• More than 100 tenants at the Chunping Shopping Mall in Beijing went on hunger strike Monday, asking for the return of their rent. The shop owners have protested and stopped eating for three days as of Monday in front of the shopping mall and two people were hospitalized due to the hunger strike.

• On March 26, several thousand marched in Tegucigalpa to demand an end to the escalation of repression, and against the neoliberal policies of the new government.

• On Monday, about 100 trolleybus drivers went on strike in Ukraine because they are owed back pay and are demanding immediate payment. They also protested against the liquidation of bonuses and deteriorating work conditions..

• On Monday, more than a dozen union members stood in front of the Daimler Trucks North America parts plant in Gastonia, North Carolina, holding signs in protest of manufacturing orders outsourced to the company’s Mexican plants.

• A hunger strike that began on March 18, by several Sahrawi detainees in Moroccan prisons to protest against violations of human rights in the occupied territories of Western Sahara has expanded to 10 other prisons.

• On the University of Victoria’s campus in Canada, the Food Not Lawns Collective is planning another “planting party,” after the administration moved quickly to remove unendorsed garden beds built by the protesters last week.

• French teachers are protesting violent attacks that have become all too commonplace in schools, an unintended result of budget cutbacks.

• In the Philippines, six political detainees of the Bohol District Jail (BDJ) are on hunger strike an in apparent support for “illegal arrest” of 43 health workers in Morong, Rizal recently.

• On Friday, dozens of unions joined striking Shaw’s workers to escalate the protest across New England after Shaw’s said it was beginning the process of hiring workers to permanently replace the striking employees.

• The public, including members and supporters of the ruling Frelimo Party, boycotted en masse a rally in the southern Mozambican town of Homoine at which the new governor of Inhambane province, Agostinho Trinta, was to have been presented to protest  the chronic shortage of drinking water, lack of rubbish collection, and the poor state of the roads in the town.

We come across a lot of prison actions working on this site, which almost always means a hunger strike by inmates. There is often little else that prisoners can do to protest their treatment given the circumstances.

A recent story from The Telegraph, that could literally have appeared as a spoof in The Onion, tells the story of one unnamed prisoner in Sweden who has taken a different tact. Read and enjoy:

Anders Eriksson, the prison’s warden, realised that the inmate’s repeated episodes of flatulence were “a series of concerted attacks” on staff.

[...]

The apparent motive came to light a couple of weeks ago when the prisoner was playing cards with fellow inmates.

“I had an upset stomach while I was playing cards but did not want to fart there. So I went over to the guards instead,” the 21-year-old convict told the prison authorities.

When challenged over his behaviour and summoned for questioning, the prisoner claimed that his “farts were all noise and no fragrance”.

He has been served with an official warning that future flatulent conduct towards prison guards will be punished.

Apparently Glenn Beck has taken a fancy to nonviolence. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer he recently made “a metaphoric plea for a Gandhi-and-Martin-Luther-King-inspired nonviolent resistance to what he claims is the government’s march toward socialism.”

“Get God on your side, and then pick up a hammer,” Beck said Saturday at a tent-revival-meets-politics rally that nearly packed the University of Central Florida basketball arena. Quoting Gandhi, he took the hammer to an anvil onstage and said: “With nonviolence, take your hammer and pound that truth every day, and everything that doesn’t fit, toss it out! We have the truth . . . With nonviolence, be the anvil of truth every single day!”

The Orlando rally was the first of at least two heavily promoted, daylong American Revival events featuring the TV-and-radio star and some of his favorite pundits, designed to answer a question that might have seemed ludicrous just a year ago but which on Saturday attracted followers from up and down the Eastern Seaboard, including the Philadelphia region:

Now that Glenn Beck has captured everyone’s attention, just where exactly is he trying to take America, anyway?

Beck plans to slowly roll out the answer over the course of 2010. He’ll be publishing a not-surprisingly apocalyptic political thriller this spring, hosting an audacious rally at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in late August – on the 47th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech there – and has claimed he’ll release another book right before the fall elections with a 100-year plan for reviving America.

Of course the one major thing stopping Beck from being the next great nonviolent leader is the very “anvil of truth” he references. If we were to follow what Gandhi said and reject “anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence” we would have to reject most of what Beck says because to be truly nonviolent you must have a just cause. Most of Beck’s rhetoric is based on lies (calling Obama a socialist and likening him to Hitler), as well as a violent agenda (opposing health care and other would-be social services that save lives).

It is interesting, though, that he chose to promote nonviolence. Perhaps he realizes its power of persuasion and the legitimacy it tends to give to a particular movement. Unfortuantely he has yet to realize his ideaology doesn’t fit with nonviolence. You can’t tell people to be nonviolent at the same time you tell them the apocalpyse is coming and that they’d better “stockpile food.”

Watch out for that anvil, Glenn.

As a tribute to the “Hoover Carts” of the Great Depression, New York artist Jeremy Dean has created a horse-drawn Hummer cart for display in Central Park. He explained his motivation in a recent interview with the Daily Mail of London:

‘I came up with the idea during the global economic meltdown,’ Mr Dean said.

‘I thought these hummers are the pinnacle of consumerism and a powerful status symbol, so what will happen when they are no longer sustainable?’

Dean’s answer may be more provocative than realistic, but it’s certainly something to think about as the Hummer becomes ever more obsolete. Excessive (and worthless) luxury can always be put to good use. Maybe we can think of a better function than horse-drawn carriage since, personally, I’d rather see people make use of pedicabs than put a poor animal to work.

If you want to receive Waging Nonviolence updates by email please sign up for our mailing list at the top of the page. We will soon start sending weekly updates with links to our top stories, as well as the occasional breaking news item.

• Hundreds of people gathered in Moscow yesterday to protest the reopening of a factory environmentalists say will lead to waste being dumped into the world’s oldest lake.

• Hundreds of protesters, many in kayaks, took to the water off Horseshoe Beach in Newcastle, Australia yesterday morning to prevent shipping movements at the world’s top coal port. Rising Tide Newcastle said the protest stopped ships from entering and leaving the port between 10am and 5pm, but the Newcastle Port Corporation denies these claims.

• Landmarks around the world—including Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Sydney Opera House—went dark Saturday evening to observe Earth Hour, a global effort to raise awareness of climate change. 126 countries and more than 4000 cities and towns took part worldwide.

• Greenpeace activists unfurled banners of every size today outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, just as Dell executives meet to discuss a roadmap to finally remove the worst toxic chemicals from their electronics. The message around the world to Dell’s founder and CEO: “Michael Dell: Drop the Toxics!”

• Covered head-to-toe in black, a Saudi woman lashed out at hard-line Muslim clerics’ harsh religious edicts in verse on live TV last week at a popular Arabic version of “American Idol.”

• Students at two New Jersey high schools cut class yesterday morning to protest Governor Chris Christie’s State school-aid cuts.

• More than 7,000 people gathered in the main park of the northern Mexico city of Monterrey yesterday to protest a wave of violence that has affected the country’s third largest city in recent weeks. Most of the protesters wore white and some released white balloons and a white dove as signs of peace.

On the Daily Show last week there was a powerful segment where Jon Stewart tore apart the recent decision in Texas to exclude Archbishop Oscar Romero – who was assassinated 30 years ago this week by graduates from the School of the Americas (SOA) – from a list of great political or moral figures of the twentieth century that will appear in high school text books.

As Jimmy McCarty explains at Sojourners’ blog:

Romero was Archbishop of El Salvador for only three brief years, but his impact continues to this day.  In the midst of dire poverty and rampant violence, Archbishop Romero never wavered from publicly preaching nonviolence and the Christian commitment to the poorest of the poor.  He did not waver when intimidated, and he loved both the poor and the enemies of the poor.  He brought international attention to the gross human rights violations in El Salvador and was a living witness to the gospel of Jesus.  His life is recent evidence of the power of the message of Jesus to transform individuals, communities, and social structures.  Every Christian can learn from his example.

On March 24, 1980… as Archbishop Romero prepared to administer the Eucharist during the memorial service of the mother of a friend, a single bullet pierced his chest, splintered, and struck his heart.

To read more, check out John Dear’s reflection on Romero at the National Catholic Reporter, and this nice piece in Killing the Buddha.

• A protest by hundreds of students led organizers to cancel a Tuesday night speech by American conservative commentator Ann Coulter at the University of Ottawa.

• Hundreds of Argentine workers demanding a rise in salary occupied Buenos Aires province’s Department of Culture and Education building for six hours Tuesday. The protesters, all members of the Association of State Workers, said they would stage a strike on April 7.

• In Rockford, Illinois, hundreds of District 205 students walk out of class Wednesday to protest teacher layoffs. The protests are tied to the announcement that all “nontenured” teachers in the school district will be laid off.

• A bright red, 71-foot yacht will sail into Newcastle Harbour at midday tomorrow, arriving for Sunday’s People’s Blockade of the World’s Biggest Coal Port. The Amsterdam-registered Gaia’s Dream will moor at Carrington before joining a mass community protest on Sunday that aims to prevent the passage of coal ships in Newcastle Harbour.

• Two hundred union members occupying the basement of the Pearl Continental Karachi Hotel ended their 25-day sit-in on Saturday night, March 20 when a direct representative of the hotel’s owner directly intervened in the conflict for the first time ever in the more than 8-year history of the conflict.

• In the UK, civil servants in Cornwall and Devon have gone on strike for a third day in protest over redundancy pay packages. The action follows a two-day strike earlier in March which saw thousands of civil and public servants across the south west stay away from work. Courts, ports, job and tax centers are among venues being hit by the strike.

According to the environmental blog Treehugger, Nestlé was forced to drop its Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas Group after a successful viral video campaign by Greenpeace, which highlighted the destruction palm oil production causes to rainforests and orangutan habitats. But the success can’t be completely credited to Greenpeace. Apparently Nestlé blundered when it got the video taken off YouTube after only fewer than 1,000 people had seen it. This allowed Greenpeace to repost the video on Vimeo.com and send out word about Nestlé’s attempts to suppress their message, ultimately causing enough hubbub to force Nestlé’s hand. This is a great example of what’s known as political jiu-jitsu or as Treehugger put it, “how activists can succeed and how corporations can screw up bigtime.”

Danish police arrest a climate activist outside the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen last year

In the backwards world of anti-terrorism laws, two climate activists are facing significant jail time in Denmark for their roles in organizing protests against the United Nations Copenhagen climate summit in December. According to a press release by the Mobilization for Climate Justice:

Natasha Verco, an Australian honours student, and Noah Weiss, an American citizen who lives in Denmark, will face similar charges in a trial which is due to last all week.

Verco, who has organised non-violent direct action in her native country and who has been part of the Climate Justice Action (CJA) network in the lead-up to the summit in Copenhagen, has been charged with organising violence, organising public disorder, significant damage to property, and organising disorder during the international talks on climate change which took place in Copenhagen last year. If found guilty, Verco faces a maximum of twelve and a half years in prison.

Speaking a day ahead of the start of the trial, Verco recalled her arrest: “On December 13 I was riding my bike down by the Copenhagen lakes,and a plainclothes police woman jumped out at me and pushed me off the bike. She took me to an unmarked police van with six or seven plainclothes policemen. I asked them ‘Are you randomly picking me up?’ and they said ‘No, we hunted you’. They held me by myself in an underground carpark for about 16 hours, I think. Then I was taken to Vester prison and held there for three weeks and two days. I was charged the day after I got to prison, but bail was refused because, they said, the investigation was ongoing and I would influence it if I was released.”

Verco and Weiss say they both had their phones tapped, along with 17 other activists, which is legal under recently introduced terror legislation in Denmark. Verco said: “I feel nervous and indignant at the same time, I wonder what the hell they’re going to argue because I can’t see what evidence they’ve got for these charges. And looking back at the calls that they’ve taped, it feels very invasive. Under the new terror laws they can do this, but it seems to me that applying terror laws to activists is steadily eroding the base of our democracy.”

Verco was heavily involved in organising the day of action on December 14, but was arrested before it happened. When it took place, she was still being held by police. “The police say that they prevented anything happening by taking me in. There was no violence, and no disruption of the public infrastructure, because they’d arrested me.”

MCJ is asking folks to send a message to the Danish justice and foreign ministries to support the two.

More than 25,000 people gathered in Montgomery, Alabama 45 years ago on this date to protest racial discrimination—the culmination of a month of hardships many now refer to as the turning point for the Civil Rights Movement.

Several hundred marchers had just completed the 54 mile trek from Selma as part of the historic Alabama Freedom March. The New York Times captured the moment with a front page story, mostly centered on Dr. King’s address to the crowd:

He referred to the tumultuous events at Selma in the last two months, during which time the voting-rights campaign that he began there turned into a general protest against racial injustice, with two men dead and scores injured.

“Yet Selma, Alabama, has become a shining moment in the conscience of man,” he said. “If the worst in American life lurked in the dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it.”

“The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma, generated the massive power that turned the whole nation to a new course,” he said.

“Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but the evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state.”

Dr. King spoke with passion, and the thousands sitting in the street beneath him responded with repeated outbursts of approval.

Several times he urged his followers to continue their support of nonviolent demonstrations, with the aim of achieving understanding with the white community.

“Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man,” he said, “but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society that can live with its conscience.”

He ended his address with a peroration on the theme, “How long must justice by crucified and truth buried?” a spirited quotation of a verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and finally a burst of “Glory, hallelujah,” repeated four times.

The crowd rose to its feet in one great surge, and the applause and cheering reverberated through the Capitol grounds.

• On Sunday, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Washington in a major rally for immigration reform. Estimates of the crowd size ranged from 200,000 to as much as 500,000.

• Tens of thousands of French public sector workers held a day-long, nationwide strike yesterday to protest  against the government’s social and economic policies.

• Code Pink pulled off a hoax by releasing a fake press release in AIPAC’s name calling for a complete freeze on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. Code Pink members also dressed up in suits and handed out copies of the statement outside an AIPAC conference to confused attendees.

• About 400 students took part Monday in a peaceful sit-in and walkout to protest the scheduled closure of their South Los Angeles charter school at the end of the academic year.

• In Cape Town, minibus taxi representatives embarked on a one-day strike on Tuesday in protest against what they claim is intimidation and harassment by law enforcement authorities.

• On Sunday, patients of a leprosy hospital, inmates of a destitute children home and staff of an HIV care center staged a sit-in at a market on the outskirts of Imphal city in India to protest monetary demands made by a faction of the Kangleipak Communist Party.

• Half a dozen nurses staged an impromptu sit-in at Pierre Boucher Hospital in Quebec to protest chronic understaffing at the facility – which they say is putting both them and their patients at serious risk.

I write this article just a few minutes walk from the district court here in Wellington, New Zealand, where I was delighted to witness the jury’s unexpected “not guilty” verdict in the trial of the three Ploughshares activists in Wellington District Court last week. Adrian Leason, Father Peter Murnane and Sam Land—the three men who were charged with intentional damage and unlawful entry at Waihopai spy base in Blenheim, New Zealand—were acquitted of all charges against them.

At the conclusion of the trial, Father Peter, Sam and Adrian said they felt privileged to have helped uncover the true nature of the spy base. “Our actions in disabling the spy base and stopping the flow of information helped save lives in Iraq,” added Adrian.

“What has been humbling for us to realize is how our witness has impacted on so many people around the world and at home,” said Sam.

Father Peter Murnane speaks to press

“We did not try to avoid the consequences of our actions, because we respect the rule of law although we do believe we are ultimately accountable to a higher authority. We damaged property at the spy base in order to save victims of war and torture. It’s all about Jesus’ command for us to treat all people as our brothers and sisters,” said Father Peter.

Commenting at the conclusion of the trial Waihopai Ploughshares media spokesperson Graham Bidois Cameron said this Ploughshares action is part of an ongoing tradition: “The practice of non-violent resistance and direct action in the cause of peace has a long history in this country—the peaceful resistance to the invasion of Parihaka, and non-violent direct action against nuclear armed warships entering our harbors being just two examples.”

“The actions of Waihopai Ploughshares also need to be understood in relation to an international movement for disarmament and peace,” said lawyer Moana Cole, herself a Ploughshares activist. “Adrian, Sam and Father Peter are part of a rich history of activism in support of those without a voice and the movement is certainly growing.”

Read the rest of this article »

• Thousands marched through the nation’s capital on Saturday to urge immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. At least eight people, including activist Cindy Sheehan, were arrested by U.S. Park Police at the end of the march, after laying coffins at a fence outside the White House.

• Activists with Rainforest Action Network erected two 20-foot-tall, purple tripod structures in front of the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington to pressure EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to enforce the Clean Water Act and halt mountaintop removal coal mining. They stayed on the tripods for 32 hours before deciding to leave.

• 130 people took part in the two-hour Melbourne World Naked Bike Ride in Australia yesterday to protest oil dependency and highlight bike safety.

• More than 1,000 union members, workers and activists gathered in downtown Philadelphia on Friday to challenge the nation’s six largest banks to pay for their bailouts by contributing to job creation and doing their part to restore the economy.

• More than 100 workers gathered outside the Department of Water Management in Chicago on Friday to protest forced furloughs.

• Around 500 protesters marched through the town of Bideford in south-west England to “reclaim” it from rising street violence.

• More than 60 Harlem middle and high school students walked out of class on Friday, while another 50 chose to stage a sit-in to protest the planned dismissal of about 150 teachers and staff members.

• More than 7,000 protesters made their way through Togo’s capital on Saturday to protest presidential election results.

• British Airways employees began a three-day strike on Saturday to protest a pay freeze and proposed changes to working conditions.

When we reported on the pouring of blood outside the Thai Prime Minister’s home in Bangkok the other day, I have to admit I was a little confused about the purpose of this action. Blood has often been sprayed or sprinkled by Western activists, such as the Ploughshares, to symbolize the death of innocent people. But the huge jugs of blood collected during a series of blood drives by the red-shirted Thai protesters and poured en masse to create what seemed like a horrifying stream of blood in front of the PM’s house seemed to indicate something totally different. I just wasn’t sure what that something was. None of the articles I read seemed to offer an explanation. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one with questions. The BBC ran a story yesterday explaining the significance of the blood protest because of the way many Westerners had perceived it:

Many Thais and Westerners were revolted by the spectacle and worried by the hygiene implications of the recent blood-spilling on Bangkok’s streets.

Some denounced the sheer wastefulness of a precious resource which could have been used to help the sick.

But red-shirt leaders said the blood spilling was a sacrifice for democracy and a curse on the government.

While a lot of the same concerns went through my mind, such as the hygiene issue, I told myself there must be some cultural explanation. It seems I was right.

In the battle for Thailand’s political soul – played out over several years by “yellow” and “red” waves of protesters – symbolism is probably the most important weapon.

A powerful belief in astrology and the supernatural (‘saiyasat’) co-exists alongside an increasingly commercial, globalised culture.

This is not just a frame of mind found in far-flung rural areas. Many of the country’s top leaders, civilian and military, have actively participated in magical rituals to seek special powers and enlist them on their side.

The rest of the story attempts to explain this mysticism, but the important thing to understand, it seems, is that we must be careful not to judge a protest in a different part of the world based on our own cultural practices.

That’s not to say the blood protest was the right tactic for the red-shirts to take. It simply means that we must judge it on the cultural standards of the Thais. Hopefully that kind of analysis will surface soon.