Isegoria

Micro-sociology attempts to be realistic, Randall Collins claims: 

Violence cannot be stopped everywhere. Sometimes force rolls on and crushes everything in its path. But — sometimes violence is stopped. It happens locally, and by persons acting in local conditions.  This is something to build on. What are those conditions?

Turn now to the work of Dr. Anne Nassauer, of the Free University, Berlin. Using videos posted on-line from mobile phone cameras, plus GPS maps of streets, charting time-lines from police radio traffic, in short with the whole array of tools now available, she reconstructs protest demonstrations in Germany and the US. With this cutting-edge media high-tech, she is able to reconstruct the micro-history of protests and to pin-point just when and where a demonstration will turn violent. On the whole, I should mention, Nassauer finds that most demos stay peaceful, and their peacefulness can prevail even when militant protestors announce in advance that they will use force; or indeed, when police announce a tough crack-down-on-everything policy. That is to say, whether a protest turns violent or not depends on local and emergent conditions; violence-threatening events can end up peaceful, and peaceful demos can turn violent.

I will not try to summarize here Nassauer’s findings of the several pathways that lead to violence. Let us concentrate on a single point: if violence has already broken out, nevertheless all is not lost. It is not too late to stop the violence — not everywhere, but locally, at the place where human individuals use the right techniques. What are those techniques?

When the police surge forward and the crowd starts running and ducking, people are likely to be beaten. Photos often show clusters of police or soldiers, attacking anyone in their path — swinging clubs at women, old people, news reporters, anyone.

This is an emotional rush by the police, that I have called Forward Panic. It is like the crowd contagion of running away, except in this case forces that have been pent up by confrontational tension, run forward into the vacuum left by a sudden weakness on the other side. It is an adrenaline surge that has been kept in suspense, suddenly released into action. That is why the police go out of control, swinging at anything in their path. It is important to see that this is a reciprocal emotion—the crowd running away is the counterpart of the police running forward, the display of emotional weakness feeding the surge of dominance of the attackers. In Nassauer’s data, she often finds that when one cop at the front swings at a target — it may be a person who has stumbled and fallen to the ground — the cops just behind will also swing at the same target. One policeman’s attack leads others to repeat the attack.

But — and here is the good news — Nassauer also finds that these attacks can be stopped locally. When an individual stands still, directly facing the police, and calls out in a strong, clear voice: “We are peaceful. What about you?” – or words to that effect, the attack almost always stops.

This does not mean that the riot as a whole can be stopped in this way. There can be hundreds or thousands of persons spread out over a considerable space. Violence in a riot is not like one huge rugby scrum, not like huge battle-lines of ancient phalanxes, but a series of little clusters of violence here and there.

Each one of these clusters may be checked, could be rendered no longer violent, by the right local action.

To repeat: the details are important. The peace-making person must stand still, no longer moving. When almost everyone’s back is turned, he or she stands in direct eye contact with the on-coming forces. And one’s voice must be clear and steady, neither threatening nor fearful.

Especially important is not to scream. Someone in the crowd, in the fear or rage of being attacked, can cry out the identical words: “WE ARE PEACEFUL!! WHAT ABOUT YOU!!” but in this case it will not work. The police perceive and feel the crowd as being out of control. To scream at the police does not correct this impression, but reinforces it. Screaming is an expression of being out of control; and that is precisely the problem with the interactional situation. Tension and fear pervades everything, and the violence is coming out of the situation of one-sided emotional dominance by the police. The victim who screams does nothing to change the emotional field. It is the strong, calm tone that changes it, back towards local equilibrium, where the violence stops.

A similar technique can work when it is not a confrontation of police (or soldiers) versus a protesting crowd, but a violent attack by one crowd upon another. David Sorge, in research at University of Pennsylvania (2014), shows that in an incident of communal violence in India, the technique was used that stopped violence in a specific location. The individual under attack was a peace-maker, a citizen who had stood up in a town meeting the day before, to urge the Hindu populace not to pay attention to rumours and not to attack the local Muslims. As often happens in the early phases of communal violence, the peace-maker became targeted as a traitor. A crowd gathered in front of his house and pelted it with stones, the usual preliminary to an attack. But the peace-maker came out of the front of his house carrying a chair. Before anyone could attack him — there is usually a time-lag of shouting before someone starts the personal assault — he stood up on the chair and started to make a speech in a loud voice. The crowd quieted down and eventually dispersed.

Notice the details. He stood up above the crowd, where he could be seen. He met them face to face. For the members of a violent crowd, usually the target is someone anonymous up there behind all the surging bodies; for the few in the front with clearer visibility, someone cringing, showing weakness and fear, usually cowering, hiding their face, or knocked to the ground where all we can see is their side and back. Standing up in a prominent position, in this instance the peace-maker remained a human individual. He spoke in a loud, strong voice, not in anger, but resolutely. He spoke to them as individuals, and took apart the collective emotion of the crowd, where each relies on the others to carry out acts of violence that ordinarily would outrage our moral sensibilities.

Again, we must recognize, it was a local solution only. The riot as a whole was not stopped. The crowd moved elsewhere, where emotional dominance was easier to establish. Nevertheless, this is a hopeful sign. The whole pattern of a riot consists in all its local parts; and the more of these parts that can be stopped, the less damage it does.

The telephoto lens has changed our access to reality, Randall Collins suggests:

The tank man photo is the most famous image of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement in Beijing. Indeed it is considered one of the most famous photos of the 20th century. It has become a symbol of human resistance, a lone individual stopping a whole column of tanks.

What the photo claims to symbolize, however, is only very partially true. It is not a photo of Tiananmen Square, but of a boulevard nearby. It was not taken during the crackdown on demonstrators, which took place on June 3 and the following night, but on the quiet morning of June 5, after Tiananmen Square had been cleared and government control had been reestablished in Beijing. And it was not a successful protest. The tanks stopped briefly; two men came into the street and took the protester away.

The photo was taken by an American newsman, from a hotel balcony 800 meters distant — about half a mile. It was shot through a telephoto lens, like so many news photos of recent decades. This is one of the marvels of modern technology, and a hidden one: how seldom do we stop to think of how the photographer got so close, so near the action where history is made?

Telephoto lenses allow us to intrude closely into events that the participants would probably like to keep hidden. It is one of the sharpest differences between our images of the world before about 1960 and the present. The Vietnam War was the first war in history where we could see what it actually looked like. Before then, we had to be content with what officials allowed for patriotic publication, plus (as of World War II) candid shots of soldiers, generally far behind the front lines. And not just for violence in war, but violence in all its peacetime forms, telephoto lenses have brought us first-hand records of how violence really looks. And other forms of conflict, too — the expressions on faces and bodies that give us clues to how conflict plays out, and enable us to cut through the rhetoric and the mythology that have obscured it since humans first began to tell lies about violence.

I would go so far as to say that the telephoto lens, even more than the advent of television, has changed our access to reality. Even more than the camcorder which in 1991 first showed the police beating Rodney King; even more than the ubiquitous mobile phone cameras that now flood the Internet-connected world with images. The reason I make this exorbitant claim is that all the other devices depend on being up close; the telephoto lens zooms in from a great distance. It can go where it is too dangerous or too private for other devices to go. Unlike TV, it gives us photos that are not posed, since no one knows there is a camera to pose for. And it can give photos of great detail — the emotional expressions on faces, the exact postures of bodies, that are so important for a micro-sociologist’s explanation. The purpose of my writing, however, is not to pick a fight as to which visual technology is best; they all work together to make our times the golden age of visual sociology.

Having extolled telephoto images, I want to raise a caveat about their limits. Taken out of context, they carry the danger of modern myth-making. To see what is distorted and what can be salvaged, let us examine the tank man photo in greater depth.

The Beijing democracy demonstrations began on April 17, 1989, and went on for 50 days until they were crushed. The tank man photo was taken on day 51.

Over the 50 days, the size of the crowds at Tiananmen Square rose and fell. After most of the initial enthusiasm had fallen off, on day 28 (May 13), the remaining few hundred militants launched a hunger strike, which recaptured public attention, and brought hundreds of thousands of supporters to Tiananmen. On day 34 (May 19), the Communist elite purged its dissidents and declared martial law, and began to bring troops into Beijing.

The next four days were a showdown in the streets; crowds of residents blocked the army convoys; soldiers rode in open trucks, unarmed — the regime still trying to use as little force as possible, and also distrustful of giving out ammunition — and often were overwhelmed by residents. Crowds used a mixture of persuasion and food offerings, and sometimes force, stoning and beating isolated soldiers. On May 24 (day 39), the regime pulled back the troops to bases outside the city. The most reliable army units were moved to the front, some tasked with watching for defections among less reliable units. In another week strong forces had been assembled in the center of Beijing.

Momentum was swinging back the other way. Student protestors in the Square increasingly divided between moderates and militants; by the time the order to clear the Square was given for June 3 (day 49), the number occupying was down to 4000. There was one last surge of violence — not in Tiananmen Square itself, although the name became so famous that most outsiders think there was a massacre there — but in the neighborhoods as residents attempted to block the army’s movement once again. Crowds fought using stones and gasoline bombs, burning army vehicles and, by some reports, the soldiers inside. In this emotional atmosphere, as both sides spread stories of the other’s atrocities, something on the order of 50 soldiers and police were killed, and 400-800 civilians (estimates varying widely). Some soldiers took revenge for prior attacks by firing at fleeing opponents and beating those they caught. In Tiananmen Square, the early morning of June 4, the dwindling militants were allowed to march out through the encircling troops.

The Tank Man photo was taken the following morning. The revolutionary crowds had been beaten. Massive arrests were being made, especially of workers, whom the government regarded as far more dangerous than students. Hundreds of thousands of security agents were beginning to spread across the country, picking off suspects one by one, ultimately arresting tens of thousands in the following months. The tipping point had passed, and the regime had clearly won.

What then was the point of the tank man protest? By his white shirt and dark trousers, we can surmise that he was a government bureaucrat, a class of people whose sympathies were strongly on the side of the protestors. But it is also a category of persons, numerous in all demonstrations, who offer support but do not take part in the actual confrontations with authority. In virtually all photos of demonstrations and riots everywhere in the world, a small portion of crowd is at the front doing the violence, while most stand at a distance and watch. Very likely tank man had seen or heard about the previous days’ violence, and came forward in the quiet atmosphere to do something to demonstrate his own commitment.

As we can see in the photo, the streets are virtually empty. He has no visible supporters, although a small audience gathered on the sidewalk to watch from a distance. On the other hand, the tank troops too are anonymous, hidden inside their armored stations. The tanks are moving slowly, making a show of force, not an actual military operation. One can know this, because the tanks are in column, a parade-like movement; deployed into combat they would go into line. I would surmise that the soldiers are calm; their action has been over for 24 hours or more.

Thus it is a symbolic confrontation: the lone man, respectably dressed in the garb of the urban apparatchik, stepping in front of the column of slow-moving tanks. In that atmosphere, there is little danger of being run over. The lead tank swerved to avoid him, but he kept in its path until it stopped. Very likely the troops had returned to the orders that prevailed during days 34-38, when unarmed troops were sent to assemble in the city as quietly as possible, and had given no resistance when crowds forced them back. On the whole, the regime had used a mixture of appeasing the crowds, waiting for them to dwindle away, and sporadic application of military force. On day 51, they were back into the mode of calm normality. The government machinery was operating again; bureaucratically organized investigations and individual arrests were the regime’s weapon now. The rebellious crowd has its best chance when it is assembled in huge numbers, in an atmosphere of emotional support that flows outward, dangerously lapping at the solidarity of the government apparatus. Now the crowd has dispersed; and it is in this configuration that bureaucratic authority can exercise its unrelenting and comparatively unemotional control.

And that is what happens. Tank man steps in front of the tank column; the lead driver stops; the tank drivers behind him stop because the tank in front stops. Two men in dark suits come and take tank man away. The column grinds slowly on.

It would have been an unknown incident except for the newsmen in the hotel with the telephoto lenses. Pictures of violence on the previous days were just making their way into Western newspaper and television, so little attention was paid to the exact sequence when things happened. A famous photo showed bicycles crushed in a street where fighting had taken place — and in the absence of photos of actual bodies, these were taken as emblems of how the revolution had been crushed. It was easy to conjure up a scenario of tanks rolling over a crowd of demonstrators. And then, in the midst of this — the heroic image of the man who stopped the tank column. All was not lost: the human individual still prevails.

We are living in the realm of symbolism here, not in the realm of history. Never mind that no one stopped the tanks, or more likely the trucks that rolled over the bicycles and carried troops into the streets where fighting had taken place 36 hours earlier. It carries a nice message, although only through the more careful retrospect of micro-sociology do we actually see what it is: the violent confrontations between crowds and army on June 3 and the early hours of June 4 — confrontations in which violence was used on both sides — did not stop the army. But at the right moment, approached with the tools of non-violence, the army was stopped.

Wars are not generally the result of “arms races” or “misunderstandings” that can be prevented with international mediation, Max Boot argues, on the 100th anniversary of the triggering of the Great War:

Rather they are usually the result of deliberate policies by capricious regimes which may not want to fight but are willing to risk conflict in order to achieve their power-hungry aims. It stands to reason that the best bet for preventing future conflict is not in sponsoring more diplomatic negotiations but rather in the forces of freedom keeping their powder dry.

That is something that Great Britain, the guardian of international order in the pre-1914 world, singularly failed to do: London was willing to maintain the greatest fleet in the world but its army was so small that it was not reckoned to be a serious factor in continental calculations and its willingness to stand up to German aggression was in doubt. This hesitancy and unpreparedness on the part of London gave Imperial Germany the opening it was seeking to launch a preemptive campaign of conquest against both France and Russia – something that even the German General Staff, arrogant as they were, might not have dared had they been certain of massive and timely British intervention.

The emotional legacies of the Great War are different for different countries:

For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion. Preventing the German Army from reaching Paris in the first battle of the Marne spelled the difference between freedom and slavery. The second battle of the Marne, with the help at last of American soldiers, was the beginning of the end for the Germans. This was France’s “good war,” while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration.

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For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals. The Germans, too, are still coming to terms with their past, unsure how much to press their current economic and political strength in Europe.

For Britain, there remains a debate about whether the British even had to fight. But fight they did, with millions of volunteers until the dead were mounded so high that conscription was finally imposed in 1916. The memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed — has marked British consciousness and become a byword for mindless slaughter.

Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was tragic but good for peace, the New York Times announced 100 years ago. Matthew Yglesias explains:

The Times reported that “in Russia, England, and France the Archduke Francis Ferdinand was regarded as one of the most serious dangers to the European peace” while “even in Germany his accession to the throne was viewed with apprehension.” Their view was that Franz Ferdinand was a proponent of an aggressively anti-Serbian foreign policy, and that his removal from the order of succession made a Balkan conflict less likely.

By contrast, the new heir apparent, “while popular in Vienna is described as a young man of no remarkable ability.”