In this video, Jack DuVall, the president of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and the co-author of A Force More Powerful, gives a good introduction to civil resistance at the Fletcher Summer Institute which I attended last week.

Over at Alternet, Devona Walker has an interesting piece about how the rally that Glenn Beck is staging at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in August to unveil his “100 year plan” for America is only the latest attempt by conservatives to claim King as one of their own. For example:

In 2006, the ultraconservative think-tank Heritage Foundation also took to spinning King’s legacy. In an essay titled “Martin Luther King’s Conservative Legacy,” it directed conservatives to lay claim to King.

“King was no stalwart conservative, yet his core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are profoundly conservative,” wrote Carolyn Garris. “Modern liberalism rejects these ideas, while conservatives place them at the center of their philosophy. Despite decades of its appropriation by liberals, King’s message was fundamentally conservative.”

[...]

Conservatives cherry-pick and exploit particular phrases, or quotes, while entirely ignoring the totality of what King stood for, what he fought against and why he died.

One snippet, in particular, seems to routinely find its way into conservative talking points. It’s taken from a 1963 address in which King said we should be judged by “the content of our character.” That simple phrase was re-branded and re-packaged into a rallying cry against affirmative action.

In 1994, right-wing media critic David Horowitz said on “Crossfire”: “Martin Luther King, in my view, was a conservative because he stood up for, you know, belief in the content of your character–the value that conservatives defend today.”

In 1991, Charles Krauthammer pitted King against diversity. Progressives, he wrote, “have traded King’s dream for something called diversity….It is the opponents of race-conscious public policy who today speak in the name of values that King championed.”

Then, in 1996, when Gov. Mike Foster abolished affirmative action, he presented the act as somehow being a fulfillment of King’s dream. In fact, one of the original astroturf groups waging an ongoing battle to repeal affirmative action cynically goes by the name American Civil Rights Institute.

Another effort to distort Martin Luther King is being undertaken with the construction of a corporate-funded memorial to the Civil Rights leader on the National Mall in Washington, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2011. While these efforts to co-opt King are infuriating, I still doubt that in the end they will be successful. One doesn’t need to read very deeply into his biography or writings to discover how radical he truly was. And unless there is some Orwellian rewriting of history, that is something that will never change.

• A group of artists under the name The Good Crude Britannia picketed a party at the Tate Britain on Monday, calling on its bosses to cut their ties with sponsor BP.

• More than 11,000 Egyptians responded to a Facebook call on Friday to protest the death of Egyptian businessman Khalid Said by police brutality.

• Eight people were arrested in San Francisco yesterday for occupying the city’s Human Services Agency in protest of the closing of a homeless shelter and the mistreatment of the people who had used its services.

• A group of US military veterans hung a large banner on an abandoned hotel in Detroit on Saturday to protest and reveal the effect of war spending on American cities. The 10 x 15-foot sign read: “How is the war economy working for you?”

• Greek workers staged walk-offs on Tuesday, as part of the latest in a series of general strikes called to protest pension and labor reforms proposed by the government in an effort to reduce the nation’s soaring deficit.

• More than 1,000 people rallied outside police headquarters in Toronto on Monday to protest the police department’s brutal crackdown and arrest of 900 people, including many journalists, during the G20 summit.

• Some 200 people were arrested in Bangladesh on Monday for violating a ban on processions in thoroughfares during a march that was part of a 24-hour general strike to protest the “failures and excesses” of the government.

• India’s opposition parties have called a nationwide strike on July 5 to protest a rise in fuel prices they say will stoke inflation and hurt poor people.

Last week, I had the good fortune of attending the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict at Tufts University in Boston, hence my absence from this site. The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which organized the week-long institute, did a phenomenal job in bringing together some of the most inspiring theorists and practitioners of nonviolent action to share their knowledge and experiences in the field.

One of the highlights for me, was getting a chance to hear Rev. James Lawson speak on the opening night and the conversation that we had later in the week. Rev. Lawson was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States who taught Martin Luther King Jr. and many other leaders of the struggle about nonviolence, and organized the student-led sit-ins in Nashville in 1959 that led to the desegregation of the city.

Fortunately, ICNC has made Rev. Lawson’s talk (video above) and several others available online. I’ll share at least a couple other presentations as the week goes on, along with my reflections on the experience as a whole.

During Saturday’s nonviolent protest of about 5,000 activists outside the conference center in downtown Toronto, where leaders of the G20 were meeting, several hundred masked figures dressed in black broke away from and started torching police cars and smashing store fronts. Not only did this steal the attention away from the peaceful protesters, but it got a lot of them hurt and arrested. By the end of the day’s events, the police had beat activists and journalists, fired tear gas and rubber bullets and arrested more than 560 people.

Just about anyone following the G20 could have seen this coming. In the weeks before, Canada was busy building what The Guardian called “the toughest security cordon in the history of the summit,” spending an estimated $1 billion dollars and bringing in 19,000 police officers. So, clearly it was ready to use them. But more importantly, why was it so ready to use them?

Some might point to the threat of vandalism promised by a group of Ontario anarchists a month before the summit. In a message to its members, the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR), announced its plan to stage “militant protests” and to “humiliate the security apparatus” by using “a variety of tactics”—a common phrase used by anarchists who perceive nonviolent action as ineffective. But as is so often the case, such dismissal stems from a complete lack of knowledge as to the dynamics of nonviolent action.

In what sounds like a reasonable appeal, SOAR told its members, “Respect for diversity of tactics also means not smashing things while we’re part of the labour child-friendly march, and remembering that although we might think certain tactics are pointless/annoying, we should not needlessly antagonize those people.”

What these anarchists don’t seem to realize is that nonviolent campaigns lose their power and are generally rendered pointless when they are associated with people who act violently.

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• On Friday, a million workers belonging to Italy’s largest union went on strike across the nation to protest proposed austerity cuts by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government.

• Despite some acts of violence, 25,000 peacefully protested the policies of the G20 in Toronto over the weekend amidst a heavy police presence.

• Tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in Taiwan’s capital Saturday to protest the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, a trade agreement with China opponents said will undermine the island’s self-rule and harm its economy.

• On Saturday, people gathered and held hands to form a symbolic line in the sand for 15 minutes as part of the “Hands Across the Sand” demonstrations organized in the US and abroad to pressure elected officials against any expansion of offshore drilling and to promote “clean” energy. In the U.S. nearly 700 rallies took place in all 50 states.

• Egyptian dissident Mohamed El Baradei led over 4,000 in a protest in Alexandria on Friday demanding an end to police brutality.

• In Michigan, thousands rallied on the state Capitol in Lansing on Thursday to urge lawmakers not to cut funding for public education.

• On Friday, 40 demonstrators greeted Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean at a Melbourne hotel when he arrived at a meeting to approve a deal to export up to 20 million tons of polluting La Trobe Valley brown coal to Vietnam.

I was on CBC Radio in Toronto yesterday morning to talk about how protesters’ messages can be effected by the way they dress. It’s an issue we’ve discussed several times on this blog (here, here, and here) and I was happy to flesh it out a little more, albeit in only a six minute interview.

Click here to go to the CBC Metro Morning show page and listen.

• An estimated 797,000 workers demonstrated and unions staged nearly 200 marches in several French cities Thursday to protest President Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

• Around 50 cyclists in Brussels left their clothes behind Sunday during Cyclonudista, an annual naked protest meant to draw attention to the monopolization of public space by cars. The event was part of larger World Naked Bike Ride campaign.

• Postal workers picketed outside an Orlando post office on Monday to protest a proposed elimination of Saturday mail delivery to cut costs.

• In El Paso, Texas about 300 people marched in front of the Border Patrol offices on Tuesday to protest the June 7th killing of 14 year-old Sergio Adrían Hernández Güereca by a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

• 1,500 members of the Swedish Dockworkers Union on Wednesday launched  a week-long boycott of cargo to and from Israel to protest the raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that killed nine people last month.

• About 200 unionized Phoenix employees marched to a meeting of the City Council on Wednesday to demand that officials protect local jobs and refuse to outsource more municipal services.

U.S. Army description: "A Soldier from Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (Airborne), watches cattle run for their lives while a CH-47 helicopter prepares to land on Landing Zone Shetland during Operation Saray Has July 19 near Forward Operating Base Naray, Afghanistan."

The rather shocking and sudden way in which a recent Rolling Stone article brought about the forced resignation of the top U.S. general in Afghanistan has, together with other milestones, churned up some long-ignored questions about what allied forces are doing there in the first place. In recent weeks, the 1,000th U.S. soldier was killed there, as well as the 300th Brit, and the war became officially the longest in American history. More and more, mainstream voices are beginning to question what is now, fully, Obama’s war.

At the New York Review of Books blog, Garry Wills writes that “McChrysal does not matter“; if there’s one take-away from the Rolling Stone piece, it isn’t the general’s insubordinate remarks but that the time has come to, as Wills puts it, “get out!”

The conflict around McChrystal will only matter if it is the occasion of recognizing what a fool’s errand he was sent on. Any military replacement will only repeat his calls for more time, more troops, more recognition of the failed policy of “counter-insurgency” (COIN). Hastings’s real point is signaled early in his Rolling Stone piece:

The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

In June 11th’s New York Times, I was struck to see, on the front page, an article about Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s expression of doubt in the very foreign troops propping up his fragile regime, while on the back page columnist Bob Herbert argued that it is probably time for us to leave. Then, two days later, the newspaper reported on a treasure trove of mineral deposits in the country—which, it turns out, isn’t really news at all, but seems to have been re-announced in order to appeal to resource-hungry cynicism in the hopes that it might renew people’s commitment to the war effort.

From McChrystal’s insubordinate remarks to the new-old minerals, there is a campaign afoot to distract the conversation from the basic questions toward which more and more observers are beginning to drift: Are the foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan doing any good? Have they ever? Do we have any idea what they’re really supposed to be doing there in the first place?

The danger is that people will—they already have—become simply resigned to an endless and pointless war because they don’t know any better or feel they have any choice. There is a choice. We have to begin devoting ourselves to developing practical, realistic, nonviolent strategies for how foreign troops can withdraw from Afghanistan with a minimum of cost to the people who live there, as well as for how a political arrangement can be brokered that will finally bring some stability to the region. This is not a utopian, unrealistic proposal. What’s utopian and unrealistic is the combat mission that has been dragging on there, continually firing the coals of radicalism since 2001. Finally the mainstream is beginning to come around to the fact that a non-military resolution—rather than military resignation—is the only sensible way forward.

Renowned Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, and environmental writer Wendell Berry is pulling many of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky’s archives to protest the naming of a new campus building. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Berry excoriated his alma matter in a Dec. 20, 2009, letter, saying the decision to name a new dorm for UK basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge “puts an end” to his association with the university.

“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team,” Berry wrote in the typewritten letter. “That — added to the ‘Top 20′ project and the president’s exclusive ‘focus’ on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University.”

Berry is among the most revered writers in Kentucky history and his statement is no doubt a blow to the university, but they’ve dealt with his wrath before:

In an essay published in 1987, The Loss of the University, Berry argued for a college education that would broaden a student’s exposure to a number of disciplines rather than produce the narrow skills of career-minded transients with no sense of a homeland.

At a 2007 commencement address at Bellarmine University, Berry railed against “the great and the would-be-great ‘research universities.’ These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the ‘industrial model,’ no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. … The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.”

While it’s unclear whether Berry’s latest action will have any kind of effect, it is no doubt consistent with his beliefs and will probably have more of an effect in the years to come, lending evermore creadence to his strong sense of respect for humans and nature.