Effective Nonviolent Resistance | Teen Ink

Effective Nonviolent Resistance

January 27, 2017
By Tallula77 PLATINUM, Sandhausen, Other
Tallula77 PLATINUM, Sandhausen, Other
46 articles 0 photos 4 comments

Favorite Quote:
With shortness of breath, I'll explain the infinite- how rare and beautiful it is that we exist
By sleeping at last


When people have a fundamental issue, giving up is not an option. For these types of conflicts when people's rights are violated, their countries are occupied and they are oppressed and humiliated they need a powerful way to resist and fight back which means that no matter how distructive or terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it.

Most of us are concerned of the level of violence in the world but we're not going to end war by telling people that war is morally wrong instead we must offer them a tool that is at least as powerful and that is as affective as violence.

 

People have been using nonviolence action for thousands of years. In fact most of the rights that we have today, in this countrie as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orrientations and as citizens concerned of the enviornment. These rights weren't handed to us. They were won by people that fought for us and who sacrificed themselves for us. But because we haven't learned from this the history of nonviolence struggle is a technique widely  been misunderstood. Many people say that they have tried nonviolence action and it had'nt worked. The idea that nonviolence struggle  is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. Although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own they don't actually want to create change. At least change that is fundamental. Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely or even not so nicely. Nonviolence struggle works by destroying an opponent. Not physically but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive. And then denying them these sources of power. Nonviolent activists can neutralise the military  by causing soldiers to defect, they can disrupt the economy through strikes and they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media. There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. There are found to be over 198 methods of nonviolent action, protest being only one.


Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. A general with his marching troops can't go into battle unless he has a plan to win the war yet this is how most of the worlds nonviolence actions opperate. Nonviolent struggle is just as complex as miliatary warfare if not more. It's participants must be well trained and have clear objectives, and it's leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve these objectives. The technique of war has been developed for thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to our understanding and approving of how it works. Meanwhile nonviolence struggle is rarely systematically studied and even though the numbers are growing there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. This is dangerous because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we are facing. The U.S government recently admitted that it's  impossible to nonviolently fight ISIS and that it's war against them.

But what many people don't know is that people have already stood up to ISIS using nonviolence action. When ISIS captured Moso in June 2014 they announced that they were putting  in place a new public school curiculum based on their own extremist ideaology. But on the first day of school not a single child showed up. Parents simply refused to send their children to school and they told the terrorists they would rather home school their children than to have them brainwashed. This is an example of just one active define in just one city. But what if this coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolence resistance that have taken place against ISIS. What if the parents's boycought was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function.


The skilled labour needed to produce food, the engineers needed to extract and refine oil, the media infrastructure and the communications network, the transportations systems and the local businesses that the ISIS relies on. It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent but it's time that we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have, enfacing it.

 

Heres an idea worth spreading: lets learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful just like we do with other systems in technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet humans needs. It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in a place of war. Violence is a tool of conflict that could then be abondened in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. With human innovation we can make nonviolence struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war.  The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete.


The author's comments:

A very important topic and an easy way to peace.


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