Is Violence Part of Resistance?: No River, No Flood
Is Violence Part of Resistance?: No River, No Flood
An interesting historical analysis that examines what constitutes effective resistance and what doesn’t.
This is a discussion about violence in resistance, and the stupidest form of resistance violence: assassination.
Right now, people are screaming about political violence having no place in our democracy, as if this democracy wasn't built on calculated bloodshed. The Boston Massacre wasn't spontaneous - Samuel Adams orchestrated it after studying how British troops firing on protesters in London created martyrs that transformed public opinion. Dead colonials would turn British authority from irritating to tyrannical. That's strategic violence.
But assassination? That's different. When resistance movements try to kill leaders, they consistently make things worse. The socialists who killed Czar Alexander II in 1881 got worse oppression under Alexander III. The Black Hand thought killing Franz Ferdinand would unite Serbia - instead they triggered World War I and lost a quarter of their population. Even killing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, accelerated the genocide. The Nazis named Operation Reinhard after him and murdered 1.5 million Jews in his memory.
The resistance movements that actually worked during World War II learned to target the machinery, not the symbols. The Polish Home Army killed 945 prison guards and deportation clerks. The Danish resistance eliminated 400 informers. The French assassinated local collaborators who knew faces and names. No glory in shooting a clerk outside a café, but the trains ran late, the deportations slowed, the resistance networks survived. They understood that occupation runs on middle management - people who are irreplaceable in ways generals aren't.
This matters now because claims about "radical left violence" in America make no sense. That radical left doesn't exist here. The American left has been domesticated - they file permits for protests in designated free speech zones while begging to be heard. When someone screams about radical left violence while the actual left is filling out paperwork for candlelight vigils, they're not describing reality.
The historical lesson isn't that violence doesn't work - it's that symbolic violence is a waste. Assassination is what you do when you want to lose heroically. Real resistance understands how power actually works, not how it looks. Most people who reach for violence are committing elaborate suicide. The ones who succeed map the machine first.
Arguably, if one wishes to maximize chances of a favourable outcome, one must avoid violence - to attract the cooperation of the widest possible public.
However, if one faces armed attack or repressions, defending against attack typically requires violence. Preferably of the short and effective kind, because the longer it lasts, the worse things get in society.
There have been assassinations that "worked". ETA didn't harm dictator Franco (at that time, and old and sick man), but they launched his prime minister - who was a bit younger, capable of organizing and vital for balancing various fascist groups - onto a short and conclusive flight. With Carrero Blanco's death, opportunity for change opened up, but pressure for this had been building for decades. Most people didn't mourn him, they were tired of the fascist regime. Some joked about Spain's first cosmonaut nearly reaching orbit. I don't know if there's a correct lesson to learn from this, it's just what happened.
Often times, assassination either fails (various people tried getting Hitler, but all failed) or produces adverse outcomes (the target survives and becomes better at surviving, it creates a martyr, it brings about repressions, etc).
Sometimes, assassination can be a prelude to discussion. After Stalin sent several assassins to get Tito, the latter finally wrote a sternly worded letter promising to send a more competent assassin after Stalin - and surprisingly, the attempts stopped.
Historically, assassination has been used to quite a lot, but generally not to bring about freedom, but to seize power or get vengeance. I think it's applications in bringing about freedom are a bit limited, since it's a secretive and inherently undemocratic step that can't be discussed in assemblies, only hushed about among conspirators.
The ETA's assassination of Blanco is an interesting case: ETA is a basque autonomy movement, similar in character to the IRA in Ireland, but while England has mollified its large Welsh and Scottish populations, Spain has several sub-national identities still fighting today for autonomy. For a country called Spain, you might be surprised to learn that most of their native population's first language isn't Spanish.
While the end of the fascist regime improved the quality of life of Basque people, it didn't get the ETA closer to its goal of Basque autonomy. Instead it cemented the ETA's image as violent terrorists, and the liberal government that followed was more effective at isolating the ETA from the Basque population. There are still a significant number of openly fascist politicians in Spain, and they are happy to use the state to exact revenge for their martyr.
If the goal of the ETA was only to reduce fascists from a single party rule to one in a plurality of political parties, one could say their strategy of assassination was successful. Their actual goal was Basque autonomy, and assassination lightened the yoke on the rest of Spain while making the cause of Basque nationalism a political pariah. Fascism is still alive and an active threat both politically and on the streets of Spain.
Blanco's death was a net positive for Spain, but then so was the death of Park Chung Hee for Korea. Even better for all of Korea's antifascist and liberal groups, the assassin was from Chung Hee's own party and head of his CIA. Whether spontaneous or part of a poorly-planned coup, it was spurred by popular uprisings across Korea, which included several dozen police stations being burned to the ground.
Mobilizing to counter pogrom marches, fighting racist skinhead gangs, standing guard outside threatened trans and LGBT events are all forms of community self-defense that somehow often get grouped into the category of political violence. The results of these kinds of direct actions are much more predictably positive than political assassination. More importantly, the grassroots network building that makes these kinds of actions successful allows for a much more nuanced and diverse set of responses to political repression, and are prefigurative of the kind of society people actually want to live in.