Tehran students rally on Sunday. Credit: NYT, Your View via Reuters

The latest news is that the Iranian police have arrested students for supposedly burning pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini in recent protests at Tehran University. Whether they actually burned these images or not seems to be in dispute. The NY Times reported Sunday that

For all the charges and counter-charges that have been raised during the crisis – including vote rigging, the rape of jailed protesters and the plotting of a velvet revolution – each side seemed to agree that burning an image of Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the state who is revered as divine, was going too far.

Given that widely shared perception it would clearly be bad tactics for the students to burn the pictures, whether in their hearts they revere Khomeini or not. These students are going for the very biggest stakes: to change their country. Whether that is evolutionary change, in the form of reforming the current system, or revolutionary change, it is still critical to win a large percentage of those alienated by the present government. Students cannot win against state power anywhere by wielding violence themselves, only by winning over growing public support.

A split is apparently developing between the reformists who wore green for Moussavi in the June presidential election and the students protesters today who are wearing less green and are more ready to ditch the whole Islamic Republic that Khomeini brought in. So it is good tactics for the Iranian regime itself to accuse the students of burning the Khomeini portraits, whether they did or not.

From a distance, this is clear. Why then, is it not clear to the small numbers of anarchists in Berkeley last week who did apparently use fire–this time not just to burn pictures of their opponent, Robert Birgeneau, the University of California Berkeley Chancellor, but to try to set fire to his home? Were the burning torches they threw purely symbolic, not intended to do harm, or did they want the building to burn? They did break windows, lights and planters at the residence.

“These are criminals, not activists,” Birgeneau said in a statement issued Saturday morning. “The attack at our home was extraordinarily frightening and violent. My wife and I genuinely feared for our lives.”

Broken lights and overturned planters at the UC Berkeley Chancellor's on campus residence after the protest.

Two of the eight arrested for this incident were Berkeley students, two UC Davis students. Their justification, we hear from inside sources, is that the state uses violence to stay in power and violence is both morally justified and necessary to overthrow the state.

Excuse me? Students using violence to overthrow the state: haven’t we heard this before? Did it ever do anything other than alienate the vast numbers of people who are entirely sympathetic with the actual reasons for the protests, whether that was in days long ago an unpopular foreign war or, in the case of the UC system today, the firings of low income workers and huge increases in student fees?

This is a matter of tactics, and how you win over large numbers of the population to your cause. You need to be highly confrontational to get your point and passion across in a time of widespread passivity. But you have to do it in ways that reveal the violence of the state, not that mimic it. You lead the march across the bridge at Selma into the raised police batons and let the country see what happens when decent, disciplined people promoting a righteous cause challenge the good old boys. That’s how you get to win.

One of the things about nonviolence, though, is that it is hard to just adopt it as a tactic. It seems to require something more. In the heat of a struggle, why not pick up a rock and hurl it at the enemy? Why not take burning torches to the chancellor’s residence, after he has set the police on peaceful, nonviolent students, some of whom ended up with serious injuries, or were needlessly humiliated, woken in the night from a peaceful, disciplined occupation and arrested in their underwear? It might seem right in the heat of the struggle to hit back. There needs to be some deeper inhibition than mere tactics, to restrain ourselves and our hotheaded friends.

That inhibition is the belief in nonviolence as a principle, and even as–if you will excuse the old fashioned language– a sacred principle. Personally I am no pacifist, and I believe there are moments when there is no choice but to defend oneself violently. Even sacred taboos have to be broken at times. And there is no space here to go into when it would have been possible to stop Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, General Custer or the British Empire nonviolently, and when it was no longer possible, even if I had a good handle on it, which I don’t. But we humans resort to violence far too easily.

We have to allow the sacredness of human life to inform our consciousness, a deep inner taboo against harming other people to inform our muscles and bones, in order to be disciplined enough in times of conflict. This takes a lot of training, thought and practice and there are people who have dedicated their lives to training people like us: such as Pace e Bene, who can provide such trainings to Berkeley students today: their workshops are listed here.

Unfortunately the people–like me, for example–who are attracted to nonviolence as both tactic and principle tend to shy away from actually promoting conflict with the powers of this world, even when things are going terribly wrong, when 24,000 children are dying every day around the world from poverty, or when our government is torturing prisoners and pursuing unjust wars. We moan, we write letters, we go on the occasional street protest, we vote. But we don’t have the passionate commitment to promoting conflict that our heroes like Rosa Parks and MLK and Gandhi had. We don’t actually like conflict at all: I certainly don’t. So when the young anarchist hotheads finally see a chance to promote some conflict, do they naturally come to us for training? No, because they haven’t seen us leading the way.

Put the conflict back into nonviolent conflict, is what I say, from my armchair, or rather, from my desk at Tikkun where I have been working through the weekend to get out another kick-ass confrontational spiritual issue of the magazine.

If we don’t, then once again, and every time into the future, the activists who embrace and practice violence will likely set back or destroy the chance of gaining widespread public support for every righteous cause.