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.”

I don’t have a TV. But I am always being exhorted to watch The Rachel Maddow Show.

One of the reasons I don’t have a TV is that if I had one, I wouldn’t be watching high-minded, informative news shows like hers. I would be completely hypnotized by the worst of the worst; eye candy dregs like CSI: Miami, The Mentalist, the new Hawaii Five-0 and Two Broke Girls (which I have yet to see).

Let my fixation be a cautionary tale to all the well-meaning parents out there wanting to shield their children from the corrosive effects of overexposure to TV: outlaw TV, and they will be forever in its sway. Let them watch it, and it will make them discerning consumers.

I can still read, though. For my birthday a friend gave me Maddow’s new book: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. My eighth celebration of year 30 was only a few weeks ago, but I have already chewed through this hard-hitting, spirited and lucid book.

Maddow is already a household name, with a trademarked wit, a loyal following and a large bully-pulpit. She is also endowed with the intellectual fortitude and homespun wisdom to pull out a new take on one of our most important and least interesting topics — militarism. And it seems to be working. This week, Drift is number 12 of Amazon’s Top 100 — right above the newest Stephen King fantasy and below Marlene Koch’s cook book urging obese Americans to Eat More of What You Love (in low sugar, fat, calorie form). That juxtaposition is worth its own blog post, but I digress.

Maddow is no pacifist. In fact, she told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that many of her family members have been in the military, and that “had it been legal for openly gay people to serve in the military in the time I might have been considering signing up. I think service is honorable, and that was always inculcated in me.” But her commitment to service does not keep her from being critical (in a way that is both detailed and conversational) about the overreaches of the military — from the nuclear weapons complex, which she calls “an $8 trillion fungus among us,” to the corrosive role of secrecy. “[I]f we are going to use drones to vaporize people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Air Force should operate the drones, and pull the trigger. And we should know about it,” she writes. “The chain of command should never be obscured by state secrets.”

The book traces how the United States lost touch with the Founders’ ideals about the role of military power and force in a democracy. She begins her opening chapter (“G.I. Joe, Ho Chi Minh and the American Art of Fighting About Fighting”) by describing Thomas Jefferson’s concerns about standing armies: “never keep an unnecessary soldier … not for a standing army in a time of peace.” This chapter is a 19-page survey of two centuries of American militarism that brings us from that Jeffersonian ideal through the last days of the Vietnam War, when “the questions of how we provide for the common defense, how we apportion our limited resources to the military, how we prepare for war, and whether or not we go to war were back where they belonged, out in the open, subject to loud and jangly public debate.”

And then in a series of chapters tackling the U.S. invasion of Grenada (remember that!), the U.S.-financed Contra proxy war in Nicaragua and other military misadventures of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Maddow demonstrates how that debate went underground again, bringing us to the situation of the last decade where the United States is neck deep in a multi-front war costing trillions of dollars and involving millions of people, but where “half the American public says it has not been even marginally affected.” She harkens back to the founders, who, she says “chafed at the idea of an American standing army” to “disincline us toward war as a general matter. Their greatest advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war … for us to feel — uncomfortably — every second we were at war.” Now, she writes “war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.”

And this is where it gets a little tricky, because Maddow is at pains to say that this is not anyone’s fault. No one made that happen. Not even all the elements that benefit richly from this system.

The name of the book is Drift not Grift or Rift of Sift. “[W]e’ve drifted off that historical course,” she writes in the introduction about the checks government is supposed to place on military power, “the steering’s gone wobbly, the brakes have failed. It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to serve theirs.”

This assertion makes her book a lot more accessible and a lot more engaging. It allows her to get into the nitty-gritty without having to build a criminal court case against the Lockheed Martins and Halliburtons and the very lucrative and effective revolving door between military contractors and the Pentagon, Armed Forces and Congress. Maybe these are all tired points anyway. They have been made so many times that they become a sort of short hand — Ike’s MIC is alive and well. (In President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address he warned of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military industrial complex,” which has created the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power…”) This does not put you between a diet cook book and a Stephen King novel on Amazon’s best seller list.

Not painting a picture of the back rooms where cigar smoke swirls and billion dollar deals get made allows Maddow to offer a fresh perspective that is motivating and empowering. It makes items on the to-do list at the end of the book seem almost doable, like:

“Let’s quit asking the military to do things best left to our State Department, or the Peace Corps or FEMA…

“Let’s wind back the privatization of war and the military’s dependence on contractors for what used to be military functions…

“Let’s ensure our nuclear infrastructure shrinks to fit our country’s realistic nuclear mission…”

The list goes on and it makes sense. Let’s DO IT!

Did it happen yet? No? Why not?

If it is all so commonsensical, why isn’t it happening? Was it just drift that led to each of these areas (and so many others) getting out of whack? Did it just happen the way the grass grows wild at her local water system? Does anyone or any entity benefit from the militarization of foreign aid? Who reaps the rewards when military functions are privatized? Did anyone push for the doubling of funds for the nuclear weapons complex at a time when President Barack Obama is publicly committed to seeking “a world free of nuclear weapons”?

There are forces at work. They are not rogue elements. They are not in back rooms. They conspire in plain sight, and they rely on the fact that we are too busy watching the dimples crease Simon Baker’s handsome face in The Mentalist to pay attention to the ways in which they are bankrupting our country and undermining our democracy.

Eisenhower urged that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Rachel Maddow’s book makes us all a bit more alert and knowledgeable and ready for the challenge.

She dedicated Drift to Dick Cheney, begging “oh, please let me interview you.” Maybe now that the former vice president has a new heart, he will say yes.

Anyone who has researched, taught, written or published on the subject of nonviolent struggle appreciates the headaches of vocabulary. Gandhi himself suffered the pains and perplexities of language, as in this passage from Satyagraha in South Africa:

None of us knew what name to give to our movement. I then used the term “passive resistance” in describing it. I did not then quite understand the implications of “passive resistance” as I called it. … As the struggle advanced, the phrase “passive resistance” gave rise to confusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to be known only by an English name.

The English word nonviolence is not much better. It is ambiguous and multifaceted. My students, for whom English is often a second, third or fourth language, frequently complain that the word “nonviolence” says what it is not but does not tell us what it is. The ability of average people to study this subject with linguistic precision, however, has lately taken a quantum leap with Oxford University Press’s publication of Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts, by the scholar of nonviolent struggle (and Waging Nonviolence contributor) Gene Sharp.

Sharp began formal studies on nonviolent struggle six decades ago in 1951, working toward his master of arts degree in sociology at Ohio State University. From then until 1955 — during which time he spent nine months in federal prison for refusal to cooperate with conscription for the Korean War — he explored the history of nonviolent action and the speeches and writings of Gandhi. Sharp started corresponding with Albert Einstein and sent the theoretical physicist his manuscript for Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, eventually published in 1960 by the Navajivan Publishing House, which was founded by Gandhi in Ahmedabad. Einstein wrote the foreword for the small volume, calling it “a truly important work” and describing Sharp as a “born historian, in whose hands the various threads are held together and woven into a pattern from which a complete picture emerges.” Einstein later wrote that this book was the finest he had seen on Gandhi.

Sharp spent 10 years in Britain and Norway, first at the University of Oslo’s Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas and then at Oslo’s Institute for Social Research. There he caught the attention of Thomas C. Schelling, a Harvard professor who would in 2005 win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Schelling invited him to Harvard. Having started on his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1960, Sharp finished his thesis at Harvard, and in 1968 was awarded the D. Phil. in political theory from Oxford. His study emphasized theories and philosophies of the nature of political power, authority and obedience, dictatorial systems and totalitarianism, and resistance and revolutionary movements. His dissertation was 1,428 pages long.

Sharp edited his thesis and in 1973 published it in three volumes, as The Politics of Nonviolent Action (also known as Sharp’s Trilogy), a sweeping historical examination of the phenomenon of nonviolent resistance. This is where his 198 methods first appeared. The Trilogy would become one of the most important, influential, and authoritative works in history on the spread of ideas about fighting with nonviolent action. Of paramount importance, he based the Trilogy on actual events, specific instances and real-life examples, while drawing heavily from the body of political theory. Both analyzing and describing the powers and properties that are fundamental to the technique of nonviolent resistance, the three volumes spread around the world from hand to hand. He has written many more books and pamphlets since then, each expanding and clarifying the field of study that he helped to shape.

Just as Gandhi was confounded by problems of terminology, Sharp recognized early that the quandaries of language impeded the understanding and teaching of nonviolent methods of fighting for social justice and political change — all the more so when translation comes into play. Many languages today have no word whatsoever for this subject, including Hebrew and Arabic. Yet even in English, something so small as the decision to hyphenate — nonviolent and nonviolence versus non-violent and non-violence — is ambiguous. Hyphenating the expression further accentuates a negative connotation; without a hyphen, the word becomes a more straightforward affirmation.

Since 1949, Sharp has undertaken an ongoing project of scrutinizing the predicaments and quandaries faced by anyone writing and speaking about the power of this form of struggle. The result has been a long-awaited dictionary of nearly 1,000 entries, described by the author as meant “to develop greater conceptual clarity.” This is a critically important development, because explanations of nonviolent action have often tended toward the bizarre, romantic or quixotic. (I recall a young man in Pondicherry, India, some years ago, who described civil resistance to me as “something to do with boldness.”) Despite numerous historically successful instances of major accomplishments from nonviolent action, it is regrettably true that universities, social scientists, news media, diplomats and policy makers have generally failed to study and grasp its power and the way it works; the lexicon is not well known even in closely related fields. Journalists and diplomats — whose work often brings them into contact with nonviolent conflict — do not receive training in this subject.

Privately, I am hopeful that a pet peeve of mine may be positively affected by the availability of Sharp’s Dictionary, namely the vacuous phrase we routinely see in Western news accounts: “the people took to the streets.” Journalists and others write this as if it were factually explanatory, when it is actually misleading in implying that impetuous, improvisational street action is all there is to nonviolent resistance. Sharp has long held that nonviolent action is actually more complex in its use of power and strategy than is military action, as this dictionary shows.

I am glad to have at hand, for instance, his re-conceptualization of “sanctions.” Sharp explains that while sanctions typically refer to punishment for failure to behave as expected, and may be used specifically in the context of international relations as one nation-state acting upon another, the phenomenon actually occurs in a wide range of social relationships, including the firing of an employee or disobedience with respect to certain laws.

“Sanctions may also be applied by the citizenry against the State, by certain nongovernmental groups against others, and by States against each other,” Sharp writes; “Sanctions in domestic and international politics are usually a key source of political power.” Among nonviolent sanctions used by non-state groups, he cites boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. Finally, “A key element in the operation of nonviolent action against repressive opponents is the refusal to capitulate or submit in spite of official sanctions and unofficial reprisals.” This broadening of the word’s meaning reflects Sharp’s thoroughgoing analysis of power, which respects not merely state-controlled physical force, but also includes the power that ordinary citizens can wield through organized, strategic action.

The dictionary also reveals ways in which nonviolent action has shaped world history, even if it is often veiled by the ways we talk about our past. Consider the entry for “protest emigration,” which Sharp defines as follows:

Deliberate migration from the Jurisdiction of a State as an expression of extreme disapproval because the resisters believe it to be responsible for certain injustices or oppression. Such action is a very serious method of social noncooperation. However, a protest emigration by very large numbers of people may take on the character of political noncooperation. Protest emigration may be permanent or temporary.

He goes on to explain, “Voluntary emigration was called hijra in seventh-century Arabic. The term hijra derives from Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina, undertaken instead of submission to oppression in Mecca.” I would add that this term, meaning “to abandon” in Arabic and employed in 622, was corrupted to hizrat when it reached India. In East Germany, the continual westward flow of East Germans to their democratic neighbors in West Germany was called “exit” and was, of course, permanent, in instances when successful.

By defining words and terms non-judgmentally and with the greatest economy, the dictionary makes rapid clarification readily accessible. Having been spoiled by the intellectually provocative historical examples that suffuse Sharp’s Trilogy, I found the dictionary upon first encounter so terse that I felt deprived. Yet, as Sharp’s Dictionary spreads throughout the world, I believe that it will contribute to both the understanding and the use of nonviolent action. For now, I am certain of one thing: No other person alive today could have produced this work, and we should be grateful that he has done so.

Che Gandhi, courtesy Beautiful Trouble and Andy Meconi

When contemplating “The Marriage of Gandhi and Che,” the subtitle of my contribution to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, I was originally thinking of something frilly with lace — perhaps an off-white gown of appropriate drama. Confronting this challenge of representation, Agit-Pop co-founder Andy Meconi came up with a more iconic image expropriation: the smiling old soul superimposed onto the dashing beret. Two great faces that face great together.

This week’s formal release of the OR Books publication put together under the auspices of Agit-Pop and the Yes Labs (“assembled” rather than edited by Andrew Boyd with Dave Mitchell) is indeed a cause for celebration. Bringing together more than seventy authors in a collection of two-page mini essays, Beautiful Trouble looks at interdependent theories, principles, tactics and case studies. Though largely written by a younger generation of agitators, including Waging Nonviolence’s own Bryan Farrell, Nathan Schneider and Eric Stoner, the book includes pieces by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, Arun Gupta, Nadine Bloch, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and many others. Accompanied by a growing website of supplemental materials, the toolbox package seeks to put the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change makers. Written in an engaging style and format and chock-full of photos, cartoons and visuals to incite and inspire, the book is sophisticated enough for antiwar and human rights veterans, while being easily accessible for newcomers.

The special timing of this effort has not been missed by any of the media-conscious movement-builders involved. With the birth of a new global people’s movement firmly in mind, the wranglers responsible for Beautiful Trouble understand that “the impossible suddenly seems possible, and all around the world ordinary people are trying out new tools and tactics to win victories where they live.” The urgency of this political moment, in the words of Andrew Boyd, “demands resources that will transform outrage into effective action” — action for building the next revolution.

For many of us, the revolution we seek must understand the connections between means and ends, as well as include the mass-based people power central to effective unarmed civilian resistance. Though the term “nonviolence” has long seemed negative to many, rehabilitating the phrase by reviving the more militant concept of “revolutionary nonviolence” is also a process whose time has come. Mainstream politicians and misguided textbooks have tried to convince us that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were extreme opposites whose visions and practices had nothing to do with one another, but the truth has always been more nuanced, dialectic and complicated than that.

It is not that Che Gandhi seeks to become the new “brand” (Che McGandhi, if you will) by accepting everything those two forefathers believed. This author, for one, does not think that Che’s idea of foco guerrilla warfare has much to offer modern-day radicals; nor do I accept Gandhi’s notions on abstinence and sexuality. The hero-worshiping of both of these figures has done much damage to their most significant joint legacy — that one must give one’s all to a total revolution which is based on love of the people. Che McGandhi’s mass appeal might not yet match the Mc-numbers we’d like — only 300 billion served? How about getting the other six and a half billion their social change with equal portions peace and justice, please? Perhaps we need to invent another prophetic hybrid, this time a West African woman — in tribute to all the women of the Global South who are leading nonviolent revolutions today. Let’s call her Cheluchi NGandhi (points for anyone who can parse the multiple hidden meanings).

What we surely and certainly need, in the U.S. and across the planet, is a new approach toward organizing that includes a sense of humor, breathtaking creativity and a focus on appealing to greater numbers of people without losing sight of how issues and struggles are connected. As we join together for that upcoming uprising, won’t we be causing some beautiful trouble then?

Initiatives promoting self-management are spreading in Spain. The latest one is ¡Rebelaos! (translated, in the imperative, as “Rebel!”), a small publication that has been flooding the streets since last Thursday and preaching a way of life outside the government and economic system.

“We want to present proposals and strategies for social change,” says Enric Duran, one of the members of the Afinidad Rebelde collective, which is responsible for the publication. “Although there is a lot of information about how to live without capitalism, the information is quite dispersed. We worked to gather these ideas and experiences into a roadmap for generating change.” Afinidad Rebelde grew out of a few dozen people from the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, Derecho de Rebelión and the 15M movement. It was born in mid-2011 to publish ¡Rebelaos!, and it will dissolve after distribution is finished.

This is not the first publication of its kind. In 2008, another temporary collective was formed to publish Crisis, distributing 200,000 copies around the country. In it, Enric Duran explained how he “robbed” almost €500,000 from 39 banks. “I deliberately carried out an individual disobedience action towards banking,” he wrote, “to denounce the banking system and to use the money for supporting initiatives which alert us to the systemic crisis that we are starting to inhabit and which intend to build an alternative society.” The article became known all around the country and earned him the nickname “Robin Bank.”

Now, there’s even more demand for these kinds of ideas. The cuts recently made by the government to health care and education are making Spaniards wonder whether, in the near future, they will still be able to count on state resources to maintain quality public services. In Valencia last month, students demonstrated because they didn’t have heating in the schools for the winter, and they were harshly repressed by police.

¡Rebelaos! has the goal of establishing a communication network among people who are committed to change and ready to act, as well as finding collective solutions to social problems. In thematically-arranged articles, there are proposals relating to labor, housing and education.

One proposal, for instance, is for the creation of cooperatives and citizen job centers, following an initiative of the Economic Group of Sol Camp called Marea Roja (Red Tide), which coordinated unemployed people to create new professional projects together and held monthly meetings at the doors of the official employment offices. ¡Rebelaos! also recommends squatting in unused buildings, collectively purchasing spaces and resettling abandoned villages—which in Spain number in the hundreds. These, then, can then be put to new uses, such as education centers and a self-managed health care system such as the one operated by the Cooperativa Integral Catalana in Barcelona. Since last year, its doctors have been working for and are supported by the local community.

Media is another theme in ¡Rebelaos!, especially in light of the recent closure of one of the main left-wing national newspapers, Público. The newspaper’s employees and readers are starting a campaign to buy it and convert it into a cooperative under the slogan “Más Público.” One of the articles explains, “We have the chance to create truly mass media, which is a critical need of social movements.”

One of the publication’s most controversial themes is economic disobedience. This is also advocated by the collective Derecho de Rebelion, which will launch a handbook in few weeks about tax resistance and insolvency as means of recovering freedom. Other collectives, such as the National Association of Unemployed People, have threatened to promote a massive campaign of fiscal disobedience if the government doesn’t immediately halt home evictions and foreclosures, and guarantee a basic income for all the unemployed.

Afinidad Rebelde has printed half a million copies of ¡Rebelaos! thanks to a crowdfunding campaign. They are being distributed in 320 cities all around Spain with the help of hundreds of local collectives and the 15M movement. Last Wednesday, 55,000 copies of the publication arrived in Madrid, and dozens of volunteers are working to make them reach every part of the city. But the initiative has crossed boundaries as well. Volunteer translators are working to spread the word in Portuguese, English and other languages. A collective in Nantes is preparing a version of it for French readers.

As in Greece, the conjunction of self-management initiatives and economic disobedience is seen by activists in Spain as the best way forward. In the coming months, with May’s tax season, there may be a real chance to push the government to change its policies for the better.

If you have ever read Dr. Seuss’s environmentally-themed children’s classic The Lorax — or had it read to you — perhaps these words will sound familiar:

“But now,” says the Once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not!”

This message of individual responsibility has served as an introduction for many children to the idea of environmental stewardship. And now it is being spread to a vast audience on the big screen. When it premiered earlier this month, The Lorax was not only the biggest box-office debut in 2012, but also the biggest opening weekend in Universal Pictures history. Not bad for a story that condemns the voracious industrialism of the Once-ler, who clear-cuts the forests for the sake of shortsighted profits, and champions the Lorax, a forest creature who “speaks for the trees.”

But what about this message of individual responsibility as salvation? Is it really the radical fix our culture needs to save the planet? Or is it a message more befitting of a big-budget Hollywood film with 70 different product tie-ins?

To be fair, The Lorax is such a seminal work in environmental literature that it might be accurately called, as a recent Nature article put it, “a kind of Silent Spring for the playground set.” It is therefore not surprising that when Seuss wrote it in 1971, he drew upon the emerging field of ecology — which promoted a “holistic” worldview where people are inextricably linked to their environments. He also addressed issues of economic externalities, property rights and consumer demands. A close reading of The Lorax reveals advanced economic and ecological ideas, elevated by colorful photos and poetic prose.

Nevertheless, there is another aspect of his analysis that is a product of its time: individualism. It’s no coincidence that the 1970s is remembered as the “Me Decade” — a time when many activists emerging from the counterculture of the late 1960s became disillusioned with political activism. Indeed, Charles Reich’s 1970 bestseller The Greening of America argued that a shift in individual consciousness was essential for ecological social change. Perhaps the most concrete example of the counterculture’s influence on modern environmentalism comes from the title of Reich’s book: the term “green” (as in Green Party and green consumerism).

Stewart Brand’s classic 1968-1972 Whole Earth Catalog offers perhaps the best example of this depoliticization and turn to individualism. The catalog promoted a wide range of energy-saving devices, appropriate technology, and other environmentally friendly tools for saving the planet. The same year The Lorax was published, Brand said, “Individual buyers have far more control over economic behavior than voters.” Brand’s emphasis on individual responsibility (rather than political solutions) and technology is central to contemporary American environmentalism. Today, thoughtful politicians can barely even phase out inefficient light bulbs — much less legislate comprehensive solutions — and every environmental problem is addressed with a technical solution.

Like the Whole Earth Catalog, The Lorax suggests that environmental destruction is both a personal shortcoming — such as the ethical failure of the Once-ler — and a personal responsibility — exhibited by the small boy, who at the end, is entrusted to replant the forest. While the moral force of an individual is essential to nonviolent social movements such as environmental justice, the myopic focus on individual responsibility too often obscures systemic problems.

I don’t mean to suggest that the personal actions people take to reduce their environmental impact are pointless, but rather to argue that these actions have the unfortunate tendency to render environmentalists complacent. I’ve known too many people who bike and recycle, and think they have done their part. This is known as the “single action bias.” As Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions discovered, when people react to a threat like climate change, they often rely on just one moderate action, such as riding a bike. The researchers concluded, “People often take no further action, presumably because the first one succeeded in reducing their feeling of worry or vulnerability.”

This often leads into another shortcoming of individual action called the “rebound effect.” Too often, conscientious consumers — myself being no exception — save money on energy efficiency, then immediately turn around and purchase more products with the saved money.

Recycling is another virtuous and well-intentioned environmental act, but it too often becomes an end in itself, a sacred act devoid of a larger context. Because only 3 percent of the total waste in the United States comes from municipal sources (and not all of that waste is recyclable), if everyone were to religiously recycle 100 percent of all recyclable products, 99 percent of the solid waste would still remain. We too often celebrate recycling, and neglect the more important actions of reducing and reusing. Ultimately, we need to challenge our disposable culture of hyper-consumption that creates these vast mountains of waste.

Fortunately, there are resistance- and awareness-raising efforts underway, such as with Buy Nothing Day, No Waste Day, Boycott Black Friday and Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping. But it will take more than living simply and rejecting “commodity fetishism.” We will also need to build and strengthen our communities because, as the venerable environmentalist Bill McKibben has argued, “individual actions don’t add up to enough.”

Imagine if we had lists of “Ten Things You Can Do to Save the Planet” that included “organize a group of your friends and meet with your community leaders” or “engage in a direct action protest at your local coal plant.” It’s this idea of communal cooperation, as opposed to isolated efforts, that gives rise to powerful social movements. A perfect example is the Green Belt Movement, which was initiated by the late Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. By connecting individual actions — undertaken as part of a larger group mission — with larger social imperatives, Maathai and her Green Belt Movement planted over 40 million trees and in the process challenged a corrupt government and exploitative industries.

Perhaps the final scene of The Lorax can be read with this in mind. As the future of the forest — the last “Truffula tree” seed — is entrusted to a small boy, he is instructed to “Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from the axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.” After all, that’s an awful tall order for just one person.

At 8:30 a.m. this past Monday morning, more than 50 women and men were bottlenecked at the top of an escalator in New York City’s Grand Central Station. Workers of every class and industry were bunched together, pinstripe suits and Carhartt jackets brushing shoulders, no one making eye contact. The crowd waited to descend to the subway and hop on a rumbling car that would  carry them back into the workweek. The mass was restless. It was time to strike.

“Occupy Wall Street!” Diego Ibanez called from the edge of the crowd. “Why don’t they just get jobs?”

“Because we spent three months creating this magazine!” I answered. The crowd chuckled, and individuals began to emerge from the half-sleep of a Monday morning transit commute. Four sets of hands flew in the air waving colorful copies of Tidal, a theory and strategy magazine for the Occupy movement.

“Get your free Occupy Wall Street magazine! No ads! No cost! No capitalism!” cried Yates McKee, with the intonation of a hawking paperboy. An older black woman reached for the magazine, then a white man in an ill-fitting suit, then two helmeted construction workers. Soon, everyone wanted one. As the crowd filtered onto the escalator, it formed a single-file line of downward tilted faces studying the magazine’s cover image: a mass surging against a collapsing chain link fence that was protecting an empty gravel lot. Two police officers try to support the fence, with heels dug in and bodies taut.

As Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated, no press release, tweet or Facebook post can speak as loudly as bodies do when they cause disruption at sites of economic injustice. These gatherings, then, must explain themselves; our actions must embody our message. So we drop “Foreclose on Banks” banners; we stage a passionate romance between puppet versions of lawmakers and bankers; we assemble beds in front of the governor’s office to protest budget cuts to homeless shelters. The distribution of Tidal is no different. Although the contents of the magazine are words, art and ideas, the distribution is a direct action.

Over the coming weeks, 50,000 copies of Tidal will hit the streets. Like the hundreds of occupations and thousands of tents that popped up all over the country last fall, these physical magazines allow the ideas inside to materialize in a way that websites and online petitions cannot. As Judith Butler wrote for the first issue:

When bodies gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands. They are demanding to be recognized and to be valued; they are exercising a right to appear and to exercise freedom.

Similarly, by printing the magazines, we are demanding that the ideas inside—which include condemnations of neoliberalism, examples of large-scale horizontal organizing and a call for strike on May 1—appear and be heard. This is a demand that has not gone unchallenged; on Monday morning at Grand Central, the police threatened to arrest us if we continued to distribute the magazine. (We did, and they didn’t.)

The sites and manner of distribution are equally significant. Our flash-mob distributions in Grand Central and Union Square during Monday morning rush-hour strategically inserted Occupy’s presence into one of the fault lines of capitalism: the transition, literally, between the weekend and the workweek.

“Stop hating Mondays,” we suggested as we handed out copies. People smiled, at first halfheartedly, then more contemplatively. With so much so-called information being communicated through fiber optic cables and satellites, this kind of human interaction is disarming. It makes people have to confront the words. I hope we reminded them that they don’t need to live in a society where it is acceptable to hate a whole day out of the week—a whole one-seventh of our lives. Inside, they found articles on the May 1 strike, on shedding their complacency and on pillowfighting. There’s also an article about what they’d just experienced—media as a direct action.

Then, two days later, as marchers who had been arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in October and men who’d been picked up for petty drug charges walked out of the courtroom, they too were handed copies of Tidal. Inside, perhaps the “Communiqué” speaks to what they already felt but might not have been able to name—that our nation’s social contract is in crisis because it expects the 99 percent to accept a legal system in which only the 1 percent can exert any control.

By hitting public transit stations, courtrooms, union halls, barber shops, bars, free newspaper stands and the outer boroughs, the distribution of Tidal is breaking down barriers to access. It is refusing to participate in racist and classist assumptions about who reads theory and strategy. Street teams are already organizing for further distribution, inspired by the Paris Situationist movement of the 1960s, when artists painted the city with slogans pulled from essays. For a period, the walls, storefronts and edifices of Paris spoke, and so too is New York City now beginning to reverberate with a new conversation—one that began in Liberty Square, that runs throughout Tidal and that is now preparing the way for a loud, honest and imaginative spring.

Video by Natasha Singh.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Steven Pinker
Viking (2011)

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide
Joshua S. Goldstein
Dutton (2011)

The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace
Ed. Nigel J. Young
Oxford (2010)

Scholars and students in peace and nonviolent studies find their bookshelves teeming with new and intriguing works on violence, conflict, and social change. In the past year, a number of very important books—not all without controversy—have appeared, and are widely available, that have taken seriously the inquiry of what will it take for peace and a world without war. Two scholars in particular, Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Joshua S. Goldstein in Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, argue that humanity is actually becoming less violent. In fact, Goldstein and Pinker penned a piece for The New York Times Sunday Review that was published at the end of December 2011 titled: “War Really is Going Out of Style.” The boldness and veracity of their claims—in that article and their books—come from different perspectives, but is suggestive of a new consciousness that reflects the global interconnectedness made possible by the Internet and intertwined economies as well as the increasing prominence of nonviolence in the mainstream purview. The 2011 publishing of The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace confirms the serious role inquiries into war, peace, nonviolence, and social change have in the classroom as well as affirms a growing dexterity with alternatives to war.

Pinker’s tome—a meticulously researched and interdisciplinary book complete with charts, graphs, convincing methodologies, and nearly a hundred pages of notes and references—relies on historical and contemporary data sets to determine the rate of violence (acts defined as murder, torture, rape, war) in relation to the other deaths or the general living populace. It eschews absolutist measures, like the 20th century is the bloodiest century ever, in favor of a more nuanced understanding of just how pervasive violence really is in its many different aspects. The Better Angels of Our Nature offers exhaustive analyses on violence throughout human history and situates it within its historical context so as to compare it to data sets from other milieus. Pinker writes that the findings of his study suggest that the rate of violence from the time of hunter-gatherer societies to the present has a “downward arrow,” which means that the likelihood of an individual becoming a victim of violence has actually decreased throughout history. The decline in the rate of violence says nothing about our capacity for violence—as accounts of torture, drone attacks, executions, and nuclear defense spending indicates—only that they are used increasingly less because “the decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence.”

The reason, Pinker argues, for the decline of violence is not necessarily a moral awakening over the course of history—as a cognitive and experimental psychologist and linguist at Harvard University, he does not believe humans are innately good or evil—but that the human person’s capacity to engage in violence is intimately connected to historical and social circumstances. Namely, our “better angels”—empathy, self-control, moral sense, and reason—are engaged and affected by historical forces that “favor our peaceable motives.” Pinker identifies those forces as a stable state with a monopoly on force—“the Leviathan”; “commerce” and interconnected trade; “cosmopolitanism” that expands one’s awareness of difference; “feminization” and increased attention to women’s rights; and the “escalator of reason” whereby rationality and discourse play a larger role in human conflict. It is a worthwhile and demanding read—focused on providing the numbers that there are alternatives to violence—that can augment the studies of any student of nonviolence and social change. For a brief but more in-depth review of Pinker’s thesis, see Peter Singer’s excellent “Is Violence History?”

While the scope of Pinker’s project extends as far back as 10,000 BCE, international relations professor Joshua S. Goldstein approaches his conclusion that war is on the decline by looking at empirical data spanning the latter-half of the 20th century. Debunking the assertion that the 20th century was the bloodiest on record, Winning the War on War offers a digestible look at casualties from violent conflict in past centuries and eras. Goldstein’s argument is essentially a critique on how information and data is organized. He contends that war “peaked” in the world wars of the early 20th century and that it is disingenuous to the substantial, and effective, advances that have been made post-World War II in the cause of peace to lump the whole 20th century together. What follows are interesting case studies of war, intervention, and conflict resolution from 1945-2011. For Goldstein, as a political realist in international affairs, what is important is scale. And the scale of war, in the latter-half of the 20th century has become—for lack of a better word—much more manageable for the institutions best poised and equipped for resolving violent conflict, especially among the increasingly infrequent interstate wars and civil wars (which constitute the majority of armed conflicts but are, according to Goldstein, ending at a rate faster than new ones are starting). Goldstein’s assertions are supported by empirical evidence as well as his reconstructing of the historical narratives that extensively quote and reference the major players in the conflict and resolutions. It is these characters—representatives of institutions like the UN, international peace-keepers, diplomats, peace movements, humanitarian aid agencies and the international community—who can be credited with the decline in war (and not just because of altruistic intentions, as Goldstein notes, as he considers regional organizations like NATO as having a legitimate role in peacekeeping efforts).

Winning the War on War is as much about the decline of armed conflict as it is about the role of the United Nations and the international community. Consider Goldstein’s treatment on the Congo and the UN intervention there. Certainly, millions in the Congo have been killed and have been victims of sexual violence—mainly women. Goldstein, perhaps somewhat controversially, argues that the violence in the Congo is not as bad as has been widely reported and it is harmful to the cause of peace to keep portraying it as not improving. Rather, he suggests, the scale of the violence has improved since UN intervention and NGO support—an affirmation of his thesis that UN peacekeeping and actions by the international community can “end wars and keep them from restarting” (as evidence Goldstein’s case studies include, among others, Bosnia and Kosovo, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique). One other noteworthy observation, and of particular interest for peace activists, is the role of peace movements in war’s decline. Goldstein offers a brief history detailing various movements and the effects they have had, but the most interesting piece is his contention that issues of peace and justice—such as anti-war activists over-concern with corporations, globalization, or oil companies—are, in fact, a hindrance to more effective means of building peace, such as supporting international peacekeeping efforts and empowering the UN. In spite of Goldstein’s criticisms of the peace movement—which is a reflection of his unfamiliarity with more justice-oriented thinkers like Glen Stassen whose work editing Just Peacemaking (Pilgrim Press, 2004) prioritizes justice and peace in abolishing war—Winning the War on War is a realistic yet hopeful look at humanity’s collective potential to further reduce the instances of war.

Lastly, Oxford University Press has released an incredible reference resource that every university library should own: The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace (OUP, 2010), edited by Nigel J. Young. The four-volume set covers nearly every imaginable entry one could think of regarding peace, including important figures, movements, and ideas from literally across the globe. With more than 850 entries, this is an indispensable go-to source for anyone looking for more than just passing familiarity with off-the-beaten-path persons and events as well as the more well known topics; from entries like Jehovah’s Witnesses and their flexible relationship to conscientious objection or the extensive detailing on “Arms Control” to the broad yet in-depth entry on “Pacifism” and figures like Gandhi and Dr. King, there is a rich array of theoretical and factual knowledge presented. The encyclopedia also displays a comprehensive understanding of the strategies, tactics, and movements that have had significant impact on issues of peace, justice, and social change. For example, the entry on “Civil Disobedience” goes beyond the tired, limiting definition of breaking an unjust law to protest it to include the more nuanced—and increasingly relevant—use of civil disobedience to make a wider point. It also offers a thorough analysis of the issues and debates concerning the use of civil disobedience, like in the use of property destruction, in a thoughtful, dialogical manner.

In addition to excellent entries, clear and consistent cross-referencing, and extensive bibliographic information for further research, the encyclopedia includes appendices of key historical documents—printed in their entirety—that concern themselves with the pursuit of peace. Some of these documents include the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, various nuclear test ban treaties, the Earth Charter, and Gene Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.” The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace is an extraordinary reference that offers an expansive view of how peace has been struggled for—and won—by recounting the diverse historical instances, persons, and movements that made it possible.

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, To Dwell in Peace. Here is what I said.

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.”

The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

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.

This is my debut column for Waging Nonviolence. After a long break from writing and publishing regularly, this seems like a good place to get my “land legs” again (or is it my web legs?). I have a lot of admiration for Nathan, Eric, Bryan and all the rest of the WNV folks, and am excited to be part of this project.

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.

Twenty-four years ago this morning—September 1, 1987—Vietnam veteran Brian Willson joined a handful of peacemakers on the railroad tracks at Concord Naval Weapons Stations to begin what they envisioned as a forty-day fast and vigil to protest arms shipments from this Northern California military base to US-backed forces in Central America.

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.