The streets of Qom, Iran’s holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners on Sunday. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.
In New York City, students left school early on Monday in a walk-out to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to stop giving students free Metrocards. The youngsters left school at 2 pm and gathered in front of the MTA’s headquarters to demand that the agency find a way to fill its $400 million budget shortfall that won’t force students to pay to commute to city schools.
Some 300 municipal staff began a sit-in at the Town Hall in Alcoy, Spain on Monday against the local government’s decision to sack nine workers, saying they will remain there until this afternoon.
Over 5,000 indigenous, Afro-Colombian and farming community members are occupying the community center of Piñuña Negro in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. A crowd of all ages has gathered at the highest government office in the area—the Police Inspector’s office—to demand negotiations with local and national government representatives and an end to military and paramilitary harassment and coca eradication programs that are causing thousands of residents to be displaced.
The Islamabad Bar Association (IBA) on Saturday protested near Sihala police training college in Islamabad to urge the government to expel the US private security company Blackwater, which lawyers said was operating inside Sihala college.
On December 13, the History Channel aired a great new documentary called The People Speak, which I had been looking forward to seeing for months. The film, for those of you that missed it, is based on Howard Zinn’s famous book A People’s History of the United States, which greatly impacted the way I look at history and the potential for ordinary people to affect change.
Over the last few years, Zinn put on a series of events around the country where actors, musicians, writers and activists, read excerpts from both famous and obscure speeches, books and documents – by Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez and many others - that highlight the long struggle for social justice in this country.
Narrated by Zinn, The People Speak weaves archival footage with dramatic readings of these speeches by actors and artists such as Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Bruce Springsteen, and John Legend.
I was fortunate enough to be at one of these events a couple years ago in New York, where Kurt Vonnegut read Mark Twain, who was an outspoken critic of the US war against the Philippines. It was something to behold, as Vonnegut, then in his 80s, bore a close resemblance to Twain.
You can still check out clips from the film, or buy a copy of it, on a special website that was developed by the channel to promote the film. And if you’d prefer to avoid supporting the History Channel, which is normally quite conservative, you can sign up to pre-order the film on its official website. It should be available early next year.
I just discovered a website called Listserve that specializes in top ten lists. Most of them are pretty random, like “Top 10 Failed McDonald’s Products” or “Top 10 Fascinating Facts About Cheese.” But there are some serious ones too. The one that naturally caught my eye was titled “Top 10 Individual Protests.”
Given the recent success of Aminatou Haidar’s hunger strike, I thought this to be a wholly appropriate time to share the list and see what people think. Who else should have been on it? Once you get beyond some of the obvious names it gets tough.
In general, I think Listserve did a great job. I learned about two people I had never heard of before: Zackie Achmat, an HIV campaigner who refused to take antiretroviral drugs until all four million of his fellow South Africans had the same opportunity, and Vedran Smailovic, who played his cello in public during the midst of the seige on Sarajevo in 1992. Nor did I know about Louis Armstrong’s refusal to represent the US in Russia because of what happened in Little Rock.
I look forward to reading what other names folks come up with…
After being on hunger strike for 32 days and coming dangerously close to death, Aminatou Haidar, the activist who has been struggling for Western Sahara’s independence from Morocco, was finally allowed to return home on Friday.
“There were no conditions. My positions cannot be sold at auction,” Haidar told French television channel France 24 by telephone.
“This is a triumph for international law, for human rights, for international justice and for the cause” of Western Sahara, she said from the airport in Lanzarote before leaving.
(To recap Haidar’s harrowing story: After landing in Western Sahara on her way home from a trip to the US last month, where she received a prestigious human rights award, the Moroccan authorities refused her entry, confiscated her passport and put her on the next flight to the Canary Islands, saying that she could not return until she swore loyalty to the King of Morocco. Upon arriving at the airport, Haidar immediately began a hunger strike that drew increasing international attention as her health deteriorated.)
Morocco finally decided to let Haidar return home after the United Nations and several countries – including the US and France – intervened on her behalf. Her hunger strike will also likely give a boost to the independence movement in Western Sahara. According to allAfrica.com:
…United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in New York [last week] that the situation arising from the hunger strike “really requires that the United Nations needs to do more on political negotiations” over the territory’s future.
Haidar’s ordeal provides a good case study of how nonviolent action can convert the opponent. As Thomas Weber, a leading Gandhian theorist from Australia, concluded after looking at the vast literature on the subject, self-suffering often leads to conversion indirectly “through the agencies of third parties” by moving public opinion or the opinion of those at a closer social distance “to the perpetrator of the suffering to the side of the sufferers.” I would argue that this pretty accurately describes how Haidar’s hunger strike worked.
Some 40 activists with Rising Tide Newcastle shut down the railway line leading to Australia‘s biggest coal export facility for six hours yesterday to protest the failure of global climate change talks in Copenhagen. 23 people were arrested after police removed them from the human blockade.
Two Greenpeace activists got past security at a formal state dinner at Christiansborg palace in Denmark where Queen Margrethe II hosted world leaders on Friday. They waved banners saying “Politicians Talk – Leaders Act,” in the reception hall of the palace before being evicted.
Greenpeace declared the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C. a “climate crime scene” on Thursday to protest the business federation’s continued dismissal of global warming. Activists scaled the Chamber’s building and draped it in yellow crime scene tape, while simultaneously surrounding it with vehicles designed to look like police units and ambulances marked “Climate Crime Unit”.
Thousands of people took to the streets of southern Yemen on Friday to protest a recent military operation against suspected al Qa’eda militants which claimed the lives of dozens of innocent civilians.
Over at Foreign Policy In Focus, I had an article yesterday in response to Obama’s dismissal of nonviolence during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. As often as the new peace laureate references the influence that Gandhi and King have had on his life, he was sure quick to write off any alternative to war in dealing with our most pressing problems.
So, I decided to tell a few stories of how nonviolence worked against the Nazis, and provide a few pieces of evidence that the threat of terrorism will only be exacerbated by sending more troops to Afghanistan. To check out the whole piece, click here.
The picture above was taken by Ed Hedemann, a good friend from the War Resisters League, at a protest that I took part in on the day Obama delivered his speech. We walked from the UN headquarters in New York to the military recruiting center at Times Square. I volunteered to carry a coffin – made of cardboard and drapped in a black cloth - and wore a protest shroud bearing an image of a civilian killed in Afghanistan by a US bomb, which brought home the real human cost of the war in a way that I have never experienced by simply holding a sign.
Thankfully, there was a lot of media covering the demonstration. For whatever reason, the irony of Obama accepting the world’s most prestigious peace award on the heels of making the decision to escalate a bloody war was too hard for even the mainstream press to ignore.
For anyone who speaks German, the video of an interview I did with Reuters during the protest can be seen in an article on the website of Die Zeit, the largest weekly German newspaper. To watch that clip, click here.
Last June was the 27th anniversary of one of the largest protests in history, when upwards of one million people gathered on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park to rally against nuclear weapons while the UN held a Special Session on Disarmament. Two days later 1,600 demonstrators were involved in acts of civil disobedience at the consulates of five countries.
One of the seminal figures of this movement was author Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 book The Fate of the Earth reinvigorated the anti-nuclear movement with its rallying call for a nuclear freeze. Though still very much focused on the issue today, Jonathan has started to pursue climate change with a like-minded passion, which is fitting given the similarities of the two movements. (Something about protesting outside a UN meeting sounds all too familiar right now.)
I met him at the Brooklyn Bridge March for Climate Leadership, which was one of 5,000 plus actions that took place on October 24, the 350-organized International Day of Climate Action. Although very little came of the march, it ended up being a great opportunity to hear Jonathan trace his interest in the issue back to when his good friend Bill McKibben first started writing about global warming two decades ago.
Not long after that, we sat down for a more formal discussion of climate activism. Drawing from his deep knowledge of nonviolent movements–which was the focus of his 2003 book The Unconquerable World–Jonathan offered tactical suggestions for climate activists, compared the threat of climate change to nuclear war and spoke of the general mystery surrounding the rise of mass public movements.
Bryan Farrell: Why has it taken so long for a climate justice movement to emerge.
Jonathan Schell: We just haven’t seen all that much in the way of social movements recently. We had the anti globalization movement in late 90s which flared up and died away. We also had the antiwar movement against the Iraq War but that also has kind of died away. There just hasn’t been much energy in social movements. Why that is is a very deep question. It’s a crippling disability when it comes to changes in policy that are on a deep and fundamental level, whether that’s changing the economic system or opposing these wars and the whole imperial mindset behind them or addressing global warming. If you just look historically, it’s very hard to find fundamental change in policy that wasn’t preceded by a very powerful social movement. So if you don’t have that card in your deck, I think it’s incredibly difficult to get fundamental change. In terms of public awareness [climate change] has been stronger than some of the other movements. Certainly it’s been longstanding and there are lots of strong organizations. Read the rest of this article »
Greece is bracing for a 24-hour strike today by the Communist-backed PAME union even as the newly-elected Socialist government struggles to tackle the country’s ballooning budget deficit. The strike is expected to include local government workers, hospital doctors and port workers, while journalists and teachers are also staging separate strikes.
Civil servants working at train stations across Turkey began to strike on Wednesday to protest the firing of 16 civil servants who were let go because they had participated in a warning strike in late November to protest a substandard wage increase of 2.5 percent.
Over 2,000 inmates began a hunger strike at Tocuyito prison in Carabobo state, central Venezuela, to demand improvements in their prison conditions.
The imprisonment of 2.3 million American citizens, comprising 1 in 99 adults, has been a “success,” according to columnist Ross Douthat in the New York Times:
For a generation now, conservatives, not Dukakis-style liberals, have been making policy on crime. They’ve built more prisons, imposed harsher sentences and locked up as many lawbreakers as possible. Their approach has worked. The violent crime rate has been cut by nearly 40 percent since its early-1990s peak. The murder rate is at its lowest point since Lyndon Johnson was president.
Except… facts are stubborn things.
Mass incarceration has indeed lowered the crime rate, but not by much. According to The Sentencing Project (pdf), three-quarters of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to factors other than incarceration, such as economic opportunity and treatment programs. Between 1998 and 2003, for example, states with stable or decreasing incarceration rates experienced the same average drop in crime as states with increasing incarceration rates.
In addition, “80% of the crime prevented by the incarceration of each additional prisoner is for nonviolent offenses,” continues The Sentencing Project, citing research. That undercuts Douthat’s implication that lower violent crime and murder rates can be attributed primarily to increasing rates of incarceration.
Douthat also ignores the “war on drugs,” a conspicuous oversight given its centrality to the lock-‘em-up ideology. The war on drugs is by most accounts a policy failure with no end in sight. While drug offenders packed our prisons, drugs became deadlier and more widespread. “If anything,” writes Georgetown law professor David Cole, “the war on drugs has probably increased the incidence of crime; about half of property crime, robberies, and burglaries are attributable to the inflated cost of drugs caused by criminalizing them.”
Mass incarceration is a human rights disaster that exacerbates race and class disparities. It would be widely condemned, Cole hypothesizes, if its effects weren’t “concentrated on the most deprived among us.” Ending this shameful chapter in American history involves not just alternatives to prisons, as Douthat ultimately recommends, but an honest account of their impact on crime.
I’ve never tried dumpster diving for food. While I’m intrigued by the idea, it honestly also scares me a bit. After watching a trailer (above) for a new 45-minute movie on the subject, called Dive!, Ryan Rodrick Beiler somewhat reluctantly discusses what has become his “primary (and free) food source,” in an interesting post on Sojourners’ blog. In it, he describes dumpster diving as an act of nonviolence and talks about his reasons for starting to dive in the first place:
Rescuing food from the landfill is both a delight and a duty. The amount of food that’s routinely discarded is overwhelming in both quantity and quality — almost magically so. And with the waste from the business of food production and distribution feeding our landfills better than many of our citizens, dumpster diving is one act of nonviolent civil resistance against the excesses of our corporate food chain.
If any of you have tried dumpster diving, let us know about your experience with it and whether you view it through the lens of nonviolence.
I just discovered a website called 
Last June was the 27th anniversary of one of the largest protests in history, when upwards of 
