Pacifism as Pathology Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America

Originally written during the mid-1980s, the seminal essay Pacifism as Pathology was prompted by veteran activist Ward Churchill’s frustration with what he diagnosed as a growing—and deliberately self-neutralizing—"hegemony of nonviolence” on the North American left. The essay’s publication unleashed a raging debate among activists in both the U.S. and Canada, a significant result of which was Michael Ryan’s penning of a follow-up essay reinforcing Churchill’s premise that nonviolence, at least as the term is popularly employed by white “progressives,” is inherently counterrevolutionary. This book challenges the pacifist movement's heralded victories, suggesting that their success was in spite of, rather than because of, their nonviolent tactics. Along with a preface by Ed Mead, postscripts by both Churchill and Ryan, and a new foreword by leading oppositionist intellectual Dylan Rodríguez, these essays are being released in a fresh edition.

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 Montréal-based translator and copy editor. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Ryan was active in Montréal’s Marxist and antiauthoritarian left. Dylan Rodríguez 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.