Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post.

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.

It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.

I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.

“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”

Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.

Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the a group broke off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, the “Revolutionary People’s Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.

Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.

Looking back, Schulte said Azir and the FBI used “security culture against activists” and “developed patterns of trust to seem legit.” The Cleveland Five, he explains, “were coached by the federal government.”

In a letter Stevens wrote from jail, Schulte told me, he described the feeling of helplessness he experienced right before the bust: “We saw this coming,” Stevens wrote.

“Brought to the edge of the swimming pool”

Andy Stepanian knows a thing or two about state repression of activists. As one of the animal-rights activists known as the SHAC 7, Stepanian has served three and a half years in federal prison after having been prosecuted under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act for costing animal testing laboratories more than $380 million in lost profits simply by operating a website. While the SHAC 7 case did not involve FBI entrapment or property destruction, the specific targeting of activists because of their anti-capitalist activism was reflective of a new era of post-9/11 state surveillance and repression.

When I talked to him on the phone about the Cleveland Five, Stepanian surmised, “These folks would not have gone out and done this if not brought to the edge of the swimming pool by federal agents and urged to jump in.”

The FBI affidavit — analyzed here by RT — confirms, again, what many have warned about regarding the growing surveillance and security agencies in the United States: To keep themselves employed and justify their budgets, people in agencies like the FBI are orchestrating plots to catch “terrorists” who, otherwise, seem to be quite unable to do anything on their own. Last fall, Mother Jones reported on FBI efforts against Muslim extremists and concluded that many of those were instances of entrapment as well.

In activist circles, there are a series of notorious cases of entrapment by federal authorities. In 2006, for instance, environmental activist Eric McDavid, encouraged by an informant known as “Anna,” was convicted on conspiracy charges. Another more notorious case is that of Brandon Darby — a well-known anarchist and activist-turned-informant — and his entrapment of David McKay and Bradley Cowder. The award winning film, Better This World, tells the story of how McKay and Cowder were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

“In most cases,” said Stepanian, “this is not one coordinated crackdown with a puppet-master. It’s a bottom-up [phenomenon] where special investigators are creating things for themselves to do. They go to potential targets to justify their position and create work for themselves.”

Perhaps even more troubling than the manipulation of vulnerable individuals — whether they be political activists or members of mosques — is the way in which law enforcement meanwhile manipulates public discourse about terrorism, Islam or, in this case, a growing social movement.

According to Schulte, the operation in Cleveland appears to have been part of a pre-planned narrative meant to paint Occupiers as a group with terrorist thugs in their midst, discouraging others from joining the movement. The FBI had a media statement prepared for immediate release on May Day after the arrests, and it hosted an unusually high-profile press conference the following day. There have been more than 300 pleas involving FBI informants in six years and such kind of overt media blitz from the feds is rare. Rolling Stone reporter Rick Perlstein observes, comparing two different anti-terrorism operations at the end of April, “that the State is singling out ideological enemies.” He reports that authorities are much less likely, for instance, to use tactics of entrapment against violent white supremacist groups.

Investigative journalist Will Potter is an expert on state-sponsored targeting of radical activist groups who has testified before Congress on FBI entrapment and is the author of a book (and an accompanying blog) titled Green is the New Red. Potter calls the Cleveland Five conspiracy “part of the ongoing focus on demonizing anarchists.” Just a cursory look at the headlines in Chicago and Cleveland confirms a growing association of anarchism with violence and terrorism while alienating radical movements from potential supporters.

Occupy Cleveland responds

Each of the Cleveland Five entered pleas of not guilty in federal court last week. As the trial of these young men plays out, their fates rest in which story is more compelling — their own victimhood, or the cunning of the federal agents. Although they were not taking action in the name of Occupy Cleveland, the future of Occupy and related movements in the United States is at stake in which story the public chooses to believe.

Occupy Cleveland, one of the movement’s longest-lasting encampments, had the remnants of its occupation removed by police in the middle of the night on May 3. There was little public outcry, when the city revoked its permit after the May 1 arrests.

Occupy Cleveland spokesperson Katie Steinmuller stressed that it was only a matter of time before the camp was evicted, and that it wasn’t entirely a result of the bomb scare. “There was a casino planned to be opened in view of the tents,” said Steinmuller referring to Occupy Cleveland’s camp when I spoke with her by phone about the eviction. “This [conspiracy] was just a good excuse to get us out.”

In a media statement following the arrests of the Cleveland Five, Occupy Cleveland affirmed its commitment to “active non-violence.” Individual occupiers have chosen to join the support team for the Five, but Occupy Cleveland as a whole is steering clear of commenting on it further.

“The FBI was successful in … what they set out to do,” said Schulte about the initial negative reaction the Occupy movement and other activists experienced in Cleveland. “People were exploited and trapped.”

“When you take away a space of legitimate protest,” adds Stepanian, “less legitimate forms of protest become more prevalent.” Events like the arrests of the Cleveland Five can create schisms within movements, which the state exploits to create a climate of fear within and about activist groups. The NATO 3 arrests and bond hearing, for instance, just before this weekend’s mass No NATO demonstration, will serve to deter people from participating and obscure the reality of the protest’s message.

In Chicago, the NATO 3 are each being held on $1.5 million bail. More details will emerge in the coming weeks, but Michael E. Deutsch, legal counsel for the NATO 3, has said that two of the 11 arrested during a house raid in Bridgeport were Chicago Police Department informants and have since disappeared. The truth of what really happened in Cleveland and Chicago may or may not emerge in the courtroom. But it is clear regardless that Occupy is now being exposed to a new level of state repression, and that it is taking a toll on what has still remained a nonviolent protest movement.

Correction 5/22: The article originally reported that Azir had been the impetus behind the Revolutionary People’s Army and that Wright appears to have been the first in contact with Azir until the spring of 2012. For information on supporting the Cleveland Five, visit www.Cleveland5justice.org

Walter Wink, via Wikipedia.

Fifteen years ago I attended a talk by Walter Wink. Like a growing number of people who knew his work on nonviolence I was a fan, and told him so. He demurred, saying he was just a writer. “It’s the activists who are doing all the real work,” he said.

It was my turn to demure.

Walter Wink died this week. The world has lost a gifted diagnostician of the dilemmas and potential of the human condition. Though the terrain he mined for decades was Christian theology, his work offered insights potentially applicable to all of us. Why? Because his research and imagination relentlessly bore down on the mechanics of systemic violence and nonviolent transformation. While this was assiduously framed in a Christian key, his work offers clues broadly pertinent to understanding the cloying functionality of domination — and the ways we can resist it.

Wink’s universal insights, though, emerged out of his patient exhumation of the often suppressed nonviolence of Jesus. By training he was a scripture scholar whose work was to unpack and referee the conflicting meanings of ancient texts, but by inclination he was committed to discovering and teasing out a new big picture, especially an alternative to the prevailing paradigm of violence. For decades, he managed to put his considerable interpretive skills at the service of this alternative vision.

In his book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Wink offers a series of incisive propositions. One, drawing from his studies as a theologian, is his judgment that violence is not episodic or capricious but the result of a violent belief system. Just as religious traditions are rooted in a set of beliefs, the phenomenon of violence flows from a belief in its power to save us. Wink said that the greatest religion on the planet is not Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Judaism but the pervasive faith in violence.

The contemporary epidemic of violence stems from our acknowledged or unacknowledged belief that violence ultimately is just and necessary. Wink named this “the myth of redemptive violence.” This myth — in the sense of the foundational story by which we live — permeates our consciousness and our culture. Hence our age’s greatest temptation: to cling to a belief in the effectiveness and preeminence of violence, the conviction that it is “the bottom line,” that violence is the final answer.

For Wink, nonviolent resistance is a critically important process for challenging violence, but, even more deeply, it is an embodied practice that can help to free us from our faith in violence forged in the furnaces of fear, hate, greed, ambition, resignation and capitulation. Creating nonviolent alternatives is a spiritual practice and a way of being at the service of the transformation of our selves, our communities and our world.

For Wink, this vision did not come from abstract speculation. Instead, it flowed from his wrestling with the Christian Gospels. For two thousand years, these accounts of the life and work of Jesus have nourished the convictions of a handful of peace churches like the Bretheren, the Anabaptists and the Quakers, but the vast majority of the Christian tradition have, willfully or not, watered down or stifled the message of radical nonviolence. Like a series of 20th-century scholars — including Andre Trocme, John Howard Yoder, Howard Thurman, Roland Bainton, Ched Myers, and John Dominic Crossan — Wink was unsatisfied with the centuries-old take that had muffled the nonviolent Jesus and that had left much of Christianity colluding with systems of violence, including theological justifications of war. So he turned his exegetical skill on the Gospels to see what they would reveal.

He did this in many ways, but one of the most memorable — and likely far-reaching — was his interpretation of Jesus’ saying to “turn the other cheek” and other sayings in the Gospel of Matthew:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. (Matthew 5:38-41, Revised Standard Version)

These exhortations has been used for 2,000 years to breed submission and complicity, especially since they were linked in the same passage to the admonition: “Do not resist an evildoer.” Wink began his research by wondering about this phrase. When he went back to the Greek text, he found that the original meaning was quite different. While the verb antistenai has been almost universally translated as “resist,” it is in fact a military term that means “resist violently or lethally.” Rather than encouraging passivity, Jesus was saying, “Don’t be a doormat. Resist violence, but not with retaliatory violence.”

Wink’s work on “turn the other cheek” helped sharpen his point. Jesus’ audience would likely have had firsthand experience with being degraded and treated as an inferior, including being cuffed with the backhand by a social superior, including the Roman soldiers occupying first century Palestine. The typical options in the face of this violence were cowering submission or violent retaliation, which likely would have been suicidal. To maintain one’s position and offer one’s left cheek creates in the cultural and political context of the time a dilemma for the oppressor. As Wink writes in The Powers That Be:

By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand: his nose is in the way… The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship … By turning the cheek, then, the “inferior” is saying, “I’m a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I won’t take it anymore.”

Wink makes a similar point about other sayings in this passage (giving up one’s cloak and going the extra mile): an active, courageous, and creative third way exists between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other.

This alternative seizes the moral initiative, explores a creative alternative to violence, asserts the dignity and humanity of all parties, seeks to break the cycle of dehumanization and faces the consequences of one’s action.

Building on these are numerous other rigorous re-readings of the Gospels. Wink offered a revealing illumination of the origins of Christianity rooted in a vision of inclusion, even as this vision has been systematically distorted and devastated by the tradition over these two millennia. Nonviolent resistance, as the examples cited above stress, is key to actualizing vision.

Wink wrote from his theological perspective and has influenced many of us working for justice and peace from that stance. But there is much in his work that illuminates the dynamics of violence and nonviolent change far beyond his particular tradition. As we engage with monumental systems of injustice, Walter Wink’s work can offer us frames that can be adapted to many contexts and settings as we struggle on for the well-being of all.

Thank you, Walter, for illuminating the power of nonviolent change for us in these times of peril and opportunity.

Original headline about Operation Spectrum.

On May 21, 1987, 16 Singaporeans were arrested and detained in a crackdown called Operation Spectrum. About a month later, four of the original 16 were released, and another six arrested. They were branded as Marxist conspirators out to “subvert Singapore’s political and social order using communist united front tactics” and detained without trial. Most of the detainees were lawyers, community workers or entrepreneurs. As the 25th anniversary of the crackdown approaches, activists are using the opportunity to raise questions anew about the repression of dissent in the country.

In Singapore, the Internal Security Act (ISA) allows the government to arrest and preventively detain individuals deemed to be threats to national security. A person can be detained for up to 30 days, after which a detention order must be issued. Although the ISA’s original purpose was for the protection of Singapore’s security, the government has long been criticized for using it as a tool to stifle activism and political opposition.

Unable to defend themselves in a court of law, those arrested in Operation Spectrum were made to appear on national television to give apparent confessions, admitting to plots to overthrow the government and establish a classless society. When nine of the detainees published a press statement upon their release recanting their confessions and accusing the government of ill treatment, they were swiftly re-arrested. Francis Seow, a former solicitor general, stepped in to represent one of the detainees. He, too, was arrested upon arrival at the detention center and held for over two months.

No public evidence – apart from the confessions – was ever produced to prove that any of the detainees were really threats to national security.

A similar spate of arrests and detentions — codenamed Operation Coldstore – occurred about two decades before Spectrum. Both events are rarely covered in Singapore’s primary and secondary school syllabi. But as Singaporeans begin to seek out alternative sources of information to the traditional media, ex-detainees are finding new platforms on which to tell their side of the story, raising awareness of the darker moments in Singapore’s history.

Several books have been written on the events of Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum, such as a collection of accounts published in 2009 under the title That We May Dream Again and Teo Soh Lung’s memoirs, Beyond The Blue Gate. When Ms. Teo stood as a candidate in the 2011 general election, fellow ex-detainee Vincent Cheng spoke in support of her at rallies and gave an account of his time in custody.

Whereas Singaporeans once only had access to the perspective of the government in the media — regarding Operation Spectrum, the national broadsheet The Straits Times simply carried the press release from the Ministry of Home Affairs — the stories coming from the detainees have revealed troubling abuses of power. Now, more and more Singaporeans support the abolishment of the ISA.

Calls for abolishment were further strengthened when Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced last fall that he would repeal Malaysia’s ISA. Since Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said in 1991 (when he was deputy prime minister) that Singapore would consider abolishing the ISA should Malaysia do so, many Singaporeans looked forward to the continued existence of the ISA being debated both in public and in the parliament.

However, a day after Malaysia’s announcement, the Ministry of Home Affairs put out a press release stating that “the ISA continues to be relevant and crucial as a measure of last resort for the preservation of our national security.” With that, the government signaled that there would be no talk of abolishing the ISA in Singapore.

Still, the campaign to abolish the ISA continues to press forward, hoping to slowly chip away at its public support until the government is left with no choice but to act. Emphasis is now being placed on educating Singaporeans and filling in the gaps left by schoolchildren’s history textbooks.

With the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum coming up, the anti-ISA initiative Function 8 and the human rights NGO Maruah are jointly organizing an event called “That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy’” on May 19. It will be held at Speakers’ Corner — the only outdoor place in Singapore were cause-related activities can be held without a permit — and will feature exhibitions, performances, speeches and testimonies from ex-detainees.

In a statement released by the organizing committee, four main objectives were identified:

1. Raise awareness on the misuse of the ISA in the past;
2. raise awareness of the danger of the continued existence of the ISA which may lead to complacency of the authorities in dealing with real security threats to our country;
3. work towards the abolition of the ISA; and
4. press the government to welcome the return of those who have been forced into exile because of the ISA, such a move being the first step towards national reconciliation and healing for all parties.

As of right now, the campaign against the ISA progresses in fits and starts — the topic comes up from time to time, events are organized and then the issue once again fades to the background. To have a greater, lasting impact on Singaporean society, the campaign requires much more participation, but is often confined to the same group of passionately supportive activists. This group of people usually finds it difficult to sustain the campaign as they are more often than not also involved in other causes such as the death penalty, migrant workers’ rights, LGBT rights and more.

Perhaps the ISA itself makes other Singaporeans hesitate to join the struggle; one only needs to speak to the ex-detainees to be reminded of the price activists in Singapore have had to pay.

UPDATE 5/17/12: 

On May 17, 2012, Function 8 and Maruah posted a note on Facebook saying that their May 19 event had been postponed. They had been informed by the police that due to a by-election being held in one of Singapore’s constituencies, Hougang, “the exemption granted under the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act to Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park has been revoked with effect from 16 May to 26 May 2012.” This means that anyone who wants to hold an event at Speakers’ Corner in that period will be required to apply for a police permit. In their statement, the organizers wrote:

Owing to the short notice and uncertainties in obtaining a police permit, as well as the prospect of inconvenience to our guests and contractors should the permit be refused, we are sorry that our event at Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park, has to be postponed. We deeply regret that a by-election in the single-member constituency of Hougang, has disrupted and inconvenienced Singaporeans from enjoying activities at Hong Lim Park which is not part of Hougang.

That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy will now be held on 2 June 2012.

Do a Google image search for protest symbols and your first page will show a range of raised fists, Guy Fawkes masks and possibly even a few giant inflatable rats. But by far the single most represented image you’ll see is the peace sign. It is probably the most famous protest symbol in the world and has its origins in the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s. The sign represents the semaphore signals for two letters: ‘N’ (the two diagonals pointing down) and ‘D’ (the vertical line that divides the circle), which together represent nuclear disarmament. It has become the symbol of anti-war and social justice movements across the globe.

The aim of a symbol is to communicate as immediately and directly as possible the core of what you represent. It is the shorthand for your values, your aspirations and sometimes your political agenda, if you’ve managed to put one together. Which brings us to an important question: Is it time to consider a new symbol for a new era?

I was at a conference recently with pro-democracy activists from the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. They expressed a strong feeling that their aspirations and values were linked despite working in dramatically different contexts and against ostensibly different adversaries. They felt united in their commitment to nonviolence, to sharing strategies, to building and putting up as much as to removing and pulling down — all in an attempt to construct a different vision of the future. They also emphasized the importance of being connected in order to find strength greater than the sum of their individual powers. Near the end of the conference, someone observed that there really is no political symbol that represents that list of values and goals.

The peace sign has a lot of significance, but its origin is very specifically nuclear disarmament, and even its broader connotation is narrowly that of peace. Another symbol handed down from previous generations is that of the clenched upright fist. It immediately conveys an expression of defiance, resistance and solidarity, but is agnostic in what it might resist. Therefore it has been used by a disparate number of groups and movements including the Black Panthers, white supremacists, the Serbian revolutionaries Otpor, Egypt’s April 6th Movement and the Socialist International, to name but a few. And although some of those groups were strategic, networked and nonviolent, some were not.

A more recent symbol is the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask often seen at Indignado and Occupy protests that alludes to a “vendetta” against the 1 percent. It doesn’t quite fit with what much of these movements seem to be about, at least not in terms of the method intimated.

So I approached a long time collaborator, Carl Le Blond, who has created some of the most powerful visual content on issues from Burma to HIV/AIDS to climate change, to see if he could help. We had some lengthy discussions about what a symbol needed to do and represent, as well as the importance of investing it with meaning — which often comes from who’s using it and how.

The existing symbols seemed to emphasize a particular dimension of struggle: nonviolence, defined by not using violence (though it is much more than that), or resistance, defined by what you are against and often neglecting what you are for. Few gave a sense of building something new. If many in the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and Indignados believe they are all connected, what would their symbol look like?

Despite being in the middle of a number of massive deadlines, Carl eventually put pen to café serviette — an old-school medium for great ideas and images. A few days later he had worked up his initial idea and the people’s cube was born.

Carl’s aim was to emphasize that when people come together in an organized way they can build something much stronger and longer lasting than they could on their own. As he put it:

The people’s cube is on first sight solid and immovable from every way that you look at it. It has the simplicity and latent strength of a perfect molecular structure. Though in this case the molecules bonding together are symbolic of people standing together with their arms locked to form a symbol of strength and unity.

It seemed to represent much of what the activists I met had been talking about: being connected, constructive, strategic and networked. I sent it around to them and was glad that it got an enthusiastic reception. It will be interesting to see if and where it might pop up first. Now it may not do it for you. And that’s cool. But it’s worth thinking about, as these are new times and they are worthy of new symbols. Grab your stencils now!

Protesters in Malaga, Spain, on May 12. By Jon Nazca, via Reuters AlertNet.

Last June, after leaving the encampment in the center of Madrid, people in the 15M movement would say, “We moved from Sol square, but we know the way back.” The day of action on May 12 this year exceeded the expectations of many people who thought the 15M movement was dead, who didn’t recognize that it had only moved to neighborhood assemblies. The one-year anniversary of the movement brought hundreds of thousands people to the streets again in nearly 80 Spanish cities. There were 50,000 in Madrid, 44,000 in Barcelona, 11,000 in Vigo (a northern city with a population of less than 300,000) and many more.

As people from around the country converged on Madrid, various neighborhood assemblies gathered in squares to prepare banners for the demonstration and to share tips for avoiding police repression. At 7 p.m., there were five columns of demonstrators marching toward Sol square, where they planned to arrive at 9 o’clock. But by 8 p.m., the first column had already arrived, filling almost half of the square. Other groups of marchers arrived within minutes, but many people could not enter and had to stay in nearby streets. Sol square was completely full before the meeting time. There, thousands sang “Happy Birthday” to the 15M movement and released balloons.

As Sol square transformed into a party celebrating a year of protest and organizing, the question remained of whether the party could last all night. Some weeks before, the government had announced that it would not allow an encampment in Sol at all, but, last Thursday, it granted the movement a right to stay in the square during “office hours.” When the government’s 10 p.m. curfew came, there were more than 15,000 people in the square, surrounded by about 2,000 police officers.

At 10 p.m., too, the first tent was erected. “Now we have more reason than last year,” said a man named Emilio, the first camper in Sol of the night. “I’m not afraid to be the first one. If the police arrest me, they will have to go through many more people.” A half hour later, above where a dozen police vans were parked, a huge white panel was deployed, on which were projected videos created by the movement.

After midnight, preparations began to hold an assembly. Dozens cleaned the paper and bottles littered across the square, while others placed cardboard on the ground for people to sit on. When the assembly started at 1 a.m., nearly 2,000 participated. “I was worried,” said one of the first people to take the microphone. “This was very much a party, and we have a lot of work to do.” The first question was whether to stay in Sol for the night, and debate continued for more than an hour and a half. Many wanted to remain, but others said that doing so would only be a provocation to the government and that it didn’t make sense.

The assembly ended at 4 a.m., but hundreds of people remained in Sol. An hour later, 30 more police vans arrived, and officers cleared the square. Eighteen people were arrested. Meanwhile, police swept the squares in Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and other cities where activists tried to spend the night. Catalunya square in Barcelona is the only place where the movement has been able to remain, thanks to authorization by the Catalan government.

May 12 was just the first day of mobilization, and the most festive. Leading up to May 15, the movement has planned actions across the country focused on housing rights, employment, economy, democracy and other issues. These are busy days for the movement, and they will certainly be instrumental in shaping its goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

Violeta Parra.

For Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking about some of the powerful and provocative creative nonviolent activist work that mothers have done through the ages — and there is a lot of it. So much of popular history tells the stories of the men who “led” the charge in struggles, but my thoughts went to South America, and Chile in particular, because of the richness of the cultural methods used, and the leadership of mothers in the face of brutal and patriarchal regimes.

“You can’t have a revolution without songs,” read the banner behind Salvador Allende when he became president of Chile in 1970, highlighting the role of Nueva Canción (New Song) in the emergent resistance movements in South America. This style of musical resistance didn’t just include the voices of women, though one of its early proponents was Violeta Parra, a mother, who wrote the song “Gracias a la Vida.” Nueva Canción was intentionally used to unite and identify concerns of oppressed peoples, as it integrated native and rural musical instrumentation with urban and European styles to speak to ever larger communities. Only three years later, when Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, his regime outlawed several instruments identified with Nueva Canción, recognizing and attempting to stop the powerful spread of political ideas, courage and resistance through music.

Still, the music lived on. Today, the tradition continues thanks to, among others, the son and daughter of Violeta, who instilled a love of this music in her children. What an amazing gift.

Even as music served functions of education, empowerment, community-building and the putting forward of alternate visions for society, it was not the only cultural work that significantly contributed to the effectiveness of the movement for justice. During the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet, mothers spent hours stitching stories of resistance and suffering in the 1980s into a traditional tapestry form, arpilleras. Disregarded as inconsequential women’s work, it was possible to smuggle and sell these beautiful quilts both into and out of jails, and outside of Chile — moving information to sons and husbands, and spreading news beyond the borders even when a suppressed press corps could not. This galvanized anti-Pinochet sympathizers globally and resulted in both financial and political support for the resistance.

Arpillera, via the Royal Alberta Museum.

As the arpilleraistas gathered, often in church sanctuaries, the threads of their handiwork not only provided income to support their families, but also sewed together a growing consciousness of their own power. The craft provided a very accessible and low-risk entry point to the movement for many, while preserving collective memory and building capacity to go public with their demands, both on the political and home fronts — confronting the dictatorship and later the culture of machismo itself.

Another protest against Pinochet evolved from Chile’s national dance, the cueca. As thousands were “disappeared” by the regime, a symbol of resistance became “la cueca sola.” Originally done with partners, it was now being performed solo by women, clutching photographs of their missing loved ones, to confront the denial of the death squads.

Chilean women’s integration of cultural resistance into movement strategies seems to have contributed greatly to the outreach, education, accessibility, endurance and, therefore, effectiveness of their protracted struggle. The mothers’ motivation to better their children’s lives and future living conditions inspired many to take action, however risky. Day to day concerns of finding food for empty bellies moved mothers to stitch together rags to not only fill wallets but also to make change.

Thank you, arpilleraistas, singers and dancers for giving us more reasons to celebrate mothers today.

Spirit Affinity Group's action at Livermore National Laboratory in March, 1983. Courtesy of author.

A longtime co-worker of mine became committed to nonviolence during a demonstration he attended many years ago as the movement to end France’s brutal war in Algeria was gearing up. In the midst of a chaotic scene in Paris, he saw a man sitting contemplatively in the street as a military vehicle bore down on him. Rather than running him over — as it seemed very likely just a moment before — the vehicle came to a stop. The driver then nudged the vehicle up to the demonstrator, coaxing him to get up. But he didn’t. This went on for a while, but the protester remained in his fixed position. Finally the driver gave up and swerved around the man, leaving him in the street.

There are no guarantees with nonviolence. This scene could have ended very differently (as it did when I saw my friend, Vietnam veteran Brian Willson, run over by a Navy munitions train nearly 25 years ago during a protest against arms shipments to Central America). But this vignette from a half century ago unfolded as it did because this anonymous man in some unnamed French street had, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, become like a mountain: centered, poised, relentless. He didn’t rant. He didn’t run. He was here. He was now. And because of this, he transformed a highly mechanistic and objective operation (a military vehicle sweeping away an obstacle in its path to establish preeminence and to reestablish order) into a highly interpersonal and intersubjective one. Despite the roles each person had been assigned in this play, they engaged with one another in a way that was no longer found in the script.

By being here and now, not only did the military vehicle relent — thus dramatizing concretely and symbolically an end to the military barrage being used by his nation to hold on to empire — it succeeded in irrevocably changing someone who was watching. Watching this simple, firm act managed to circumvent my friend’s deeply entrenched defenses and, in an instant, to reframe things. He understood for the first time that we have a power which had previously been only vague and theoretical.

In these days of accelerating movement building, it is useful to reflect on the power of action that is centered, poised and relentless. Just as this long-ago scene on a Parisian street communicated a new way of being to my friend, so all nonviolent action is a form of communication, a specific type of discourse, designed to provoke a new kind of conversation with one’s larger society.

Social movements change the world by changing the conversation. Injustice succeeds by monopolizing the chat, dominating the airways, laying down the law. Social movements rush headlong into history fueled by the conviction that such a one-way monologue is death. They are always dreaming up methods to muscle their way into the room, to pull up a chair, and to flick the discussion in a very different direction using a very different lingo.

While injustice hinges on controlling the semantic universe to manufacture consent — so that money becomes speech and corporations become people — social movements succeed by crashing the party and challenging the chatter. They do this using the most powerful language we have at our disposal: the creaky, resilient and three-dimensional profundity of the human body — whether in Selma or Cairo or a forgotten street in Paris.

Nonviolent action is about stoking a serious, jaw-dropping conversation with one’s society. As the late Bill Moyer’s book Doing Democracy stresses, the goal of a movement is not to convince the policy-maker to change. Instead, it is to alert, educate, win and mobilize the populace on whom the policy-maker depends for her or his power. The aim of nonviolent action is to spark and sustain a conversation with one’s larger society about grievances and their remedies. It seeks to pry open the doors of dialogue, so that whatever injustice we’re pitted against can be seen for what it is and we can finally all sit down and hash it out.

To do this, though, one’s action has to find a way past all the implacable guards posted to keep these doors locked: fear, cynicism, apathy, powerlessness, hate.

The genius of nonviolent action is that it carries within its beating heart the capacity to slip past these defenses. Where violent action can often harden opposition and increase polarity, nonviolent action has the power to circumvent — and sometimes even to short-circuit — the willful knot of emotional and political obstacles a society erects to defend itself against transformation. No one action will create change, but each has an opportunity to advance the society-wide conversation on which change will ultimately rest.

At least three dimensions of nonviolent action help to do this: vulnerability, creativity and a commitment to the larger good. The more these are expressed, the greater the potential that a given action will reach a society’s soul, or at least its “right brain.” The language of bodies in action — vulnerable, creative and implicitly desiring the good of all — speaks to us in a peculiarly poignant and clear way.

Over the years I have seen this embodied power in action. I have seen people bring their deepest selves to critically important conversations, delivering their piece of the truth in person and in public: at federal buildings, at weapons facilities, in the streets, in the public square. Not always, but often, they have changed the atmosphere, opened possibilities that weren’t there before and extended a conversation that seemed stuck.

Sometimes creating embodied power is a conscious process: remembering to breathe, recalling why we are taking action, walking with intentionality and purpose, anchoring ourselves in our heart and our deepest longing, noticing what we are feeling. In nonviolent action trainings, I invite people to choose six words that capture why they are taking this step, a phrase to which they can return again and again during the action. Other times this power comes from the form of the action itself. For example, for many years I participated in “die-ins” to symbolize the destruction that various policies mete out. Being horizontal and silent and immobile in this way induced a focused, contemplative intentionality.

In the 1980s I took part in a die-in at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a member of Spirit Affinity Group. Some of us decided that we would not cooperate with being arrested (to symbolize our unwillingness to cooperate with the lab’s design of nuclear weapons). When I refused to get up after a police officer had placed me under arrest, he started tugging at my arm. “Don’t fool around with him!” his superior yelled from across the street. “Just break his wrist.” The officer grabbed my wrist and I suddenly felt a piercing jab of pain as he started to break it. With no premeditation, I leaned up and calmly whispered, “You don’t have to do that.” We were now looking in each other’s eyes. There was another stab of pain — then it stopped. He had decided not to go through with it. He had just given me a gift by sparing my wrist. I then decided to give him a gift by getting up and walking with him. As we trotted over to the police bus, he abruptly said, “Thank you for telling me that I didn’t have to do that. They brought someone in last week to teach us to break wrists. I didn’t feel right about this at the time, but when my commanding officer told me to break your wrist, I had to follow orders. Something about what you said woke me up. I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

As noted before, there is no guarantee that nonviolent action will always have such happy outcomes. (A police officer broke the wrist of my friend David Hartsough under similar circumstances, and of course many others have paid much more dearly than this.) But nonviolent action bears within its vision and method the potential for transforming the intractable in small and large ways, for helping to break the spell of violence and injustice, just as the two of us in front of a weapons laboratory were momentarily transformed.

Nonviolent action invites us to bring our deepest self to a heart-to-heart with those we encounter in the messy chaos of the action itself and with our larger society. And it invites us to do this through the irreducible plenitude and power of our bodies, creatively risking a little or a lot for the well being of this suffering world.

The Meta-Activism Project, a digital activism think tank, has just launched a new resource for nonviolent activists.  The resource, called Civil Resistance 2.0, is a database of technology-assisted nonviolent methods based on the 198 methods of nonviolent resistance compiled by Gene Sharp, the trailblazing scholar of the field, in 1973. Communication tools have become more numerous and more accessible to activists since then, and other technology-based methods, like using airborne drones to track humanitarian crises, have also emerged. The database (use links tinyurl.com/CivRes20 or tinyurl.com/CivilResistance20 to visit or share) is being crowdsourced, which means that scholars and activists can add to and update the list. Please stop by and share your creativity and experiences.

"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

In an effort to bring the board of Sotheby’s back to the negotiating table, the art handlers and members of Local 814 met on May 2 to protest and picket at Sotheby’s in New York City. Allies from Occupy Wall Street and other unions joined them. That night, also, Sotheby’s auctioned off Edvard Munch’s The Scream for a record-setting price of almost $120 million.

Protesters were kept away from Sotheby’s entrance door on 72nd Street and York Avenue. While attendants filed inside, protesters were directed by police officers to the corner on 71st and York Avenue. This location, and the presence of the officers, kept protesters from engaging directly with those entering the doors of the auction house.

Shop steward David Martinez has worked for Sotheby’s for almost 20 years. Art handlers like him are trained to transport art from homes and archaeological sites to the auction house. “We handle everything from major Southeast Asian stone artifacts that just came out of a temple to tribal artifacts from Native Americans,” Martinez says. “We handle fragile, immovable things. That’s something you just can’t get anyone to do.”

“I’m trying to send a simple message — I want to go back to work,” Martinez adds. “There is no other choice. They want to keep us out like that, I say bring it on.”

The idea for the protest emerged from the “99 Pickets” that were organized by OWS as part of its May Day actions. The intention of the pickets was “to connect May Day with the workers’ struggle,” explains Rose Bookbinder, an organizer with OWS and the United Autoworkers Union. “The pickets started on Tax Day, and we kept going. We organized 99 Pickets to make the people of New York aware of the injustice that’s going on in labor.”

The picket at Sotheby’s occurred on May 2 in order to show New Yorkers that the struggle for workers’ rights would not end after May 1, Bookbinder notes.

People from OWS have participated in actions with the Sotheby’s Teamsters since last September as a way of building stronger relationships between the movement and organized labor. According to Harrison Magee, who is part of OWS and the International Workers of the World, actions against Sotheby’s in recent months have “involved a lot of different formations within the organizing community.” Union organizers wanted to broaden the scope of the Occupiers’ struggle. Artists and labor activists within OWS recognized the importance of targeting the influence of corporate wealth in the art world. According to Magee, getting OWS to support the Sotheby’s struggle is a critical way of developing the movement’s capacity for meaningful organizing.

“The fighting mentality and brand of toughness that the Teamsters have is the kind you only learn as an employee — someone who is in direct, physical confrontation with the 1 percent,” says Magee. “Not a lot of OWS has that at its organizing core, which is made up of people who are dedicated to OWS as if it was a full-time job.”

By uniting with the Sotheby’s Teamsters, OWS not only supports workers who have been wronged by the 1 percent, but also strengthens itself for an ongoing role in labor and arts activism. In the process, OWS is “creating a cross-movement that is more coordinated and able to deal with its future as a strong grassroots movement,” Magee says. “Even though the [Sotheby’s] outcome is hugely important, I think we should realize that the lockout itself is really just the red herring for everything to come.”

The sale of The Scream inspired the picketers to do their own “people’s scream,” raising their arms and screaming for two minutes. One Occupier said that the scream was a way for “all of us to bring creative tactics to the pickets to sustain visibility and express our anger.”

It remains uncertain, however, when or if Sotheby’s will start negotiating again. “[Sotheby’s] needs experienced people, and these are the experienced guys,” Pat Walsh said. “So why do [the board members of Sotheby’s] have to be greedy? Give them their jobs back, give them their retirement, give them their benefits, give them something. They put heart into the place.”

By Dave Id, via San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia.

As U.S. congressional leaders are hashing out the next Farm Bill in the Senate — an event that occurs every five years — farmers, activists, food justice advocates, environmentalists and many others are hard at work trying to salvage conservation and alternative farming programs from budget cuts. The bill, in all likelihood, will further hand the food system over to industrial agriculture and food producers. It has sweeping implications across the globe, affecting domestic and global food assistance, farmer crop insurance, conservation programs, commodity subsidies, and more. In essence, the Farm Bill props up the industrial food system, even as it contains small programs that support alternative and organic agricultural practices.

Last Sunday, when 200 people set out to grow food in the overgrown fields of the Gill Tract, a 10-acre agricultural lot in the East Bay neighborhood of Albany, Ca., owned by the University of California — and slotted for development — they were directly challenging the ethos of the industrial food system that the Farm Bill represents. The plan for the action, dubbed “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Gill Tract,” was to celebrate Earth Day by turning this piece of rich agricultural land into a vibrant urban farm.

“You can’t just let people go out into the fields without telling them how to farm,” said Lesley Haddock, a UC-Berkeley student without any farming experience who joined the ambitious Take Back the Tract project. “But people just went out and started doing it — pulling weeds, roto-tilling. I was amazed. It was beautiful.”

At the end of the day, 15,000 donated seedlings had been planted and an occupation was emerging. Fifty or so people — complete with tents, a kitchen and a composting toilet — stayed on to protect the hard work of all the volunteers, including Albany residents, Occupy Oakland activists, UC students and community organizers.

The Gill Tract was once more than 100 acres but, thanks to encroaching commercial and residential development promoted by the university, very little of it remains. For more than 15 years, community organizers and citizens have tried to convince the university to preserve the land for agricultural purposes. According to Haddock, dialogue failed, so the farm occupation is their last-ditch effort to save one of the last pieces of good soil in the East Bay area.

“We are at the end of a struggle,” said Haddock, hopefully. She explained that formal communication with UC authorities about the tract has not occurred, adding, “Our communication is our occupation.” Last Wednesday, though, UC officials visited the farm and released a media statement demanding that the protesters vacate the land, along with allegations that occupiers were unsanitary in their handling of human waste (referring to the composting toilet, which is a viable method of ecological sanitation used globally). Take Back the Tract is inviting neighbors and the public to see for themselves what is going on with a “Farmland is for Farming Family Weekend,” including tours, teach-ins, activities and work opportunities.

There are no plans for this to be a long-term occupation. Take Back the Tract hopes that the university will allow them to use the land but is unsure what exactly it would take for a lasting hub for food production and education to permanently materialize. Take Back the Tract’s primary concern is food justice:

We are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to meet the needs of local communities. We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which our East Bay communities make use of available land — occupying it where necessary — for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.

In his article “Occupy the Farm: A Model of Resistance,” San Francicso educator and urban farmer Antonio Roman-Alcalá helps contextualize food sovereignty and the Gill Tract occupation in an unjust food system:

[F]ood sovereignty demands local and democratic control over our public institutions. And instead of a historically and logistically impossible division of “government” on one side and “markets” on the other, food sovereignty promotes a market that is accountable and humane because it is built up from the lives and decisions of those who are affected by it. This may all sound very theoretical, but land occupations like the effort to Take Back the Tract make these ideas real, immediate, tangible, and imaginable.

Anna Ghosh, communications manager with Food & Water Watch, works on advocating for a fair Farm Bill for consumers, farmers and the environment. According to Ghosh, what needs to change is who makes the rules that allow unchecked market consolidation by a small handful of corporations. Food & Water Watch publishes a useful primer on the Farm Bill and the corporate control of the food system.

“The work Occupy the Farm is doing is really important,” wrote Ghosh in an email, “because not only does it help people access good food, but it offers a great opportunity for people to learn more about what it takes to raise food and what is wrong with our current system.”

Confronting the kind of political power behind the tightly-controlled food system — which includes universities, corporations and the government — increasingly seems to require direct action tactics like occupation. The Gill Tract farmers and residents feel they know better than the UC Board of Regents what their Albany community needs: a farm. And those who work most closely with the land — the farmers, the ecologists, the conservationists — usually know best what the land needs: a better food system.

As the Gill Tract occupiers were coping with having their water shut off by UC authorities, “Mad Farmer” Wendell Berry — advocate of a 50-year farm bill based on ecological principles — was in Washington, D.C., delivering the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. In his comments, Berry suggested that Americans may tend towards one of two inclinations: “boomers” and “stickers.” In the parlance of Occupy, the boomers are the 1 percent — those who, according to Berry, are “motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.” He continues, “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Those who occupy are stickers. They believe if something is the right thing to do, they have every right to do it. This is this sort of attitude that will foster food sovereignty and transform the system from a centralized, industrial one into a localized, sustainable model for living communities, economies and ecosystems.

Wendell Berry’s closing sentiments warned of the dangerous path we are on as the wheels of industrial agriculture and a corporate food system churn at breakneck speed. But, like the Gill Tract occupiers who’ve created a community farm in the shadow of commercial development, Berry tells us, “This has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.”

The 2012 Farm Bill will not go far enough in supporting a democratic food system because those who write it don’t have ties to the land or the neighborhoods that will be most affected.

“An economy genuinely local and neighborly,” declares Berry, echoing the vision of the Gill Tract farm, “offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.” Take Back the Tract seems like the perfect antidote.

A general strike can be one of the most potent noncooperation methods in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. It is a widespread cessation of labor in an effort to bring all economic activity to a total standstill. Although it is easy to broadcast the call for a general strike, it is exceedingly difficult to implement for the maximal impact that it potentially exerts. What’s more, a general strike must be called prudently, because it loses its effectiveness if weakly executed.

The Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike in the United States on May 1 make me think of an instance in which a general strike was brilliantly carried out and with great effect, in Czechoslovakia in 1989 — for only two hours.

For years beforehand, the sharing of subversive literature, drama and ideas against the communist regime had been occurring in Czechoslovakia, virtually unseen. In fact, historian Theodore Ziółkowski reminds us that “almost from the moment when the Soviet empire, after Yalta, swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe, the fight against Communism began.” Thousands of clandestine samizdat (Russian for self-published) publications had been manually typed on onion skin with carbon paper, read, passed from hand to hand and circulated sub rosa. Incarcerated authors and dramatists worked intensively in contemplation and planning from their prison cells. While building strong networks among these civil society organizations in formation, Czechoslovaks considered how to withdraw their cooperation from the communist party-state, and thereby bend it to the popular will.

On November 17, 1989, in Czechoslovakia’s capital, Prague, police brutally interrupted a student demonstration. In response, the Czechoslovak people undertook what came to be known as the Ten Days, as I have recounted in more detail elsewhere. Events seemed to unfold instantaneously, but anyone who has studied nonviolent struggles knows otherwise. Aided by Radio Free Europe and labor unions, Prague’s theatrical circles would become catalytic in organizing a massive national resistance, including major demonstrations against the procedures of the regime. Citizens were emboldened by listening to Radio Free Europe and reading samizdat, and were thus aware of the popular national nonviolent mobilizations already underway in Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The Czechoslovaks also benefited from a more enlightened Soviet policy than during the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These relative advantages, and the caliber of leadership emanating from the playwrights and thinkers in theatrical circles, meant that the Czechoslovaks would be able to bring about their 1989 Velvet Revolution with astounding haste and effectiveness, a key element of which was the breadth of participation in a general strike.

Overnight on November 17 — Day One — and into November 18, students became determined to go on strike. They spread word to Prague’s Charles University and other colleges and universities. Although students were the first to call for strikes, by Saturday afternoon the denizens of Prague’s famous theaters had declared their support and were proposing a national general strike for November 27. The students straight away endorsed the proposed general strike and for six weeks would persist in striking on their own, to a great extent backed up by similar noncooperation measures by actors and dramatists. As the students published releases announcing their strikes, the theatrical managers and actors circulated theirs, while Radio Free Europe broadcast texts transmitted by telephone. Official media, having long toed the government line, condemned the officials’ violence of November 17. Employees at television stations denounced biased coverage and disputed untruthful news reports. Broadcasts of the first photographic images of the Prague demonstrations proved to be critical because they disclosed to thousands what was happening in their own country.

On Day Three — Sunday, November 19 — a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Prague for a demonstration to protest the police brutality against the students. That night a citizens’ pro-democracy organization called the Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been persistent critics of the party-state. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague. Tens of thousands of young people and students took over Wenceslas Square, carrying flags and chanting slogans: “Freedom,” “Resign,” “Now’s the Time” and “This Is It.”

With playwright Václav Havel as the guiding light, Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater became the nerve center of the Civic Forum, in part because of its proximity to Wenceslas Square. Its wardrobes and changing rooms were assigned to committees, and Havel became the author and mediator for the Civic Forum’s statements and positions. Throughout the Velvet Revolution, the forum would act as the speaker for the Czechoslovak people, while coordinating the collective nonviolent actions of the broad opposition. The Civic Forum encompassed most perspectives and sentiments of opposition, and included some reform-minded communists. A Slovak group, Public Against Violence, acted as partner to the forum.

Prague’s theaters were perfect for hearty political debate. Instead of the curtain rising on productions, the actors would lead audiences in discussions of the situation. Signs instantly appeared in theaters across the country reading “We Strike” or “On Strike,” rousing unity because of the popular esteem for the dramatic arts. Theaters in Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava went on strike the next day. Wherever actors and dramatists gathered, they joined the noncooperation.

On Tuesday, November 21 — Day Five — the Civic Forum and student representatives met officially with Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, who guaranteed that no violence would be administered against Czechoslovak citizens. The government announced that “socialism was not up for discussion,” but no one missed the meaning of such a meeting in the midst of mounting popular defiance. In Wenceslas Square in Prague and in Hviedoslav Square in Bratislava, mass demonstrations ratified calls for a general strike on November 27. Václav Havel addressed the multitude as the exemplar of the Civic Forum, his speech blunter and less courtly than usual. When he and the respected banned priest Václav Malý spoke, the crowd could hear every word, because rock groups had lent huge amplifiers. A message from the Roman Catholic František Cardinal Tomášek declared, “We cannot wait any more,” stressing that Czechoslovakia was surrounded by countries that “had broken the back of totalitarianism,” referring to Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. Bells rang. One journalist reported 200,000 sets of key rings unforgettably jangling. Throngs chanted “Today Prague, tomorrow the whole country!” and “Time’s up!” Striking students held sit-ins at institutions of higher learning throughout Prague.

On Wednesday, November 22 — Day Six — the Civic Forum formally announced a two-hour general strike for Monday, November 27. The forum and its partner, Public Against Violence, sought an incapacitating general strike with the participation of virtually every citizen to exert sufficient pressure on the government to accelerate a rapid, nonviolent transition of power. A general strike could reduce the threat of reprisals among large numbers of participants, yet many were ambivalent about hurting an already stagnating economy. By limiting the strike to two hours, the effect of a general strike would be wielded while minimizing harm to the economy.

Coal miners in northern Bohemia announced that they would join the work stoppage, but no one knew to what extent laborers in the country’s smokestack industries would join the growing noncooperation action. By Thursday, November 23 — Day Seven — Wenceslas Square saw more than 300,000 marching. The party-state started to split and divide. The ministry of defense that day announced that the Czechoslovak military forces would not be deployed against Czech and Slovak peoples. The Civic Forum issued a statement renewing commitment to a Czechoslovak tradition: “We are against violence and do not seek revenge.”

Striking students insistent on free elections and a change in government then sent hundreds of their numbers into the countryside to visit industrial plants and talk with workers, enlisting their involvement in the general strike. The government raised calamitous warnings of economic breakdown and tried in other ways to frighten the workforce not to join the general strike. Reporters who traveled to machinery works encountered busloads of communist militia members blocking the students from contacting the laborers and sharing handouts. The Reverend Václav Malý, now a spokesperson for the Civic Forum, proclaimed that workers at more than 500 enterprises had pledged to strike.

On Saturday, November 25 — Day Nine — the Civic Forum pronounced the upcoming national general strike as a “referendum” on communist rule. In Prague, 800,000 marched; in Bratislava 100,000 demonstrated. On national television, with Havel announcing that the planned November 27 national general strike would proceed, the forum had become the rudder for the nationwide preparations for the two-hour strike action. The forum encompassed virtually the entire Czechoslovak opposition to the party-state, served as the representative for the Czechoslovak public, coordinated the opposition’s civil resistance and had become a national voice. Comporting itself in a sensible, ethical and deliberately open manner — if a slightly chaotic one — the Civic Forum called its program “What We Want” and concentrated on civil and human rights, a free and independent judiciary, multiparty electoral democracy and political pluralism, economic and free-market reforms, and alterations to the nation’s environmental and foreign policies.

Roughly 6,000 strike committees were at work preparing to bring all economic activity to a halt. As midday approached on Monday, November 27, the population stopped functioning as church bells rang. Minutes before noon, a television broadcaster stated that he was joining the strike and would go off the air. Taxi drivers aligned themselves so as to block Prague’s ring road with a two-mile succession of cabs. This elegantly executed national noncooperation action lasted from noon until two o’clock — during lunchtime, so as not to endanger jobs. The colossal industrial strike reflected no divisions between classes, as laborers, workers of all skills, intellectuals, academicians, students, artist and theatrical personnel together orchestrated the nationwide general strike.

This countrywide, successful act of noncooperation brought the Civic Forum and the government into discussions that would soon lead to a peaceful democratic transition of power. The party-state began to yield. The Civic Forum and the government began discussions. The “leading role” of the communist party, protected in a constitutional clause, was formally rescinded. On December 29, 1989, the Federal Assembly, the communist-dominated national legislature, unanimously elected Havel as president.

The artists, playwrights, academicians, priests and activist intellectuals wanted genuinely revolutionary change that would transform Czechoslovakia permanently and construct a resilient democracy. Years of prudently building the strength of civil society had culminated in the ability to mount a memorable and effective national general strike. With the united voices of the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, the people had brought about an expeditious transition of power. Czech educator Jan Urban explains the logic of those who were coordinating Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution: “[F]rom the first moment, we wanted to be aggressively nonviolent in our stance — to make a power of our lack of weapons.” He summarized, “In the course of one week, in November 1989, Winter blossomed into Spring in Czechoslovakia. A nonviolent mass movement … triumphed … in transition from the negation of the old to the building of the new.”

An installation art piece that was set up in Speaker's Corner in Singapore on Human Rights Day in 2011 to represent the 170 who have been executed between 1999 and 2010. There was a blank canvas card for each person and a list of names that are known, with a voice in a little speaker reading out the names.

Execution day is always a Friday in Singapore. As the night sky slowly lightens into day, the inmate is taken from his or her cell and escorted to the gallows. At 6 a.m., the trapdoor opens and the inmate falls through. By the afternoon, the family should have collected the body, or the state will deal with it as it sees fit. And that, as far as Singapore’s authorities are concerned, is that.

In the past, very few people spoke against the death penalty. The message most children received in schools was that it is part and parcel of the tough laws that distinguish Singapore from other dangerous, crime-ridden cities. It was not something to be questioned, or even mentioned much at all. Apart from the sense of it being irrelevant to the average law-abiding citizen’s life, the topic of death is considered inauspicious and therefore not often a subject of conversation in Singapore’s Asian communities. In recent years, though, thanks to the growing influence of the Internet and social media, an increasing number of inmates’ stories are being told, and awareness of the death penalty is slowly rising.

A few keystrokes and a click of the button

When the state-owned newspapers, radio stations and TV channels that dominated the Singaporean media landscape and public gatherings were all subject to censorship, getting the word out about the death penalty in Singapore was difficult. To learn about it, people would have to already have made the decision to seek out more information themselves. Attracting new faces to a movement against it was a huge challenge.

But the proliferation of new media has made it much easier. News, photographs, event notifications and even excerpts of Singapore’s penal code are being shared with the click of a button, reaching a larger audience than activists could possibly have hoped for previously.

Organizations such as the Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Campaign (SADPC) and We Believe in Second Chances — a group that I co-founded — quickly set up social media networks to disseminate information as quickly as possible. “Social media got involved to lend us the publicity that the campaign needs, which is a very good thing as the mainstream media usually block such news out,” says Rachel Zeng from SADPC, in an email interview.

Alternative websites such as The Online Citizen have also contributed to the discourse on the death penalty by featuring articles that shed light not only on legal and philosophical arguments, but also stories of individuals on death row. One such individual — arguably the one who has attracted the most attention to the issue in recent years — is a young Sabahan named Yong Vui Kong.

A boy and the campaign

Arrested in 2007 at the age of 19, Vui Kong was convicted of trafficking 42 grams of heroin into Singapore and sentenced to death under the mandatory death penalty as stipulated in the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Vui Kong’s story is a sad tale of poverty and desperation. As a child he grew up on his grandfather’s plantation, going to school early in the morning and coming home to work late into the night. His mother, a single parent, continues to suffer from clinical depression and relies on medication. He left school and made his way to Kuala Lumpur while in his early teens, where he fell in with gangs that led him towards a life as a drug runner.

At the time of his arrest, Vui Kong was illiterate, unaware that his actions would attract such a harsh punishment. But once in remand — and later on death row — he began to turn to Buddhism, rising early in the morning to meditate and study scriptures. He also started to educate himself, learning to read and write in Mandarin and Malay, and making some headway with English. His family and lawyers have all remarked upon his remarkable transformation and reform.

Vui Kong’s case has since sparked off campaigns for his life in both Singapore and his home country of Malaysia, which also has the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking. Malaysian Chinese media featured his story in newspapers and on the covers of magazines, galvanizing the Malaysian Chinese community into action — especially those in his hometown of Sandakan in Sabah.

Part of the 109,346 signatures delivered to the president of Singapore at Istana in August 2010.

On August 24, 2010, his family, accompanied by Sabah Member of Parliament Datuk Chua Soon Bui, walked to the back gates of Istana (the official residence of the president of the Republic of Singapore) to deliver a petition signed by 109,346 people asking for a second chance for Vui Kong. Images of his family kneeling before the guards at the gate quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter.

Vui Kong’s story of youth, repentance and reform appealed to many, drawing them into the campaign.

“At the age that Vui Kong was caught, I was so much more fortunate than he was. I didn’t have to worry about income, a roof over my head, and I had good education,” says Priscilla Chia, founding member of We Believe in Second Chances. “It made me sympathize with Vui Kong a lot more.”

Vui Kong’s story has also inspired a song written by Singaporean musicians and a play produced by Amnesty International Malaysia.

A boy and the law

While activists appealed to the public to support Vui Kong, his lawyer, M. Ravi — incidentally the only human rights lawyer in Singapore willing to consistently take up death penalty cases, often pro bono, and work with campaigners — took on a series of challenges in court.

“In my opinion, this is a landmark case,” says Rachel Zeng. “In the past, once a convict is sentenced to death and the appeal period was over and clemency denied, the court would never allow anymore challenges or appeals from the defense.”

Singaporean lawyer M. Ravi

In Vui Kong’s case, however, Ravi had managed to win not one, but two stays of execution so as to be able to challenge his client’s sentence on legal grounds. Ravi and Vui Kong returned to court again and again, raising issues such as the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty, the president’s discretionary powers in granting clemency and prosecutorial discretion.

Every appeal and application made was dismissed by Singapore’s highest court, the Court of Appeal. But with every trip to the Supreme Court, Singaporeans began to learn more about the death penalty and its application. For the first time, many Singaporeans discovered the difference between the death penalty and the mandatory death penalty, which removes discretionary powers from the judges when it comes to sentencing.

We learned that in granting clemency, the president is required to act according to the advice of the very legislators who implemented the mandatory death penalty in the first place. We learned that it is possible to convict and sentence drug mules to death while masterminds have all charges against them dropped.

“People found out from these challenges of the inherent injustices and systemic obstacles stacked against people who are from similar socio-economic background like Vui Kong,” says Ted Tan from ThinkCentre, a local NGO that carries out research on democracy and human rights issues.

Slow progress with a long way to go

Having been involved with the anti-death penalty campaign in Singapore since 2009, Rachel Zeng has seen many changes:

More people are aware of how the mandatory death penalty works. More people have taken an interest in discussing it, whether they are pro or against, on blogs and online forums. People have stepped up to voice out against it, and groups have worked together, and are still working together, on the campaign against the death penalty. Social media has chipped in to help us publicize the campaign.

“[The Vui Kong campaign] has also generated support and awareness of civil society across the causeway [linking Singapore and Malaysia] in a more sustained way than in the past that I can recall,” Ted Tan adds. “But collaboration could be better.”

While Vui Kong’s campaign appears to have made much headway in Malaysia, with the de-facto Law Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Abdul Aziz and the Malaysian Bar Council coming out to voice support for abolition of the death penalty, things are moving along at a slower pace in Singapore.

Even though awareness and discussion has increased over the years, the fact remains that many Singaporeans are still pro-death penalty. After a lifetime of being told by authorities that the death penalty is a necessary “trade-off” for safety and security and the well-being of our children, the task of overturning people’s belief in capital punishment is a thankless uphill battle.

It doesn’t help that different groups are sometimes unable to agree on fundamental stances. Certain groups favor the complete abolition of the death penalty in Singapore, while others are only opposed to the mandatory death penalty. And amidst such discussions, all campaigning is required to be extremely fluid and adaptable as cases sprout up, families approach activists with pleas for help, appeals are dismissed and the clock counts down on inmates’ lives. The demands are heavy on activists who can only volunteer their time, money and energy on top of already-exhausting full-time jobs.

Still, every anti-death penalty campaigner in Singapore understands that things will not change overnight. And so we learn to recognize the little victories, and to stand our ground until the time when Friday mornings bring no more heartbreak.

ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

On the morning of April 25, 2012, ACT UP took back those same streets, alongside activists from the Occupy movement, itself aspiring to be the kind of umbrella that can gather and propel young queers and allies to work together. Hundreds of people carried those trademark ACT UP banners (with some homemade signs for that Occupy touch) in a march down from City Hall to the New York Housing Administration to Trinity Church. A break-out action took the intersection at Park Street, where activists set up house with sofas and chairs, chaining themselves together with the cry, “Housing saves lives!” Another group dressed in Robin Hood green locked down an intersection at Wall Street, demanding a 0.05 percent tax on financial transactions to funnel to AIDS relief. I imagined each person I saw in a fading ACT UP shirt — the seriously garish image of Ronald Reagan in neon branded AIDSGATE, and countless pink triangles now on a field of soft grey — to be a surviving elder, or standing in the garment of a lover or friend who should have lived to walk alongside them.

Reclaiming that story — of greed and neglect, and also of resistance and loss — is what drove Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard to produce their film United In Anger, using footage drawn from their joint archive, The ACT UP Oral History Project. Schulman recalls that the film’s origins were in her visceral response to an NPR story on the 20th anniversary of AIDS that she heard while driving a rental car through Los Angeles:

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

I almost crashed the car.

She didn’t crash. She did call up Hubbard, though, and their work began. The film premiered this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of ACT UP.

Now, just a few months after the birth of another direct action protest movement on Wall Street, it is difficult not to connect these familiar images through a quarter-century-long struggle. Here are the throngs of young people linking arms along Broadway, the high sheen of cop uniforms as police push their way into crowds, locked arms being wrenched apart in the grip of twice as many cops as there ever are activists, and the way — as he’s being loaded into a cop wagon — one of the activists turns his head to call back to the others, to the cameras. It’s a performance, and a sincere one, that’s become part of so much protest, and it’s captured here well before the YouTube age.

ACT UP hit the streets just as cheap consumer video did, defining the visual and tactical conventions of activist video. Through the late 1980s, ACT UP spawned several activist video crews, like DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In addition to serving as witnesses at actions, DIVA produced compilation tapes to educate and inspire ACT UP activists around the country and the world, who then shared them with each other at parties, bars or through the mail.

Captured in all that glorious 80s footage is a raw, life-affirming anger. For all the comparisons drawn between Occupy and ACT UP,  Occupy has yet to fully embody this urgency, or this rage, that transforms pain into action and back again. The most moving sequences of United In Anger are set to a funeral march, a low drumbeat that carries through political funerals in Manhattan and Washington, culminating in a group funeral procession to the White House, where several ACT UP members requested their remains be delivered as a final demand.

As powerful as ACT UP’s tactics are to observe — banner drops at Shea Stadium and Grand Central Station, storming the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration — it’s the testimony of ACT UP members that provides real depth, humor and contradiction to these victories and contentious setbacks.

The most dramatic of these was ACT UP’s legendary Sunday-mass protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which turned even some of their supporters against them. For many in ACT UP, that was no failure. “We said for years in ACT UP that our job was not to be liked,” said Ann Northrop, an early member. “We were not doing what we were doing to get the public to like us. We were doing what we were doing to accomplish something about particular issues, and I think we did that, enormously successfully.”

What cannot be ignored, in this film or in our attempts to make sense of the early years of the epidemic, is the power of people to organize in the face of death, to claim expertise, to lead. As the gatekeepers in medicine and government struggled to catch up with the virus, ACT UP took caring for their communities into their own hands and took their fight to the doors of those in power. Through United In Anger, we meet activists who worked to redefine AIDS, to take account of their lives and what could be done to preserve them, and to hold those who abandoned them to death accountable. “In my view as a witness, people did not die of AIDS,” Shulman said in a recent interview. “They died of government neglect and indifference. These are political deaths.”

Colman McCarthy, the former Washington Post columnist who established a second career teaching nonviolence in high schools and colleges, once published this pithy gem: “I had a student at the University of Maryland who wrote a 13-word paper that has stayed with me: ‘Question: Why are we violent but not illiterate? Answer: Because we are taught to read.’”

There was a time when only the 1 percent learned to read, but in the 19th century a movement for universal literacy took hold. Though this global effort is still a work in progress (even today illiteracy is enforced culturally, religiously, politically and economically in many contexts) it has dramatically changed the world. This transformation has not been easy or magical. Like every movement, this far-reaching campaign challenged the injustice and debilitating inertia of the existing order. It resisted the systems that benefited from the literacy monopoly and slowly established the right to read as the default.

As McCarthy’s student infers, we are as much in need of nonviolence education today as we were of literacy training a century ago. To extend this analogy a bit further, systematic nonviolence literacy — teaching the principles and practices of nonviolent power — offers options beyond passivity, on the one hand, or more violence, on the other.

Most of those who have participated in the nonviolence trainings I’ve been part of over the years have been in their late teens and on up. “Training” in this context is a slight misnomer. By the time we hit our teen years we’ve already been trained deeply in the ways of violence. From then on, our violence training is often reinforced by virtually daily refresher courses, which tend to undermine our potential for nonviolent alternatives and to feed a belief that nonviolent change is impossible. Nonviolence education is thus less a form of “training” than of “re-training”: deconstructing and reframing deeply ingrained patterns, attitudes and behaviors.

Is it possible, though, to start this kind of peace education early enough to provide children with a durable foundation not in violence but in nonviolence? That is, for nonviolence to begin as the default?

This is a thorny issue for many reasons, including the tenacious nature/nurture debate, which has sparked a recent cottage industry of research on topics like empathy and forgiveness. For my purposes here, I will sidestep wading into this thicket, just as I will give no more than a passing glance to the growing proliferation of K-12 peace studies curricula and programming. Instead my attention here is drawn to what one could call “toddler” nonviolence training. Even before kindergarten — in fact, even before pre-school — there seems to be a quiet peace-building movement afoot.

How do I know? I’d like to say that I’ve done copious, systematic research in which I compiled an extensive database of cases and curricula and then devised clever instruments for evaluating them. This, though, isn’t the case. Instead, my expertise in this arena rests entirely on the fact that virtually every weekday morning I take my two-year-old daughter, Leah, to toddler classes.

Chicago, our hometown, is studded with hundreds of parks with hundred-year-old field houses that, no matter the weather, are crowded every morning with innumerable toddlers and their parents. While the sessions are called classes, “the pedagogy” steers toward creativity, self-expression, adventure and fun. There’s structure (free play, music, art project, snack), but just enough to allow great helpings of spontaneity. There’s alone-time — what seems a kind of freeing and freewheeling self-possession — and group activity.

All of this, you might say, is what one expects of two year-olds. But what has struck me, being immersed in this space over and over again for the last year-and-a-half, is the lack of chaos and conflict. Most of the children, it seems, have not been schooled in the mechanics of group conflict yet. When conflict happens (someone takes another child’s toy or one child pushes another) there’s a kind of awkwardness to the vignette, as if the script of conflict is unpracticed, tentative, uncertain.

Most of the time, though, conflict isn’t what transpires. Instead the environment is hyperactivity personified, but a hyperactivity that has an unexpected lack of anxious tension and pre-loaded expectations of conflict or violence.

If my reading of this is right, the toddler nonviolence formation program I detect here is built largely by the children themselves, with just enough guidance and cues from the teacher (Ms. Margaret, Ms. Laura, Mr. Tim or Ms. Valentina, as the case may be) to give them space to make this super-charged serenity a reality.

After being there a few months, I began to notice the posters on the walls. The one that got me thinking was named “Getting Along” with a colorful spray of sayings:

Be kind
Use polite words
Listen carefully
Think first
Respect everyone
Take turns
Be honest
Help others
Do your best

From Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac to Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Effective People (not to mention the ethical prescriptions of many of the world’s religions before and since), we have been presented with lists of suggested action for right living. This poster sports a stellar set that, I have no doubt, would have left Gandhi beaming.

At another field house there was another set of guidelines:

Follow directions
Clean up after yourself
Share with others
Say please and thank you
Listen quietly to others
Take turns

While there was some overlap with the first list, this set seemed a bit more focused on maintaining order (directions and cleanliness), while still highlighting interpersonal peace (sharing, listening, cordial speech, and, like the first poster, taking turns).

What moved me most, though, was the Take Ten poster, which was hung near one emblazoned with the words, “Violence Free Zone”:

Take Ten!
Talk it out!
Walk it out!
Wait it out!

Take TEN…
…Deep Breaths (before you say something that hurts)
…Steps Back (before getting involved in a fight)
…Seconds (before using something as a weapon)
Violence has had its turn… and it isn’t working. Take Ten… it’s time!
Take Ten is an action plan for non-violence! (created by Anne Parry)

What? The field houses of Chicago are promoting an action plan for nonviolence that critiques violence — because it doesn’t work — and then gets specific about tactics? Breathe deep (center oneself), step back (create spaciousness and see the bigger picture), and count to ten (not simply to lower your blood pressure but to give you time to think before reaching for that trusty weapon). After encountering this latest specimen, I began to ask, “Who is the intended audience?” After all, even the most precocious kids here aren’t reading yet. So maybe it’s for some of the older kids who use the building at other times of the day? Maybe it’s for the parents, or even some of the employees?

In the end, I came to this: These tactics and prescriptions amount to a vision woven into this space. They comprise an intention, a blessing, a wager. To those who can read, they are meant literally. To those who cannot, they are a promise that the rest of us can deliver, so that the peaceableness that is still percolating in these two-year-olds can be nourished and deepened. Each of these spaces is a house of peace where toddlers practice peace in their inmost being, while those who have passed this stage can perhaps reconnect with this spirit and build on it in a world of violence and injustice.

So what can this say to the rest of us?  Some years ago Robert Fulghum published a bestseller entitled All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, which also offers some of the wisdom I have encountered in Chicago’s field houses. What my small-sample, anecdotally-based study suggests is that this learning starts at least two years earlier.

The question is what we do with this when we enter what we claim is the real world. These are the potential building blocks for a culture where everyone matters. We are thus called to build movements that put these guidelines into practice and even try to recreate the atmosphere I have discovered in the Chicago field houses: creative, expressive, adventurous, and — dare I say it? — fun.

Nonviolence literacy may start at two years old, but it will flourish only if we read the world in a new and transformative way.

An article published by CounterPunch yesterday, “Inconvenient Truths about Tar Sands Action,” argues that the grassroots campaign targeting the Keystone XL pipeline was nothing more than “a manipulated charade, funded and run with loads of money from pro-Obama Democrats through non-transparent organizations like the Tides Foundation.” It follows, then, according to the article, that the real goal of Tar Sands Action “was to manufacture Obama a ‘green victory’ during his first term in the run up to the 2012 election.”

In short, for those thousands of you who participated in the White House sit-ins or encirclement and became “True Believers in the mission,” you were duped. What you took part in “was not social change, nor was it grassroots empowerment.” You became nothing more than a name on an email list. You were “converted into clicktivists who will hopefully contribute money to the Obama ‘I’m In’ 2012 Presidential campaign, ecological landscape be damned.”

I’d ask you how it feels, but I should know. I’m one of you. The article mentions Waging Nonviolence along with the socialist group Solidarity and author Naomi Klein as being among the “principled radicals” who “drank the kool-aid.” So how do I feel? Well, for someone who has supposedly been drugged, I feel remarkably sober and unconvinced.

To believe that the Democrats mobilized thousands of people to get arrested as part of an effort to manufacture an environmental win for Obama is to ignore the fact that he rejected this gift-wrapped, hand-delivered win. He never fully acknowledged the claims of the campaign, and has recently spoken positively of the pipeline, thereby ensuring neither an environmental win nor the support of environmentalists.

Despite the joyous rhetoric  (“BIG NEWS: We won. You won.”) that emerged from the campaign after Obama’s November announcement that he would be delaying a decision on the pipeline until 2013, excitement has waned in the months since. More recent emails from organizer Bill McKibben have focused on the hard realities of the pipeline — for instance, Obama’s recent trip to Oklahoma, where he “lauded his administration’s fast-tracking of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like a campaign or a president working in cahoots. Yet, according to the author of the CounterPunch article who goes by the pseudonym The Insider, the two have been in lock-step, tricking environmentalists into doing the Democrat’s bidding. Never mind that the president hasn’t kept up his end of the bargain; the evidence of deception is clear to The Insider. For starters, there’s the fact that tar sands oil will be flowing into this country with or without the Keystone XL. So, since Tar Sands Action (TSA) is not targeting all entry points at once or trying to smash the whole industry at once, it is clearly just a sham. From The Insider’s perspective, TSA’s effort to build a mass movement from scratch through a series of concrete victories is irrelevant. What’s important is ideological purity.

This is where the Tides Foundation conspiracy comes in to play — which is where the article starts sounding like a Glenn Beck rant. While neither TSA nor its organizational affiliate 350.org received any Tides money (at least according to the document cited by The Insider), many of the groups that supported it did — for instance, the Sierra Club, NRDC and Friends of the Earth. Why does that matter? It boils down to Tides having “Democratic allied funders.” That’s the smoking gun. And apparently we can just take it on good faith that anyone who accepts money from Tides is actively working to reelect Obama. The proof is in the fact that some people showed up at the White House sit-ins and encirclement wearing Obama pins and shirts.

The Insider draws out this idea of co-optation further. “Tar Sands Action was a sophisticated, extremely well-funded model for creating the illusion of movement building, complete with mass civil disobedience,” the article contends, “but the real goal, mirroring its cousin, ‘The 99 Spring,’ was (and is) to hammer Republicans and fire up grassroots enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.”

Co-optation is always a legitimate and serious concern, but as Nathan Schneider noted in regards to the 99% Spring, it’s important to ask, “Who’s co-opting whom?”

The logic of a civil resistance movement is always to co-opt the existing structures of the society around it, to radicalize them, to drive them away from the status quo and into doing something truly revolutionary. And it is precisely by co-opting these institutions that the movement is generally able to build enough capacity to make real change.

That’s how I’ve always seen Tar Sands Action: as a campaign that recognized the power of grassroots action but knew it needed the reach of the big green NGOs to be effective. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, point out, “The tactical and strategic advantages of high levels of diverse participation explain — in large part — the historical success of nonviolent campaigns.” So, to ignore the big greens and their massive base of supporters is to make your job as an organizer much harder. But to co-opt them, their email lists and their political influence is to give your campaign a huge boost.

Of course, doing so is not easy, despite what The Insider thinks about the Tides money that somehow made all the pieces fall into place. I recently spoke with Linda Capato, who handled recruitment for TSA, and she explained just how much the big green groups had to move outside their comfort zone to support the two weeks of civil disobedience.

We’ve always been told don’t do something that’s too nuts. Mass civil disobedience in front of the White House gates for two weeks, that’s crazy. Sierra Club isn’t going to sign on because of course they can’t. They have those mandates. NRDC isn’t going to be supportive. All these big greens are not going to come to the table and it was like okay, we can do it without them. And so it was this moment of let’s try. And then, as it was happening and as we were organizing, everyone was jumping onboard because it was a smart idea, it was the time to do it, it was the right target, the right strategy, and the right tactic.

That, ultimately, is what The Insider is overlooking. The Keystone XL was a strategic target which had a major leverage point in the president, since the decision was his alone to approve or reject. It was not meant to bring down the tar sands industry. To fault it for not doing so is like faulting the lunch counter sit-ins for not ending segregation. Furthermore, to say that “Martin Luther King must be turning in his grave,” is to deny that King not only appealed to the moral rhetoric of Lyndon Johnson but also met with him.

The TSA sit-ins and encirclement of the White House were hardly Obama campaign rallies. They were strategic actions meant to draw in a diverse crowd. A few radicals on tripods or in armlocks are wonderful, but to succeed, the effort needed a much broader coalition. Make no mistake, though, most of the organizers who helped guide TSA come from radical organizing backgrounds; for them, using the Obama rhetoric was a way to underscore the gap between the president’s lackluster record and his inspiring rhetoric.

That kind of messaging has far more potential to stimulate a mass movement than the kind of angry screaming that often takes place at protest and is why McKibben at one point said, “We are not going to do President Obama the favor of attacking him. We are going to hold the Obama campaign to the standard it set in 2008. Denying this pipeline would send a jolt of electricity through the people that elected this president.” That, to me, sounds like an attempt by TSA to co-opt one of the largest political movements in recent years and galvanize it into acting for the environment. But all The Insider hears is “well-funded, political theater and public relations.”

The problem with conspiracy theories in general is that they dismiss the contributions of ordinary people. Instead of giving credit to the participants in TSA for shaping their own campaign, which involved significant sacrifices both of time and body, the conspiracy theorist disparages those who took part as “rank-and-file day-to-day worker-bees.”

That’s simply not the case for Tar Sands Action. The reality is that as much as the campaign was about bringing thousands of people to the White House, it was also about empowering local communities to take their own action against the pipeline. ”A lot of the communities along the pipeline route are working together that haven’t before,” Linda Capato told me. “Folks in Nebraska who have been dealing with imminent domain are working with folks in Texas on the same issue. If the zombie pipeline does come back, at least we’ll have a lot more power and part of that power is these communities are talking to each other.”

The Insider concludes by quoting activist John Stauber, another skeptic of TSA, who says, “I would love to see the real people who have bought the hype and taken these civil disobedience trainings, and who have gone through the arrests, rise up and seize control of their own movement.” Perhaps he just needs to open his eyes.