Violence & nonviolence

‘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).

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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.

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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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

‘But what about Nazi Germany?’ No doubt many Peace News readers have been asked this question when they have voiced support for nonviolence.

Summarising a range of published material, George Paxton shows that nonviolent resistance to Adolf Hitler’s government was widespread. And though it is often poorly-referenced and somewhat repetitive, this feels like one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time.

From underground newspapers, open letters, graffiti, and…

Nonviolent Palestinian activists are facing a new wave of repression, demonstrating again that the Israeli authorities fear effective nonviolent action.

Israeli officials themselves know ‘we don’t do Gandhi very well’, as the then director of policy and political-military affairs at the Israel ministry of defence, major general (reserves) Amos Gilad, said in February 2010. Gilad, who retired in February after 14 years in that critical post, was talking to US officials about the…

South African professor Pumla Dineo Gqola’s latest book comes without any trigger warnings. Frank and affecting, it demands more attention be given to reducing the frequency of gender-based assaults and eventually the eradication of such violence altogether. In contrast to publications such as Nina Burrowes’ The Courage To Be Me, which may offer comfort and support for victims/survivors, this book instead challenges the behavioural patterns and ideologies in our societies that…

Last year, excluding suicides, over 13,000 people in the US – including roughly 2,500 children and teenagers – were killed by firearms. In 2012 – the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available – the number of gun murders per capita in the US was nearly 30 times that in the UK.

Yet, though ‘each individual death is experienced as a family tragedy that ripples through a community,’ notes Gary Younge ‘the sum total barely earns a national shrug’. Indeed, with the…

In mid-September, Pat Gaffney of Pax Christi was invited to Scotland to share her experience of a conference in Rome in April which called the Christian church to recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence. Pat’s visit to Glasgow and Edinburgh was organised by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Scottish Christians against Nuclear Arms and the Scottish Justice and Peace Commission.

The Rome conference looked at all the ways in which Jesus proclaimed nonviolence. In words, he…