Following on with my morning post, as I was looking for something to listen to while doing some housework, I came across a short speech by Diane Nash about the force of nonviolence to make political change. It was tempting to just add it on as an update but, thinking about it in relation to the history of those who rejected that nonviolence and the fact that progress stalled out and stopped and the fact that a number of those whose faces pushed the Diane Nashes out of the camera frame in the 1960s went on to become tools for the enemies of equality and, in some cases, joined the enemies of the movement needs to be looked at. While I don't feel qualified to do that, it's something I will be thinking about. I think it, as well, carries a lot of how the left failed as the 1960s continued into the Nixon era and in the constant retreat we still suffer from today.
But, with that said, what she said about the force of nonviolence, her analysis of how discrimination was a two-sided practice and how they used that analysis to change things is too important to leave for later.
As someone who, from time to time, comes across derisive comments about "church ladies" made by those on the atheist pseudo-left, note what she says about the role that just those "church ladies" played in the success of the lunch counter desegregation effort. I'd rather have a hundred "church ladies" in the struggle than every Communist who ever burdened the left with their parasitic presence.
Clearly, I have a lot to learn from Diane Nash and the others who brought about real change, myself. Her "agapic energy" has a lot more evidence of being able to power that change than the imaginary power behind the progress of history, the Hegelian dialectic, which went from the Czars to Vladimir Putin with other Czars by other titles in between. I think the immoral, futile enthusiasm for violence and causing havoc on the pretend left is due to a belief in that nonsense.
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