by Admin | July 28th, 2008
Last week I and Sonia Silbert of the Washington Peace Center gave a workshop on nonviolent direct action for Peace Action and the Student Peace Action Network in Washington DC. We provided a fairly typical introduction workshop that included role plays in nonviolent action, some history, principles, and methods of NVDA. We also tried something new. We asked participants to share common criticisms of nonviolent action that they had heard from others in their community. The list included:
- Disruptive and counter-productive
- undemocratic, mob-rule
- hippies,
- don’t do it, it will destroy your future,
- ineffective
What I intend to do in future workshops is to spend more time on these criticism, seeing which ones are at least partially true and seek ways to minimize these criticisms. If any of the readers have ideas on ways to explore the dangers/downsides/weaknesses of nonviolent action, please share below.
Note that criticisms is not synonymous with “misconceptions about nonviolence” that is commonly done in workshops. Some of the criticism above are “misconceptions” but many of them are partially true. Trainings/Workshops need to address the criticisms and concerns full-on rather than calling them misperceptions and ignoring them.
Which of these criticism above has some merit, and do we address them?