Catégorie : Non-violence

Piece from my book Le nouveau paradigme de non-violence, p. 219 :

In Poland, the KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników, Workers’ Defense Committee) and the Solidarnosc movement did not fall into the trap of the Soviet leaders, who expected violence from the Polish trade union and even sought to provoke it, in order to legitimize the dispatch of tanks massed at the border, whose orders were to crush the rebellion. After General Jaruzelski’s coup de force in December 1981, the official press of the Polish People’s Republic called Lech Walesa and the Solidarnosc activists « terrorists », but nobody was fooled about the origin of the terror.  The entire art of the resistance was to fight in indirect confrontation, avoiding the mistakes of the spontaneous, open-air Budapest uprising of 1956.  In the underground, for many long years, it was necessary to organize civil society, build citizens’ power, create solidarity, without ever offering the slightest pretext to justify the intervention of the forces of law and order of the Pax Sovietica. « If totalitarian power is perfectly armed to crush any violent revolt, it is largely helpless to confront the non-violent resistance of an entire people who have freed themselves from fear.[…] Thus, non-violence, that doctrinaire minds profess plays into the hands of totalitarian regimes, actually proves to be the most appropriate way of combating them » (Muller Jean-Marie, La nouvelle donne de la paix, 1992).