Friday, November 4, 2011

Occupy Non-Violence

It is not enough to say we are non-violent, we have to have serious discussions about violence and non-violence from the perspective of history, theory and ideology. If we can not establish clearly why we are not violent, we create the potential for violence.
In times of social upheaval and revolution, people will find themselves at a point in which violence, if not thoroughly understood, will seem only to be rejected out of political correctness or naivete. They will justify the use of violence as the tool of the most dedicated, as a necessary evil, etc. 
If we are unwilling to have these discussions it is likely because we are afraid of what we will find if we go down that road, which means that on some level we ourselves have not actually rejected violence. We need to open up this dialogue, and do it soon, because violence is not rejected because we are too gentle, or too weak, but because non-violence is actually much more radical and revolutionary than violence, and because violence does not work.

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