Violent Direct Action
Violent direct action is any direct action which utilizes physical injurious force against persons or property. While groups such as Animal Liberation Front and Sea Shepherd claim that destruction of property is not violence, US and international law include acts against property in the definition of violence. Examples of violent direct action include: destruction of property, rioting, lynching, terrorism, political assassination, graffiti, freeing political prisoners, fighting against wartime occupation, interfering with police actions, self-defense, and armed insurrection.
However, under this definition Jesus, Muhammad and Nelson Mandela are examples of individuals who have practised violent direct action. The Christian pacifist group, the Plowshares Movement, and the women's right-to-vote group, the Suffragettes, would have also used violent direct action to advance their aims. Historically, the Boston Tea Party is an early example of American violent direct action. An example group that promotes direct action against property is the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which boasts of having sunk several whaling or fisheries vessels, though intentionally without loss of life.
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Famous quotes containing the words violent, direct and/or action:
“His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“One merit in Carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. He removes many cartloads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. His writings are all unfenced on the side of the future and the possible. Though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broadly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumerable pools and lakes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)