It is not a good time to be a pacifist in the United States.  In fact, it usually isn’t, but with the recent killing of Osama bin Laden and the drunken and not-so-drunken revelry that followed, historical context, international relations, and the long view take the back seat.  As with the events of 9/11 and the ensuing wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, to question – not even dissent from – the legality, efficacy, or wisdom of violence is tantamount to treason (a distinction I don’t find particularly helpful, at least as a Christian anarchist).  But to question the assassination of bin Laden, which is increasingly looking like an execution (but that does not seem to matter to most of us), is to put oneself on the wrong side of justice – at least according to President Obama’s versions of it.

For my part – as so many peace-loving people around the world – the thousands killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks were tragic and scary.  That sentiment does not matter if I also sympathize with the Afghan or Iraqi people who, too, have been traumatized.  It does not matter if I care about certain adherents of international law that prevent summary executions of people.  There is something wrong with me, says America, that I am disturbed by bin Laden’s death, Obama’s comments, and Americans’ responses.  Again, all of this does not condone anything about bin Laden or al Qaeda – but that does not matter in the age where critical thinking, moral authority, and creative nonviolence are weakness and stupidity at best.

The events of May 1, 2011 held a mirror up to our faces, showing the real depravity – “the banality of evil” to borrow Hannah Arendt’s famous indictment of complicity with authoritarian violence – of who we are as a nation.  I will certainly be labeled any number of grotesque names that one dare not utter in front of grandma, but such is the nature of these kind of events where our true colors bleed through whatever facades we cast upon ourselves.  I have learned more about myself and those around me by how they have responded to the news of bin Laden’s death and the national reactions.  I am heartened, even surprised, that so many others are troubled by the celebrations in the streets.  I find solace that others do not feel more safe that the apparent mastermind of al Qaeda – a claim worth disputing, but, again, such criticality is not welcome in the mainstream political discourse – has been dispatched.

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Palestinian political factions, Fatah and Hamas, signed a notable reconciliation accord last Wednesday in Cairo. The agreement may foster a much-needed spirit of unity between the two political camps that have remained divided, with calculated assistance from Western powers, for the last several years. Analysts across the political spectrum have offered explanations for the reconciliation agreement, such as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas attempting to forestall the nascent Palestinian youth movement inspired by the Arab Spring, or the Palestinian Authority reaching out to Hamas to gain a semblance of legitimacy as the great majority of Palestinians see the Palestinian Authority as a Western-backed government that is actively avoiding elections.

Angered by the reconciliation agreement and the possibility of Hamas gaining legitimacy, Israel quickly froze more than $86 million of tax revenues collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Rather than holding Israel accountable for seizing money belonging to a foreign government, the European Union agreed to provide additional aid to the Palestinian Authority to help cover the cost of government employee salaries and welfare payments.

Predictably, most Western governments have been slow – if not, unwilling – to celebrate the joining of the Palestinian governing parties. Politicians and government spokespeople have returned to parading around worn-out rhetoric about the preconditions to be placed on Palestinians before the ‘dog-and-pony-show’ peace process resumes. Britain and the United States both made statements calling on Hamas to renounce violence and to recognize Israel (if you think Hamas is unique in this respect, please remember the Likud charter which rejects a Palestinian state), or else the Fatah-Hamas coalition may be left out in the cold. These demands are reminiscent of Obama’s words in Cairo in June 2009:

Palestinians must abandon violence.  Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed.

Obama continued:

Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have to recognize they have responsibilities.  To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Any mention of Israel’s need to abandon violence was absent from Obama’s speech in Cairo, as it is now absent in the statements that followed the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement.  Western powers have been continually harping on Hamas, since their democratic election to power in 2006, to abandon violence and any forms of armed resistance. Even following Wednesday’s agreement with Fatah, Hamas maintains their right to utilize armed resistance, a right that happens to be supported by international law. What has changed is the new agreement that Hamas and Fatah will (theoretically) be in consultation on a variety of governance issues, including chosen forms of resistance.

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The battle to save an old growth forest outside of Moscow has come to a head. Environmental activists have been fighting for years to stop the construction of a highway that would cut through the once protected green belt. But in recent days clashes between peaceful protesters and Khimki police and state security services have escalated. On Thursday at least two activists were beaten by armed thugs. “We were able to stop the logging, but some thugs beat two of our activists,” Yevgenia Chirikova, the leader of the Defend Khimki movement, told the Moscow Times. On Sunday a peaceful demonstration was broken up by law enforcement officials and some 30 activists, including Chirikova, were detained.

The crackdown comes just days after Chirikova returned from Paris where she delivered a petition to the French construction company, Vinci, which has signed the contract to build the highway and operate the toll road for at least the next thirty years. Since its inception the project, known as the Moscow St. Petersburg Motorway, has been marred by brutal attacks against journalists investigating the issue and activists calling for greater transparency.

Last year, after unusually large public protests, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for a review of the planned route. There was some hope that the forest might be spared. A few months later, however, the government announced that the development would commence sometime this year.

Fearing that they had exhausted their options within Russia environmental activists turned their attention to Vinci, one of Europe’s largest corporations. Vinci is the only remaining European player involved in the controversial project: the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank have withdrawn their support.

A report released last week by Bankwatch Network and the Defend Khimki Movement reveals that the North West Concession Company (NWCC)—a joint venture between Vinci and several Russian construction and engineering firms—includes a long-time friend of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and a number of offshore investment firms whose shareholders are largely unknown (in 2009 Putin signed a decree that effectively altered the forest’s protected status to allow for “transport and infrastructure”).

“The Russian public deserves answers to the questions raised by the research before it considers going any further with the project,” said Mikhail Matveev of the Movement to Defend Khimki Forest. “The government must re-examine its choice of concessionaire, and disclose the concession agreement and whole ownership structure of the company, if this project is to bring benefits to anyone other than the company owners.”

Vinci has shown no interest in reconsidering its involvement in the project and, at its annual shareholders meeting last week, CEO Xavier Huillard said that the company bears no responsibility for the route selection or land acquisition.

Maureen Dowd makes a really subtle and interesting point in last week’s New York Times.

Only fools or knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non-violently.

Okay, maybe not so subtle. But she must support the claim somewhere, right? Like, with something other than an insult and an assertion?

The subsequent sentence doesn’t help; by then she’s already back to where she began the essay—heckling President Obama’s Republican detractors and defending her right to celebrate bin Laden’s death. Maybe the previous sentence will help us understand why she is calling all the people who have called for more sensible responses to terrorist violence “fools or knaves.”

The really insane assumption behind some of the second-guessing is that
killing Osama somehow makes us like Osama, as if all killing is the same.

I guess we’re “fools or knaves” because we’re insane. And/or because we hold some kind of philosophical position about the nature of killing. It’s a sad reminder of how invisible serious nonviolent points of view are in the mainstream media, and how quickly someone like Dowd thinks they can be dismissed—even more quickly, in this case, than some Republicans’ recent attempts to defend Bush’s torture tactics. We at Waging Nonviolence have our work cut out for us.

I’m curious how many times, though, one can read Dowd’s insults before they simply turn back on themselves.

Tomorrow, live at the Brooklyn Peace Fair, hear Waging Nonviolence editors Bryan, Eric, and Nathan talk about our work and look back over the past year’s major nonviolence news stories.

The fair is totally free and open to the public. It will take place at Brooklyn College’s Student Center between noon and 5 pm. Our talk will be at 3:10 pm in the Zodiac room on the 7th floor. It’s easy to get to by bus and subway. As for us, we’re riding our bikes.

Download the full program here.

Before our talk, also, don’t miss Democracy Now! co-host Juan González’s keynote at 2 pm. His talk has a rather emphatic title: “Peace Budget?…War Budget! How War and the Military Economy Affect YOU!!”

We can be emphatic too: We’ll look forward to seeing you there!

As thousands take to the streets today across Syria, in what has been dubbed the “Day of Defiance,” Al Jazeera ran a very interesting interview with Rami Nakhle, known online as Malath Aumran, who is part of an extensive network of exiled Syrian cyber-activists that is responsible for getting videos, images and news of the ongoing protests out of the country. (Hearing about their operation reminds me of Burma VJ, a powerful documentary about how Burmese activists were able to keep the world informed about the 2007 Saffron Revolution.)

Over the course of the now seven-week-old uprising in Syria, human rights groups are claiming that more than 600 people have been killed and 8,000 have been jailed or gone missing.

Despite this severe repression, there are many positive signs that the movement is only gaining strength and that protesters have broken through their fear.  As one protester in Baniyas told Al Jazeera:

We are here today to say we don’t want to die. We don’t want to be humiliated and we will never stop… Killing us and invading us with tanks will never stop us. Our souls will ascend to heaven calling for freedom.

Importantly, protesters are also showing signs of unity and a remarkable nonviolent discipline:

In the mainly Kurdish town of Amuda in the northeast, people were chanting “The Syrian people are one” and “Freedom, freedom, peaceful, peaceful”.

One Syrian human rights activist based in Damascus also argues in the Guardian today that the brutal crackdown by the Syrian government is driving more of the middle class into the protest camp, which could be decisive:

Nevertheless, the continual mistakes of the regime have led the middle classes to shift position with each passing day from being silent supporters of the regime to supporters of the revolution. The Syrian government is fumbling, like all governments that faced and are still facing Arab revolutions have done, as they continue to escalate the situation to the extent of waging war on an unarmed population. Think Deraa, al-Rastan, Banias.

Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting article about the current state of protest in China and how a network of young expat Chinese bloggers continue to work diligently to foment a Jasmine revolution in their homeland, despite a harsh government crackdown.

The very first call for a Jasmine movement was broadcast from a Twitter account using the name mimisecret0, which was quickly overwhelmed by suspect messages and subsequently shut down, dissidents overseas said. The call was taken up by Boxun, a Chinese-language site run out of North Carolina, before that site too suffered a massive cyberattack in late February. Those attacks continue to cripple the site, said its editor, who is known by the pseudonyms Wei Shi or Watson Meng.

After the Boxun site was attacked, the New York blogger who calls himself Gaius Gracchus connected with activists in China to publish molihuaxingdong.blogspot.com, or Jasmine Movement, a simple blog on Google’s blogger platform, to keep the momentum going online. His role was first reported by The Associated Press.

The blog has registered more than 600,000 visitors, more than half of them from within China, and his group’s e-mail list includes more than 3,000 names.

The Times article also looks at what security measures Gracchus takes to protect himself and his communication with other dissidents:

Sitting at a spare black desk in his girlfriend’s Morningside Heights apartment, where he lives, Gracchus said that his group protects itself against malicious viruses by using Linux-based operating systems and by opening e-mail attachments using iPads, both of which are less susceptible to them. To secure his communications, he employs a Google application that sends a unique code, which changes every minute, to his mobile phone so he can log into his e-mail.

Despite the popularity of Gracchus’s blog, the calls by Chinese activists for protest have largely fallen on deaf ears.

No protesters have gathered in Chinese streets under the banner of the Jasmine movement since late February. Only the police heed the calls for protest each Sunday, blanketing areas in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in an attempt to snuff out coordinated gatherings.

Nevertheless, this group of dedicated activists seems motivated to keep fighting for a more democratic China.

• Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters today, killing at least six people as thousands joined demonstrations across the country calling for an end to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

• Thousands of people gathered in the Yemen capital of Sana’a Wednesday to press their demand for the ouster of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

• Commuters in Italy scrambled today to find the few buses and subway trains running during a one-day general strike that also affected air and rail travel, banks, public offices and schools.

• More than 600 people led by a Mexican poet whose son was killed by suspected drug traffickers set off on a march Thursday from the resort city of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to protest the country’s unrelenting gang violence.

• In Argentina, outsourced railway workers in the Belgrano Norte line blocked the ticket booths in the Retiro station for a couple of hours while demanding that they are hired as permanent staff.

• More than 150 journalists from the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung downed tools on Wednesday between 8am and midnight, leaving a skeleton staff of senior editors to fill a smaller-than-usual paper with predominantly agency copy.

• In Indonesia, hundreds of journalists rallied in front of Medan Police headquarters to protest the closure of TOPKOTA and an attack on Orbit, two local daily newspapers.

• On Tuesday, an estimated crowd of between 7,000 to 8,000 educators, parents, students and concerned citizens gathered at the Bicentennial Mall in downtown Raleigh to protest potential budget cuts to public education.

In a recent article for NL-Aid, influential Egyptian journalist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy, whose writings I often like, reveals his deep ignorance about how nonviolent action works. He writes that:

One of the biggest myths invented by the media, tied to this whole Gene Sharp business: the Egyptian revolution was “peaceful.” I’m afraid it wasn’t. The revolution (like any other revolution) witnessed violence by the security forces that led to the killing of at least 846 protesters.

But the people did not sit silent and take this violence with smiles and flowers. We fought back. We fought back the police and Mubarak’s thugs with rocks, Molotov cocktails, sticks, swords and knives. The police stations which were stormed almost in every single neighborhood on the Friday of Anger–that was not the work of “criminals” as the regime and some middle class activists are trying to propagate. Protesters, ordinary citizens, did that.

No proponent of nonviolence would ever argue that by using nonviolent action protesters will not face violence from the state. In fact, in most cases, when facing repressive regimes violence should be expected.

Moreover, no one that I know ever claimed that there was absolutely no violence in Egypt. We acknowledged the violence of the protesters on this site and were critical of it.

That said, to argue that it was the “rocks, Molotov cocktails, sticks, swords and knives” that won the day in Egypt is crazy. Could anyone really think that these crude weapons were any match for Egypt’s military and security apparatus?

Rather than being a key to their eventual victory, the moments when protesters resorted to violence were the closest points during the uprising that they came to losing control. The throwing of rocks was about as useful strategically in Egypt as it is in Palestine. Such desperate acts distract onlookers from the cause they are fighting for and provide a ready excuse for state repression.

The truth is that most people in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt did face violence without responding in kind and their nonviolent discipline was a key to their success. If most people had responded with violence the death toll of the revolution would have been dramatically higher and Mubarak may very well have prevailed.

In a recent post at iRevolution, Patrick Meier mentions two related theories that explain why cutting of the internet or blocking popular websites backfires against repressive regimes, as it did against Mubarak, rather than effectively stifling dissent:

The Dictator’s Dilemma suggests that repressive regimes are incurring increasing opportunity costs when they decide to cut access to the Internet and/or cell phone networks. The theory suggests that doing so incurs financial and ultimately political costs. The term was coined by Christopher Kedzie who wrote that an increase in the relevance of digital/networked technologies will force repressive regimes to face a dilemma, where they will have to choose between open communications, which encourage economic development, and closed communication, which may help control ‘dangerous’ ideas but may hinder access to the information economy.

Ethan’s “Cute Cat Theory” relates to the notion that most web (and mobile phone) users access online content for entertainment purposes, e.g., to look at pictures of cute cats. If repressive regimes block access to socially entertaining sites like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc, this may backfire by possibly politicizing a large user base that until then was largely apolitical. In his recent talk at the Share Conference, Sami Gharbia described a related dynamic. The regime’s decision to block social media sites drove a large number of new users to Facebook as this remained one of the only non-censored social networking platforms available to Tunisians. This in turn made it near impossible for the regime to shut access to Facebook without serious blowback.