• An estimated 175,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday to participate in the One Nation Working Together rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance.

• Twenty-three Mapuche activists ended their 82-day long hunger strike late Friday evening after Chile’s government agreed to withdraw terrorism charges against the jailed activists and promised a series of reforms to the nation’s much questioned terrorism law.

• Thousands of tribesmen took to the streets in tribal region of North Waziristan on Thursday to protest against strikes by the US drone aircraft in the tribal region.

• In the UK, 7,000 marched through Birmingham on Sunday in response to cuts in public spending.

• As many as 200 workers, including Saudis, Sunday refused to work on a vital project under way in central Jeddah due to non-payment of their dues for the last four months. Another 200 workers remained absent from the work site in protest.

• On Friday, striking dock workers in France paralyzed the country’s main southern port of Marseille as part of a work stoppage that organizers said would last three days to protest pension reform. The disruptive action was spreading to other ports.

• Bonfires burned on Sunday on beaches around New Zealand’s North Island, as part of an ongoing campaign against offshore oil drilling.

There are dozens of lovely, tree-filled squares in London, but only one—Tavistock Square, in northern Bloomsbury—is dedicated as a peace park. Surrounding a statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s Mahatma (“Great Soul”), are benches with plaques asserting the commitment of one Londoner after another to Gandhi’s vision of peace and the “soul force” of nonviolence.

One of the plaques, however, carries the name of someone who would have loved to be an honorary Englishwoman, but was in fact a New Yorker, born and bred. It says, “From Beatrice Kelvin of New York City, who works for world peace and loves London.”

Bea Kelvin was my mother, and thanks to her determination and that of her daughters, the plaque was placed there in her lifetime, as she wanted it, on a bench facing the back of Gandhi’s statue (why the back of his statue is a different story, equally typical of my mom). Today being Gandhi’s birthday and the International Day of Nonviolence, I put this out in my mother’s memory and his.

The Hotel Tavistock, across the street from Tavistock Square, is a little the worse for wear since its construction in the Art Deco-mad Thirties. But it’s still a handsome example of that then-modern school of architecture, and the slight wear-and-tear has brought the price down to my family’s preferred range. So it was that my peripatetic mother discovered the Tavistock in her world-traveling heyday, learned that the square across the street was a peace park, and began to conceive a desire to have her own plaque there, talking about it from time to time as another might talk about where she wanted to be buried. So it was, too, that she and her two daughters continued to stay there even after Bea could no longer travel alone and I had to accompany her when she left the country. And so it was that in 2005 my sister Joan and I found ourselves at the Tavistock without Bea, who had had a stroke the year before and couldn’t go anywhere at all anymore.

We had stepped across the street to look at the square for her, so to speak, and were talking wistfully about her desire to have her name represented there. Then it occurred to us that there probably was a sign somewhere in the park that could tell us how one went about acquiring a plaque on a bench, and faster than you could say “Mohandas K. Gandhi,” Joan was speaking to the very parks department representative on her international mobile phone …

Back in the States, I told Bea about our research, thinking it was another installment in our increasingly frequent conversation about her post-mortem arrangements. “So you see,” I said, “we can get you a bench there after you, um—after—well, you know—”

“I don’t want it when I’m dead!” she said. “I want it now, when I can see it.”

She got it. She never did see the real thing, but she saw pictures. She was very proud of it. For the last years of her life, she kept a photo of the bench—taken by one of her sons—in a prominent spot on her piano, along with her pictures of her grandchildren. (She was convinced that the park had put her plaque on the wrong bench and that she had requested it facing the front of Gandhi’s statue, but in fact she had misread the diagram they sent and insisted that the spot she chose—the one where the plaque is—was eye-to-eye with him.) When she died, four years after the plaque was installed, we displayed a large photo of it at her memorial service and noted in her death notice in The New York Times that a “bench in London’s Tavistock Square is dedicated to peace in her name.”

On this International Day of Nonviolence, “The Political Landscape” salutes Mohandas Gandhi and everyone else—including my mother—who has ever dreamed of a world without slaughter or cruelty and put their lives to the service of bringing that world to birth. May we finally make it so.

This blog orginally appeared on The Political Landscape.

Ted Rall, a journalist who I’ve read over the years and generally liked, has a new book out called The Anti-American Manifesto, in which he argues that violent revolution is the only way out of our current mess. As David Swanson explains:

According to Rall, “no meaningful political change has ever taken place without violence or the credible threat of violence.” And, “without violence, the powerful will never stop exploiting the weak.” From these statements, scattered throughout the manifesto, one would have no idea that anyone else believed there was a third choice beyond violence or doing nothing. There is no indication here of the role of nonviolence in evicting the British from India or overthrowing the ruler of El Salvador in 1944, or even in ending Jim Crow in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa, in the popular removal of the ruler of the Philippines in 1986, in the largely nonviolent Iranian Revolution of 1979, in the dismantling of the Soviet Union in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, in the resistance to a stolen election in the Ukraine in 2004-2005, and in hundreds of other examples from around the world.

Now, Rall could try to argue that many such movements have violent as well as nonviolent components. He could claim that nonviolent activism can constitute a threat of violence. That is, even though the actors themselves may prove their willingness to die rather than use violence, the understanding of those in power as well as of activists like Rall who think only in terms of violence could be that violence is being threatened. But Rall attempts no such arguments, so we don’t really know what he would say.

Apparently, Rall also believes that it was the black bloc activists who broke a few windows in Seattle in 1999 that should be credited with slowing corporate globalization, not the tens of thousands of peaceful protesters who won allies inside the meetings and effectively shut down the city. I honestly have never heard anyone make that argument.

It’s really unfortunate that Rall has such a twisted view of social change. While he may point out many of the problems we face in this country, it sounds like Rall comes up woefully short on solutions. How he sees “a hundred thousand angry New Yorkers armed with bricks (or guns)” challenging the most militarily powerful state the world has ever known and addressing our many crises is truly beyond me.

On Gandhi’s birthday tomorrow, which the UN has recognized as the International Day of Nonviolence, there will be a massive march in Washington DC to push for a broad range of progressive policies. As our friend Alex Kane explains over at Alternet:

The rally is taking place under the banner of the “One Nation Working Together” coalition. Endorsing organizations ranging from the NAACP to the American Federation of Teachers to CodePink Women for Peace are hoping to see tens of thousands of people at the Lincoln Memorial call for the creation of new jobs, the strengthening of the safety net and the need for quality public education, among other demands.

Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America, a union that represents over 700,000 people, sees the One Nation Working Together coalition as a “big tent” of progressives working together. The union, along with groups like the National Council of La Raza, a Latino rights organization, and Green For All, an environmental group pushing for green jobs, are key organizers behind the effort, which was first put together by the NAACP and the Service Employees United International 1199 union.

While the organizers apparently stress that the march is focused on issues rather than on political parties, the march seems to be in part an effort to rally Dems to vote in the upcoming midterm elections.

On a strategic level, I question whether having such a wide range of issues on the table, even though I think they are all connected, is a wise move. It would seems to make it more difficult for the wider public or the administration to take a clear message from the march.

Despite my concerns, radical groups like the War Resisters League will be present, and if I could be there I would.

One of the most outspoken artists against Arizona’s SB1070 is Conor Oberst of the band Bright Eyes. Earlier in the summer he defended his decision to join The Sound Strike, a campaign launched by musicians urging a boycott of musical performances in the state. Now he’s released a new song and video, titled “Coyote Song,” which can be bought from the Sound Strike website. Proceeds go to the Florence Project, a non profit organization that provides free legal help to immigrants in the Arizona detention and deportation system.

Oberst released the following statement along with his new song:

American ideals of democracy and liberty are built on the foundation that all people, regardless of race or country of origin, deserve fair and equal treatment by the government…We’ve all seen the power music has to spread messages of solidarity and hope.

• A cement truck plastered with antibank slogans blocked the entrance to the Irish Parliament on Wednesday as tensions mounted over the country’s debt crisis and enormous bank bailouts. The side of the truck was painted with the words “Toxic Bank” next to the corporate logo of the government-owned Irish Anglo Bank. A billboard on the back said “all politicians should be sacked.” The brakes and electric cables had been cut, making it difficult to remove.

• A group of people slept in sleeping bags outside the parliamentary building in Reykjavík last night to protest the government’s lack of action against a wave of forced property sales.

• Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner calling on the EPA to “protect people not polluters” at the site of Coal Ash hearings at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky on Tuesday.

• Police in the southwestern German city of Stuttgart used tear gas and water cannons yesterday to break up demonstrators trying to stop crews from cutting down trees in a city park to make way for a train station. At least 116 people were injured, including three teenagers and a 12-year-old.

• About 50 AIDS activists carried signs made with empty pill bottles in front of the White House on Wednesday to protest the failure of President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress to allocate emergency funds for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program known as ADAP.

• A Southern-Illinois group calling themselves “The Black Cross Alliance” are placing black crosses throughout the area to protest the mining and burning of coal for energy.