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But this is exactly what you shouldn't be doing -- determining the legitimacy of tactics by assuming they're being used by someone whose cause you like. There's

• scarmig 15y ago
  There's a misunderstanding here. I wasn't saying that those tactics are justified because Martin Luther King wrote a justification of them. I'm saying Martin Luther King wrote a justification of them, and a damn good one. The point is not the reference but what the reference points to.
  • hugh3 15y ago
    Honestly, I didn't read the whole thing, I only vaguely skimmed it. Can you summarize his argument? It seemed to boil down to "This is the right thing to do, because we're right, and the other guys are wrong"
    • scarmig 15y ago
      A key paragraph: "You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. 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. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue." The point of nonviolent activism isn't to harm someone else or their economic well-being (though the latter is often a side effect). It's to force a rupture or break in the institutions of a community to resolve what King calls an underlying tension in that community. By forcing people in power to use violence against nonviolence, it disrupts the ruling ideology by pointing out its hypocrisy and forcing action by threatening the breakdown of the social order predicated on that ideology. Of course, a neo-Nazi may well try a sit down, but that's likely to be ineffective as it's not exploiting any inherent tension and isn't going to cause any huge community squabbles that have the potential to degenerate into violence. As to why it's okay to threaten the social order... well, in effect because laws and order exist to establish justice, and we are compelled by moral law to oppose unjust laws. Which is, you might say, just saying we should do this because this is right. Perhaps. But it's a difficult proposition to say every action can be be considered individually and judged without moral context. Occupied Resistance in WW2 fought the Nazis and broke many laws (including not just vandalism but murder). A slave in pre-Civil War America who ran away, and anyone who helped that slave run away, was breaking many federal and state laws, as well as seriously disrupting the economy and commerce. Those were unjust situations, though, and so it was right.