Swedish nonviolence educator and Plowshares activist Per Herngren
by Per Herngren
When civil disobedience spread across Europe and the United States, the biggest mistake was perhaps the fixation on blockades. In the rich part of the world, the blockade has been made the dominant method of civil disobedience. In this text, various reasons are analyzed as to why Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi did not use blockades.
Gandhi used proactive and performative resistance, and the goal became the means of the struggle, “means and ends are convertible terms”. (Mohandas Gandhi, 1939.) The desired solution to the problem was turned into the method of civil disobedience. When local salt extraction and cotton production were monopolized by the colonial power, Gandhi, together with others, mined salt and spun cotton, breaking the colonial monopoly. This is called performative in queer feminist theory and is similar to Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence, where means and ends are the same. A performative is an action that realizes its vision.
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