V for Vendetta
Watched it again tonight. After Brexit, Trump, Johnson, and Covid … a lot scarier than in 2006.
Climate Emergency
Martin Shaw indulges in wishful thinking when he claims that ‘non-violent action has consistently been more effective than violent action in achieving change’ (Letters, 16 December 2021). The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was formed as a result of the defeat of the French colonialists and pro-French Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It was the 1968 Tet Offensive that turned American public opinion substantially against the Vietnam War and marked the beginning of the US withdrawal. It wasn’t non-violent action that led to the fall of Saigon and the Americans’ panicked flight in 1975. A similar story could be told about China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Algeria. The majority of anti-colonial revolts in the period following the Second World War succeeded through force of arms, with mass protests playing only a subsidiary role. As documented in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent peace process, it was armed struggle by the IRA that brought the Brits to the negotiating table.
It used to be the case that the proponents of exclusively non-violent direct action would contend that armed struggle led only to top-down change, with no deepening of democratic institutions. If Shaw wants to contend that, as a result of the ‘unarmed direct action of mass movements’, South Africa is now a substantially equal and democratic society, I wish him luck. It looks to me as if the leading forces in the liberation struggle — the ANC and SACP — left too much of the South African apartheid state untouched, and simply took up roles within it. In any case, the fundamental problem with non-violent direct action is that it is only ever conducted by one side — and never the winning one.
Nick Moss
London NW10
But the Wachowski Brothers made the same mistake the Occupy and Arab Spring movements made. Burning does not suffice. The old regime is a phoenix. Until you are ready to replace it, it arises again from its ashes.