A checkpoint run by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Baba Amr, a poor district in the southwestern part of Homs. Photo from Der Spiegel.

Say the words, “Free Syrian Army” in nearly any gathering of Syrian expatriates lately, and their faces break into wide smiles of appreciation. Say the same words to people in Syria, and they say, “They will liberate us.” This sentiment is growing all over Syria, as the defected soldiers that make up the FSA wage battle against their pro-regime counterparts. But will such optimism last?

Nearly 11 months into the Syrian uprising, ordinary civilians, once certain of the effectiveness of civil resistance, are losing hope. They turn to the FSA for protection. The world has been in awe of the Syrian revolution and its peaceful activists (“How brave!” “Such tenacity!”), who vow to oust the Assad regime once and for all, and the peaceful protests continue daily. However, many of these demonstrations are protected from Assad’s army and snipers by the FSA, where and when possible. The presence of the FSA at protest sites has re-energized protesters, who are coming out in increasing numbers even as the regime escalates its violence against them.

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As chants of “Al-shaab urid iskat al-nizam” (“the people want to bring down the regime”) rise, so, too, does the hailstorm of bullets. As people come out into the streets to express themselves, so, too, do the tanks. Syria’s revolution is entering its ninth month, the Assad regime uses familiar tactics in its attempt to crush dissent. There is nothing creative about deploying tanks and snipers to villages. There is nothing creative about using rape as a tool of war, especially against an unarmed population. In contrast, however, the Free Syria movement has responded to these assaults with amazing creativity. Syrians continue to take to the streets in peaceful protest against the Assad regime—every day, in nearly every city, in nearly every village.

Being creative takes work. Nonviolent creativity, especially when faced with live ammunition, takes steely willpower and a fierce commitment. Syrians have demonstrated both as they slowly but surely rid themselves of a regime that thinks nothing of using rape as a tool of repression, dismemberment as a message, or kidnapping as a reminder. That the protests have remained largely peaceful is awe-inspiring; that Syrians are so creative under these circumstances is astonishing.

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A modified dollar bill from the Sindegate campaign.

While the United States government debates the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Spanish Internet activists have won a small victory against the threat of censorship on the web. If the proposed Sinde Law had been approved in Spain on December 2, the government would have won the power to shut down websites that offer downloads and streaming of digital content under copyright. But ultimately, the lame-duck, left-wing party PSOE kept the law from passing because of an internal debate created by a two-year long mobilization that was the prelude of the occupation-based May 15 movement.

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On Saturday night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, just before the third act of Faust began, a man began yelling from the audience, “Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street!” It had neither the rhythm of a chant nor the participatory quality of the usual “mic check” that has been used to disrupt so much lately, interrupting public figures including Michele Bachmann, Scott Walker, and Barack Obama. (Maybe having the quorum for a mic check would have cost too many tickets.) It was first received with a boo from someone on the opposite side of the theater, but that was quickly drowned out by a round of applause—something like what a singer might receive at curtain call for a decent performance in a supporting role. The protester was carried away by the NYPD.

Presumably this comes as part of Occupy Lincoln Center, which on December 1 held a protest attended by Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. That night, the Met performed Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha. One sign read, according to the LA Times, “Gandhi would be pepper sprayed.” Like the other Occupy actions under the umbrella of Occupy Museums, these protests oppose “cultural institutions that serve the nation’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of the vast majority.” (It doesn’t help that people aren’t being allowed to protest on Lincoln Center’s plaza—apparently, it’s Koch-Blocked. Or that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s media is one of Lincoln Center’s chief funders.)

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Twenty more innocent people were pepper-sprayed last week, although not by police cracking down on protesters this time, but by a woman fighting for a discounted Xbox at Walmart.

This was only one of many violent incidents that marred Black Friday last week, as throngs of crazed consumers hit stores across the country to get the best deals of the year, on what turned out to be the biggest day of shopping ever.

In an effort to push back against the frenzy of consumerism that overtakes our country every year at this time, Adbusters used the 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to kick off their latest campaign: #OCCUPYXMAS.

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I did my best to smell and look expensive, like someone who would normally come out on a Monday night to hear “venture capitalist and turn-around CEO Steven Pease,” author of a 622-page book called The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement. The program began with a complimentary light dinner, then the talk: “Why Jews are Disproportionately High Achievers.” This was the first in a series of Wall Street-oriented events hosted at Birthright Israel’s alumni headquarters, a loft on West 13th Street with exposed brick walls and tasteful track lighting.

Inside my free copy of The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement—Birthright, flush with the cash of Wall Street bajillionaires like Michael Steinhardt, is very big on free—I found tables with statistics: 21% of Ivy League students are Jews, 11% of senators, 40% of NBA team owners, 31% of Forbes’ 400, 24% of Fortune‘s “25 Most Powerful People in Business,” 72% of “25 Real Estate Fortunes Among Forbes 400,” 23% of all Nobel prizes, and on and on. In every arena you could think of, Pease extolled “disproportionate Jewish achievement.”

The last time I’d been in that loft was early 2010, for a pre-trip Birthright orientation. (I wrote about my subsequent trip in The Nation.) But this time, I came with ten young Jews—a minyan—to Occupy Birthright. To liberate Birthright by repurposing its space.

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A photograph on the front page of The Washington Post on October 27 showed Yemeni women burning their veils, a Bedouin tribal expression that appealed for assistance from tribesmen. With this action, the women appear to be saying that the official powers that ought to be safeguarding Yemeni women citizens instead are attacking them. The Associated Press photo, part of a gallery of shots of Yemeni women’s nonviolent actions, is visually stunning. While some onlookers might assume that the veil is a symbol of repression, to these Yemeni women it is part of their means of empowerment.

Yemen’s ongoing struggle is indicative of this year’s larger Arab Awakening in the way that women have assumed responsibility for speaking out politically.

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The media team working at Liberty Plaza.

A lot of what you’ve probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you’re getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That’s where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.

At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream. They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until they’re viral. But for those looking to understand even the basic facts about what is actually going on—before September 17 and since—the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything else.

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The signature tactic of this revolutionary year, it would seem, is a mass protest in a large, symbolic public space. We saw it in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout, and then in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square in Athens. Now, in the U.S., the October 6 movement is planning to take over Washington’s Freedom Plaza, while another coalition has been planning to do the same on Wall Street on September 17—tomorrow. (For a basic account of what’s going on with the latter, see my report from earlier this week.) If you want to get something done, apparently, the way to do it is to take the square. And this is exactly what the people at Adbusters had in mind when they made their initial call to occupy Wall Street, observing that “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future”; they continued, “We want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”

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So much of the ugliness that the American wars have brought into the world over the past decade has been invisible, hidden from view by being unrecorded, unremembered, redacted, spun, censored, or glorified. For those not in the way of falling bombs and night raids, or those whose families haven’t been torn apart by deployment after deployment, the wars have been easy enough to ignore. We’ve all seen enough, though, to know better. We should know that this ugliness hasn’t done, and cannot do, any good. Yet the ugliness has, as a whole, left Americans discouraged and irresolute. Maybe it will take beauty to finally show people the courage to pay attention and act.

That’s the idea behind 10 Years and Counting, a new initiative hatched in the Adirondack compound of the Blue Mountain Center, an activist and artist residency community nestled beside a high-country lake. 10YAC’s goal is this: between September 11th and October 7th of this year—marking the 10-year anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war in Afghanistan—launch an artistic groundswell by coordinating protest and arts events around the country. Their network includes activist groups, including Code Pink and the War Resisters League, as well as arts organizations and galleries. To see some of the visual art, poetry, music, and performances they’ve been gathering, take a look around the 10YAC blog.

But art, for 10YAC, is not quite an end in itself. “One of the most important visions” of the project, according to Alice Gordon, program director at Blue Mountain, is to see “as many Americans as possible getting onto the streets for peace around the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.”

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