Pacifism As Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America, third edition

(Paperback, 3rd New edition)

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Pacifism as Pathology is a dissident classic. Originally written during the '80s, the seminal essay 'Pacifism as Pathology' was prompted by Ward Churchill's frustration with what he diagnosed as a growing - and deliberately self-neutralising - 'hegemony of nonviolence' on the North American left. The essay's publication unleashed a raging debate among activists in both the US and Canada, a significant result of which was Michael Ryan's penning of an essay reinforcing Churchill's premise that nonviolence, at least as the term is popularly employed by white 'progressives,' is counterrevolutionary.

Reviews

"Although Churchill couches his psychological analysis in much more polite terms than I would, he believes that some white upper-middle-class activists are deeply conflicted about whether they really want to dismantle capitalism and give up their position of privilege."
--Greanville Post

"The book's main thrust is to analyze and tear apart the ideology of pacifism, explaining how it is, in many ways, a counter-revolutionary ideology."
--Irish Republican News

Author Bio

Ward Churchill is a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and of the elders council of the original Rainbow Coalition. Among his two dozen books are Agents of Repression and The COINTELPRO Papers, both coauthored with Jim Vander Wall; A Little Matter of Genocide, and Acts of Rebellion. Michael Ryan is a Montral-based translator and copy editor. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Ryan was active in Montral's Marxist and antiauthoritarian left. Dylan Rodrguez is professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. He is the author of two books: Forced Passages and Suspended Apocalypse. Ed Mead is a cofounder of Prison Legal News. His memoir Lumpen was published in 2015.