We agree that the world has massive injustice, exploitation, and is in a dead-end course in relation to the needs of the planet. We've personally experienced the oppression of being brought up working class; his being indigenous and my being gay has brought us still more of the harshness and pain of oppression. We have no illusions about capitalism, about top-down authoritarian structures, or the murderous U.S. Empire.

When we survey the results of social movements of the last half-century, I agree with Ward's disappointment that the movements claimed as successes by nonviolent advocates have not been more far-reaching. Racism is still rampant in the U.S. despite the civil rights movement's concrete gains in equal accommodations, voting rights, and affirmative action. The nuclear power industry still markets its deadly plants abroad and still poisons people at home through its nuclear wastes, despite the anti-nuclear power movement's success in ending the building of new plants here. The U.S. Empire continues military interventions abroad that make it today's number one global killer despite the success of the anti-Vietnam war movement in creating a "Vietnam syndrome" that put some restraints on U.S. powerholders. (1)

While I share Ward's disappointment that those movements and others didn't accomplish more, I may differ with him by celebrating the gains that we did make. I believe that we activists grow more through a combination of self-criticism AND self-affirmation than we do by only second-guessing ourselves.

I agree that pacifists are sometimes smug and self-righteous, unwilling to open themselves to genuine pragmatic debate about courses of action but instead using a moral ideology to shield themselves from open-minded consideration of alternatives.

Ward points out that nonviolent activists have a history of running real risks and even sacrificing their lives for social change. At the same time, there have been many nonviolent protests which have contented themselves with polite witness and ritualized arrests, minimizing risk and minimizing impact. I agree with this criticism.

I also agree that excluding armed struggle from consideration dogmatically, rather than weighing the pros and cons of mixing both violent and nonviolent tactics, doesn't contribute to creating strategy. At the Boulder debate I emphasized that long-term strategy and vision are what our movement needs most of all.

I agree with Ward that a great way to think about struggle is pragmatically: what are the means that have the best chance of reducing suffering, increasing justice, and creating a new society?

This essay therefore mostly focuses on pragmatics. I'll respond to Ward's challenges in terms of practical, hard-headed realities. I'll pick a fight with some of the assumptions he makes on pragmatic grounds. I'll challenge his reading of history at some points in terms of what the power realities were. And I'll describe some movements that learned, from their own pragmatic experience, that they could wage struggle more successfully through nonviolent direct action than through violence.