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waging a good war
Feb. 20th, 2025 01:48 pmThomas E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won its Battles, 1954-1968.
Ricks is a U.S. military historian. If you're used to thinking about nonviolence as a set of lofty ideals, this project raises immediate questions: why would a military historian be interested? And why would someone who is morally committed to nonviolence--someone like me--care what he thinks?
But there's an intensely practical case for nonviolence as well. I learned this partly from reading Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's work on nonviolent regime change, and partly by turning the counterinsurgency writing of David Kilcullen upside-down.
Here's the thing. Most people, regular people living under whatever government, just want to live their lives. To do that, they need to feel safe--not perfectly safe, but convinced that lightning or roving bands of leopards or the other generalized dangers of existence are unlikely to strike them personally. The task of a counterinsurgency operation is to convince people that their government can keep them safe. A group that wants to change government, for instance by overthrowing the incredibly repressive system of Jim Crow, needs to convince regular people that their government does not protect them.
One way to do this is to make the government's violence visible.
When you think of the civil rights movement this way, as a deliberate and ultimately successful campaign to confront a violent enemy, it's easier to see why a military historian would be interested.
Specifically, Waging a Good War is about the campaigns waged by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr.'s group) and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group that organized the Freedom Summer). It describes the Movement's strategy (how people chose, or failed to choose, their overarching goals) and tactics (how they pursued them), with regular comparisons to U.S. military campaigns. Most of the comparisons reference World War II; it's clear that Ricks prefers writing about people whom he thinks are the good guys, though he doesn't try to beatify any of the leaders whose decisions he examines.
If you're looking for an overview of the civil rights movement with an emphasis on techniques that other protest groups might try to emulate, this is a very solid place to start. I found, as I hoped, lots of practical information about planning and training. I learned about many civil rights leaders whose names I had not known, and learned more about people of whom I had only heard in passing. In particular, this book is full of praise for the leadership and insight of Diane Nash. As a mathematician, I was aware of the Algebra Project founded by Bob Moses (a very different person from the city planner by the same name!), but had no idea about his foundational role in Freedom Summer. That portion of my ignorance has now been rectified.
One theme that I did not anticipate is PTSD, or, as Ricks often terms it, combat stress. He devotes a substantial portion of the book to the question of what happens after a major operation, how survivors recover or fail to recover. I've seen echoes of the struggles Ricks describes among friends who were heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. The questions he raises about how an organization might try to plan for the aftermath of a huge effort are important. Even in activist circles, I've generally heard this discussed in terms of individual burnout, rather than as a problem of collective support.
Waging a Good War is clear about its own scope. Some elements of the civil rights movement fall outside that scope; in particular, this is not the right place to find a detailed account of the NAACP's legal strategy. A more serious and less intentional limitation is that this book does not contemplate the U.S. as a colonialist power. Occasionally, this flavor of patriotism impedes Ricks' efforts to find an appropriate military simile. Here he is talking about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, for example:
I am not a military expert, but I don't think it's difficult to find twentieth- and twenty-first century examples of the U.S. cooperating with people it termed warlords!
But this isn't the kind of book you read to stoke your cynicism; it's the kind of book you read to gear up for a long march. If you think a book like Waging a Good War could be useful to you, it almost certainly will.
Ricks is a U.S. military historian. If you're used to thinking about nonviolence as a set of lofty ideals, this project raises immediate questions: why would a military historian be interested? And why would someone who is morally committed to nonviolence--someone like me--care what he thinks?
But there's an intensely practical case for nonviolence as well. I learned this partly from reading Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's work on nonviolent regime change, and partly by turning the counterinsurgency writing of David Kilcullen upside-down.
Here's the thing. Most people, regular people living under whatever government, just want to live their lives. To do that, they need to feel safe--not perfectly safe, but convinced that lightning or roving bands of leopards or the other generalized dangers of existence are unlikely to strike them personally. The task of a counterinsurgency operation is to convince people that their government can keep them safe. A group that wants to change government, for instance by overthrowing the incredibly repressive system of Jim Crow, needs to convince regular people that their government does not protect them.
One way to do this is to make the government's violence visible.
When you think of the civil rights movement this way, as a deliberate and ultimately successful campaign to confront a violent enemy, it's easier to see why a military historian would be interested.
Specifically, Waging a Good War is about the campaigns waged by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr.'s group) and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group that organized the Freedom Summer). It describes the Movement's strategy (how people chose, or failed to choose, their overarching goals) and tactics (how they pursued them), with regular comparisons to U.S. military campaigns. Most of the comparisons reference World War II; it's clear that Ricks prefers writing about people whom he thinks are the good guys, though he doesn't try to beatify any of the leaders whose decisions he examines.
If you're looking for an overview of the civil rights movement with an emphasis on techniques that other protest groups might try to emulate, this is a very solid place to start. I found, as I hoped, lots of practical information about planning and training. I learned about many civil rights leaders whose names I had not known, and learned more about people of whom I had only heard in passing. In particular, this book is full of praise for the leadership and insight of Diane Nash. As a mathematician, I was aware of the Algebra Project founded by Bob Moses (a very different person from the city planner by the same name!), but had no idea about his foundational role in Freedom Summer. That portion of my ignorance has now been rectified.
One theme that I did not anticipate is PTSD, or, as Ricks often terms it, combat stress. He devotes a substantial portion of the book to the question of what happens after a major operation, how survivors recover or fail to recover. I've seen echoes of the struggles Ricks describes among friends who were heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. The questions he raises about how an organization might try to plan for the aftermath of a huge effort are important. Even in activist circles, I've generally heard this discussed in terms of individual burnout, rather than as a problem of collective support.
Waging a Good War is clear about its own scope. Some elements of the civil rights movement fall outside that scope; in particular, this is not the right place to find a detailed account of the NAACP's legal strategy. A more serious and less intentional limitation is that this book does not contemplate the U.S. as a colonialist power. Occasionally, this flavor of patriotism impedes Ricks' efforts to find an appropriate military simile. Here he is talking about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, for example:
There are few analogies for this situation in conventional modern Western military history. Rather, Hoover operated like a medieval warlord, both an ally of the sovereign and a danger to him...
I am not a military expert, but I don't think it's difficult to find twentieth- and twenty-first century examples of the U.S. cooperating with people it termed warlords!
But this isn't the kind of book you read to stoke your cynicism; it's the kind of book you read to gear up for a long march. If you think a book like Waging a Good War could be useful to you, it almost certainly will.
