Federation of Nonviolent Action Groups

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Logo of FöGA, a combination of the symbolism of the anarchist circled A with the anti-militarist broken rifle

The Federation of Nonviolent Action Groups ( FöGA ) was founded in 1980 in the Federal Republic of Germany as a nationwide amalgamation of various anarchist - pacifist groups with an anti-militarist focus and was the first nationwide organized anarchist alliance after the Second World War. It consisted of offensively non-violent and self-responsible autonomous reference groups .

The development of the FöGA was closely related to the magazine Graswurzelrevolution and the Graswurzelbewegung , founded by Wolfgang Zucht and his partner Helga Weber in 1972 and published by the FöGA in 1981–1987 . Weavers and breeding were also significantly involved in the initiative to found the FöGA.

The term grassroots revolution is borrowed from the US “grassroots movement”. The groups in the Federal Republic of Germany filled it with more radical content than those in the Anglo-American region. The FöGA consisted of anarchists, pacifists and feminists .

The Federation of Nonviolent Action Groups was not a cross-curricular organization. Its members were close to anarcho-pacifism and the concept of the grassroots revolution, which is used to denote groups and movements that seek to change society from the bottom up rather than as a party or state organization. The attempt is made “in addition to criticizing the existing conditions, to at least begin to organize today as society as a whole will later be” (GWR, No. 1).

The FöGA was the first attempt to combine political agency and grassroots democracy - for example through the reference group concept . It focused on acts of civil disobedience such as B. Sit in front of military bases. The FöGA mainly conveyed anti-militarist and anti- sexist content. Between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the FöGA was significantly involved in the (West) German coordination of the international non-violent marches for demilitarization , which took place with the participation of groups from different countries in Western Europe and North America in the summer of 1979 in Spain, 1980 in Italy, and Took place in the Netherlands in 1981. At the end of the 1990s, the FöGA slowly disintegrated with the decline of the new social movements , especially the peace movement .

ZUGABe , the abbreviation for “Civil Disobedience, Nonviolent Action, Movement”, is a network of various campaigns and groups that work in a similar way to FöGA . The motivation of ZUGABe is to bring organizations, action groups, campaigns, civil disobedience and work areas together, “z. B. the campaign Gendreck weg ; Bombs no - we're going in; X-thousand times across ; Nonviolent Action Abolish Nuclear Weapons; but also action groups like the Lebenslaute, long-standing reference groups, training collectives, the workshop for nonviolent action in Baden, the archive active ”. Unlike the FöGA, it is politically broader and does not want to take its own positions.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Networking the Campaigns of Civil Disobedience Quote after the Grassroots Revolution , No. 328, April 2008. A GWR interview