have been the moral issue, as insistently voiced by Robert Kennedy, that provided the tiny and momentary margin of safety whereby armageddon was avoided.  Arguing against Dean Acheson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, et al., Robert Kennedy protested that he

 

could not accept the idea that the United States would rain bombs on Cuba, killing thousands and thousands of civilians in a surprise attack . . . This, I said, could not be undertaken by the U.S. if we were to maintain our moral position at home and around the globe.  Our struggle against Communism throughout the world was far more than physical survival — it had as its essence our heritage and our ideals, and these we must not destroy.

We spent more time on this moral question during the first five days than on any other single matter . . . We struggled and fought with one another and with our consciences, for it was a question that deeply troubled us all.[37]

 

After President John F. Kennedy had decided to defer (to defer) a surprise attack in favor of the blockade, Robert Kennedy concluded that:

 

The strongest argument against the all-out military attack, and one no one could answer to his satisfaction was that surprise attack would erode if not destroy the moral position of the United States throughout the world.[38]

 

By no means am I saying that Robert Kennedy was a pacifist!  Only that he raised just enough of a moral argument for just long enough to perhaps have been the Dutch boy at the dike.   Also, according to Theodore Sorenson, Robert Kennedy, in his unfinished memoir, had intended

 

to add a discussion of the basic ethical question involved: what, if any, circumstance or justification gives this government or any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?[39]

 

This is good as far as it goes, but even Robert Kennedy's fellow dove Sorenson has minced words here.  "Bringing under a shadow" is rather abstract and euphemistic.  Sorenson and Robert Kennedy and the other crisis managers in both countries were themselves just an eyeball away from pouring nuclear fire and brimstone on more people than all mass murderers in history combined.

Therefore, it is appropriate to measure these principles against the extremity of nuclear war, as well as all the lesser degrees of organized killing.  Then if any Principle of strategic nonviolent defense seems hard to swallow, seems to require too much human sacrifice, we need only let our minds momentarily ponder October 1962; or a "rational" nuclear war; or an ordinary protracted war with merely millions of casualties; or a miniscule war in a vest-pocket country such as Lebanon or Ulster, with "miniscule" casualties, and religious consolations.  Sacrifice, real and potential, gushes all around us in tragically wasteful cloudbursts.  Like fire and flood, this human energy must be voluntarily — repeat, voluntarily — channeled to the benefit and longer run survival of the world community and human posterity.

 

Postscript

We should at this point pause to reflect on whether divine assistance is still operative or essential, in reality, or in nonviolent defense theory.  We cannot risk and write off so many lives without asking whither and why.

Is God real, or helpful?  That is for you to decide.  Personally I am a Quaker, but I have my doubts; and most of my eggs are in a rational basket.  Therefore I do not say that nonviolent defense is contingent on a Supreme Ally.  But neither do I want to disregard a providential influence in worldly power politics, whether exemplified by the life of Gandhi, the survival of Israel, or the twin emergence of Solidarity and a Polish Pope.

Until about the late 1950s, the strategy of nonviolent defense was reinsured by God.  Since then it has become almost totally secularized.  For Gandhi, in his day, nonviolence without God was impossible; and death is merely an intermission.  A. J. Muste (1885-1967), a pioneer theorist of nonviolent defense, shifted the tone of his argument increasingly in later years from Christian advocacy to political analysis with a more generalized morality.  As we have seen, the 1955 Quaker case for nonviolent resistance adverted to the "politics of eternity".  But its 1967 sequel omitted a Quaker/moral epilogue which was in the 1965 draft.[40]  The younger Gene Sharp was a fervid Gandhian, but his 1973 masterwork, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, does not even list "God", "truth", or "morality" in the index.  More recently, Sharp has tended to scoff at such preoccupations as "halo-polishing".[41] This is indicative of a decision he and others made in the early 1960s, for nonviolent defense strategy to fly on its own without coming back to its earlier nest of religious pacifism and Gandhiism.

An essentially strategic doctrine for nonviolent defense is all to the good — indeed, one of my own specialties.  But I suggest it is not halo-polishing to correct the ultra-pragmatic tilt a little, in order to reconsider first principles and extreme consequences and moral wherefores and divine solace.  The average soldier and the chief of staff, the dedicated terrorist and the implacable tyrant, must each operate from some philosophic or religious starting point.  The moral premises of nonviolent defense strategy cannot be evaded by undue striving toward a pseudo-pragmatism.

That said, I will water my own wine.  I have argued the "Sacrifice" Principle in its most stringent and dogmatic form.  But reality and real people will have their own priorities.  Signing up for heavy-casualty lists is not one of them.  Personal and national ambivalence about heroism is an old story.  Pragmatic nonviolent resistance planners will have declaratory as well as action policies, balancing public resilience and the art of the possible.

The steadfast Polity will indeed Expect the worst and tolerate heavy casualties — but this is a principle to be husbanded very carefully; to be saved for a very rainy day.  High national endeavor can be galvanized by the likes of Thomas Paine, Carl Mannerheim of Finland, or Ho Chi Minh; to say nothing of Napoleon, Stalin or Churchill.  Like them, astute leaders of a nonviolent common defense effort will discern those uncommon situations which enable uncommon personal and national sacrifice.

Me, I'd rather be somewhere else.

 

Notes