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2006-7 National Service Topic Guide

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The non-violence kritik is a very simple and straight-forward argument.  The kritik argues that violence is always wrong and should never be supported.  It directly challenges the affirmative’s readiness advantage.

There are a couple of different ways that you can answer this kritik.

First, you can debate the link. You can argue that your plan never specified that the individuals you recruit for the military act violently and that you can permute the kritik and argue for non-violent action on behalf of the U.S. military.

Second, you can argue that violence is necessary to solve genocide and deter conflict.  There is extensive criticism of the concept of pacifism.

Non-Violence Kritik Shell

A. RELYING ON VIOLENCE TO SOLVE PROBLEMS NORMALIZES IT AND DESENITIZES US TO ITS IMPACT

Michael N. Nagler, Professor, U California at Berkeley, Is There No Other Way?: The search for a nonviolent future, 2001, p. 108

The Gulf conflict had another, extremely bad results that is not controversial, once you give it a moment’s thought: every time we use violence to solve a problem we send the signal that violence is the way to solve problems. In the present case, it is hard to ignore the desensitization of the CNN-watching American public for whom the war was turned into a video game. In the world of violence, as we’ve seen, nothing is more dangerous than trivialization, than losing our human sensitivity. This is why the task in nonviolence, by contrast, is often to awaken sleeping consciences by making people aware of the pain they’re causing – making them feel it emphatically.

THE KRITIK TURNS THE CASE

1. CAN’T MAKE PEACE USING VIOLENT MEANS

G. Simon Harak, S. J., Visiting Professor, Baltimore City College, Nonviolence for the Third Millennium: its legacy and future, ed. Harak, 2000, p. viii-ix (HARVUN0582)

For those engaged in nonviolence, however, the strategy of walking expresses a centrally important realization of nonviolent peacemakers: that the “end” is the unfolding “means”. Just as one cannot make oatmeal cookies with the ingredients for rice pudding, so one cannot make peace by violent means. Understanding that intrinsic relationships between ends and means, we can see that walking is such a good means for nonviolent ends because it shares so many of the characteristics of nonviolence – in its gradual approach to things, in its time for reflection, in its building of community, in its communication with the earth, and in its making the walker available, even vulnerable, to others on the road to peace.

2.  ARMED THIRD-PARTY FORCES INCITES AGGRESSIVE REJECTION BY LOCALS

Dr. Tom Woodhouse and Dr. Oliver Ramsbotham, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, Terra incognita: here be dragons, peacekeeping and conflict resolution in contemporary conflict, June 1996, http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/home/publication/research/peacekeeping/terra.html (HARVUN0656)

Although a large number of obvious operational and financial difficulties remain to be addressed, there is growing support for the view that Rose expressed in the quote above, that we need to map out a middle ground between what he calls "total peace" and "total war" and to understand and apply new doctrines and theories capable of supporting peace initiatives and humanitarian standards in civil wars. The need for such an approach in post cold war conflict has been well put by Mackinlay, who warned against attitudes in the American military which favoured the use of "decisive force" in future UN operations as a response to severe intercommunal violence: "The social damage of intercommunal violence on the scale of Bosnia, Angola, or Somalia is so deep and divisive that .......... (these conflicts) will require healing processes that are measured in decades not months ..... Not only is the long term approach more realistic, it is cheaper, more humane, and internationally stabilising than allowing intercommunal violence to flourish in an abhorrent and threatening manner ...... in these circumstances the use of decisive force on an overwhelming scale that initially subdues and marginalises any factions that may oppose the peace is not an option .... The history of intervention shows that the intrusive arrival of a powerful and aggressive third-party force, particularly one that comprises largely foreign troops, will incite an equally determined and aggressive reaction and rejection by local people".

3.  VIOLENCE BECOMES ACCEPTABLE WHEN LIFE LOSES MEANING

Michael N. Nagler, Professor, U California at Berkeley, Is There No Other Way?: The search for a nonviolent future, 2001, p. 37 (HARVUN0523)

The reason a young person ends his or her life in South Boston, or kills someone along a California freeway; the reason a father turns on his own family or a nation sets off nuclear explosions, is not money or jealously or traffic. Ultimately, it’s because life has lost its meaning for them – they cannot imagine a future with any hope or purpose. Money and all those other factors can precipitate violence, but only among people for whom, consciously or otherwise, life has lost its value – or more accurately, people who have lost sight of life’s precious value and what a Greek philosopher called its “inexhaustible meaning.”

C.  ALTERNATIVE:  NON-VIOLENCE

1.  1. NONVIOLENCE CAN SECURE PEACE &  REPLACE WAR

Michael N. Nagler, Professor, U California at Berkeley, Is There No Other Way?: The search for a nonviolent future, 2001, p. 219 (HARVUN0550)

Can nonviolence be used to defend a whole state – can it lead to a replacement of the war system? Even in the largely unworked field of peace itself some scholars will declare that nonviolence is not relevant to the solution of international conflict; it just can’t reach that far: “Nonviolent action has never been and will never be a replacement for warfare.” But that glittering thread of intuition we picked up in Calcutta and traced through Beirut and Oslo seems to be leading to a “yes.” As W.E.B. DuBois said, it indicates that those who cultivate the “arts of love” like King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa are the ones who bring peace to the world, not those who hold others at bay in an uneasy equilibrium of naked power. DuBois was speaking incredulously, even sarcastically; but I will be confirming it in all seriousness. To Gandhi, it was very clear: only nonviolence can replace warfare. “I can say with confidence that if the world is to have peace, non-violence is the means to that end, and [there is] no other.”

2. NONVIOLENCE REAFFIRMS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

David McReynolds, War Resister League, Philosophy of Nonviolence, no date, visited site May 2004, http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philo-nv2.php

There is one remarkable line from the Gita that is central to nonviolence: "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? . . . That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die." Death is a given. Our own life is supremely important to us - our only experience of consciousness - yet we must come to terms with its inevitable end. At least for those of us who are atheists, there is no afterlife. Part of what makes nonviolence so powerful is its respect for the unique nature of every person. Not one of us has existed before, or will exist again. Each of us contains a kind of "private universe" of experience. It is good to live, good to experience life, good to enjoy that experience, good to rejoice in the wonders of life. All the more urgent, if we are here but once, and briefly, to feel entitled to experience the delights. It is this extraordinary uniqueness of being that makes the pacifist so absolutely unwilling to destroy another person, for with each death a universe ends, and can never be replaced. How wonderfully we are made, how different from one another. To respect and understand the uniqueness of each person may make it possible also to sense what we have in common, even if what we have in common is only the certainty of our own end. Yet we must be reconciled with the fact that we must die. What we do not have to do is kill - that alone is our choice. We come in different sizes, shapes, sexes, colors, each of us bearing different cultural and family memories. Nonviolence is about a society in which, far from having people conform to some standard, each person is able to realize, during his or her life, their greatest potential.

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