I’ve come across two posts recently on non-violent direct action. The first is about those protesting against the erection of the Israel/Palestine apartheid wall.
I was recently rereading my diaries for 1989, that annus mirabilis when pro-democracy demonstratons were breaking out all over, and dictators fell in Romania and Paraguay and several other places, including, of course, the fall of PW Botha in South Africa, and the Berlin Wall fell. But 18 years after the Berlin Wall fell, another “wall of shame” is being erected.
The second post concerns the protests against proposals to extend Heathrow Airport in Britain and has some interesting reflections on the superiority of nonviolent direct action to lobbying. The writer notes that
As a Christian I’m taught to be ’salt in the world’ and that if I lose that saltiness I shall become worthless, yet that is exactly what so much of the NGO campaigning going on around Britain today, and with which the church some how finds huge affinity, is doing; it seems to my mind that many, though not all, of the biggest have already lost all the saltiness they ever had.
And that seems to apply to both situations.
