Active Nonviolence is the force that will transform the world
On June 15, 2007, a UN resolution established October 2 of each year as the International Day of Non-Violence, in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the men who contributed to the world with a powerful and determined voice for the construction of peace using the methodology of active nonviolence.
New Humanism or Universalist Humanism that inspires our Federation of Humanist Parties, has in active nonviolence, one of its fundamental ethical and methodological pillars.
For New Humanism, violence is not natural to human beings (understood as the act of harming by action or omission, of attempting against the freedom and intentionality of others), but rather it is a cultural, historical and social fact.
Therefore, the pillars on which violence is driven are not natural: individualism, discrimination, competition, pragmatism, power, revenge and contradiction.
Violence is multi-causal and multi-faceted. We distinguish different types of violence: physical, economic, social, ethnic, generational, sexual, psychological, environmental, etc.
Violence is exercised within a scale of values that has placed money as the central value, in a materialistic culture that puts things above the value of people.
Currently, the main actor driving violence at the global level is the international financial system, associated with the mass media, the military industrial complex and the transnational corporations producing services and goods.
In the face of the different forms of violence mentioned above, active non-violence emerges as an overcoming response, as a personal attitude and as a methodology of action.
Active nonviolence as a personal attitude leads to not responding to violence with violence, where the right to self-defense is a component that forms a legitimate part of this attitude.
In the field of social practice, active nonviolence promotes concrete actions to raise awareness, denounce, protest, resist disobedience and counteract different forms of violence.
Humanists support the need to advance towards a culture of nonviolence, based on personal freedom, social solidarity and non-tolerance of violence.
Humanists promote a non-violent culture that places people at the center of its values, allowing the construction of a truly humane society where power is in the social whole, overcoming the current violence where a minority part imposes conditions on the rest.
At this moment in the historical process of humanity, it is time that active nonviolence is resolutely promoted to work for real democracy and a just distribution of wealth, to eradicate inequality and poverty, to prevent the unbridled depredation of natural resources and for the application in practice of all human rights.
These essential and urgent causes for human evolution unconditionally need the force, coherence and direction that active nonviolence provides, for the humanizing transformation of our world.
As Silo stated in Madrid in 1993: "We must move from prehistory to true human history only when the violent animal appropriation of some human beings by others is eliminated. (...) All forms of violence, thanks to which human progress has been blocked, are repugnant to humanists. All forms of overt or latent discrimination are grounds for denunciation by humanists.
As violence increases in our societies, the most important thing is the construction of non-violent tools for social and personal action, such as these:
- Rejection and emptiness before the different forms of discrimination and violence
- Non-collaboration with violent practices.
- The denunciation of all acts of discrimination and violence.
- Civil disobedience in the face of institutionalized violence.
- The organization and social mobilization based on voluntary work and solidarity action of those who promote it.
Today, more than ever, the ethical value of active nonviolence is evident as the only real form of solution to the great challenges facing humanity, since it is clear that there is no violent solution to the problems: violence is the problem.
If violence is learned,
non-violence as well.
International Coordination Team (ICT) of the International Federation of Humanist Parties