Perhaps the most famous Wisconsin Socialist was Victor Berger, who with Eugene Debs helped found the Socialist Party in 1901.

With all that’s been happening in Wisconsin the past month, a question came to mind: Is there something unique about the history and culture of the Badger State that helped make this uprising possible?

When we consulted with our good friend and Wisconsin native Quince Mountain, who wrote some amazing dispatches from Madison, he pointed out that the recent events didn’t just appear from nowhere—nor were they solely inspired by Governor Walker’s budget cuts and union-busting efforts.

After all, there have been activist groups organizing in and around the politically vibrant state capitol for a long time. Their experience no doubt fostered the right environment for massive protests.

Even so, this explanation doesn’t fully explain “why Wisconsin?” A recent piece in The Indypendent, however, does a great job of looking back on the state’s rather radical political history:

If there is one single reason why Wisconsin has become a national battleground in the war to roll back labor rights, it is history. Starting with Germans who immigrated to the Badger State after fleeing the crushed revolution of 1848 in Germany, Wisconsin is steeped in more than a century of popular movements that fought for women’s equality, freedom of the press, grassroots democracy and socialism.This history includes “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette who was governor of the state from 1901 to 1906 and the founding of the nation’s first public employees union in 1932. Robert Marion La Follette was a radical, anti-slavery Republican who championed the first system of worker’s compensation, progressive taxation, the open primary, women’s suffrage and the direct election of U.S. Senators. All this came to be known as “the Wisconsin Idea.”

Less well known is that the city of Milwaukee had Socialist Party mayors and city councils from 1910 to 1960. European immigrants poured into Wisconsin in the late 19th century as Milwaukee was industrializing. The resulting concentration of wealth and monopolies in railroad rates, grain elevators and utilities spurred labor organizing.

The piece goes on to make a compelling case for the role of Wisconsin’s radical history in today’s uprising. Still, it’s by no means a definitive answer to the original question. When it comes to understanding what it is that makes people take action we may never know for sure. Each case has a variety of reasons that create a sum greater than the individual parts.

For those of you in New York, I will be speaking on a panel with Mathis Chiroux from Iraq Veterans Against the War and Pardiss Kebriaei from the Center for Constitutional Rights this Sunday at the Left Forum. I plan to talk primarily about my trip in December to Afghanistan and how the situation there has only devolved since Obama came to power.

Here is the official description of the panel, which will run from 10-11:50am in room E324 at Pace University:

From the Bush Regime’s “War on Terror” to “Obama’s Contingency Operation” – Why We Resist

An examination of how the Obama administration is, in some ways, worse than the Bush regime in prosecuting secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen with the use of secret ops and unmanned drone attacks; night raids in Afghanistan; continuing involvement of troops, contractors and the largest embassy in the world in Iraq; the development of list of targets for extra-judicial killing by the CIA; the continuation of renditions to third countries, denial of habeas rights for detainees in Bagram; and revelations of the US military policy of fostering human rights abuse of prisoners by puppet armies.

A group of 28 peace activists from the US and Australia, including Waging Nonviolence contributors Simon Moyle, Jim Haber and Jake Olzen, has just arrived in Afghanistan. They immediately connected with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a truly inspirational group of young people who I had the good fortune of getting to know during my trip there in December. As Voices for Creative Nonviolence co-coordinator Kathy Kelly explains in an article that was widely published today:

Last evening, they showed us photos of an unusual walk they’d held in the streets of downtown Kabul that morning.  Dressed in white, with the young women wearing sky blue veils and the young men in the same color neck scarves, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers carried sky blue and white banners proclaiming that Peace is a Pre-Requisite for Progress. They are seeking an end to wars in their country.  “Why did you choose sky blue?” I asked.  “Because it shows that there is just one sky over all of us,” Chahara replied. Although they came from different ethnicities and various provinces, they walked shoulder to shoulder, 40 of them, on a bright, warm day.

The delegation’s itinerary over the next few days is jam-packed. Kelly writes that:

On March 19^th, in Kabul, Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers will hold a candlelight commemoration, remembering the children recently killed in Afghanistan.  Following  this ceremony they will plant saplings as a symbol of their dedication to a nonviolent future. Their compassion extends beyond Afghanistan to young people in other lands, some of whom they will connect with through a “Global Day of Listening,”  a 24 hour Skype communication which they’ll host on the first day of spring [March 20], Afghanistan’s “Nau Roz” (New Year’s Day) holiday…  (see:  www.livewithoutwars.org and www.ourjourneytosmile.com or email globaldayoflistening@gmail.com to arrange participation for yourself and/or your community.

Hopefully over the next few days we will be running the dispatches from our contributors on the ground, so check back for updates on the work of these courageous activists.

Leading nonviolent theorist Gene Sharp continues to receive the recognition he has long deserved with an enthralling feature in The Nation magazine. Right from the outset, Nation reporter Sasha Abramsky paints Sharp as an unfairly overlooked figure, who “has labored in obscurity for much of his life.” This theme runs throughout the piece and is counter-balanced by the tremendous effect he’s had on global democracy movements over the past quarter century.

He was like a boutique wine: cherished by a select few, hidden from the broader public. Even his friends and colleagues believed that he was, to a degree, tilting at windmills.These days, however, with the Egyptian revolution upending longstanding assumptions about the interplay between dictatorships and the people they oppress, Sharp’s ideas don’t seem so quixotic. Those windmills, says his friend [Bob] Helvey, might just be morphing into giants.

What Abramsky does best, aside from accurately explain Sharp’s theories, is tell us more about the man himself. The story of how Sharp came to believe in the power of nonviolent action is no less engaging than the stories we’ve been hearing about the people and movements he’s come to influence.

Gene Sharp grew up in a conservative Republican family in the American Midwest. His formative years were dominated by stories of World War II, images of the horrors of death camps, the onset of the cold war, the atomic bomb. As the images sank in, he developed an abhorrence of violence and totalitarianism; during the Korean War he went to prison rather than allow the Army to conscript him.

Shortly after Sharp was released, he wrote a book about Mahatma Gandhi, who had recently been assassinated and who, Sharp concluded, was misunderstood. Maybe he was a saint, as he was widely being portrayed; maybe he wasn’t. To Sharp the question was beside the point. For him, Gandhi was one of the century’s great political strategists. He realized that Indians couldn’t successfully fight the British Empire militarily and instead carefully crafted a nonviolent strategy that ultimately destroyed the Raj. When Sharp completed the book, he sent a note to Albert Einstein, asking whether he would write an introduction; to his delight, the legendary physicist cum peace activist agreed. Sharp’s course was set.

The rest of Abramsky’s Nation piece is well worth the read.

• Security forces and government loyalists struck protest camps across Yemen on Thursday, hurling rocks, beating protesters with sticks and firing rubber and live bullets, hoping to break the will of thousands camped in squares for over a month, demanding their longtime authoritarian leader leave power.

• In Saudi Arabia, Shi’ite Muslims marched in the kingdom’s oil-producing east Wednesday, demanding the release of prisoners and voicing support for Shi’ites in nearby Bahrain.

• Nearly 100 University of Michigan students rallied Wednesday afternoon to protest a plan to have Gov. Rick Snyder as commencement speaker at spring graduation ceremonies next month due to his support for cutting funds to public universities.

• Taking the fight from the statehouse in Madison to the nation’s capital, protesters shut down major streets in downtown Washington, D.C. on Wednesday as they marched to the White House in protest against a fundraiser for Wisconsin GOP legislators.

• Raffi Hovannisian, the leader of the opposition Zharangutyun (Heritage) party, continued his high-profile hunger strike in Yerevan’s Liberty Square on Wednesday amid expressions of support from fellow opposition figures and the Armenian government’s silence.

• Hamas has agreed to meet with the Palestinian Authority after Palestinians held parallel national unity rallies in the West Bank and Gaza earlier this week.

• In Tennessee, troopers forcibly carried out seven union supporters from the Capitol on Tuesday after a protest against anti-union legislation disrupted a Senate committee hearing.

• In Tunisia, hundreds of people gathered in the capital city of Tunis on Friday to protest the visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

After a month of largely peaceful pro-democracy protests in Bahrain, the situation has taken a dramatic turn for the worse this week. On Monday, 2,000 soldiers from Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region entered Bahrain at the request of King Hamad al-Khalifa.  The king then announced a three-month state of emergency and yesterday his security forces moved on Pearl Roundabout, where the protesters have been encamped since the movement began on February 14. At least 6 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The violent crackdown has continued today, with the arrest of six leading opposition figures.

The pro-democracy movement in Bahrain faces challenges that those in Egypt and Tunisia did not. The Sunni-controlled Bahraini government systematically discriminates against Shiites, who make up more than 70 percent of the country’s population. And as last week’s very insightful episode of Al Jazeera’s People & Power (above) explains, virtually no Shiites are not allowed in the police or army, and the “king brings Sunni immigrants from abroad to police the streets, giving them citizenship and housing.”

This makes dividing the loyalty of the security apparatus – which is often a key to the success of any nonviolent movement – in Bahrain far more difficult than it was in Egypt. While they are all Muslim, because of the sectarian split, Bahrainis will have a harder time appealing to the army and police on religious grounds.

Moreover, since many are brought in from other Sunni countries, the opposition can’t even appeal to them as citizens of Bahrain. This fact makes them in some ways comparable to mercenaries, in that the financial motive is likely more central to their thinking than anything else. They are totally dependent on the current regime for their livelihoods, which would potentially be jeopardized if the predominately Shiite pro-democracy movement emerges victorious.

Given this reality, and the presence now of Saudi troops in the country, the opposition may want to consider changing gears. While the police and military are always an important pillar of support to any regime, in this case it would appear to not be very vulnerable. Therefore, the pro-democracy movement may want to consider focusing on undermining other sources of the ruling family’s power. Rather than focusing on mass demonstrations to register their dissent, for example, Bahrainis could shift towards tactics – like strikes, boycotts and tax refusal – that will put economic pressure on the regime and disrupt the day-to-day functioning of the state without providing such an easy target for repression.

With all the recent and well-deserved attention on the work of Gene Sharp, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a film about the foremost living strategist of nonviolent action is soon to be released. Still, that doesn’t make the news any less exciting.

As Jamila Raqib, executive director of Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institution, told me in an email, “We are pleased that this film—which has been in preparation for two years—is due to be released in the midst of this new unprecedented increased attention to our work.”

According to the filmmakers, How to Start a Revolution tells “the story of the power of people to change their world, the modern revolution and the man behind it all.” Along with testimony from key players and advocates, such as Retired U.S. Army Colonel Bob Helvey—who used Sharp’s methods to train activists in Venezuela, Burma, and Serbia—the film also contains user-generated protest videos from the streets of Tehran, Cairo and Tunis.

Although Raqib has yet to see the film in its entirety, she expressed great confidence in director Ruaridh Arrow’s ability to convey a “careful presentation of the development of Dr. Sharp’s decades-long research and writing, as well as how this work has been studied and used by diverse individuals and groups on nearly every continent.”

As it turns out, Arrow was in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the recent uprising—thus witnessing first-hand the far-reaching influence of Sharp’s work. This experience will undoubtedly make for a powerful conclusion to a film that will hopefully bring the importance of Sharp’s work to new audiences and inspire further reading.

“The hope,” Raqib said, “is that after viewing the film, people will then seek and access additional information and writings that can provide a more in-depth understanding of the subject matter.”

• Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank took to the streets in mass demonstrations Tuesday demanding an end to the inter-Palestinian political division and an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

• Some 5,000 people carrying Bahraini flags, marched from the capital’s Pearl Square to the Saudi embassy to protest the arrival of Saudi troops brought in to help restore calm in the Sunni-ruled kingdom after weeks of protests by the Shi’ite majority. Later, Bahraini police killed at least two protesters and wounded dozens more as they attacked a peaceful protest camp in Pearl Square.

• Hundreds of labor supporters in Tennessee gathered for a midday protest near the Capitol yesterday to denounce a bill stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights. Seven union supporters were arrested after disrupting a Senate committee hearing with chants of “union busting”.

• More than 1,000 seniors and retirees packed the front of the Michagan state Capitol to  yesterday to protest Gov. Rick Snyder’s budget-balancing plan that would tax pensions like ordinary income.

• Angry teachers chanting “save our schools” and holding signs criticizing Texas Gov. Rick Perry rallied outside his Austin office Monday, saying Republican-backed plans to slash $10 billion from education spending would cripple public schools.

• Several hundred people rallied Tuesday near Kazakhstan’s presidential palace to urge the government to assist homeowners battling repossessions.

• A strike paralyzed the Lisbon underground on Tuesday, as part of a protest wave against the Portuguese government’s austerity measures.

• Hundreds gathered outside the the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis yesterday for a “no hate” rally against a package of bills similar to the tough new immigration laws in Arizona.

Corporations have long used the false rhetoric of “jobs versus the environment” to pit what would be natural allies—environmentalists and labor activists—against one another. But the dire threat facing unions in Wisconsin at the hand of corporate interests has actually provided an opportunity to reverse that trend and rally against a common enemy. As Rainforest Action Network recently explained on its blog The Understory:

If you’re concerned about the environment you should care about what’s happening in Wisconsin because the same people, the same corporate interests that have orchestrated this attack on workers are also lobbying to slash funding for the EPA, working to destroy any notion of climate legislation and securing massive handouts for big polluters.

Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Ag have bought and paid for our democracy, and it is their agenda that our elected representatives are serving. Billionaire polluters like the Koch brothers who funded the crippling of last year’s climate bill and are now going after the EPA, are also funding this attack on our state’s teachers and other public workers. The same big corporations that have a vested interest in minimizing environmental regulations are pushing to cut the power of workers.

If the only good thing that comes out of the uprising in Wisconsin is this reawakening of common interests and needs between labor and the environment, the effects could be far reaching. As RAN points out:

What’s happening to workers across the country should matter to environmentalists because our movements need the strength of workers and unions, and their movements need us. For far too long we have been divided into niche issues. It is past time we show up for each other. Not only because it’s right, but also because that demonstration of collective power is the only way to win. Can you imagine the day that all environmentalists, union members and educators, pro-choice activists, immigration and racial justice activists all worked together? That is the day when we win our country back.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In 2007, the Buckminster Fuller Institute began offering an annual $100,000 prize to the individual or team who could present the most practical, efficient, viable way to make a poorly functioning aspect of the existing reality obsolete. Bucky called this kind of solution a “trimtab,” named for the tiny rudder on an enormous ship that is ultimately responsible for steering. I wasn’t ready to enter the competition that year, but from then on, my mind began working around the clock on the riddle of the trimtab. What universally accessible and implementable strategy could bring as many people on board as possible, inspiring contributors to take immediate action using whatever materials may be at hand?

I began to study and implement appropriate technologies and permaculture. I started a Facebook group called USE HALF NOW to explore the notion that more mindful consumption may be an efficient place for many to begin (at least for those of us living in “overdeveloped” countries). I studied the wildly successful conservation and Victory Garden campaigns introduced in the U.S. and Britain during World War II. Leaders called on citizens to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” and people ably complied. I wondered, what if a similar campaign could be put forth today? What if people were simply invited to have a stake in creating a healthier, more peaceful world? What if the sense of helplessness, disempowerment, and defeat that seems to pervade our culture could be overcome, simply by suggesting that each of us contribute to the solution in whatever ways make the most sense to us? Perhaps the fastest-acting, most accessible trimtab would not appear as some new magic-bullet “green” technology—instead it might come in the form of a radical  mental shift.

The German artist Joseph Beuys practiced social sculpture, a kind of art-activism that called upon audiences to participate. He believed that everyone, by infusing even the most mundane action with a sense of purpose and creativity, could contribute to ones’ own health and the health of society and the environment at large. By so doing, he proposed that “everyone is an artist” of their chosen vocation. Beuys taught that in order for social transformation to be truly constructive and enduring, methods used to achieve it must be as holistic and inclusive as possible.

21st-century advances in internet technology and network accessibility offer extraordinary new tools for the contemporary social sculptor. Interactive initiatives based on the dissemination and sharing of information have far greater potential than during any other age in history. Inspired by the developing power of virtual networks, the spirit of the 1940’s conservation campaigns, and the Buckminster Fuller Challenge itself, after four years of deep consideration, it finally seemed that an opportune moment to present a formal application to the Challenge had arrived.

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