Strategy For A Living Revolution

Gandhi taught that nonviolence is all-pervasive. A commitment to nonviolence is more than acting nonviolently in any given conflict; it's also a commitment to the creation of a nonviolent society. A theory of nonviolent revolution is evolving that encompasses the broad institutional, economic, and social changes needed to dismantle the war system on which our society is now based.In Powerful Peacemaking, George Lakey lays out a flexible five-step model for bringing about these fundamental changes, on the individual and societal level, with lots of historical examples. Lakey's twenty years' experience in the trenches of nonviolent action puts inspiration, reality, and guts behind his words.We all need means of producing goods and services, we need measures to ward off attack and domination, and we need support for positive self-definition. These are individual needs which are also community needs, and insofar as a nation is a community (through shared tradition and values), a nation also has these needs.As long as the military continues to fill these societal functions, it cannot be dislodged, no matter what the bad "side-effects" of militarism may be. A society will support disastrous policies as long as they meet these functional needs. Germans, for example, continued to support Hitler despite the terrible punishment they were taking in the Second World War. They did so because his movement was meeting needs for identity, economy, and security better than any existing alternatives. Only with their leader dead and their cities in rubble did general compliance, with Nazism dissolve. Other peoples, similarly, will go along with policies which take the heart out of the economy, increase the chance of nuclear holocaust, and sink us in despair - if there are no functional alternatives.(Whole Earth Review, 1990)