Yesterday, I attended a moving commemoration of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 64 years ago at the Buddhist temple here in New York City (video above). They hold their annual event on August 5th, because in Japan – when the difference in time zones is taken into consideration – it is already the morning of August 6th.

There was music, poetry, and various speeches against not only the use of nuclear weapons, but all war and violence. At 7:15pm (which was 8:15am in Hiroshima), the exact time that the bomb was dropped, prayers were said as a peace bell was rung.  The group of about a hundred then proceeded to walk with signs and candles some twenty blocks to a church where an interfaith service and concert was held for peace. I was very moved by the event, including the presence of a man who actually survived the horrific bombing that day.

My good friend Frida Berrigan, daughter of the longtime anti-nuclear activists Phil Berrigan and Liz McAllister, wrote a wonderful piece about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that is worth quoting at length.

In Hiroshima, Little Boy’s huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph Siracusa, author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: “In one terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima… was destroyed. The blast temperature was estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet in diameter.”

Three days later, Fat Man exploded 1,840 feet above Nagasaki, with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. According to “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered,” a web resource on the bombings developed for young people and educators, 286,000 people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped; 74,000 of them were killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously injured.

In addition to those who died immediately, or soon after the bombings, tens of thousands more would succumb to radiation sickness and other radiation-induced maladies in the months, and then years, that followed.

In an article written while he was teaching math at Tufts University in 1983, Tadatoshi Akiba calculated that, by 1950, another 200,000 people had died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb, and 140,000 more were dead in Nagasaki.

She then discusses where we are at today in the struggle to rid the world of these terrible weapons and provides some shocking numbers that remind us how far we have yet to go:

The nine nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, France, England, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea — have more than 27,000 operational nuclear weapons among them, enough to destroy several Earth-sized planets.

[...]

According to the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the United States still maintains a nuclear stockpile estimated at 5,200 warheads — of which approximately 2,700 are operational (with the rest in reserve), while the Obama administration will spend more than $6 billion on the research and development of nuclear weapons this year alone.

[...]

Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when compared to today’s typical nuclear weapon. Little Boy was a 15 kiloton warhead. Most of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal today are 100 or 300 kilotons — capable of taking out not a Japanese city of 1945 but a modern megalopolis. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and a former launch-control officer in charge of Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles armed with 170, 300, and 335 kiloton warheads, pointed out a few years ago that, within 12 minutes, the United States and Russia could launch the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshimas.

• More than 3,500 workers at South African telephone group Telkom in four of South Africa’s nine provinces began a two-day strike on Monday to push demands for pay increases, only days after the end of a five-day strike by tens of thousands of council workers that saw rubbish pile up on the streets and key services paralysed.

• Hundreds of physically disabled people staged a sit-in protest in New Delhi on Monday against non-inclusion of disability in rights to Education bill. Activists of the Disabled Rights Group,an NGO,said that the bill excludes more than 20 million children who are specially-abled.

• Hundreds of Saudi women students held a rare protest at a university over alleged corrupt admission policies. After being turned away on admissions day at Taif University, south of the holy city of Mecca, the female students held a sit-in and blocked streets and the entrance to the university.

• On Monday, followers of the ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya began a hunger strike in front of the building of the Professors College of Middle Education from Honduras to demand his immediate return to power.

• A group of environmental activists calling themselves the Camp for Climate Action Scotland (CCAS), are planning to use this week to stage a number of acts of civil disobedience within Central Scotland to protest the coal industry.

• Missionary schools across Pakistan closed on Monday in a three day protest against the deaths of up to seven Christians after an angry mob of Muslims torched 40 houses and a church in the remote village of Gojra.

• In Sri Lanka, a group of unemployed graduate went on a hunger strike in front of the Fort Railway Station demanding employment opportunities at government institutes.

• More than two dozen Thomas Cook PLC employees were arrested by Irish police on Tuesday after they defied a court order by occupying one of the travel company’s Dublin locations.

• Two Palestinian families who have been forced to leave their homes in East Jerusalem (al-Quds) have staged a sit-in protest.

• Around 45 workers occupied Orchard Lodge, the only secure children’s unit in London, after a meeting in which they were told the building in William Booth Road, Anerley, was closing.

As negotiations with Costa Rican president Óscar Arias between the two claimants to the Honduran presidency remain unproductive, reports say that ousted leader Manuel Zelaya is massing a “pacific resistance army” on the Nicaraguan side of his country’s southern border. Says Costa Rica’s English paper, the Tico Times:

Deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya will mobilize a “popular, pacific army” of loyal followers to join him in his promised return to Honduras, he said from his exile post in Nicaragua opposite the border with his homeland.

“We will begin with a training period. The best way is for five trainers to train 20,” Zelaya said Wednesday evening to a crowd of hundreds of supporters in Ocotal. He added that the struggle will remain peaceful and the members of his force “will use weapons of intelligence and reason.”

China’s Xinhua tells the same story:

The National Front of Pacific Resistance created by ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in Nicaraguan border with Honduras, will become the People’s Army of Pacific Resistance, Zelaya announced Thursday.

Zelaya announced in Ocotal, 26km to Honduran border, the beginning of a training, education, exercise, and vigilance stage of the new people’s Army.

However, Zelaya said it is a pacific people’s army needed in Honduras to defend its conquest and rights with the weapons of intelligence and reason.

Zelaya told the press that he has visited many estates in the nearby of the bordering zone, where the camps of his resistance army could be set.

It is encouraging to see that, in a crisis with so much potential to erupt into regional war, at least one of the sides has decided to pursue its goals with coordinated, principled, nonviolent methods. But the AFP, also reporting on Zelaya’s utterances last week, tells a very different, much less rosy story:

“Either the coup is reversed or generalized violence is coming,” Zelaya warned the interim government headed by Roberto Micheletti in an interview Friday with Nicaragua’s state-owned Channel 4 TV.

“The people have the right to protest, to insurrection. This is the case of the Honduran people, which is being brutally repressed,” he said.

Soon after, around 100 Honduran men belonging to Zelaya’s “popular army” began training exercises in a camp on the Nicaraguan side of the border with Honduras, an AFP journalist witnessed.

The recruits, mostly young men and all unarmed, exercised, marched, and carried out maneuvers under the direction of leaders who said they were Honduran army veterans.

[…]

Zelaya announced Wednesday that — with permission from leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega — he would organize his own army based on the more than 300 Honduran supporters that gathered at his base at the border town of Ocotal, 226 kilometers (140 miles) north of the Nicaraguan capital Managua.

This will be “the popular militia that will guard the president upon his return,” Zelaya said.

“If you want peace, prepare for war,” Ortega said. “Precisely to avoid war we have to prepare for whoever thinks they can come take a stroll in Nicaragua.”

Ortega said that “it made no sense to launch any aggression against Nicaragua” because it has a well trained army ready to defend the country.

No mention of “pacific.” It doesn’t directly speak of weapons, but you can bet “Honduran army veterans” aren’t working from the playbooks of Gandhi or Gene Sharp. Not a popular resistance movement but an elite guard for the president. Which account is true, or more true? What is Zelaya creating?

If you can shed any light on these conflicting accounts, please let us know in the comments.

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio, which goes out live in Austin, TX on KAOS 95.9FM, and is then replayed on stations in Southern California, San Francisco, and Oregon.

I gave a brief overview of what this site is all about, and then spoke on the use of nonviolence to force political changes, the decline of the antiwar movement after Obama’s election, the need for more creative and assertive protests, why there is no such thing as a humanitarian war and the replacement of soldiers with remote-controlled robots. Click below to stream or download the interview

Eric Stoner on Antiwar Radio (30:25).

• Witnesses estimated as many as 20,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur on Saturday in defiance of government warnings for people to shun the rally against the Internal Security Act, which allows the indefinite imprisonment of people regarded as security threats. Police broke up Malaysia’s biggest street protest in nearly two years by firing tear gas and chemical-laced water at thousands of opposition supporters (video above).

• Railway traffic in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) ground to a halt Thursday after train drivers went on strike to protest government plans to cut salaries in the sector by 10%.

• On Saturday, 168 Palestinian refugees in Iraq in Tanaf refugee camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border staged a sit-in before the UNRWA tent demanding their immediate evacuation from the desert camp to Italy that announced readiness to accommodate them.

• Thomas Cook staff have started a sit-in protesting the decision to close the Irish operation a month ahead of schedule.

• Around 25 workers on the Isle of Wight are continuing their occupation of the Vestas Wind Systems factory in a bid to stop the factory closing with the loss of 625 jobs.

• Palestinian detainees in the Israeli Salem detention facility have conducted a two-day hunger strike in protest to the ongoing violence practiced against them by the Israeli prison guards and the bad living conditions.

• More than 1,000 people protested for a second day in central China on Thursday over pollution from a chemical plant that they say has sickened locals and poisoned surrounding farmlands.

• Some 200 Venezuelans gathered outside a Caracas broadcaster Saturday to protest a decision by President Hugo Chavez’s government to revoke the licenses of 34 radio stations.

• California’s largest state employees’ union, the SEIU, voted on Saturday to approve a strike authorization measure to protest furloughs of state workers and pressure state officials to ratify its labor contract.

Three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee takes a pause in his account of a summer spent living among Depression-era, cotton-picking tenant farmers for an “Intermission,” subtitled “Conversation in the Lobby.” The overall thrust of this portion, phrased as a furious response to questions posed to writers by the Partisan Review in May, 1939, is to defend the radicalism of the artist’s vocation.

A good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist.

The Partisan Review‘s final question concerned the “the next world war.” It asked, “What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?” Of all his answers, here Agee replies the most directly, the most earnestly, and the least aggressively toward the askers. He says he has thought much about the matter—“first glibly … later with more and more perplexity, distress, and immediate interest, fascination, and fear”—and several possibilities have come to him.

1. Enlist in that part of the war which seemed most dangerous, least glamorous, least relevant to any choice I might have through “education,” “class,” “connections,” or personal craftiness. This either for personal-“religious” reasons or out of an “artist’s” curiosity, or more likely both.
2. Join the stalinist party and do as I was told or Bore from Within it. [A page earlier he writes, “‘I find, in retrospect,’ that I have felt forms of allegiance or part-allegiance to catholicism and to the communist party. I felt less and less at ease with them and am done with them.”]
3. Stay wherever I happened to be, mind my own business, refuse every order, and take the consequences.
4. Stay wherever I happened to be, and write what I thought of the War, the Pacifists, etc., wherever I could get it printed.
5. Escape from it by whatever means possible and by the same means continue to do my own work.

For those of us hoping to plant Agee in a particular position or camp, either for or against this war or war in the abstract, he is evasive. Even the pacifist crowd, so radical in its way, he considers also a “society” into which an artist cannot afford to blend. Answer 1 offers a very Christ-like self-sacrifice, venturing among the least to reveal the truth for all. But, unlike number 3, and possibly numbers 2 and 4, it seems a perfectly anti-political position to take. So also is number 5. Taken together, though, the options offer little assurance to the partisan.

A footnote appended later seems to be some encouragement for radical nonviolence:

I would now (fall of 1940) have to add to this belief in non-resistence to evil as the only possible means of conquering evil.

Only to equivocate in the very next sentence:

I am in serious uncertainty about this belief; still more so, of my ability to stand by it.

If you’re tempted to dismiss Agee as simply a political weakling, a dilettante making games out of serious business, the last sentences of this section are worth hearing out. They spell out a cosmic reversal, an insistence that The War everyone talks about is in fact a game, an absurdity when viewed from the truly serious business of making art and meaning for the human race.

Or, in other words, I consider myself to have been continuously at war for some years, and can imagine no form of armistice. In that war I feel “responsible.” I doubt any other form of war could make me more so.

This artist, he insists, cannot be the partisan that the Review wants to drum out concerning the coming war. He refuses to accept the war being declared by politicians and generals—and all manner of those who consider themselves informed—as the real war most worthy of his attention. Especially when no one else does, the artist can look past her or his society’s present means of mass suicide and murder, into the deathless questions that, by being ignored, so provoke the rest of us.

During World War II, Agee devoted himself to reviewing films for Time and The Nation. The draft board passed him over. He had a son who died soon after being born, and he married his third wife.

Protesters banging on pots and pans in Santiago, Chile in 1983.

“When citizens of oppressive governments can’t protest, how do they show their discontent?” asks Zeynep Memecan at Newsweek last week. A few creative examples of what people have done under such circumstances are then offered, including one which caught me off guard. She writes of a protest in Chile against “Marxist” President Salvador Allende in December 1971 where thousands beat on pots and pans in the streets of Santiago to protest “widespread food shortages” and “acts of violence in the country.” In what seems to be an approving tone, Memecan concludes by saying that “these elite women were very influential in creating an unstable political moment that eventually led to a military coup by Augusto Pinochet in 1973.”

There is no mention of the fact that many of Chile’s problems while Allende was president were due to meddling by the U.S. government. In Killing Hope, William Blum documents in extensive detail Washington’s campaign to destabilize the Chilean government. For example, it was later revealed that  only days after Allende was elected, President Nixon ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to “make the economy scream” in Chile, and for starters offered $10,000,000 for the task.  (Here is an excerpt from that chapter, which unfortunately does not include the many useful footnotes that he provides in the book.)

Also not mentioned by Memecan is the reign of terror that Chileans lived through as a result of the coup in 1973. The raw numbers are shocking. According to Naomi Klein, “more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons” during Pinochet’s 17-year rule.

But what I found most problematic about this article was that Memecan chose this example at all, especially when she could have highlighted a very similar protest that happened more than a decade later against Pinochet. On May 11, 1983, people throughout Santiago beat on their pots and pans as a symbolic act of resistance and solidarity, which helped spark the courageous nonviolent movement that eventually brought an end to the dictatorship.

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