THE EARLY YEARS

In this chapter 1 will focus on the period from 1972-1974, from the founding of the newspaper Grassroots Revolution, to the point when the Grassroots network began to concentrate on opposing nuclear power. During this period of formation, the Grassroots network grew from a loose network of individuals into a small alliance of nonviolent action groups. While local concerns varied widely, the staff of Grassroots Revolution tried to pull the network together by focusing on a series of international campaigns such as support for Spanish conscientious objectors and the flrst Greenpeace effort to halt nuclear testing. These campaigns helped to develop ties between the local groups, but the network found it difficult to generate strong support by focusing on problems outside the FRG. The 1974 shift towards anti-nuclear work resulted partly from this weakness.

Only the Vietnam era protests match the size and breadth of the movement unleashed by the election of Donald Trump. One point of comparison: The massive march and rally against the Vietnam War in 1969 was the largest political demonstration in American history until the even more massive Women’s March in January.

Someone rang up the other day and asked what PN thought about ‘peace education’. I said that there was a range of things going on, from super-fluffy let’s-just-be-nice-to-each-other talk which does more harm than good, through activist history and analysis, to training that helps people to gain skills and to become more powerful in their work for change. (We like the ‘direct education’ approach to activist training developed by George Lakey and others.)

Turning the Tide (TTT), a 20-year-old Quaker programme dedicated to spreading the skills for and understanding of nonviolence for positive social change, draws on the long Quaker history of working for peace and justice as the basis for our approach.

Our approach is experiential. Nonviolence training is a learning experience of the mind and body, both an individual and a collective experience. It’s radically different in its content and approach to formal schooling; a notebook and pen may be helpful but are not essential.

One of TTT’s volunteer facilitators, Kiyo Miyamoto, asked this question: ‘where does nonviolence training for activists come from?’ She then went about tracing this back through the local and global movements of the 20th century from which TTT sprang in 1994. Kiyo reported on her progress in a report called ‘Turning the Tide Pre-history: Tracing the origins of transformative nonviolence training’, which is available on our website.