The most extreme -- and painful -- result of confusing the words is in Ward's description of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. First, he overstates how passive the Jews were in the face of the Holocaust. It's really important that we honor the brave Jewish people who worked against genocide. (4) Second, he says that the Jews who were intimidated into silence, or who were in denial about what was happening, were engaged in nonviolent action! "History affords us few comparable models by which to assess the effectiveness of nonviolent opposition to state policies, at least in terms of the scale and rapidity with which consequences were visited upon the passive." (5)

All of us who have engaged in nonviolent direct action know the difference between action and passivity. Join any discussion among workers who are deciding whether to go out on strike and you'll hear the difference between the active ones and the passive ones. Join any community discussing whether to defend themselves against a new toxic waste dump, and you'll hear the difference between active and passive.

In the 1930s Gandhi was concerned about trends in Nazi Germany and wrote to a leading Berlin rabbi urging him to organize a resistance and to mobilize as many Jews and allies as possible against the threat. Wherever Gandhi saw passivity in an unjust situation, he urged that active nonviolent resistance replace the passivity. In fact, Gandhi was so opposed to passivity that he advised that, if we see an evil being committed and the only options we know about are passivity and violence, we should take the option of violence! Of course Gandhi believed that in real life there are always more than two options, and we can create effective nonviolent actions to take.