Natalie Bennett, Green Party leader, said yesterday: 'Austerity has failed and we need a peaceful political revolution to get rid of it.' Pippa Bartolotti, the leader of the Wales Green Party, said: 'We can have a peaceful revolution in the UK and still reduce the deficit to 1%
Peace News has long stood for nonviolent revolution, and we recently re-published the much-missed Howard Clark's classic essay Making Nonviolent Revolution (with a new afterword). While the policies in the Green Party manifesto would be a great step forward if they were implemented (and many of them are desperately needed), our definition of 'peaceful revolution' has been more thorough-going.
The idea of nonviolent revolution was advocated from different perspectives by US activist George Lakey and US author Gene Sharp in recent interviews, and critiqued (also in the pages of PN) by Bob Overy and Diana Francis, two important figures in the postwar British peace movement.