Nonviolence is about winning the hearts and minds of our opponent through persuasion. Does coercion have a place in this?
Nonviolence is about building relationships of trust and openness. Is secrecy ever appropriate?
Is property destruction violence?
How can we be serious nonviolent people with anger still in our hearts?
How does suffering connect with our actions?
Should we be dogmatic about our approach to injustice?
Pesuasion vs Coercion
Nonviolence is about winning the hearts and minds of our opponent through persuasion. Does coercion have a place in this? Can coercive acts be described as nonviolent?
- Nonviolent change is about persuading and converting our opponent, and many people are uncomfortable with coercive behaviour. Can a distinction be made between coercion and violence? Is there such a concept as nonviolent coercion?
- Is coercion a more assertive form of persuasion? Think of how we bring up children; do we use coercion to stop them doing harm? Do we help force decisions in other parts of our lives? Is pulling someone out of the way to save them from injury a coercive act? Is it nonviolent?
- When challenging long entrenched vested interests, is persuasive argument sufficient even to gain the attention of our opponents? Will persuasion alone change them? What if the issue is very urgent?
- Some argue that creative coercive actions can go a long way to changing a situation, and still be nonviolent. Can direct action coerce an opponent into stopping what they are doing without physically harming or degrading them?
Secrecy vs Openness
Nonviolence is about building relationships of trust, including with your opponent. How does secrecy contribute to this?
- Secrecy tends to breed mistrust and suspicion and is inconsistent with the ethos of nonviolence, which favours openness and accountability. But would this work, say, in totalitarian societies?
- Even in more liberal societies some actions depend upon surprise for their effectiveness, for example, banner drops with key campaigning messages on well-known buildings.
- Integrity is a fundamental part of nonviolence, which Gandhi saw as a search for truth. In the Second World War, Dutch Quakers secretly hid Jewish friends in their homes and, when questioned, refused to reveal this to the Gestapo. Were they acting out of truth and integrity?
Property Destruction
Violence to property is still violence. How can it be called nonviolence?
- This is another area where context and motive are all important. We are talking here about carefully prepared and executed actions that focus on particular property.
- Is "violence to property" a more contentious issue in affluent and property-conscious societies?
- In 1980, American activists (King of Prussia Ploughshares 1980) who damaged nuclear weapon parts and equipment identified as part of their legal defence the concept of "improper property", which they argued was property that has no right to exist. They included in this weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction and otherwise neutral property like fences that serve to protect something that intrinsically harms humanity.
- Nonviolent actions that involved property damage include the pulling down of the Berlin Wall (1989), pulling down the fence at Greenham Common nuclear weapons base (1983), disabling a Hawk fighter aircraft bound for the repressive Indonesian government (1985), emptying a floating laboratory serving the Trident nuclear weapons system (1999), disabling B52 bombers to prevent them bombing Iraq (2003), pulling up genetically modified crops from test fields (1999).
- Many who support such actions ask those who don't what they would do if they heard the cries of a distressed child behind a door. Would they break down the door to rescue the child?
Anger
Anger is a destructive emotion and the opposite of what nonviolence claims to be. How can we be serious nonviolent people with anger still in our hearts?
- A common view about peace and nonviolence is that it is inconsistent with anger, and that we should work to eliminate these feelings. Anger often leads to hatred and both emotions form the basis for so much destructive action. They encourage defensive or retaliatory behaviour in opponents, inhibit dialogue and place barriers in the way of positive change. Hatred clouds thinking and makes it difficult to separate the person from their actions, an essential requirement for nonviolence.
- But can anger and hatred be separated? Can you be angry at the act without hating the person? Can anger be channelled? Can it be used as a positive form of energy that leads us into creative action?
- For many activists, the anger they feel when they see people suffering or the natural world dying is directly related to the love and compassion they have for these things. Their anger is a measure of their love. It's the thing that led them to action in the first place, and fuels their continued activism.
Suffering
Seeing the suffering of others is often the trigger for our own actions. Our own suffering in the struggle is often a key and inevitable part of the work of challenging injustice and oppression - the connection to the hearts of others, including the perpetrator. But how far do we go with this?
- Realistically, if you are confronting an inherently violent system, there is a chance that the violence will come to the surface and manifest itself in a physical way. Sometimes nonviolent action has that very intention, to make the violence in the system more visible so it can get dealt with.
- In 1963 Martin Luther King Jnr deliberately chose Birmingham, Alabama as the focus for intensive resistance to desegregation because it was the city he saw as the toughest on black people. Police began using their clubs on marchers and turned their dogs on them. Water from powerful fire hoses knocked them to the ground. Pictures of this unprovoked brutality appeared in newspapers all over the country. People were shocked. In retrospect, this was a turning point in the entire US civil rights movement, when large numbers of white middle class Americans began supporting the civil rights movement.
- For Gandhi, suffering was a core aspect of the struggle, and one that served to move the heart of the oppressor. Although this is a traditional component of nonviolence, could for example Gandhi's fasts be regarded as violence to self?
Diversity of Tactics vs Dogmatic Nonviolence
Should we be dogmatic about our approach to injustice? Should we all challenge and defeat it in whatever way is right for us? Surely, the wider the range of approaches, the more effective we shall be. Does this mean that violent and nonviolent approaches can work together?
- This is about who we work with in social change actions and who wants to work with us.
- A fundamental principle of nonviolent activism is to be prepared to take the violence on yourself without giving it out. This is where those who adopt nonviolence as a useful tactic depart from those who see it as a core principle and way of living. For example, in situations where protesters are suffering violence from police, they may assert their right to defend themselves, violently if necessary.
- A counter argument is that acceptance of activist violence can undermine and detract from the issue at stake. It also provides easier entry points for agents provocateurs, who can (and do) infiltrate resistance groups and advocate violence deliberately to undermine them.
- When activists use violence against a system that is massively more violent, the focus tends to be on the violence and the situation can become polarised and locked. And more people get hurt.
- Part of the strength of social change activism is its creativity and diversity. Some will argue for careful preparation, others for the freedom to express opposition one's own way, perhaps spontaneously on the day.
- Many have argued that these disagreements divide the movement and that we are at our strongest when we all work together with our differences. Others maintain that acceptance of violence excludes them.
