• On Sunday thousands took the streets across Syria demanding that President Bashar al-Assad step down. At least 13 people were killed and many more arrested when Syrian forces attacked ongoing protests in two towns.

• In Yemen, at least 22 people were wounded Sunday when government forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh fired on pro-democracy protesters. The crackdown came just one day after thousands of women took to the streets to protest a claim by Saleh that demonstrators are violating Islamic law because they are allowing women and men to mix.

• A Bahraini hunger striker protesting the assault and detention of her father and husband was taken to hospital Sunday but was released after refusing an intravenous tube.

• In Serbia, some 50,000 protesters Saturday gathered in the capital, Belgrade, to protest against the government and call for early elections.

• Hundreds of people attended a ‘kiss-in’ protest at a London pub after a gay couple claimed they were thrown out for kissing.

• In Pakistan, enraged citizens held protest demonstrations in different parts of Karachi against unannounced load shedding by the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) despite increasing the cost of electricity.

• Around 150 demonstrators set up chairs for a ‘sit- in’ protest in front of the Chinese embassy in Berlin on Sunday to demand the release of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.

• On Sunday, 6,000 Palestinian prisoner launched a one-day hunger strike to protest the internal Palestinian split and Israeli measures.

With all the excitement on other fronts, we’ve managed to neglect Tina Rosenberg’s extraordinary feature in Foreign Policy on CANVAS, the veterans of the Serbian Otpor! movement who have been teaching strategic nonviolent action to activists around the world—including Egyptians. Let it be neglected no longer. This is a really welcome, in-depth exploration of how resistance movements have been learning and spreading over the last decade, particularly among small, committed groups of young people.

In particular, Rosenberg gives an account of a CANVAS workshop for Burmese students. Here’s a bit of how it went:

Some of the students said they had thought nonviolence meant passivity—morally superior, perhaps, but naive. Popovic framed the task in terms of Sun Tzu: “I want you to see nonviolent conflict as a form of warfare—the only difference is you don’t use arms,” he told them. This was new. He argued that whether nonviolence was moral or not was irrelevant: It was strategically necessary. Violence, of course, is every dictator’s home court. The Otpor founders also knew they could never win wide support with violence—every democracy struggle eventually needs to capture the middle class and at least neutralize the security forces.

Over and over again, Djinovic and Popovic hammered at another myth: that nonviolent struggle is synonymous with amassing large concentrations of people. The Serbs cautioned that marches and demonstrations should be saved for when you finally have majority support. Marches are risky—if your turnout is poor, the movement’s credibility is destroyed. And at marches, people get arrested, beaten, and shot. The authorities will try to provoke violence. One bad march can destroy a movement. Here was a point that had people nodding. “Any gathering in Rangoon is lunacy,” Djinovic said.

It’s a really revealing glimpse into how CANVAS is sharing their experience far and wide. We’re also enjoying Rosenberg’s account of Otpor! in her new book, Join the Club.

I wrote rather innocently a few weeks ago about the New York Times review of Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Gandhi, Great Soul. I wasn’t aware that, the same day I was writing, the Wall Street Journal published an incendiary review of the book by the British historian Andrew Roberts. (Roberts specializes in writing books about British military history. He has compared George W. Bush’s leadership in the invasion of Iraq to that of Winston Churchill in World War II—applauding both, of course—and has defended the use of waterboarding against “Islamofacism.” And more.) His review portrays Gandhi as “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist.”

Here are some of the Roberts’s points—many which are either already well known or more controversial than he allows:

• “For all his lifelong campaign for Swaraj (“self-rule”), India could have achieved it many years earlier if Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful.”
• “In August 1942, with the Japanese at the gates of India, having captured most of Burma, Gandhi initiated a campaign designed to hinder the war effort and force the British to “Quit ­India.” Had the genocidal Tokyo regime captured northeastern India, as it almost certainly would have succeeded in doing without British troops to halt it, the results for the Indian population would have been catastrophic.”
• “Mr. Lelyveld shows how implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. ‘We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs,’ Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. ‘We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.’”
• “[W]hen he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her ‘nightly cuddles‘ with him.”
• “Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908.”
• “Gandhi was willing to stand up for the Untouchables, just not at the crucial moment when they were demanding the right to pray in temples in 1924-25. He was worried about alienating high-caste Hindus. ‘Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?’ he asked a visiting missionary in 1936. ‘Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding.’”

Gandhi’s native state of Gujarat has since voted to ban Lelyveld’s book. Unfortunately this seems to be mainly because reviews like Roberts’s allege that the book reveals Gandhi to have been to some extent homosexual. (Lelyveld apparently said to the Times of India, ”I do not allege that Gandhi is a racist or bisexual in Great Soul. The word ‘bisexual’ nowhere appears in the book.” Plausible deniability at best, one gathers from the reviews.) But what if he was? Besides the homophobia implicit in the accusation—so what?

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Last week, Fox News announced that Glenn Beck will lose his show later this year. While this decision was likely made for a variety of reasons, including his falling ratings, the ad boycott launched by Color of Change in July 2009, after Beck called President Obama a racist, clearly played an important role.

In an article at Alternet, Color of Change executive director James Rucker explains the logic of the boycott and how it worked this way:

…it was based on a simple theory: Beck’s rhetoric was so egregious, so far over the line of decency, that few advertisers would want to associate their brand with Beck. If we could convince advertisers to abandon Beck’s show, and stay away, this would make Beck a financial liability for Fox News Channel, ultimately leading to his show’s demise.

The theory proved true: 285,000 people signed our petition to Beck’s advertisers, and hundreds of major companies made sure their ads would not appear during his show. Beck could not attract major advertisers for more than a year, so demand for ad space (and hence, the price of ads) on his TV show plummeted, hurting Fox’s bottom line.

As Jason Easley writes at PoliticusUSA:

By mid-September 2009, the boycott was costing News Corp $600,000 a week. Despite the financial losses Rupert Murdoch stuck with Beck because his ratings were still high, and the company believed that Beck was right. However Beck’s ratings plunged in 2010, and the advertisers never came back.

After Beck had lost half of his audience by July of 2010, 15 of the 27 ad slots on his show were unpaid ads. The situation continued to get worse. By March 2011, 400 advertisers were boycotting Glenn Beck’s program. In the first quarter of 2011, Beck was still bleeding viewers to the tune of 500,000 a night.

While I’m sure we have not heard the last of Glenn Beck, this successful nonviolent action dealt a serious blow to the Glenn Beck brand by helping to remove his most influential platform.

If you were fooled into believing yesterday’s Tax Day announcement that General Electric planned to donate its entire 2010 tax return of $3.2 billion to the US Treasury, don’t feel bad. At least you didn’t publish an article about it on a news service picked up by thousands of media outlets. That ignominious honor belongs to the Associated Press. Thanks to their slip-up—the result of AP “not following its own standards for verifying the authenticity of a news release”—major publications like USA Today ran the story, only to find out they, along with GE had been hoodwinked by those clever Yes Men.

As with any Yes Men prank, the joke wasn’t so much intended to be on the mainstream media. They were just the unwitting accomplice in an attempt to poke GE and other large corporations who have managed to avoid paying taxes despite an economic crisis that’s led to job cuts and slashed services for hard-working people.

Appropriately, the Yes Men—through their Yes Lab project—worked in concert with the the grassroots anti-tax fraud group US Uncut to pull off the prank. Rather ingeniously, after sending out the “GE” press release from an email that was only a couple letters different from the real GE PR-team, US Uncut responded with its own press release, thanking GE for coming clean, but ultimately saying it wasn’t enough.

“This is a good first step,” said, US Uncut spokesman Carl Gibson. “But even if they return their full $3.2 billion 2010 tax benefit as they’re promising, they will still have paid $0 in US taxes since 2006, when they had profits of $26 billion. So while we welcome this gesture by GE, it is only a first step. GE should pay its share, and Congress needs to stop the budget cuts and close the tax loopholes that give the richest corporations a free ride.”

“This just shows the power of the growing backlash to corporate power in America,” said US Uncut spokesman Duncan Meisel. “In just a few short months, regular Americans have put the biggest companies in America on the defensive as a result of bold, direct action in our communities. The billions that GE is returning to the US Treasury will enable us to restore a few of the recent devastating cuts to health, education and infrastructure that so many of us count on. People across America who are hurting and angry will be pleased to read the papers for a change. We hope other corporate tax cheats, like Verizon, Bank of America, FedEx, and ExxonMobil follow GE’s lead.”

“We’re hoping this isn’t a publicity stunt,” said Gibson. “Promises just aren’t enough – we need to see results from GE and then from Congress. We’re still planning to continue with our actions this weekend. We won’t stop until the cuts stop.”

A stunt it most definitely was—but a wholly righteous one. After all, GE was forced to admit that it had no such plans to do the right thing. Of course, as Us Uncut later pointed out, the law doesn’t allow for companies like GE to do the right thing because if it did their stock would plummet. During the period the hoax was believed, GE’s stock actually did drop 0.6 percent—an amount, according to US Uncut, that was far more than the supposed value of the tax return.

Once the prank had run its course, US Uncut gave this summation of the day’s events:

“At a time when working families are being asked to accept massive cuts nationwide, this action showed another way the world could work,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson. “For a brief moment people believed that the biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing. But the only way anything like this is really going to happen is if we change the laws that allow corporate tax avoidance in the first place.”

• Around 3,000 people marched through central Tokyo on Sunday to protest the Hamaoka nuclear-power plant, which is located about 200 kilometers southwest of Tokyo in Shizuoka Prefecture—the heart of a region that seismologists believe is well overdue for a massive undersea earthquake of a magnitude 8 or higher.

• After Bahrain’s interior ministry acknowledged that two political prisoners had died in custody last week, the daughter of a detained human rights activist began a hunger strike on Monday, calling on the authorities to release her father and other members of her family who have been arrested.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis filled the streets of Sanaa, Taiz, Hudaydah, Ibb and the southeastern province of Hadramaut on Monday to protest the Gulf Cooperation Council’s plan for Saleh’s removal.

• Soldiers and police moved into Cairo’s main square on Tuesday to end a five-day sit-in by protesters demanding civilian rule and swifter prosecution of Egypt’s former president and his allies.

• Irish Greenpeace volunteers held a protest outside Facebook’s Dublin office yesterday, calling on it to phase out its use of coal power.

• Protesters chained themselves to a ladder inside the State Government’s offices in Melbourne, Australia on Monday and called on the Government to withdraw its support for a proposed coal and gas-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley.

• Workers at Buenaventura’s Uchucchacua silver mine in Peru have lifted an eight-day strike seeking higher bonuses and better working conditions, but a protest by villagers with their own set of unresolved problems stemming from the mining company kept the workers from returning.

Mayor Vincent Gray of Washington, D.C. and several members of the D.C. City Council were arrested Monday night as they blocked traffic on Constitution Avenue next to the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The officials had gathered along with over 200 city residents to protest restrictions on D.C. funding included in last Friday’s Congressional budget deal.

They sat for half an hour, chanting, “No justice, no peace,” before being arrested by U.S. Capitol Police. Forty-one people were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. The activist group DC Vote organized the protest.

The Congressional budget deal on Friday, which averted a government shutdown, prohibited D.C. from using its own locally raised funds to pay for abortions for low-income women. The budget deal also financed a school voucher program, controversial among D.C. leaders.

“I’m tired of being a pawn in a political game,” Mayor Gray said before being arrested, according to The Washington Post. “All we want is to be able to spend our own money.”

The Constitution denies D.C. the right of self-government by authorizing Congress “[t]o exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District.” D.C. has gained greater authority over its affairs since 1791, but—as this budget deal shows—not nearly enough.

All laws and budgets passed by the D.C. Council must be sent to Congress for approval. So that’s one problem: the Congressional veto over D.C.’s local democracy. The other problem: D.C has no voice in the Senate and its delegate to the House cannot vote. The reason: partisan silencing of the 86% of D.C. voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2008.

Residents of D.C., which at 600,000 is more populous than Wyoming, lack that basic democratic right: to have a voice in decisions that affect them. Some 235 years since the original tea partiers protested taxation without representation, the slogan still bites.

The immigrant rights movement is getting extreme.  In the past two years, in addition to some of the largest mass gatherings in the country, undocumented students and their allies have shifted their protest from street marches to civil disobedience.  There has been a preponderance of undocumented students “coming out,” announcing that they are “undocumented and unafraid.”  Some have taken an even greater risk by engaging in acts of civil resistance – a witness that can lead to harassment and deportation.  Last week, as Waging Nonviolence reported, seven undocumented students were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia protesting proposed legislation that would ban undocumented students from public universities in Georgia.

The Georgia protest follows in the footsteps of other undocumented students across the nation who have risked not just arrest and jail time for their speaking out for comprehensive immigration reform – including the DREAM Act -  but also deportation.  The courageous actions of these students originated in Tucson, Arizona – one of the epicenters in the struggle for a more just and humane approach to immigration policy – when five undocumented students occupied Senator John McCain’s office in May 2010 advocating for the DREAM Act (the DREAM Act would provide a path to citizenship for qualifying students and military members; it failed to pass the Senate in December 2010).  None of the undocumented students who have been arrested for acts of civil disobedience have yet to be deported (More information on these actions can be found at TheDreamIsComing.com).

It is likely that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not want the bad publicity of deporting some of America’s best-educated youth of moral character – even if they do not have papers.  And that is the point of these acts of resistance and protest; by publicly declaring one’s undocumented status and allowing oneself to be publicly scrutinized, these students are debunking the anti-immigrant rhetoric head on.  It challenges the state’s hegemonic notion that “illegals” are criminals with nonviolent action by revealing the real, ordinary human person behind the ugly label of “illegal.”  The immigrant rights movement, in humanizing the conflict, supporting these brave students and by putting more bodies on the line at ICE facilities, detention centers, and federal buildings, is finding its roots in the tactics and vision of the Civil Rights Movement’s tradition of nonviolence.

In “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” Dr. King responded eloquently to his detractors – white “liberal” clergyman – to explain and justify the necessity of direct action as a means of struggle for just ends.  The movement, having grown tired of waiting for negotiations to give way to meaningful change, believed that “justice delayed was justice denied.”  By escalating its tactics to that of direct action, the movement hoped to put pressure on the power holders to come to the negotiating table willing to cede to the demands.  Direct action, then, for King and the movement was a responsible choice which they did not make lightly and prepared intensely for:

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“I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.”
– William James

A few weeks ago General Petraeus, leader of the US forces in Afghanistan, announced that once again he could proudly report that progress was being made. “We have managed to reverse some of the Taliban’s momentum,” he announced grandiosely, as though this was some kind of accomplishment for the world’s largest military after almost 10 years of war, more than a trillion dollars and countless lives destroyed. Of course his further admission that the gains were still, as in the December review, “fragile and reversible,” didn’t similarly make the news headlines.

This equating of winning a war with “progress” is never questioned by our media or our society. It is simply an implicit part of being involved. If we’re killing more of the enemy than they are of us, it’s progress; if we’re not, then we need to try harder to kill more. War as a method of progress is never questioned, just its ‘success’ rate. Progress is in the eye of the war wager.

Yet for ordinary Afghans, this war has not brought progress of any kind. It has only destroyed what progress had been made, and set them back for decades to come. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

A couple of weeks ago the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers marched through Kabul, to the UN headquarters, bearing a banner with a contrary message. “Peace is the prerequisite for any progress,” it proclaimed.

The alternatives to the great loudness, speed and force of the military is the quiet, slow, patient, painstaking work of relationship, work which the AYPVs are doing internationally through the Global Days of Listening, and locally through letters, the Bamiyan Peace Park, and other creative initiatives. For example, they made mobile phone pouches out of scrap leather, embroidered the word “peace” on them, and sent them with messages of love to students at schools in Kandahar in the south. The rarity of such action was underscored by the incredulous responses they received, such as, “I can’t believe such a love is possible.”

Yet after ten years of military effort, we can begin to see that even the grandiose claims of militarism are beginning to ring hollow. Poverty is worse than ever, as is security, with the conservative International Committee of the Red Cross declaring life “untenable” for ordinary Afghans.  Our continued unquestioning faith in the ability of violence to achieve results should be severely undermined. Even as Thomas Merton proclaimed the Vietnam debacle to be “the psychoanalysis of the U.S.” and the subversion of the myth of U.S. ‘progress’ so also Afghanistan should crack, if not shatter, our faith in redemptive violence and force to achieve good.

One of the inspiring things about the AYPV’s march is that it didn’t just proclaim a different way, it embodied it. As we’ve all seen in recent days, protests in Afghanistan typically end in violence and often deaths. Yet the presence of riot police didn’t intimidate or incite these young people to retaliate or flee in fear – instead they responded with active love. “Be alive and happy!” they called to police through beaming smiles.

These are small, humble, unspectacular actions but I am beginning to realise that this is how most real, lasting change for the better is made.

The Global Days of Listening too have been ways that ordinary people can connect across the world and make those most fragile yet strongest of bonds – human friendships. People from across the world are able to speak to people from Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza, and to build relationships more robust and meaningful than any peace accord. “Mountain cannot reach mountain,” goes the Afghan proverb, “only human can reach human.”  This is what real progress looks like – progress for humans to become more humane, more compassionate, more connected.

• Tens of thousands of Egyptians waved flags and shouted slogans today in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square, demanding that Hosni Mubarak and his family be put on trial over allegations of corruption in one of the biggest protests since the longtime president was ousted two months ago.

• Two people were killed today after Yemeni security forces fired at protesters in the southern Yemeni city of Taiz, leaving more than two dozen others wounded. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of Taiz in ongoing protests against President Ali Abudullah Saleh.

• Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in over two dozen cities across Mexico on Wednesday to demand an end to drug-related violence.

• Syrian security forces killed at least 15 demonstrators today in the southern city of Daraa, amid fresh protests against the rule of Bashar al-Assad. Similar protests erupted in the western port city of Latakia, Tartus, Baniyas, Homs- near the Lebanese border - and in Edlib, in the northwest of the country.

• Around 7,000 Palestinian prisoners launched a one-day hunger strike yesterday to protest the Israeli Prison Service’s (IPS) treatment of them and their families.

• Around 5,000 Turkish Cypriot union members staged another protest on Thursday in divided Cyprus’ breakaway north against austerity measures they say Turkey is saddling them with.

• More than 500 Jordan Water Company (Miyahuna) employees staged a sit-in on Thursday, the second in a month, demanding that the management improve their living conditions.

• In Zambia, unionized Workers at Nkwazi Primary School in Lusaka staged a sit in protest yesterday to demand improved conditions of service.

• Around 50 activists have camped out inside the Washington State Capitol in Olympia to protest a proposed round of state budget cuts. Meanwhile in Florida, several hundred people rallied on Thursday against Gov. Rick Scott’s decision to cut programs for the mentally disabled.