26 Jun
2010

Posted in: Nonviolence
By Eddie    2 Comments

The old King-Che Discrepancy

At least that’s what John H. Yoder liked to call it.

Behind the simple claim that only violence is effective, there is a power of deception deeper than mere illogic. One of its most extreme forms is what I have called the “King-Che discrepancy.” The thought pattern is widespread. I was first struck by it in 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated. Many leaped to the conclusion that nonviolent alternatives had thereby been refuted. At the same time, all over Latin America, the fact that Che Guevara had been gunned down in the Bolivian mountains did not mean that guerrilla violence had failed. Why not?

You’ve got to chuckle a little when folks point out the obvious double standards. But, that’s not where the inconsistencies stop. As I intimated in a previous post (Abortion funding, war funding, and inconsistencies), there are double standards in some pretty public places and discussions. Prior to the above statement, Yoder said:

When preparing for violent conflict, time, training, and equipment are necessary: we pay for the Pentagon, war colleges, research centers, arms industries. Yet people reject nonviolence for its failure to “work” without any comparable investment.

When the nonviolent are killed, many opponents will say nonviolence failed. But when the violent are killed, violence has not failed. The off hand rejection of nonviolent, love-based, Christ-centered alternative responses and actions is simply unfair and unjust. Consider: Did you give it a chance? Was there any investment made in the investigation or trials of the nonviolent alternatives, at least on par with the investment of the violent means?

To be consistent, to keep integrity, we need to consider these thoughts very seriously. Do we reject the Christ-centered, love-based alternatives to forceful, violent, coercive actions (last resort or not) because we know they won’t be successful (whatever that might mean)? Or do we just think it?

Here’s a small scale example. Spanking or not spanking your kids. Some say that spanking is violence. There are pacifists who say otherwise. But can you say, “The only thing that works is spanking,” if in fact you have not tried everything else? Of course not. You can only say, “The only thing that works” if you have first tried every known option and have discovered that indeed the spanking method was the only one that worked.

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