Our Tragic Flaw

I have been thinking more about nonviolent strategy and have concluded I need to disavow a statement I wrote in an earlier post: "Gelderloos argues, correctly, than nonviolence is not a strategy. But still, there are such things as nonviolent strategies--strategies that, among other things, do not include the use of violence."

But nonviolence can, in fact, be a strategy. In my earlier remark, I was implicitly accepting Gelderloos' operating understanding of nonviolence as simply any tactic that did not include violence. I was asleep at the switch.

Nonviolence is a strategy when it is consciously employed; when the strategy only includes nonviolent tactics and strictly excludes violent ones; and when the intent is to transcend a violent worldview by consistently and resiliently offering up its antidote. A nonviolent strategy is one that seeks to claim the moral high ground (not just in its rhetoric, which is nothing new, but--and this is the decisive element--in action).