When examining political violence between states and citizens, it is best to distinguish four different groupings or types of political violence. The first and least common is State vs. Self. An example of this would be Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. The next group is State vs. Citizens; examples of this would be police brutality or police using their authority to harm innocents. The third grouping is Citizens vs. State, which includes most riots. But usually groups two and three operate in tandem, such as a riot officer throwing a tear gas canister into a crowd of people, and said people throwing it back.
Finally, the last group is the most interesting: Citizens vs. Self. This can but does not refer to infighting or normal crime, but refers specifically to self-inflicted violence, like the Indian hunger strikes or self-immolations used as a form of protest. This is the most interesting form of political violence because it shows that the state can prevent such violence if it chooses to, by acceding to demands, but does not.
Political violence often instills widespread public concern. A shared fear among citizens that law and order will be dismantled, that the violence will turn towards the citizens. And so in reaction to said fear, people reflexively turn towards authorities. It has been demonstrated that when there is violence present, average authoritarian sentiment increases, even if said authorities cause violence.
This is how people start signing their rights away during a crisis. A notable example of this is the Patriot Act following the 9/11 attacks. The one exception to this is when authorities are violent toward citizens who are explicitly peaceful. It is present when the authorities beat people who refuse to fight back, or when they allow citizens to starve or burn themselves.
In these outliers, the public loses faith in authority. So with the fear that is born inherently out of violence, the citizens are given a losing hand. Once the state proves that it can and will commit acts of violence against its own citizens for whatever reason, the people only have the choice to give up or to fight violence with violence. Once a political dilemma reaches a physical struggle, it is impossible to revert said dilemma back into a purely moral one. The only choice the citizens have is to decide which group the violence will occur in.
Pacifism is a powerful strategy, but it is hard to willingly get beaten down and arrested for merely sitting somewhere. When critics advocate for more peaceful demonstrations, essentially what they are advocating for is that the correct way to protest is for citizens to allow a heavily militarized police force, which demonstrates that it’s willing to murder innocents in full view of the public, to beat them senseless. One cannot advocate for nonviolence, only a preference for who has to face said violence.
The problem that is being faced today is new media coverage. This news and media polarity and selectiveness raise questions about whether citizens can truly protest in a way that is perceived as self-inflicted and therefore peaceful. Peaceful protest through self-inflicted violence only works if the public sees it. Not if the news chooses to gloss over all the peaceful demonstrations and focuses instead on the few actual rioters. Currently, the authorities being protested against have control over the media that is being pushed to their citizens. What happens is that the new press takes peaceful protests and spins them as riots, or chooses not to cover them at all.
This leads to the public not grasping the whole picture, and justifies the use of excessive force by the authorities. The most iconic photo from the Ferguson protests is of a man throwing a tear gas canister. Many think that he is throwing it at the police, because that’s what the news and media said. But he clarified that he was throwing it at nobody; he just wanted to get it away from himself and the children. During the BLM protests, the media covered isolated acts of vandalism while day-long peaceful marches were going on with little to no coverage.
Pacifism does not work if the public does not see it. Suppose you connect with people because of their pacifism and nonviolence, they will tell you that George Floyd had a criminal record and that Trayvon Martin had been suspended from school. And yes, they were completely unarmed when they were killed, and yes, the crimes they were suspected of weren’t violent.
But they may have been violent at some point in the past. And they won’t mention Breonna Taylor and Sarah Bland at all. They don’t need the news to be directly controlled by them; the authorities simply report it as a riot, and the news starts to spiral, “Was it a riot?”. And when the top news stations all report a seemingly peaceful protest as a riot, how can the people take the power back?
Hunter Shaffer is a columnist. Contact him at [email protected]