Once Syria’s Assad regime folded,
Travis Timmerman, an American who had entered Syria on a religious pilgrimage,
was freed from a prison after seven months there. A border guard had thrown him
into prison. That Timmerman is Christian may have had something to do with it.
Austin Tice, an American journalist who had been missing since his abduction in
Syria 12 years earlier, was still unaccounted for days after the fall of the
Assad regime. Incredibly, Timmerman said of his prison experience, “I was never
beaten. The only really bad part was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I
wanted to. I was only let out three times a day to go to the bathroom.”[1]
Timmerman’s experience can be used to calibrate just how violently police handled
Belarusians who protested the rigged election in 2020 in Belarus, and the
quick, unexpected fall of Assad can remind us of the plight that could be in
store for Lukashenko. For as soon as enough state “riot” police decide not to follow
orders to beat, falsely imprison, and even torture non-violent protesters, what
seems like a solid dictatorship could unravel surprisingly quickly. This is
especially so because, like Assad, Lukashenko has used violence solely for the
same of retaining power, rather than to further an ideology. This renders the
violence committed on the orders of Assad and Lukashenko as even more shameless than
Mao, Stalin, and even Hitler, all of whom sought to radically reshape society
in the broad sense, including the economic and political systems, and thus could be countered ideologically as a wsy of stopping the repression and murders. The shameless, naked power-aggrandizing, non-ideological violence against non-violent individuals evinces power as an end in itself. It is especially ripe for a Gandhian
approach of resistance wherein moral power is intentionally set against the raw
power of violence.
Around the time of the 2020 election
in Belarus, a woman accused of insulting Lukashenko was sentenced to 3 years at
a penal colony, an entrepreneur was sentenced to 3.5 years for rioting (i.e.,
attending a peaceful political protest), an engineer who merely went to
a polling station to view the results was detained and beaten by riot troopers,
and a poet was detained for having walked his dog on the day before the 2020
election.
The entrepreneur later reflected
on his experience by asking, “How can you imprison an entire nation?” The
engineer remarked, “When people stop obeying [the president’s] orders, the
system will collapse.” The poet pointed out that if no factory workers had
shown up for work for three days following the election, the regime would have
collapsed. The thread here is essentially about the collective action problem.
An IT contractor who had been arrested subsequently pointed out that virtually none
of the people who depend on the state for a job would risk being fired by
joining in even peaceful protests on the rigged election. It could even be said
that the problem of collective action inhibited the numbers that would be
necessary for Gandhi’s kind of non-violent moral resistance to work. It seems
that not even the use of social media like Facebook to notify residents of a
mass protest can facilitate enough additional people to come out that the
problem would be solved. Hence, violent dictators around the world could
continue to count on the problem of collective action to keep the size of
protests down to a manageable number of people who can be beaten and taken away
to be imprisoned. After all, this cannot be done to an entire people.
The moral contrast between a Belarusian
policeman saying to prisoners that he would burn them all alive if he got the
order even though he was presumably not enraged by the non-ideological protestors
and the prisoner who subsequently said that he would not bear a grudge or take
revenge on that riot trooper is just the sort of contrast between good and evil
that Gandhi’s non-violent passive resistance fits. So too, the moral contrast between the young
women handing out flowers to riot troopers in military vehicles while knowing
that the police could get an order, which they would obey, to beat, detain, and
even torture the non-violent women. Handing out the flowers is something Gandhi
would certainly do, even while being beaten. Were the problem of
collective action not such an obstacle, perhaps the sheer number of followers
of Gandhi’s method of political resistance would be such that dictators could
no longer take advantage of the problem by knocking off individual protestors
with impunity. With sheer numbers, the moral shock of people around the world
would not have to be relied on for pressure to build internationally against a
given dictator. A whole people cannot be arrested; the system would come to a halt.
Ultimately, courage would have spread while the problem of collective action is
alleviated somehow. Until then, a world without brutal dictators will be possible,
though not probable.
1. Mohamad El Chamaa, Abbie Cheeseman, and John Hudson, “U.S. Citizen Found in Syria Says He Was Imprisoned for Months,” The Washington Post, December 12, 2024.
