On nonviolent resistance.

• Author: Wishnia, Steven
• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the editor

Colman McCarthy's claim that "nonviolent resistance defied the Nazi onslaught" in Holland and France rings sour, given the near-total extermination of the Jewish communities in Amsterdam and Paris ("Fighting Fire with Water," February issue). Mahatma Gandhi didn't have much of an answer, either; in 1946, he told an interviewer that maybe the German Jews should have committed collective suicide, as it would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence.

Nonviolence vs. violence is one of the great conundrums of politics and activism. I don't have any answers-if I did, I'd win the Nobel Prize for Revolution--but we have to be effective, not just defiant. Black bloc types proclaim that they "went into the streets, resisted, and didn't just walk around in circles like sheep," when all they accomplished...