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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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?”

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After the Arab Spring, few would argue—as many did until very recently—that nonviolence and Islam are incompatible or even contradictory. At the same time, however, few still have any knowledge of the rich history of nonviolence in the Muslim world, which long predates the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

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

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

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After The Smoke Clears:
The Just War Tradition and Post-War Justice
Mark J. Allman and Tobias L. Winright.
Orbis Books (2010)

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

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People are rarely swayed by information alone. If they were, the cigarette industry would have collapsed when the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking came out in 1964, and fossil fuels would have been phased out in 1989, when Congress was first alerted to the threat of global warming. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg writes in her recently released book Join the Club, “No amount of information can budge us when we refuse to be budged. The catalog of justifications for destructive behaviors is a tribute to human ingenuity.”

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

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

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

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

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Anyone who makes even a modest habit of speaking out against war in public soon runs up against the inevitable, supposedly unanswerable question: What about World War II? (We have a whole category devoted to it.) It’s meant to be the ultimate stumper. This was the “good war,” wasn’t it, the war waged by the “greatest generation” against the evil incarnate of Hitler and imperial Japan? There was simply no other choice before the forces of goodness and truth but to leap into the single most deadly undertaking in all of human history. Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The authors of Small Acts of Resistance—a great little book filled with stories of ordinary people taking bold, creative and often-times humorous action to defy injustice—recently published a piece in Yes! Magazine that boils their message down to “10 Everyday Acts of Resistance That Changed the World.” The list, much like the book, features some familiar stories that may be recognizable to longtime advocates of nonviolence—such as the Danish resistance movement during WWII—but mainly focuses on ones that have unfortuantely remained obscure, like the one about football fans in Uruguay, who during the military dictatorship mumbled the national anthem until it came to the line, “May tyrants tremble!”

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