Nonviolence

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love...    -- William Blake

In December, 2013 the human rights lawyer and activist Razan Zaitouneh and three others were taken from their offices at the Violations Documentation Center in Douma, north of Damascus. Although their fates aren't certain, it's likely they were imprisoned and later killed. Over eleven years later and as many as 620,000 Syrians dead, there is hope that Syria's new government will care for its citizens. Bashar al-Assad is finally gone, a man who loved power more than life.

It's comforting to think that the deaths of Zaitouneh and her colleagues were not in vain. But was the naive onviolent resistance that began, what the West termed the Arab Spring, worth it? Mrs. Zaitouneh must have understood that her opposition to the Syrian regime could end her life. She had been hiding and was documenting human rights violations when she was abducted. But not everyone expected the sadistic crackdown on dissent. Mass murder, torture, hangings, gas attacks, starvation, and the intervention by Russia and Iranian militia is al-Assad's legacy.

In the early days of protests against their rule of India, the British killed thousands protesting in 1919. This is far fewer compared to the Syrian civil war but it's how it was, and how other countries react to protests today. Therefore, to eventually bring about an enlightened government through nonviolent resistance, many people may have to die.

How many people have to die? If Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine, Russia is probably willing to kill all Ukrainians. Putin wants Ukraine, not Ukrainians. The missiles and drones directed at civilian targets express what Putin wants. Within Russia, a meaningful resistance would requre spontaneous and sustained nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience across the country. Millions would have to die or be imprisoned before the country no longer functioned and the totalitarian government fell. A million Russians alone could die before the surveillance cameras were overthrown.

In the United States, surveillance cameras will be even more popular because of their role fighting crime. Within the past year, camera footage shown to the public led to the arrest of two assassins. In the future, cameras that capture movement in real time could help prevent crime. An Artificial Intelligence (AI) would watch a camera's live feed and alert authorities if it noticed something suspicious.

Do we need another application of AI? Historically, assassinations went nowhere or somewhere bad: Julius Caesar, the end of the Roman Republic, Abraham Lincoln, the beginning of the end of reconstruction, Franz Ferdinand, the spark that ignited World War I, John F. Kennedy, what might have been if he had lived, Martin Luther King, hero of nonviolence and freedom, John Lennon, I wonder what he'd say if he was alive today, and Yitzhak Rabin, worked on peace between Israel and a Palestinian state.

There was the assassination of the Nazi Governor Reinhard Heydrich in May, 1942 by two Czech agents. Heydrich was an architect of the Holocaust and organizer of Kristallnacht. The Nazis retaliated by destroying a Czech village, killing all the men and sending most of the women and children to concentration camps in Germany.

Nazi brutality is not what we are experiencing today. We need better words that more accurately describe our own time. My impression is that there is an aspiration on the right for a state that believes freedom is buying and selling with no government regulation, a gun buyer automatically joins a militia, families should have children and go to church on Sunday or synagogue on Saturday, the tragedy of the commons is a hoax, education, medical insurance, and charities are private, there should be no discouraging words, and there is only one legitimate political party This amounts to a Libertarian dictatorship, an oxymoron and Bizarro World vision of China.

This could be nonsense or an exaggeration. To know the truth we must ask questions that will draw out the truth behind the rhetoric. We could have asked someone who said extreme things in service to freedom of speech, yet was amenable to civil debate. We lost that someone. It was a tragedy of the commons.

Notes

• Deed - Attribution 4.0 International
  
• Donatella Della Ratta Syria: The virtue of civil disobedience
  Aljazeera, April 6, 2012
  "Civil disobedience is the only way to mobilise people in big cities that are deemed to be regime strongholds in Syria."
• Lydia Denworth Conservative and Liberal brains might have some real differences
  Scientific American, edited by Gary Stix, October 26, 2020
  "The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives."
• How Are the Brains of Liberals and Conservatives Different? [update]
  A-mark foundation Updated March 21, 2024
  
• More or less stream of consciousness, typed out and fixed up, but incomplete.