An Open Letter to the Occupy Movement from Starhawk and the Alliance of Community Trainers.

Nonviolent direct action clearly dramatizes the difference between the corrupt values of the system and the values we stand for. Their institutions silence dissent, while we value every voice. They employ violence to maintain their system, while we counter it with the sheer courage of our presence.

Grace BRAITHWAITE. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
 Learning at the Feet of the Master; oil on canvas;
courtesy Syracuse Cultural Workers Peace Calendar 2012.

The Occupy movement has had enormous success in the short time since September when activists took over a square near Wall Street. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of active participants, spawned occupations in cities all over North America, changed the national dialogue and garnered enormous public support. It has even, on occasion, gotten good press!

Now we are wrestling with the question that arises again and again in movements for social justice: how to struggle. Do we embrace nonviolence, or a diversity of tactics? If we are a nonviolent movement, how do we define nonviolence? Is breaking a window violent?

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by Chris Hedges

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.

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