Over on the left, my hardcore commie Facebook friends are posting memes about “eat the rich” and “smash the system” and “execute all billionaires.”
Meanwhile, the extreme right (fortunately, none in my Facebook feed) has, over the last couple decades, engaged in “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism,” which has become so common, it’s been abbreviated down to IMVE.
According to Koffler Fogel, President and CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs says “In 2019, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada data are available, Jews were the most targeted religious group for police-reported hate crimes, and targets of the second-most-police-reported hate crime overall. On average, an anti-Semitic incident happens pretty much every day of the week, 365 days of the year. Comprising only less than one percent of the Canadian population, Jewish Canadians accounted for 16 percent of all victims of hate crimes in 2019, a trend repeated year after year.”
Meanwhile, Mustafa Farooq, CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims appeared before the Standing Committe on Public Safety and Security (which is also where the quote above comes from) says that the day he was preparing to prepare for his appearance at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, two individuals threatened to bomb the centre.
Race and religion are two of the reasons people engage in IMVE, but they’re not the only ones.
Gender-based IMVE is becoming far too common. It is not new. Remember the Montreal Massacre, where Marc Lapine walked into a class at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, told all the men in the class to leave, then shot all the women, before wandering through the rest of the school, killing a total of 14 women before shooting himself?
Since then, there have been a number of attacks specifically targeting women. Indeed, of the nine terror attacks in Canada in the last decade, four have been perpetrated by Islamic extremists (three with connections to ISIS), two have been perpetrated against Muslims, one is unknown, and the remaining two have been perpetrated by incels—short for “involuntarily celebate”—against women.
On both sides of the political spectrum there is this idea that violence is the only way to affect real change.
But according to Erica Chenoweth, that’s not true.
Indeed, according to research done by Chenoweth and co-author Maria Stephan evaluating societal change (typically politically motivated, like Tianamen Square or the overthrough of Slobodan Milošević) over the last 100 or so years, non-violent forms of protest—mass strikes, marching in the streets, boycotts and demonstrations—proved to be twice as effective as violence.
And it is getting more pronounced as time goes on. Indeed, it was in the 1950s when the success rate of non-violent campaigns surpassed those of violent campaigns, and by the 1980s, the success rate of violent campaigns plummeted, now at less than 15 percent as of the early 2000s, while the success rate of non-violent campaigns has soared to nearly 70 percent.
This is shocking, to none moreso than Chenoweth, who wrote her political dissertation on how and why people use violence to create political change in their countries. “Back then I bought into the idea that power flows from the barrel of a gun,” says Chenoweth in a Tedx talk in 2013.
So, why is civil resistance so much more effective than armed struggle?
The answer, says Chenoweth seems to lie in people power itself.
“Researchers used to say that no government could survive if just five percent of its population rose up against it. Our data showed that the number may be lower than that. No single campaign has failed during that time period after they had achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population.”
3.5 percent, while it sounds like a low number, is bigger than it might seem. In Canada, with our smaller population, let’s call it 1.5 million people. And it’s a descriptive, not a prescriptive figure, meaning it’s not some sort of magic number. As in all things, reality is complicated and messy.
Chenoweth says that one of the things about non-violent protests are they are egalitarian: young, old, rich, poor, women men…all can be a part. And for the people who might not want to stand up against a repressive regime on their own? Might be willing to join the crowd if there’s 10,000 people out in the streets.
And if you’re a soldier tasked with putting down the rebellion, it becomes hard to stand up to those protestors when those people might be a neighbour.
For instance, when it became obvious that hundreds of thousands of Serbs were marching on Belgrade to demand that Milošević leave office, police officers started to disobey the order to shoot on demonstrators.
When one of them was asked why he did so, he said simply, “I knew my kids would be in the crowd.”
I think about this in terms of the recent election, and what would happen if the 6.3 percent of the population that voted for the NDP were to stand up and say “the current first past the post system is broken.”
And what would happen if the 41.3 percent of people who voted Conservatives turned their face towards reworking the system, rather than considering ripping this country into pieces because of the way the system is structured? If the 56.3 percent of the country that didn’t vote for the people in power had some representation and a voice in parliment?
Trudeau promised to change the system but never did, and we’re left with a system where a party that doesn’t get a majority of the votes can still have the majority of the seats, where one political ideology can run roughshod over the rest simply for having 50 percent +1.
But the great thing about a democracy is we do have a voice, and we can, if we want to, push towards proportional representation. Is proportional representation perfect? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Probably. Visit fairvote.ca for more info.
Congratulations to our winners for the Ovintiv Events Centre Peace Love & Dueling Pianos in Dawson Creek contest draw. Have a great evening!
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
