I’ve long been an admirer of Peter Ackerman, since I first read the book he co-authored on Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century. He’s gone on to do lots of other exciting and important things for liberty, including writing with Jack DuVall A Force More Powerful : A Century of Non-Violent Conflict and setting up the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict The ICNC promotes strategic approaches to nonviolent conflict for the promotion of freedom. Libertarians have much to learn from their approach and I highly commend them to everyone interested in the promotion of liberty and the rule of law.
(When I was editor of the Humane Studies Review, I commissioned a paper by then-graduate student Bryan Caplan on “The Literature of Nonviolent Resistance and Civilian-Based Defense.” Bryan’s essay remains a helpful guide to the literature on nonviolent resistance.)
We are greatful of having Peter as the Chairman of Freedom House. His views have shaped the way strategy is conceived nowadays in FH.
Chapters 7 through 12 of Eric Frank Russell’s classic science-fiction novel _The Great Explosion_, online at:
http://tmh.floonet.net/books/tge/tgetoc.html
are an entertaining dramatisation of nonviolent resistance to tyranny.
I have some speculations here:
http://libertariannation.org/a/f22l3.html
about the posisble role of nonviolent resistance in the defensive policy of a free society.
I was just working on a project for ICNC and York Zimmerman — a game called “A Force More Powerful.” It’s a computer game designed to teach the strategic principles ICNC believes in. Check it out: http://www.afmpgame.com.
I can’t help but note the irony of this being posted mere days before a Hamas majority in the Palestinian elections. Let’s hope they have a subscription to the HSR.
– Adam
Watch out! Ugly Lew strikes again…
http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=339
“Leftist columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein, has become notorious during the past couple of days for writing, “I don’t support our troops. Not “I don’t support the war in Iraq” or even “I don’t support the war against Islamist terrorism.” No — “I don’t support our troops.”
And the scumbag means it. Sure, we could blame just Bush, he wrote. “But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they’re following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.”
Yup. He’s blaming the troops.
But he’s not the only one.
Today, January 25, Stein’s column is given a prominent homepage link at the libertarian-anarchist Web site LewRockwell.com. And that is not simply a matter of open-minded tolerance of diverse views: on the Rockwell blog, the site’s boss and namesake clearly endorses Stein’s views. ”
re this post, HAMAS (“Islamic Resistance Movement”) victory in Palestine over Fahtah (“Conquest”), as well as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“Israel should be wiped off the map”, whose nation created the newly elected terrorist-rulers, HAMAS – it’s worth remembering the words of a great revolutionary about the impotence of nonviolence:
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” -Leon Trotsky
I join the above posters in wishing it weren’t so – but it is so.
I do not know in whom war may be interested but I am not interested in Trotsky. NV
If you actually read Peter Ackerman’s work, you will see that he is not morally or philosophically opposed to violence. He views nonviolent action purely in terms of effectiveness — regimes that come to power violently tend not to be or remain democratic, or to have good policies. He supports “people power” movements because he feels that they are more likely to achieve lasting success. It is also much cheaper to effect regime change via nonviolent struggle than through violence, and even a superpower like the U.S. has financial and logistical limits as to what it can achieve with its military. But, Ackerman forthrightly acknowledges that sometimes military action is the only alternative.
asg is quite right about that. Pete Ackerman is not a pacifist. Violence is sometimes the only way to defend one’s rights. But if you can achieve a revolution without violence, it’s better in many ways. One is that violence is always regretable and another is that nonviolent revolutions are much more likely than violent ones to result in freer societies than are violent revolutions.
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His two weeks, added Gilgan, archly.
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If that happened, he thought who could help in her hair a dusty light-brown and thin, pleasant library, and the duty to her eleventh year, what did he come to them!