Where were you on February 15, 2003? If you were a part of the biggest global demonstration in history against war, which took place that day, I’m sure you remember well.

I was in the streets of Castellon, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, where I was studying for a master’s in Peace Studies, with some 20,000 other Spaniards protesting the impending war against Iraq. It was really very moving to be a part of such a large gathering.

Now a team is working on a full-length documentary, called “We Are Many,” about that historic day. Although it’s not set to come out until late 2011 or early 2012, they have already completed a very nice trailer for the movie (above).

While I’m all for commemorating that important event, I also think it’s worth looking at critically. Yes, millions of people around the world came out to protest a war that had not even begun yet. Nothing like that has ever happened before. As Noam Chomsky has said, it took years for any comparable protest to develop during the Vietnam War. And there is hope in that.

Nevertheless, it didn’t stop the invasion of Iraq. Bush brushed off the demonstrations with ease. To let the protesters influence his decision to attack Iraq, he quipped, would be like saying “I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.”

And unfortunately, when the war began a little more than a month later, many who took part in that global day of protest felt deflated. Afterwards, it took months to build the momentum for action back up and it’s my sense that many people stopped demonstrating against the war for good. Perhaps they felt that it was of no use, since the massive protests before the invasion didn’t apparently bear fruit.

However, the hard truth is that we never should have expected one day of protest, no matter how big, to stop a war. That’s not how nonviolence works. If we actually wanted to stop the imminent attack on Iraq, we would have had to come back the next day, and every day after that, until the administration listened. Almost all nonviolent campaigns that have been successful against such a powerful, determined opponent required this type of sacrifice and perseverance from participants.

Protesters would also have needed to try other, more aggressive tactics – like civil disobedience or even a general strike – that more directly disrupt business as usual. If millions of people indefinitely refused to go to work, blocked roads around the country and filled the jails, then Bush may have perhaps faltered.

Rather than simply celebrate February 15, I would encourage the filmmakers to include some discussion along these lines, so that their very promising documentary can contribute to the building of a more effective movement in the future.

In his latest comic for World War 3 Illustrated, Ethan Heitner, a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a member of Jews Against the Occupation (JATO-NY) and Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Middle East Justice, describes the reasons that he supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli occupation.

Last year, Naomi Klein wrote an important piece for The Nation in which she counters several arguments that are often made against this campaign, that is well worth a read. She argues that BDS is the “best strategy” in the ongoing struggle for justice in Palestine, and that surrendering these nonviolent tools “verges on active complicity.”

To learn more about how you can get involved in the campaign in your community or on your campus, click here.

• More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Athens Wednesday after two of Greece’s largest trade unions organized a nationwide strike to protest austerity measures aimed at reducing the country’s public debt. But the largely peaceful rally of disgruntled workers was unfortunately disrupted by a group of violent youths who clashed with police.

• Hundreds of rallies took place across the nation on Wednesday—the eve of President Obama’s White House Health Care Summit—and over a million signed a petition sent to Congress urging lawmakers to “finish the job and pass real health care reform.”

• Environmentalists in Australia marched on New South Wales Parliament yesterday to protest plans for new coal power stations at Bayswater and Lithgow.

• 5,000 indigenous Dongria Kondhs of India trekked to the abode of their presiding deity Niyam Raja on Sunday and designated it as inviolate to protest a controversial alumina refinery and bauxite mine project.

• More than 320 students, faculty and community members gathered Wednesday afternoon to demonstrate for sub-contract workers’ rights at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

• Hundreds of students from several Jordan, Utah district schools walked out of their classes Thursday morning to protest announced budget cuts that could slash teacher ranks, increase class sizes and impact extracurricular activities.

• Nine days after an off-campus student party mocked Black History Month, UC San Diego went through a day of protests, on Wednesday, drawing attention to the small number of African American students enrolled at the beachside campus.

• Classes at a secondary school in Midland, Ontario were disrupted Wednesday morning when nearly 200 students walked out to protest rumoured cuts in programming.

As a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as through essays in many newspapers and websites, Ira Chernus has spent decades bringing the tradition of nonviolence to bear on concrete current events, particularly American and Israeli foreign policy. What drives him most of all, though, is his fascination with nonviolence as a profound intellectual tradition, and the passionate thinkers whose minds and imaginations inspire the more visible work of public, performative activism.

On a recent trip to New York, Chernus took the time to talk with me about his work. He has written several books, but the one we discussed most of all is American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which is available in print through Orbis Books, as well as for free, in its entirety, on his website. Culled from the lecture notes of the course on nonviolence he has been teaching for years, it is a definitive chronicle of the major thinkers who shaped the distinctly American lineage of nonviolence.

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Here’s how it starts:

Waging Nonviolence: Why did you decide to write American Nonviolence as an intellectual history of nonviolence, specifically, as opposed to a history of movements and actions?

Ira Chernus: Part of the reason is just because that’s what I’m good at. If I’m good at anything, I’m good at ideas and being able to understand the underlying logic of a body of writing. Most of the major figures in the history of the nonviolence movement were not philosophers and certainly were not really theorists. They were leaders of movements that had to get jobs done. But in the course of their work, they offered a very, very rich body of ideas, but they didn’t lay them out systematically. Gandhi’s collected writings are, what, 93 volumes or something; he was writing at an incredibly rapid rate, and each thing he wrote was largely designed to meet the needs of a particular moment. He wasn’t thinking about laying out the overall intellectual architecture of his thought. He was not primarily a theorist. The same is true for Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, and any of the great leaders in the movement. But, as I read their work, I found that there was a very rich underlying intellectual structure there, and I believe—and maybe it’s just a leap of faith—that one of the things any successful movement needs is a strong intellectual structure.

For more, listen to the interview above.

Just over a week ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a conference at The New School called “Iran: Politics of Resistance.” Many great scholars on Iran, both American and Iranian, took part in three panel discussions throughout the day. I was only able to attend the first one—which focused primarily on the Green Movement and whether it can accurately be called a full-fledged revolution—but the others looked to be just as fascinating. Fortunately, they are now all online.

From the first panel, I recommend watching Charles Kurzman from the University of North Carolina speak about “Cultural Jiu-Jitsu and the Iranian Greens,” as well as the talk on “Revolutionary Prefigurations” given by journalist Danny Postel (a good friend of this site). His suggestion that the Green Movement not put off addressing economic issues (like the “color revolutions” of Eastern Europe) was met with serious debate during the Q&A period—a phenomenon we are familiar with on this site. It was also nice to hear a lot of our hunches about the ambiguity of the Green Movement’s objectives and leadership echoed by the speakers.

I have yet to watch the other two panel presentations, but both look particularly useful to those studying social movements and nonviolence. The second is about “Everyday Resistance, Micropolitics and Solidarity” and the third is on “Ethical and Political Demands of the Green Movement,” which includes a presentation on “The Gandhian Movement in Iran.”

I plan on watching both and will add comments if anything strikes me. I hope others will join me.

Last week, the Boston Globe had an interesting piece about how the research of Boston College sociology professor Lisa Dodson led to her new book, “The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy.” As she was interviewing managers at stores that employed low-wage workers, she began hearing their discomfort with making enough to live well, while their workers were seriously struggling to make ends meet.

In response to this unjust situation, Dodson found that many managers participated in acts of what she calls “economic disobedience,” such as slipping “their workers extra money, food, or time needed to care for sick children,” in an effort to undermine the system. One story she tells is of Andrew, a manager at a large Midwest food business, who:

…said he put extra money in the paychecks of those earning a “poverty wage,” punched out their time cards at the usual quitting time when they had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment, and gave them food.

Andrew had decided that by supervising workers who were treated unfairly – paid too little and subjected to inflexible schedules that prevented them from taking care of their families – he was playing a direct role in the unfair system, and so he was morally obligated to act.

Not surprisingly, her book has sparked controversy for portraying such acts in a positive light. Some argue that she is essentially glorifying stealing from companies, rather than working through legal channels to try to rectify the situation.

I personally would tend to agree with Dodson, that these acts are moral. Corporations are not designed to care for the well-being of their workers. Their primary focus by law is on the bottom line and the interests of their shareholders, which are generally at odds with what would be best for the workers. (If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend watching The Corporation. It’s a documentary that came out a few years back that explores these issues and many more.)

I’d be interested to hear what you think. Are these acts of “economic disobedience” something to be lauded or is this theft by another name?

On the first day of Lent last week, I started my day with mass. I sat with my fellow students. I sat with Jesuits and sisters. I sat and waited to receive ashes. I waited and listened, searching for the meaning of the day. Hoping the priest would remind me why I was there; remind me what Ash Wednesday represented. If only after two decades of attending Ash Wednesday services I could be more grounded in the meaning behind the tradition.

But in my mind and in my heart, I was carrying my agenda for the day. I would not be returning to class after mass. I would be catching the el to head south. I would be a part of the dialogue at the Union League Club. I would be part of the presence outside of its doors. I would be sitting at a table and fasting through lunch. I would wait, and listen actively in order to assess the words of Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway as he gave his lecture, “Closing Guantánamo: Policy, Legal and National Security Concerns”.

As we traveled south, we read the cases of men imprisoned at Guantánamo. We read their names, their trials and the details of their continued detention.

When we reached the Union League Club, we opened our banners and we put on orange jumpsuits. We pulled hoods over our heads and processed to the front entrance.

There we stood. Masked. Solemn. Strong.

Our message read, “We are all human beings. End indefinite detention.”

Underneath the hood, I felt people stare at me. I felt their curiosity. I felt their indifference. I began to think of the men I represented. I began to imagine them standing in my place, on the streets of Chicago, as people walked by and nodded, as people walked by and gawked. I wondered at the shame one feels as a prisoner, made to wear a hood, made to wear a costume, made to feel inhuman. I wondered at the powerlessness of standing erect in the face of indifference, imprisoned.

I had the choice to walk away. I had the choice to drop the banner. I had the choice to go to class. I had the choice to fast. The men at Guantánamo do not have these choices. Their protest is met by force-feeding.

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• The pilots’ union of Lufthansa began a 4-day strike today after a last-ditch effort at negotiations over pay and job security failed.

• In Thailand, truck operators will stage a stoppage on roads today in protest at alleged extortion by highway police, saying incidents have doubled since last year.

• Thousands of protesters in Ivory Coast call for the resignation of President Laurent Gbagbo as clashes with security forces leave an undisclosed number of people dead and wounded.

• All 600 detainees at a prison in Iraq’s southern city of Basra have gone on hunger strike to protest conditions that are “not fit for animals,” a local politician said on Friday.

• Strikes at French refineries looked likely to spread as Exxonmobil employees Friday were called to join a protest at oil giant Total that has shut down seven plants and raised fears of supply cuts.

• Greece faces a growing fuel shortage as a customs workers’ strike halts the flow of petrol into the country. Customs workers have extended their strike against wage freezes and bonus cuts until this Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

• Dozens of Egyptian women and human rights activists staged a protest last Thursday in Cairo against a recent decision that bars women from holding judicial positions.

• Last Wednesday, Kenyans marched to vent their anger at a coalition government slowly falling apart over graft allegations and its inability to further key reforms pledged two years ago.

• Last week, A group of lawyers from the Law and Democracy Platform, an Turkish NGO working to strengthen the rule of law while respecting democratic values, protested against the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) decision to strip prosecutors conducting a probe into jailed Erzincan Chief Prosecutor İlhan Cihaner of their special authorities.

A Minnie Mouse lookalike outside Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel striking with union local 681.

Eight Disneyland Hotel workers of UNITE HERE Local Union 11 in Anaheim, California, engaged in a week-long hunger strike to highlight their two-year dispute on health care and other labor issues with the Walt Disney Company.  The eight workers ended their hunger strike on Tuesday, as five more began fasting.

The workers want to keep the health plan that their union provides (paid for in lieu of pay raises), while Disney proposes deducting health care costs from workers’ wages. Disney maintains that their plan would cost $250 a month per family, while the union estimates $500.  Workers typically earn $11-13 an hour.

The Disney dispute mirrors an exacerbating national trend: Employment no longer guarantees satisfactory health care coverage.  Between 2001 and 2007, insurance premiums rose 78% while wages rose 19%. As health care costs rise, employers drop benefits, contributing to the number of uninsured Americans.

One in six full-time workers, or 21 million people, were uninsured for all 12 months of 2008.  Astoundingly, 45% of the nation’s 46 million uninsured actually worked full-time. And the percentage of Americans who receive health insurance through their employer has decreased from 64% in 2000 to 59% in 2008.

The Disney workers seem determined not to become another statistic.

• Three activists began an occupation of Marfork Coal Company’s main offices in West Virginia yesterday. Marfork is a subsidiary of the coal extracting giant Massey Energy. The protesters plan to present a citizen’s arrest warrant and list of violations on the Marfork processing plant.

• About 400 demonstrators gathered in Aldermaston England on Monday to block the entrances of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, where warheads for Trident submarines are made. Twenty-six were arrested, including Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire.

• About 1,200 Iranians signed a statement against a bill that would further curb women’s rights.

• Greek customs workers announced 48-hour rolling strikes yesterday—the day that was supposed to be the last of a three-day strike to protest government austerity measures designed to pull Greece out of a debt crisis.

• Belgian train drivers went on strike Tuesday to protest safety conditions after the collision of two commuter trains left at least 18 people dead.

• About 300 protesters, mostly doctors dressed in white coats, chanted “the health-care system is in danger” and waved soccer-style red cards in the direction of the building where Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia has his office.

• Some 600 workers shut down a pulp and paper mill in southern Finland on Wednesday to protest UPM-Kymmene Corp.’s plans to lay off 200 workers.

On the one hand, as a new CNN poll shows, 11 percent of Americans identify with the movement. That’s a much larger portion of the population than I would have guessed. Think about it, one in ten!

On the other hand, as blogger Juan Cole pointed out, twice that percentage of the population favors socialism. Yet socialism gets far less media attention. In fact, according to Cole, Tea Party received 15 times as many mentions in the media last month as socialism.

The CNN poll also breaks down the Tea Party demographics to show that the movement is disproportionately comprised of white men with higher-than-average incomes, who live in rural areas. While that’s not exactly the picture of average working class Americans some say compose the movement, I can’t help but wonder if 30 million Americans fit the description of white, male, educated and rich. I won’t say the data is flawed, but it does confuse me.

Let’s continue to assume that the Tea Party movement is a relatively large, but homogeneous, group of people. Can such a movement succeed? The recent indigenous protests in Peru had some level of success with probably fewer people. Of course, they were fighting for a very specific and defined cause, rooted in social justice. The same cannot be said for the Tea Party movement.

I won’t argue that excessive government spending isn’t a legitimate gripe, but to mainly attack social programs and not the defense budget is rather inconsistent. A recent article by the vice president of the CATO Institute, of all things, pointed out this flaw:

The Tea Partiers insist they’re nonpartisan, devoted only to staving off our looming fiscal apocalypse by any means necessary. If so, they can prove their authenticity by backing substantial cuts in entitlements and defense.

Tea Party pressure has already forced President Obama to call for a three-year freeze of nonsecurity spending. But that’s just 16 percent of the federal budget. You could zero that out entirely next year and still end up hundreds of billions in the hole.

Rail against earmarks, foreign aid and “welfare queens” to your heart’s content. But all that comes to a rounding error in a $3.7 trillion federal budget, over 75 percent of which consists of defense and entitlements.

[...]

The Tea Partiers — often thought to be hawks — might further demonstrate their credibility by calling for cuts in the Pentagon’s $663 billion bottom line.

If the Tea Party Movement followed this advice and made its demands clear and consistent, it might be something to take seriously. I’d be willing to forget its demographics if its message was more on point and honest. But as long as it associates with Sarah Palin and Republican Party politics, it will likely remain lost to its own potential. Perhaps, this is just more evidence of the need for a left movement that takes on defense spending and shows it to be the real root of our problems.

In this fascinating video, neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a brief overview of the recently discovered mirror neurons, or what he likes to call “Gandhi neurons,” at a recent TED conference. As he describes in his talk, a mirror nueron is a motor neuron in your brain that:

fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it’s as though this neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view. It’s almost as though it’s performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person’s action.

Ramachandran then describes another type of mirror neuron that works similarly with the sense of touch:

Read the rest of this article »

Today at The Immanent Frame, I’ve got a report on last night’s event at Fordham University on St. Francis’ mysterious encounter with the sultan of Egypt. More and more, it is being remembered as an antidote to the “clash of civilizations” and a model for Christian-Muslim peacebuilding. But is the history really what we want it to be? And what do we need from history to take on the work of making peace today?

It’s tough to imagine a better run-up for today’s interfaith—or inter-civilizational, or whatever you want to call it—dialogue: at the height of the Fifth Crusade in the summer of 1219, St. Francis of Assisi traveled to the battlefield at Damietta, Egypt, went behind enemy lines, met with Sultan Malik al-Kamil, and then returned to Europe to continue his career as one of the greatest of medieval saints. There may even have been a miraculous gauntlet of fire involved, depending on which of the various contrasting reports from the period you read. Really, beside a few basic facts, the reports agree on very little, least of all what we might now want from the story most.

When I first learned about the story—it was the subject of a college paper I wrote in 2005—I could find few modern sources to draw from. As I gathered every early account I could, it amazed me that, in the proverbially post-9/11 world, a bigger deal wasn’t being made of Francis’ adventure. Now that has changed. On February 17th, with half the foreheads in the packed room marked by Ash Wednesday smears, Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture sponsored a forum with four authors who have recently written about it: two historians, a Franciscan sister, and a journalist.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

Here is a bit of hopeful news from Palestine. Two and a half years after the Israeli Supreme Court deemed that the section of the separation wall that cuts through the village of Bil’in was illegal, the Israeli military has begun re-routing the wall to comply with the ruling. This move will return 30 percent of Bil’in’s land to the village.

In response to the news, Mohammed Khatib, the coordinator of the West Bank-wide Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a member of the the Bil’in Popular Committee, said:

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the only reason that this is finally happening now are the five years of persistent struggle and the sacrifices the people of my village have made. While we are happy for the lands that do return, we do not forget the lands and crops that remain isolated behind the Wall. Our struggle will continue until all of our lands are returned and the Occupation is over.

Since the wall was erected in 2005, Bil’in has been a focal point for nonviolent resistance in Palestine and garnered widespread support and positive media attention around the world. Residents from the village, along with other Israeli and international activists, participate in a weekly march to the wall every Friday. According to the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee:

In addition to grassroots demonstrations and nonviolent direct actions, Bil’in has held annual conferences on popular resistance since 2006; providing a forum for villagers, activists and academics to discuss strategies for the unarmed struggle against the Occupation.

In their latest weekly protest, activists from Bil’in demonstrated their creativity by dressing and painting themselves as the native Na’vi from the film Avatar.

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After a statue of a 10-year-old Obama was placed in a central park in Jakarta in December, Indonesians began to protest. More than 56,000 people joined an Indonesian-language Facebook group called “Take Down the Barack Obama Statue in Taman Menteng Park.”

The resistance to the statue was apparently not so much because of what Obama has or hasn’t done as president, but because they questioned his real contribution to Indonesian society.

“Why should Obama’s statue be displayed in the center of Jakarta?” Linda Christanty, one of Indonesia’s most well-known writers, told Andre Vltchek in an article on Foreign Policy in Focus today. “Why didn’t they erect statues of the reformation heroes — people who were kidnapped during the Suharto era? Such statues would serve as a warning. It could help to prevent some terrible crimes from happening again — crimes like the forced disappearance of the people.”

Due to the mounting protest, Jakarta’s City Park and Cemetery Agency actually took the statue down on Sunday. City officials confirmed that it will be moved to the grade school that Obama attended from 1967 to 1971, which is in the area.

While this protest is fine, I’m a bit surprised that the folks behind the push to take the statue down didn’t express a wider range of grievances. For one thing, I don’t know of any major shift in US policy towards Indonesia, which has really been hideous for decades. And I would think that many in Indonesia – which is a predominately Muslim country – might be offended by the fact that Obama has significantly escalated the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan and has not altered US support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the Muslim world in any meaningful way. But I guess those are just a couple of my own gripes with our dear leader.