{"id":100837,"date":"2017-10-30T12:01:32","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T12:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=100837"},"modified":"2017-10-28T10:42:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-28T09:42:06","slug":"a-nonviolent-strategy-to-end-violence-and-avert-human-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/10\/a-nonviolent-strategy-to-end-violence-and-avert-human-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"A Nonviolent Strategy to End Violence and Avert Human Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Oct 2017 – <\/em>Around the world activists who are strategic thinkers face a daunting challenge to effectively tackle the multitude of violent conflicts, including the threat of human extinction, confronting human society in the early 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

I wrote that \u2018activists who are strategic thinkers face a daunting challenge\u2019 because there is no point deluding ourselves that the insane global elite \u2013 see \u2018The Global Elite is Insane\u2019<\/a> \u2013 with its compliant international organizations (such as the UN) and national governments following orders as directed, is going to respond appropriately and powerfully to the multifaceted crisis that it has been progressively generating since long before the industrial revolution.<\/p>\n

For reasons that are readily explained psychologically \u2013 see \u2018<\/a>Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War\u2019<\/a> and, for more detail, see \u2018<\/a>Why Violence?<\/a>\u2019<\/a> and \u2018<\/a>Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice<\/a>\u2019<\/a> \u2013 this insanity focuses their attention on securing control of the world\u2019s remaining resources while marginalizing the bulk of the human population in ghettos, or just killing them outright with military violence or economic exploitation (or the climate\/ecological consequences of their violence and exploitation).<\/p>\n

If you doubt what I have written above, then consider the history of any progressive political, social, economic and environmental change in the past few centuries and you will find a long record of activist planning, organizing and action preceding any worthwhile change which was invariably required to overcome enormous elite opposition. In short, if you can identify one progressive outcome that was initiated and supported by the global elite, I would be surprised to hear about it.<\/p>\n

Moreover, we are not going to get out of this crisis \u2013 which must include ending violence, exploitation and war, halting the destruction of Earth\u2019s biosphere and ongoing violent assaults on indigenous peoples, ending slavery, liberating occupied countries such as Palestine, Tibet and West Papua, removing dictatorships such as those in Cambodia and Saudi Arabia, ending genocidal assaults such as those currently being directed against the people of Yemen and the Rohingya in Myanmar, and defending the rights of a people, such as those in Catalonia, to secede from one state and form another \u2013 without both understanding the deep drivers of conflict as well as the local drivers in each case, and then developing and implementing sound and comprehensive strategies, based on this dual-faceted analysis of each conflict.<\/p>\n

In addition, if like Mohandas K. Gandhi, many others and me you accept the evidence that violence is inherently counterproductive and has no countervailing desirability in any context \u2013 expressed most simply by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. when he stated \u2018the enemy is violence\u2019 \u2013\u00a0 then we must be intelligent, courageous and resourceful enough to commit ourselves to planning, developing and implementing strategies that are both exclusively nonviolent and powerfully effective against extraordinarily insane and ruthlessly violent opponents, such as the US government.<\/p>\n

Equally importantly, however, it is not just the violence of the global elite that we must address if extinction is to be averted. We must also tackle the violence that each of us inflicts on ourselves, our children, each other and the Earth too. And, sadly, this violence takes an extraordinary variety of forms having originated no later than the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago. See \u2018A Critique of Human Society since the Neolithic Revolution\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is all of this possible?<\/em><\/p>\n

When I first became interested in nonviolent strategy in the early 1980s, I read widely. I particularly sought out the literature on nonviolence but, as my interest deepened and I tried to apply what I was reading in the nonviolence literature to the many nonviolent action campaigns in which I was involved, I kept noticing how inadequate these so-called \u2018strategies\u2019 in the literature actually were, largely because they did not explain precisely what to do, even though they superficially purported to do so by offering \u2018principles\u2019, \u2018guidelines\u2019, sets of tactics or even \u2018stages of a campaign\u2019.<\/p>\n

I found this shortcoming in the literature most instructive and, because I am committed to succeeding when I engage as a nonviolent activist, I started to read the work of Mohandas K. Gandhi and even the literature on military strategy. By the mid-1980s I had decided to research and write a book on nonviolent strategy because, by then, I had become aware that the individual who understood strategy, whether nonviolent or military, was rare.<\/p>\n

Moreover, there were many conceptions of military strategy, written over more than 2,000 years, and an increasing number of conceptions of what was presented as \u2018nonviolent strategy\u2019, in one form or another, were becoming available as the 1980s progressed. But the flaws in these were increasingly and readily apparent to me as I considered their inadequate theoretical foundations or tried to apply them in nonviolent action campaigns.<\/p>\n

The more I struggled with this problem, the more I found myself reading \u2018The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi\u2019<\/a> in a library basement. After all, Gandhi had led a successful 30 year nonviolent liberation struggle to end the British occupation of India so it made sense that he had considerable insight regarding strategy. Unfortunately, he never wrote it down simply in one place.<\/p>\n

A complicating but related problem was that among those military authors who professed to present some version of \u2018strategic theory\u2019, in fact, most simply presented an approach to strategic planning (such as using a set of principles or a particular operational pattern) or an incomplete theory of strategy (such as \u2018maritime theory\u2019, \u2018air theory\u2019 or \u2018guerrilla theory\u2019) and (often largely unwittingly) passed these off as \u2018strategic theory\u2019, which they are not. And it was only when I read Carl von Clausewitz\u2019s infuriatingly convoluted and tortuously lengthy book On War<\/em> that I started to fully understand strategic theory. This is because Clausewitz actually presented (not in a simple form, I hasten to admit) a strategic theory and then a military strategy that worked in accordance with his strategic theory. \u2018Could this strategic theory work in guiding a nonviolent strategy?\u2019 I wondered.<\/p>\n

Remarkably, the more I read Gandhi (and compared him with other activists and scholars in the field), the more it became apparent to me that Gandhi was the only nonviolent strategist who (intuitively) understood strategic theory. Although, to be fair, it was an incredibly rare military strategist who understood strategic theory either with Mao Zedong a standout exception and other Marxist strategists like Vladimir Lenin and V\u00f5 Nguy\u00ean Gi\u00e1p understanding far more than western military strategists which is why, for example, the US and its allies were defeated in their war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.<\/p>\n

Some years later, after grappling at length with this problem of using strategic theory to guide nonviolent strategy and reading a great deal more of Gandhi, while studying many nonviolent struggles and participating in many nonviolent campaigns myself, I wrote The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach<\/em><\/a>. I wrote this book by synthesizing the work of Gandhi with some modified insights of Clausewitz and learning of my own drawn from the experience and study just mentioned. I have recently simplified and summarized the presentation of this book on two websites: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy<\/a> and Nonviolent Defense\/Liberation Strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let me outline, very simply, nonviolent strategy, without touching on strategic theory, as I have developed and presented it in the book and on the websites.<\/p>\n

Nonviolent Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n

You will see on the diagram of the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel<\/a> that there are four primary components of strategy in the center of the wheel and eight components of strategy that are planned in accordance with<\/em> these four central components. I will briefly describe the four primary components.<\/p>\n

Before doing so, however, it is worth noting that, by using this Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, it is a straightforward task to analyze why so many activist movements and (nonviolent) liberation struggles fail: they simply do not understand the need to plan and implement a comprehensive<\/em> strategy, entailing all twelve components, if they are to succeed.<\/p>\n

So, to choose some examples almost at random, despite substantial (and sometimes widespread) popular support, particularly in some countries, the antiwar movement, the climate justice movement and the Palestinian and Tibetan liberation struggles are each devoid of a comprehensive strategy to deploy their resources for strategic impact<\/em> and so they languish instead of precipitating the outcomes to which they aspire, which are quite possible.<\/p>\n

Having said that a sound and comprehensive strategy must pay attention to all twelve components of strategy it is very occasionally true that campaigns succeed without doing so. This simply demonstrates that nonviolence, in itself, is extraordinarily powerful. But it is unwise to rely on the power of nonviolence alone, without planning and implementing a comprehensive strategy, especially when you are taking on a powerful and entrenched opponent who has much to lose (even if their conception of what they believe they will \u2018lose\u2019 is delusional) and may be ruthlessly violent if challenged.<\/p>\n

For the purpose of this article, the term strategy<\/em> refers to a planned series of actions (including campaigns) that are designed to achieve the two strategic aims (see below).<\/p>\n

The Political Purpose and the Political Demands<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you are going to conduct a nonviolent struggle, whether to achieve a peace, environmental or social justice outcome, or even a defense or liberation outcome, the best place to start is to define the political purpose of your struggle. The political purpose is a statement of \u2018what you want\u2019. For example, this might be one of the following (but there are many possibilities depending on the context):<\/p>\n