Deming, Barbara

Deming, Barbara

Barbara Deming

3 April 2014Feature

This classic text from 1971 pushes nonviolent activists to respect and value rage and untangles our political and personal relationships to this emotion.  


Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Seven Deadly Sins
or the Seven Vices - Anger. Photo: via wikicommons

I have been asked to talk about the relation between war resistance and resistance to injustice.

There are many points to be made that I need hardly belabour. I don’t have to argue with any of you at this conference that if we resist war we must look to the causes of war; try to end them. And that one finds the causes of war in any society that encourages not fellowship but…

13 August 2011Feature

A classic pacifist statement from the US, 1968

Do you want to remain pure? Is that it?” a black man asked me, during an argument about nonviolence. It is not possible to act at all and to remain pure; and that is not what I want, when I commit myself to the nonviolent discipline. I stand with all who say of present conditions that they do not allow men and women to be fully human and so they must be changed - all who not only say this but are ready to act.

When one is confronted with what Russell Johnson calls accurately “The…