Property Damage, Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Strategy

Disruption is the heart of civil resistance as long as it does not turn to violence

We are in a new period of activism with forces exerting pressures on all of us—those who seek justice and an end to police killing unarmed black people, those who are severely hurt by this godawful pandemic, those whose small businesses have been smashed and looted, and those simply afraid to make any move right now.

One of the sticky questions revolves around the property damage we’ve seen recently in so many US cities. By all credible on-the-ground reporting, the vast majority of those on the streets protesting, city-to-city, are nonviolent. They are not necessarily peaceful—they make a great deal of sound singing or chanting and they are at times visibly and righteously angry—but disruption is the heart of civil resistance as long as it does not turn to violence.

BUT WHAT ABOUT EXPLOSIVES?

Arson and use of explosives, however, are a different matter. Even if no one is immediately injured from such actions— which is hard to guarantee—the people engaging in such actions cannot control them once they ignite them. Some may argue that such actions—if they do not hurt or intend to hurt others—are not violent. However, from a strategic perspective, they have an impact that is similar to violence. They make people afraid and therefore less likely to mobilize publicly in support of the cause. They also divert media coverage, alienate the general public, raise support for officials to “restore order” by any means necessary, and increase unity and obedience among security forces.

In some places, especially after dark, riots break out. Property is damaged. The opinions about this are all over the map. Please entertain mine for a minute, as I’ve been thinking a lot about this since the 1960s, when my friends burned their draft cards and some destroyed Selective Service files to interfere with the draft sending young men to kill and die in the preposterous war in Vietnam.

I thought about this property destruction harder when some of my mentors hammered on nuclear weapons in symbolic disarmament. I followed their footsteps and reflected on it while incarcerated for these sorts of acts.

I’ve been convicted of property destruction three times, and all three times the judges and juries have come to agree with me that my acts might have been illegal, but were nonviolent.

There are five basic elements of my notion of when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign.

• That no private individual’s property is destroyed.

• That the item destroyed was harming others.

• That the core organizers of the campaign approved of the physical actions ahead of time.

• That no property destruction happens in the context of a public event unless that destruction was advertised ahead of time as likely to occur.

• That the act can be explained very well and repeatedly to the public by those who were totally transparent in their actions and are demonstrably committed to nonviolent strategy.

Two of my convictions were as part of the Plowshares movement, in which individuals or small groups disabled military equipment in the spirit of the guidance to “hammer swords into plowshares,” as in the famous statue outside the UN, in a bow to biblical scripture.

In the first case, the judge liked me and basically just sentenced me to probation.

In the second case, the judge was quite rightwing and yet he said in a pretrial motion hearing that he was getting tired of me explaining why cutting down 50-foot poles and sending the thick antenna crashing to the ground was nonviolent, conceding, “We all know it was nonviolent.”

The antenna’s purpose was to command the launch of nuclear war. Two of us literally cut down that possibility, but since we all knew they would repair it quickly, toppling the pole was also a symbolic act. The case generated a great