Nonviolence and Powerlessness (Formalizing the Feeling of Evil)

The essay examines nonviolence as a historical phenomenon that has lost its relevance in the form of political action. Reasons that have contributed to the decline of political nonviolence are the inability to fully separate violence from nonviolence and the inevitability of sacrifice and suffering required for the practice of nonviolence to bring about a positive political result. The author argues that it is the failures of the political practice of nonviolence in recent years that has made it clear what has changed in politics and how it has learned to neutralize nonviolent protest. The tool of political power that nonviolent protest cannot cope with is torture. The de facto legalization of torture has as its goal not the declared struggle for the security of the state, but the creation of a regime of isolation and fear that prevents the solidarity necessary for nonviolent protest. It is possible to overcome this situation by reconsidering the foundations of nonviolent resistance, recognizing that it is part of the political struggle for rights and therefore part of the world of political violence. Meanwhile, the situation of crisis reveals a different source of nonviolence: freedom, understood not in the abstract but as an impulse of revolutionary solidarity. Such freedom is not a political force. It has no analogs in nature, but it is what becomes the primary threat to normalizing power and the main target of torture, thus indicating the place of evil in a world that has lost its religious understanding of the term.