Subject: (7) from THE RADICALS AND NONVIOLENCE
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NONVIOLENCE IS ACTIVE
Interview with Marco Pannella
[...] Political nonviolence now constitutes the most advanced and integral
form of "lay tolerance", on which the civilization of a society or a state
is founded, if it is translated into laws and into the conduct of those in
power, as well as of the opposition. For two hundred years or so, after the
bourgeois revolution, terrible contradictions have injured the civilization
of tolerance and democracy. In the name of the goddess Reason, men have
killed and carried out massacres, in the name of Nations and Revolutions
men have made war and slaughtered, and it has also been thought that
tolerance and violence could and should co-exist, when violence became
state violence or "revolutionary" violence. Unfortunately, the Catholic
Church has, over the centuries, been subject to, and in certain periods has
committed, atrocious massacres and violence. In the Stalinist trials, the
"Inquisition" can clearly be seen (1).
Nonviolence places the person and dialogue at the centre of social life,
like Socrates, not only like Gandhi. Nonviolence presupposes the fact that
there are no demons, but only people: and that the worst person, if
attacked with the force of nonviolence, which unlike the apparent meekness
of pacifism is always "aggressive", can correspond with the best part of
himself...
True political nonviolence, for example, has nothing to do with certain
forms of hunger strike, like those of the IRA prisoners. If we do not want
nonviolence to be a form of violence, we need to use its extreme forms,
such as the hunger strike, only to ask the government to put into effect
that which it has promised and which the law itself requires...
[...] However, tolerance, lay civilization, must tremble in fear at a state
and laws which aim to impose moral and ethical values; the law must only
guarantee that no individual and collective morality should develop at the
expense of others and do violence to them.
Interview by Milovan Erkic of the Belgrade newspaper "Politcki Svet".
November 1988
(1) The Catholic tribunal established in the 13th century for the discovery
and suppression of heresy and the punishment of heretics.
