“In other countries, the country has a military. In Pakistan, the military has a country.”

I arrived in Pakistan on May 4^th, traveling with Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, based in Chicago. After traveling through Pakistan for about two weeks, I surely can’t claim to fully understand the country, but these words from I.A Rehman, Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, seemed to summarize what I learned.

I learned that most of the combat troops in the pre-1948 Indian Army were Muslims. So the army “got a country” when East and West Pakistan were formed in 1947 from the former British colony of India.

One difficulty is that democracy and the military don’t mix well: the military is not a democratic institution. When it comes to running a country, this mis-fit becomes even more problematic. Kathy and Josh had been to Pakistan last year, and this year, as we went from place to place and interviewed person after person, we kept hearing about how the government was not representative of the people. Instead, we learned that a small ruling elite runs the country for its own benefit.

Here in the US, corporations are increasingly influencing US warmaking policy to fuel their consumption of resources. In Pakistan, however, the military actually owns profit-making corporations. As Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, writes in her book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy: “The military’s two business groups – the Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust – are the largest business conglomerates in the country.” And the military’s investment in their own corporations leads them to use more and more government influence so as to stifle, or even take over, rival corporations.  That, in turn, entails an increasingly militarized and hence an increasingly undemocratic state.

Modeled by the federal government, this non-representation of the people’s interests extends down even to local police and courts, creating an “enfranchisement gap” between the people and their “leaders,” with the people of Afghanistan feeling more like subjects than citizens, as one professor told us.

When the people realize that the government is not guaranteeing their civil rights, sooner or later they will begin to act to secure those rights.

In Pakistan, that action by the people takes several forms. The first is in the growing number of civil rights demonstrations scattered across the country. Dr. Mubashar Hassan, a long-time and astute political activist and observer told us he believed that a some point, those isolated demonstrations will coalesce and form a national movement that will compel the ruling elite to change.

We can get glimpses of that movement toward unity among the demonstrators from the social media. For example, check out the newly formed Amn Tehrik (Peace Movement) out of Peshawar, or Voice for Peace out of Khar.

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With the conclusion of the G20 protests in Canada, the inevitable post-mortem dissection has begun in earnest. Activists prepare to file lawsuits, organizers vow to do things differently next time, police pledge to investigate further, the media highlight the purported “destruction” before moving on to the next big story, and world leaders promise to continue their efforts unhampered by the misguided protesters. And, as is by now par for the post-protest course, pretty much everyone seems to cast blame on “the anarchists.”

More recently, in the aftermath of the Oscar Grant verdict in Oakland, the media fan the flames by blaming the few stray acts of window-breaking and looting on “self-described anarchists,” while police officials emphasize that this de facto terrorist segment justifies their conduct vis-à-vis protesters in general. More rifts develop in the streets, and although a tenuous solidarity is at times expressed as well, the lasting images once again are of anarchists acting in seemingly unproductive ways that put the interests and safety of larger movement contingents in jeopardy.

These are but two recent examples of a phenomenon that has been regularly played out in North America since at least the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Antipathy toward anarchists seems to have increased steadily since then, not only from corporate elites and law enforcement officials, but from a number of fellow movement participants as well. Ironically, this comes at a time when interest in anarchism among activists has greatly expanded, and likewise when its impact upon American activism in general has seen a strong resurgence in recent years.

Critical voices regularly chastise anarchists without indicating that they fully understand what anarchism actually is. But anarchists as well oftentimes seem to act in contravention of both historical and political senses of what anarchism represents. This is further made problematic by the basic fact that anarchists generally eschew doctrinaire definitions and ideological litmus tests, suggesting that people ought to be free to define their own actions and ideas in the manner of their own choosing. And yet, a kind of orthodoxy that increasingly seems like “fundamentalist anarchism” may be taking hold among some sectors that posture as “real revolutionaries,” who denigrate as “pathological” those who would seek to deploy their version of anarchism in less spectacular ways than overtly “smashing the state” by striking at some of its symbolic targets.

Interestingly, this plays right into the hands of the caricature of anarchism as violent, bomb-throwing, chaotic behavior that seems to be the first question one gets asked when their anarchism is presented in mixed company. Indeed, I always enjoy getting that inevitable query: “Isn’t anarchism just violence and destruction?” To which I usually reply: “How many people would you estimate have been killed by anarchists in the last hundred years? Now, how many would you say have been killed by liberals, or conservatives, in that time frame? If a lawyer or corporate manager were here before you now, would you ask about the blood on their hands or just let it slide as part of business as usual? The state didn’t save us from the violence of anarchy — it simply monopolized it, institutionalized it, and expanded its role in our lives.”

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a series of workshops on “Anarchism and Nonviolence” in the U.S. and Canada. As one might expect, spirited conversations ensued in which many powerful young voices felt challenged by the notion of being nonviolent in a world that in their lifetimes has appeared as inherently violent. Indeed, these issues get at the heart of matters of ethics, tactics, and visions for the future, comprising some of the most basic concerns for social movements and individual consciences alike. One of the exercises we did in these workshops was to create a working definition of anarchism, and then one of nonviolence. Comparing the two lists, many overlapping values emerged: self-governance, rejection of domination, respect and mutual aid, antiwar and anti-oppression practices, solidarity, a radical egalitarianism, and the politics of “prefiguring” the future society. Further, it was pointed out that both notions, (an)archism and (non)violence, trace their linguistic origins to the negation of something — yet have developed proactive self-definitions despite an initial reactive framing.

And the synergies don’t end there. Among the anarchist milieu, we find figures such as Emma Goldman, who dabbled in the use of revolutionary violence in her younger days but came to reject it in her later years. She once told her comrade and coconspirator Alexander Berkman that “violence in whatever form never has and probably never will bring constructive results,” and further elucidated her position that “methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose.” In the end, Goldman saw nonviolence and revolution as intertwined:

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• New Orleans artist Mitchell Gaudet has created a conceptual display of 53 black oil drums on the grounds of National Historic Monument Longue Vue House and Gardens. The barrels represent the amount of crude oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico every minute.

• Five activists from Culture Beyond Oil poured a black oil-like slick around one of the British Museum’s statues in central London to protest its sponsorship by BP. The thousand year old statue was chosen because it “represents the way in which civilisations once considered invincible can collapse in a short period of time”.

• More than 200 people, mostly Latino, gathered outside last night’s All-Star Game at Angel Stadium in Anaheim holding signs and distributing pamphlets that asked Major League Baseball to move next year’s All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s controversial immigration law.

• A Libyan aid boat carrying 2,000 tons of food and medical supplies to Gaza was forced to reroute to Egypt yesterday because of engine trouble. A spokesman for the aid mission insisted the boat still intended to reach Gaza, but would not violently resist any efforts to stop them.

• More than a million people held a march in Barcelona to call for greater autonomy for the Catalan region after a Spanish constitutional court declared that there was no legal basis to recognize Catalonia as a nation or for the Catalan language to take precedence over Castilian Spanish.

• Several hundred hotel workers and supporters, many wearing black-eye Mickey Mouse masks, rallied at the Anaheim Convention Center on Monday to demand better health care benefits for employees of Disney.

• A small group of anarchists held an unauthorized picket at the South African Embassy in Moscow on Saturday in support of social activists and residents of informal settlements in South Africa, who were evicted for the World Cup.

• Around 200 dairy farmers gathered on the streets of Brussels on Monday to protest reforms that bring an end to permanent contracts between farmers and milk companies.

Israeli troops approach a model of a ship representing the Gaza aid flotilla during a demonstration by activists in the West Bank in early June.

At the beginning of the month, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article about Hamas and Hezbollah’s newfound interest and appreciation for nonviolent tactics following the Israeli raid on the Free Gaza boats at the end of May and other nonviolent actions by activists in Palestine:

“When we use violence, we help Israel win international support,” said Aziz Dweik, a leading Hamas lawmaker in the West Bank. “The Gaza flotilla has done more for Gaza than 10,000 rockets.”

[...]

Hamas’s turnaround has been… striking, said Mustapha Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian advocate for nonviolent resistance. “When we used to call for protests, and marches, and boycotts and anything called nonviolence, Hamas used these sexist insults against us. They described it as women’s struggle,” Mr. Barghouti said. That changed in 2008, he said, after the first aid ship successfully ran the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

“Hamas has started to appreciate just how effective this can be,” Mr. Barghouti said.

Hamas has started organizing its own peaceful marches into the Israeli-controlled buffer zone along the Gaza border and supported lawsuits against Israeli officials in European courts. Hamas says it has ramped up support for a committee dedicated to sponsoring similar protests in Gaza.

Mr. Dweik, the Hamas lawmaker, recently began turning up at weekly protests against Israel’s West Bank barrier.

Apparently, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was so impressed by the effectiveness of the Free Gaza Movement that he has called on his followers to participate in the next flotilla.

Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, a member of the Hezbollah politburo in Beirut, said it was the first time Mr. Nasrallah had forcefully and publicly embraced such tactics against Israel.

“We saw that this kind of resistance has driven the Israelis into a big plight,” he said. Organizers in Lebanon say they have two ships ready to sail, but no departure date has been set.

While I’m happy to hear that these groups are beginning to see nonviolent action in a new light, I question how wise it would be to include members of Hezbollah or Hamas in any future flotilla, primarily since they have not renounced violence. Like it or not, their involvement would only make it that much easier for Israel and the corporate media to justify another attack and discredit the campaign to end the blockade of Gaza. It is clear from experience that nonviolence is most effective when it is not tainted by violence or even the hint that those involved in any given action may turn violent.

The ousting of Kyrgyzstan’s President back in April by violent anti-government protests was followed by more violence in June, as the Uzbek minority found itself a convenient scapegoat for the economic woes facing the country. In the aftermath, at least 2,000 Uzbeks were dead and some 375,000 displaced. Hundreds of Uzbek businesses and homes were also looted and burned to the ground. As a result, some fear a Rwanda-type situation is brewing. If so, does that mean it is up to the typically indifferent international community to intervene?

In a recent piece for Common Ground News Service, University of San Francisco professor S. Francesca Po and UC Berkeley professor/founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Michael Nagler wrote about another option that draws on Gandhi’s dream of a Shanti Sena or “peace army.”

The idea behind the Shanti Sena was that trained non-violent volunteers would live in a place with conflict long enough to gain the confidence of the locals as a truly neutral third party. They would then provide services to promote peace in times of tension: abating dangerous rumours and misconceptions, accompanying vulnerable persons under threat, mediating when asked and – if need be – interposing themselves between conflicting parties if it was too late to defuse tensions.

This practice is more commonly known as “unarmed civilian peacekeeping” and it has had tremendous success, despite the fact that it’s largely ignored by mainstream media.

For instance, Peace Brigades International has been active in conflict regions since 1981, Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1990, and Nonviolent Peaceforce—co-founded by WNV contributor David Hartsough—since 2002.

Kyrgyzstan could benefit from this kind of a neutral, non-violent third party presence to teach and demonstrate to the local population that ethnic violence does not solve anything – but non-violence just might.

In Kyrgyzstan in particular, peace armies could act as a protective force, escorting and defending targeted minorities like the Uzbeks. Nonviolent Peaceforce has already sent an exploratory team to the southern Caucasus, where there have been multiple interstate and ethnic conflicts in the recent past. With an invitation from the new Kyrgyz government, and international support and funding, Nonviolent Peaceforce could get to work in southern Kyrgyzstan and help the country transition – peacefully – into a parliamentary democracy.

Every time non-violence has been used correctly it has been a brilliant success – and almost every time, barely anyone notices. Until the media catch on, it’s up to the public to get informed about unarmed civilian peacekeeping. For if we know of no alternative, we may continue to flounder in the old dilemma of violence or inaction.

• On Thursday, activists with Rainforest Action Network staged a sit-in  at EPA Headquarters in Washington, where they occupied the lobby and used metal lock boxes to lock themselves together.  The action was to bring attention to EPA’s newly approved Pine Creek mountaintop removal permit in Logan County, West Virginia.

• Newsstands were mostly empty, Internet sites weren’t updated and the airwaves were practically news-free in Italy on Friday as journalists went on strike to protest Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s bid to restrict wiretaps, a move he says is to protect the privacy of everyday Italians while journalists claim it’s a gag law aimed at protecting him and corrupt officials.

• On Saturday, calling it a Day of Action for Civil Liberties, some 1,200 protestors marched from Queen’s Park to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to protest how police and governments are handling the G20 summit aftermath.

• Guillermo Fariñas, an opposition activist in Cuba, ended a 134-day hunger strike on Thursday, after indications that the government would make good on its promise to release 52 political prisoners.

• Defying curfew, thousands of people protested across the Valley in Kashmir for the fifth consecutive day Friday against the killing of unarmed civilians. he protesters staged a sit-in on the Cement Bridge for nearly 30 minutes.

• The National Health Service in Britain said they would immediately reinstate round-the-clock care to Angela Caviill-Burch’s quadriplegic husband after she went on hunger strike last week.

• In a protest against the unofficial ban imposed by the Sindh Government in Pakistan on the movement of wheat, flour mills across Punjab continued to observe a complete strike for the fifth continuous day on Monday.

• On Thursday four members of a group from Dalga Youth Organization were arrested as they held a flash-mob action of protest in front of the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan. The youth activists were marking the one year anniversary of the arrest of the bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli.

• In Pakistan, a shutter-down strike was observed in Quetta and southern districts of Balochistan on Thursday to protest against the rationing of electricity and increasing cases of kidnapping for ransom.

Mark Twain’s antiwar leanings are already common knowledge (or should be), perhaps best of all through his haunting short story “The War Prayer.” But now, as his complete autobiography is being published for the first time by University of California Press, the true radicalism of his position is becoming more evident than ever. Writes Larry Rohter in The New York Times:

Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes this week about the growing trend toward self-conscious nonviolent resistance among Palestinians against Israeli occupation. But he is also quick to point out its shortcomings, as in his account of one action in Bilin:

Most of the marchers were Palestinians, but some were also Israeli Jews and foreigners who support the Palestinian cause. They chanted slogans and waved placards as photographers snapped photos. At first the mood was festive and peaceful, and you could glimpse the potential of this approach.

But then a group of Palestinian youths began to throw rocks at Israeli troops. That’s the biggest challenge: many Palestinians define “nonviolence” to include stone-throwing.

Kristof, often sensitive to matters of gender, points out that women may be leading the charge toward a truly nonviolent resistance in Palestine:

But imagine if Palestinians stopped the rock-throwing and put female pacifists in the lead. What if 1,000 women sat down peacefully on a road to block access to an illegal Jewish settlement built on Palestinian farmland? What if the women allowed themselves to be tear-gassed, beaten and arrested without a single rock being thrown? Those images would be on televisions around the world — particularly if hundreds more women marched in to replace those hauled away.

He tells of one case in which a women’s movement was successful:

Most Palestinian demonstrations are overwhelmingly male, but in Budrus women played a central role. They were led by Mr. Morrar’s quite amazing daughter, Iltezam Morrar. Then 15, she once blocked an Israeli bulldozer by diving in front of it (the bulldozer retreated, and she was unhurt).

Israeli security forces knew how to deal with bombers but were flummoxed by peaceful Palestinian women. Even when beaten and fired on with rubber bullets, the women persevered. Finally, Israel gave up. It rerouted the security fence to bypass nearly all of Budrus.

While it may be that women will play a pivotal role in future nonviolent action in Palestine, men can do it too. If Palestinians, truly want to make progress—and galvanize international opinion—against Israeli power, they should follow the lead of these women and men calling for unyielding, courageous, nonviolent resistance. If they want to continue making matters worse, they can keep throwing rocks and launching rockets.

Working In These Times has an interesting post about the decline of labor activism in the United States. According to new figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union elections have dropped by 60% from 1997-2009 and only five “major strikes” (involving 1,000 workers or more) occurred last year—the lowest number since BLS began recording strike data in 1947. Working attributes these declines to three factors—unionbusting, outsourcing, and union leader incompetency.

As labor power weakens, employers have doubled their use of illegal unionbusting tactics since the 1990s, according to a study by Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Currently, 34 percent of employers fire union activists to intimidate other workers from joining a union. Studies show that without such threats, 58 percent of the workforce would be willing to join a union. But intimidation tactics make that virtually impossible.

The threat of outsourcing makes it increasingly difficult for unions to organize workers as well. Since 2000, 2 million jobs in the more heavily unionized manufacturing jobs have been lost to China. Outsourcing causes unions to not only lose members, but makes it tougher for unions to organize new members.  In 57% of all union drives, employers threaten to move factories if workers unionize—a threatthat  is very real.

Labor leaders also have played a very big role in labor’s decline. While the labor movement has lost 1.1 million members, the salary of top labor officials’ salaries has nearly tripled, according to a recent study by Labor Notes. If unions capped their total annual compensation at $150,000, they would save the labor movement $143 million dollars annually. At a time when unions are laying off young organizers as they lose members, there’s no reason why officials should take such exorbitant salaries.

This is important gut-check analysis, as it will hopefully help labor think about solutions to these problems, which admittedly aren’t easily solvable. But American labor activists can look to other countries, where strikes are quite prominent, such as the UK, for inspiration and advice on overcoming these hurdles.

As evidenced by the rather extensive list of issues covered on this site, we follow a variety of movements and campaigns. One that we often overlook, however, is the growing trend of people counter-protesting the Westboro Baptist Church—a hate group known for picketing at public events and funerals, usually in relation to gay people, Jews and soldiers killed in battle (the latter of which they consider “God’s punishment” for the moral decay of America).

While this group deserves opposition and resistance, the typical response has been somewhat counter-productive. A distinct attitude of snarkiness and irony pervade the counter-protests, which usually consist of signs mocking the language of the Westboro Baptist Church. For instance, parodies of the sick “God hates fags” signs present at most WBC gatherings range from the sarcastic “God hates signs” to the absurd “God hates fuzzy tiny kittens.”

That’s not to say there isn’t power in humor. One admittedly funny photo from a counter-protest shows a WBC woman holding a sign that reads “Homosexuality is a sin”, while a young man stands next her holding a sign mocking her attire: “Corduroy skirts are a sin.” By playing on the stereotypical keen fashion sense of gay people, this comment is in its own way incisive. Yet, by also being insulting, it can only serve as a further divide between two people that ultiamtely must come together for hatred to be extinguished.

I have yet to see much effort to reach out to the WBC, perhaps because people think they are insane, irrational and unchangeable. Unfortunately, this attitude toward their fellow man/woman is something they share with the WBC. If both sides are belittling the humanity of the other as irredeemable than no progress will ever be made. Since the basic ideology of WBC is based on hate, the burden is therefore on the counter-protesters to bring the WBC folks back from the edge.

But if counter-protesters aren’t ready to make this gesture, they can at least improve the effectiveness of their campaign in other ways. Perhaps the best tactic being employed (or about to employed) is by an LGBT support group in Dallas. According to The Advocate:

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