How Much 'Social Control Violence' Does It Take to Actually Control People Socially?
A couple lessons in strategically massacring people
Trump’s Rose Garden speech yesterday threatened protesters with death pretty explicitly:
“As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults, and the wanton destruction of property.”
If you’re like me, this made you think, “Oh no! Police or the military, or both, are going to fire into crowds of protesters.” I know I’m not the only one who thought this.
The New York Times ran an op-ed a few days ago called “'Liberal World Order' Was Built With Blood,” which, if you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to convince you is true. The author, Vincent Bevins, just wrote a book about precisely how all this blood led to “order.” The model he examines is The Jakarta Method, which is also the title of his book. It refers to the roughly a million (or maybe only as few as 500,000) Indonesian communists murdered with the support of the CIA in the 1960s.
One of the best documentaries of all time, The Act of Killing (2012), is about the legacy of that massacre (Can you call it a genocide if it’s a massacre of communists? That’s above my pay grade). In The Act of Killing, you see that after the communists were dehumanized and wiped out, their cause was so completely erased from Indonesian society that the people who committed these atrocities remained pillars of the community who never even thought to question the morality of what they did until a filmmaker came along, handed them cameras and makeup, and said “Hey why don’t you show me what all those massacres you carried out were like.” And they went ahead and did it:
Sure, Henry Kissinger is pretty scary as a cold, calculated planner of mass murder abroad, but what could demonstrate social control through violence more viscerally than having the leaders of the death squads that brought about the status quo in a country publicly brag about physically going out and murdering their own countrymen, and then spend the rest of their lives as minor celebrities?
Bevins documents the ways in which similar massacres in Brazil and Argentina emulated Indonesia, until, he writes in the Times, “By the end of the 1970s, most of South America was governed by authoritarian, pro-American governments that secured power by mass murder.”
This is a very flawed analogy for the killing of black people in the United States. For one thing, a sudden massacre of black protesters would be part of a long-term trend going back to the days of lynchings for the purpose of social control, and in the case of the large-scale killing of people who were enslaved, a whole lot further back than that.
Nonetheless, it got me wondering just how Americans respond to people in their movements being massacred, which led me to a sociology paper from 1973: “Social Control Violence and Radicalization: The Kent State Case” by sociologists Raymond J. Adamek, and Jerry M. Lewis of Kent State University.
I was thinking about Kent State, because of some footage of a national guardsman hugging protesters today.
…which is a little like when Kent state protesters chatted “amicably” with Guardsmen in the hours before the shooting started.
The 1970 protests that led to the Kent State shootings were (speaking of Kissinger) a response to the Nixon’s Cambodian bombing campaign. As were the shootings less than two weeks later at Jackson State University. A total of six antiwar protesters were killed by the National Guard in both shootings (Well, five protesters, and one student who was just walking to class). It’s remembered as a turning point in the antiwar movement. Adamek and Lewis demonstrate more or less why with their study based on survey data gathered the year after the shootings:
Among demonstrators in particular, 81 percent said the shootings made them more or likely to participate in demonstrations, and only 4 percent said they’d be less likely. That stands to reason, but it’s an even more resolute response than I would have expected. After all, the guardsmen had guns, and they’d just shown they were willing to use them.
In response to Kent State, about a million students walked out of classes later that month. And that also makes sense in a way. It’s hard to picture the National Guard killing a million students, so there’s safety in numbers. If your goal is to simply kill a million dissidents and then brag about it later, according to The Jakarta Method, you have to be more secretive. You take people in for questioning, and then make them disappear (by strangling them and throwing them in a river). And maybe somewhere in between six deaths and one million deaths there is a point at which dissidents will stop being dissidents.
The shootings at Kent and Jackson State Universities are an imperfect analogy for any hypothetical massacres in response to the present protests, of course. They all are. One thing that makes this one so imperfect is that in the days between the two 1970 shootings, cops in Augusta, Georgia, killed six black men protesting the death of a teenager who had been tortured to death by police.