Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from chapter 4, There Will Be No End of It, in Lynn Hunt’s new book, Inventing Human Rights: A History. The chapter has to do with the expansive logic of natural rights, and the way in which the universalizing ideal gradually (though, in the French case, fairly rapidly) to encompass demands for religious freedom, the emancipation of the Jews, rights for free blacks, the abolition of slavery, and the liberation of women. Unfortunately, in the end, the self-styled vanguard of the Revolution was more willing to recognize the rights of their brothers than they were with certain other of their siblings.

In September 1791, the antislavery playwright Olympe de Gouges turned the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen inside out. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman insisted that Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights (Article 1). All citizenesses and citizens, being equal in its [the law’s] eyes, should be equally admissible to all public dignities, offices, and employments, according to their ability, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents (Article 6). The inversion of the language of the official 1789 declaration hardly seems shocking to us now, but it surely did then. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft did not go as far as her French counterparts in demanding absolutely equal political rights for women, but she wrote at much greater length and with searing passion about the ways education and tradition had stunted women’s minds. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, she linked the emancipation of women to the explosion of all forms of hierarchy in society. Like de Gouges, Wollstonecraft suffered public vilification for her boldness. De Gouges’s fate was even worse, for she went to the guillotine, condemned as an impudent counterrevolutionary and unnatural being (a woman-man).

Once the momentum got going, women’s rights were not limited to the publications of a few path-breaking individuals. Between 1791 and 1793, women set up political clubs in at least fifty provincial towns and cities as well as in Paris. Women’s rights came up for debate in the clubs, in newspapers, and in pamphlets. In April 1793, during the consideration of citizenship under a proposed new constitution for the republic, one deputy argued at length in favor of equal political rights for women. His intervention showed that the idea had gained some adherents. There is no doubt a difference, he granted, that of the sexes [sic –RG] … but I do not conceive how a sexual difference makes for one in the equality of rights. … Let us liberate ourselves rather from the prejudice of sex, just as we have freed ourselves from the prejudice against the color of Negroes. The deputies did not follow his lead.

Instead, in October 1793, the deputies moved against women’s clubs. Reacting to street fights among women over the wearing of revolutionary insignia, the Convention voted to suppress all political clubs for women on the grounds that such clubs only diverted them from their appropriate domestic duties. According to the deputy who presented the decree, women did not have the knowledge, application, devotion, or self-abnegation required for governing. They should stick with the private functions to which women are destined by nature itself. The rationale hardly sounded new notes; what was new was the need to come out and forbid women from forming and attending political clubs. Women may have come up least and last, but their rights did eventually make the agenda, and what was said about them in the 1790s–especially in favor of rights–had an impact that has lasted down to the present.

–Lynn Hunt (2007): Inventing Human Rights, pp. 171–172.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from chapter 3 of William T. Vollman’s new book, Poor People. It’s a sometimes compelling and sometimes tiresome book; Vollman went around cities in the U.S. and all over the rest of the world, interviewing (urban) poor people in several different countries, bringing back their stories and their answers to questions like Why are you poor? and Why are some people poor and other people rich? The compelling part are the actual stories; the tiresome part, which appears only a little in this passage but a lot more elsewhere, is Vollman’s insistent, neurotic handwringing about his own position as a rich American and his own authorial presence in the tale. (There’s nothing wrong with being upfront about these things; but there’s also nothing interesting in spending 2, 5, or 8 pages musing about your trouble in writing about poor people’s stories, which you could have spent actually letting them talk about their own stories.) Anyway, this passage comes from Vollman’s visit to Russia in 2005, when he met an eighty year old woman in front of a church, who was begging to help support herself and a family of four — her daughter Nina, her son-in-law Nikolai, and two grown grandchildren, Marina and Elena.

Nina, who had been the family’s agent of verification twice in my case (first she telephoned the interpreter to inquire about our motives and resources, and then when I had invited myself into their home she had been the one who emerged from the doorway graffiti’d KISS MY ASS to inspect me), who calmed her husband whenever he got overly worked up against the government, and who seemed to be closest to the two daughters, had originally seemed to me, even taking into consideration Oksana, who in spite of being the breadwinner was after all eighty-one years old and who so frequently wept, the most capable physically, mentally, and emotionally. Nina was a handsome, careful woman who was aging well.

I had no idea that things would turn out this badly, she said. They promised us an apartment in Petersburg. We had no idea; we were actually lied to. We were told that my husband was sent there for construction, not to clean up. We heard about it on the radio, but they told him that he would be at a safe distance from the contamination. He was away for three months. He wrote letters. He was forbidden to let us know that anything was wrong. So I took him at face value; I thought that my husband would never deceive me. His health problems began immediately. He could no longer complete an eight-hour workday, so they proposed to fire him.

And what did you do?

I sat with the children a lot and also taught grade school.

…

When did you know that something was wrong? I asked.

I knew exactly when they measured me, the man replied. My exposure was nine point four.

And what did you know before they sent you to Chernobyl?

I didn’t know, he said. On my official military ticket they put down that I would only build houses, nothing else.

I had always thought that the USSR was fair to the workers, I said.

That is absolutely not true, he insisted, raising his voice. Fairness to workers is only what they scream about in the newspapers. I have written a letter to Putin. They reply told me to contact the regional authorities who have already ignored me.

The man had lost some of his hair. He was very lanky in his old blue suit, and sported a strangely pale and bony face.

He showed us his card which bore the date 1986, an incorrect year, which meant that he couldn’t prove that he had been at Chernobyl and therefore remained ineligible for compensation. (Here something must have been lost in translation or else Nikolai Sokolov was confused, for the date of explosion was in fact April 1986. Perhaps his part of the cleanup took place in 1987, for he later said: From ’88 to ’94 we lived in Volgograd trying to get housing.)

Have you stayed in touch with the other workers?

No, he said.

His wife thought the date to be merely an error. But he was sure that the government wanted all personnel in the cleanup crews to die.

I think that Moscow is responsible, he said. The whole point was to change the situation so that no one is responsible for what they have done to the people.

How are you today?

Unwell, he replied.

His wife said: When he was in the hospital, he got treatment. Then, when he had no more housing, that meant no more treatment…

I produced more radiation than the X-ray machine used to measure my lungs! he cried in proud horror. It was a four and I was a ten, so the X-ray was unsuccessful.

Was your presence dangerous to your family?

The lady who works the machine has to wear a lead apron against level four and I am a level ten, so absolutely. The situation was caused intentionally…

How was your life before Chernobyl?

He stood there folding his arms, thought, then said: My life was stable and very simple. I put in ten hours at the factory. Now I get the shakes and my joints ache. I am a house builder. I build from the bottom up. That is how I was trained, but I branched out into different types of work. Work is work everywhere. I started branching out into factory work and office work but then I started being discriminated against. I wasn’t making the same rate as others–

As I said, there were no more chairs in the Sokolovs’ flat, so he stood. I, the guest, observer and rich man, sat. By now he’d begun to exert a weird effect upon me with his lank hair and bald forehead, his heavy greying eyebrows.

When you went to Chernobyl what did it look like?

Very regulated. We would get on a particular bus, travel to an intermediate area, put on our suits, then go to the main reactor compartment. We would carry armatures and concrete, and pour the concrete. Japan sent robots inside the reactor, but the radiation was so high that those new, shiny robots became useless. They just stood there.

What did it look like inside?

The reactor was already capped with concrete when we got there. But there was a machine tunnel next to it, the mechanical chamber. What had blown out of the reactor in the explosion landed there: walls, pencils, whatever. In the beginning we had to run, not walk, because the radiation was so high. We were in there with shovels wearing masks. We were only there for several seconds at a time. Five seconds per day was what we worked. We would run in, shovel one load into a trench, then run out. The trench was six to eight meters deep. Once the tunnel had been cleared out we were told that it was all right to walk. When the trench had been filled, we pumped concrete over it. Downstairs where we worked, we wore fabric suits. On the roof they wore lead suits. They were better protected.

How many workers did you see?

There were several busloads of people every day, just for our shift.

Why didn’t they just fly over it in an airplane and drop sheets of lead?

Elena, sitting in her chair, brushed her pale hands together and said something bitter in Russian. Meanwhile the man grew more and more loud, leaning forward ever closer. –I’ve asked myself that many times. The reason is that they were too cheap to spend the money and chose instead to expend people.

Elena echoed bitterly: Just people.

It’s war, but people basically end up dead. Our veins are clogged, so they just tell us to drink more vodka, which makes it worse.

How many people have died?

I don’t know. I don’t listen to the radio. I’m tired of listening to fables.

If you hadn’t gone to Chernobyl, what would your life be like today?

I would continue building houses, he shrugged. I would be able to have a decent job, and enough money.

–William T. Vollman, Poor People, pp. 70–73.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from chapter 21 of Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973).

Raising the Child

As early as possible, it’s valuable to establish relationships with your child that are similar to the relationship you have with your lover.

The child should have his own world where he is clearly the sovereign. That means a room of his own that is subject to his control alone. If he doesn’t take care of it, he’ll learn the consequences of that sooner or later. But if he’s forced to keep it as his parents wish, he’ll never discover for himself the consequences of alternative courses of action.

He should also have other property to use in whatever way he chooses. Property isn’t owned if it can be used only in approved ways.

You’ll have to decide how he’ll obtain his property. He can earn it, receive an allowance, get outright gifts, or he can receive property in any combination of these ways.

But once he receives something, it’s important that he learn to understand what it means to own something and be responsible for its preservation. He shouldn’t be taught to expect automatic replacement of any of his property that he might destroy.

The importance of his sense of ownership can be seen by observing the difficulties many adults have in dealing with the world. For close to two decades, most people are led to believe that they aren’t sovereign.

Then, suddenly, they’re thrust out into the world, and expected to make far-reaching decisions concerning their lives. It’s no wonder that they have difficulty foreseeing the consequences of their actions and fall back on any authority that appears to be competent to make decisions for them.

I believe the child will be far better equipped to face the world if he understands how the world operates right from the beginning. He can easily learn what it means to make decisions and to experience the consequences of his decisions.

This means, too, that he should be helped to understand that you have your property, also. Show him which areas are off limits to him or require permission before he can use them. Even the dining table he eats on will belong to someone; part of his arrangement with the owner can include table privileges.

Obviously, a two-year-old child won’t have an explicit understanding of these matters. But there are two ways that he can understand them at the earliest possible age. One is that he can learn by example if the entire family operates in this way.

The second way is by never being taught otherwise. For some reason, many parents seem to think it important to change systems at some point in a child’s age. They first teach him he has no authority over his life, and then try later to instill a sense of responsibility in him. In the same way, they first want him to believe that Santa Claus loves and rewards him and then later want him to understand that it’s the parents who love him. I think it would make a considerable difference if the child were never taught anything that you intend to reverse later.

It’s important that each of the three of you be a separate human being with his own life, his own interests, and his own property. None of you is living for the benefit of the others; rather, each should be there because he wants to be. And each will want to be there if it’s a setting where he can live a meaningful life of his own choosing.

It obviously isn’t necessary that each member of the family own his own washing machine, stove, and living-room furniture; nor is it necessary for permission to be requested every time a non-owner wants to use something. Various things can be made available to other members of the household on a till further notice basis. But the ultimate ownership should never be in doubt.

If these principles don’t seem attractive to you, it may be because you’ve never been married. You may never have seen the hundreds of insignificant joint decisions that preoccupy most married people.

I’ve never known a family who used these principles who didn’t find them a great relief and advantage over normal ways of handling such matters.

A Sovereign Child

If you want your child to understand that he lives in a world in which his future will be of his own making, encourage that by letting him deal directly with the world as much as possible. Let him experience the consequences of his own actions.

Naturally, you don’t intend to let him discover first hand a very dangerous consequence of something he wants to do. But it’s important to deciade in advance where you will draw the line. How far will you let him go in making his own decisions? Don’t leave it to decide each time the matter arises. Have a clearly defined policy in advance that will prevent inconsistencies.

Be available to let him know your opinions–without implying that your opinions are binding on him. Let him think of you as a wiser, more experienced person–but not as a moral authority who stands in the way of his living his own life.

Be a source of information and opinion concerning the consequences of acts. Let him learn that the nature of the world he lives in (not the attitudes of people bigger and smarter than he is) sets the limits on what he can and cannot do in the world.

If you recognize him as an individual who is allowed to learn for himself, a genuine friendship can develop between you. He’ll be willing to talk to you about his ideas, plans, and problems–because he won’t have to fear the moral retribution that most parents inflict when they disagree with their children’s ideas and actions.

Parents who fear letting their children make decisions fail to realize that their children do make decisions on their own. You can’t possibly control all your child’s actions. So the best security you can have comes from two conditions: (1) allowing the child to learn as early as possible that his actions have consequences to him; and (2) developing a friendship that will make it possible for him to come to you when he needs help.

If either of these conditions is missing, you shouldn’t be surprised if you find out about crises only after they’ve happened. A child who knows that acts have consequences and who knows that he has a wise friend will be more likely to consult his friend before risking something dangerous.

Love and understanding are important to a child. And you’ll show your love more by respecting his individuality and appreciating him for what he is, not for what you force him to be.

–Harry Browne (1973), How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, pp. 240–243

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from the introduction to the Incite! anthology, Color of Violence (2006).

The Color of Violence: Introduction

Many years ago when I was a student in San Diego, I was driving down the freeway with a friend when we encountered a Black woman wandering along the shoulder. Her story was extremely disturbing. Despite her uncontrollable weeping, we were able to surmise that she had been raped and dumped along the side of the road. After a while, she was able to wave down a police car, thinking that they would help her. However, when the white policeman picked her up, he did not comfort her, but rather seized upon the opportunity to rape her once again.

Angela Davis’s story illustrates the manner in which women of color experience violence perpetrated both by individuals and by the state. Since the first domestic violence shelter in the United States opened in 1974, and the first rape crisis center opened in 1972, the mainstream antiviolence movement has been critical in breaking the silence around violence against women, and in providing essential services to survivors of sexual/domestic violence. Initially, the antiviolence movement prioritized a response to male violence based on grassroots political mobilization. However, as the antiviolence movement has gained greater prominence, domestic violence and rape crisis centers have also become increasingly professionalized, and as a result are often reluctant to address sexual and domestic violence within the larger context of institutionalized violence.

In addition, rape crisis centers and shelters increasingly rely on state and federal sources for their funding. Consequently, their approaches towards eradicating violence focus on working with the state rather than working against state violence. For example, mainstream antiviolence advocates often demand longer prison sentences for batterers and sex offenders as a frontline approach to stopping violence against women. However, the criminal justice system has always been brutally oppressive towards communities of color, including women of color, as the above story illustrates. Thus, this strategy employed to stop violence has had the effect of increasing violence against women of color perpetrated by the state.

Unfortunately, the strategy often engaged by communities of color to address state violence is advocating that women keep silent about sexual and domestic violence to maintain a united front against racism. Racial justice organizing has generally focused on racism as it primarily affects men, and has often ignored the gendered forms of racism that women of color face. An example includes the omission of racism in reproductive health policies (such as sterilization abuse) in the 2001 United Nation World Conference Against Racism. Those forms of racism that disproportionately impact women of color become termed simply women’s issues rather than simultaneously racial justice issues.

There are many organizations that address violence directed at communities (e.g., police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, colonialism, and so on). There are also many organizations that address violence within communities (e.g. sexual/domestic violence). But there are very few organizations that address violence on both fronts simultaneously. The challenge women of color face in combating personal and state violence is to develop strategies for ending violence that do assure safety for survivors of sexual/domestic violence and do not strengthen our oppressive criminal justice apparatus. Our approaches must always challenge the violence perpetrated through multinational capitalism and the state.

It was frustration with the failures on the part of racial justice and antiviolence organizations to effectively address violence against women of color that led women of color to organize The Color of Violence: Violence Against Women of Color conference held at the University of California-Santa Cruz on April 28-29, 2000. The primary goals of this conference were to develop analyses and strategies around ending violence against women of color in all its forms, including attacks on immigrants’ rights and Indian treaty rights, the proliferation of prisons, militarism, attacks on the reproductive rights of women of color, medical experimentation on communities of color, homophobia/heterosexism and hate crimes against lesbians of color, economic neo-colonialism, and institutional racism; and to encourage the antiviolence movement to reinsert political organizing into its response to violence.

–Andrea Smith, Beth Richie, Julia Sudbury, and Janelle White (with the assistance of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence collective members, The Color of Violence: Introduction, in Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology, pp. 1-2.

Further reading:

• Women of Color Blog (2007-01-27): What Does a WOC Movement Look Like?
• GT 2006-04-07: Over My Shoulder #18: Barbara Deming's "A World Without Prisons" (1970), from We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Mark Kurlansky’s recent book Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006):

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the radical revolutionaries, those who wanted to break away from Britain and were prepared to go to war, were a minority, but they were the most vocal and articulate and the best organized faction. Proponents of nonviolence know that it is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails. It is not clear that the decision to go to war against the British was the majority opinion of most of the revolting colonies, but the radicals proceeded and made it a fait accompli.

Another enduring lesson of history is that it is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable. Once the first shots are fired, those who oppose the war are simply branded as traitors. All debate ends once the first shots are fired, so firing shots is always an effective way to end the debate. The silence may not last for long, as the War of 1812, World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, all unpopular wars, demonstrate, but there is always a moment of enforced silence when debate and criticism are banished and this moment gives the war boosters at least a temporary advantage.

In February 1775 the British sent 240 soldiers to Salem, Massachusetts, to seize ammunition and weapons that the rebels were amassing. Though the nonviolent defense of a weapons cache does not truly qualify as nonviolence, the townspeople’s plan averted violence and prevented the opening of a shooting war. They simply pulled up the drawbridge into town and made the British negotiate entry, which the British did by giving assurances that they would not disturb the town. Apparently the colonists at the drawbridge were less concerned about the fate of the weapons than the principle that the British army had to ask permission before entering their town. According to Hobbesian logic, such happy solutions only put off the inevitable, which came on April 19, when another British column attempted to seize another rebel arms cache, this time in Concord. Whether or not this qualified as what Hobbes termed Natural Law, the reality was that elements among the rebel movement had decided that they wanted a shooting war, and once that kind of decision is made, it is, as a rule, almost impossible to avoid it. American revolutionaries intercepted the British column in Lexington. The rebels only exchanged a few shots and a number of them were killed. Each side claimed the other side had fired first, though all the casualties of this brief first engagement were on the rebel side. The British marched on to the supply depot in Concord. But the shots had been fired, the war begun, and the debate ended.

Curiously, up until those few shots were fired in Lexington, the rebels, even while arguing for war, had been spectacularly successful at what could be considered nonviolent resistance. Both demonstrating and rioting for a wide range of causes were commonplace in eighteenth-century America. One historian, Paul A. Gilje, counted 150 riots and street actions in the thirteen colonies just between 1765 and 1769. Though rules of class conduct were not rigid, generally the upper classes wrote pamphlets and negotiated, while the lower classes took to the street. The lower classes would cart around effigies of officials at their demonstrations before hanging, burning, or beheading them. Even before television there was a belief that effective nonviolence needed to be visual, needed a sense of theater to attract an audience. When the British passed the Stamp Act in 1765, the colonists staged a series of demonstrations throughout the colonies. In Charleston, South Carolina, two thousand demonstrators protested taxes by burning effigies and then staging a mock funeral for the death of American Liberty. The stamp officials were forced to resign in every colony but Georgia. The demonstrations were accompanied by a boycott of British goods. The result of all this was that within a year the act was repealed. But the following year the British attempted another taxation scheme, the Townsend Acts, which, because they only taxed imports indirectly, the British hoped would be more palatable.

The working poor were angry about their economic plight and they were not always nonviolent. They attacked and destroyed homes of officials, and looting was not uncommon. The intellectual leaders, being largely men of property, opposed these acts of destruction and tried to keep the street protests orderly. There was clearly a class division, and the upper-class leaders had to negotiate with the street leaders. The former tried to keep elements that they thought of as rowdy out of demonstrations. They sometimes banned black people from participating in demonstrations, convinced that they were an inherently unruly race.

In 1768 the Massachusetts Assembly dissolved rather than collect the Townsend duties. Not entirely nonviolent, the revolutionaries formed mobs to harass customs officials. On March 5, 1770, boys began throwing snowballs at British troops in Boston. The troops began pushing. Men came to the aid of boys. When one British soldier was struck with a club, he responded by firing into the crowd. Other soldiers also fired and five colonists were killed. When the British soldiers were brought to trial, John Adams, a moderate, defended them and noted in defense of the troops that black people were in the crowd. As a matter of fact, a mulatto man, Crispus Attucks, was among the victims. The British were acquitted.

By 1770 the British recognized the Townsend Acts to be another political and financial disaster and repealed them. But the tax on tea remained. This led to the most famous act of nonviolence in the American colonial period.

The American revolutionaries, in their prewar days, were particularly effective in their use of an important nonviolent tool, the boycott. Women began weaving cloth by hand rather than buy fabric from British mills. Homespun became the fashion. Spinning bees became patriotic gatherings. One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers. But there were many debates in Boston on how to take the tea boycott even further. On December 16, 1773, sixty revolutionaries, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea valued at £10,000 into the sea. This was a perfectly managed act of nonviolent protest. There were no incidents of looting or vandalism. According to legend, one padlock was broken and the revolutionaries replaced it.

Though far less famous today than the Boston Tea Party, the crowning achievement of American colonial civil disobedience, the one that John Adams considered the turning point of the American Revolution, came in 1774, before any shots were fired. The colonies were becoming ungovernable and unprofitable. The British were responding with repression, including the so-called Coercive Acts, which cost them more money and tied up more troops. From the point of view of the rebels, the British response was ideal, as it was mobilizing public opinion against England. One of the new repressive measures enacted by the British Parliament, intended as a response to the Boston Tea Party, was the Massachusetts Government Act passed in the spring of 1774. It removed the right of Massachusetts’ elected representatives to have a say in the appointment of judges. When the new British-appointed Court of Common Pleas for the county of Worcester tried to sit in September, thousands turned out to block them. Of the estimated six thousand, about one thousand were armed. They stopped the court from coming to session and formed a convention that effectively took over, closing courts and freeing prisoners.

The weapons, which were not used, were unnecessary, since no armed force opposed them. Everywhere else in Massachusetts where the British tried to open a Court of Common Pleas, they were also stopped by huge crowds, which often had no weapons at all. The crowds were large enough to keep the courts closed, force the judges to resign, and keep the army helplessly at a distance.

The revolution had overthrown the government in Massachusetts without a shot being fired. Why, then, did the rebels turn to arms? Sentiment was already strongly anti-British. John Adams wrote to Jefferson late in his life, The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced. So why was the war necessary? Jonathan Schell in The Unconquerable World astutely noted that the participants in other revolutions had reached similar conclusions. The Romantic writer François René de Chateaubriand, who lived through the French Revolution, said almost the exact same thing: The French Revolution was accomplished before it occurred. And Leon Trotsky, one of the authors of the Russian Revolution, wrote, The declaration of October 23 had meant the overthrow of the power before the government itself was overthrown.

So if revolutions are accomplished in the minds of the people, why must they be followed by force of arms? Why do almost all political theorists–not only Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, but later ones such as Marx and Lenin–insist that a revolution must be an armed movement? If the outbreak of war is inevitable, as seventeenth-century thinkers believed, history teaches the lesson that its inevitability does not rest, as they believed, on natural law, but on individuals incapable of conceiving of another path. Is the source of violence not human nature, as Hobbes contended, but a lack of imagination?

In the case of the American Revolution, could independence have been accomplished without warfare? The British gave up on America even though the Americans had scored very few military victories in the war, because they wanted to get on with other business, including their European wars, and could not afford to tie up military and money in these colonies any longer. But the path of disruption and protest had already been tying up British troops, costing British money, making the colonies unprofitable–the very reasons that Britain later gave up the war and negotiated peace. Colonies were supposed to earn, not cost. It seems quite possible that the British withdrawal could have been achieved by continuing protest and economic sabotage.

–Mark Kurlansky (2006): Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea. 75–80.