• On Thursday, thousands of Nigerian women took to the streets in protest of religious violence that left at least 200 dead last weekend, singing and waving branches full of green leaves — a traditional sign of protest. They also carried Bibles and crosses made out of scrap lumber.

• The mass protest intended to paralyze Bangkok and topple the Thai Government began at exactly 12:12 pm today with a huge round of applause followed by the sound of gongs and Buddhist chanting.

• Workers belonging to CGIL, Italy’s biggest labor union, will walk off their jobs today for four hours to protest cuts at companies such as Fiat SpA, Alcoa Inc. and Antonio Merloni SpA. The strike called by CGIL, with a membership of 5.5 million people, and a demonstration in city centers will cripple traffic and cause delays in public transport and air travel.

• The third general strike was underway in Greece yesterday. Public services were shut down and air traffic controllers sealed off national airspace.

• Zimbabwe’s striking civil servants say they are now resorting to a hunger strike after the cash strapped government ignored their month long job boycott.

• The National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) workers – led by Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Marvi Memon – ended their seven-day long protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club after the Sindh government assured the protesters that it will regularise 1,547 temporary NPIW employees.

• Affected villagers of Barapukuria coal mining areas in Bangladesh started an indefinite hunger strike on Wednesday to realize their compensation.

• At least 70 detainees at the West Japan Immigration Control Center, which has long been criticized by human rights groups and Diet members, have been on a hunger strike since Monday.

On Tehran Bureau, an interesting new blog on PBS’s website about Iran, an Iranian friend of ours -  writing under a pen name – published an important article last week with some sound strategic advice on nonviolence for the Green Movement.

The goal is to erode the pillars of support for the regime until loyalties shift, practical power begins to drain away, and the regime starts crumbling from within. Civil disobedience is thus not primarily aimed at demonstrating the moral superiority of the opposition movement — though that is admittedly one objective — but rather to disrupt the “normal” flow of commerce, politics, and everyday life. Clearly, a violent struggle against a much stronger foe has little chance of disrupting “normal” conditions except for fleeting moments, since violence gives the state license to stamp out its opponents with the full range of instruments at its disposal.

Moreover, violence he argues would only cede the religious “center,” which includes most clergy and millions of everyday citizens, to the hardliners. He then enumerates several critical strategic principles, including:

Read the rest of this article »

Last week on WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, there was a nice interview with Gene Sharp and his assistant at his office. In the interview, he discusses his take on nonviolent action, what’s going on in Iran, and far-left critics who think he’s a government agent. The segment can be streamed off of the station’s website.

• Downtown Athens was paralyzed once again on Friday when thousands of Greeks took to the streets to protest against the country’s newly announced package of austerity measures.

• In the UK, an estimated 270,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union will walk out today to begin a two-day strike over redundancy payments.

• Portugal’s public services–including schools, hospitals and customs–were disrupted Thursday by strike action called by unions to protest the government’s plan to freeze wages.

• In Pakistan, the workers of the National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) continued their protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club on Friday, protesting against the Sindh government over delay in regularizing the services of employees.

• In Egypt, protesting workers from the Tanta Flax and Oils Company ended a 15-day sit-in last week after reaching a compromise with Manpower Ministry representative Wael Allam. They were offered a sum equivalent to two months’ salary and an early retirement package of LE40,000, which they accepted.

• Dutch gay rights groups have called for a halt to protests against a Catholic church southwest of Amsterdam after it said it would no longer seek to bar homosexuals from taking communion.

• Workers at a frozen pizza factory in Ireland have ended their hunger strike after making a deal with bosses over the sacking of three men.

• In the Philippines, Gabriela – the country’s foremost alliance of progressive women’s organizations -  has declared March 8, International Women’s Day, as a “day off” for Filipinas, to be spent out in the streets, marching, protesting and asserting their rights.

Yesterday, Democracy Now! covered escalating tension and protest at the University of California San Diego over a spate of racist incidents over the last few weeks on campus, including the hanging of a noose in the main library.

Towards the end of the interview, which is cut off on the Youtube video above, Professor Daniel Widener says:

And I think that it’s very important that people throughout the country try to do what they can to mobilize to help us, whether that’s emailing our chancellor, chancellor(at)ucsd.edu, calling her office at (858) 534-3135, or looking at a website that the students have put out called stopracismucsd.wordpress.com. These are all things that people can do immediately now to help us build pressure for change.

• In Evansville, Indiana, a crowd estimated at 5,000 strong poured onto the shoulder and parking lot of the Evansville plant, protesting Whirlpool’s decision to shut down and ship jobs to Mexico.

• Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).

• Scores of Jordanian politicians and trade union members staged a sit-in at the Trade Unions Complex in Amman on Saturday to denounce Israel’s addition of two West Bank holy sites to a list of Jewish heritage centers.

• Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.

• In Nepal, the 48-hour sit-in protest of the Civil Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP), which began from Thursday in front of the Constituent Assembly building, to urge political parties to draft the constitution within the given time frame, concluded on Saturday at 8 am.

• Several Cuban dissidents say they will refuse food in protest at the death earlier this week of a jailed government opponent. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on Tuesday in a hospital in the capital Havana after a hunger strike of 85 days. His death triggered international protests and Cuban President Raul Castro issued an expression of regret.

• Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.

• Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.

• Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

• On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.

• Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.

• Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.

Where were you on February 15, 2003? If you were a part of the biggest global demonstration in history against war, which took place that day, I’m sure you remember well.

I was in the streets of Castellon, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, where I was studying for a master’s in Peace Studies, with some 20,000 other Spaniards protesting the impending war against Iraq. It was really very moving to be a part of such a large gathering.

Now a team is working on a full-length documentary, called “We Are Many,” about that historic day. Although it’s not set to come out until late 2011 or early 2012, they have already completed a very nice trailer for the movie (above).

While I’m all for commemorating that important event, I also think it’s worth looking at critically. Yes, millions of people around the world came out to protest a war that had not even begun yet. Nothing like that has ever happened before. As Noam Chomsky has said, it took years for any comparable protest to develop during the Vietnam War. And there is hope in that.

Nevertheless, it didn’t stop the invasion of Iraq. Bush brushed off the demonstrations with ease. To let the protesters influence his decision to attack Iraq, he quipped, would be like saying “I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.”

And unfortunately, when the war began a little more than a month later, many who took part in that global day of protest felt deflated. Afterwards, it took months to build the momentum for action back up and it’s my sense that many people stopped demonstrating against the war for good. Perhaps they felt that it was of no use, since the massive protests before the invasion didn’t apparently bear fruit.

However, the hard truth is that we never should have expected one day of protest, no matter how big, to stop a war. That’s not how nonviolence works. If we actually wanted to stop the imminent attack on Iraq, we would have had to come back the next day, and every day after that, until the administration listened. Almost all nonviolent campaigns that have been successful against such a powerful, determined opponent required this type of sacrifice and perseverance from participants.

Protesters would also have needed to try other, more aggressive tactics – like civil disobedience or even a general strike – that more directly disrupt business as usual. If millions of people indefinitely refused to go to work, blocked roads around the country and filled the jails, then Bush may have perhaps faltered.

Rather than simply celebrate February 15, I would encourage the filmmakers to include some discussion along these lines, so that their very promising documentary can contribute to the building of a more effective movement in the future.

In his latest comic for World War 3 Illustrated, Ethan Heitner, a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a member of Jews Against the Occupation (JATO-NY) and Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Middle East Justice, describes the reasons that he supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli occupation.

Last year, Naomi Klein wrote an important piece for The Nation in which she counters several arguments that are often made against this campaign, that is well worth a read. She argues that BDS is the “best strategy” in the ongoing struggle for justice in Palestine, and that surrendering these nonviolent tools “verges on active complicity.”

To learn more about how you can get involved in the campaign in your community or on your campus, click here.

Last week, the Boston Globe had an interesting piece about how the research of Boston College sociology professor Lisa Dodson led to her new book, “The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy.” As she was interviewing managers at stores that employed low-wage workers, she began hearing their discomfort with making enough to live well, while their workers were seriously struggling to make ends meet.

In response to this unjust situation, Dodson found that many managers participated in acts of what she calls “economic disobedience,” such as slipping “their workers extra money, food, or time needed to care for sick children,” in an effort to undermine the system. One story she tells is of Andrew, a manager at a large Midwest food business, who:

…said he put extra money in the paychecks of those earning a “poverty wage,” punched out their time cards at the usual quitting time when they had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment, and gave them food.

Andrew had decided that by supervising workers who were treated unfairly – paid too little and subjected to inflexible schedules that prevented them from taking care of their families – he was playing a direct role in the unfair system, and so he was morally obligated to act.

Not surprisingly, her book has sparked controversy for portraying such acts in a positive light. Some argue that she is essentially glorifying stealing from companies, rather than working through legal channels to try to rectify the situation.

I personally would tend to agree with Dodson, that these acts are moral. Corporations are not designed to care for the well-being of their workers. Their primary focus by law is on the bottom line and the interests of their shareholders, which are generally at odds with what would be best for the workers. (If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend watching The Corporation. It’s a documentary that came out a few years back that explores these issues and many more.)

I’d be interested to hear what you think. Are these acts of “economic disobedience” something to be lauded or is this theft by another name?

• The pilots’ union of Lufthansa began a 4-day strike today after a last-ditch effort at negotiations over pay and job security failed.

• In Thailand, truck operators will stage a stoppage on roads today in protest at alleged extortion by highway police, saying incidents have doubled since last year.

• Thousands of protesters in Ivory Coast call for the resignation of President Laurent Gbagbo as clashes with security forces leave an undisclosed number of people dead and wounded.

• All 600 detainees at a prison in Iraq’s southern city of Basra have gone on hunger strike to protest conditions that are “not fit for animals,” a local politician said on Friday.

• Strikes at French refineries looked likely to spread as Exxonmobil employees Friday were called to join a protest at oil giant Total that has shut down seven plants and raised fears of supply cuts.

• Greece faces a growing fuel shortage as a customs workers’ strike halts the flow of petrol into the country. Customs workers have extended their strike against wage freezes and bonus cuts until this Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

• Dozens of Egyptian women and human rights activists staged a protest last Thursday in Cairo against a recent decision that bars women from holding judicial positions.

• Last Wednesday, Kenyans marched to vent their anger at a coalition government slowly falling apart over graft allegations and its inability to further key reforms pledged two years ago.

• Last week, A group of lawyers from the Law and Democracy Platform, an Turkish NGO working to strengthen the rule of law while respecting democratic values, protested against the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) decision to strip prosecutors conducting a probe into jailed Erzincan Chief Prosecutor İlhan Cihaner of their special authorities.

In this fascinating video, neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a brief overview of the recently discovered mirror neurons, or what he likes to call “Gandhi neurons,” at a recent TED conference. As he describes in his talk, a mirror nueron is a motor neuron in your brain that:

fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it’s as though this neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view. It’s almost as though it’s performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person’s action.

Ramachandran then describes another type of mirror neuron that works similarly with the sense of touch:

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Here is a bit of hopeful news from Palestine. Two and a half years after the Israeli Supreme Court deemed that the section of the separation wall that cuts through the village of Bil’in was illegal, the Israeli military has begun re-routing the wall to comply with the ruling. This move will return 30 percent of Bil’in’s land to the village.

In response to the news, Mohammed Khatib, the coordinator of the West Bank-wide Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a member of the the Bil’in Popular Committee, said:

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the only reason that this is finally happening now are the five years of persistent struggle and the sacrifices the people of my village have made. While we are happy for the lands that do return, we do not forget the lands and crops that remain isolated behind the Wall. Our struggle will continue until all of our lands are returned and the Occupation is over.

Since the wall was erected in 2005, Bil’in has been a focal point for nonviolent resistance in Palestine and garnered widespread support and positive media attention around the world. Residents from the village, along with other Israeli and international activists, participate in a weekly march to the wall every Friday. According to the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee:

In addition to grassroots demonstrations and nonviolent direct actions, Bil’in has held annual conferences on popular resistance since 2006; providing a forum for villagers, activists and academics to discuss strategies for the unarmed struggle against the Occupation.

In their latest weekly protest, activists from Bil’in demonstrated their creativity by dressing and painting themselves as the native Na’vi from the film Avatar.

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After a statue of a 10-year-old Obama was placed in a central park in Jakarta in December, Indonesians began to protest. More than 56,000 people joined an Indonesian-language Facebook group called “Take Down the Barack Obama Statue in Taman Menteng Park.”

The resistance to the statue was apparently not so much because of what Obama has or hasn’t done as president, but because they questioned his real contribution to Indonesian society.

“Why should Obama’s statue be displayed in the center of Jakarta?” Linda Christanty, one of Indonesia’s most well-known writers, told Andre Vltchek in an article on Foreign Policy in Focus today. “Why didn’t they erect statues of the reformation heroes — people who were kidnapped during the Suharto era? Such statues would serve as a warning. It could help to prevent some terrible crimes from happening again — crimes like the forced disappearance of the people.”

Due to the mounting protest, Jakarta’s City Park and Cemetery Agency actually took the statue down on Sunday. City officials confirmed that it will be moved to the grade school that Obama attended from 1967 to 1971, which is in the area.

While this protest is fine, I’m a bit surprised that the folks behind the push to take the statue down didn’t express a wider range of grievances. For one thing, I don’t know of any major shift in US policy towards Indonesia, which has really been hideous for decades. And I would think that many in Indonesia – which is a predominately Muslim country – might be offended by the fact that Obama has significantly escalated the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan and has not altered US support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the Muslim world in any meaningful way. But I guess those are just a couple of my own gripes with our dear leader.

Here is a interesting report by Franklin Lopez of the Vancouver Media Co-op that aired on Democracy Now! about the developing protests around the Winter Olympics which began in Vancouver today. To thwart positive coverage of the protests, Canada has stopped at least two American journalists from entering the country this week, including John Weston Osburn of Salt Lake City and Chicago radio journalist Martin Macias.

• Thousands of civil servants have marched through Athens, the Greek capital, as they went on a 24-hour strike in protest against the government’s plans to freeze wages, gather more taxes and reform pensions. The action left flights grounded and many schools and government offices closed, while public hospitals were expected to only take emergency cases. A two-million-strong federation of unions will also start a general strike Feb. 24.

• Ikea offered Wednesday to meet with labor union leaders after strikes shut down several stores in France — but only if six workers end a sit-in at its Paris office first. Workers walked off the job starting Saturday in protest over pay.

• Disneyland hotel workers  began a water-only fast Tuesday to protest what they describe as life-threatening safety issues on the job.  To show support for workers fasting outside the Grand Californian, over 300 people marched in front of Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel in Anaheim yesterday.

• In Iran, numerous opposition figures reported police harassment on Thursday, including the firing of tear gas and paint balls at protests in the capital Tehran.

• Also in Tehran, workers of Tohid Tunnel gathered in front of the entrance of the tunnel they work for in protest of unpaid salaries. The gathering resulted in the closure of the connections between north and south Chamran Freeway from Milad tower to the entrance of Tohid tunnel.

• Syracuse Peace Council members protested outside the Syracuse Air National Guard base on Tuesday against unmanned drones that are now being operated from the site.

• In Texas, dozens of prisoners have gone on a hunger strike at a Los Fresnos immigration jail in protest of inhumane conditions. It’s at least the third hunger strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center in less than a year.

• Tomorrow, citizens of Florida and Destin will have the opportunity to show their opposition to oil drilling off Florida’s coastline. Hands Across the Sand encourages Florida residents concerned with pending drilling legislation to gather on beaches at noon and hold hands forming lines in the sand against oil drilling in coastal waters.

• Thousands of Australians will let their tastebuds do the talking when they sit down later this month for “Vindaloo Against Violence”, a mass dining event to protest attacks against Indians.