On what should be a sad occasion, I’ve found myself uplifted by the many great remembrances floating around the internet of Howard Zinn’s long and productive life. They serve as a reminder that a life well lived is to be celebrated, not mourned. His single greatest accomplishment was not writing A People’s History, but living an active life worthy of inclusion in such a book. He stands as an equal among the American heroes he wrote about for his organizing and speaking out against the Vietnam War, which, on one occasion, as Daniel Ellsberg recalled, led to him being beaten and arrested by police.

I was fortunate enough to have my own interaction with Zinn a few years ago. I was in the midst of discovering the power of nonviolent social movements and had come across his famous article “A Just Cause, Not A Just War,” published a few months after Sept. 11. Being somewhat blinded by my own passions and interests, I seized not upon his wonderful message that war is inherently unjust and must cease no matter the cause, but on this one little statement:

There might be situations (and even such strong pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil would be justified.

It struck me as an unfortunate disclaimer from a man I wholly admired, in an article I otherwise loved. Furthermore, I was not aware of any justification for violence given by Gandhi or King. So I wrote him and asked for an explanation. To my surprise, he wrote back:
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• Hundreds of Notre Dame University students and faculty members gathered on campus yesterday to demand more equality for LGBT students. The protest was in response to an anti-gay comic strip which appeared in the student paper a few weeks ago.

• Climate activists in South Lanarkshire closed down one of Scotland’s main coal terminals yesterday when one of the protesters chained himself to a digging machine. This led to 11 coal trucks queuing at the terminal’s gate and prevented a coal train being loaded.

• Dozens of people gathered in front of Camp Phoenix, an ISAF military base in the eastern part of Kabul, to protest the death of a civilian by NATO forces. They blocked the road that links the Afghan capital to eastern provinces.

• Roughly 100 members from the UAW and Teamsters unions and their supporters gathered outside the Japanese Embassy in Washington yesterday to protest Toyota’s decision to close a California plants and hire nonunion carhaulers.

• Hundreds of students and alumni packed the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson yesterday to show their support for higher education funding and their opposition to proposals that call for merging some Mississippi universities.

• About 1,400 construction workers defied a court order to end their strike at the $13 billion liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia. The strike started Jan. 22 to protest Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s plans to make the workers change accommodation every month instead of providing permanent housing.

• Five concerned parents barricaded themselves inside a primary school in Glasgow this week to protest proposals to shut down the school. It was the latest in a series of school occupations which have taken place over the past year.

• Thirteen people were arrested Tuesday at a protest outside the White House against US militarism abroad. The activists lay down on the sidewalk after reading the names of Americans, Iraqis and Afghans killed in US wars.

In memory of Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, I reread an address he gave at Johns Hopkins University in November 1970, titled, “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” and reprinted in Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

Zinn discussed his frustration with the so-called “problem of civil disobedience.”  That’s “topsy-turvy,” he said, just plain backwards, like a protester getting clubbed by the police and then getting arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Here’s Zinn:

Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Facing injustice, we are oblivious if not complacent – a stance that stems from undue deference for the law, as if it were holy.  “There is nothing sacred about the law,” Zinn said.  “The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.”

The internationally praised Executive Orders signed by President Obama on his first day in office to close the illegal prison in Guantánamo missed its deadline last week.  But that was old news.  It was clear from early on that the closing of Guantánamo, as well as the ending of other Bush era policies in the “War on Terror,” were not going to be much more than a face-lift.   An Obama-appointed Task Force, led by the Justice Department, just finished a collaborative effort in re-reviewing (including the men at Guantánamo cleared for release by the Bush Administration’s standards) the cases of all the remaining men at Guantánamo.  What did they find?  The results are quite staggering and depressing and confirm the continue need for action, witness and pressure against torture and the condition that allow it to happen.

Of the 198 men (now 196 after two Algerian men were released on January 22, 2010) it was reported that “nearly 50 should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war,” according to The Washington Post. As Andy Worthington correctly notes, such indefinite detention is not only legally dubious, it “rubs salt in Guantánamo’s wounds” by announcing such findings on the anniversary of Obama’s missed deadline.  And yet, 110 men are cleared for release, many for the second time, but remain indefinitely detained as the question of where these men are “allowed” to go is resolved.  Repatriating or resettling these innocent men – letting these men go free – is difficult because the United States refuses to take any of them and is stringent in allowing men to return to the Middle East because of unsubstantiated claims of “recidivism.”  Succumbing to the fear-mongering, the U.S. Congress has barred the settling of innocent men from Guantánamo into the United States.  The vote, which passed the Senate 79-19, effectively tied Obama’s hands from making the simple gesture to primarily European nations that the United States is willing to clean up its own mess.

And that is why we continue to protest against torture and indefinite detention.  Waging Nonviolence (here, here, and here) reported some of the activities and civil resistance from Witness Against Torture’s Fast and Vigil for Justice, particularly the 42 women and men arrested at the U.S. Capitol last week mourning the deaths of the three “suicides.”  Most of those arrested spent close to 30 hours in jail, identifying themselves only by the name of a prisoner cleared for release.  After a fast from solid foods for a week and a half, it was a difficult experience for those who spent the day and a half in jail with little water to drink.  But we realize the 12-day, liquid only fast is a small, humble attempt to bring the human face of and suffering reality of the men in Guantánamo (and Bagram) to the United States.  The stories and poems that are related to us by the men in Guantánamo (and through their lawyers) draw us into their humanity in ways that only fasting can do.  Through our own experiences of suffering during the fast, albeit miniscule in comparison, our hearts and imaginations are cracked open and we are able to feel the tears and pains and sorrows and hope (the little there is left) of the men in Guantánamo.  Although we are kept many miles apart, with borders and walls and barbed wired and armed guards and land mines separating us, during moments of our fast, we are drawn into compassion for even those we are told are our enemies.  For some reason, and Gandhi certainly knew this, when you fast, the layers of judgment, fear, and violence are shed and you are able to love even the “worst of the worst.”

We fast because it makes us more human, makes them more human.  Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker, often extolled the “weapons of the spirit, [the] denying of ourselves and taking up our crosses” as the foundation for radical social change.  Gandhi urged his followers to fast to reiterate the need to be nonviolent. We fast because it draws us deeper into nonviolence and emboldens us for public action and civil resistance. Throughout our 12-day fast, many of us expressed a deeper solidarity with the men at Guantánamo than we had experienced before. Only a handful from Witness Against Torture have traveled to Cuba to try to visit the prison. Very few of us have been able to share in dialogue and community with the men imprisoned there, as we are not lawyers.  We fast and protest because indefinite detention, torture and extraordinary rendition are always wrong.  We fast and protest because we want to live in a world not ruled by fear but by courage. And so, while our bodies may be weakened by the fast, our spirit and our resolve are strengthened to hold on, to keep fighting, to keep protesting because one day justice will flow like a mighty river and our brothers at Guantánamo will be welcomed at our table.

The recent demonstration by antiwar activists on the Georgia Tech campus, in which audience members turned their backs on General Petraeus, is reminiscent of an attempt to disrupt a talk by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at last year’s World Affairs Council in San Francisco. Both actions challenge activists to consider effective methods of communication and audience outreach, particularly in an effort to stop the further dissemination of war propaganda during public speeches.

In the Georgia Tech case, silently standing in a large auditorium allowed Petraeus to continue unabated. Also, many people in the audience seemed oblivious to the political action and the security response. For the participants, it seemed like a powerful personal statement, but as a public witness, it seemed only somewhat effective. Petraeus surely knew what was going on, but many in the auditorium did not. Speaking truth to power happened, but speaking truth to people less so (a distinction I heard Noam Chomsky make some years ago). Still, I thank the protesters for carrying out their action.

In the San Francisco case, organized by several of my personal friends and long-time activist associates, the audience was very aware of the action, which was far more disruptive in intent and effect.

As much as I liked the serial disruption approach, the need to scream became less as time went on and anyone standing up, even whispering, would have created a problem for Olmert and the audience. Instead of yelling, which likely jarred the audience into sympathy for Olmert, it would have been more effective to speak with a more normal voice and engage with attendees on a personal level. Neutral audience members might have remained open to the demonstrators’ points about free speech and the problem of giving a platform to someone defending crimes against humanity.

More such actions are necessary. I am reminded fondly of a night in Berkeley some years ago when so many people demonstrated outside of a planned talk by Benjamin Netanyahu that he decided not to give his presentation at all. We felt very powerful that night. I look forward to developing more effective approaches to carrying out actions like this. The potential to shift attitudes of questioning people is great.

A number of commentators have questioned the accepted logic that disasters bring out the worst in people, directly challenging the pervasive “looters run amok” imagery often perpetuated by the media and held out by lawmakers as a rationale for military occupation. Having done relief work following Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, I have found that people are more likely to work together – even if only out of necessity – when severe hardship strikes. In fact, it is precisely the isolation and individualism of ordinary daily life that tap into our worst instincts, while the removal of these impediments can actually liberate our better qualities.

As Dustin Howes recently observed, “the vast majority of people in Haiti responded to the earthquake with the apparently just as natural of an impulse to help one another.” The New York Times has uncovered a widespread ethic of “communal rationing” in Haiti, in which “no matter what is found, or how hungry the forager, everything must be shared.” As the article explains, many Haitians “are finding ways to share. In several neighborhoods of Carrefour, a poor area closer to the epicenter, small soup kitchens have sprung up with discounted meals, subsidized by Haitians with a little extra money…. [Three women there] started cooking for their neighbors the day after the earthquake. On many mornings, they serve 100 people before 10 a.m. Smiling and proud, the women said they did not have the luxury of waiting for aid groups to reach them in their hilly neighborhood.”

This is the untold and largely unreported state of the crisis in Haiti. Amy Goodman filed a series of reports for Democracy Now! from places where relief had yet to be delivered. In Leogane, the epicenter of the quake where perhaps 90% of the city had been destroyed, Mayor Santos Alexis noted that aside from people occasionally taking food from destroyed stores, “there’s no violence really in Leogane.” Still, the mainstream relief agencies remain obsessed with security concerns, to the extent that they will drop small amounts of food from above rather than land and talk with the people on the ground. As Mayor Alexis lamented, the people “feel humiliated, because of the airplane flying and dropping some bread to them. They feel very embarrassed by that.” Haitian expatriate blogger Wadner Pierre likewise reflects on these unfortunate realities, and how they stand in contrast to baseline Haitian values:

My beloved country is one where people know how to do ‘konbit’ (put their hands together) to help their brothers and sisters. But because so many of the organizations now involved in the relief effort do not know Haiti well and do not have Haitian employees who speak the local languages, the situation may worsen… Why are American relief organizations… humiliating people by dropping food and water to them by helicopters? Would they treat American citizens in this manner?

When we consider the practice of nonviolence, one of the foundational premises is humanization, of both self and other. In Haiti, the chasm between survivors and most of the aiders prevents the discovery of a mutual humanity from which empathy may spring, making truly “humanitarian” relief efforts problematic if not impossible. A key aspect of grassroots work in the region has been to reclaim this basic humanity, providing a voice to the Haitian people themselves so that we can see, across the chasms of distance and status, that they are people with the same complexities and desires as ourselves. (A 2008 grassroots video project called “Looking Through Their Eyes” effectively captures this sense of commonality.)

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“Prison officials don’t need a gun; they already have full control over you,” said a former Michigan prisoner who was raped by a correctional officer. She shared her experience with Just Detention International (JDI), an organization working to end the sexual abuse of detainees in prisons and jails around the globe.

The horror of prison rape has been well-documented by Human Rights Watch (hat tip, Te-Ping Chen at change.org). But in American popular culture, the issue of prison rape (when it’s not being ignored), is somehow considered funny, the subject of late-night, drop-the-soap humor. Humor can bring relief to conversations of uncomfortable facts, but it can also dehumanize and trivialize.

Just Detention International (note the name’s double entendre) seeks to change that dynamic with a moving new campaign. JDI prepared three sets of images.

The first set challenges the view that prison rape is somehow not really rape:

The second highlights the health of rape victims:

The third targets the alleged humor of people being raped:

Prison rape has reached epidemic proportions in US jails and prisons. Some 60,500 (4.5%) of the 1.3 million people in federal and state prisons were sexually abused in 2006, according to a 2007 Department of Justice study. By one account, one in five male prisoners is sexually abused at some point during his incarceration. Meanwhile, HIV is four times more prevalent, and Hepatitis C is eight to 20 times more prevalent, in US prisons than in society overall.

Among juveniles in U.S. youth prisons, according to a just-released Department of Justice study, one in eight reported being sexually victimized in the past 12 months (or if they were incarcerated for fewer than 12 months, since they were admitted). Eighty percent of these victims were abused by prison staff.

Kudos to Just Detention International for humanizing people in prison by depicting them in something other than prison garb. Rape is awful whether it happens to women or men, free or imprisoned. “No matter what crime someone has committed,” says JDI, “sexual violence must never be part of the penalty.”

• A protester has a banner around his head that reads ‘Let the people judge’ during an anti-corruption protest in front of the parliament building in Jakarta last week. Lawmakers are conducting an investigation of the government’s $730 million bailout of Bank Century in 2008, which the demonstrators opposed.

• Tens of thousands of pro-life activists marched in San Francisco on Saturday, January 23, for the 6th Annual Walk for Life West Coast.

• In Albany, New York, a rally was held on Monday over plans to allow for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in upstate New York. Critics say the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” could contaminate the water supplies of New York City and other areas of the state.

• Police officers in Balochistan (Pakistan) staged a sit-in on Monday to protest the fact that their salaries haven’t been increased.

• The Cairo Public Transportation workers are starting a strike in all the Cairo garages, at 6am today, demanding the modernization/replacement of the obsolete buses and spare parts, raising allowances related to work hazards, increasing bonuses, reforming the health services, and calling for the formation of a free union, independent from the corrupt state-backed NDP-run Egyptian General Federation of Trade Unions.

• Three anti-coal activists in West Virginia have entered their fifth day of a tree-sit on Monday as part of an effort to shut down a mountaintop removal site run by the mining giant Massey Energy. The three activists are perched atop platforms on trees on Coal River Mountain.

• Tens of thousands of Venezuelans opposed to Hugo Chávez took to the streets of Caracas Jan. 23, blaming him for numerous problems in the country, including increased electricity blackouts, water rationing, and widespread crime.

• Thousands of people protested Sunday in the streets of Indian-controlled Kashmir, accusing the Indian army of killing a civilian.

In the absence of an intact corpse, families often gather for memorial services rather than funerals.

The families of Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani – three Guantánamo prisoners whose earlier purported suicides were declared “asymmetrical warfare” by the Bush Justice Administration – received Salah’s, Mani’s and Yasser’s broken and lifeless bodies. Previously the families had gathered to wake their loved ones, after authorities in their countries informed them that their sons had died in Guantánamo.

Following three grueling years of unanswered questions and heartache, Scott Horton’s recent article in Harper’s Magazine has revealed that the deaths of these three detainees may not, in fact, have been due to suicide, but to having been tortured to death in U.S. custody.

Compelled to act by this tragic news, fourteen members of the Witness Against Torture fast were arrested in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday, January 21st for holding a memorial service in remembrance of the three men. The activists paid respect to the families of the dead in the very room where U.S. presidents are historically waked, adorning a makeshift burial shroud with handfuls of rose petals and filling the enormous Rotunda with story and song.

The Yemeni and two Saudis have stories much like many of the other men who were (and still are) indefinitely detained at Guantánamo; snatched and handed over to the United States for bounty money, 16-year-old Al-Zahrani spent the last five years of his short life in custody. Al-Utaybi, orphaned in his youth and described as “a peaceful person who would harm no one,” was intercepted after traveling to a conflict zone that straddles Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to do humanitarian work. The U.S. Justice Department has no evidence linking Al-Salami to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Two of them had already been cleared for release by the U.S. government; it was determined that they could not be held any longer, and they were flagged, finally, for return to their home countries.

All three were on hunger strike to challenge their illegal detention.

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What’s the most influential social movement in the United States today? When was the last time we heard, for instance, from ol’ Chairman Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party? And the Internet magic made for the Democrats’ 2008 electoral campaigns seems to have settled comfortably back into the self-satisfaction of recycling latte cups. Today, with health care, robber-baron big banks, and two disastrous wars in the balance, the people taking to the streets and capturing the media’s gaze are the so-called Tea Partiers, calling for an end to social services and a return to the joyful jingoism we felt the day after 9/11. Just the other day, they helped ensure the victory of Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, perhaps dooming the chances of the Democrats’ health care plan.

In the February 1st issue of The New Yorker, Ben McGrath gives a truly carpetbagging account of middle American Tea Partiers in action. Here’s one of many striking passages:

[Keli Carender, a.k.a. the Liberty Belle] identified a tactic that would prove invaluable in the months of raucous town-hall meetings and demonstrations to follow: adopting the idealistic energy of liberal college students. “Unlike the melodramatic lefties, I do not want to get arrested,” she wrote. “I do, however, want to take a page from their playbook and be loud, obnoxious, and in their faces.”

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