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Violence Good
Nonviolence is a tactic. It cant be treated as an absolute rule. Willie Henderson, University of Birmingham Senior Lecturer, African Affairs, April, 1996, p 288 Mandela supports the notion that Gandhian non-violence is a tactic to be used rather than a sacred principle. The campaign boosts the membership but also boosts government legislation aimed at further levels of suppression. Facing police, courts and prison, the ANC manages to make 'going to prison . . a badge of honour. . .' (p. 129). He finds in his exertions, release from 'any lingering sense of doubt or inferiority I might still have felt; it liberated me from the feeling of being overwhelmed by the power and seemingly invincibility of the white man . . .'. Mandela is thus, in his own eyes, now fully matured. His self-assertion is shown later when he stands up to a rude cross- examination by a police officer, a reaction which did not impress the traditional authorities in his home area whom he is trying to convince to reject Bantu Authorities Absolute pacficism is impossible Mohandes Gandhi, as quoted in The Pacifist Conscience, ed. by Peter Mayer, 1966, p 214
I do believe that, where

there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have nm away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so called Zulu rebellion and the late War. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the
method of violence. I would rather have India resort to aims in order to defend her honour than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour.

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Violence Sometimes Justified

We dont advocate violence, just defense against oppression Hans Massaquoi, Ebony, February 1993, p. 36 Now the reporter wants to know whether Malcolm X suggests using violence. The benign expression vanishes and his eyes become fierce. We dont advocate violence, but non-violent tactics based solely on morality can only succeed when you are dealing with a basically moral people, he explains. A man who oppresses another man because of his color is not moral. It is the duty of every Afro-American to protect himself [herself] against mass murderers, bombers, lynchers, floggers, brutalizers and exploiters. If the government is unable or unwilling to protect us, we reserve our right as citizens to defend ourselves by whatever means necessary. A man with a rifle or club can only be stopped by a person armed with a rifle or club. [herself is my feminist editing, ceo]

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Pacifism fails law is violent

All law is violence. The critique of militarism fails. Jacques Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Drucilla Cornell, ed, 92, p. 402. To discuss the conservative violence of law, Benjamin sticks to relatively modern problems, as modern as the problem of the general strike was a moment ago. Now it is a question of compulsory military service, the modern police or the abolition of the death penalty. If, during and after World War I, an impassioned critique of violence was developed, it took aim this time at the law-conserving form of violence. Militarism, a modern concept that supposes the exploitation of compulsory military service, is the forced use of force, the compelling (twang) to use force or violence (Gewalt) in the service of the state and its legal ends. Here military violence is legal and conserves the law, and thus it is more difficult to criticize than the pacifists and activists believe; Benjamin does not hide his low esteem for these declaimers. The ineffectiveness and inconsistency of anti-military pacifists results from their failure to recognize the legal and unassailable character of this violence that conserves the law. Here we are dealing with a double bind or a contradiction that can be schematized as follows. On the one hand, it appears easier to criticize the violence that founds since it cannot be justified by any preexisting legality and so appears savage. But on the other hand, and this reversal is the whole point of this reflection, it is more difficult, more illegitimate to criticize this same violence since one cannot summon it to appear before the institution of any preexisting law: it does not recognize existing law in the moment that it founds another. Between the two limits of this contradiction, there is the question of this ungraspable revolutionary instant that belongs to no historical, temporal continuum but in which the foundation of a new law nevertheless plays, if we may say so, on something from an anterior law that it extends, radicalizes, deforms, metaphorizes or metonymizes, this figure here taking the name of war or general strike. But this figure is also a contamination. It effaces or blurs the distinction, pure and simple, between foundation and conservation. It inscribes iterability in originarity, in unicity and singularity, and it is what I will call deconstruction at work, in full negotiation: in the "things themselves"and in Benjamin's text. As long as they do not give themselves the theoretical or philosophical means to think this co-implication of violence and law, the usual critiques remain naive and ineffectual. Benjamin does not hide his disdain for the declamations of pacifist activism and for the proclamations of "quite childish anarchism" that would like to exempt the individual from all constraints. The reference to the categorical imperative ("Act in such a way that at all times you use humanity both in your person and in the person of all others as an end, and never merely as a means," p. 285), however uncontestable it may be, allows no critique of violence. Law (droit) in its very violence claims to recognize and defend said humanity as end, in the person of each individual. And so a purely moral critique of violence is as unjustified as it is impotent. For the same reason, we cannot provide a critique of violence in the name of liberty, of what Benjamin here calls "gestaltlose Freiheit," "formless freedom," that is, in short, purely formal, as empty form, following a Marxist-Hegelian vein that is far from absent throughout this meditation. These attacks against violence lack pertinence and effectiveness because they remain alien to the juridical essence of violence, to the Rechtsordnung, the order of law (droit). An effective critique must lay the blame on the body of droit itself, in its head and in its members, in the laws and the particular usages that law adopts

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under protection of its power (Macht). This order is such that there exists one unique fate or history (nur ein einziges Schicksal, "only one fate," p. 285). That is one of the key concepts of the text, but also one of the most obscure, whether it's a question of fate itself or of its absolute uniqueness. That which exists, which has consistency (das Bestehende) and that which at the same time threatens what exists (das Drohende) belong inviolably (unverbriichlich) to the same order and this order is inviolable because it is unique. It can only be violated in itself. The notion of threat is important here but also difficult, for the threat doesn't come from outside. Law is both threatening and threatened by itself: This threat is neither intimidation nor dissuasion, as pacifists, anarchists or activists believe. The law turns out to be threatening in the way fate is threatening. To reach the "deepest meaning" of the indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit, "uncertainty," p. 28S) of the legal threat (der Rechtsdrohung), it will later be necessary to meditate upon the essence of fate at the origin of this threat.

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Civil Disobedience Fails

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Civil Disobedience causes marginalization, disproportional punishment, and fails to have transformative effects
Rachael E. Schwartz, J.D. 1981 Georgetown University Law Center, BOSTON UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, Fall 1994, p. 256-257. Recent decades have seen an impressive expansion of the extent to which international law recognizes fundamental individual rights. Public international law no longer concerns itself solely with the subject of relations between states. However, the establishment of a law of individual remedies and the accompanying enforcement institutions to assure vindication of these rights has not kept as swift a pace as the recognition of the existence of the rights themselves. As a result, many people have bare rights with no legal substantive basis or process for obtaining redress for violations of these rights. Faced with such a state of affairs, several options are available to the aggrieved individual. One may simply resign one's self to one's fate. While it is understandable that some may take this route as a means of short-term selfpreservation, it is unacceptable to many. Alternatively, one may attempt to avail one's self of those limited legal avenues which are open. This is admirable, but ultimately may well prove a futile risk; the individual may gain nothing only to become known to the government as a "troublemaker." A third possibility is civil disobedience; that is, open and non-violent breaking of the law of a state with voluntary acceptance of such punishment as may be imposed pursuant to that law. Prominent practitioners of civil disobedience include Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This too has obvious risks: there may be little chance that the punishment will be fair or that those in authority will be persuaded by a display of moral integrity to correct their behavior rather than retaliate. Nonviolent change is temporary. The 1989 prodemocracy movement in China was crushed in the Beijing massacre. In El Salvador 1944, the nonviolent insurrection against the Martnez dictatorship didnt lead to long term improvement. Iranian non-violent revolutions have been ultimately unsuccessful, as was Jewish pacifism. Ghandis non-violence was only successful in the context of global armed resistance to British colonialism. For every Martin Luther King, there is a counter-example

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Civil Disobedience Bad

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We must be pragmatic pacifists to end state violenceabsolute pacifism fails to challenge the policies of the state by opting out of the game entirely
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 1984, p. 114-6 It conceivable that governments might grant selective objection the same legal status as it gives to pacifism? The answer, I fear, is no. And that tells us something important about pacifism. Governments are prepared to tolerate pacifism, because it poses no threat either to their political policies or to the manner in which wars are conducted. The pacifist objects equally to all wars waged by all governments. In this sense he opts out of the game altogether. By contrast, the selective objector will be forced to analyze both the policy decisions of the government as well as the conduct of the armed forces. He will be publicly carrying out an officially sanctioned comparison between mutually agreed just-war criteria and the actual performance of the government. That is a lot to expect of governments as we know them, but there is still more. What would be the implication of a state granting an exemption on selective grounds? Fundamentally, the state would be agreeing with the claim that its war policies may be reasonably interpreted as unjust. The belief that all war is wrong is a proposition which states might agree is debatable among rational men, and, therefore, claims to exemption on this basis may be allowed. It is a very different matter, however, to grant exemption for a particular war, for here we are faced not with two philosophical theories about violence but with a factual dispute. Selective objection presupposes that both the government and the claimant agree upon the criteria for undertaking a justified war and the rules for conducting it. The claimant would have to show, in order to qualify for an exemption, that his government is engaged in acts of war which a person might reasonably characterize as immoral. As such an admission is inseparable from policy questions, it is inconceivable that any government would be willing (or politically able) to wage war while publicly agreeing that there is sufficient reason to doubt the morality of that war to grant exemptions from it. This is not to say that individuals should not refuse to fight in wars which they believe are immoral but to acknowledge that governments cannot be expected to institutionalize such a practice. The evenhandedness of the pacifist who objects to all wars does not threaten the particular policies of any state. In condemning them all equally, pacifism exempts itself from political reality: What is needed, then, is not a general pacifism but a discriminating conscientious refusal to engage in war in certain circumstances. States have not been loath to recognize pacifism and to grant it a special status. The refusal to take part in all war under any conditions is an unworldly view bound to remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the states authority than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of marriage. By exempting pacifists from its prescriptions the state may even seem to display a certain magnanimity. But conscientious refusal based upon the principles of justice as they apply to particular conflicts is another matter. For such refusal is an affront to the governments pretensions, and when it becomes widespread, the continuation of an unjust war may prove impossible.

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Civil Disobedience Bad

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Their notion of disobedience cements the states monopoly of violence

Jordan J. Paust, Professor of Law, University of Houston, EMORY LAW JOURNAL, Spring 1983, p. 549-550. With such a focus, one should discover that private individuals and groups can and do engage in numerous forms of permissible violence. It is too simplistic to say, therefore, that authoritative violence can only be engaged in by "the government" or by governmental elites and functionaries. As Professor Reisman stated, the notion that only state institutions can permissibly use high levels of violent coercion "is a crucial self-perception and deception of state elites." Thus, the useful question is not whether private violence is permissible, but what forms of private violence are permissible, when, in what social context, and why. As Professor Reisman further suggests: [I]nsistence on non-violence and deference to all established institutions in a global system with many injustices can be tantamount to confirmation and reinforcement of those injustices. In certain circumstances, violence may be the last appeal or the first expression of demand of a group or unorganized stratum for some measure of human dignity. Of course, such an injunction can also have particular relevance concerning the question of revolutionary social violence. Here, as elsewhere, no facile "rule" or simplistic prohibition will do.

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Pacifism Causes Violence

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Pacifism causes immediate escalation of violence

Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 1984, p. 102-3 Narveson argues that what I have called intrinsicalism is a genuine moral position in virtue of its claim that the use of force in self-defense is in itself evil and that pacifism is incumbent on everyone, not just those who happen to believe that the use of force is evil. So intrinsicalism satisfies the Kantian test for calling a particular principle a moral imperative. Narvesons objection to pacifism is directed toward what he claims are logical inconsistencies in the principle itself. For the belief that the use of force is inherently evil must minimally entail that people have a right not to be the object of violent attacks. At least part of what must be meant by saying that a particular action is wrong is that people have a right not to have that sort of thing done to them; they have a right to take steps to prevent the abridgement of that right. This is an interesting line of argument because its effectiveness depends not upon an opposed set of moral principles but upon an analysis of what it means to possess a right in general. If the notion of having a right is to make any sort of sense, if it is not be be merely an expression, then to say that someone has a right must also be to say that he is justified in taking steps to prevent that right from being abridged. The must is a logical must: To say that you have a right to X but no one has any justification whatever for preventing people from depriving you of it, is self-contradictory. If you claim a right to X, then to describe some action as an act of depriving you of X, is logically to imply that its absence is one of the things you have a right to.8 A pacifist might well reply that this logical point, while sound, is not a description of his position. What Narveson shows is that if a person has a right, [they] cannot also have a duty to be purely passive in the face of an attack upon that right. Of course, the pacifist will insist that his is not a doctrine of passivity or fatalism. As a moral agent, he is concerned with ethical imperatives, with guiding action. So the question becomes not whether a person does or does not have a duty to acquiesce in the removal of one of his rights but, rather, what level of force is appropriate in face of a violent attack. Narveson might well reply that the commitment always to refrain from violence is in effect a permission to abrogate his rights. For if an opponent knows in advance that the pacifist will only resist up to the level of actual fighting, then [they] will simply escalate his attacks beyond that point. This is precisely what happened when nonviolent resistance was tried briefly in Nazi-occupied Norway.

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We must adopt an intrinsic form of pacifismabsolute pacifism justifies passivity in the face of atrocious acts like rape or genocide
Robert L. Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 1984, p. 101-2
Let us label this position intrinsicalism and contrast it with what I shall call tactical pacifism. Someone

who believes that it is morally permissible to use force to resist or prevent violence might adopt the pacifist stance as a purely tactical matter. He might judge that pacifism is likely to be the best means of bringing about peace. This could happen in at least two ways. It might be thought that pacifism is the appropriate response because of peculiar historical circumstances. Thus, India in 1946 and the United States in the 1960s could be seen as places where nonviolent resistance would be an appropriate tactic. In both of
those places the rule of law obtained to the degree that the penalties for such disobedience were relatively mild, and there was a chance that such tactics might succeed. However,

the same person could well decide that pacifism was not obligatory in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Someone might also adopt tactical pacifism based upon a judgment about the actual possibility of using force justly in the modern era. While admitting the theoretical possibility of justified force, it may be thought that as long as certain sorts of weapons are retained, or as long as terror is officially sanctioned, then a justified war simply cannot be fought. Both of these versions of tactical pacifism are compatible with bellum justum;
indeed, they are entailed by that doctrine. Neither makes an a priori commitment to the position that the use of force will always, under all conceivable circumstances, be wrong. The behavior of the tactical pacifist may be indistinguishable from that of the intrinsicalist on many occasions, but the former leaves open the question of whether force is justified in a given circumstance, and this marks an important moral difference. Thus,

In Narvesons words, To hold the pacifist position as a genuine, full-blooded moral principle is to hold that nobody has a right to fight back when attacked, that fighting back is inherently evil, as such. It means we are mistaken in supposing we have a right of self-protection.
intrinsicalism is the only version of pacifism which can be described as a moral position opposed to bellurn justum.

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Violence Causes Change

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VIOLENT REVOLUTION IS NECESSARY TO FORCE SOCIETAL CHANGE

Guyora Binder, Professor of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo, TEXAS LAW REVIEW, June 1991, p. 2008-2009.
Twentieth-century radicalism

has seen revolution as central to the notion of radical transformation of human nature because it has seen revolutionary violence as encouraging solidarity and selfsacrifice. By militarizing the conflict between an unpopular government and a passively disaffected people, guerrillas hope to impose on the populace a choice between active support of the regime and active resistance. Removing the middle ground of grudging and cynical acquiescence forces an existential crisis in which the subject must redefine and resurrect her civic identity. The mobilization of the populace is not only a means of
realizing the revolutionary program -- it is the revolutionary program, the desired radical change.

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Non-Violence Justifies Genocide

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Failure to try is morally equivalent to genocide

Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, President of the ICTY, Nov. 19, 1998 Address to the U.N. General Assembly. Online. <http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/SPE981119.htm> Accessed 10/7/02.
Following the ravages of World War II, the Nuremberg Tribunal was

created to put the world on notice that the international community would not allow such atrocities to go unpunished. Hence the phrase, "Never again." Yet, "again" and "again" such barbarity comes back to haunt us. Without a firm renewal of the commitment to the important principles underlying the work of the Tribunal, those who would slay innocents make a mockery of our pledge, "Never again." This century has been the bloodiest in human history. Sadly, the world community has been schizophrenic in its response. Despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the adoption of the Genocide Convention, and numerous treaties proscribing such unlawful acts, international and non-international conflicts, where the targets are innocent civilians, have occurred with alarming frequency and ferocity. We cannot stand by while such atrocities are committed. For if we do, surely, we are as guilty as the perpetrators. The heinous crimes committed by the Nazi regime were allowed to happen because many bystanders looked the other way. They knew what was happening, but they feigned ignorance. They did not want to know. It was easier and safer for them not to know. They knew and they did nothing. Erwin Straub, the author of The Roots of Evil writes that a real danger of all Human Rights violations is not the perpetrator, but the bystander--because he knows and does nothing. The international community must demonstrate, not merely with words, but with deeds, its renewed commitment to transform these instruments prescribing international norms into effective tools of deterrence. It is worse to condemn behaviour and then tolerate it than to not condemn it at all. Not only is this an exercise in hypocrisy, but the effect is to render these instruments nothing more than aspirational statements--nothing more than "paper tigers."