Explore "The Force of Nonviolence" by Howard Zinn on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This article, written for the March 17, 1962, issue of The Nation, locates the reader just six months before the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis and at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Howard Zinn seizes this moment of historical importance to defend and explain the merit and force of nonviolence. He considers nonproliferation and nonviolent protest to be the people's best options, even-or especially-when threatened with aggression. Howard maintained this principled stance of nonviolence until his last day. -Eds.
Four instances of violence come to my mind. One I read about in the newspapers; another I witnessed; in a third I was on the receiving end; in the fourth, the most brutal of them all, I was a perpetrator.