Motorists in Cape Town were warned last week to avoid segments of the city’s highway where road blockades had been constructed and trash and tires set alight. Local newspapers reported only that the blockades were part of protests staged in the shanty towns lying along the dusty, windswept flats of the city’s outskirts.

The blockades were in fact part of a month-long “strike” of informal settlement-dwellers organized by Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape. Centered in Khayelitsha, a black township area of about 1.3 million, the movement mobilizes those who have erected basic shelters without the state’s permission and who are sometimes subject to violent removals by local police. The informal strike campaign was an effort to protest this repression and demand accelerated efforts to provide housing to the nearly one in four South Africans who live in shacks.

Sixteen years into democracy, South Africa remains a place of dire poverty and alarming inequality. In Cape Town, apartheid’s continued legacy of social segregation means that such conditions in the city’s townships may go almost unnoticed by the eyes of the media and middle class. Referred to as the “dumping ground of apartheid,” the settlements along the city’s highway continue to house black and colored communities in poverty conditions with few opportunities for employment.

Aside from the inconveniences caused to motorists, Abahlali’s strike campaign thus came to a close with few signs of it having registered in Cape Town’s commercial center and wealthy suburbs. The muted public reaction to the movement’s appeals reveals much about the politics of protest and visibility in contemporary South Africa, where new movements of the poor are still struggling for recognition as they contest a government credited with ending apartheid.

Since 2004, a wave of mass mobilization has been taking place in South Africa’s townships and informal settlements. Referred to collectively as “service delivery protests,” these demonstrations bode poorly for the country’s democratic institutions, which hold less and less legitimacy among communities for whom democracy has brought little change.

Read the rest of this article »

Over on her blog, Sojourners editor Rose Marie Berger has a nice post about a story of nonviolence from World War II that I had never heard, but sounds quite amazing. She writes of the work of photographer Norman Gershman, who in recent years has documented the stories of Albanian Muslims who at great risk to themselves hid more than 2,000 Jews in their homes over the course of the war.

According to a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about an exhibit of Gershman’s photographs of these families that has traveled extensively around the world:

Gershman said it wasn’t just Muslim families who shielded Jews from the Nazis, but also Orthodox and Catholic families. All of them were motivated by an Albanian code of honor called “besa,” a concept that can be translated into “keeping the promise,” Gershman says. The Albanian villagers were motivated to risk their lives by the simple concept of helping one’s neighbor.

[...]

Before the war, Gershman estimates from his research, only about 200 Jews lived in Albania, a country that is about 70 percent Muslim. During the years of occupation, 10 times as many Jews streamed into Albania to escape persecution from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy. Gershman says it was the only country in Europe where the Jewish population grew by the end of the war.

Gershman’s work was also published in what looks like a beautiful book, Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II.

As we’ve noted on this site, this is not the only story of Muslims saving Jews during World War II, despite the fact that there are no Arab names among the 20,000 non-Jews recognized at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem. PBS ran a documentary earlier this year called Among the Righteous, that told the previously unknown story of how many Arabs did help Jews in parts of Nazi-occupied Tunisia.

This story from Albania also reminds me of the nonviolent resistance in Denmark and really every other country that I know of where people risked their lives to save Jews during World War II, in that where anti-Semitism was not rampant and people saw Jews as their brothers and sisters, they were often able to avert the Holocaust. The problem is that because anti-Semitism was so widespread throughout Europe, in many places the local populations were either passive or actively cooperated with the Nazis in their effort to exterminate the Jews.

• Hundreds of people convened in downtown Pittsburgh on Tuesday to protest the development of “fracking,” a new and untested method of natural gas extraction that is threatening to take over Pennsylvania and neighboring states.

• More then 4,000 BBC employees started a 48-hour strike over pensions today, forcing the state-funded broadcaster to curtail programs and run pre-recorded shows.

• Concerned residents of the Navajo Nation, along with activists, constructed symbolic black crosses in front of Kayenta Mine in Arizona, which was named last spring as one of the most dangerous mines in the nation.

• About 40 North Carolina State University students painted the school’s “Free Expression Tunnel” black overnight to protest racist and homophobic graffiti.

• 11,000 London Underground staff began a 24-hour walkout on Tuesday night to protest job cuts.

• Hundreds of people in India’s Amritsar City gathered for a sit-in early Wednesday morning to protest the federal government’s delaying of justice to the victims of the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots.

• An extremely frail 38-year-old woman dubbed “The Iron Lady” marked 10 years without voluntarily taking food or water Thursday — a hunger strike launched to protest an anti-terror law that grants Indian soldiers sweeping powers to crack down on rebels.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack for taking a critical look at the Rally to Restore Sanity last weekend. Most of the commenters argued that the rally was important because it served as a much-needed call for civility and a critique of the mainstream media for its fear-mongering and sensationalism.

I couldn’t agree more.  While I wasn’t able to watch the whole rally, the excerpts that I heard of Jon Stewart’s closing speech were very poignant.

My problem was that I thought the way Stewart framed the rally on his show was insulting to traditional activism. By arguing that real Americans don’t protest because they have “shit to do,” I felt Stewart implied that demonstrators are often on the street because they don’t have anything better to do. For most of the activists that I know, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Perhaps in response to others who made similar critiques, Stewart explicitly said during his closing remarks that his intention was not to ridicule “people of faith or people of activism.”

Nevertheless, his inclusion of Kid Rock in the lineup showed not only his poor taste in music, but his disregard for the power of everyday folks to effect change and make the world a better place.

Preforming “Care” off his new CD, Kid Rock sang to the crowd of more than 200,000:

“I can’t stop the war, shelter homeless, feed the poor… I can’t change the world and make things fair. The least that I can do is care.”

When I heard that refrain, I was shocked. What an incredibly disempowering message to give anyone, let alone an enormous throng at a rally. We can stop the wars if we work together, and I’m good friends with people who shelter the homeless and feed the poor every day. These things are desperately needed and completely doable, and there is absolutely no justification for telling anyone otherwise.  Simply “caring” is not enough.

The Rally to Restore Sanity. Lots of people—but for what?

“I thought about, but never seriously considered, making a bigger sign,” read the piece of paper taped to the back of one man’s sweatshirt. “God hates hommos! She prefers baba ghanoush,” went the word-play on another rallier’s cardboard. This was not the angry anti-war protest that rocked Washington in 2003, or Glenn Beck’s revival at the Lincoln Memorial in the summer. This, rather, was the anti-anger protest, a call for moderation in the place of extremism of any kind, put on by a pair of comedians.

In Washington DC on October 30th, hundreds of thousands gathered for the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” hosted by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. The crowd’s energy was enough to overshadow some technical difficulties: the stand-up comedy performance and musical acts were hard to hear halfway down the Mall. Not letting this sour the mood, people entertained themselves by cheering on young ralliers scaling tree trunks to get a better view of the stage. “Yes you can!” those below shouted as climbers shimmied up, one by one. Some stood victoriously amongst the branches of an autumn-shaded oak, while others slid shamefully down to mutters of, “No you can’t.”

It was hard to tell whether this was a political rally or not. Almost no mention was made of the looming November 2nd elections. But what, then, was the goal?

“We need to tone down the media, show them that we are against the strategies they use, the way they hype up events,” explained one 40-something Kansas City resident, carrying a sign that read, “God hates rallies.” Two University of Maryland college students said that they had come to “show that less people think like the Tea Party,” and stand “in opposition to the craziness in the media.” The Tea Party, they said, is not “representative of America.” A 52-year-old speech therapist from New Jersey stated her desire “to be counted as here, to beat Beck’s rally.” Comedy, she explained, “is the voice of sanity right now.” As a watcher of MSNBC, she contrasted herself to Fox News fans who attended Glenn Beck’s August 2010 “Restoring Honor” rally. She was also “thrilled to see so many young people here” and recalled the fervor during the Obama campaign that motivated youths to canvass for votes and cast their own for the first time.

Many people I talked to weren’t satisfied with the afternoon’s handful of musical acts and Stewart-Colbert skits. “I was expecting more speakers,” complained one 23-year-old. A political analyst I talked with expressed frustration that Stewart and Colbert said nothing about voting. Read the rest of this article »

Much has been made of Saturday’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, particularly the way Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert used humor to criticize the media, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and, in general, traditional forms of protest. While I’m all for humor, and think it is one of the most important tools we have to expose the truth, there is a point where it ceases to be useful. Take for instance, the following sign that, according to Boing Boing, was made for Saturday’s rally:

On the one hand, there’s no doubting its visual irony. Protest signs are typically pithy and this one is uncharacteristically wordy. That’s funny, for sure. But the message itself loses me. It’s too extreme of a position to be true and it belies historical examples of the contrary.

When I first read this sign, I immediately thought of the signs carried by the striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.

Having recently been to Memphis and seen the wonderful exhibit on the sanitation strike at the National Civil Rights Museum, I don’t think one can say that protest signs are ineffectual. These signs, with their “simple pithy slogans”, dramatized the plight of the sanitation workers in a way that is still iconic today.

In a movie that shows at the museum, civil rights leader and Memphis-native Rev. Billy Kyles says, “One of the things that was terribly significant was seeing these men with signs, which didn’t say peace, didn’t say freedom, didn’t say justice. All it said was, I Am A Man.”

This makes me think that we must be careful with our humor. There is a time for irony, snarkiness and smugness. And there is also a time for sincerity and heartfelt appeal. We mustn’t forget that we can reach people with simple honest words and that sometimes it’s more effective to do it that way.

There were many signs at Saturday’s rally that rightfully made fun of the ignorance and hate being projected on Muslims. But what if instead of a sign like this one—where the point is to ridicule, not connect with, the opposition—there were signs carried by Muslims that said “I Am A Human.” What if we really made it that simple?

• At least 600 people were arrested in India on Monday for opposing the construction of the world’s largest nuclear park in Jaitapur, and hundreds more voluntarily risk jail.

• As of last week, some 20,000 Sahrawi protesters were gathered in provisional camps outside the cities of El Aaiun, Smara, Dakhla and Bujador, to oppose the Moroccan occupation. The massive protest action started in a smaller scale almost three weeks ago.

• Hundreds of Indian workers employed to manually clean non-flush toilets have protested in Delhi against their working conditions. The demonstrators began their protests a month ago by criss-crossing the country to highlight their demands.

• On Sunday, in New Zealand, opponents of mining in the Coromandel launched a new protest after discovering a company drilling for gold and silver in a forestry area.

• Opposition supporters have held protests in several parts of Tanzania at the slow pace of announcing the result of Sunday’s general election.

• One day before Halloween, environmentalists wore costumes of dead waterfowl during a protest to show their disdain over the latest tailings pond tragedy in northern Alberta, which has led to the deaths of 350 ducks.

Jeremy Kessler, a writer and law student who is currently at work on an important research project about conscientious objectors in World War I, has a powerful new essay over at the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s website. Looking back at the treatment of German-Americans during the “Great War,” he sees parallels with the outbursts of Islamophobia today:

Almost a century ago, the American essayist Randolph Bourne warned that one of the unavoidable consequences of our nation’s diversity is that when we wage war on a foreign foe, we risk civil war at home. Published in the Atlantic Monthly prior to the United States’ entrance into WWI, Bourne’s prophetic essay, “Transnational America,” argued that if his country joined the war, it would be declaring war on itself, uprooting the lives of millions of ethnically German citizens and bathing the nation in hate and mistrust. On the other hand, if the United States remained neutral and cultivated domestic peace, it would show the world the possibility of multi-ethnic harmony. Bourne’s ultimatum was two-sided: while peace at home inspires peace abroad, war abroad breeds domestic division.

America has been at war for almost a decade, and the violence has already cost many nations so much. Yet we are only beginning to pay the wages of war at home. A land of immigrants, America contains within its borders all possible fault-lines of global conflict. Because at our best we are inviting, at our worst, we can always find representatives of our overseas enemies right around the corner, whether they are German, Japanese, or Muslim Americans.

Bourne’s ultimatum went unheeded and his prophecy was confirmed. As American warships sailed east in the winter of 1918, witch-hunts, raids, and show trials began on the home-front. Rioters destroyed German language newspapers and printing presses. Public libraries held book-burnings. Local governments forced hundreds of German-American schools to shut down for good. In Montana, a traveling salesman was sentenced to seven to twenty years for calling new government regulations a “big joke.” On April 4, 1918, a mob lynched the German-American Robert Prager, an Illinois miner, for making “disloyal remarks.” Intrepid German immigrants settled much of the interior of our nation. Between 1917 and 1919, their memory was effaced from the landscape, as thousands of streets and towns were renamed. Most ethnic Germans stopped speaking German altogether. An entire culture was erased.

Kessler’s essay comes to a chilling conclusion in the face of the US policy of perpetual war over the last decade: “If we want peace at home, we must pursue it abroad.”

Over at the Independent, the always insightful Johann Hari had a wonderful article last Friday on the power of protest, and how you can’t forsee the impact that taking a stand can have.

Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.

Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.

Hari then writes that evidence suggests protesters might very well have stopped Presidents Johnson and Nixon from dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam, even though they may have thought they were not having an effect at the time.

He also offers another inspiring example from that terrible war of how, as Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world”:

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

Last week, in his weekly column for the National Catholic Reporter, Fr. John Dear wrote about one verse from the Gospel of Luke that is often misread as a justification for war or violence, and how it should be interpreted.

Shortly before his crucifiction, while Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells his disciples that “one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.” In response, the disciples find two swords, and Jesus replied, “It is enough” (Luke 22:35-38).

As Fr. Dear explains, the disciples simply didn’t understand that Jesus was not speaking literally. When his followers run off to produce two swords:

…Jesus, barely keeping the glimmer of light alive, snaps: “Stop. It’s enough!” Or in a better translation: “Oh, forget it!”

The misunderstanding is complete. The scriptures foretell it; Jesus resigns himself to it. It is part and parcel of his vocation.

But the Gospel doesn’t end there. Jesus presses the matter even yet.

During the tussle of the arrest, the disciples collectively ask for permission: Can we strike now? And one impetuous disciple (the other Gospels identify him as Peter) is in no mood to wait for an answer. He takes a swing and hacks off an ear of one of the Roman guards.

And again comes a rebuke from Jesus: “Enough! No more of this!”

When the disciples realize that Jesus refuses to take up arms even at this terrible moment they take to their heels. This nonviolent Jesus is more than they had bargained for.

And if we want to take this passage absolutely literally to justify war, Fr. Dear jokes at the end of his article:

…then clearly the passage limits the entire world to only two swords. And we’ll all have to share them.