The Myth of Green Party Nonviolence.

• Author: Swing, Gary

I first became interested in the Greens back in 1984 when I read that Green parties in Europe and elsewhere were promoting the idea of national defense by nonviolent resistance as an alternative to war, an idea which I believe is essential for advancing freedom and justice.

The Greens claim to stand for ecological wisdom, social justice, nonviolence, and grassroots democracy.

Unfortunately, the best known Green Party, in Germany, abandoned its professed belief in nonviolence to further its quest for political power. As part of a coalition government, the German Greens supported military intervention in Kosovo. Among Greens in the United States, nonviolence is just an empty catchword.

No Green Party platform in the United States demonstrates a belief in nonviolence. Both the (nonbinding) National Program of the Greens/Green Party USA and the Association of State Green Parties' Green Platform 2000 reject pacifism. The ASGP' s platform even includes the statement, "We must maintain a viable American military force...." A political party that stood for nonviolence would never even consider putting such a statement in its platform. State Green Party platform statements on nonviolence range from weak to nonexistent.

I have examined campaign literature and websites from dozens of Green Party candidates for Congress and President from 1994-2000, but I have never seen a Green Party candidate in the United States use his or her campaign to advocate nonviolent alternatives to war. At most, candidates and platforms have proposed cutting the military budget from 50 percent (ASOP) to 75 percent (OPUSA), but a nonviolent, alternative vision has not been offered. Green "national security policy" in the United States is just less of the same militarism offered by the two major parties. The Green Party's 1997 "Peace Conversion Plan" made no mention at all of nonviolence. This plan proposed to leave the United States with a genocidal arsenal of 240 nuclear weapons and "a military twice as big as any other country." So much for nonviolence.

War, and the military institutions which make war possible, are the foremost manifestations of violence in our society. At a minimum, a nonviolent political party would be one which explicitly renounces war, calls for the abolition of armed military forces, and advocates the resolution of international conflicts only by pacific means. This doesn't mean just opposing particular wars. It means rejecting the very institution...