Nonviolent direct action

Destroying fences at the border by the AATW, 2007

Non-violent direct action (NVDA) is any form of direct action that does not rely on violent tactics. Mohandas Gandhi's teachings of Satyagraha (or truth force) have inspired many practitioners of nonviolent direct action, although the use of nonviolence does not always imply an ideological commitment to pacifism. In 1963, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. described the goal of NVDA in his Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

One major debate is whether destruction of property can be included within the realm of nonviolence. This debate can be illustrated by the response to groups like the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, which use property destruction and sabotage as direct action tactics. Although these types of actions are prosecuted as violence, those groups justify their actions by claiming that violence is harm directed towards living things and not property.

In the end, it is a discussion about semantics when the real argument is about ethics. If property destroyers do not feel bad about it, then it can still be violence. They may practice violence against property, but are still nonviolent in the fact that they just do not practice the sort of violence that harms living things, in the same way that people call themselves vegetarian when they are not vegan.

In the United States, the term has largely come to signify civil disobedience, and protest in general. In the 1980s, a California direct action protest group called Livermore Action Group called its newspaper Direct Action. The paper ran for 25 issues, and covered hundreds of nonviolent actions around the world. The book Direct Action: An Historical Novel took its name from this paper, and records dozens of actions in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Human rights activists have used direct action in the ongoing campaign to close the School of the Americas, renamed in 2001 the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. As a result, 245 SOA Watch human rights defenders have collectively spent almost 100 years in prison. More than 50 people have served probation sentences.

"Direct Action" has also served as the moniker of at least two groups: the French Action Directe as well as the Canadian group more popularly known as the Squamish Five. Direct Action is also the name of the magazine of the Australian Wobblies. The UK's Solidarity Federation currently publishes a magazine called Direct Action.

Until 1990, Australia's Socialist Workers Party published a party paper also named "Direct Action", in honour of the Wobblies' history. One of the group's descendants, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, has again started a publication of this name.

Food Not Bombs is often described as direct action because individuals involved directly act to solve a social problem; people are hungry and yet there is food available. Food Not Bombs is inherently dedicated to non-violence.

See also

Christian anarchism Direct action Leo Tolstoy Mohandas K. Gandhi Nonviolence

anti-war WP) civil disobedience WP) consistent Life Ethic WP) monopoly on violence WP) nonresistance WP)

nonviolent communication WP) nonviolent resistance WP) Not one more! WP) pacifism WP) peace churches WP)