Last weekend, Pax Christi Metro NYC honored Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ as part of its Peacemaking Through the Arts Winter Benefit. Outside, the weather was icy, but, inside, friends gathered from as far away as Montreal, Canada, to celebrate Dan. I was invited to give a “testimonial” about a man I had known since birth. It was a tough assignment, but I thought I would share it with the Waging Nonviolence community. I did not really talk about all his many accomplishments; those are well documented in many places, including his autobiography, 

It is hard to sum up a life in a few sentences, especially when the man living that life so boldly and so fully is sitting in the front row and is smiling wryly and with tolerance. This assignment makes me think about retirement—it brings up a lot of iconic images, doesn’t it? You know; the gold watch for years of dedicated service, the gilded plaque etched with platitudes, the break room or Elk Lodge or church hall party. And then the life afterwards: golf, fishing, carnival cruises, and a fun and stimulating hobby like carving duck decoys or learning French.

Some people never retire. Dan Berrigan has never retired. And we are here to say thank you and thank God for that.

Everywhere I go I meet people who express to me overwhelming love and admiration for my uncle. They mention his poetry, his prose, his bold activism… but most of all they talk about his time. Many of you know this and have experienced the gift of my uncle’s time and attention.

Uncle Dan, you spend so much time with people. And I know the delight you take in their accomplishments. You meet their sorrows and disappointments with empathy and compassion. You give gentle advice without judgment or hector. Your advice has literally shaped the lives—and for the better—of so many people.

Uncle Dan, for so many people, you are a critical link, a life link to a church that has disappointed and alienated so many. An institution that has forgotten or dismissed the man we are taught to follow, the man who prayed and thought and acted on his feet and with his friends, who made a poem out of his life and always had time for children, for women, for the sick and the disabled, for the disenfranchised, for the castigated and the cast-asides. You keep the gospels alive in a cynical time. You bring us back to Jesus, to that man. And you bring the church out of the darkness and the pomp, you free our brother Jesus from its clutches and you bring the sacraments out to us: to the soup kitchen, the picket line, the occupied block, the AIDS clinic, you bring the church to where people are.

I revel—in a slightly awkward sort of way—at these encounters, basking in the refracted glory of my Uncle Dan, agreeing wholeheartedly with how awesome he is and recalling all of our own far-reaching, hilarious, profound and life-altering discussions.

“Well, we solved it all, haven’t we?” he’ll sum up. Or, sometimes, “Come on, we’ve been good long enough,” he’ll quip, and we pour a drink.

I stand here on behalf of  my family—but really on behalf of all these people who celebrate you Dan—far too many to be in this room. And on behalf of all of them, I say: thank you for leading, thank you for listening, thank you for loving.

I would love to give you a gold watch and a holiday cruise to honor your ongoing non-retirement. But instead, I will share the gift of my own poetry. Yep, you heard it here first: Dan Berrigan is not the only Berrigan kissed by Calliope.

A little background. Every Christmas, members of the Jesuit community choose a secret Santa. In addition to a small gift, the men write each other limericks. They are often read in Don Moore’s inimitable cadence. I love this tradition. Limericks unleash the poet inside each of us, and so, to close, I offer my own limerick:

Uncle Dan, you are inspiring
For peace, synapses are firing
Your words are so kind
Brilliant is your mind
So please, no thoughts of retiring.

And because one limerick is never enough, here is another (and I promise it is the last):

Berrigan, you’re second to none
The struggles for justice are won
Love, all for the least
You’re more than a priest
We are all your daughters and son.

That’s it. After Liz McAlister (my mom) and Bishop Tom Gumbleton both spoke, Uncle Dan got up and read a real poem. He wrote it soon after September 11, 2001. I had never heard it before. Far cry from limerick, but good (nonetheless).

Parable

Once on a time
the heart, a sure compass
voyaged
by torrid demarche, portage, storm

to the Land of Basilisks, Neros
tarnished Judges, Dementia
enthroned, Commissars born
thumbs down.

Heart
crossed the border surreptitiously—
was shortly seized.
Crime; “Demeaning
the peoples’ and the state’s integrity,
displaying
for public viewing
a decadent artifact.”

“Honor, the accused was apprehended
distributing in a public place
a drawing entitled ‘Self Portrait,’
portraying
a human frame naked, arms outstretched
a bird suspended from each palm

and in blank mid rib cage
a curious organ
otherwise unknown.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

Since the mid-1990s, Douglass has peered clearly into the void of The Unspeakable by making a protracted study of assassination and its meaning. His raft of books on the power of nonviolent action that preceded this focus—including Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God— prepared him to unearth the place of premeditated, targeted killing in the maintenance of the state; in the reinforcement of a culture rooted in the saving power of violence; and (as Douglass brilliantly and soberly illuminates) in the attempt by systems of domination to suppress and extinguish the nonviolent option.  For fifteen years he has been engaged in a long-term research and publishing project focused on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first book that appeared was JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. This carefully researched study, published in 2008, tracks President Kennedy’s gradual shift from a traditional Cold Warrior to a covert peacemaker who was engaging with his putative enemies to defuse volatile international crises and to attempt to build a more enduring peace on the major fronts of his day, including Vietnam, Berlin, Indonesia, Cuba, and the barreling nuclear arms race. Douglass assembles convincing evidence that Kennedy was assassinated because of this pursuit of the nonviolent alternative.

Before completing his next projects on King and Malcolm X, though, Douglass began researching the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. As he explained in a 2011 talk at Marquette University, it increasingly became evident to him that what he was discovering about Gandhi’s assassination could shed light on the dynamics of the assassinations that took place in the U.S. in the 1960s.

This week—as we marked the sixty-fourth anniversary of Gandhi’s death on January 30—Douglass published the fruit of this research: Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth (Orbis Books). This summary highlights Douglass’s findings:

While researching [the Kennedy assassination], Douglass learned from Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Indian liberation leader, that his grandfather had been killed by a conspiracy involving powerful nationalist forces within the Indian government—not a lone gunman. This led to Douglass’s rigorously investigating thousands of documents on Gandhi’s 1948 murder. He now provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why. “Gandhi’s murder, followed by the repression of its truth,” writes Douglass, “forms a paradigm of killing and deceitful cover-up that U.S. citizens would soon have to confront in our own government.” No other contemporary writer is exposing the mechanics of assassination as methodically and bravely as Douglass. But because he is a Catholic independent scholar and activist most well-known for his writings on nonviolence and suffering, this book is more than a fresh look at historical circumstances: it’s spiritual spelunking into the depravity of unchecked political power.

Douglass has devoted his life to illuminating the potential of nonviolent action to create options in a world caught in a web of violent and unjust forces—especially by engaging with, having faith in, and loving the enemy. He has done this through his writing, but even more importantly, he has done this by pursuing his own Gandhian experiments with truth. Here are two examples.

In 1979 Douglass, Rosemary Powers and John Clark engaged in nonviolent action at Naval Submarine Base Bangor, the Pacific homeport for the U.S. Navy’s Trident submarine fleet in Washington State. They scrambled over a security fence with the hope of making their way to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC), a nuclear weapons storage area at the center of the base. As Douglass wrote in “Pilgrimage to Ground Zero” in Sojourners magazine (March 1980):

Our plan was to walk through Bangor’s woods, crossing six roads patrolled by naval security, and eventually climb over SWFPAC’s two high security fences in order to pray at “the physical site of an evil we all refuse to see, and thus refuse to take responsibility for”—as we put it in our advance leaflet to the Marines, passed out at the base three weeks earlier.

In the course of our pilgrimage to SWFPAC we spent 12 hours undetected on the base, continuously pursued by helicopters, civilian security guards, the Naval Intelligence Service, and hundreds of Marines as we climbed fences and crawled through the brush… We were finally arrested near a conventional weapons site just short of the high-security fences of SWFPAC.

In meditating on this anti-nuclear pilgrimage, Douglass noted the urgency of finding a way to “break the hypnotic spell nuclear weapons have over America.” He explained that:

After reflecting on the absurdity of the situation—what does one do in the presence of an H-bomb?—we decided that the only thing we could do was to go to SWFPAC, in a pilgrimage to that point of responsibility. Once there, we could only ask God’s forgiveness and mercy for our responsibility in creating such weapons, and pray for the power to be transformed in our collective conscience to a responsible, loving people capable of disarmament.

The following year—on January 6, 1980, the Feast of the Epiphany—Douglass and Clark again made their way inside the base. After not being detected on the grounds of the 7,000 acre facility the first day, they spent an all-night vigil in the woods in preparation for the next day’s events:

The next morning we used stepping stools and rug remnants to climb over the 12 foot-high double security fences enclosing SWFPAC… We walked alone and unimpeded to the first nuclear bunker. It was like a tomb—huge sliding concrete slabs shut under a small mountain of earth. We stood in silence for several minutes on the concrete entry, joined hands, and said aloud the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then we walked on to the next bunker, and prayed there in the same way. We continued our nuclear Stations of the Cross for six bunkers before we were arrested.

The spirit of this Gandhian nonviolence is also conveyed in the text of the leaflet distributed to the Marines at the base beforehand:

We know that it is your responsibility to guard these nuclear sites. We ask you to consider carefully in advance our attempt to join you there. We know that by government regulations you are “authorized to use deadly force” in protecting nuclear weapons. Brothers, we ask instead that you lay down your arms, for the sake of all our lives. We know that you are good people, and that you love and respect life.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—whose courageous vulnerability contributed significantly to the nonviolent struggle for the eventual restoration of democracy in Argentina—James W. Douglass in these and many other actions has communicated his hope for profound social transformation in his own vulnerable body. And like Gandhi—whose vision and embodiment of soul-force continues to challenge and change our world—his hope has been enduringly vested in a transformed relationship with the enemy.

In this time of a growing national security state which increasingly depends on the proliferation of “targeted killings”—one of the faces of The Unspeakable today—may each of us be inspired by Douglass’s words and deeds to take nonviolent action to transform our lives and our world.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet and politician, who died on December 18, 2011.

Václav Havel often said we should live life “as if”—as if there is no oppression, as if we must set an example of life well-lived even under the weight of a coercive regime. His belief in the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people—as opposed to the more formal political acts of revolutionary leaders—set Havel’s approach to resistance apart. He did not ask for heroics. He recognized the revolutionary force of everyday examples: not bowing your head, not putting the picture of a tyrant on your wall, not voting in farcical elections, not hanging the party sign in your shop window. Havel’s hero was the greengrocer, the powerless, the everyday casualty of oppression. He insistently resisted the epithet “dissident” because he did not like the idea of recognizing only one or two people of extraordinary courage and repute. Instead, he felt that there are no small acts of resistance; any act, by anyone, has the potential of reverberating—of being absorbed and replicated, and leading to meaningful change. Of course, the context dictates the significance of the act, and an awareness of that environment makes for true political consciousness and authentic acts of resistance.

To paraphrase Jan Palach, the Czech student who died from self-immolation in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969, the purpose of “living in truth,” of acting out one’s own life choices against the imposed existence of an oppressive power, is to not give up and not give in. The parallel with Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi should not be lost here, and it leads to the core of Havel’s point: it is the reverberation of a given act that makes for revolutionary change. Havel’s story of resistance centers around the active observer who sees, internalizes and interprets the act. Exemplary acts can be replicated in a different form, at a different time, with a different audience. They become a springboard for the observer’s own actions. Sarcastically invoking Marx’s opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, Havel called this “the specter of dissent.”

Havel never forgot Palach’s urge to resist demoralization and the temptation to give in. He asked the question powerless people everywhere want answered: How can we prevail over oppression? How can the individual overcome the psychological, social and political barriers imposed by the experience and history of violence? Havel maintained that while individuals might have trouble overcoming such barriers, the difficulty is not insurmountable. The individual can both recognize and overcome her circumstances. Agency from this point of view relies both on the capacity of the individual to recognize her own moral compass and the moral example set by others. Since totalitarian societies destroy the web of human relations among us in order to forestall opposition, we must rebuild our mutual ties, starting with ourselves. Havel’s idea of resistance builds on a view of life as a series of layers, an environment we create together, a work of solidarity continuously in the making. “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart,” he wrote, “in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Havel’s work stands as a remarkable articulation of what responsible action could look like under the extreme conditions of Eastern European totalitarianism, but the value of his inquiry extends beyond that time and place. Indeed, he expected political ideas to cross boundaries of time and place. Havel the playwright and Havel the dissident intertwine in a philosophical tale of resistance and responsibility that has sparked action the world over. This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Yet his call to political action also applies to the less extreme but equally important ways in which consumer societies with gross inequalities erode a sense of human connection. His life and work exemplify a kind of interplay between the private individual and the political world, between personal responsibility and social consciousness. Resistance can and must be reawakened within each of us. A year of revolutions has ended with the death of a true revolutionary, but we should rejoice in seeing Havel’s spirit endure in the actions of ordinary people from Cairo, to Russia, to Wall Street.

Illustration by Piotr Lesniak, Illustrations Portfolio.

Václav Havel, who died on December 18, epitomized the power of the pen. A playwright and actor, he was born in Prague in 1936, two years before Nazi Germany militarily occupied Czechoslovakia. As I have written elsewhere, the Stalinist effort to destroy internal opposition to the Czechoslovak communist regime and its worsening economic policies led to hundreds of executions and tens of thousands of imprisonments. Millions were left suffering. Rigid communist economic views, bureaucratization of all dimensions of life, and recurring shortages meant that people could survive under communist rule only through venality and by shortcutting regulations. Those who went along with the habitual corruption—including the great proportion of managers and professionals—found themselves subjected to blackmail and entrapped by lies.

Havel’s family property was confiscated after 1948 by the regime, and he was denied access to education because of his “bourgeois” background. Yet he managed to reach the university level. In 1959, he got a job as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical group and started writing plays with Ivan Vyskocil. By the late 1960s, Havel was a resident playwright of the Balustrade theatrical company.

One of the first Czechoslovaks overtly to refuse conformity with the totalitarianism that descended after 1948, he would be in and out of prison starting in 1977. On August 9, 1969, Havel sent a private letter to Alexander Dubček, first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, urging him to oppose reintroduction of callous one-party rule, following the Soviet-led invasion by 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops in response to the reforms led by Dubček and during what came to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, the government blacklisted Havel’s writings and charged him with subversion.

Under Stalinism, the Havel family’s farmhouse in northern Bohemia, where he died, served as a retreat for informal authors’ conferences. There, writers and theatrical personalities found a place of calm and strength after being alienated from each other when authorities destroyed their articles, novels and plays.

For more than a century, those ruling in the name of Marxism maintained that theirs was the true opposition to repression and injustice. As Havel and his colleagues sought to uncover such hollow posturing with a strategy called by Havel “living in Truth,” it challenged the pretenses of the communists, who would over a period of years lose their ability to make the people obey. In due course, the erosion of the legitimacy and authority of the party-state by these activist intellectuals would be among the currents that forced the communist party to abandon its efforts to hold onto its hegemony.

Throughout the 1970s, statements and manifestoes were being posted overnight on kiosks and walls. Citizens copied or memorized them to share them with other sections of the country. In April 1975, Havel publicly criticized the government’s disdain for the principles it had accepted in the Helsinki Accords, the Final Act of which was signed on August 1 of that year. In an “Open Letter to Gustáv Husák,” general secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, he voiced the deep ethical crises faced by communist Czechoslovakia and protested the policy of “normalization”—code word for re-imposing harsh Soviet control after the crushing of the Prague Spring. Doing what the party-state most detested, he violated the protocols of silence. Having sent the letter by regular mail, he simultaneously released it to international news agencies. In this, his first systematic philosophical writing, Havel concentrates on fear and moral decay. As the letter’s contents quietly spread, waves of dissent broke, followed by repression. In 1976, civic defiance groups rapidly formed.

An active figure in a dissenting community of actors, playwrights and staff of Czechoslovakia’s admired theatrical companies, and connected with university-based academicians, in 1972 he and others founded Edice Petlice, or Padlocked Editions, a semi-clandestine press that published typescripts of fiction, philosophy and literature. Photocopy machines were forbidden, but typewriters were allowed. By 1987 Padlocked Editions had available more than 400 manually-typed volumes. Havel damned the party-state “not because it was Communist, but because it was bad.” Forbidden printing presses cultivated fearlessness, as clandestine publications and journals communicated below the radar of government censorship. Musicians, rock bands, entertainers and artists spread ideas. One popular tactic was to bog down government officialdom with incessant protest letters from aroused citizens.

When musicians from the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground rock group, were arrested in 1976, it set the stage for Charter 77. The energies of diverse former party reformers, artists, theater people and Roman Catholic intellectuals congealed to defend the musicians’ right to free expression. Milan Hlavsa had created the band in 1968, soon after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion, basing its name on the song “Plastic People” by the U.S. musician Frank Zappa. On New Year’s Day in 1977, a document signed by 243 citizens materialized. The most significant occurrence since the 1968 Prague Spring, Charter 77 contested “the system of the virtual subjection of all institutions and organizations in the state to the political directives of the apparatus of the ruling party and the arbitrary decisions of the influential individuals.” In muted and studiously “antipolitical” wording, it suggested that the Moscow-imposed and Czechoslovak communist system had no popular mandate. Among the signers were leaders from the Prague Spring, artists, clergy, engineers, journalists, professors and its creator, Václav Havel. Charter 77 argued that the Czechoslovak regime must honor all international agreements, including the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords that it (and the Soviet Union) had agreed in 1975 to uphold. Within two years, eleven of the foremost signers were locked up, Havel and five others receiving prison terms of two to five years.

By 1979, with Havel under a four-and-a-half year sentence, his letters and other prison writings continued to spread covertly, inspiring pro-democracy movements across Eastern Europe. His major works include four plays and three one-act dramas. Havel’s writings often ponder the justifications given by individuals who cooperate with a repressive machine and are compelled to reconcile, within themselves, their collaboration with a malicious order. Shunning the cliché of excusing individuals as impotent against state coercion, he penned essays on the origins of power and totalitarianism. His dramas enact the pressures of living under corrupt authoritarian systems of tyranny, non-accountability, unrelenting moral compromise, random violence, cruelty, police states and the necessity of living in Truth as a means of breaking a vicious cycle.

The concept of living in Truth brought Havel recognition as a moral philosopher and playwright. He never joined the communist party. The Beatles musician John Lennon was an icon of clever defiance for the growing opposition in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s; Havel said he was a Lennonist, not a Leninist.

Havel’s years in prison, and an even longer time being banned and censored, made him emblematic of those who sought to prevail despite a ruthless Eastern bloc. Deeply grasping the value of communications, he relied on underground publications called samizdat (Russian for “self-published,” as opposed to state-published) to spread his commentary and tracts on political responsibility. Czechoslovaks had been using samizdat as a means of contention since the country fell under Soviet domination in 1948. Frequently typed on yellowed onionskin paper onto ten carbon copies, samizdat was crucial for the covert circulation of ideas leading to the Velvet Revolution. Samizdat also established essential links between democracy movements throughout Eastern and Central Europe, often reaching the West. Havel’s fellow countrymen and women viewed him as a leader who prized honor and honesty.

Havel’s living in Truth concerns the ability of persons who regard themselves as powerless to understand that they possess a form of power and can act upon it. Otherwise, he argued, one mutely functions in the midst of injustice, official deception and corruption—doing nothing to produce change, while sustaining an unjust structure through one’s silence. To stop living within a lie, one must withdraw cooperation with the machinery of oppression. Living in Truth lets citizens repossess their humanity and take responsibility, in compatibility with the appreciation of nonviolent struggle for the connection between the means and ends. Havel said this in plain words: those who live in Truth “create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways.” He regularly expressed his conviction that the power that comes with living in Truth is the power to overturn repressive structures and undermine dictatorships. Such power resides within each person.

When historian Timothy Garton Ash arrived in Prague in November 1989, he said to Havel of the time required for the self-liberation of adjacent nation-states: “In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!” November 17, Day One of what would be called the Ten Days, marked the start of the Velvet Revolution, which began with 15,000 students condemning the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and honoring Jan Opletal, a student killed by Hitler’s army half a century earlier. By some accounts, the pupils numbered 50,000 when they turned toward Wenceslas Square, where police accosted them, beating some and arresting others. By Day Two, word spread to Prague’s Charles University and other universities. Students first called for strikes, but the theatrical circles soon declared support and proposed a national general strike. On Day Three, a pro-democracy Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been active in Charter 77. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague, as they would indeed for much of the famous Ten Days. Havel became the beacon for the Civic Forum, which used the Magic Lantern Theater for its headquarters. Speaking to multitudes in Wenceslas Square on November 24, the seventh consecutive day of massive demonstrations, he invited the police and armed forces to join the opposition.

The Ten Days in reality took twenty-four. At gatherings, processions, and rallies nationwide, popular sentiment favored Havel assuming the presidency, which he would soon do.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a proud, cultured nation that had lost its freedoms gradually re-developed a civil society, a domain not controlled by government. In this political space, the artistic, drama, journalism, literary and university communities—and those who had been obliged into manual labor washing windows or stoking furnaces, banned as authors, or tossed in jail—interacted and worked to set themselves free from the corrosion of economic, moral and political decomposition. Its guiding light was Havel.

We are teaming up with our good friend and Billionaries for Bush founder Andrew Boyd—and activists from other grassroots groups, including Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, The Center for Artistic Activism, SmartMeme, Beyond the Choir and The Ruckus Society—to create an exciting new resource called Beautiful Trouble. As the Kickstarter campaign describes the project:

Beautiful Trouble will be a book & web toolbox that puts the best ideas and tactics of creative action in the hands of the next generation of change-makers, connecting the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest to the popular outrage of the current political moment.

From prank websites to militant carnivals, flash mobs to virtual sit-ins, social activism has a creative new edge that is melding prank and PR, direct action protest and pop art. More and more, activists and artists find themselves together on the barricades.

But in the heat of battle, the principles that  make creative actions successful seldom get hashed out or written down — until now. Beautiful Trouble will arm our movements with their own best weapons.

Beautiful Trouble will pull together an interlocking set of design principles, best practices, innovative tactics and case studies, that will enable anyone to pull off effective creative actions.

Having seen the book develop from the inside, I can confidently say that it will be an invaluable handbook for activists—and one that I will be regularly turning to—for many years to come.

To make this great project a reality, they are currently campaigning to raise $12,000 on Kickstarter. At the moment, there are pledges of nearly $4,000, or about a third of their total. However, as you may know, if you aren’t able to reach your goal on Kickstarter, you don’t get any of the money.

With only 22 days left before time runs out, please donate now to help create this important resource that will assist activists of all stripes engaging in creative nonviolent action do so more strategically and effectively.

And as a bonus, depending on how much you pledge, they are offering a range of great gifts—including a signed copy of the book, The Yes Men Fix the World DVD and a copy of the “Iraq War Ends” fake New York Times signed by the Yes Men—for your support.

I don’t have a “beat” yet for my column. While I used to write a lot on militarism and the arms trade, I’m no longer working for the Arms and Security Initiative and not following those issues as assiduously as I did when it was my paid job. So, we will just have to see where this takes us. Tempted as I am to write about September 11th ten years on—to join my voice to the chorus (or cacophony) of remembrances—I will try and hold that for next week.

I finally got around to reading Sunday’s New York Times this morning (due to Hurricane Irene it was not delivered to my New London, CT apartment until after 8 a.m. on Monday). Of course, I flipped right to the Style Section and the Vows Column. But after getting my requisite dose of modern love and conspicuous consumption, a long opinion piece in the Sunday Review section grabbed my attention. “Give Pacifism a Chance” was written by Louisa Thomas, author of Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Faith and Will in World War I. 

Being the product of public schools (City Forever!), I know little about World War I save for the usual Archduke of Austria (right?) assassination business. And (confession time) despite being a member of the board of the War Resisters League (the venerable secular pacifist organization mentioned in Thomas’ article), there is much I do not know about the history of pacifism in my very own country. Notwithstanding, I finished reading the article and dutifully put a hold on Louisa Thomas’ book at my local library (thank goodness we still have those). Thomas’ great grandfather was Norman Thomas, a perennial socialist presidential candidate, member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and conscientious objector to World War I along with his brother Evan.

The conscientious objector, as Norman Thomas wrote in 1917, is

persuaded that the supreme force in the world is Love and that Love can only win by its own weapons, which are never the weapons of violence. He is accused of ethical optimism, but he is too much of an ethical realist to preach to great armies the modern doctrine that they go out to kill each other with bayonets, bombs, big Berthas and poisonous gas in a spirit of love. He may believe in dying for one’s country, or for ideals; but not in killing for them.

The brothers certainly struggled and suffered for their country and their ideals. Evan was tried and convicted for refusal to serve. Initially sentenced to life in prison and hard labor, his prison term was eventually reduced to 25 years. He was freed after a successful appeal in 1919.

Once released, Evan campaigned on behalf of those who remained in prison. According to a POV Backgrounder accompanying the film Soldiers of Conscience, “Of the 450 conscientious objectors found guilty at military hearings during World War I, 17 were sentenced to death, 142 received life sentences and 73 received 20-year prison terms. Only 15 were sentenced to three years or less.” The sentences of all were eventually commuted after the war, but the brutality and isolation took its toll on these men.

Two other Thomas brothers—Ralph and Arthur—volunteered for service and fought in WWI in the army. This is the family story that Louisa tells, and I look forward to reading it!

All and all, the Fall of 2011 seems like a good time to be reading about the historic roots of pacifism. Not only is there is a crop of serious, scholarly and well-written books out there, but as the United States enters the 10th year of war against “terrorism,” peace activists need new ideas and new energy (at least I do), and perhaps mining our illustrious and difficult past is a good place to start. Also on my list (and in a neat stack on my living room floor) are the following books:

• A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds by Martin Duberman
• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio
• Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement 1933-1983 by Lawrence Wittner

I also put a hold on Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion (1914-1918) at the library, after reading his recent interview with Waging Nonviolence.

Off the cuff (by which I mean, without having read these or very many other books about historical opposition to war), it strikes me that there is a lot of loneliness and suffering between the dust jackets of each of these books. I don’t expect to see pacifism spelled out in shiny neon or atop a Broadway marquee in any of the books I have set aside for myself.

I have at least read most of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II and the End of Civilization, and since that versatile and prolific author is experiencing a mini media hurricane these days (Baker, Baker everywhere), I will have to get it back from the person to whom I lent it and read it again. The book, as I recall, is dedicated to

the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They’ve never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.

Which reminded me of how Louisa Thomas’ New York Times essay ends:

[W]ar has a way of coming home, eroding our democratic culture as well as our safety. American pacifists of the past knew that, and we need people like them today: people who don’t believe war is inevitable, who will challenge what we assume and accept, and who will work to end it.

There you have it. Stirring and important words. Words to stake ourselves to. Words to work on. Pacifists were right (are right); the belief that war is not inevitable must endure. While it doesn’t exactly pay the bills, draw sellout crowds or result in many invites to fancy cocktail parties, it is something. In fact, it is better than the fruits of war: a heap of dead bodies, a tab of bi(tri)llions of dollars and the seeds of the next one flung into the four corners for the winds to sow where they will find fertile ground. Anyway, time to get reading.

Instead, a 900-ton munitions train, traveling at three times the legal speed limit, plowed into Brian and dragged him under. Standing a few feet away, I saw him turn over and over again like a rag doll and then (as the never-slowing train rumbled on toward a nearby security gate) sprawling in the track bed, a huddled mass of blood.

Miraculously, Brian survived (thanks, largely, to the tourniquets applied by his then-wife Holly Rauen, a professional nurse), though both legs were sheared off and his skull was fractured.

Now, over two decades later, he has published Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, a new autobiography available from PM Press. This book does not simply recount a horrifying event from long ago. It offers, more importantly, a vivid example of a still-unfolding pilgrimage for peace that turns on a burning question: “What is my responsibility to make peace and challenge murderous violence in a direct and meaningful way?”

At a critical turning point in his life, Brian allowed this question in and everything changed. Of course, this question is not Brian’s alone. It is meant for each of us in the midst of the storm of horrific violence that continually bears down on our planet and its inhabitants.

Brian’s memoir recounts his journey from childhood in upstate New York (born on the Fourth of July, he enthusiastically shared his family’s pro-military and anti-communist convictions), to his decision to go to law school, and then his being drafted and sent to Vietnam as an Air Force captain, where two incidents changed his life.

One was a rocket attack in which he was saved by a quick-thinking companion who pushed him to the ground and out of the way of the blast. Though they survived, another soldier was blown to bits a few feet away. The second event even more clearly seared his soul. He had been sent out to do damage assessment of US bombing raids on villages and found a blackened mess that used to be huts, littered with bodies:

My first thought was that I was witnessing an egregious, horrendous mistake. The “target” was no more than a small fishing and rice farming community. The “village” was smaller than a baseball playing field. The Mekong Delta region is completely flat, and the modest houses in its hamlets are built on small mounds among rice paddies. As with most settlements, this one was undefended—we saw no anti-aircraft guns, no visible small arms, no defenders of any kind. The pilots who bombed this small hamlet flew low-flying planes, probably the A-37Bs, and were able to get close to the ground without fear of being shot down, thus increasing the accuracy of their strafing and bombing. They certainly would have been able to see the inhabitants, mostly women with children taking care of various farming and domestic chores … The buildings were virtually flattened by explosions or destroyed by fire. I didn’t see any inhabitant on his or her feet. Most were ripped apart from bomb shrapnel and Gatling machine gun wounds, blackened from napalm burns, many not discernible as to gender, and the majority were obviously children.

I began sobbing and gagging. I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing, smelling, thinking. I took a few faltering steps to my left, only to find my way blocked by the body of a young woman lying at my feet. She had been clutching three small, partially blackened children when she apparently collapsed. I bent down for a closer look and stared, aghast, at the woman’s open eyes. The children were motionless, blackened blood drying on their bullet and shrapnel-riddled bodies. Napalm had melted much of the woman’s face, including her eyelids, but as I was focused on her face, it seemed to me that her eyes were staring at me.

She was not alive. But her eyes and my eyes met for one moment that shot like a lightning bolt through my entire being. Over the years I have thought of her so much I have given her the name, “Mai Ly.”

I was startled when Bao, who was several feet to my right, asked why I was crying. I remember struggling to answer. The words that came out astonished me. “She is my family,” I said, or something to that effect. I don’t know where those words came from. I wasn’t thinking rationally. But I felt, in my body, that she and I were one. Bao just smirked, and said something about how satisfied he was with the bombing “success” in killing “communists.” I did not reply. I had nothing to say. From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same for me.

Thus began a deep transformation, which led him in the 1980s to notice with deep alarm the connection between what he had experienced in Vietnam and the Reagan administration’s war in Central America. He traveled to the region and saw a vivid parallel between the two conflicts, especially the wanton attack on civilians, and became convinced that he had to take action.

“We are not worth more, they are not worth less,” he declared, and joined the Veterans Fast for Life on the steps of the US Capitol in 1986, where he and three other former members of the US military fasted for 47 days. One year later, he and others formed Nuremberg Actions—named after the principles of international law enunciated in the wake of the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II that defined crimes against humanity and the responsibility and complicity in such crimes—and organized a 40-day fast at Concord in which he and others planned to block weapons trains. A Freedom of Information Act request had yielded concrete evidence that ships leaving this base were carrying 500-pound bombs, white phosphorus, and millions of rounds of ammunition, and Brian wanted to stop such shipments in their tracks.

He expected the train to stop, at which point he would be removed and arrested—in effect compelling the military to demonstrate the kind of care that should also be accorded to those at the other end of the line in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Instead, the government ran the train (in spite of the clear communication with the Navy over the prior ten days), thus dramatizing with palpable clarity what those at the end of the line faced every day.

We are not worth more. They are not worth less.

Brian’s autobiography details the aftermath of the Concord attack, including his activism, his own inner and outer growth, his comprehensive and embodied choices to live simply (on this recent book tour, for example, he traveled by pedaling a special bicycle that uses his hands instead of his feet), and his thoroughgoing critique of the American Way of Life (AWOL). (Less than three months after being run down by the train, Brian testified in Congress about this event. You can read his engrossing testimony here.)

What can we learn, after all these years, from Brian’s journey?

One lesson is the importance of “finding your own tracks and taking a stand there,” as he has often said. A catchphrase we used at the time held that “Stopping the war starts here”—stopping it at a weapons base, but also in many, many other places. Brian did so by taking this action “in person”: using the most powerful symbol at his disposal, his vulnerable, resilient, determined, and spirited body.

We can do this, too. This is not to say that we are all called to sit on train tracks (such action requires much discernment and training). But there are many places to stand nonviolently, withdrawing our consent and pointing our communities, our societies, and even ourselves in a new direction.

The world begins to change when we find this place.

That is why “Islam” Means Peace: Understanding the Muslim Principle of Nonviolence Today, the new book by Amitabh Pal, the managing editor of the Progressive, is so important. In addition to writing wonderful chapters on somewhat more well-known figures in the nonviolence world like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Pal tells the story of many obscure Muslim peacemakers who deserve far more attention—such as Abdul Kalam Azad, who worked alongside Gandhi in India’s independence struggle, and Ibrahim Rugova, who led the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent movement against Milosevic.

For anyone not well-versed in Islam, Pal also provides a great primer on the Qur’an, the real meaning of jihad and how Islam actually spread around the world, effectively rebuting many of the most common myths about the religion. I recently interviewed Pal for Religion Dispatches about this hidden history and how the nonviolent movements in the Middle East are shaking up both the region and the way that the West perceives Islam. Here is an excerpt:

What role have women played in nonviolent movements in Muslim countries? How might their greater participation in these actions and campaigns change the gender dynamics in these countries?

I can answer this historically. In the case of Ghaffar Khan’s movement there was the participation of a surprising number of women, given how conservative—and you can even argue misogynist—Pashtun society had been traditionally. They allowed women to participate because he said so and his honor and stature was such that they couldn’t resist. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, women used to lead their marches! This is just incredible. What power and influence he must have had to convince them to allow that to happen! Did that lead to a large scale change in the way that women were perceived in Pashtun society? No, probably not. Did that perhaps lead to a small, tiny change? Hopefully yes.

If we leap forward to what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia, women have participated in very large numbers. I think it’s been a very positive development and I think they will form the bulwark against a regression on women’s rights and ensure that the Muslim Brotherhood and their ilk will not be able to seize power and push women to the back room. They have been empowered and I don’t think they’re going to give up their rights, at least in these two countries, very easily. That’s positive and hopeful. Historically, Tunisia has been one of the most progressive in the Arab world in terms of women’s rights, and I think women there are determined to keep it that way.

In one part of the interview that was cut from the final version, Pal gives a very powerful response to a question about the difficulties that many of the ongoing movements in the region still face that is worth remembering.

What would you say to critics who now point to Libya or the recalcitrance of regimes in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain to argue that nonviolence can’t succeed against more ruthless regimes?

I would urge people to be patient. We live in an age of short attention spans where everything seems to happen at hyper speed. It took Gandhi three plus decades. Let’s not forget. He came to India from South Africa during World World I. It took Martin Luther King a decade or so, from Birmingham to the civil rights bills. To take a European example, Solidarity in Poland seemed to be vanquished in the mid-80s and it came back in the late 80s after a decade of struggle and toil. So it takes time. It has barely been six or eight months for heaven’s sake. People are so impatient!

After The Smoke Clears:
The Just War Tradition and Post-War Justice

If linguistic precision has any importance, it might be time to replace the phrase “Just War” with “Just Slaughter.” What else is war but the organized and systematic slaughter of combatants and civilians? War is a word so routinized—the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on trafficking—that it lacks all impact. It’s like a piece of knotted wood sanded to flatness by a carpenter’s hand, the roughness smoothed over. When co-authors Mark J. Allman and Tobias L. Winright present themselves as “contemporary just war theorists,” as they do several times, it’s worth asking whether or not they would mind being called contemporary just slaughter theorists.

No hint is given in these pages, which means, for a moment of comity, we’ll have to go along with them and their theory that the mass murder of warmaking can sometimes be just. But it’s here that Allman and Winright are having trouble making up their minds. “War always remains an evil,” they say. “Perfectly just wars do not exist. When we speak of a ‘just war,’ we are really talking about a ‘mostly just war.’”

Come again? What does “mostly” mean? It would help if the authors came forth with a list of these kinds of wars. With more than 30 current wars or conflicts to choose from, as well as those of the 20th century—history’s bloodiest—the authors had plenty from which to select. But no list of examples of where the authors believe “the use of force, including lethal force, is justified” is offered.

As the subtitle states, the concerns of Allman, who is a professor of ethics at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., and Winright who teaches Christian ethics at St. Louis University, are focused on post-war events. Here again, precise language is needed. Instead of After the Smoke Clears how about After the Corpses Are Counted or After the Radiation and Plutonium Clears or After All the Amputees Get Their Artificial Limbs Fitted or After the Veterans’ Nightmares End? Admirably, the authors write that Christians are called to:

…pray for an end to war. But when war does happen, our task is not done; all that we do during war must be directed toward a just peace. Nor does our duty to build that just peace subside when the shooting does stop.

The authors argue that the building requires reconciliation between former enemies: “justice tempered with mercy.” Relationships need to be restored. Mutual forgiveness is essential. War criminals should be punished. Victims of wars deserve apologies, restitution and compensation. “The moral responsibility for war,” the authors write, “does not come to a halt when combat ends.”

Who can argue with that? Not to discount the idealism of Allman and Winright—who draw on the peace and justice statements of U.S. Catholic bishops and the Second Vatican Council’s “Gaudium et Spes”—but their case is weakened by the near absence of detailed examples where post-war justice has occurred. It isn’t enough to mention in passing the Marshall Plan or the economic aid given by the U.S. to Japan after the Second World Slaughter. Has a warrior state or tribe ever invaded an enemy’s border intent on carrying out the program of post-war justice Allman and Winright lay out? And then did it? If so, where, when and who? The authors are mum. Do they really believe that sides, say, in the 15-year conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—with 5 million killed and hundreds of thousands of women sexually assaulted—are attentive to the theoretical and high-minded calls of two American professors for post-war justice via reconciliation, punishment, forgiveness and compensation?

Because the authors lean on Roman Catholic notions, only a few references are made to such pacifist theologians as Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder. Not much wiggle room is found in their teachings, as against what is present in the counsel of mainline churches and their acceptance of what one Jesuit at Georgetown University jesuitically calls “imperfectly just” wars. The difficulty faced by the well-intentioned authors, and one they don’t overcome, is trying to explain how justice can be delivered to civilians slain in war. They’re dead. As for the survivors, does payment of $2,000 from the U.S. military to a grieving Afghan widow come anywhere close to justice? On these questions, the authors’ aren’t exactly firing on all burners.

Instead of post-war justice, isn’t it saner to create pre-war justice, i.e., the only justified war is the one that’s never necessary to wage.

So what does move us? According to Rosenberg, it’s peer pressure. You know—the same thing that drives teenagers to wear certain clothes, smoke cigarettes, and engage in all sorts of risky behavior that drives parents crazy—except it’s much bigger than that. Peer pressure is also responsible for some astounding instances of social change, which Rosenberg highlights in her book—from a campaign that lowered the incidence of HIV among South African youths, to the organization of a previously passive and fatalistic citizenry into the nonviolent army that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

I recently met up with Rosenberg to discuss her book and the implications of what she calls “the social cure”—the process that changes people’s behavior through joining a new peer group—on the world of activism. The conversation touched on the relevance of social media, the success and fear of failure in Egypt, peer pressure as a means to combat climate change, and Rosenberg’s formative years spent living under two dictatorships.

Waging Nonviolence: How did the idea for this book come about?

Tina Rosenberg: I was doing a story for the New York Times Magazine on psychological and social and cultural barriers to fighting AIDS. I had gone to South Africa and the story was in part about loveLife, which is the teenage prevention program there, and it threw out old strategies of giving people information or scaring them and instead decided to make a really fun group to belong to—one that kids would want to join and was very positive and was about them. It’s been quite successful. Then I met Ivan Marovic [one of the founders of the student movement that led to the ouster of Milosevic] and I learned about Otpor [the name of that movement, which means "Resistance"] from him and realized this group was using a very similar strategy. I was working at the time on writing an article about Otpor and CANVAS [the group that formed out of Otpor and has trained many activists around the world] for the Times magazine, which ended up running in Foreign Policy. Since they were both using the same strategy and techniques of trying to mobilize people for a social cause—not by giving them information or scaring them, but by forming this really cool, hip, positive movement that allowed people to think of themselves as daring and heroic instead of passive victims in Serbia—I decided that I needed to write a book looking at how this strategy can be employed in other ways.

WNV: You reference Malcolm Gladwell a couple times in the book. Despite few overt references to activism in his work, many activists have found his theories on the way ideas spread to be useful in their organizing efforts. Join the Club, however, is more activist-oriented. Was this a conscious decision? Did you recognize the applicability of recent social science findings to activism?

TR: I’m naturally much more political than Malcolm. He’s a brilliant writer about social science curiosities. My first book, however, was about political violence in Latin America and my second one was about dealing with the past in Eastern Europe. So, I’m just more interested in those topics. But Malcolm is now writing about this. He had a New Yorker article arguing that there’s no such thing as a Facebook revolution.

WNV: Yes, that caused a big stir in the activist world. What’s your take on that argument?

TR: Social media is a platform like traveling minstrels or sky writing or TV or newspapers or word of mouth. It’s an effective platform. It can let you get to your membership cheaply and in a mass way. But I don’t think revolutions are conducted online. I think revolutions are conducted in the street. The April 6 movement [in Egypt] may have had 75,000 members on their Facebook page, but if they hadn’t had the strategies in the street, they wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

WNV: Scholars of digital activism have argued that the shortcomings of social media might not be the fault of the medium, but rather the people using it. It might be possible, rather than tout the supremacy of social media, as some “cyber utopians” do, to learn how we might better use the tool to form strong personal bonds.

TR: I don’t think it is. I think what Facebook can do is get people to Tahrir Square, but you need to be in Tahrir Square to be able to build those ties and to build a movement where everybody says, “This is where I have to be.” I don’t think Facebook can do anything more than post the information. Maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong, but for the moment, that’s what I think.

WNV: How did you see a social cure at work in Egypt?

TR: First of all, obviously a lot of CANVAS tactics were at work in Egypt—not necessary the social cure ones, but the more strategic ones—such as being nice to the police, et cetera. I think those are very important, but the social cure was evident in the way people felt about themselves during the revolution and going into Tahrir Square and being surrounded by this wave of massive goodwill and the feeling that you’re a hero and that you’re daring and doing something important. I think that was absolutely crucial in Egypt, and that’s the social cure.

WNV: In the book, you mention that everyone in Otpor agreed on the need to overthrow Milosevic, but not everyone agreed on what Serbia might look like after Milosevic—particularly the economic system. This has been the case with other recent nonviolent pro-democracy movements and has led to lingering issues in those countries, despite the victory of largely bloodless regime change. We are starting to see it in Tunisia and Egypt, with the G8 pledging billions of dollars in aid to the two countries so long as they embrace neoliberalism. Can a social cure be used to support a longterm vision that protects countries from being manipulated by global powers?

TR: I don’t know if it can. It’s much more difficult, and in fact Otpor didn’t manage to do it. They had a few small contributions to make after October 5, 2000 [when Milosevic was overthrown] and it failed in the end, for many reasons. You need a clear-cut enemy. The purpose of a social cure is not to inform; it’s to motivate. You need to already have a basic agreement on what you’re motivating people to do and it has to be something people already know they want to do. So with policy, it’s just not going to work like that. I can imagine, and I write about it in the book, how it could be used to run an anti-corruption campaign. It’s something that’s really clear; everyone already knows we want this. But Otpor really hit the sweet spot in terms of the circumstances for which a social cure is really really good. It was perilous, but not too perilous. There was a very clear enemy; everyone agreed on that. They were really ideal conditions.

WNV: Why do you think some people, like the members of Otpor, understood the social cure? Obviously they didn’t have your book to know what it was. But the idea was more intuitive to them than others it seems.

TR: How did the Serbs hit on it? I don’t know actually. From the very beginning it sounded like they were trying to figure out how to motivate people. It was a group of exceptionally smart people. That’s probably not unique to Serbia. Chile [in the 1980's] was the same way. It had this very tired and somewhat corrupt and discredited political class that was doing business as usual. And then you had a student movement. The student movement did not come up with the creative solution that they did in Serbia, and I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps because the politics in Chile wasn’t as discredited as it was in Serbia. Chile is just a highly politicized society. So almost every student in Chile belonged to some political party. Maybe they had a vested interest in doing it the old way. But most countries are closer to Serbia than Chile in that way and yet they didn’t come up with this.

WNV: How did you end up living under two dictatorships—Pinochet in Chile and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua?

TR: I went to Nicaragua in 1985. I was very young and had gone there for a week with a friend. It felt like visiting the moon. It was so bizarre. I had never been to a poor country, a socialist country, or a country at war. And I just thought, “Wow, this is fascinating.” So I moved there and then I started to write and I found that a lot of the publications I was writing for—because Nicaragua was so highly politicized and the Reagan administration was pushing so hard on the politics—didn’t want to take articles from someone who was very young and very unknown. So to be able to make a living, I had to branch out and visit other countries and I had to write about them. I went to Chile in ’86 and just fell in love with it, as many gringos do.

WNV: Did you feel a special connection to the Otpor story, having had those experiences, witnessing protests against autocratic regimes?

TR: The Otpor story, which I devote two chapters to in the book—more than any other story—is very interesting to me because I’m interested in political change. I really felt like it was a creative solution to a problem I’d seen over and over again: how do you build a movement? I also felt it was interesting because the way they did activism can be turned to other purposes, not just toppling a dictator. So I thought it was a versatile strategy.

WNV: What did you know about nonviolence before learning about Otpor?

TR: I knew of Gene Sharp. I don’t think I’d read anything he’d written. But Chile and Nicaragua were very cautionary experiences on how armed insurrections are not necessarily all that useful—Chile especially. I felt that the existence of a guerrilla movement was a big problem for democracy activists. It wasn’t going to help. So I was already in tune with the idea that violence can be a contaminant for a successful nonviolent struggle.

WNV: Do you see a similarity between the social cure and nonviolence, at least in the way that they make use of group dynamics and winning people over to a particular side?

TR: I think they’re really different. The social cure is not just about community. I want to make a really big distinction between the way we form groups and the idea of social capital. Having ties with other people is a very good idea and I think that’s extraordinarily important for nonviolent struggle, but that’s not what I’m writing about. What I’m writing about is how to use that social capital in a very specific way, which is to create behavioral change and the uses of that. So I think the social cure can be used in nonviolent struggle. I do write about how it can be. But I think the two phenomena are different.

WNV: Climate change is an issue that plays on many of the themes in your book—it’s such a major failure of information to inspire social change. You mention it only a few times in passing throughout the book, but clearly it’s something you’ve been thinking about.

TR: It is, and it’s a tough one, because the problem is extremely salient and present and overwhelmingly important in some countries, but those are not the countries that have the capacity to do anything about it. If they had coal plants in Ethiopia, they could probably amass huge protests. But they don’t. They have coal plants in countries where people are not yet personally touched by climate change to the degree that they are in other places. I think that’s a big problem for using the social cure for climate change. It may not be five years from now.

WNV: How can the climate movement make use of the social cure?

TR: The key in mobilizing people with the social cure is to focus on how do we make this about you, about how you think of yourself and how your friends think of you. There are other ways—for example, buying choices and purchasing are really important with climate change. There is an avenue in using peer pressure to encourage people to make better decisions about how they live. But it is so far lacking the salience. It’s tough in a society like ours where it’s not a life or death issue yet.

That won’t work if you’re talking to Nicholson Baker. In an extraordinary cover story in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” Baker explains how learning about World War II was actually a big part of what made him a pacifist in the first place. “In fact,” he writes,

the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists.

His thinking began drifting this way during the Gulf War, and continued to evolve through the sequence of American military operations since. In the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in talk about bombing Iran, he noticed that World War II kept coming up. It kept being used to justify one war after another. Every new enemy only had to be painted as another Hitler to ensure public support.

By 2008, Baker published Human Smoke, a book that collects documents, newspaper reports, and notable utterances during the lead-up to World War II, revealing how determined the Allied leaders were to fight at any cost. But, because of its form, we don’t get much of his own voice in that book. “Why I’m a Pacifist” is a chance to hear more directly from Baker himself about how he came to the conclusions that he did about the war.

I was so thrilled with the essay that the moment I put it down I wanted more, so I wrote to Baker with some questions about what he’d said. Our exchange was as follows:

WNV: Why did you decide to write Human Smoke the way you did, and why now write about World War II again as you do in Harper’s?

NB: Human Smoke deals atomistically with the beginnings of the war because I thought that was a good way of conveying the confusion and sadness of what was going on. You have to pause and think moment by moment in order to feel the gradual disintegration of civil restraint. The book stopped at the end of 1941. The Harper’s piece mostly concentrates on events from 1942 on, and it’s an effort to take up one big question: Were the pacifists right in calling for an immediate negotiated peace?

WNV: Why do you say at the outset of the essay that you don’t expect most people to be persuaded? Is pacifism really such a lost cause?

NB: No, pacifism isn’t a lost cause—in fact, most people, even generals and headbanging bar brawlers, act peaceably most of the time, or we’d get nothing done. “I’m not going to kill you” is basic to all cooperation. But during wars, pacifists are often in the minority and their arguments (so I’ve found!) make people really mad. Over time, these same people may and often do change their thinking, but it isn’t going to happen all at once. An inductive “nonviolent” approach to argumentation sometimes helps.

WNV: What do you think American pacifists can do now, or should have done, to stop wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya?

NB: American pacifists made heroic efforts to end those wars, using every channel available. They deserve our thanks. Afterward, when more people acknowledge that a military attack was a mistake, it helps to go back and see who really understood what was going on. I find it incredibly moving to see how right they were. Being able to stop a war isn’t the only reason for protesting a war. You may fail, but you still want to get it on record that there was an obvious better way as it was happening. The objection to any war has to be steady and constant, and one way of objecting is to re-examine historical touchstones. I wrote Human Smoke and “Why I’m a Pacifist” to recall, as others have, that the war resisters of World War II offered paths out of the horror at the time. Their steadiness and belief in reconciliation can help us now. We need new heroes. I’d rather think about Jessie Hughan, Abe Kaufman, Dorothy Day, Rabbi Cronbach, or Vera Brittain than Winston Churchill.

WNV: What business does a novelist have to write on matters of war and peace anyway?

NB: Tell that to Tolstoy.

Authors Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson introduce the piece as a reminder that victories “borne of small acts toward monumental change,” like the recent ones in Tunisia and Egypt, are not new. And perhaps, with the even more recent and sad turn toward violence in Libya, we should be ever more wary of innovative and inspiring ways to challenge violent regimes. The good news, as I learned from Jackson just the other day, is that the book is set to be reprinted in Arabic this summer. “Perhaps a bit late,” Jackson joked. But really, it’s never too late to spread these stories. They should be told as often as possible. So, if you haven’t read the book yet, be sure to at least check out the magazine piece.

Please share these resources, which will be regularly updated as more works are translated, with anyone in the region who might be interested. And if you know of anything that is missing, but should be added to the list, let me know and I’ll pass the word on.

Nevertheless, a boycott of HarperCollins has been launched by librarians Brett Bonfield and Gabriel Farrell that is getting a lot of attention. Their no-frills website, boycottharpercollins.com, has a very helpful page explaining why they are calling on consumers to not buy any books or eBooks from the company or any of its imprints, which it lists, until this policy is revoked. They also provide a sample letter that you can edit and send to HarperCollins explaining your support for the boycott.

As Bonfield and Farrell explain:

Given the pace of digital innovation, there’s a good chance that ebook files libraries purchase today will be obsolete within a few years. For now, libraries have arrangements with publishers and ebook vendors that include some restrictions on ebooks lending, such as two-week loan limits and one-borrower-at-a-time. These restrictions make borrowing or loaning an ebook much like borrowing or loaning a traditional book.

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While circulation limits on ebooks might encourage libraries to buy additional digital copies of some ebooks, that’s just speculation: libraries have limited budgets, especially in the current economy, so there is a good chance that libraries will spend the same amount on ebooks they are already spending but offer less variety because they would have to buy more copies of the most popular items.

Gene Stoltzfus, founding director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, surely would have been excited about the overwhelmingly nonviolent people power movements spreading throughout the Middle East today. “Good nonviolence awakens energy,” he liked to say, and the massive demonstrations calling for freedom, justice and economic reform have indeed energized people around the world—many of whom likewise have been involved in longtime nonviolent campaigns that have inspired each other.

Some Waging Nonviolence readers are lucky enough to have met Gene, as he spoke and traveled widely during and after his 1988 – 2004 tenure with CPT.  Since his death last March, his spouse, Dorothy Friesen, has been collaborating with friends and family to compile many of Gene’s writings and experiences into a book called, “Create Space for Peace: 40 Years of Peacemaking.”  The book is due out next month, and can be ordered through the website Create Space for Peace, which was just recently launched to describe the book and Gene’s significant contribution to nonviolence theory and practice.

The book is aptly named. I first met Gene when he traveled through Texas on a speaking tour in 2005, and he talked about nonviolence as a sacred space that is opened when violence is pushed back, a space where something new can happen. Peacemaking involves engagement with all sides in a conflict, he said. “When you talk with your adversary, you are establishing the possibility for change.”

Those who knew Gene may be familiar with his Mennonite background, his five years of alternative service as a civilian in Vietnam in the 1960s and his commitment to the peace team approach. In recent years, he had woven together reflections and ideas that emerged from his peacebuilding experiences by writing a regular blog called Peace Probe.  Gene’s warmth, sincerity and good nature came through as abundantly in his writing as it did in person, and he expressed thoughtfully both the profound joys and human pain he witnessed and felt during the course of his life work.

Gene was a vibrant man who was deeply optimistic about the future of nonviolence. He knew how it could grow because he had seen it planted. I’m looking forward to reading the book that his loved ones have created, and I like imagining what he might have been writing now about the renewable energy that bubbled up in Egypt, enlivening the world.