In this webinar for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), Meta-Activism Project founder Mary Joyce looks at how digital technology was used during the Egyptian uprising and explains seven ways activists can use these tools: documenting, co-creating, mobilizing, broadcasting, synthesizing, protecting and transferring resources.
Fifty years ago today, on May 4, 1961, the first group of black and white students, calling themselves the Freedom Riders, got on two public buses in Washington D.C. and headed south to challenge the continued de facto segregation of public transportation, which had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court only six months prior.
This small group of 12 people, despite being beaten so badly that they were forced to stop, inspired hundreds of others to join the campaign that eventually led to the desegregation of bus and train stations throughout the country.
On Democracy Now! there is a wonderful segment today about the Freedom Riders, that includes clips from a new documentary called Freedom Riders, which will air on PBS at 9/8C on May 16, and interviews with Bernard Lafayette and Jim Zwerg, who both took part in the Freedom Rides.
While Martin Luther King didn’t take part in the Freedom Rides, Lafayette explains why and recounts an amazing story from that period that shows his remarkable commitment to nonviolence:
…there was some taxi drivers there in Montgomery, black cab taxi drivers. And we had received word that they were mobilizing and arming themselves to come and rescue us. And there were a large number of cab drivers and taxi companies in Montgomery, because during the boycott a lot of people started driving their cars. They had 27 black cab companies in Montgomery, and some of them only had two cabs.
But the thing that really struck me, and I’ll never forget, is that Martin Luther King stood in the pulpit of the church, the First Baptist Church, when a mob was surrounding the church, and he said, “I want some—I want a few people who really are sure about their nonviolence, because we’ve got a special mission.” And everybody did not volunteer, including a lot of the ministers, but he got a little group together, maybe about eight or 10 maybe. He walked out of that church, through the mob, to dissuade those cab drivers from coming with arms to rescue us. This was before the marshals show up. And then he walked back through the mob. Now that is one mystery in the whole thing that I have never been able to fathom.
Last week, NPR ran a wonderful segment about the Freedom Riders that included excerpts from an interview that Terry Gross did in 1985 with civil rights leader James Farmer Jr., who helped organize the campaign, that is really worth listening to. Farmer tells some wonderful stories about their time in prison during the Freedom Rides and how they sang to keep the spirits up.
The complete interview with Farmer can be heard on NPR by clicking here.
Anyone who makes even a modest habit of speaking out against war in public soon runs up against the inevitable, supposedly unanswerable question: What about World War II? (We have a whole category devoted to it.) It’s meant to be the ultimate stumper. This was the “good war,” wasn’t it, the war waged by the “greatest generation” against the evil incarnate of Hitler and imperial Japan? There was simply no other choice before the forces of goodness and truth but to leap into the single most deadly undertaking in all of human history. Right?
That won’t work if you’re talking to Nicholson Baker. In an extraordinary cover story in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” Baker explains how learning about World War II was actually a big part of what made him a pacifist in the first place. “In fact,” he writes,
the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists.
His thinking began drifting this way during the Gulf War, and continued to evolve through the sequence of American military operations since. In the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in talk about bombing Iran, he noticed that World War II kept coming up. It kept being used to justify one war after another. Every new enemy only had to be painted as another Hitler to ensure public support.
By 2008, Baker published Human Smoke, a book that collects documents, newspaper reports, and notable utterances during the lead-up to World War II, revealing how determined the Allied leaders were to fight at any cost. But, because of its form, we don’t get much of his own voice in that book. “Why I’m a Pacifist” is a chance to hear more directly from Baker himself about how he came to the conclusions that he did about the war.
I was so thrilled with the essay that the moment I put it down I wanted more, so I wrote to Baker with some questions about what he’d said. Our exchange was as follows:
WNV: Why did you decide to write Human Smoke the way you did, and why now write about World War II again as you do in Harper’s?
NB: Human Smoke deals atomistically with the beginnings of the war because I thought that was a good way of conveying the confusion and sadness of what was going on. You have to pause and think moment by moment in order to feel the gradual disintegration of civil restraint. The book stopped at the end of 1941. The Harper’s piece mostly concentrates on events from 1942 on, and it’s an effort to take up one big question: Were the pacifists right in calling for an immediate negotiated peace?
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In this interview with the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, co-founder of Egypt’s April 6 Movement Ahmed Salah talks about what strategies and tactics they employed, how they dealt with state violence, what role the internet and social media played in sparking the uprising and what the next steps are for Egyptians. To read a transcript of the interview, click here.
“The assumption is that bin Laden’s disciples would like nothing better than to avenge his death with an attack in New York,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters this afternoon.
Somehow that thought hadn’t crossed my mind, as I traversed the streets of New York this afternoon. I suppose the media I had seen up to that point was too busy touting the joyousness of the occasion to point out the obvious: violence tends to breed more violence.
Honestly, though, it wouldn’t have mattered. As much as we all seem to understand that basic dynamic, we’re helpless to break the cycle or even criticize it. The people outside the White House last night, cheering bin Laden’s death, were, even according to Police Commissioner Kelly’s logic, safer yesterday, when bin Laden was still alive, than today when he was pronounced dead and buried at sea.
Of course, we’d be even safer if we weren’t at war with several countries in the Middle East and supporting several others that have brutal regimes. To be completely safe, though, we would have to engage in nonviolence, or more appropriately Gandhi’s form of it, known as satyagraha. In that sense, we would be building life sustaining systems in the Middle East, which would dissolve the tension and desperation that breeds terrorism.
Instead, we celebrate the killing of a terrorist—who was largely insignificant just a few days ago—only to potentially reignite his cult and invite them to attack us. To lull ourselves into a false sense of security we populate our major hubs with “anti-terror squads with assault rifles and bomb-sniffing dogs.”
Is this really cause for celebration?
As I learned of the news last night that Osama bin Laden was killed and saw footage of the crowds celebrating outside of the White House and in New York, I couldn’t help but question the impact of his death.
While many seem to think that this news signifies a step towards the eventual demise of Al Qaeda, and an end to the war in Afghanistan, there is considerable evidence that bin Laden’s death may have serious negative unintended consequences.
In the New York Times last year, Robert Wright wrote about a compelling study published in the journal Security Studies by Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago.
She studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through “leadership decapitation” — eliminating people in senior positions.
Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.
Particularly ominous are Jordan’s findings about groups that, like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, are religious. The chances that a religious terrorist group will collapse in the wake of a decapitation strategy are 17 percent. Of course, that’s better than zero, but it turns out that the chances of such a group fading away when there’s no decapitation are 33 percent. In other words, killing leaders of a religious terrorist group seems to increase the group’s chances of survival from 67 percent to 83 percent.
To explain why this might be the case, Wright uses a helpful analogy:
For starters, reflect on your personal workplace experience. When an executive leaves a company — whether through retirement, relocation or death — what happens? Exactly: He or she gets replaced. And about half the time (in my experience, at least) the successor is more capable than the predecessor. There’s no reason to think things would work differently in a terrorist organization.
As the New York Times mentioned, there is also the possibility that “the death of the leader of Al Qaeda galvanizes his followers by turning him into a martyr,” which must not be discounted.
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Osama bin Laden in 1989 in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden is dead. You’ve seen the news. US troops stormed the mansion where he was hiding, an hour’s drive from Islamabad, in the backyard of Pakistan’s elite military academy. President Obama came on TV last night and announced—victoriously, but without much bravado—what he described as “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.” He called for unity, like the country experienced after 9/11, when George W. Bush’s approval ratings were soaring. There have been celebrations in the streets of US cities. The stock market even got a spike. But what is there, really, to celebrate? The death of a man? The end of the war on terror?
Celebrating becomes tough when you considers the cost. Bin Laden’s persona has been the totem justifying US war policy since 9/11. The idea was to get ’im, dead or alive. Soldiers have been taught to fantasize about someday nailing him, issuing the payback that he’s had coming since 2001. Politicians have promised his head as the ultimate prize. To that end, there was an invasion of Afghanistan almost ten years ago now, which started a war that is now bloodier than ever. (The CIA reports that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda operatives in that country.) Then there’s Iraq—a country that the US invaded while giving various elusive reasons, most designed to somehow link Iraq to the bin Laden totem in people’s imaginations.
The cost, exactly? There have been as many as a million people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. More than $1 trillion of US money down the drain. And for what? Ask the architects of this war on terror, and they’ll say that all the armies, and the air strikes, and the torture chambers have been rooting out al-Qaeda and global terrorism for good. But, if you could ask bin Laden today, or yesterday, he might have smiled.
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