Earlier this month, over at Think Progress, the widely-read Matt Yglesias wrote about his take on nonviolence, which I found rather surprising:

If African-Americans had spent the 1950s mounting a campaign of violence against southern law enforcement and political officials, you can easily understand viewing that as a justifiable response to past and continuing wrongdoing. But in practice, such a course would have been hugely counterproductive to the goal of garnering political support among northern whites for meaningful civil rights legislation.

[...]

I think the general moral of the story is that non-violence is a tactic whose potency people pretty systematically underrate. When the force being resisted is one you also sympathize with, it gets easy to see that non-violence would work better. But when the force being resisted is one you’re both frightened of and embittered against, the tendency is to be blind to this.

Over the years I’ve come to adopt a pretty extremist view on this, and I think I’m even prepared to accept the reductio ad Hitler case. Had it been feasible to coordinate the population of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. into a mass campaign of non-violent resistance to German occupation I think that would have brought even Hitler down. The problem there is essentially about how difficult it is to sustain collective action rather than about the need to fight evil with violence.

Of course, I agree with him on all of these points, including the potential that nonviolent resistance had in stopping Hitler. In fact, I devoted the final chapter of my Masters thesis (which can be downloaded and read here) to stories of the successful use of nonviolence during World War II, of which there are many.

For example, using nonviolent methods, the people of Denmark, Finland and Bulgaria, were able to save virtually their entire Jewish populations from the Holocaust. And then there is my favorite story about the courageous nonviolent resistance mounted by the French village of Le Chambon.

Given these stories and many more, I’m convinced that had their been a commitment to nonviolence and a far deeper knowledge of nonviolent strategies and tactics across Europe, the Nazis could have been stopped with far less bloodshed and destruction.

Coming up with the perfect headline is not always an easy task. And I’m not claiming to have a particular knack for it. I know I’ve written my fair share of duds.

But this headline in The Highlander, the student paper at the University of California, Riverside, about a protest over education is just plain lazy.

Nothing about it distinguishes this protest from any other. At most demonstrations, protesters are upset with the status quo and want change. And there is no mention of what issue they are upset about. If you can’t come up with something sharp, which can be tough, you’ve got to at least get the basics in the headline.

• About 100 people demonstrated Thursday outside the Japanese Consulate in the 300 block of South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles as part of a worldwide protest against the annual slaughter of dolphins in that country.

• Union workers shut down all of France’s 12 oil refineries on a fourth day of nationwide protests over pension reforms Friday.

• About 100 workers from the Greek culture ministry barricaded themselves inside the Acropolis on Wednesday by padlocking the entrance gates and refusing to allow any tourists in until their demands for unpaid wages were met. But riot police cleared the site after obtaining a court order.

• Activists with Change Chevron infiltrated and interrupted a speech of Chevron’s CEO at the University of Chicago on Wednesday, and turned it into conversation about his company’s toxic pollution in Ecuador.

• Dozens of people dumped what they labelled as “GM-canola weeds and GM-contaminated soy infant formula S-26″ on Monsanto’s Melbourne office today as a protest to coincide with UN World Food Day.

• More than 100 Chinese writers, lawyers and activists have released a letter urging the government to release the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo and other political prisoners.

• Activists with the Sierra Club stood frozen outside a Board of Trustees meeting on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus yesterday to protest the university’s decision to “remain frozen in the 19th century and not move into a clean energy future” by building a new coal powered boiler.

When Malcolm Gladwell’s much talked about New Yorker piece on activism and social media came out last month, I was in the middle of reading his first book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. It was rather strange timing. Not only because I all-of-a-sudden decided to read a ten-year-old best-seller, but also because I was reading it with the explicit purpose of seeing what Gladwell’s sociological insights had to offer activists.

I got the idea from UC Berkeley nonviolence scholar Michael Nagler, who mentioned in one of his downloadable lectures that despite its more obvious appeal to those in the advertising world, Tipping Point might be an invaluable source for those trying to understand nonviolent movements. Having now read it, I can confirm this hunch.

So much of Gladwell’s terminology and descriptions apply to nonviolent movements. For instance, when he talks about “connectors,” or “people with a truly extraordinary knack [... for] making friends and acquaintances,” I think of Gandhi, whose social network included people from all strata of Indian society. When he talks about “mavens,” or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information” and who “want to solve other people’s problems,” I think of Gene Sharp. And when he talks about “salesmen,” or charismatic people with negotiating skills, I think of Martin Luther King, Jr.

These three types of people make up his “Law of the Few,” which states, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” I’d wager you could pick out the connectors, mavens and salesmen in almost every successful nonviolent movement by looking at the makeup of its leadership.

Gladwell’s other two rules for epidemics also apply directly to nonviolent movements. “The Stickiness Factor,” as he calls it, is just another way of talking about a movement’s message, the idea that people connect and rally behind. All successful nonviolent movements have at least one, from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to the fist of the Serbian student movement that brought down Milosevic.

Finally, there’s “The Power of Context,” which says, “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” This is the sort of thing that might further explain why the civil rights movement took hold when it did and not any earlier, despite previous attempts. I’ve heard many experts in nonviolence refer to the triggering of a movement as something magical, something not quite yet within our range of predictability.

This is what Gladwell does best, though. He gets people thinking in new ways. And somehow he does it without ever talking about the things we want him to talk about—in this case: nonviolent movements, civil resistance, MLK, activism, protests, etc.

So you can imagine how exciting it was to hear about his New Yorker piece, in which he actually does talk about such things, and within a very important context, that of social media. His central thesis, however, is surprising, given his propensity to talk up “how little things can make a big difference.” He says that “the revolution will not be tweeted.” More specifically, the “low-risk,” “weak-tie” and non-hierarchical nature of social media make it incapable of effecting great change.

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Last week, Code Pink came out with this wacky rap about how Blackwater “makes a killing out of killing.”

I’m all for raising awareness about the mercenary firm’s never-ending scandals, and have written extensively about the industry myself, but I’m not sure that this was the right way for the antiwar group to get the message out.

While the video has gotten attention, which some might say makes it a success, it may not be the kind of attention they were looking for. As Spencer Ackerman writes over at Danger Room:

Whatever the merits of the substantive case, we’ve got to say: this is going too far.

Does Blackwater really deserve the sight and sound of Benjamin bobbing her head and waving her arms like a fish out of its cultural waters, spitting, “They got a mercenary here, a mercenary there/ Erik Prince’ll send a mercenary” — wait for it! — “a-ny-where”? Must it suffer through a relentless AABB structure and a mid-tempo synth-driven beat, with no variety and no flow? Should it have to watch an ersatz-contractor, in blue polo shirt and wraparound shades, pantomime killing people and making it rain on himself? And what, no Cartman-with-an-AK reference? Cube’s “AK-47 is the tool” line in Straight Outta Compton” sets it right up for you!

Not even the presence of D.C. rapper Head-Roc on the chorus can save Benjamin.  Jim McMahon’s “Super Bowl Shuffle” verse is officially no longer in the record books for most cringe-inducing mic performance.

• In Cairo, around 50 workers and their families, along with labor activists and lawyers, congregated outside the headquarters of the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) and the National Council for Women (NCW) on Sunday to protest “arbitrary and punitive lay-offs” and demand reinstatement.

• Activists protested open pit mining in Costa Rica Saturday in front of Casa Presidencial. The protest against the Crucitas open-pit gold mine, a project that is on hold near the northern border with Nicaragua, will involve a hunger strike by activists, including Costa Rican actress Rocío Carranza.

• Two Spanish citizens who owned La Vaca farm have been on a hunger strike for five days at the gates of Spanish Consulate in Caracas, as they are waiting for the National Land Institute (INTI) to provide an answer on the compensation for their property, which was seized by the Venezuelan government.

• On Monday, food service workers at three hospitals in Allentown, Pennsylvania  held a one-day strike against Sodexo in response to what they see as the company’s ongoing campaign to prevent workers from organizing to get a better life.

• On Sunday, about 100 Ghazvin Naznakh textile workers in Iran held a rally across the presidential palace at Pasteur street. The workers were demanding back wages that they are owed after the factory shut down last March.

• On Monday, protesters from a gay rights group descended on an Indianapolis bakery that is accused of denying an order of rainbow cupcakes meant to celebrate National Coming Out Day.

• The Pir Sultan Abdal Culture Foundation, an Alevi organization, staged a 24-hour sit-in protest in the Turkish capital on Saturday in order to express their opposition to compulsory religion courses in Turkey’s schools.

• The police on Sunday locked up 320 Foxconn India workers in Vellore prison in connection with the workers’ protest.

I recently interviewed a radical queer activist who told me that he believed his actions – stampeding upon churches that preached anti-gay messages, staging a kiss-in at the Academy Awards – were the only way for his cause to be acknowledged.  After all, in his time (the 1980′s and 1990′s), many of his friends were dying of AIDS, and no one was paying attention.  While many mainstream GLBTQ groups called their actions defaming, this group of activists believed that the silence surrounding the disease was the true problem.  That acting nice, in short, got them nowhere.

You could say the same thing about the recent step taken by members of the group Veterans for Peace, who recently, as seen above, “dropped [a] banner down the front of the Newseum, while others distributed special edition copies of the War Crimes Times, explaining the action and what they considered obscene,” according to this piece in Common Dreams.

While militant, and even shocking, the veterans of VFP, you could say, are shaking the boundaries of nonviolence by explicitly using one of the most derogatory, inflammatory terms in the English language.  And that they are hanging the banner on the building’s First Amendment wall says something, too: the obscenity, they indicate, is not the foul word (“fucking,” in this case) but the act of war.

I think it’s an effective, multi-dimensional message.  You have to think for a second.  But you also have to know what the reference is to, so the effect may not be immediate.  It may only appeal to a small group.  (For instance, would a tourist who is visiting DC for the first time know that this wall has the First Amendment on it?)

I’m torn on this one, folks.  What do you think?  Do you think this is nonviolent, considering the language?  That the confrontational manner is effective?  I’m curious, drop me a line on here.

Since 1981, Paper Tiger Television has been waging nonviolence by trying to create a bottom-up, volunteer-driven alternative to mainstream TV. Based in New York, they’ve often found themselves focusing on New Yorkers’ concerns. But now, for their next project, the collective has set its sights on another city, a place especially shaken by the events of recent years: Detroit.

In this short video, see a bit about how the folks at Paper Tiger think about their mission, what calls them to Detroit, and how you can help.

Contribute to Paper Tiger Investigates Detroit on Kickstarter.

This Thursday, our good friend Daryn Cambridge, who is the Director for Knowledge & Digital Strategies at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and an adjunct professor at American University, will be giving a free webinar, called The Digital Duel: Resistance and Repression in an Online World. According to the announcement, he will explore:

…the emerging role of digital tools and new media in impacting the way people around the world struggle nonviolently for human rights, justice, and democratic self-rule.  In addition, he will look at how these communication technologies are also being used as tools of repression by the very governments and structures these movements oppose.  Looking at the evolution of communication and information sharing as a tool of resistance, Daryn will expand on contemporary struggles for rights waged with the help of online, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and technologies such as cellphones and digital cameras that advance the utility of these platforms.

The webinar will run from 12-1pm EDT. To reserve your place, click here. And if that time doesn’t work for you, ICNC will post the video of the presentation on their website afterward.

Bryan Farrell and I will be running a workshop at the Gandhi-King Conference in Memphis, which begins on October 22. We will be speaking about our experience with this site, some of the interesting things we’ve dug up over the last year, and the role that blogging and new media can play in supporting nonviolent movements. If any of you can make it, or are already planning on attending,  it would be wonderful to meet you. To learn more about the conference or to register, click here. And I hope to see you in Memphis!