Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Social Reaction: A Nonviolent Amazon Perspective

In a TransAdvocate article entitled “On the Ethics and Utility of Violence,” an anonymous contributor makes the case for such violent acts as punching Richard Spencer, a white supremacist who has invoked Nazi slogans, in the middle of an interview while he was assaulting no one and posed no physical threat to anyone. Far from a “victory,” I find that act of violence a surrender to the ethos of patriarchy and domination, as opposed to the values of feminism, democracy, and active nonviolent resistance to racism and militarism. Sadly, over three decades after the publication of such classic works as Barbara Deming’s Revolution and Equilibrium (1971) and Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), there are still basic misunderstandings about the nature of nonviolence as a religious or philosophical commitment, and nonviolent action as a practical technique of struggle often used by those who might have used armed self-defense

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