It’s a familiar retort — one that comes up whenever people discuss how to strategically engage with white nationalists, fascists, or reactionary movements. And it consistently misses the point, whether through misunderstanding or because it’s easier to dismiss the argument than to wrestle with its implications.
The claim isn’t that kindness is owed to harmful ideologies or that everyone should cultivate endless patience for people spreading them. The argument is about strategy — about understanding what actually disrupts the psychological and social mechanisms that keep authoritarian movements thriving. Hostility strengthens those mechanisms. A different kind of engagement, used when one has the capacity for it, can sometimes undermine them.
No one working seriously in nonviolence — whether it’s Martin Luther King Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, George Lakey, or Daryl Davis — believed kindness is about capitulation. They understood it as a disciplined form of power. Not the sentimental variety, but the sort that draws from Taoist insight: the subtle force that turns toward what is stuck, redirects what is rigid, and exposes the hollowness of cruelty without imitating it.
The Grievance Engine
Modern authoritarian movements run on a very simple engine: grievance. They cultivate the belief that the world is stacked against them, that every institution despises them, that elites and outsiders are conspiring to erase them. By the time an individual adopts these ideas, they’ve developed an interpretive grid that treats anger as proof of authenticity and treats compassion as evidence of betrayal.
Hostility strengthens this grid. Every insult, every put-down, every contemptuous remark becomes another data point confirming the worldview. What many people don’t recognize is that these movements rely on this cycle. They need the constant reproduction of conflict to keep their followers insulated from doubt.
This is why nonviolent communication is so threatening to them. Not because it excuses their ideology, but because it disrupts the emotional logic that sustains it.
Recognizing the Person Beneath the Ideology
Human beings aren’t blank slates waiting for rational arguments; they’re overloaded nervous systems running narrative loops.
A glance at contemporary neuroscience confirms what every spiritual tradition already knew: people do not transform when they are cornered. They transform when something in their internal landscape is interrupted — a contradiction, an unexpected warmth, a momentary loosening of the story they’ve been carrying.
Daryl Davis didn’t befriend members of the Klan because he was naïve. He did it because he understood a simple fact: the minute someone encounters a truth that contradicts their worldview but doesn’t attack their dignity, their mind must choose between the ideology and the lived experience. That instability is often the beginning of change.
It rarely works immediately. In most cases it looks like failure. But the seed still lands.
Every story we have of deradicalization involves an encounter where someone received humanity in a moment when they expected hostility. The act was disorienting precisely because it didn’t fit the script.
The Misfire: “So you’re saying I should be nice to my abuser?”
This jump — from “strategic nonviolence” to “tolerating abuse” — comes directly from trauma. Not as an insult, but as an acknowledgment of how experience shapes interpretation. When someone has been harmed, the suggestion to use compassion in a political conflict can feel like an erasure of survival instincts.
But boundaries are part of nonviolence. King and Nhat Hanh never argued that people should endure interpersonal harm.
They taught that each person must know their own limits and act from a place of choice rather than compulsion.
The practice is not passivity; it’s clarity. It’s understanding that the first responsibility is to one’s own safety and nervous system. No one is obligated to enter a conversation that tears them down.
Nonviolent communication is not about sacrificing yourself. It’s about choosing strategies that reduce harm while preserving your integrity. Sometimes that means speaking calmly. Sometimes it means walking away.
The Internal Work
People often imagine nonviolence as a technique. In reality it’s a discipline that begins internally. It requires slowing the automatic reactions long enough to access curiosity — the Taoist pause where reactivity softens and a new option appears. It asks you to anchor your attention in something steadier than the provocation in front of you.
Chomsky’s work on propaganda is relevant here: systems of power are most effective when they can trigger predictable emotional responses. The ability to stay oriented, to keep your thinking intact instead of being swept into the vortex of manufactured outrage, is a form of resistance.
But none of this is easy. It demands emotional resources that fluctuate day to day. Some days you have the capacity to engage with skill. Other days you don’t. Stepping back isn’t a failure; it’s a recognition of limits.
The Long Arc
The traditions that shaped these practices — Buddhist, Taoist, civil-rights, Quaker — all emerged from prolonged study of human suffering. They understood that conflict escalates when we mirror each other’s worst impulses. They saw that change happens not through dominance but through contact with reality.
Nonviolence isn’t about being pleasant.
It’s about disrupting the cycle that keeps hatred self-sustaining.
It’s about clearing enough relational space for truth to get in.
And it’s about recognizing that the path to collective liberation is shaped by how we treat people in the moments when it feels least deserved.
The goal isn’t to win arguments. The goal is to reduce the conditions that make violence — political or interpersonal — seem inevitable. In a society where polarization is both a product and a tool of concentrated power, choosing nonviolent engagement is one way to loosen that machinery.
The human being beneath the armor may not reveal themselves today or tomorrow. They may never reveal themselves. But every time hostility fails to reproduce itself, the landscape shifts a little. And those small shifts are how movements grow, not through dramatic conversions but through steady, disciplined refusal to participate in the cycles that keep us divided.
Common Objections
“Nonviolence wouldn’t have worked in World War II.”
This objection surfaces constantly, and it’s almost always used to shut down a conversation rather than illuminate one. It takes the most extreme case of mechanized, industrial warfare — one of the worst catastrophes in human history — and uses it as a proxy for the entirely different situations most of us actually face.
The reality is simple: none of us are confronting Panzer divisions or a totalitarian state with a global military footprint.
We’re dealing with online conversations, fractured communities, local tensions, and the social conditions that allow extremist ideas to spread.
These require a different toolkit.
When fascists hold rallies, organize, recruit, or influence local politics, we respond with strategies suited to civil society, not battlefield conditions.
Nonviolent strategy isn’t one thing. It’s a set of tools calibrated to context. What you use in a comment thread is not what you use at a mass demonstration, and what you use at a demonstration is not what you use against a coup attempt or militia movement. The point is to match the method to the moment, instead of invoking World War II as a universal conversation-ender.
“Nonviolence means being passive.”
No. Nonviolence is active. It demands planning, discipline, and an ability to respond without feeding the narrative your opponent relies on. It includes direct action, mass mobilization, economic pressure, strategic communication, and community defense. Nothing about it requires silence or submission.
The point is to challenge harm without reproducing the conditions that sustain it.
“You’re asking people to be nice to racists.”
De-escalation and rehumanization are strategic choices, not moral obligations. The practice is not about protecting someone else’s feelings; it’s about undermining the machinery that keeps their belief system stable.
If you don’t have the capacity for that, you don’t do it.
No one is required to take on emotional labor that harms their well-being.
The strategy is available when it’s useful, not mandatory.
“Kindness excuses their behavior.”
Kindness doesn’t erase accountability. It doesn’t prevent consequences, nor does it eliminate boundaries. You can set limits, name the harm clearly, and still refuse to dehumanize the person in front of you. The stance is about clarity — not capitulation.
“Talking won’t stop fascism.”
Correct. Talking alone won’t. But communication is one piece of a larger strategy that includes organizing, education, mutual aid, movement building, policy work, and social disruption. Authoritarian movements grow through isolation and grievance. They shrink when those conditions weaken. Dialogue is one tool among many for weakening them.
“Some people are beyond reach.”
Sometimes that’s true. People in deep ideological capture or violent networks may not respond to this approach. That’s why nonviolence is not a single tactic — it’s a spectrum of strategies that adapt to risk levels and power relationships.
Some people require containment, not conversation.
Others require community pressure, not persuasion.
The key is to discern which approach fits the situation rather than defaulting to hostility.
“The best response to a Nazi is a punch to the face.”
This line became popular because it’s cathartic, not because it’s strategic.
It turns a complex problem — authoritarian recruitment, social precarity, propaganda, trauma, and alienation — into a single moment of theatrical retaliation.
The question isn’t whether people sometimes deserve a punch. The question is: Does it work?
Every deradicalization group that actually succeeds — Life After Hate, EXIT, Free Radicals Project — says the same thing: humiliation reinforces extremism.
Violence fuels the persecution narratives these movements depend on. Most individuals in hate groups are already primed to interpret hostility as validation.
What disrupts their worldview is the opposite: an unexpected act of human recognition that contradicts the story they’ve been taught about who “the enemy” is. That disruption is what opens the door for them to step out of the identity they’ve fused with.
Punching someone may feel satisfying in the moment, but it closes the only exit they might have found.
“These people don’t want to be part of any community with us.”
Some don’t. But a remarkable number do — once they catch even a glimpse of belonging that isn’t conditioned on fear, anger, or hierarchy.
Authoritarian movements offer people a distorted form of community: a place to channel grievance, to feel seen, to feel powerful. What many former extremists say is that leaving the movement wasn’t first about ideology; it was about losing the only social structure they had.
Deradicalization experts emphasize that you can’t pull someone out of a hate movement unless you offer them something healthier to step into.
That “something” is what King described as the beloved community — a society where care, accountability, and shared humanity are the norm, not the exception.
Bringing people back into community is not about absolving them. It’s about recognizing that authoritarian politics feeds on the absence of community. Rebuilding it is part of the solution.
“Kindness is naïve. These people are too far gone.”
This assumes a level of certainty about another person’s inner life that none of us possess. People change in ways that are unpredictable and often invisible until the moment they’re ready. Most former white nationalists didn’t leave because someone destroyed them in debate. They left because an unexpected interaction made their ideology feel hollow for the first time.
Nonviolent engagement isn’t based on naïveté; it’s based on research and decades of field experience. We know what accelerates radicalization. We know what slows it down. Antagonism usually accelerates it. Humanizing contact — carefully applied and within one’s capacity — can slow or even reverse it.
The point isn’t to assume everyone can be reached. It’s to stop pretending that no one can.
“We should be ruthless with fascists. That’s the only language they understand.”
Authoritarian movements certainly respect force. But they grow through spectacle — through dramatic clashes they can portray as proof that they’re under attack. Every public brawl becomes recruitment material.
Nonviolent strategy denies them that spectacle. It forces them to reveal themselves without granting them the emotional fuel they rely on. George Lakey notes that successful nonviolent movements are not passive — they are disciplined, organized, and disruptive. They challenge the structures that empower extremists rather than performing endless cycles of reactive confrontation.
Ruthlessness may feel powerful, but it often gives them exactly what they want.
“Trying to bring them back into community is letting them off the hook.”
It isn’t. Community is not the absence of accountability. Community is the container for accountability.
Without community, there’s nowhere for transformation to occur.
Deradicalization groups are clear: you can’t shame someone into responsibility; you can only support them into it.
The goal is not to protect their comfort. It’s to create the conditions in which they might willingly relinquish their hatreds — not out of fear, but out of recognition.
That kind of transformation strengthens the whole society.
“Talking to them is a distraction from real organizing.”
It isn’t a replacement for organizing — it’s a complement. Movements win by reducing the number of people who can be mobilized by reactionary politics.
Part of that work is structural: economic justice, housing, healthcare, labor rights.
Part is cultural: creating communities resilient enough that extremist narratives struggle to take root.
Direct engagement is not the whole strategy. It’s simply one tool on one front.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people and movements creating a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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