Is violent protest wrong?

The collision between whalers and an anti-whaling boat reveals the biggest problem with violent protest: it breeds more violence
Bibi van der Zee, guardian.co.uk 8 Jan 10;

How far can you go, in pursuit of a campaign goal? Is violence ever acceptable? The collision between the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd boat and the Japanese whalers this week was the fault – both parties claim – of the other side. Did it make life better for whales – the ostensible focus of the Sea Shepherd campaign? Those two sentences, pretty much, sum up the problem with violence.

The accepted position is that violent tactics are, de facto, wrong. The only people who are legally allowed to use violence in our society are the police, the army, and, very occasionally, us in self-defence. It is not acceptable, we all believe, that the World Wildlife Fund, say, should stand at the frontiers of jungles and bash over the head anyone who tries to nick a baboon.

But somewhere between rattling a tin on the high street and beating people up to stop them doing things there is a surprisingly wide grey area, and for the last century activists have been exploring that area. They've tried civil disobedience, non-violent passive resistance, boycotts, sit-ins, die-ins, blockades, and of course direct action. They've explored right up to, and sometimes over, the difficult-to-define line that differentiates violence from non-violence.

This, in fact, is part of the problem. In a thought-provoking book by anarchist Peter Gelderloos, he describes a workshop he ran where he read out a list of tactics and asked the participants to walk to one spot if they considered the action violent, and to another if they considered it non-violent. "The actions included such things as buying clothes made in a sweatshop, eating meat, a wolf killing a deer, killing someone who is about to detonate a bomb in a crowd and so on. "Almost never," he wrote, "was there perfect agreement between the participants."

Violence against property is one of the biggest sticking points; some activists who are entirely committed to non-violence regard the destruction of property as an entirely separate issue. But according to the FBI, eco-terrorism consists of violence against people or property.

And Paul Watson, unlike most activists, decided a long time ago that as far as he was concerned violence against property was absolutely fine. Watson was one of the earliest members of Greenpeace who took part in the early anti-whaling voyages described by fellow-member Robert Hunter as "a sea-going gang of ecological bikers... being involved in an archetypal battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light... reincarnated Indian warriors whooping and hollering as we surged down out of the hills towards the wagon train." For Watson that was the way he wanted to carry on the battle. And so in the decades since he has scuttled ships, threatened to ram them, seized nets and destroyed them, and thrown bottles of butyric acid onto the decks of whalers.

Is it right? Well, some of it is illegal, but is the legal framework the only arbiter of right and wrong? According to some religions, violence in support of your passionate beliefs is right. According to others it is wrong. But from my point of view one of the biggest problems with using these kind of tactics is that you legitimise the use of them by your opponents. Frankly, if the Sea Shepherd boat was rammed by the whalers, it's hard to get too hot under the collar about it when in the past Sea Shepherd have openly admitted deliberately ramming and sinking whaling boats themselves. Violence (against property or people) breeds violence. Once you step outside the legal framework you lose all protection for yourself.

As to whether it works, although studies have shown that violence is often successful as a campaign tactic the fact is that in this particular case, despite years of campaigning the whalers are still whaling. These huge, intelligent mammals, who have been observed grieving for their young, are still being killed with harpoons, and bleeding to death over hours in the oceans. As far as they are concerned, Watson's tactics clearly are not working.