On President Obama's Praise of Nonviolence

Today, May 19, 2011, President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he intended to state a new American policy toward the Middle East and North Africa.  That speech contained many lofty statements praising democracy and calling for governments throughout the region to respect the fundamental human rights and dignity of all of their citizens.  Fair enough.  There was little that was said in the speech that was objectionable as far as it went.  There is one aspect of the speech, however, that cries out for comment.  Two of President Obama’s statements in that speech lay bare the hypocrisy of American policy.  They are the President’s statements in praise of nonviolence.

The first of these statements was in reference to the recent, mostly nonviolent people’s revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.  President Obama said that “through the moral force of non-violence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades.”  The second was a more general praise of nonviolence as an agent of change.  Referring to the civil rights movement in the United States the President said “I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of non-violence as a way to perfect our union – organizing, marching, and protesting peacefully together to make real those words that declared our nation: 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”  In these two statements President Obama affirmed the two fundamental truths about nonviolence, namely, that it works and that it is a moral force.

I applaud the President’s recognition of the moral force and the efficacy of nonviolence as an agent of social change and progress, yet my first reaction when I heard these statements was hardly a positive one.  As the President was lauding the nonviolent popular movements in the Arab world I saw, alongside images of those movements, American soldiers on kill missions in Afghanistan and American drones dropping bombs on human targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  I saw NATO planes, some of them American, strafing and bombing in Libya.  I saw an American commando team violating the sovereignty of Pakistan to commit what is surely murder under the laws of that nation.  Yes, Osama bin Ladn was a very bad man; but President Obama resorted to violence not nonviolence to deal with him (as indeed he had promised to do during the 2008 election campaign), thereby making his praise of nonviolence today sound hypocritical at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.  Apparently for President Obama nonviolence is fine for the people of the Middle East and North Africa and for movements for social change within the United States but not appropriate for, much less morally binding on, the United States in its actions abroad. 

How can the President expect anyone to believe his praise of nonviolence when his actions abroad are consistently violent?  His words praise nonviolence.  His actions say that, at least for the United States as it acts in the world, violence is appropriate and morally justifiable.  His actions say that nonviolence is fine for others but violence is our chosen method of addressing problems.  People are influenced much more by what they see other people doing than by what they hear other people saying.  The behavior that the United States models in the world is violent.  As long as it remains violent, all the President’s pretty words in praise of nonviolence will sound hollow and unconvincing.