I had a piece on Huffington Post over the weekend about Quentin Tarantino’s WWII revenge-fantasy Inglourious Basterds, a film in which a band of Jewish soldiers brutally terrorize Nazis on their way to take part in a plot to kill Hitler and other high ranking Third Reich officials.

Like other recent WWII movies—Valkyrie and Defiance—Basterds reinforces the myth that only violent resistance could have worked against the Nazis. To counter this myth, I present several prominent case studies of successful nonviolent resistance against the Nazis—any one of which would make for a great film.

Ultimately, my point is to say that it’s time to move on from the stale and misleading storyline that violence is what saved us from the Nazis, when there are so many positive stories of ordinary people triumphing over what we often consider the greatest evil to ever walk the earth.

• Hundreds of Palestinian villagers have made a short but symbolic march to the separation wall that Israel has built on their land, a non-violent protest that they regularly undertake.

• More than 300 Iraqis protested yesterday to demand that Syria stop its alleged support for “terrorists and assassins” determined to carry out attacks in Iraq.

• Argentine farmers marked the end of an eight-day sales boycott on Friday with rallies and marches promising to “keep fighting” in support of aid for peers suffering from the worst drought in decades and to eliminate the current export tariffs system which distorts production and threatens several crops.

• 40 anti-coal activists gathered on the steps of Parliament in Victoria, Australia yesterday to launch a campaign to close one of the state’s coal power stations.

• Following a recent robbery, about 50 disabled persons in Patna, India assembled on the platform of the Patna Junction yesterday morning and held a sit-in demonstration on the tracks to protest the lack of security in areas reserved for them on trains.

• Dozens of Prisoners at a prison in Bryanston, South Africa have gone on an indefinite hunger strike to protest the prison’s administration’s refusal to go through parole processes.

P-38s on the assembly line in World War II (Wikimedia Commons).

During World War II, government fiat turned thousands of peacetime manufacturers into arms producers for the war effort. Factories that once made cars and home appliances were retooled to turn out weapons. Now, in the present recession, market forces appear to be doing effectively the same thing, threatening to throw even more of the weight of American industry (such as it remains) into the war business.

Last April, NPR had a report about how auto parts suppliers are turning to other industries. As the U.S. car market dries up, and with the “war on terror” going full steam ahead, the choice is easy for producers eager to maintain their profits and their workers. The reporter talked to Greg Rothermel, business development director of a supplier in Plymouth, Michigan:

Rothermel says the aerospace-defense industry has a big backlog of orders worth about $200 billion annually. TNT’s business was about 25 percent aerospace-defense last year; he projects it will be up to 50 percent by next year. Revenues have grown from $10 million in 2003 to $12 million as of last year, since TNT began diversifying.

It’s an offer more and more of these struggling outfits are unable to refuse. The car business is getting lost to foreign competition, but Pentagon policy ensures that it has to spend its billions at home. This amounts to a form of discretionary protectionism for a dangerous industry masquerading as patriotism.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if, following President (and General) Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, our policy were to limit the commitment of civilian industry to the military? The more wages (and executive bonuses) come to hinge on the war business, the more war will seem like reasonable economic policy, and the less reluctance business leaders will have to waging it.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the problem is growing. According to a study by the Congressional Research Service, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,” the United States market-share in the international arms trade—already the world’s largest of course—is growing considerably. Our military-industrial complex therefore stands to benefit not only from wars we ourselves wage, but also those of our client states. This is nothing new; U.S. industry has long profited from the conflicts of others. But, in today’s desperate economic times, such practices can proudly display themselves as “recession-proof” devices of recovery. And it certainly seems safer to depend on other people’s wars than on our own.

These trends need to be taken for the threat to national and international stability that they are. In response, we must go out of our way to foster alternatives. This means sensibly considerable public investment in other necessary industries (and divestment from defense) to the point that they can compete with Pentagon contracts. The target industries should be pretty obvious, considering the crises that we presently face: health care, environmentally sustainable development, prison reform, social services, and international humanitarian aid. These are public responsibilities that have been tragically abandoned in the name of cutting spending, even while we continue to invest billions and billions into the future’s bloodbaths.

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• Around 60 people organized by Environment Ohio dressed up as cavemen to protest the GOP’s prehistoric energy policies outside a closed-door panel discussion in Columbus held by Ohio’s Republican representatives.

• Hundreds, possibly thousands, of members of China’s Han majority marched peacefully in the city center of Urumqi to protest a series of mysterious syringe attacks that may be linked to ethnic rioting that took place in July and killed nearly 200 people.

• African-American communities across the Midwest mobilizing this Labor Day weekend to boycott Yum Brands and its subsidiary, the KFC Corporation for the way it handled a recent promotion aimed at African Americans, as well as firings of longtime minority workers.

• The Toronto International Film Festival is set to open next week with a widening artist protest and possible boycott over its spotlight on Israel and its filmmakers. 50 directors, writers and activists who have signed an open letter to the festival titled “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation.”

• Protests took place Thursday outside of Geico’s Chevy Chase, Maryland headquarters in response to 12 union workers who lost their cleaning jobs there.

• Hundreds of people converged on Miami-Dade County Hall yesterday in a last-ditch effort to protest sweeping budget cuts for social services programs run by community-based organizations.

Leading Young Lord Member Denise Oliver speaking at The First Spanish Methodist Church.

August marked the 40th Anniversary of the founding of The Young Lords Party, a revolutionary Puerto Rican community organizing group that began in New York City and spread to other major cities across the country. While opposing racism, militarism and capitalism, The Young Lords fought for community control of institutions and land, freedom for political prisoners and self-determination for all Puerto Ricans. They also provided many health care services to their community and, through direct action, won many concessions from the city government.

I recently had the chance to speak with several party members at a commemoration ceremony held in East Harlem. We discussed the importance of health care to their cause and the various direct actions used to gain their objectives.

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Interview with The Young Lords

[Photo by Marina Ortiz]

A thousand human-shaped ice sculptures melted away in a Berlin square yesterday, as part of an effort by the World Wildlife Fund to draw attention to melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica.

• Twenty activists wearing flippers and goggles sat in kayaks outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London to mark the end of the Climate Camp protest “false solutions” to climate change.

• Six climate change activists entered the headquarters of a construction contractor in Britain that is bidding to build a coal-fired power station. They spoke to staff and handed out leaflets, while another group scaled the building and hung a banner reading Don’t Build Kingsnorth.

• Groups of Climate Campers in London marched towards the head offices of BP and Shell on Tuesday to protest the mining of tar sands in Canada. They were led by indigenous Canadian activists chanting: “When I say BP, you say criminal”. See a photo-set from the various actions.

• Teachers have shut down schools in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca this week, seizing government offices and blocking roads to protest the shooting death of a colleague.

• Hundreds of Asian laborers in Dubai have ended their two-day strike and returned to work after the company’s management promised to address their complaints and include overtime pay in their next salary.

• Residents of Denton, Texas demonstrated in front of City Hall on Tuesday to protest nearby natural gas drilling, which they say is endangering the environment and their health.
  

We just heard from the folks at the Metta Center about an upcoming conference in October that should be really worthwhile:

Sixth Annual
Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking
October 23-25, 2009
Memphis, TN

Less than two weeks left for Early Registration!!!!

ENDS SEPTEMBER 15

Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with experts on issues of justice, nonviolence, sustainability, education, community building and more!!!

Featuring: Rev. CT Vivian, lifelong civil rights activist • Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence • Mubarak Awad, Nonviolence International • Barbara Love, United to End Racism • Rudy Balles, PeaceJam Foundation • Michael Nagler, Metta Center

Workshops by: United to End Racism, Community Media Workshop, National War Tax Resistance, the Matrix Center, and more!!!

Learn more and register at gandhikingconference.org.

• More than 120 protesters from London’s Climate Camp descended on the Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices yesterday, including seven who glued their hands together after gaining entry, to protest the lender’s investments in Canada’s tar sands.

• A further 15 activists staged a naked protest and climbed the roof of central London public relations firm Edelman, which consults the German energy firm E. On, owner of a major coal power plant in Kent.

• Two people were arrested yesterday after scaling the roof of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia to unfurl a banner protesting logging in Tasmania’s old-growth forests.

• Arab educators in Israel are threatening to use civil disobedience if the Education Minister removes the phrase Nakba from textbooks in the Arab education system. The word means “day of the catastrophe” and refers to May 15, 1948, when Palestinians were expelled from what is now Israel.

• Students and faculty of San Francisco State rallied in front of the Cesar Chavez Student Center yesterday and marched to the top of campus to protest the effects of the budget cuts.

• About 20 state workers in Portland, Maine held an informational picket along a major highway to protest 20 planned state shutdown days over the next three years.

• About 15 people chained themselves to the gates of Malta’s Environment and Planning Authority offices to protest permits that threaten the environment.

• On Saturday, a dozen members from the satirical protest group Billionaires for Wealth Care pulled up in their stretch limo and joined the right wing protesters at a Town Hall Meeting hosted by Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-CA) in Spring Valley, California, thanking them for fighting for the profits of the health industry that enriched them.

• Argentine cattle auctions and grains markets were almost inactive Monday as farmers refused to sell products on the fourth day of a protest against government agricultural policy.

• Canadian filmmaker John Greyson has withdrawn his short film “Covered” – a doc about the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival, which was cancelled due to anti-gay violence – from the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival in protest against the festival’s inaugural City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv.

• In Australia, more than half the students at Mullumbimby high school on the North Coast of New South Wales walked out over the death of a teenager in a playground fight.

• Three inmates were in a critical condition at Dar es Salaam’s Keko Remand Prison on Sunday after a five-day hunger strike.

• The pilot’s union Cockpit has called for a 16-hour strike to protest against a move to replace pilots working for LTU with those working for Air Berlin.

• In Dubai, thousands of workers for Al Habtoor Engineering did not report to work and protested they be paid overdue salaries on Monday.

• Climate camp activists staged a “clean-up” protest outside the Treasury in London yesterday. Wearing boiler suits and brandishing cleaning equipment they said they wanted to expose the Treasury’s “dirty practices”, including the use of taxpayers’ money to fund fossil fuel extraction despite the Government claiming to be a global leader in the fight against climate change.

• Five workers from the Indorama textiles factory in Shibeen El-Kom in Egypt launched a hunger strike on Friday after four were fired and one threatened verbally that his employment will be terminated.

• In West Virginia, two anti-mining activists were arrested Monday after they ended a week-long tree-sit. The action forced Massey Energy to temporarily halt work at a mountaintop removal site. Nick Stocks and Laura Steepleton have both been charged with trespass, obstruction and littering.