Appendix IV The Non-Violence Theory searchable text

                                                                                      APPENDIX IV

THE NON-VIOLENCE THEORY

          Because of the peculiarities of the age, it is inconceivable that widespread public demonstrations on a large scale can be carried out without physical conflict. This is a violent age.  Of course, there is the legal definition of violence as the criminal use of force; but in a duplicity of local, state, and federal laws, it is practically impossible to stage a physical demonstration without violating, hence violence, some statue.

          Passive resistance in the sense of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi is a positive non-violence in a transcendental mystic sense based on a dual ontology of a pantheistic or panpsychistic Nature.  What King and Abernathy mean by non-violence is a negative and is dissociated from any idea of a universal spirit that may be importuned by incantation into action by any mystic forces, even though the leaders of the demonstrations draw out the Negroes’ predilection for the rhythmic chant.

          A cognizance of the antithetical difference between remonstration and demonstration is essential.  The remonstrations are designed to be peaceful and thus non-violent expostulations privately conducted; the demonstration is a public display, planned in full cognizance of violent repercussions.  Such prescience includes police brutality, judicial miscarriage, retaliatory vengeance, and rioting, as results.  The initial

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purpose of the demonstration is to physically defy local laws so as to bring them into clash with Federal law.

          From a logical view point the laws of stress and strain are brought into the equation.  Granted that an equation is the balancing of two qualities as equal quantities; when the equilibrium is violated, one of the qualities has suffered the violence of excess and stress, and it responds with strain; but the other quality tends to strain to the extent that it feels likewise the stress.  The laws of stress and strain continue in effect until the fulcrum is centered, and the equation is balanced.  The moral significance of that analogy is that any act calculated to produce violence is a stress which intentionally produces distress.  Obviously, a demonstration becomes violent when it produces violence, or if any interested or disinterested party to the demonstration is excited to violence, whether that violence be aggression or resistance.  By definition, the term non-violence becomes mere chimerical sophistry, or it does not apply to the demonstrations.

(Handwritten note in italics)