Twenty more innocent people were pepper-sprayed last week, although not by police cracking down on protesters this time, but by a woman fighting for a discounted Xbox at Walmart.
This was only one of many violent incidents that marred Black Friday last week, as throngs of crazed consumers hit stores across the country to get the best deals of the year, on what turned out to be the biggest day of shopping ever.
In an effort to push back against the frenzy of consumerism that overtakes our country every year at this time, Adbusters used the 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to kick off their latest campaign: #OCCUPYXMAS.
Yesterday, Waging Nonviolence launched our first post published in collaboration with Possible Futures, an exciting new website and book series organized by the Social Science Research Council: “Women in Occupy Denver” by Chad Kautzer. In addition to choosing really great collaborators, however, Possible Futures has also gotten a start on launching an important discussion in various academic disciplines about what the Occupy movement represents. Most of all, taking advantage of the SSRC’s international orientation, the project is approaching the movement in global terms—as few are, and as all of us should be.
The day after Mothers’ Day, May 14, 1961, the front-page picture of a Greyhound bus engulfed in flames galvanized the American public. It was Anniston, Alabama, and Klansmen had fully intended to burn the freedom riders alive. For the first time many Americans realized the full depth of hatred faced by black southerners—and those who came to help them.
Right now two videos may be having a similar effect. They show shockingly savage attacks on students by the police; at Berkeley, we see protesting students with linked arms being jabbed and beaten by police “batons” (as poet laureate Robert Hass pointed out, this is not an orchestra and those are not batons—they’re clubs). At Davis it’s a line of seated, peaceful students being casually doused with pepper spray by an apparently impassive police officer.
If the salutary shock of this confrontation were to wake up the public as the photo of the burning bus succeeded in doing in 1961, what might they learn? I think, three things.
Occupy Denver (OD) has been a tenacious occupation—and some say the angriest—fighting on despite external pressures and internal strains along the fault lines of oppression and privilege. The following is mostly about the latter, particularly the role and projects of women organizers, but the external pressures are great and not unrelated, so let me first say a few words about them.
The two greatest external threats to OD have no doubt been inclement weather and aggressive policing under the direction of the Democratic political establishment here—the first in the nation to forcibly uproot an Occupy encampment. Three weeks after OD’s emergence, John Hickenlooper, a pro-business Democratic governor, gave a press conference with Democratic Mayor Michael Hancock, declaring the encampment illegal. Days later, riot police carried out a middle-of-the-night raid, arresting dozens and removing some 80 tents from the encampment near the Capitol building. It would be the first of three forcibleevictions.
Most of the rich nations gathering at this year’s UN climate summit have already conceded defeat when it comes to producing any kind of binding treaty to slow greenhouse gas emissions this decade. But that isn’t going to stop poorer, more climate-vulnerable nations from trying.
“We went to Copenhagen [in 2009] with the illusion we could reach an equitable agreement. We went to Cancún [in 2009] where we saw slight but not sufficient progress. Frustration is now deep and building. Now we hear that we will need more conferences. Sometime we have to get serious. We should be going to Durban with the firm conviction that we do not come back until we have made substantial advances.”
While it is not known whether anyone will take up Figueres’s call to action, the Guardian did speak to one ambassador who said, “In the corridors [here] there is talk of occupying the meeting rooms, but there could be sanctions. So it needs to be big inside in order to have impact and nobody is punished. We are at the beginning.”
Sichuan Province in China has been rocked by a string of self-immolations by Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns this year. Eleven members of the Kirti Monastery in the province have set themselves alight demanding religious freedom for Tibetans in China and the return of the Dalai Lama. Six of the demonstrators succumbed to their wounds, the latest being Palden Choesto, a nun from the monastery, who immolated herself on Thursday last week. Even exiled Tibetans have self-immolated to voice their criticism of the Chinese Communist regime. On the 5th of November, a Tibetan activist did so outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, and on the 10th of November, another activist self-immolated at Boudhanath, a Buddhist site on the outskirts of Kathmandu in Nepal. What remains to be seen, though, is whether actions like these will have any significant political effect.
Last Friday marked the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign. It is easy to be motivated by the idea of a 16 day dedication to combating violence against women, but I float between enthusiasm, doubt, and the occasional eye-roll as I read through some of the websites of major organizations that are promoting the campaign, like Say NO – UniTE, which is led by UN Women. I have to work a little bit to get past the cringe factor of what could appear as an elite-led advocacy campaign (ribbons, rubber bracelets, glossy pamphlets, etc.) to understand the significance of the campaign and its connection to the goal of a nonviolent world. Can anything led by the UN seriously be called activism?
At a TEDx event in Kraków last month, our good friend Srdja Popovic, who was one of the leaders of Otpor—the student-led nonviolent movement that played a key role in the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000—and currently runs the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade, delivered this great introductory talk on people power that is well worth watching.
If you’re in New York this coming Wednesday, we hope you’ll consider joining WNV editor Nathan Schneider and contributor Jeremy Kessler for a panel discussion about the First Amendment issues raised by the Occupy movement. Get in on Facebook here.
A little after 7 last Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive police eviction two days earlier, into the warren of streets that surround the New York Stock Exchange. It was the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which has introduced a new language of political confrontation—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, Occupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the national conversation. An entire “Day of Action” was in the works. For the early morning event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal barricades, police vans, motorcycles, and riot police that have effectively privatized that narrow strip of once-public land. It was perhaps the movement’s most carefully-orchestrated action—though you might not have known it by watching the news that day.
