Filed with 60.23 History · Related: 60.13 Wars · 60.14 Colonialism
Pinker’s Chapter 7 supplement — nonviolence as coercive strategy, not passivity
Pinker reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” as an example of moral knowledge assembled across traditions: biblical and Black-church rhetoric, Enlightenment individual rights, Niebuhr’s realism about groups, and Gandhi’s strategy. On this account, nonviolence is not simply refusing to fight. Sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations impose costs while controlling the form of confrontation.
The strategic logic has several parts: a prohibition on violence filters out participants attracted mainly to mayhem; discipline preserves morale and focus after setbacks; refusing to supply a plausible pretext for retaliation helps the movement retain third-party sympathy; visibly one-sided repression can split the opponent’s coalition; and persistent disruption keeps pressure on the disputed institution. Pinker explicitly says the method does not work against every enemy. Its force depends on audiences, defections, institutional constraints, communication, and an adversary vulnerable to legitimacy costs.
Pinker’s broader historical claim is that the late-twentieth-century rights movements were unusually nonviolent by earlier revolutionary standards. The urban riots of the 1960s were not the civil-rights movement’s principal tactics; Stonewall was nonlethal; and animal-rights terrorism remained fringe. That comparison supports a strategic case for disciplined nonviolence without implying that the movements produced no disorder, coercion, or violence at their margins. Chapter 7 synthesis · King’s intellectual synthesis, PDF pp. 663–664 (file not included in this release) · Mechanisms of strategic nonviolence, PDF pp. 664–665 (file not included in this release) · Rights movements and the comparative violence claim, PDF p. 665 (file not included in this release)
Idea from: The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel - Haviv Rettig Gur - YouTube
- 1:30hrs
This idea of “coercive nonviolence”
Zero-sum to
Pleading with what people claim to be.
Terrorism_Violent_Extremism_Six_Principles_of_Non-Violence.pdf