3 May 2016
3 hours

National Committee of 100: London Committee Archives.
Archive Box 36. The cover states: Documents concerning the trial and imprisonment of Nicolas Walter after the Brighton Church demonstration / 1967

Archive Box 37. The cover states: Documents concerning the trial and imprisonment of Nicolas Walter after the Brighton Church demonstration / 1967

Archive Box 38. The cover states: Documents concerning the trial and imprisonment of Nicolas Walter after the Brighton Church demonstration / 1967

Archive Box 42. The cover states: Questionnaires A-B / 1965-1966.

Nicolas Walter Papers
Archive Box 55. The cover states: Notes relating to non-violence. With some correspondence, clippings and other documentation. 1963, 1965-1966.

- No title [“Anarchism and Non-Violence”]
Original typescript, extensively corrected in ink. Author: Nicolas Walter. No date [ca. 1965]. Format: B4. 3 pages.
Untitled, undated and incomplete article by Walter on anarchism and nonviolence. Contrary to what many believe violence is not part of the anarchist philosophy. In the early days of anarchist thinking anarchists and pacifists were more or less one inseparable. For about a century (1840-1930) anarchism has often been associated with violence, and some anarchists did participate in violent movements, yet this was not the position of the majority of anarchists, and many of the foremost spokespeople were outspoken pacifists (Tolstoy, Benjamin Tucker, Domela Nieuwenhuis, Bart de Ligt, etc.). “Bart de Ligt turned the old ideas about violence upside down. Before him, people regretted violence, but then insisted it was necessary to get things done. He regretted violence, and then insisted that it was unnecessary because it didn’t get things done – ‘The more violence the less revolution’.”
After the Second World War most anarchists seem to have embraced nonviolence. As a nonviolent anarchist Walter welcomes this development, but he is also of the opinion that “non-violence is getting out of hand. What began as a useful idea has become a whole ideology which is neither useful nor simple. […] The ideology of non-violence has several features in common with other ideologies. One is obsession with categories. All advocates of non-violence distinguish between two main categories of non-violent action – what Gandhi called duragraha or the non-violence of the weak, and satyagraha or the non-violence of the strong. There are many definitions of these categories apart from Gandhi’s – non-violence as a tactic or a technique, and non-violence as an ethic or a principle; secular or political non-violence, and religious and moral non-violence; and so on.”
However, both strands of nonviolence are quite different, “they are not really two kinds of the same thing, but two quite different things.” Using one term for both phenomena obscures the picture. All the more so because most theorists seem to opt for the “more extreme category”. Walter prefers a distinction of his own: “The true distinction is between pragmatic non-violence and dogmatic non-violence – the non-violence that is practiced by people, and the non-violence that is taught by experts: non-violence as an idea and non-violence as an ideology.” Walter favors the pragmatic version.
The article ends mid-sentence. 

- “Toynbee on Violence Versus Gentleness”
Original typescript, extensively corrected in ink. Author: Nicolas Walter. No date [ca 1965]. Format: B4. 2 pages.
Some lose notes on Toynbee and his concept of gentleness. Walter delves into Toynbee’s The Study of History (Vol. V) and notices that when Toynbee discusses his concept of the ‘internal proletariat’ he remarks that some of those victims were moved to respond to force with counter-force, yet others responded in a way Toynbee called gentleness. Toynbee later qualifies this gentleness as something “which might equally well be called Non-Violence”. He then discusses the various meanings of this nonviolence, of which he lists 4: “(1) A cynical disillusionment with the fruitlessness of a Violence which has been previously practiced ad nauseam without having produced the intended results.; (2) a conviction that Man’s divinely allocated role in the economy of the Universe is to adopt a patiently passive attitude towards a mundane scene on which it is God’s exclusive prerogative to execute His divine will through His own action; (3) ‘a means to some constructive end’ which is mundane (Gandhi); and (4) ‘a means to some constructive end’ which this time is ‘Otherworldly’ (Jesus).”

Archive Box 56. The cover states: Notes for a book on direct action. With the typescript of the introduction and a German paper on direct action. 1967, 1972.
The box contains a large collection of index cards and several (illegible) handwritten manuscripts.

- ‘Direct Action”
Original typescript. Author: Nicolas Walter. Date: 1967. Format: B4. 19 pages.
The manuscript only contains the introduction and the first chapter of a book (Direct Action) that never was. Added to the manuscript is a one page blurb that gives a brief outline of what the book should have covered. “This is the first book covering the whole field of direct action. Direct action is social or political action which by-passes the normal channels of government (In his Introduction he defines direct action merely as: “It is action, as opposed to thought, writing, talking; and it is direct. It is direct in two senses. It is action taken by the people directly involved in a problem, and not by intermediaries, representatives, delegates, officials; and it is action taken directly against the problem itself, and not against something else”).
The Introduction explains at length how the idea of direct action was developed by anarchists and syndicalists in the nineteenth century labor movement, and was then taken over by the leaders of the India struggle against the South African and British Governments. 
In chapter 1 he deals with Gandhi’s legacy towards and role in the development of the concept and use of direct action. “The ultimate end was to destroy industrial capitalism and the national state and establish a system based on hand labor and the village commune, and the ultimate means for achieving this was by organizing a non-violent revolution or its equivalent based on the conversion of the people to the philosophy of truth and non-violence.”
In his philosophy Satyagraha was to be a way of life in which non-violence took center-stage “to the exclusion of anything else”. Satyagraha as a method rather than a way of life, including the concept of direct action, was first drawn attention to by authors such as De Ligt, Clarence Case, Fenner Brockway, and they placed both the non-violence and the direct action of Satyagraha in a long and important tradition, going back to Hindu and Christian ideas as well as to John Ruskin, Thoreau and Tolstoy, but also that of the Dutch resistance to the Spanish in 1576, The Paris commune, the suffragette movement, the Finnish resistance to Russian conscription and many other historical examples. “These writers show that whatever Gandhi may have thought, he did in fact belong to a long tradition; or rather, he belonged to two traditions – the tradition of non-violence and individual resistance, and the tradition of direct action and mass resistance, and his particular contribution was not so much the emphasis on non-violence as the combination of non-violence with direct action, of individual resistance with mass resistance.”