PACS 164A - Lecture 02

PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence - Fall 2006. An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense.

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Education

Tags:

• peace
• conflict
• education
• courses
• PACS164A
• berkeley
• uc
• webcast.berkeley
• yt:quality=high

[Brenrhad]

Beeindruckende Vorlesung!

[Rabbitthat]

@camipco As an Irish person I would have to disagree. Those people on hunger strike had set bombs that murdered children. There weren't too many who would have cared if they died. All that their hunger-strike proved was that they were willing to die for ruler-ship of a small piece of land, not only to kill children for it. I think most of us would prefer to die before killing a child, but they would only choose death for themselves when there were no children around to kill.

[Rabbitthat]

@camipco The second part of the comment is absolutely true, but this has nothing to to with the hunger strikers. They were not nonviolent and no one saw them that way.

All they did was take legitimacy from the whole action of hunger striking, because now when people here hear "hunger strike" that's what they think of.

If the first thing they ever did for their cause was to hunger strike then you would be right. But first they murdered, only when they could not murder anymore did they strike.

[camipco]

@Rabbitthat

You may disagree that they were worthy of empathy and many people agree with you, but the fact is that a lot of people were moved think of the IRA differently by the strikes.

The violence in Northern Ireland has all but stopped, and the reason it stopped was that all parties, the leaders of the Republican and Unionist movements and the British government, were willing to sit down together, drop the kind of rhetoric you employ here, and treat each others' grievances as legitimate.

[julbasur]

gbhgfhgfj

[lohdeepak]

Great video...more lectures on BigGyan.

[camipco]

I'm not entirely convinced by rule 2. For example, the counter example he gives of the IRA prisoners fasting against the British I would argue had a crucial positive effect. It undermined the message of the British government that the IRA were just terrorists without legitimate grievances, and was an important step in the demands of the Irish Republican movement being seen as legitimate in Britain. I'd say it sowed the seeds for the negotiations a decade later.

[bundarapapa]

I have setup a facebook group for all interested to join and share ideas.

Simply search for keyword "PACS 164A" in facebook should be able to take you there. (Youtube does not allow naked url in comment)

[KKKKKDAWG]

The actions of the women, a demonstration of the "non-violence arsenal", were only used as a "last resort" (note how well the other rules for successful non-violence action are satisfied in this example). Well applied non-violence should more often than not avoid this "last resort" situation.

[KKKKKDAWG]

In the latter case, who is to say that we might not have a far better current existence if violence (and/or the intention of violence) had not been used in the past? Furthermore, in the example with the women saving the Muslims, if structural violence had not existed, and positive energy had been inputted in the situation right from the very beginning, then the two ethnic groups might have already lived happily together in the same region.

[KKKKKDAWG]

I think the answers to the question lays in this lecture too. When you say "past negative conflicts", do you mean over evolutionary time-scales (millions of years) or political time-scales (thousands of years). In the former case, I would argue that early humans were not fully capable of violence for the same reasons as Duffy, there is the lack of intention and the intellect to foresee the consequences.