Last column I finished offering my reflections on Michael Moore䴜s Bowling for Columbine. But there is one incident in that film that I have not talked about yet that is going to be our point of departure for a new series of columns. In the movie, Moore is talking to the brother of Terry Nichols. (You may recall that Terry Nichols was convicted for assisting Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing.) Moore is asking Nichols about the meaning of the Second Amendment. Nichols correctly states that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment is to enable the people to resist a tyrannical government. Moore asks, what about Gandhi? When Nichols doesn䴜t have an answer, Moore asks, do you know who Gandhi was? Nichols answers, no.

Moore is asking, essentially, have you ever thought about nonviolent ways of dealing with tyranny? He is testing Nichols, and by proxy, questioning the moral seriousness of the whole gun rights crowd. Is ‰¥þresisting tyranny,‰¥ÿ or as one writer described it, the ‰¥þinsurrection theory of the Second Amendment,‰¥ÿ just something that you parrot as a high-brow political justification for your love of guns, or have you ever given serious thought about what the reality of using guns for that purpose would be?

Maybe if you haven䴜t given some serious thought to resisting tyranny nonviolently, through civil disobedience, you really love, or welcome, violence and the chance to murder others. If you took your moral obligations to your fellow man seriously, wouldn䴜t you spend at least five minutes thinking about nonviolent alternatives to a violent insurrection? Wouldn䴜t you at least know what Gandhi did? This essentially is the subtext of Moore䴜s question of Nichols.

That Nichols does not even know who Gandhi was is a black mark on the whole gun rights movement. Yes, you read that right. The whole movement. Nichols is obviously not learning about Gandhi, that is, civil disobedience, in the standard gun rights material he䴜s been reading, from which he gleaned that violent insurrection is a means of correcting the excesses of a tyrannical government. Moore could not have asked for a more perfect answer.

In the next several columns we are going to examine some of the literature of nonviolence as a means of evaluating the insurrection theory of the Second Amendment. The reason is simple. No one should be espousing violent insurrection without having seriously considered and weighed the alternatives. If ‰¥þGandhi‰¥ÿ is not the answer and guns are, we have better have had thought it through and be able to give an account of our position. No one should speak glibly about the prospects of achieving better living through modern killing.

Violence vs. Nonviolence

Before beginning our review of some of the literature in this area, it will be helpful to clarify some terminology and to note an important distinction. First, the common term used to describe nonviolent resistance, ‰¥þcivil disobedience‰¥ÿ, is not going to be accurate enough for our purposes, because it refers simply to an act of refusing to obey a law or legal authority. As we will see by the end of this column, a more comprehensive form of nonviolent resistance is noncooperation, the withholding of support. While Rosa Parks‰¥ú refusal to sit at the back of the bus was civil disobedience because she disobeyed a specific unjust law, Dr. King‰¥ús organized boycott of the Montgomery public busses was not disobedience, but noncooperation, a refusal to take part in the system of segregation then in place.

The second thing I wish to note is that, in addressing this topic, we will see there is a distinction in the literature of nonviolent resistance, between civil disobedience or noncooperation as a tactic to achieve a social or political goal, and nonviolence as an unconditional moral principle. Certain proponents of noncooperation, including Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, have espoused nonviolence as a means of achieving social and political change, without necessarily rejecting all forms of violence as wrong. They were not necessarily opposed to self-defense, or to government itself. Gandhi wanted the English out of India but did not oppose Indians ruling themselves, even though government involves coercion and force.

Others, like the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, have rejected coercion and violence as a means of dealing with one䴜s fellow man under any circumstances. This has led them to reject government itself, which relies on violence and coercion, and even self-defense. In the coming months, we will review both philosophies.

Radical Theory

The question whether noncooperation, as a tactic, can overcome tyrannical laws or a tyrannical government depends on the nature of obedience, or at least, the psychology of obedience. Possibly the most fundamental work in the entire literature of nonviolence is also one of the oldest. In the mid-1500s, a French law student by the name of Etienne de la Boetie wrote an essay titled The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. A simple pamphlet that can be read in a couple of hours, it is one of the most radical works in all political theory. You can find it here: www.mises.org/rothbard/boetie.pdf.

De la Boetie argued that, contrary to popular imagination, men do not obey a ruler because of the force of his arms or even because of fear of punishment or death at the ruler䴜s hands The government rests in the hands of one, or a very few, men. In reality, no small group of men can ever truly compel or force a great mass of men to do anything. It is not a question of strength of arms or the brutality of the ruler 䴋 it is an impossibility to actually make tens or hundreds of thousands of men do what you want them to do. The truth, therefore, and the reality, is that men are ruled only because they voluntarily submit; they willingly put on the yoke and cooperate with their servitude. This is true no matter what the form of government.

De la Boetie describes it this way: ‰¥þYou live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own, and it would seem you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and you very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite members dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.‰¥ÿ

‰¥þWhere has he acquired enough eyes to spy on you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? ... How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?‰¥ÿ

If the power of the ruler truly rests on voluntary submission and cooperation, then ‰¥þthere is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing.‰¥ÿ If ‰¥þnot one thing is yielded‰¥ÿ to rulers, ‰¥þif, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. ... I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.‰¥ÿ

But this discovery, that men readily cooperate with their own servitude, leads de la Boetie to undertake another investigation. How is it, he wonders, ‰¥þthat nature fails to place within the hearts of men a burning desire for liberty?‰¥ÿ What name, he wonders, should we give this monstrous vice, far worse than cowardice, that men welcome and cooperate with their own servility? We will look at de la Boetie‰¥ús examination of the psychology of obedience in the next column, and evaluate the insurrection theory of the Second Amendment in light of his insights.