It’s not necessarily obvious how to go about protesting war on Memorial Day. When there are a bunch of elderly men gathering in the town square wearing their old uniforms and kids having fun of various sorts, it isn’t always easy to make a constructive stand against the militarism that is the cause of their sacrifice, their nostalgia, and the day off work. When then-presidential hopeful Jonathan Edwards encouraged people to protest the Iraq War on Memorial Day in 2007, it spurred a huge amount of anger.

Nor does a news search today for Memorial Day actions turn up much of anything—though that nothing was reported doesn’t mean that nothing happened. (Veterans for Peace had a few actions, for instance.) The closest thing I ran into in the news was Medea Benjamin and Adam Kokesh’s rather odd Jefferson Memorial dancing flash mob on Saturday, in response to a recent court decision that upheld the ban on demonstrations, including “expressive dancing,” at the memorial. Both Benjamin and Kokesh are well-known war protesters, but neither made an anti-war point on this occasion. Hawks denounced them as if they had, though.

When we asked our Facebook subscribers last week what they planned to do for the holiday, here’s what some of them said:

What did you do? What is our Google News search missing? What will you do next year?

Tomorrow, ICNC will be hosting what looks to be a very interesting webinar, led by Enlace director Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, on an extremely important subject that too often goes overlooked in the field of nonviolence: how ordinary people can successfully resist corporate power. According to the announcement:

When we reflect on nonviolent struggles we usually think of nationwide movements fighting against a non-democratic regime. This perspective obscures other rights-based struggles that have become common in recent years – those of a relatively small group of protesters and organizers that have to confront non-state actors such as large multinational corporations, many of which are even more powerful and wealthy than some governments.

This webinar will focus on the struggle of a small group of low-wage Mexican workers against the transnational mega company Sara Lee. In the face of violent intimidation tactics and corporate spies, this worker movement creatively developed tactics and recruited key allies to bring Sara Lee to negotiate with the workers. Utilizing the Integrated Organizing Approach, workers developed a strategy and plan that eventually won.

This talk will provide some analysis and insight as to the kinds of tactics and strategies workers need in order to effectively take on a transnational corporation and a local government, who often work together profiting off worker abuse. We will look at the kinds of internal changes a movement must make to foster its unity and coalition building. We will examine the effective international partnerships between organizations that were formed during the campaign, and how this model is being used today by other struggles to successfully presssure corporations to change their abusive behaviors. Finally we will comment on the impact of these types of campaigns on building a more democratic society.

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

And in case you missed the last webinar, in which Professor Emeritus at Barnard Dennis Dalton discusses the life of Gandhi, it can be watched here.

I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know Dalton over the last few years and he is really an incredible teacher and person. If you want to study Gandhi more seriously, I’d very much recommend his wonderful book called Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. There was also a very moving profile of him in the Utne Reader, written shortly before he retired, that is definitely worth reading.

The protests that swept through Spain last week, highlighted by the ongoing sit-in at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, have not surprisingly led some commentators to say that the Arab Spring has arrived in Europe. While the timing should not be ignored, neither should Spain’s unique set of political circumstances, history and culture—which differ greatly from the autocratic regimes of the Middle East.

There’s a reason peaceful protests involving tens of thousands of people erupted in over a hundred Spanish towns and cities for nearly a week to the point where the word “revolution” was being tossed around—however yet premature it may be. Record-high unemployment among young people, much like in Tunisia, may have been the reason most cited, but without the oppression of a dictatorial regime to generate a greater sense of urgency, it clearly took something more to get people talking about revolution. That something may have been a creative vision for a more egalitarian and participatory society forwarded by many of the young artist-types at the head of the organizing.

To better understand this phenomenon, Waging Nonviolence spoke with Angel Borrego Cubero, an architect who works on creating alternatives to public space and housing. He also teaches at The Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, which has been a breeding ground for many of the young activists. Cubero has assisted and observed the Puerta del Sol protests and in this interview lends his deep understanding of Spanish culture to a discussion on the embrace of nonviolent methods by protesters, the evolution beyond France 1968-style dissent, and the inspirational role of architecture.

Waging Nonviolence: What’s the appropriate name for this movement? We’ve seen 15-M, Real Democracy Now, and most boldly: the Spanish Revolution.

Angel Borrego Cubero: One of the more interesting features of the protests has been the amount of care put into avoiding a single name, a tag, a label that would serve to give it a simple image, but also to excessively frame it. It also has to do with the lack of ideology behind them, the drive to inclusiveness. Most of the names being thrown around sound good enough, but there’s no single correct one for it. Among the ones you put forth, Real Democracy Now is in fact the name of just one of the organizing groups behind the protests. Perhaps the more appropriate or generic names for it are 15M, Spanish Revolution, Take the Street, Take the Square. A caveat has to be made here: Although a part of it is particularly Spanish, many of the fighting points are shared with many other countries, particularly the “Western democracy” model, as blurrily defined by the European Union, United Nations, and any other labeling body.

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• Tens of thousands of Iraqis dressed in the colors of the Iraqi flag marched in a military-style parade and chanted “Get out, occupier” in the Shiite slum of Sadr City on Thursday.

• Eight Greenpeace activists climbed one of the nation’s oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants, the Fisk Generating Station, in the heart of Chicago on Tuesday morning to protest the immense damage the plant inflicts upon the local community.

• About 2,000 ethnic Mongolians in northern China held a rare protest on Wednesday in front of a government building over the death of a shepherd, who was run over by a van driven by a Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnicity. The protests continued across the region on Thursday, as thousands more took to the streets.

• About 1,000 people gathered in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Sunday to protest environmental law changes that would increase deforestation in the Amazon.

• Over 150 activists from regions the world over gathered outside Chevron’s Annual General Meeting of shareholders in San Ramon, California on Wednesday to share the stories of the human and environmental degradation Chevron had unleashed in their communities.

• Georgian police early Thursday violently dispersed an antigovernment rally in Tbilisi, crushing protesters’ attempts to prevent a military parade marking the country’s 20 years of independence since the breakup of the Soviet Union and calling for President Mikheil Saakashvili’s resignation.

• The Canadian province of Saskatchewan’s 12,000 teachers are on strike this week to protest protracted contract talks with the government.

• Thousands of Peru’s ethnic Aymara inhabitants blocked the main road linking southern Peru to Bolivia on Tuesday to protest the presence of a Canadian silver mining company.

• Gaza’s fishermen have staged a sit-in demanding that the ban and naval blockade imposed on the sector be lifted.

Saudi women have started a right-to-drive campaign that has quickly garnered the attention of the international media as well as the concern of conservative Saudi Arabian authorities. The organizers of Women2Drive had began encouraging women to take to the streets en masse, behind the wheel, on June 17 in defiance of a religious edict, fatwa, forbidding women to drive automobiles. A figurehead of the movement, Manal al-Sharif, was detained and released on Saturday and then arrested on Sunday by Saudi police shortly after she posted a video of herself driving a vehicle.

The social media tools that al-Sharif and her fellow activists had used to spread the word about the campaign were quickly removed from the internet. The video of her driving was taken down, as was its replacement. Additionally, the Facebook page marking the June 17 protest against the driving ban was removed and al-Sharif’s Twitter account appeared to be ‘secretly’ taken over by Saudi authorities. Unsurprisingly, the internet community rallied: the video has been reposted, two new facebook pages are online, as is a new twitter account for the campaign.

Before it was removed by Saudi censors, the “I Will Drive Starting June 17^th” Facebook event page read:

We women in Saudi Arabia, from all nationalities, will start driving our cars by ourselves. We are not here to break the law or demonstrate or challenge the authorities. We are here to claim one of our simplest rights. We have driver’s licenses and we will abide by traffic laws.

The Women2Drive campaign is not the first time a group of Saudi women have organized a protest against the religious fatwa (as distinguished from a governmental law) issued against women driving, but this most recent attempt has taken practical and rhetorical measures to avoid a drastic response from Saudi authorities. According to Abu Dhabi’s English publication The National:

Planners of the June 17 protest were taking care to avoid violating the kingdom’s prohibition of public demonstrations by urging women to go about their errands individually and not converge on one place. “It means these girls learnt a lesson. They’re smart,” said Fawziah Al Bakr, a professor of education at King Saud University and one of the women who participated in a 1990 protest against the driving ban.

Women who drove in that protest were severely punished. Some lost their jobs, were forbidden to travel abroad, or were maligned in mosque sermons.

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For nonviolent methods and convictions to have a future, they need to have a past. This is what makes accessible documentary works like A Force More Powerful (the book and film), Gandhi (the film), Parting the Waters (the book), and many more, so vitally important. For people to believe that they can meet their greatest challenges without resort to arms and slaughter, it’s incredibly empowering to know it has been done before, and that these ideas have been thought before. It has. They have. But the way history is usually told, and the way the history of ideas is usually presented, the story of nonviolence gets drowned out by the cacophony of battles.

Few histories of nonviolence have been so poorly remembered, and thereby obscured, as the history of Christian nonviolence. As the cover of Michael Long’s new textbook attests, the cross has been identified with the sword to the point that the two can seem indistinguishable. Christian Peace and Nonviolence: A Documentary History, published this year by Orbis, belies its cover. The primary-source texts that comprise it, from the Book of Isaiah to Andy Alexis-Baker, reveal not simply the centrality of nonviolence to Christian tradition but also the centrality of Christianity to the history of nonviolence in general. There’s Leo Tolstoy, whose pacifism inspired Gandhi’s, and Fredrick Douglass, whose Christian faith made him oppose even a war that promised to liberate his people from slavery. No less than Clarence Darrow, one of the 20th century’s greatest agnostics, relies on Christian language as he prophesies against Christian militarism. The depth and variety of Christianity’s resources for thinking about and acting with nonviolence are tremendous—and will be, to many, surprising.

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Last week, Susannah Vila posted a fascinating interview at Movements.org with Yemeni based activist Atiaf Alwazir, who runs the blog Woman From Yemen, in which she offers some insight into how information about the protests is spreading throughout the country. Here is an excerpt:

 In many major cities there are “sit-in” sites that have turned into “mini cities” for the protesters. The areas have tents, vendors, and seminars. People are camped there and have been there for three months. So decisions to march are spread via the stage at the sit-in site, and mainly via SMS and Facebook.

Between cities, protesters are trying to coordinate using phone calls, Facebook, and SMS messages. For example deciding what to name a Friday (every Friday has a name) many groups chat to discuss it from different cities to try to unify the name nationwide. Sometimes one city decides and others follow.

Yes, only 2% of the population has internet access, but the majority of young activists find ways to get online. As an example, it’s now 1 AM and practically everyone I know is on Facebook. i’m part of at least 14 Yemeni groups, discussing the revolution, organizing, suggesting ideas. These groups all have around 1000 members - not many compared to the number of people in the street, but many of them are leaders and activists. There are different groups – one is called the group for coordination, where people can share ideas on how to run things and what to do next. One is for creating and finalizing the “youth demands” document (now that it’s finalized group is not as active). One is a women’s revolutionary group talking about women’s issues (the role of women in the revolution, and how to guarantee women’s rights post revolution), then others are groups associated with specific movements or youth coalitions discussing activities related to them at specific city squares. 

Over the course of our coverage of the revolution in Egypt, I was especially grateful for the dispatches that started appearing on the New York Review of Books blog by the Egyptian journalist Yasmine El Rashidi. As far as I could tell they were unequaled in their combination of eloquence and thick, streetwise grasp of what was going on minute-to-minute. New York Review Books, the Review‘s publishing arm, has just released an e-book that collects El Rashidi’s reports from Tahrir Square: The Battle for Egypt: Dispatches from the Revolution. It includes a short preface by Timothy Garton Ash, the British journalist and scholar of civil resistance, which does a nice job of describing what made reading her during the chaos of revolution such a treat:

[S]he gives us more than just the immediate picture of what it was like to be there, with memorable vignettes such as the female soldier wearing a rose behind her ear. Unlike most of the foreign correspondents present, she knows the language, places, backgrounds, social forces, and, not least, individual people. At one demonstration, she spots Hazem Moussa, the son of Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League; at another, karim El Shafei, whom she identifies as CEO of one of the country’s largest investment funds. Such details matter.

She shares with us the emotional highs and lows, the confusion, the frantic rumors. She also documents the humor and spontaneous creativity characteristic of many revolutions. One protester’s placard calls on Mubarak to resign soon “because my arm is aching from holding up this sign.” She translates some choice passages of revolutionary rhetoric. An Imam at Friday prayers, for example, praises the country’s youth calling for democratic rights and, yes, free speech. But she does not omit the more worrying parts. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi—the Muslim Brotherhood guru who as recently as October 2009 called for a “day of rage” against the Danish cartoons of Muhammad—appeals to the assembled crowd to pray for “the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem.”

The e-book is available for $9.99 on the NYRB website. Most of El Rashidi’s reports included in it can also be read on the NYRblog.

Using information that has been collected by Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa from the Nuclear Resister, Center for Constitutional Rights legal director Bill Quigley writes that more than 2,600 activists across the United States have been arrested in acts of civil disobedience since Obama was inaugurated.

Research shows over 670 people have been arrested in protests inside the US already in 2011, over 1290 were arrested in 2010, and 665 arrested in 2009.   These figures are certainly underestimate the number actually arrested as arrests in US protests are rarely covered by the mainstream media outlets which focus so intently on arrests of protestors in other countries.   

Arrests at protest have been increasing each year since 2009.  Those arrested include people protesting US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo, strip mining, home foreclosures, nuclear weapons, immigration policies, police brutality, mistreatment of hotel workers, budget cutbacks, Blackwater, the mistreatment of Bradley Manning, and right wing efforts to cut back collective bargaining.

These arrests illustrate that resistance to the injustices in and committed by the US is alive and well.  Certainly there could and should be more, but it is important to recognize that people are fighting back against injustice. 

Below is a list of all the arrests this year that they have documented along with a brief summary of the reason for the protest. To see the arrests for 2010 and 2009, check out the rest of Quigley’s article and to dig even deeper keep an eye on the Nuclear Resister.

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After its seeming victory over Japan’s whaling industry this year (as evidenced by the forced cancellation of this season’s whale hunt in the Southern Ocean), the controversial anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd has set its sights on bluefin tuna poachers—in the waters off Libya, no less. The activists will be equipped with bulletproof vests and backed by a helicopter. According to MSNBC:

Sea Shepherd will send two boats into the war zone — the 190-foot Steve Irwin, named after the Australian conservationist, and the 115-foot Gojira — said Paul Watson, founder of the group based in Friday Harbor, Wash.

Watson said he’ll captain the larger boat, which has a helicopter and was recently repainted in blue/gray/black camouflage colors. The smaller, faster boat will act as a scout, looking for targets.

The boats will carry divers ready to cut the nets of fishing boats to free the tuna. Last year, Sea Shepherd cut the net of one boat in the area, freeing about 800 fish, Watson said.

The crews plan to set sail from Cannes, France, around June 1.

Given the extremely dire condition of bluefin tuna stocks—which, by some estimates, have plummeted 80 percent in recent years—aggressive tactics such as net cutting may perhaps be justifiable. But, as is always the concern with Sea Shepherd, does its cache of sophisticated battle-ready gear—which at times has included non-lethal weapons—inspire the opposition to use greater violence and ultimately undermine its ability to gain public sympathy or change destructive cultural habits?

In regards to whaling, an argument could be made that since Japanese whale meat consumption has dropped significantly over the last several decades, the culture war has already been won. Therefore, Sea Shepherd’s responsibility isn’t to engage a Japanese public that largely already understands the perils of whaling, but rather to snuff out the last remaining vestiges of the industry.

Even if this logic is sound, it overlooks why there is still a whaling industry in Japan. As Howard Schiffman, professor of International Environmental Governance at New York University, recently told me, “The government subsidizes the ‘research’ hunts and some meat goes to market, but I think Japan is hanging on to whaling for nationalistic reasons.”

If that’s the case, there is still important work to be done on the societal and cultural level. Hostile, if not violent, conflict on the high seas has the propensity to impede that work by making Sea Shepherd look less like protectors of endangered marine life and more like a threat to Japanese identity. Furthermore, since Japan is the world’s largest consumer of bluefin tuna, Sea Shepherd really should have an interest in running a campaign that garners sympathy for the cause (which could lead to conversion), not hatred (which might lead to further entrenched nationalism).

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