It’s out: an enormous trove of documents about the war in Afghanistan yesterday appeared on Wikileaks (whose servers currently seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic) together with comprehensive reports by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. The leak represents no less than a historic act of civil disobedience; consisting of 92,201 US military internal records, this is the largest leak of classified material in history. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, may be a criminal in the eyes of the US government, which has roundly condemned his work even while begging for his help to plug up his sources (this administration has been harsher with informants than its predecessor). A 22-year-old American intelligence analyst in Iraq named Bradley Manning has already been arrested for, under the online handle Bradass87, funneling the documents to where Wikileaks could arrange to publicize them. He wrote in an online chat of the trove, “it[']s beautiful and horrifying … It’s public data, it belongs in the public domain.”

To Assange and Manning, and to many others, keeping records like this classified is far worse a crime than releasing them. Explore the documents, particularly at those three outlets above which have had access to them for several weeks, and see the dark impression they convey about what has really been going on in Afghanistan. The Guardian summarizes:

• coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents

• Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

• a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

“The war logs” inevitably bring to mind Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War. What impact will this leak, which is considerably larger, have?

The documents all date from before December 2009, when the new “surge” was launched, so they don’t tell us anything about its progress. But they do suggest the true challenges that it faces, with a clarity which the public didn’t have access to when it put its continued support behind Obama’s war last year. If we had known then what we know now, would Congress have allowed itself to fund the surge? And, if things are getting so much worse, why does the administration continue to insist on escalating?

Some who have opposed the war since its beginning back in 2001 may feel the temptation to be gratified that Afghanistan has become so much the quagmire that we predicted. That apologists for the war continually use military successes, such as they are, to retroactively justify military force only encourages the war’s critics to claim failures as a kind of vindication—which in turn makes the critics vulnerable to accusations of siding with the so-called enemy. No—what these documents portray is nothing other than a disaster, one to be regretted by all and forcing all to come to grips with what we are actually dealing with: a dreadful war and a government unwilling to admit it.

What the trove reveals, also, is how information resistance may be a form of resistance par excellence today. Bringing the truth to light like this, on such a massive scale and in such a concerted fashion, lends new meaning to Gandhi’s call for “truth force.”

In this video, Paul Jay from The Real News Network interviews Shir Hever, an economist at the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem and the author of the forthcoming book Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation, about how the growing worldwide boycott of Israel is effecting that country’s economy.

HEVER: The effect is hidden by the Israeli various bureaus of statistics and the Manufacturers Association, for example. There was one survey that showed 21 percent of Israeli exporters reported on average 10 percent loss of income because of the boycott, which was related specifically to the attack on Gaza in 2008-2009. But this report was censored. This report was removed from—was never published, it was only leaked to the media once, and it’s impossible to get it, because the Manufacturers Association know that if that information reaches people who support the boycott movement, that will empower them and give them more confidence to continue their efforts.

Hever also has an interesting response to Jay’s question about his position on the controversial cultural and academic boycott of Israel:

HEVER: We at the Alternative Information Center published a report about Israeli academic institutions, and our argument is basically that the big universities in Israel—actually, all of universities in Israel, with the exclusion of the Open University, have been actively participating in acts of repression against Palestinians, discriminating against Palestinian students or not accepting Palestinian students, and not allowing freedom of protest, not allowing professors to research certain topics that are considered inappropriate or not loyal enough, providing benefits to the Israeli army or to officers, and developing weapons. So we have a list in this publication, which you can download from our website, of every Israeli academic institutions and what kind of crimes they’re involved in, and you can make your own decision whether you want to boycott these institutions or not. And the same goes for a lot of other kinds of businesses in Israel—not necessarily businesses that have their factories in the occupied Palestinian territory (of course, those are clear examples of colonialism), but also factories that don’t offer equal employment opportunities for Palestinian citizens, factories that embrace the army and gives discounts to soldiers, factories that contribute to the army. And so you see that the vast majority of the Israeli economy is very strongly intertwined with the project of Judaification and Zionism. So there is a very strong argument for boycotting every Israeli product, or at the very least for boycotting every Israeli product until Israel is able to differentiate and to give accurate and fair information about its exports—which exports come from the occupied Palestinian territories, which aren’t; which companies offer equal opportunities, which aren’t. And it’s not just about economic boycott, it’s also cultural boycott, because we don’t want to give the impression that Israel is a normal country, that you can just have it as part of a tour of performances of various famous artists. So we’re asking famous artists not to come and perform in Israel. That would be legitimizing the Israeli apartheid.

To see the report on the involvement of Israeli academic institutions with the occupation of Palestine, click here.

Last week, Corporate Ethics International launched a multi-year ad campaign – including an online video (above), ads on Google and tourism websites, and billboards in Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis – calling on tourists to boycott Alberta over the province’s oil sands. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Tourism is important for Alberta, which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year to its wilderness parks and resorts in Banff and Jasper, and to the annual Stampede rodeo and outdoor show in Calgary.

Alberta officials and members of the oil sands industry were angry at the ad campaign. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said in a press conference Wednesday that the campaign “does, of course, anger me to a large degree because it’s an attack on about a hundred thousand Albertans whose lives depend upon the tourism industry.”

In an interview with CTV News Channel,  executive director of Corporate Ethics International Michael Marx explained the motivation for the “Rethink Alberta” campaign and why the characterization of the the effort as an “attack” isn’t accurate:

“We think the Alberta government has been pretty arrogant in ignoring the concerns of environmental groups in the U.S., in Europe and in Canada, as well as First Nations, and that it’s been deceptive in its public relations in claiming that they’re greening the tarsands,” Marx said.

“We felt like we needed to be more aggressive in calling the government out.”

He added that his group doesn’t wish to harm tourism businesses but hopes they will get involved in oilsands issues.

“Ultimately we think that the tarsands industry, by contributing to global warming, actually endangers the tourist industry,” he said.

Whether that message will resonate with Albertans is yet to be seen. Next week the group is rolling out a similar ad campaign in the UK.

In other tar sands news:

Another campaign has been growing in the U.S. that hopes to block TransCanada from building the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry crude from Alberta to refineries in Texas. Henry Waxman, a prominent congressman, and 50 other legislators stated their opposition to the project.

One of the most difficult challenges posed to the antiwar movement in the 20th century was that of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Once the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he drifted away from nonviolence on the eve of World War II, insisting that in a fallen world like ours, violence would sometimes be necessary.

Today The Immanent Frame published my interview with sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, author of, among other books, Terror in the Mind of God and Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. He has written extensively about Gandhian nonviolence, but he was also a student of Niebuhr’s at Union Theological Seminary, so he has some unique insights about the legacies of the two men. The interview covers a lot of other ground (including reflections on Juergensmeyer’s own interviews with terrorists), but here are the relevant passages:

NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?

MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people’s minds when they’re so seized with passion about a struggle that they’ll go out and kill in such horrible ways.

What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.

I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.

NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?

MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.

NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr’s thought play into how you think about violence?

MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn’t understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn’t give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent’s position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don’t think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.

• About 30 people, including a priest, protesting working conditions in front of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago were arrested by police Thursday in a staged act of civil disobedience.

• French air travel has suffered significantly since Tuesday morning when some air traffic controllers went on strike to protest the reorganization of European skyways.

• In Las Vegas, eight activists protesting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s inaction on gay rights legislation were arrested for blocking traffic at one of the Strip’s busiest intersections today.

• On Tuesday, about 20 undocumented youths held sit-ins and risked arrest at various congressional offices in Washington D.C., including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, to urge the passage of the DREAM Act.

• Yesterday morning, a group of Barriere Lake Algonquins set up a peaceful blockade on the access road leading to their reserve, about 300 km north of Ottawa. The defensive action was aimed at stopping a government-appointed electoral officer from holding a nomination meeting on the reserve for the government’s highly-controversial imposed Band Council Election.

• The Teamsters Union, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, Clean New York, WEACT for Environmental Justice, concerned parents, students and consumer activists protested toxic PVC plastic used in toys at the Toys R Us flagship store in Times Square yesterday.

• Rainforest Action Network activists disrupted Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s talk at the National Press Club yesterday sending by holding up two large banners that said:“Massey coal – not Clean, Safe or Forever.” They were eventually escorted out by security.

As part of a series of articles on activism in the US, the Utne Reader has published a short interview with Gene Sharp in their current issue that is worth checking out. Here’s an excerpt:

When you look at contemporary domestic movements, both on the left and on the right, what do you see?

People don’t have a good idea of what kind of social change they want. They assume that you get major social change simply by voting every four years.

When I lived in Brooklyn many years ago the people in my neighborhood would always find something to complain about and then end with the same phrase: “What are you going to do?” That’s a tragic situation.

Is there a single mistake you see over and over again?

Yes. The failure to properly analyze political power; nobody understands political power. All power has its sources. And if you can identify the sources you can cut them off.

It’s a fundamental distinction that leads to a totally different approach to waging political struggle.

What do these sources of power look like?

There is moral authority: Do the people giving the orders have the right to give them? There is economic power. There is control of the masses. Hitler didn’t have three brains, you know; he got other people convinced that what he was doing was important and that they should help.

Rather than protest the actions of those with political power, you can cut off the sources of their power—and this is rarely understood.

This seems like an approach that demands strategy.

Well, it should, but not everybody who uses nonviolent action knows a thing about strategy. People often think that if they can just show the world how terrible an opponent is, they’ll be able to get rid of the opponent. That’s nonsense.

And the opposite of identifying the sources of power.

That’s a totally different trip. There’s also a big issue [in nonviolent movements] of how people define success and failure. I remember cases where people didn’t succeed at all in achieving their objectives but say they felt better afterward. That’s not success. It’s important to feel that you’ve done something worthwhile, but it isn’t good enough.

You have to learn as much about nonviolent struggle as possible; know your own situation as well as possible; and know your opponent’s objectives, needs, and weaknesses as well as possible—and then make a plan.

You shouldn’t have an objective like total justice or complete peace. You have to think in smaller bites. Work out a plan that will weaken your opponent, but also strengthen your people and give them the capacity to carry on the struggle—to achieve the next objective.

So if you haven’t defined a realistic objective before you’ve launched into a struggle using nonviolent methods, you’ve already failed.

Yes.

Nonviolent actions were a major component of the movement to stop the invasion of Iraq. Activists failed to stop the war; does that mean the movement was a failure?

You don’t get rid of war by professing against it—though professing against it should be done. You can’t get rid of war until you have a substitute tactic. And once war is breaking out, it’s usually too late to apply a substitute means.

With Iraq, there needed to be an effective nonviolent movement to oust Saddam Hussein. There wasn’t a need for a war in Poland [when the country broke away from Soviet control], for example; they didn’t need a foreign military power to intervene because they did it themselves and they did it nonviolently.

Over at openDemocracy, Shelley Anderson has written a nice article that explores why nonviolence – which she beautifully describes as “a continuous and radical struggle to stay human by always recognising the humanity of others” – is not better known. She begins by telling a moving story of nonviolence at work:

The scene: several years ago in a Dublin sidewalk café. Two human rights activists, one African, the other North American, are talking at the next table. I sit at another table, an unrepentant eavesdropper.

“I must tell you this story,” the African lawyer said. “Some women from both sides of the conflict had been secretly talking to each other. A message from the other side was smuggled to the wife of a local military commander. The women learned that her husband has been ordered to attack a nearby village. In the message, the women beg her to stop the attack.

“The wife is in a quandary. How can she stop a military attack? Time is running out. Then she has an idea. She goes to her husband and tells him that she must go shopping the next day in that village. Her husband tries to dissuade her but she insists she must go. She knows the attack is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Her husband is in a panic. He calls off the attack. The women succeeded!”

Most nonviolent success stories are similar to this one, she argues, in that they are not written down because they are “anecdotal, anonymous and above all, ordinary.” Many proponents of nonviolence have made this observation. Gandhi perhaps said it best in Hind Swaraj, which he penned in 1909 on a return voyage from London to South Africa:

The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars in the world, it still lives on.

Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of this force of love or of the soul.

Read the rest of this article »

Since the recent passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, scheduled to go into effect on July 29, those of us working for social justice in the United States have a rare opportunity to register a particularly effective form of protest.  The inherently unjust nature of this legislation presents conscientious individuals with a real chance to go back to what many might say civil disobedience was originally intended to do: promote the repeal of an unjust law by openly and nonviolently breaking the law itself.

This is what has come to be known today as direct civil disobedience.  It is distinguished from indirect civil disobedience, where the law being broken is not itself the target of the protest.  Not many would argue, for instance, that a law prohibiting people from sitting in the middle of the street is unjust.  When used to draw attention to an issue of social importance, however, violating this law with a willingness to accept the consequences may be an effective tool.  Although the merit of such tactics can vary depending on any number of factors, to score a direct protest by violating an unjust law is very likely to be viewed as more legitimate.

The distinction is useful because in recent years we in the United States haven’t had to worry much about severely repressive, overtly dictatorial laws.  Not so very long ago, in certain parts of the country, violating an unjust law was as simple as ordering food at a lunch counter, sitting near the front on a city bus, or going swimming at a public beach.  More common in the US today we find people courting arrest by blocking entrances to buildings, occupying government offices, or chaining themselves to fences, seeking to address an injustice more or less unrelated to the law actually being transgressed.  Since these injustices don’t always allow for direct, public defiance, we try to create that tenuous link between issue and protest method as best we can.  But while indirect civil disobedience always beats inaction, from a strategic standpoint, if the opportunity is there, direct beats indirect every time.  And with this new Arizona law, the opportunity is definitely there.

Indeed, not since the end of the draft in 1973 has there been a law in the United States that seems to render itself so well to direct civil disobedience.  Arizona SB 1070 requires non-citizens to keep registration documents on them at all times, and forces police officers to inquire about immigration status during any kind of arrest or routine stop if they encounter “reasonable suspicion” that the person might be in the country illegally.  In addition, the new law gives police leeway to arrest someone solely on the basis of there being probable cause that they may be undocumented, at which point they’re to be turned over directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This basically boils down to the police in Arizona having new license to stop anyone looking remotely Hispanic – for no other reason than that they look remotely Hispanic – demand papers from them, and take them into custody if satisfactory documents are not immediately produced.  Predictably this has led some people, such as Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony, to draw parallels to the lives of those in Europe forced to live under the Nazi régime.  Additionally – and this concerns all of us – the new Arizona law makes it a crime to “transport or move”, or “conceal, harbor or shield” undocumented immigrants, reminding me more of something out of the Fugitive Slave Acts from this country’s dark past.  Against such blatantly unjust, potentially far-reaching legislation, at least we’re armed with a chance for everyone to participate in its direct disobedience, instead of just abandoning our undocumented brothers and sisters to their fate.

In a relatively short amount of time, Martin Luther King, Jr. became somewhat of an expert on unjust laws.  In a speech he delivered before the Fellowship of the Concerned in 1961, King defined an unjust law as “a code that the majority inflicts upon the minority, which that minority had no part in enacting or creating, because that minority had no right to vote in many instances.”  Although close to 50 years old, this definition holds up in modern-day Arizona quite well.  The undocumented minority, having virtually no recourse to its voice being heard, is at the mercy of the majority – in this case that of the Arizona Senate – 60 percent Republican, and 100 percent white.

Read the rest of this article »

Earlier this month, the Southern African Litigation Centre, based in Johannesburg, posted this video about a wonderful act of nonviolence that took place in April 2008, when dockworkers in South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Angola refused to unload weapons from a Chinese ship that were destined for Zimbabwe’s Defense Forces.

To learn more about this great case study, check out this in depth report from the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), which was published last summer.

I’m all for protesting budget cuts that will negatively affect hospitals and health care, but doctors in Italy went too far on Monday. According to the AP:

An Italian doctors’ union says more than 40,000 operations have been delayed by a one-day strike against the government’s austerity plans.Medical workers are protesting outside parliament in Rome to protest expected shortages of medical workers in the system because of government plans to not renew many temporary contracts.

While they say they only refused non-emergency surgeries, I don’t see how doctors or nurses refusing to care for their patients to register their dissent about low wages – or anything else for that matter – can be justified.

There are very few sectors that I would say should never go on strike, but medical professionals would be one. Too many lives are in their hands. And it is not the officials or executives responsible for their predicament who are most affected by such actions, but the patients themselves.