What 'diversity of tactics' really means for Occupy Wall Street / Waging Nonviolence - ... - 0 views
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Ihering Alcoforado on 15 Nov 11#AMERICANAUTUMN What 'diversity of tactics' really means for Occupy Wall Street by Nathan Schneider | October 19, 2011, 12:02 pm Occupy Wall Street marchers watch from the pedestrian walkway as hundreds of their comrades take to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Even as Occupy Wall Street shapes the public conversation about high finance, political corruption, and the distribution of wealth, it has also raised anew questions about how resistance movements in general should operate. I want to consider one of the matters that I've thought about a lot over the past month while watching the occupation and its means of making its presence felt on the streets of New York and in the media. "Diversity of tactics," in the context of political protests, is often treated as essentially a byword for condoning acts of violence. The phrase comes by this honestly; it emerged about a decade ago at the height of the global justice movement, especially between the 1999 demonstrations that shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle and those two years later in Quebec. While all nonviolent movements worth their salt will inevitably rely on a variety of tactics-for instance, Gene Sharp's list of 198 of them-using the word "diversity" was a kind of attempted détente between those committed to staying nonviolent and those who weren't. Consider this characterization by George Lakey: "Diversity of tactics" implies that some protesters may choose to do actions that will be interpreted by the majority of people as "violent," like property destruction, attacks on police vehicles, fighting back if provoked by the police, and so on, while other protesters are operating with clear nonviolent guidelines. Those who extoll the importance of total nonviolent discipline-as Lakey eloquently goes on to do-might be disappointed to learn that Occupy Wall Street has made "diversity of tactics" its official modus operandi. However, the way that the occu