Guys so this essay was written by William P. Meyers and it took me a really long time to type this so i hoped that one of you can finish this essay cause its extremely long. The ideology of nonviolence has come to play a major role in political struggles in the United States of America and, indeed, in nations around the world. Almost every organization seeking radical change in the USA has been targeted by organizers for the nonviolence movement. Organizations like Earth First!, which originally did not subscribe to the ideology of nonviolence, have since then adopted that ideology or at least its set of rules for protest and civil disobedience. Yet nonviolence activists have put little energy into bringing their creed to establishment, reactionary, or openly violent organizations. In this essay it will be argued that nonviolence encourages violence by the state and corporations. The ideology of nonviolence creates effects opposite to what it promises. As a result nonviolence ideologists cooperate in the ongoing destruction of the environment, in continued repression of powerless, and in U.S./corporate attacks on people in foreign nations. To minimize violence we must adopt a pragmatic, reality-based method of operation. I agree that violence, properly defined, is bad. It should, ideally, not be part of how humans deal with each other. I believe that a society should and can be created where no state, economic entity, or religion uses violence against people. In such a society people can achieve their individual and collective goals through voluntary cooperation. But when you scrape the make-up off the face of the ideology of Nonviolence, there you will find, grinning, the very violence it pretends to oppose. Much of the ability of the corporate state to neutralize its opposition in the USA (and elsewhere) depends on purposeful confusion of the language used to discuss the issues. It is important to distinguish exactly what is meant by violence, not being violent, and the ideology of Nonviolence. Most people have a pretty clear idea of what violence is: hitting people, stabbing them, shooting them, on up to incinerating people with napalm or atomic weapons. Not being violent is simply not causing physical harm to someone. But gray areas abound. What about stabbing an animal? What about allowing someone to starve because they cannot find means to pay for food? What about coercing behavior through the threat of violence? Through the threat of losing a job? Violence as a dichotomy, with the only choices being Violence or Non-violence, is not a very useful basis for political discussion, unless you want to confuse people. Violence, the word, must be modified and illustrated to be useful for discussion. In this essay violence against animals, plants, and inanimate objects will be distinguished from violence against humans. Violence, unmodified, will always mean direct violence, actual bashing of people, and will be distinguished from the threat of violence, as when laws are passes with violent penalties attached. Also distinguished will be economic violence, as when economic activity leads to physical harm to humans, such as starvation or disease. Other methods of categorizing violence need to be distinguished, such as violent self-defense against violent predation. The ideology of nonviolence will from this point on be distinguished from ordinary not-being violent by capitalizing it thus: Nonviolence. Most people are not-violent most of the time. Even soldiers and policemen spend more time in a not-violent state than actually committing violent acts. Most social-change activists, including environmentalists, have little or no experience with inflicting violence on other people. Yet the Nonviolence activists target social change activists with their doctrine, rather than teaching it to those policemen, soldiers, politicians and businessmen who do occasionally practice violence. Nonviolence claims to have found a method to bring violence to an end. The fact that it has not worked at all so far has not deterred the adherents of Nonviolence from marching onward towards their millennium. If only more people would listen to us, our dreams would come true, they say. On the other hand they like to claim that non-violence has a remarkable track-record of success, with the gold-medalists of the Nonviolence Olympics usually being put forward as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Nonviolence ideology states that violence begets violence. Since the goal is a non-violent society, (even if other goals are included such as economic justice, national self-determination, etc.), only nonviolent actions can be used in struggles to change society. Thus one may argue (politely), publish, vote, and assemble in protest. At the extreme edge of Nonviolence ideology lies the Holy Grail: non-violent civil disobedience. Nonviolence has but one prescription for all social diseases. It prescribes Gandhi-brand aspirin for everything from a headache to terminal cancer. But the social diseases of the real world are complex, not simple. To gain a proper perspective on what political tools are best used to cure which social diseases you need to be well-informed of the nature of society and of the variety of political tools that are available. It should not surprise anyone that given the complex (and advanced) natures of our social diseases, a one-size fits all political solution is not likely to succeed. To put this is less colorful terms, to change reality you must know reality. You cannot pretend that aspects of reality do not exist just because there is nowhere to put them in your ideological box. It does not matter whether your ideology is Nonviolence, or Marxism, or Free-Market Capitalism; reality will do what it wants to do. So let us examine some aspects of reality. The goal to keep in mind is the minimization of global violence (the total amount of violence against humans on earth. Preferably including economic violence and even threats of violence). The failure to oppose violence encourages or allows violence, and the effectiveness of opposition directly correlates with the level of discouragement of violence. But the opposition needed to stop the rape of a woman may vary greatly according to circumstances (particularly, the personality and experience of the rapist). Such situations can be only of metaphorical use in analyzing the opposition needed to stop a sugar corporation from bribing presidents and congressmen to order the US Army to murder 2 million peasants in order to take their land (as happened when the US grabbed the Philippines in 1898). Since Nonviolence has only one solution to all problems, it can only offer degrees of Nonviolent action for any given situation. For rape I suppose you are supposed to Nonviolently interpose yourself between the rapist and the intended victim. If the rapist has a history of rapes, you can talk to him and tell him about how much better his life would be if he adopted Nonviolence as a way of living. For war against third world peasants you can Up the Level of Nonviolence. You can call for Massive Nonviolent Protest. You can sit in front of a Federal Building for a few minutes before being hauled away by the police, most probably being released after being given a ticket. I should point out here that I have chosen two examples that I know cause ordinary people and even people who believe in Nonviolence to question its effectiveness. That is to make clear that violence as an automatic solution to social problems is just as out of touch with reality as Nonviolence. But I must emphasize that violence is counter-productive in most situations. Situations that are about to escalate into violence can often be diffused by wise intervention, by talking or physically placing oneself between antagonists. In bar-room fights on TV usually once two people start fighting the entire bar crowd starts throwing chairs around, but in reality in most bars friends of the drunken boxers pull them apart until they can calm down. At all levels of society self-defense discourages aggression, and is a far better principle (when extended to the idea of community defense and defense of Mother Earth) to use as a starting point than Nonviolence. The normal interpretation of self and community defense, arrived at after millennia of experimentation by almost all societies on earth, is that you can use as much violence as is necessary to bring an end to the current attack. Of course, this is a matter of judgement. It is also a favorite plea of hypocrites. The Romans used self-defense as a pretext for their village to conquer and rule a territory extending from England to Judea. The “American People” have self-defended themselves from the villages of Roanoke and Plymouth across this continent to the Pacific and on to Hawaii and the Philippines. Nevertheless, self-defense is not only a right, but a duty. A community that refuses to defend itself against aggression encourages further aggression. Under the rules of Nonviolence aggressors always win. There is nothing to stop them from marching around the world, taking what they want, killing those who are inconvenient, and congratulating themselves.