US President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize while ‘justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to the “graveyard of empires”.’ Obama’s acceptance speech was used as a rationale to deliver a ‘lengthy defense of the “just war” theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world’s most pressing problems.’
“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason,” he said.
Obama equated nonviolence with doing nothing, not knowing that nonviolence has been effective in its campaigns throughout history. ‘Using a broad array of tactics — including strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, and protests — nonviolent movements have not only gained important rights for millions of oppressed people around the world, they have confronted, and successfully brought down, some of the most ruthless regimes of the last 100 years.’
The nonviolent movements that ousted the murderous regimes of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, for example, are proof that nonviolence is not a passive move.
In “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” a study published in the journal International Security found that “major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns” after ‘analyzing 323 resistance campaigns over the last century.’
Posted by GSerrano on December 26, 2009 in News + Politics · 0 Comment
