Human Beings Are People, Not Things
I was reading the book A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, and came across a passage on p. 29 that sent ice water through my veins. Under discussion were the events of “Bloody Sundy” in St. Petersburg, Russia, in January 1905:
The march on the Winter Palace changed everything: The public’s acquiescence to autocracy was ruptured, and the country would soon begin the greatest convulsion of its history. In the eyes of the organizers, the march was a victory: The honor and legitimacy of the Tsar did, as they predicted, “drown in blood.” But the working men and women who marched that day had taken the meaning of their action at face value, as a humble request for justice, not as a deliberate act of conflict with their lives on the line. They had been drawn into a movement many were not aware of joining.
On a similar note, Saul Alinsky approvingly claims in Rules for Radicals (p. 96) that
… at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre [Samuel Adams] was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution…
What I find disturbing about both of these passages is the implied willingness of political agitators to sacrifice other people’s lives for the sake of their cause. It is one thing to ask people to participate in an act of resistance while being open about the dangers involved, and taking steps to mitigate the risks. It is quite another to lead people unknowingly into the lion’s den, and hope to provoke the beast to bloodshed. The latter puts the interests of an abstract cause above those of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. It relegates those human beings to the status of tools, means to an end; and such “end justifies the means” thinking led to the murders of at least 150 million people in the 20th century.
Human beings are people; they are ends in themselves; they are not things. This is something we must never lose sight of in our own struggle.