After spending the night in Liberty Plaza with more than a hundred Occupy Wall Street activists, Waging Nonviolence editor Nathan Schneider was on Democracy Now! this morning to give a live update from the streets. Let’s all hear it for Nathan and his excellent reporting, which is by far the leading coverage of this unfolding action.
When more than a thousand protesters marched on Saturday from Bowling Green, near the southern tip of Manhattan, toward the backup meeting point marked “2″ on their maps, they thought they were going to a place called Zuccotti Park, several blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. That’s what it said on the map. It’s now a private park, owned by Brookfield Properties, but it hasn’t always been its name. Before being renamed after Brookfield’s chairman, John Zuccotti, it was called Liberty Plaza. Going there was a last-minute decision on the part of the group’s Tactics Committee, and it was one with significance. Tahrir in Arabic, after all, means “liberty.” Though with fewer people than the historic protests in Cairo this winter, Tahrir has come to the United States, at least in name.
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Communications are extremely important for civil resistance. At the most fundamental level, when a group has decided that it must try to halt certain practices, start specific reforms, change the policies of an unresponsive system, clean up democracy, bring down a despot, or lift a military occupation, it is critically important to convey the grievance with clarity. Yet attentive news coverage can never be taken for granted or assumed. It must be won. Gaining the attention of the news industry is one of the central functions that must be planned by a nonviolent movement that hopes to succeed.
The Brazilian filmmaker Julia Bacha’s captivating TED Talk, “Pay Attention to Nonviolence,” has attracted wide interest. Her presentation is thoughtful and powerful, as is her film, Budrus, a documentary case study on how civil resistance can sometimes be effective despite daunting odds. The Palestinian village of Budrus stood to lose 40 percent of its land by the construction of an Israeli “separation barrier,” but through nonviolent action it was successful in persuading the government of Israel to move the Wall off their land and to the Green Line, the internationally recognized armistice line.
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This week was a rocky one for Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, who were arrested by Iranian forces more than two years ago while on a recreational hike in Iraqi Kurdistan and recently sentenced to eight years for espionage, and their supporters. (A third hiker, Sarah Shourd, was freed last year.) First, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that they would be released this week on $500,000 bail, only to have the Iranian courts step in and say that he did not have the authority to let them go.
In response to the continued imprisonment of Shane and Josh, a vibrant, multifaceted campaign has emerged to call for their freedom. The New York Times gives a good recap of the various ways supporters can plug in and get involved:
There is a Facebook group for supporters of the hikers… [that] has 30,000 members, and its information page lists six official online outlets, independent of the hundreds of groups and blogs created by individuals:
Over the last week, Global Voices reports that there has been a surge in arrests of pro-democracy activists in Morocco, including of blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Mohamed Douas, rapper Moad Belghouat— whose alias is Haked (Arabic for The Vindictive or The Outraged)—and poet and political satirist Younes Belmalha.
These arrests, however, did not silence the opposition in Morocco but have led to renewed protests. In the powerful picture (above), at a march in solidarity with Haked, supporters are wearing t-shirts that read “Free Haked or arrest us all.”
In the Guardian earlier this week, Savitri Hensman has a nice article about the amazing life and writings of André Trocmé, who is one of my favorite nonviolent heroes, forty years after his death. She writes:
Trocmé was no armchair scholar. Nor was he an easily swayed follower of cultural trends. He is best known for his remarkable work as pastor of Le Chambon, a French village, in the early 1940s.
Jewish people in France – including those who had escaped from other parts of Europe – found themselves in mortal danger when the Vichy regime agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany. “The duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences,” he and his fellow-pastor Edouard Theis urged their Protestant congregation. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel.”
Under the leadership of Trocmé and his wife Magda, the villagers saved the lives of thousands of refugees, hiding them and smuggling some to safety across the Swiss border. He was arrested and held for some weeks, after which he went into hiding, and his cousin Daniel died in a concentration camp. But the villagers continued to shelter those in danger, despite the risk to themselves.
This incredible story, which is perhaps the most powerful example of how nonviolence could work even against the Nazis, is recounted in a wonderful book called Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed that I couldn’t recommend more. Hensman also mentions one of Trocmé’s own books, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, which is also a must-read and can actually be downloaded for free here.
Ghiyath Matar, a 26-year-old activist, was arrested in Syria on Sept. 6 and then died in detention after being tortured, according to Human Rights Watch. (Human Rights Watch/AFP/Getty Images)
Not surprisingly, the conservative National Review does not get what nonviolence is all about. In a commentary on the killing by Syrian security forces of Ghiyath Matar—a young activist nicknamed “little Gandhi,” who pioneered the tactic of handing out flowers and water to soldiers—Mark Krikorian writes that his death “highlight[s] the limits of nonviolent resistance.”
I have a couple issues with his analysis, if you can call it that. First, while it’s tragic that Matar was killed, his death doesn’t show the limits of nonviolence. The fact is that people die in nonviolent struggle, just as they die—almost always in far greater numbers—in violent conflict. To really illustrate the hypocrisy here: Would Krikorian argue that every US soldier that’s killed shows the “limits of war or violence?” I highly doubt it.
What Matar’s death shows is that nonviolent struggle requires sacrifice and it may highlight the need for the Syrian opposition to consider shifting to tactics of dispersion, like strikes and boycotts, that would be more difficult for the security forces to repress.
Bonnie Urfer exudes calm and strength. Her eyes twinkle and her voice stretches o’s like a Wisconsinite. On Wednesday, Judge Bruce Guyton called her a “prolific criminal.”
Prolific? Sure. Bonnie has been an activist since the 1980s. Working with a group called Nukewatch out in the forests of Wisconsin, Bonnie has tracked nuclear waste and materials shipments, cut down the Extremely Low Frequency poles that studded her sylvan landscape to communicate the first strike orders to nuclear submarines, and been arrested dozens of times. Criminal? Not when nuclear weapons are illegal (at least according to international law—which by treaty is our law too), immoral and just plain useless.
But Bonnie is prolific in her artistic gifts as well as in her resistance.
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