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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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