Brock McIntosh (left) and Jacob George, via Military Families Speak Out.
Last night at NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, on the south side of Washington Square Park, Jacob George and Brock McIntosh spoke on behalf of Iraq Veterans Against the War about their experiences in Afghanistan, both as US Army soldiers and, most recently, as members of a Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation.
They said a lot of good stuff. But one part that especially stuck out for your Waging Nonviolence correspondent was how McIntosh responded to a question about the prospects for nonviolence education both in the US military itself and among Afghans. He’s uncommonly optimistic about the latter, and he’s in a good position to know. Currently a conscientious objector in the National Guard, he has been spending the past year or so attending the best nonviolence trainings he can find, as well as making contacts among Afghans interested in fostering a culture of powerful nonviolence in their country.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Download [4:34, 2.1MB]
Note, among much else, his mention of the impact of recent WNV contributor Maria Stephan‘s book Civilian Jihad.
Read the rest of this article »
There’s nothing like ending a hard fought intellectual battle with a pithy uplifting quote by a famous historical figure. Writers and speakers do it all the time. It’s a way of validating their thoughts as though they were Gospel. Unfortunately, far too many of the quotes that have entered the common vernacular were actually never said by the person to whom they are attributed.
In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Brian Morton, director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, righted a few wrong famous quotations by such nonviolent luminaries as Gandhi, Thoreau, and Mandela. In the case of the former, Morton wrote:
Read the rest of this article »
Most people remember Pandora’s box as a source of all the troubles in the world. In the original version, however, there’s an intriguing element: one thing remains in the box, for which the Greek word is elpis meaning “expectation” or “hope.” With the presidential elections of 2012 already heating up, many of us may well be asking ourselves, what happened to the high hopes that floated our spirits after the last one. In the words of Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
The myth may give us a partial answer: hope is still there, but we’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’s not to be found in a politician elected to high office, for however good a person he (or she—God forbid!) may be. That person will be constrained by an extremely corrupt and even vicious system. It is hidden inside the box of human potentials where we have not been able to see it through the crowd of troubles fluttering around the lid.
Read the rest of this article »
Recent analyses of the Arab Spring have questioned the efficacy of nonviolent resistance compared to armed struggle in ousting authoritarian regimes. The relatively expeditious victories of the nonviolent uprisings (not “revolutions,” as some suggest) in Tunisia and Egypt stand in stark contrast to Libya, where a disparate amalgam of armed groups, guided politically by the Libyan Transitional National Council (TNC) and backed militarily by NATO, are on the verge of removing Moammar Qadhafi from power. As someone who has written extensively about civil resistance, notably in the Middle East, while at the same time working on the Libya portfolio within the State Department, I’ve been grappling with the meaning and significance of the Libyan revolution and its possible impact on the region.
Read the rest of this article »
- More than 140 people took part in the Tar Sands Action sit-in this morning outside the White House, including a delegation of 60 religious leaders, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, CREDO Mobile president Michael Kieschnick, Greenpeace Director Phil Radford, 350.org Executive Director May Boeve, and many others.
Posted under Asia, Climate change, Democratic reform, Economic policy, Environment, Europe, Labor, Latin America, Middle East, Protests, Sit-ins, United States
1 Comment »
Israeli activists are hoping for a “million strong” march for social justice next weekend in protest of the high cost-of-living there and neoliberal economic policies. And while those demonstrations will likely shut down normal life in Israeli cities, there is little chance that the Israeli police will use tear gas or rubber bullets on the protesters. But over the weekend, the Israeli military met a peaceful protest at the Qalandia checkpoint calling for free Palestinian access to Jerusalem with excessive force. This is no surprise.
Whatever the issue—water allocation, permits for building, income levels—there exists massive inequalities between Jews and Palestinians as a result of Israeli policies. Israel privileges the Jewish residents it governs and systematically excludes and marginalizes the Palestinians under its control.
The Israeli police’s response to the outbreak of the July 14 social justice movement across the state exposes one more separate and unequal facet of Israeli policy: how the state responds to unarmed protests. Israeli Jewish protesters angry about the cost of living do not pose as big of a threat to the Israeli establishment as those who explicitly challenge the occupation and Israel’s system of racial discrimination. That much is clear when comparing security forces’ response to the different types of protests that occur between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Read the rest of this article »
The forthcoming dedication of the national memorial monument honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., affords an opening for considering the complexity and meaning of his leadership. He was not the tamed and desiccated civil hero as often portrayed in the United States around the time of his birthday, celebrated as a national holiday. He was until the moment of his death raising issues that challenged the conventional wisdom on poverty and racism, but also concerning war and peace.
King was in St. Joseph’s Infirmary, Atlanta, for exhaustion and a viral infection when it was reported that he would receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. As Gary M. Pomerantz writes in Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, this was the apparent cost exacted by intelligence surveillance efforts and the pressures of learning that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had formally approved wiretaps by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His evolving strength as a leader is revealed in his remarks in Norway that December, which linked the nonviolent struggle of the U.S. civil rights movement to the entire planet’s need for disarmament. Noting that the movement’s most exceptional characteristic was the direct participation of masses of people in it, and crediting Gandhi’s influence on him, King’s remarks in Oslo were also his strongest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals across the world were concerned about world peace: “I venture to suggest [above all] … that … nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations … which [ultimately] make war.” Telling journalists that he would donate the prize money to the movement, he returned home to engross himself in plans for the 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, which would be the last major surge of direct action for the movement.
Read the rest of this article »
Today around Waging Nonviolence headquarters in Brooklyn, everyone seems to be rushing around getting ready for Hurricane Irene. She has struck North Carolina and is heading up our way. Lines of people are snaking through the grocery stores with bags full of canned goods. The subway is already shut down in preparation for the storm surge. National Guard troops have been deployed. We’re keeping an eye on the news and hoping that those south of us are bearing the fury okay.
WNV contributor Mary King pointed out to me yesterday that Irene’s name might not be quite appropriate for a hurricane. It is derived from the Greek εἰρήνη (eiréné), which means “peace.” It turns out, therefore, that so much of what we do on this site is actually “irenology”—the study of peace.
Read the rest of this article »
As the new Martin Luther King memorial is unveiled this month, there is going to be a lot of nonsense batted around about how much our post-racist society reflects the fruit of his dream. But Princeton philosopher and “bluesman in the life of the mind” Cornel West preempts this in a powerful op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times:
The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.
Read the rest of this article »
On Sunday August 28 the hearts and minds of America will be focused on our capital where a 30 foot tall granite statue of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is being dedicated. This historic event – long in coming – is tied in a crucial way to a series of events happening this past week and in the coming days as well.
Many forget that civil disobedience was a major tactic of Dr. King’s. Altogether, Dr. King was arrested over two dozen times. In addition to championing civil rights – Dr. King also blew the trumpet on behalf of the poor and marginalized, and spoke out against war and nuclear weapons.
Each day since August 20, scores of activists have been arrested in front of the White House to focus attention on the consequences of a decision now on President Obama’s desk. Obama has the power to approve – or stop – plans to build a pipeline that will transport Canadian tar sands through the heartland of America to Texas where it will be processed into oil.
Read the rest of this article »
