NONVIOLENCE

The conventional history of nations, even continents, is a history ofwarfare. According to this view, all the important ideas and significantchanges of humankind occured as part of an effort to win one violent,bloody conflict or another. This approach to history is only one of many examples of how societiespromote warfare and glorify violence. But there have always been a few whohave refused to fight. Governments have long regarded this minority as adanger to society and have imprisoned and abused them and encouraged theirpersecution. This was true of those who refused Europe's wars, who refused to fightfor their king, who refused to fight for Napoleon as well as against him.It was true of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell- outcasts in rural Sussex because they opposed World War I at a time whenthe British socialist movement described a bayonet as a weapon with aworker on each end.It was true of the first American draft dodger, aMenonite who believed in American independence but believed it was wrongto use violence and rejected the call of his local militia. It was true ofthe many abolitionists who had dedicated their lives to stopping slaverybut refused to fight in the Civil War. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and, most impressively,the Menonites and the Quakers - all have passages in their major teachingsrejecting warfare as immoral. In this brilliant exploration of pacifism,these points of view are discussed alongside such diverse non-violencetheorists as Tolstoy, Shelley, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aldous Huxley,Erasmus, Confucius and Lao Tse to show how many modern ideas - such as aunited Europe, the United Nations, and the abolition of slavery -originated in such non-violence movements.