There are literally dozens of ways to do nonviolent social action, and the Einstein Institute has gone to the trouble list almost 200 of them. I’d like to add another: buy a Dixie Chicks album. And apparently both sides are engaging in nonviolent action, as I was forwarded this email earlier today:

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Dear Friends,

As you may have heard, War is Not the Answer yard signs are being stolen. In fact, while I was standing in my front walk, around 5pm yesterday, I actually witnessed such a theft.

A new Mazda SUV, darkish beige or tan, stopped in the middle of the street and a young man ran onto my lawn, snatched the sign and jumped back into the car. He had just taken the sign from my neighbor’s yard, apparently. The young man was white, probably six feet or over, medium build, in his early twenties. He had close cropped black hair. I got the license number of the car and reported it to the Decatur police.

I am circulating this information in the hopes that there are others out there who also have such information. I believe that it is vital that we pool this information and go to the respective police departments and pressure them for action. This kind of activity is more than simple vandalism; it is an attempt to silence dissent. In the days ahead it will only get worse. We must start now making it clear that the peace community will not allow its voice to be silenced by these kinds of intimidating activities. We must support one another in our stance.

(Name Withheld for Privacy)
Atlanta, GA

The Einstein Institute also lists some common misconceptions about nonviolent social action. They’re good enough to include here in full:

1. Nonviolent action has nothing to do with passivity, submissiveness, and cowardice; just as in violent action, these must first be rejected and overcome.
2. Nonviolent action is not to be equated with verbal or purely psychological persuasion, although it may use action to induce psychological pressures for attitude change; nonviolent action, instead of words, is a sanction and a technique of struggle involving the use of social, economic, and political power, and the matching of forces in conflict.
3. Nonviolent action does not depend on the assumption that people are inherently “good”; the potentialities of people for both “good” and “evil” are recognized, including the extremes of cruelty and inhumanity.
4. People using nonviolent action do not have to be pacifists or saints; nonviolent action has been predominantly and successfully practiced by “ordinary” people.
5. Success with nonviolent action does not require (though it may be helped by) shared standards and principles, a high degree of community of interest, or a high degree of psychological closeness between the contending groups; this is because when efforts to produce voluntary change fail, coercive nonviolent measures may be employed.
6. Nonviolent action is at least as much of a Western phenomenon as an Eastern one; indeed, it is probably more Western, if one takes into account the widespread use of strikes and boycotts in the labor movement and the noncooperation struggles of subordinated nationalities.
7. In nonviolent action there is no assumption that the opponent will refrain from using violence against nonviolent actionists; the technique is designed to operate against violence when necessary.
8. There is nothing in nonviolent action to prevent it from being used for both “good” and “bad” causes, although the social consequences of its use for a “bad” cause may differ considerably from the consequences of violence used for the same cause.
9. Nonviolent action is not limited to domestic conflicts within a democratic system; it has been widely used against dictatorial regimes, foreign occupations, and even against totalitarian systems.
10. Nonviolent action does not always take longer to produce victory than violent struggle would. In a variety of cases nonviolent struggle has won objectives in a very short time — in as little as a few days. The time taken to achieve victory depends on diverse factors — primarily on the strength of the nonviolent actionists.

Some comments on each:

1. Nonviolence requires the traditional warrior virtues. What we need, then, are “peace samurai.”
2. Nonviolence requires strategies akin to military strategies. Force is pitted against force. Sun-Tzu will be more helpful than Lao-Tzu.
3. No, nonviolence does not require we buy into the sentimentalist notion that humans are born as
4. Yes, I eat meat, but I can still protest the war. I forget to recycle things sometime, but I can still protest the war. I like violent movies and video games, but I can still protest the war.
5. We do not all need to get along. We do not need to hold hands and teach the world to sing. We do not need to share “a moment.”
6. Nonviolence unites marginalized people (and their allies) in North and South. The methods themselves are something we all have in common with one another.
7. Too true, too true.
8. See email above.
9. But can it be used against corporatist regimes? We’re about to find out.
10. So nonviolence can be just as unpredictable as violence. Yet another reason to practice the warrior virtues.