Maikel Nabil and Peaceful Resistance
What if the meaning
of peaceful resistance had to be revisited for the 21st century?
Where would you turn to then?
Though examples of
civil disobedience, conscientious objectors and peaceful protests are by no
means rare nowadays, it is necessary to turn to extraordinary events of the
kind that attach new meanings to historical circumstances; the meanings are
never new but what remains is the novelty of the event.
Revolution is of
course the event par excellence in which history is interrupted and something
is begun anew. In the 21st century even though the word revolution
is constantly heard, there is no more salient example than the Egyptian
revolution.
Inspired by Tunisia,
on January 25, 2011 thousands of Egyptians took to the streets and assembled at
the now iconic Tahrir Square to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. On
February 11 2011 the long-time president departed from office after the Egyptian
army took the protesters’ side and apparently helped to complete the
revolution.
A slogan – was coined
then: “The Army and the People are one hand”. After weeks during which the same
army brutalized the demonstrators and killed hundreds of them, the sudden
change of heart was welcome and the power vacuum left by regime was quickly
filled by the army, with the promise implied that a transition to civilian rule
would happen eventually.
The rest of the story
of the Egyptian revolution is now known all over the world: Military trials,
virginity tests, NGO raids, constant clashes – often violent – between
demonstrators and the security apparatus, massacres, and more than anything a
power vacuum that has left the country sliding into a fierce slope of violence
and counter-violence, as it was aptly put by Egyptian businessman Hany Ghoraba
in his article “Egypt: The Wild Wild East”.
What happened to the
Egyptian revolution and to the peaceful protests that in theory overthrew a
regime? The question here for political theory (an expression not free from
irony) doesn’t have to do necessarily with the particulars of Egypt – the rise
of Islamism, the weakness of liberalism and the fact that leftovers of the
deposed regime remain intact in office.
One has to ask
himself the question whether a revolution is possible nowadays and under which
conditions. It is clear by now that the concept of revolution is challenged
today by a variety of circumstances that should bring us to examine briefly two
aspects of revolution: The distinction between power and violence and the
nature of non-violent resistance.
In his reading of
Kant, Foucault tells us what it is that Kant considers significant in
revolution: “What is significant is the manner in which the Revolution turns
into a spectacle, it is the way in which it is received all around by
spectators who do not participate in it but who watch it, who attend the show
and who, for better or worse, let themselves by dragged along by it.”
This might well lead
us to a very basic insight of Hannah Arendt: “Revolutionaries do not make
revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the
street and then they can pick it up”. What is then this power that Arendt is trying
to grasp? There is almost unanimous agreement among her readers that the
distinction between power and violence is the most crucial and yet difficult
aspect of her political theory.
Power is the human
ability to act not as an individual but in agreement within a group and this
power remains alive only for as long as the group is bound together; it can
disappear anytime and temporary as it might be, it is the only cure known to
the fragility and meaninglessness of human affairs.
Violence is the
opposite of power that has been for long glorified as its exact equivalent,
turning power into an instrument that needs justification to pursue its own
ends but is always at risk of outgrowing the means and remaining at the level
of instrument only – means without an end. In her words: “And what needs
justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything”.
Then we assume that
power can become violent and violence but power can never grow out of violence
and is fact destroyed by it. Power – that unmediated action that grows out of
common agreement in action between men – is the only thing that can destroy violence
and tyranny as it is exemplified in Gandhi, but whatever the reality and
success of this non-violent resistance as power is put to test in the modern
world often with tragic results.
Arendt is no idealist
at this point and she expresses herself with clarity about her reservation on
the effectiveness of non-violent resistance after fascism: “In a head-on clash between violence and
power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and
successful strategy of non-violent resistance had met with a different enemy
–Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England, the
outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission.
However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their
restraint.” Needless to say this has been the outcome of each and every Arab
revolution where power hasn’t been enough to defeat violence.
What is required from
non-violent resistance to generate the quantity and quality of power that can
effectively defeat violence? Here it is obvious that an association with the
military and with militarism in general can never be the answer, and while
there are no definite answers to draw from tradition or otherwise, there are
always singular examples one can meditate on.
On March 28, 2011 an
Egyptian blogger, Maikel Nabil, was arrested by the military police and
sentenced to three years imprisonment on charges of insulting the military in a
long blog post from March 8 2011, titled “The Army and the People Were Never One Hand”.
In his blog, Maikel
Nabil provided sound evidence of how activists had been tortured and killed by
the army, during and after the revolution and expressed in different words an
insight that was already known to Toynbee in his studies of world history: One
of the patterns in the breakdown of civilizations is the suicidalness of
militarism and its intoxication with victory, out of which periods of freedom
have never emerged.
This simple insight
proved very dangerous at a time when the power of the people had become a
monolithic whole, aptly expressed by Maikel in one fragment written from
prison: “Maybe there are many who don’t know the simple distinction between
seeking unity and seeking tolerance, but we saw the core difference between the
two things and how unity leads to failure while tolerance earns you strength
and pushes you to succeed.”
Human action and
power – its plural version – can only unfold in plurality and the fact that
such was no longer the case attests to the extent to which the suicidalness and
intoxication of militarism had already infinitely weakened the power of the
revolution. In an entirely un-revolutionary fashion, the sentence delivered on
the blogger was celebrated by many and at best met with difference because of
his rather unpopular ideas: Peace with the State of Israel and the end of
compulsory military conscription.
Nevertheless, the
consensus fostered by militarism and the price paid by the search for unity at
the expense of plurality and tolerance was levied on Maikel Nabil not because
of a failed analysis but by simple exclusion in a battle of opinions from which
truth as a public power – to use the metaphor of Philip Goodchild – was absent;
what of course places power in the status of refugee and violence as the
supreme ruler.
Arendt insisted
always that the truths of any age must be always challenged for every generation
and it is in this challenge that the power of non-violent struggle resides. It
was she who popularized the Austrian adage “there’s no discussion as heated as
that on a book no one had read” in reference to the controversy sparked by her
book about the Eichmann Trial.
Maikel Nabil wrote
from jail that people who supported him should support him for his thoughts and
not for his personality because it was his thoughts what put him in jail. It
was his thoughts that led him to a hunger strike that lasted over a hundred
days. And even after he ultimately was released after a long legal battle of
ten months with a clearly illegitimate authority, most of the people who
supported him—and those who did not—still don't know much about his thoughts.
Thinking becomes the
keyword here: Roger Berkowitz writes of Hannah Arendt that reasoning and
thinking are not the same and that thinking for Arendt constitutes a form of
action and the basis of all political life and experience – nothing to do with
political philosophy or Realpolitik but with our appearance in the world among
others.
Thinking and the
ability to take responsibility for the consequences of our thoughts is the
building block of our ability to appear in the world and as such is the most
effective form of resistance under totalitarianism and forms of tyranny in
which truth – the material out of which power is made – is absent from the
common world.
In an interview of
1974 with Roger Errera, Arendt concluded by saying:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything
can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship
to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are
not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you
believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is
because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government
has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not
only a lie – a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days – but yet
get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a
people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is
deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and
to judge. And with such people you can then do what you please.
This cynicism is
precisely the risk that unthinking unity poses – that thinking, plurality and
truth might disappear altogether, and with them power as well. For Arendt,
plurality demands the courage for plural individuals to enter the public
sphere, which is why courage, she writes, is the first virtue of politics.
Was Maikel Nabil
courageous? The answer to this question is obvious but I disagree with Arendt about
the political nature of courage as a virtue.
Susan Sontag writes
that courage and resistance have no intrinsic value in themselves unless they
are coupled with an adjective – for there is amoral courage and resistance too
– by means of which it is qualified. The value of courage and resistance
depends on the specific content of whatever it is that is being defended.
Heroism isn’t what is stake here, for it is something that always comes in hand
with tragedy and pathos and it is precisely heroism what the political
consequences of thinking mean to dispose of.
Sandra Lehmann writes: “If heroism is to overcome, it can also
dispense pathos and vanity. It needs no reward, not even that of great
importance and meaning. Probably only heroism without reward is true heroism.
It is a matter of the moment and of a far off future.”
What Maikel Nabil was
defending was the life of the mind, and in this crusade against those who want
to terrorize the life of the mind lies the true nature of non-violent
resistance and the potential of every action that might attain revolutionary
power – it begins in the solitude of our thoughts one good day and yet, it can
unmake the world. All thinking is dangerous.
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