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Q: Theories and Applications of Nonviolent Mass Action ( No Answer,   3 Comments )
Question  
Subject: Theories and Applications of Nonviolent Mass Action
Category: Science > Social Sciences
Asked by: universal-ga
List Price: $10.00
Posted: 21 Aug 2003 13:25 PDT
Expires: 31 Aug 2003 18:08 PDT
Question ID: 247388
To prepare you for the question, I'll ask you to reimagine the opening
scene of "Saving Private Ryan" in the following way:

Instead of finding brave soldiers landing on the Beaches of Normandy
on D-day, we find a arguably braver coalition of UNARMED nonviolent
mass actors landing, in the millions, on the beaches of Normandy to
both manifest and submit "love for life" by engaging warring troops
with a demand that the violence cease, a committment to disarm them
peacfully, and a committment to bearing witness to the necessary
primacy of the anti-violent, sacrificial way of being in the world.

As they are shot up and killed by the Nazi war machine - to the tune
of hundreds and thousands of dead nonviolent mass actors (mechanics
and housewives, teachers and accountants, homeless and prep schoolers,
farmers and others of all global persuasions) - they continue, of
course horrified but unabated, to sweep towards those German gun
positions that are taking life in order to remove the weapons from
those German hands in that mode of self-defense best described as the
way you would "disarm" a beloved Uncle who, at a family gathering, had
imbibed too much alcohol and was a danger to himself and others, i.e.,
with love, of both that Uncle and of all the others...

But before more lives can be sacrificed, German soldiers manning those
positions, most young and impressionable, begin to stop shooting,
unwilling to mow down unarmed civilians from all over the world, even
to the extent that they themselves are shot by superior officers; thus
the false chain of command of militarism, which asks individual humans
to carry out descended decisions, begins to be broken.

The peacful gambit to end the Second so-called "World War" is working.
 The belief that nonviolence enacted could reveal that Hitler (or
Tojo) was just one man, that individual human beings were making
individual decisions to pull triggers, and thus could make a decision
to NOT do so, particularly in the face of a critical mass of actors
committed to both ending the war and doing so without becoming war, is
bearing fruit.

As this group of millions of regular folk sweeps across France and
then Europe, the word moves ahead of them: "Women and Men without guns
are sacrificing themselves in mass numbers to BE peace, and in that
absolutely courageous sacrifice they are forcing each soldier, each
warmaker, to re-consider his own place in dealing out death.  Soldiers
are walking away from the war in droves in the face of being forced to
engage, in all sorts of ways, the truth of nonviolent sacrifice."

In the end, the war is neither won nor lost, but rather it is ceased,
in favor of a brand new paradigm for conflict resolution that begins
to reshape the world, from that moment on that beach, from those
overwhleming sets of acts of sacrifice.  Millions of lives are lost,
but MUCH less lives than in the alternate reality in which we live,
where the war was settled in a nuclear way, leading of course
to...more war.

Okay.  Given the above hypothetical scenario, the question is this: 
Is there ANY place on the 'Net where nonviolent mass action formulated
or thought about in the above way is explored, promoted, criticized or
otherwise engaged?
Answer  
There is no answer at this time.

Comments  
Subject: Re: Theories and Applications of Nonviolent Mass Action
From: snsh-ga on 22 Aug 2003 08:34 PDT
 
I kind of think that if you took the guns away from the americans in
Saving Private Ryan, you would be left with the movie Schindler's
List.

Are you looking for a local community?  A philosphical discussion?  An
activist group?
Subject: Re: Theories and Applications of Nonviolent Mass Action
From: ponzi9-ga on 23 Aug 2003 05:02 PDT
 
Two successful non-violent mass actions come to my mind: Ghandi &
Martin Luther King (who studied Ghandi).  The opponents, in each case,
were fundamentally decent entities that were failing to apply their
own beliefs to a particular cause.
   The non-violence of European Jews led them to death camps by the
millions.
Subject: Re: Theories and Applications of Nonviolent Mass Action
From: universal-ga on 23 Aug 2003 14:56 PDT
 
"Are you looking for a local community?  A philosphical discussion? 
An
activist group?"

All three.

"Two successful non-violent mass actions come to my mind: Ghandi &
Martin Luther King (who studied Ghandi).  The opponents, in each case,
were fundamentally decent entities that were failing to apply their
own beliefs to a particular cause.
   The non-violence of European Jews led them to death camps by the
millions."

An interesting perspective; I disagree vehemently, however.  In fact,
and the above scenario gets at this a bit, there were only thirteen
men driving the praxis of the Nazi party:  Hitler, Georing, and a few
others.  All others were taking orders; orders that classic psychology
experiments in the 1950's showed would likely have ben followed by the
vast majority of humans.

In addition, its also illuminating that you have that take on King and
also, apparently, have that take on the seeming "failure" of Jews in
their implementation of nonviolence.  In fact, King, speaking on 20
May, 1965 to the American Jewish Committee's 58th Annual Meeting,
submitted the following:

"...I have discussed the social effects of nonviolent mass direct
action at length because I believe it is too often limited in its
application merely to the civil rights movement. Perhaps if there had
been a broader understanding of the uses of nonviolent direct action
in Germany when Hitler was rising and consolidating his power, the
brutal extermination of six million Jews and millions of other war
dead might have been averted and Germany might never have become
totalitarian. If Protestants and Catholics had engaged in nonviolent
direct action and had made the oppression of the Jews their very own
oppression and had come into the streets beside the Jew to scrub the
sidewalks, and had Gentiles worn the stigmatizing yellow arm bands by
the millions, a unique form of mass resistance to the Nazi regime
might have developed..."

That's the type of discourse, across cyberspace, that I'm hoping the
guys at Google Answers can help me find...

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