Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

1 June 2018Comment

Students and unions defeat jobs law

Goal: The repeal of the First Employment Contract (CPE) law.
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 6 points of 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 3 / 3
TOTAL: 10 / 10

January 2006 in France was a tense time. Economic growth had been unexpectedly poor. National unemployment was at nearly 10 percent, totalling more than 2.5 million people. People under 26 suffered a joblessness rate of 22–23 percent nationwide and 40 or 50 percent in France’s poorest communities. Urban…

1 April 2018Feature

The Christian church is well-placed to be a movement for nonviolence

Bronze statue of Roman emperor Constantine I, York Minster. Constantine’s version of Christianity was a violent, imperial religion. Photo: York Minster CC-BY-SA-2.0

In February 2003, 15 years ago, millions of people marched in the UK and across the world opposing US president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair over their planned invasion of Iraq. Any pride at the strength and vitality of that anti-war mobilisation is overshadowed by the obvious truth that we failed to…

1 April 2018Comment

Textile workers win economic justice

Goals: A wage increase of 35 percent to cover ‘dearness’ (cost of living) for textile labourers. Or to reach agreement with the Mill Agents’ Group to settle the dispute through arbitration.
Success in achieving specific demands: 6 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 / 1
Growth: 3 / 3

A heavy monsoon season in 1917 destroyed agricultural crops and led to a plague epidemic claiming nearly 10 percent of the population of the city of Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat. During…

1 February 2018Comment

Women struggle for the vote

Goal: Suffrage for women of Kuwait
Success in achieving specific demands: 6 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 / 1
Growth: 3 / 3

The country of Kuwait acquired independence from the UK in 1961. Women seized the moment to seek further liberation. As an act of defiance, many women burned their robes, rejected notions of female dress. A year later, the Kuwaiti parliament passed new election laws that limited the electorate to men over the age of 21, whose families lived in…

1 December 2017Feature

Gabriel Carlyle reports on Pax Christi's recent speaking tour

Riders in a London Bikestormz event, July 2017. Photo: Huck Magazine


2 October is the official UN International Day of Non-Violence (no, I didn’t know either). So what better way to spend it than in London with the folk from Pax Christi, the international Catholic movement for peace, at the first of their four ‘Nonviolence Works!’ seminars? (The other events took place in Leeds, Birmingham and Liverpool.)

Arriving, I bumped into PN contributor Henrietta…

1 December 2017Review

PM Press 2017; 192pp; £14.99

‘When our enemies expect us to respond to provocation with violence, we must react calmly and peacefully; just as they anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade.’ This is pretty much the only ‘reflection on the role of armed struggle in North America’ that you will find in Ward Churchill’s 1986 essay, ‘Pacifism as Pathology’. These words, quoted approvingly, are from Black Nationalist activist Kwame Ture (formerly nonviolent civil rights Freedom Rider Stokely Carmichael).

27 October 2017Project

The Russian Revolution started in Petrograd in February 1917 with a mass nonviolent uprising of women protesting against the lack of break on International Women's Day (pictured), and continued through to the overthrow of the Provisional Government in October 1917 and the triumph of the Bolsheviks. The role of mass nonviolent action - in the streets, in the factories, on the railways, and in the barracks - in the making of the revolution has never been properly emphasised.

1 October 2017Comment

Violence and a lack of principle helped undermine the movements against German fascism in the 1930s - today's social movements should take heed, argues Milan Rai

Roter Frontkaempfer Bund Logo.
Image: Kille via Wikimedia Commons.

 

US radical Noam Chomsky recently warned against ‘self-destructive’ anti-fascist tactics such as disrupting right-wing meetings, something that is ‘wrong in principle’, he told the Washington Examiner.

Chomsky added: ‘When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That’s quite apart from the opportunity…

1 October 2017News

Campaign Nonviolence plan 'Referendum for a nonviolent future' for 2018

Hundreds of peace and justice events took place in the Campaign Nonviolence Week of Actions in the US in late September. Sponsors Pace e Bene say they are already aiming at next year’s action week (15–23 September 2018) which will take place just before important US congressional elections.

Campaign Nonviolence wants to frame those mid-term elections as a ‘Referendum for a Nonviolent Future’: ‘Will we ratify the policies of violence and injustice – or will we set a new course for…

1 October 2017News

Head of Bil’in Popular Committee against the Wall comes to Aberystwyth

On 10 July, some 50 Ceredigion residents gathered in the Morlan Centre in Aberystwyth to hear Iyad Burnat bear poignant witness to a life of resistance in his native Bil’in, a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank some seven miles to the west of Ramallah. Bil’in has been divided by Israel’s separation barrier which cuts off access to half of its agricultural land.

Iyad is the head of the Bil’in Popular Committee against the Wall (PCAW) which for the last 12 years has staged…

1 October 2017Review

New Internationalist, 2016; 136pp; £9.99

Sean Michael Wilson’s latest non-fiction comic book – written in conjunction with the political philosopher Brad Evans – surveys a wide variety of thinking about violence, by 10 figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon to Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky.

Unfortunately, most of the treatments are – perhaps necessarily, given their brevity – fairly superficial. I suspect that some of the showcased thinkers (for example Judith Butler) have…

1 October 2017Feature

Nonviolent action was a crucial - and oft-negelected - part of the Russian Revolution, argues Milan Rai

Women begin the revolution on International Women’s Day, 1917. PHOTO: Petrograd State museum of political history of Russia

The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have succeeded without fearless nonviolent action by hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers. Even the ‘storming’ of the Winter Palace on 25 October was largely nonviolent. Yes, there was plenty of revolutionary armed action in Russia in the course of 1917, but there were also many extraordinary, inspiring,…

1 August 2017Comment

The most effective actions exert power and engage conscience, argues Milan Rai

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a group against AIDS, protests in New York City against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. PHOTO: riekhavoc via Wikimedia Commons

Someone rang up the other day and asked what PN thought about ‘peace education’. I said that there was a range of things going on, from super-fluffy let’s-just-be-nice-to-each-other talk which does more harm than good, through activist history and analysis, to training that helps people to gain skills and to…

21 July 2017Blog

A report from a Christian conference on nonviolence.

The practice of nonviolence was an integral part of the life, teaching and work of Jesus. This was the message heard by those attending the conference Reclaiming Gospel Nonviolence, sponsored by the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, Pax Christi and the Fellowship of Reconciliation held in Kinnoull, Perth on 14-16 July.

John Dear, a Roman Catholic priest from the USA, looked over the life of Jesus and the lives of the early Christians to draw inspiration for the idea that practising peace…

1 June 2017Review

AK Press 2016; 231pp; £14

We are halfway through Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be before Shon Meckfessel clarifies what his title is about.

Along the way, he refers to postmodernists such as Deleuze and Althusser and sprinkles in words like ‘materiality’, ‘imaginary’ (as a noun) and ‘profanation’.
The main purpose of the book is to justify ‘counterhegemonic’ rioting. There are chapters on the ‘eloquence’ of public property destruction and of clashing with the police.

Meckfessel writes…