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mee the strategy is violent or nonviolent. The cost of social change is often high and the brunt of it is always taken by those who have most to gain, The real question is not, "How can the suffering be avoided?"' The question is, "How can it be minimized?" In case after case the violent strategy has brought more suffering on the heads of the innocents than the nonviolent strategy. This is even true on a national level -- compare the freedom struggles of India and _) Kenya, against the same Britiah power. The nonviolent Indians lost fewer lives and had fewer injured than the Mao Mao movement of Kenya, despite the fact that the Indian movement was larger and lasted longer. Violence does not deter violence in the long run and often not even in the short run. Again and again in the civil rights struggle police have been itching to shoot into demonstrations but have not because they could not find the excuse of "self-defense" or "rioting." Sometimes in nonviolent struggles the rulers have sent spies Owes Ae wee eS By into the movement to start violence so they would have an excuse to mow the campaigners down, The argument for violence in self-defense assumes that the opponents are more afraid of violence than of nonviolence. This may be true of individual policemen, but it is not true of their bosses. Violence is what police and armies know how to deal with - they are experienced in this. What baffies them is the use of disciplined nonviolence ~- they actually do not know what to do with it. Imagine 1000 Negroes in Birming~ ham setting up barricades and shooting it out 112 after extreme provocation -- this is simply war, and the government has won bigger wars than this! 1000 Negroes, however, have demonstrated in Birmingham for several months without being put down, Nonviolence is simply harder to handle, and if your job is to preserve the status quo, ‘ you will be more afraid of it. In Hungary in 1956 the revolution began with nonviolent tactics, and as long as this stage lasted real gains were made. When Hungarian soldiers joined the movement and it became violent, how- ever, the Russians knew what to do, and the re- volution was brutally crushed. We do not know of any Hungariana who felt "protected" during the second stage, th < iort, then, nonviol brutality better than violence does. If however, you are looking for a 100% guaranteed safe way of action, then you do not belong in a dynamic struggle for social change. Freedom is not free. a weak Argument 2: ony nce drains the po- tential militancy of the Negro community by giving a theory of struggle which is_an illusion. Nonviolence may be "nice," and can win the approval of parts of the white power structure, but it can never mount the kind of attack on the power structure that will be necessary to win. The agnoment that kind of attack is mounted, reprisals will be fierce, and the Negroes, un- used to defending themselves, will become disillusioned, apathetic, or will be killed Argument 2: Nonviole 113.