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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? |
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There is no answer at this time. |
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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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