It isn't often that the ideas in a book have the power to change the way you think about the world, but for me this book did just that. I found myself looking at long held beliefs with a very critical eye when I had finished reading this short (182 pages), succinct and very readable book.

I have always seen violence as a last resort, something to be avoided as far as possible, and war as a failure of negotiation skills. I had also considered that there were probably some ends - the freeing of the slaves in America after the Civil War, the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the founding of the French Republic, for example - which would or could not have been achieved without a fight.

Mark Kurlansky questions these assumptions, and also why the major religions, all of which started out committed to the idea of non-violence as an aspiration for believers, have ended up supporting war after war, up to the present day.

In this concise and refreshing book, Kurlansky begins by asking why no language has a word for non-violence. In each language he illustrates that the word for violence is the norm and it is only by adding a negative before the word that the idea can be expressed.

Pacifism has its own word in most languages but one of the key points of the book is that non-violence is not at all the same thing as pacifism. He sees pacifism as being a passive state and non violence as being active, and he quotes many examples of the people who throughout the ages have campaigned vigorously for peace.

With a few notable examples, Ghandi being the best known, these people have been reviled, laughed at, persecuted and written out of history. If it is true that history is written by the victors then it follows that history will not criticise the methods they chose to win this victory.

I was most affected by the chapters examining the American Civil War and World War II. The statistics from America are staggering - between 600 -700,000 Americans died during the Civil War, more than the total deaths from all other American wars combined.

Was this enormous loss of life necessary to free the slaves in the South? In reality, the only right southern blacks had gained from the war was to go north and labour long hours at an underpaid dangerous job created by the new industries that the Civil War had developed.

One hundred years after the Proclamation of Emancipation, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a crowd of hundreds of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and promised the black people of America that in the future they would be "free at last". Someday perhaps, but a century after that dreadful loss of life he did not believe that it had already happened.

Kurlansky then makes the point that all through the 1930's American companies such as General Motors, ITT and Ford were operating in Germany under the protection of Hitler. The German writer Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1934 "While horror of Hitler's methods is great .... The Governor of the Bank of England was sent to the United States to obtain credits for raw materials for Germany, i.e. armaments credits."  Anti- Nazi Germans received no support for their campaigns against Hitler because "to the captains of banking and industry in the United States, Britain and France, and to the political leaders who supported them, the enemy was not fascism, it was communism."

Mark Kurlansky concludes with a list of 25 rules, from which I have chosen just five as examples to illustrate his thinking:

• Practitioners of non violence are seen as enemies of the state
• Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its non-violent teachings
• People who go to war start to resemble their enemies.
• Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence
• The miracle is that despite all of society's promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.

This book is not negative, despite the many examples of failure to find ways of resolving conflict without torturing and killing opponents. On the contrary, he repeats many times that the idea of non violence has already been explored, and therefore much of the work has been done. To succeed, sufficient people will take up the idea and refuse to fight. It is a notion which has particular relevance as we move into the second decade of the 21st century and the concept of perpetual war no longer appears to be something out of a horror comic.

"Since the close of the twentieth century it has become commonplace to refer to it as the most catastrophically bloody century in history. Lenin, who saw war as "an inevitable stage of capitalism" had predicted this at the century's beginning. By the end of the century an estimated 187 million people had died in war, the equivalent of 10 per cent of the planet's population at the outbreak of World War I. That made it a record century, but also a far higher percentage of war fatalities were civilian than in any previous centuries. In World War I one fifth of the casualties were civilian but in World War II it went up to two-thirds. In twenty -first-century war-fare, such as Iraq, it may be as high as 90 per cent civilian." page 145

It is now clear that perpetual war can be very profitable: for Governments, for the armaments manufacturers, and for the multi- national security firms who have taken on the role of law keepers from the Allied military, in Iraq and who may do also in Afghanistan. There are some signs that the next country to receive attention from these organisations could be Iran. I urge you to read this book, even if you are sure that you support the idea of a "just" war.

Mark Kurlansky is an author with a great interest in Spain - his best known book "A Basque History of the World" is just that and follows on from his earlier work "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World". "Non Violence -the history of a dangerous idea" is not available yet in Castellano.

Nina Davies, February 2010

Non Violence -the history of a dangerous idea
Mark Kurlansky, Jonathon Cape, London 2006
forward by His Holiness The Dali Lama
Modern Library