Americans are flocking to a film that celebrates a soldier who killed lots of people during the U.S. war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans want the U.S. to send ground troops back into Iraq to fight ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
So now is the perfect time for people to see Selma, which like American Sniper has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Selma celebrates a genuine hero, Martin Luther King, and it delivers a message—backed up by empirical evidence–that our violence-intoxicated era badly needs to hear.
Selma dramatizes one of American’s history’s most inspiring episodes, when King and other courageous activists banded together to challenge violent, state-sponsored bigotry and injustice and changed our nation for the better.
One crucial scene follows the horrific depiction of “Bloody Sunday,” an incident in 1965 when Alabama police beat 600 civil-rights protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan). After the bloodied protesters retreat to a church, one declares that it’s time to fight the police with guns.
A protest leader, Andrew Young, insists that violence is not the answer. “You can’t win that way,” Young says in the film, which closely tracks Young’s own recollections in a 1985 interview. “I’m not talking about the Bible, I’m talking facts. Cold, hard facts.” Young, who went on to become an eminent politician and diplomat, argues that nonviolence is not just morally superior to violence; it is more effective, especially for people struggling for justice against a more powerful group.
King emphasized the pragmatism of nonviolence too, and so does political scientist Gene Sharp, whom I have discussed previously on this blog and in my book The End of War. Drawing upon the careers of King and Gandhi as well as other historical episodes, Sharp argues that violence, even in the service of a just cause, often precipitates greater injustice and suffering; nonviolent movements are more likely than violent ones to prevail and to lead to democratic, non-militarized regimes.
Scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan present further evidence of the effectiveness of nonviolence in Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. The 2012 book presents evidence that between 1900 and 2006 “campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals.”
King opposed U.S. militarism as well as injustice. In a major speech in 1967, he spelled out moral as well as practical objections to the Vietnam War. The U.S. military buildup, far from suppressing North Vietnam aggression, had exacerbated it, he suggested. North Vietnam “did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands.” He urged the U.S. to stop bombing North Vietnam and set a date for withdrawal of its troops.
King’s speech (well worth reading in its entirety) enraged President Lyndon Johnson, who had supported civil rights legislation sought by King, and was denounced by major media, including The New York Times and Washington Post. King was right: the Vietnam War was both immoral and unwinnable.
Last fall, I reported on non-military proposals for dealing with ISIS. Can such strategies work against a group that seems intent on using violence to provoke violent responses from the U.S. and other nations? I don’t know. But clearly our military strategies have not worked; in fact, they have made bad situations worse. So why not try nonviolence?
Meanwhile, I’m rooting for Selma to win Best Picture, and for American Sniper to lose.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
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