Who Really Supports Nonviolence?

Since it’s Martin Luther King Day, and Washington, DC is braced for another armed attack, it’s worth thinking for a moment about political violence.

Every schoolchild knows that King, in his struggle for civil rights, preached non-violence. What I fear many children and adults were not taught is that when King preached non-violence, he was talking not only, or even mostly, to Black Americans. He was talking to the United States government.

In his 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam war, King explained that,

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems…But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

For King, non-violence was not a moderate position. It was a breathtakingly radical one because it challenged the constant, taken-for-granted, often invisible, violence practiced by the most powerful government on earth—not only overseas, but at home. King condemned urban riots, yet he saw them as a rounding error compared to the lawlessness and violence of Americans in power. “If the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots,” King wrote during the “long hot summer” of 1967, “the hardened criminal would be the white man.”

It is a testament to King’s influence that, for at least a moment, he made some powerful white Americans question the violence they had previously taken for granted. Robert Kennedy began his governmental career as an unreflective, self-righteous hawk, a Camelot Marco Rubio. In 1961, when undersecretary of state Chester Bowles warned it might be illegal for the CIA to install a friendly government in the Dominican Republic, RFK, according to David Halberstam, called Bowles a “gutless bastard.” As Attorney General in 1963, Kennedy’s paranoia about communist influence in the civil rights movement led him to authorize the wiretapping of King’s phone.

But by the time King was murdered in 1968, the civil rights movement had made Kennedy question the American political establishment’s self-satisfied tropes about acceptable and unacceptable violence. After declaring that, “No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders,” Kennedy acknowledged that,

there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men.
Now that King is dead—and can cause no more trouble—it is easy to nod approvingly at his and Kennedy’s words. But apply to them to contemporary events and you quickly find yourself outside the political mainstream.

Over the past two weeks, Republican leaders have denounced the attack on Congress while also denouncing the violence at Black Lives Matter protests this summer. Some have even called Democrats hypocrites for being more outraged by the former than the latter.

But if you see violence the way King did—as including the violence of state oppression—then the two insurrections look totally different. Throughout his presidency, Trump has reveled in government violence against people who threaten white Christian supremacy inside the United States and American supremacy overseas. He has encouraged the police to abuse suspects they arrest, tortured migrant children by separating them from their families, pardoned US marines who killed civilians in Iraq, dramatically increased the number of civilians killed by US airstrikes in Afghanistan and tried to withdraw health coverage from more than twenty million Americans. Last week, his administration designated Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a terrorist group, which will make it virtually impossible for humanitarian groups to work in the territory under Houthi control and, according to UN officials, spark “large-scale famine.”

These actions may not look as spectacular as the attack on Congress. But they are acts of unjustified violence. And when Trump’s supporters violently overran Congress earlier this month—in an effort to ensure that the candidate who won the most white Christian votes became president, not the candidate who won the most votes overall—they were pursuing the same broad agenda as Trump himself. Many Americans recoiled in horror because we are unused to seeing one arm of the American government, the executive branch, stoke violence against another, the legislative branch. But Trump’s mob simply used unconventional and extra-legal methods to carry out the same white supremacist violence that Trump’s executive branch has been employing for the last four years. Saying you support Trump but oppose the attack on Congress is like saying, in King’s day, that you supported George Wallace but opposed the Klu Klux Klan.

That’s why the analogy between Trump’s minions and Black Lives Matter activists is so flawed. Black Lives Matter is a movement against state violence. The Capitol mob was an irregular wing of that state violence. The protesters who this summer filled America’s streets were outraged by the police brutality Trump encouraged. The protesters who this month attacked Congress were outraged by the prospect of a president who might not encourage such brutality enough. If you want to tally the violence on each side, you can’t just compare Black Lives Matter supporters to the MAGA hat-wearing goons who paraded around Nancy Pelosi’s office. You must do what King did: Compare the violence committed by Black people resisting state violence to the violence that the state—in all its myriad manifestations—unjustly commits against them.

This summer, Black Lives Matter—like King in the 1960s—nudged this more honest and holistic conversation about violence into mainstream progressive discourse, so that Joe Biden could say that America’s “institutional violence” make Black Americans feel like they’re living “with a knee on their neck.”

But in many arenas, that perspective remains largely taboo. Take Robert Kennedy’s words about that “other kind of violence”: the “slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter…the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men.” Then apply them to the Gaza Strip, which is subject to an Israeli blockade so sweeping that, according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha:

Gaza residents may not bring a crate of milk into the Gaza Strip without Israeli permission; A Gaza university cannot receive visits from a foreign lecturer unless Israel issues a visitor’s permit; A Gaza mother cannot register her child in the Palestinian population registry without Israeli approval; A Gaza fisherman cannot fish off the coast of Gaza without permission from Israel; A Gaza nonprofit organization cannot receive a tax-exempt donation of goods without Israeli approval; A Gaza teacher cannot receive her salary unless Israel agrees to transfer tax revenues to the Palestinian Ministry of Education; A Gaza farmer cannot get his carnations and cherry tomatoes to market unless Israel permits the goods to exit Gaza.

Choked off from normal travel and commerce, Gaza has become, according to the United Nations, “unlivable.” This, too, constitutes violence. Recognizing that doesn’t justify Hamas rocket fire any more than recognizing state violence against Black Americans justified violence by protesters during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. That wasn’t King’s point. He didn’t include unjust state violence in his moral tabulations because he thought it was OK for rioters to throw Molotov cocktails. He did so because he knew it was dishonest and immoral to condemn violence by the weak without also condemning violence by the strong.

He understood that unless your opposition to violence makes people in power uncomfortable, you’re probably not advocating non-violence at all.