"This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed" and Other Objections to Strategic Nonviolence

The most common objection to nonviolent resistance - "it only works if your opponent has a conscience" - I've addressed in a prior article. But there are other serious critiques that deserve engagement, particularly this one: “This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed.”

That's what Hartman Turnbow told Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964. Turnbow was a Black Mississippi farmer who'd faced down white supremacist terror. When Klansmen firebombed his home, he fought back with rifle fire. His warning carried hard-earned wisdom: in contexts of extreme violence with no state protection, pure pacifism can get you killed.

He was right. But his warning—and similar objections from the left today—often gets interpreted as rejecting strategic nonviolence entirely. The reality is more complex, and understanding that complexity matters for movements facing authoritarianism now.

Below, I address these common objections:

• "This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed"
• "Nonviolence only wins small reforms, never systemic change"
• "Nonviolent victories just get absorbed back into neoliberalism"
• "Nonviolence only works in democracies"
• "Nonviolence is privileged activism"
• "They're already killing us—they don't need an excuse"

These arguments contain important truths. Armed self-defense played crucial roles in successful movements. Victories were often partial. Movements are messy coalitions where different tactics coexist.

But these critiques also misunderstand key dynamics about what creates transformative change.

Objection: "This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed"

Hartman Turnbow was one of the "First Fourteen" who attempted to register to vote in Holmes County in 1963. When his home was firebombed in May 1963, Turnbow fought off the attackers with rifle fire, explaining afterward: "I wasn't being non-nonviolent, I was just protectin' my family."

His point: In the context of systematic violence with no state protection, nonviolent protest won't keep you alive. Sometimes you need guns.

This objection deserves serious engagement because it names a genuine danger while missing the strategic picture.

What Turnbow got right

In rural Mississippi in the 1960s, nonviolent protesters absolutely needed armed community members for protection. When Klansmen came in the night to bomb homes and churches, nonviolent philosophy didn't stop them. Armed defenders did.

Fannie Lou Hamer kept "a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom." C.O. Chinn sat outside movement meetings with a shotgun across his lap and a pistol by his side, telling CORE organizers: "This is my town and these are my people. I'm here to protect my people." When SNCC field secretaries traveled dangerous roads, local people with guns kept them alive.

Turnbow's statement wasn't theoretical—it came from lived experience of what it took to survive as a Black person challenging white supremacy in Mississippi. In that specific context, he was right: pure nonviolent pacifism without any armed defense could indeed get you killed.

What this misses strategically

But Turnbow's warning, while true about personal survival, doesn't address what actually created political change. Notice what happened:

1. Turnbow and others registered to vote (nonviolent action)
2. They faced violence
3. They defended themselves (armed self-defense)
4. The political victory came from the voter registration, not from the self-defense

Armed self-defense kept activists alive to continue organizing. But the organizing itself—the voter registration drives, the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the marches—was nonviolent direct action. That's what created the political crises that forced change.

Consider the full context: Turnbow stepped forward at the courthouse and declared, "Me, Hartman Turnbow. I came here to die to vote. I'm the first." That was an act of nonviolent courage that inspired a movement. When he fought off the firebombers weeks later, that was survival. Both mattered. But they served different functions.

The strategic distinction

Turnbow's armed defense worked because it remained defensive. He wasn't launching armed attacks on the courthouse or assassinating segregationist officials.

Defensive gun use didn't provide pretexts for massive state repression. When Turnbow shot back at night riders attacking his home, it didn't give the federal government an excuse to send troops to crush the movement. In fact, he was arrested and charged with arson—the authorities claimed he firebombed his own house. The absurdity of that charge helped expose the injustice.

But armed revolutionary rhetoric—even without offensive action—provided pretexts for crushing repression.

The RAM case study

The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) offers a devastating example. Founded in 1963 by young activists led by Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmad) and Robert Franklin Williams, RAM was a Marxist-Leninist organization that fused Black nationalism with Maoism. RAM advocated armed revolution as the only way to fundamentally alter American society.

Despite its small size and relative obscurity, RAM's militant posture made it a target. By 1965, undercover FBI agents had infiltrated the organization. In June 1967, police rounded up seventeen RAM members in predawn raids. In September 1967, seven members were charged with conspiring to assassinate leaders, blow up city hall, and poison the police force.

Here's the critical detail: Charges consisted of conspiracy and intent based on fiery speeches or militant rhetoric rather than acts committed. The testimony of informers was the primary evidence. In spring 1967, J. Edgar Hoover called Max Stanford "the most dangerous man in America."

With most of the leadership in prison, under surveillance, or in hiding, RAM collapsed in 1968—having achieved none of its revolutionary goals.

But the real damage went far beyond RAM itself. RAM was used as a test case for how to watch and harass civil rights and Black nationalist groups throughout the 1960s. Hoover used the operations against RAM as an example of COINTELPRO's success in later orders to FBI offices.

In July-August 1967, the FBI began "COINTELPRO-BLACK HATE," which focused on King and the SCLC, as well as SNCC, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, CORE, and the Nation of Islam. Note the tragic irony: The official rationale for COINTELPRO was that organizations under surveillance were likely to commit acts of violence. In fact, few arrests were ever made for violent crimes. Most targeted organizations, such as King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were explicitly nonviolent.

RAM's armed revolutionary rhetoric gave Hoover exactly the pretext he needed to attack the entire movement—including groups that were genuinely nonviolent.

The Black Liberation Army, which did engage in armed actions against police, emerged largely from the fragments of groups that COINTELPRO had already shattered—including remnants of RAM and the Black Panther Party after it faced devastating infiltration and the assassination of leaders like Fred Hampton. The BLA faced even more crushing repression.

The pattern: advocating armed resistance—regardless of whether violence actually occurred—gave the state exactly the justification it needed to attack both armed and nonviolent movements alike.

Armed self-defense versus armed revolution

In rural Mississippi in the 1960s:

• Armed self-defense was necessary for physical survival against terrorist violence
• Nonviolent direct action was necessary for political victory through mass mobilization
• These weren't contradictory—they were complementary

If the movement had shifted to armed offensive action—if instead of voter registration drives they'd started ambushing sheriffs—it would have been crushed militarily and lost the moral and political high ground that enabled federal intervention.

What this means now

Turnbow's warning teaches us important lessons, but we need to be careful about what those lessons are.

His quote gets used to dismiss strategic nonviolence entirely, but look at what Turnbow actually did:

✓ Defended his home when attacked
✓ Protected his family
✓ Continued nonviolent organizing (voter registration)
✗ Didn't launch armed attacks on the state
✗ Didn't abandon mass nonviolent mobilization
✗ Didn't argue for armed revolution

His actual practice combined defensive self-protection with continued commitment to nonviolent direct action as the path to change.

Contemporary authoritarianism—with surveillance tech, militarized police, and a culture glorifying state violence—shifts the tactical math further. Armed self-defense against assaulting cops or ICE agents today carries the risk of near-certain death.

If the goal is staying alive, Turnbow's quote just doesn't apply here.

Is nonviolence still risky? It absolutely is. The question is: "what approach minimizes risk and keeps our people alive while maximizing chances of success?"

You're right, there's real overlap between these sections. Let me map it out:

Both sections cover:

• "Didn't overthrow capitalism" critique
• Violent revolutions produced authoritarianism (Russia, China, Cuba)
• Nordic model as counterexample
• Partial victories point

Unique to "small reforms" section:

• The list of major victories
• Chenoweth/Stephan research
• Gandhi/India as case study
• Mass participation argument

Unique to "neoliberalism" section:

• "Hammer isn't a house" framing (tactic vs. systemic transformation)
• "Sliding back is an organizing failure, not a tactic failure"
• The longer-term requirements (decades of organizing, political education, alternative institutions)

Here's a consolidated version that keeps both objections but eliminates redundancy:

Objection: "Nonviolence can only win small reforms, never systemic change"

This critique often comes packaged with claims that nonviolent victories get co-opted, that movements only maintained capitalism, that radical economic demands got watered down. There's truth here—movements do get co-opted. The transformation of MLK from a democratic socialist who challenged capitalism and militarism into a sanitized icon of liberal incrementalism is a perfect example.

But the claim that nonviolence can only win "small reforms" ignores the most transformative victories in modern history:

• Indian independence — Ending 200 years of colonial rule
• Ending US segregation — Dismantling a system of racial apartheid that existed for generations
• Ending South African apartheid — Overturning an entire constitutional system
• Solidarity in Poland — Catalyzing the collapse of Soviet communism across Eastern Europe
• People Power in the Philippines — Overthrowing a 20-year dictatorship
• Velvet Revolution — Ending 41 years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia
• Singing Revolution — Three Baltic nations regaining independence from the USSR

These aren't tweaks. These are systemic transformations that violent insurgencies had failed to achieve in the same contexts.

Research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan examining 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900-2006 found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent ones. This held across different regime types, geographic regions, and time periods.

"But those movements had violent elements too"

Yes—and the research accounts for this. The finding isn't that successful movements had zero violence anywhere. It's that success correlated with the nonviolent campaign's ability to mobilize mass participation, not with the presence or strength of violent flanks.

The Civil Rights Movement had armed self-defense elements (Deacons for Defense, armed community members). The anti-apartheid movement had Umkhonto we Sizwe. The Indian independence movement had armed factions. Some argue these violent flanks helped by making moderates look reasonable or providing protection.

The research tells a different story. Chenoweth and Schock's study of 106 cases found no statistical relationship between violent flanks and campaign success—positive and negative effects cancel each other out. But when they examined individual cases, armed movements were consistently shown not to protect nonviolent activists but to put them at greater risk, as authorities used the presence of armed actors to justify repression against all resistance movements. Violent flanks also reduced mass participation—and mass participation is the strongest predictor of success.

Their conclusion: nonviolent campaigns succeed despite violent flanks, rarely because of them. What created the political crises that forced change was mass nonviolent mobilization—the boycotts, strikes, marches, and non-cooperation that made systems ungovernable.

On partial victories

Yes, the Civil Rights Act had limitations. But this critique ignores what was actually won: the legal dismantling of Jim Crow, the Voting Rights Act that enfranchised millions, the foundation for fair housing laws.

When movements win partial victories, the question is why. Sometimes it's because the tactic wasn't powerful enough. But often it's because the movement itself had limited demands—constrained by the dominant ideology, internal divisions, or lack of solidarity consciousness. Early suffrage movements won the vote for white women because that's what many of those movements fought for—a failure of vision, not of nonviolent tactics.

The Civil Rights Movement's more radical economic demands weren't sidelined because nonviolence was too weak to win them. They were sidelined because COINTELPRO assassinated and imprisoned the leaders pushing those demands, because the coalition fractured, because the dominant culture successfully manufactured consent among the masses and marginalized those fighting for change.

Nonviolent resistance is a tool. What you win depends on what you fight for, who you build coalition with, and whether you can sustain pressure long enough to achieve it. The tool doesn't limit the vision—the movement does.

Objection: "These victories just get absorbed back into the system"

A related critique: "Nonviolent resistance wins temporary concessions, but then movements lose momentum, gains get rolled back, and the underlying system reasserts itself. We keep repeating this cycle."

But this conflates two questions: whether nonviolent resistance can force political change, and whether movements can sustain those gains over generations.

It's true: The Civil Rights Movement didn't dismantle capitalism. Chile still operates under economics Pinochet embedded in their constitution. Apartheid ended but economic inequality persists in South Africa. These are real limitations—but they're not failures of the tactic. They're failures of sustained organizing in the face of massive, well-funded opposition.

A tactic isn't a silver bullet

Putting the burden of "ending neoliberalism" on nonviolent resistance is like blaming a hammer for not being a house. Nonviolent resistance is a tactic—a powerful one—but no single tactic is a silver bullet for achieving socialism.

Getting to genuine social democracy requires more than strikes and boycotts. It requires sustained organizing over decades, political education, building alternative institutions, winning people to new economic arrangements, and maintaining movements across generations.

The question isn't "did nonviolent resistance solve everything?" It's "which approach builds a foundation for that longer transformation?"

The alternative doesn't deliver either

The critique implies armed struggle would achieve deeper transformation. The historical record doesn't support this.

Armed revolutions that "won" frequently replaced one form of concentrated power with another. The Russian Revolution led to Stalinism. The Chinese Revolution led to Mao and later market authoritarianism. Cuba replaced one autocracy with another. If the standard is "achieved democratic socialism," armed struggle has an even worse track record than nonviolent resistance.

Meanwhile, the Nordic labor movements of the 1920s-30s used sustained nonviolent resistance—strikes, boycotts, mass non-cooperation—to break the power of the 1% and build social democracy. That didn't happen because strikes are magic. It happened because workers built organizations, sustained pressure across years, created alternative institutions, and won enough people to their side to shift power fundamentally.

Sliding back is an organizing failure, not a tactic failure

When neoliberalism reasserts itself, that's not a failure of nonviolent resistance—it's a failure of sustained organizing.

The Civil Rights Movement won specific battles. That later generations didn't maintain the pressure, that the movement's radical economic wing was violently crushed by COINTELPRO, that white America found new ways to maintain hierarchy—these are failures of follow-through and coalition maintenance amid massive forces bent on manufacturing consent.

Blaming nonviolence for this is like blaming the 1930s labor movement for Reagan-era union busting. The tactic worked. What failed was the long-term project of building and maintaining power.

Objection: "Nonviolence only works in democracies with functioning institutions"

This claim contradicts the historical record. Nonviolent resistance has succeeded precisely in authoritarian contexts:

• Serbia under Milošević — Not a just society, still overthrown nonviolently
• Chile under Pinochet — Brutal dictatorship, still faced down through mass resistance
• Apartheid South Africa — Legal framework designed for injustice, still dismantled
• Soviet bloc — Totalitarian systems, still collapsed under nonviolent pressure
• Philippines under Marcos — Martial law dictatorship, still toppled

These weren't liberal democracies with strong institutions. They were authoritarian systems where nonviolent resistance created the crises that made them ungovernable.

Strategic nonviolent resistance works by making oppression unsustainable—through economic disruption, loyalty shifts within institutions, third-party intervention, and mass non-cooperation. None of these mechanisms require just institutions.

In fact, nonviolent resistance often works better in authoritarian contexts because the contrast between peaceful protesters and brutal state violence creates powerful "backfire effects" that shift public opinion and trigger defections.

Objection: "Nonviolence is privileged activism"

This critique suggests that nonviolent resistance only works for those with existing safety, resources, or protection—that it's a luxury option unavailable to the truly oppressed. History shows the opposite.

The most successful nonviolent movements were led by people facing extreme violence with no institutional protection. Black Mississippians organizing voter registration drives in 1963 weren't operating from positions of privilege—they were among the most vulnerable people in America, facing lynching, firebombing, and systematic terror with no expectation of state protection. South African anti-apartheid activists faced massacres, torture, and permanent states of emergency. Indian independence organizers under colonial rule faced mass imprisonment, police violence, and execution.

These movements succeeded not despite their participants' vulnerability, but in part because nonviolent resistance was the only viable strategy available to people without armies or institutional power.

The "privilege" framing also misses who actually participates in movements. Nonviolent resistance enables broader participation—including by the most vulnerable: women, elderly, children, people with disabilities. Armed struggle privileges mostly young, able-bodied men and excludes most of the population from meaningful participation.

A movement that can only mobilize armed militants will always be outnumbered and outgunned by the state. A movement that can mobilize millions—including those who cannot or will not take up arms—becomes ungovernable.

Objection: "They're already killing us—they don't need an excuse"

This objection names a devastating reality: the state does commit violence against nonviolent movements. Bloody Sunday happened to people marching peacefully. Police brutalized civil rights protesters who never raised a fist. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his sleep. COINTELPRO targeted Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC despite their explicit commitment to nonviolence. In 2020, 93% of Black Lives Matter demonstrations involved no violence or property destruction, yet were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests (ACLED US Crisis Monitor).

The argument is powerful: If the state brutalizes nonviolent movements anyway, if they infiltrate and attack us regardless of our tactics, if they're already killing us—why does nonviolence matter strategically? They don't need us to give them an excuse. They'll make one up if they need to.

But this reasoning misses a crucial distinction: the difference between state violence that delegitimizes the state versus state violence that strengthens it.

When nonviolent movements face state violence

The violence backfires. Images of police attacking peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge generated national outrage that accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act. Every video of police brutalizing nonviolent Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 shifted public opinion and triggered defections within law enforcement. State violence against clearly peaceful movements creates legitimacy crises that force change.

Public opinion shifts toward the movement. The brutal police response to nonviolent civil rights protesters in Birmingham shocked moderate whites into supporting federal intervention. When security forces are clearly the aggressors against peaceful demonstrators, it becomes impossible to maintain the fiction that the system is just.

Security forces experience moral injury and defect. Police and soldiers ordered to attack people who aren't fighting back face psychological costs that lead to defections and refusal to follow orders. The nonviolent resistance in the Philippines succeeded in part because soldiers refused to fire on peaceful crowds.

The state pays political costs domestically and internationally. When governments attack nonviolent movements, they face pressure from their own populations, international sanctions, and diplomatic isolation.

When armed resistance faces state violence

The violence is justified and normalized. "They shot first" becomes the story. Media frames it as two sides fighting, not as state repression of dissent. The brutal response is seen as appropriate defense against "violent extremists" or "domestic terrorists."

Public opinion shifts away from the movement. Most people fear chaos and instability more than they oppose injustice. Armed confrontation makes movements easy to frame as threats to public safety, pushing potential allies toward supporting state repression.

Security forces feel morally justified and experience less defection. It's psychologically easier to shoot people who are shooting at you. Armed resistance eliminates the moral injury that creates cracks in state institutions.

The state faces fewer political costs and gains justification for emergency powers. Armed resistance provides pretext for martial law, suspension of civil liberties, and expanded surveillance.

The state wants us to fight back violently

The state wants to portray movements as violent threats. When movements actually engage in armed resistance, they're handing the state exactly the narrative it needs.

State violence against nonviolent movements creates a dilemma for authorities. They either back down (losing face) or attack peaceful people (losing legitimacy). State violence against armed movements creates no such dilemma—it's just "law enforcement" doing its job.

The strategic question isn't "will the state use violence against us?" It will. The question is: "What makes that violence backfire against the state rather than strengthen it?"

And the answer, proven across dozens of successful movements, is maintaining nonviolent discipline while the state attacks people who clearly pose no violent threat.

State violence as strategic weakness vs. strategic strength

When police beat peaceful protesters, they reveal their own illegitimacy. When police respond to armed attacks, they appear to be doing their jobs.

Nonviolent resistance doesn't prevent state violence—but it transforms that violence from a source of state strength into a source of state weakness.

Yes, they're killing us. Yes, they'll continue to use violence. But whether that violence strengthens them or destroys them depends on whether we give them the justification they desperately need—or whether we maintain the moral and strategic high ground that makes their violence indefensible.

The Deeper Problem: What's the Alternative?

The most significant weakness in these critiques isn't what they say about nonviolence—it's what they fail to offer as an alternative.

If nonviolent resistance is just "privilege" that can only win "small reforms," what's the proposed solution? Armed revolution? The 20th century is littered with the corpses of failed armed struggles—and the authoritarian regimes that emerged from the successful ones.

These critiques correctly note that many nonviolent victories were partial, co-opted, or left capitalism intact. But armed struggles produced the same outcomes (or worse), partial victories are better than total defeats, and creating space for democratic participation enables further struggle.

The movements that overthrew apartheid, Jim Crow, colonial rule, and Communist dictatorships weren't perfect. But they transformed the terrain in ways that armed struggle in those contexts had failed to do for decades.

A more honest assessment

Rather than romanticizing either approach, we should recognize the actual dynamics at play.

Nonviolent resistance isn't magic. It requires mass mobilization (hard to achieve), strategic planning (often absent), sustained commitment (people get tired), favorable conditions (sometimes missing), and protection against co-optation (always a risk).

Armed struggle isn't inherently more radical. It often fails militarily against better-armed states, justifies violent repression, marginalizes broad participation, produces authoritarian structures, gets romanticized in hindsight despite terrible costs, and lacks broad popular support.

This last point deserves emphasis: armed struggle typically relies on small groups of militants rather than mass participation. This isn't just strategically weaker (easier to infiltrate and crush)—it's fundamentally anti-democratic, substituting vanguard action for the collective power of ordinary people organizing together.

The evidence is clear: strategic nonviolent resistance achieves systemic change far more effectively than armed struggle, particularly in contexts where the state has overwhelming military advantage. Armed self-defense may protect organizers, but armed rebellion against the state has consistently failed where mass nonviolent resistance has succeeded.

What Victory Actually Looks Like

In the 1920s-30s, workers in Sweden and Norway faced a choice remarkably similar to ours. The 1% owned virtually everything. Wealth inequality was extreme. Striking workers were met with deadly force—employers hiring goons to crush labor organizing, police killing strikers.

Swedish and Norwegian workers could have chosen armed revolution. Some advocated for it. The Russian Revolution had just happened. Armed struggle seemed like the "serious" response to deadly oppression.

Instead, they chose strategic nonviolent resistance—and over two decades, through waves of massive strikes, boycotts, and direct action, they broke the power of the 1%. Not by asking nicely. Not by appealing to conscience. But by making the economy ungovernable until the wealthy were forced to negotiate.

They built what we now call the Nordic model—not through violence, not through electoral politics alone, but through sustained mass noncooperation that made the old system unsustainable. Workers occupied workplaces. Communities organized mutual aid networks. They created alternative economic structures. When the state deployed force, it backfired—every violent crackdown on peaceful protesters shifted more of the public to the workers' side, eroded police willingness to attack their neighbors, and isolated the ruling class politically.

The wealthy didn't surrender because they grew hearts. They surrendered because continuing to fight cost more than conceding. The strikes were too widespread to break. The solidarity was too deep to fracture. The economic disruption was unsustainable.

This wasn't a "small reform." This was transferring power from capital to labor in ways that reshaped society for generations. And it was achieved through strategic nonviolent resistance—even when that resistance faced deadly violence.

The Work Begins Now

We're facing a violent police state. ICE operates as modern slave patrols—raiding homes, separating families, beating protesters, killing witnesses. Trump and his allies are looking for any excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act.

They want us to fight on their terms. They're prepared for that. A few armed resisters give them everything they need—the “domestic terrorism” narrative they've been desperate to manufacture. But the reason this lie has been blowing up in their faces is because the truth is so far from the reality.

Mass non-cooperation is the way forward. Workers refusing to drive the buses, build the cages, process the paperwork. A country that stops going along with it.

So ask yourself: Where does your own compliance flow into this system? What could you refuse? What could you disrupt?

But individual refusal only goes so far. The Nordic workers didn't win because a few brave individuals stopped cooperating. They won because they joined together—in unions, in community organizations, in movements that could sustain pressure over years.

That's the work. Find the people already organizing in your community and join them. If they don't exist, become the person who starts the conversation. The infrastructure of resistance is built in living rooms, union halls, church basements, and group chats.

We have more power than we've been led to believe—if we organize to use it.

Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.

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