Letter to the Editor
The Sunday Times
April 23, 2006

Regime reversal

Michael Pinto-Duschinsky claims that we are engaged in a "huge propaganda campaign" as well as secretive and subversive activities to topple regimes such as the one in Tehran (Bush's salon revolutionaries plot an Iran coup, News Review, April 9). We are, in fact, an independent foundation that develops and transfers generic knowledge about how nonviolent civic movements in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe have achieved human rights and elected governments based on the people's consent. Is it subversion to share with Iranians, Papuans or Zimbabweans (whom we do not name at their request), the lessons of how Gandhi used boycotts and civil disobedience? Of how Chileans organised to defeat Pinochet? The default strategy for resisting oppression is still violent insurrection or terror. Giving people access to knowledge of how they can devise and apply nonviolent strategies to reverse injustice should therefore be welcomed.
 
Jack DuVall, President
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Washington, DC