On what should be a sad occasion, I’ve found myself uplifted by the many great remembrances floating around the internet of Howard Zinn’s long and productive life. They serve as a reminder that a life well lived is to be celebrated, not mourned. His single greatest accomplishment was not writing A People’s History, but living an active life worthy of inclusion in such a book. He stands as an equal among the American heroes he wrote about for his organizing and speaking out against the Vietnam War, which, on one occasion, as Daniel Ellsberg recalled, led to him being beaten and arrested by police.

I was fortunate enough to have my own interaction with Zinn a few years ago. I was in the midst of discovering the power of nonviolent social movements and had come across his famous article “A Just Cause, Not A Just War,” published a few months after Sept. 11. Being somewhat blinded by my own passions and interests, I seized not upon his wonderful message that war is inherently unjust and must cease no matter the cause, but on this one little statement:

There might be situations (and even such strong pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil would be justified.

It struck me as an unfortunate disclaimer from a man I wholly admired, in an article I otherwise loved. Furthermore, I was not aware of any justification for violence given by Gandhi or King. So I wrote him and asked for an explanation. To my surprise, he wrote back:
Read the rest of this article »

I began my recent dip into Slavoj Zizek’s Violence with a question that he raises but never quite answers: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” What he offers, instead, is an analysis of the violence that goes unacknowledged simply because we are so accustomed to it, because it is woven into the systemic order of society’s power relationships. But the crucial importance of this question to those of us invested in the theory and practice of nonviolence—forced to notice that it threatens to undermine our entire enterprise—kept me looking for other texts to help me think through it. At the end of that post, I promised a turn to Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which is what I’ll do now.

Butler is, says Cornel West on the dustjacket, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today.” A professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, she has played a defining role in the poststructural analysis of gender and sexuality, bringing Hegel, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others to bear on the foundational questions of human identity. I quote West most of all because I’ve mainly encountered Butler on panels alongside him, and their remarkable repartee has conditioned some of the most riveting intellectual experiences of my life. West plays the prophet and Butler the meticulous artificer, whose inventions tread along subtle gears to astonishing results. Together, they give me hope that the disciplined imagination still has something to say to our ever-more technocratic way of doing politics.

Frames of War is a series of essays on the horrific violence of US power during the last Bush administration. The book’s subtitle is When Is Life Grievable?, and it points to the heart of Butler’s argument: the senselessness of this violence stems from an inability (or unwillingness) to grieve for the human beings who fall victim to our weapons. Implicitly, we don’t even seem to consider those people really alive. She calls for “a new bodily ontology” (Butler’s prose is infamously technical) that allows us to recognize how intertwined we are with them. Other human beings are inevitably woven into, as she puts it, the conditions that make life livable for us, and consequently we have obligations to them. Grief would be a start.

What suggested to me the relevance of this text to the issue at hand was the discovery, while perusing it in Bluestockings bookstore, of the problem that orients its final chapter, titled “The Claim of Non-Violence.” It is a restatement of Zizek’s unanswered question:

I was asked by the philosopher Catherine Mills to consider an apparent paradox. Mills points out that there is a violence through which the subject is formed, and that the norms that found the subject are by definition violent. She asks how, then, if this is the case, I can make a call for non-violence.

Read the rest of this article »

Over at Foreign Policy In Focus, I had an article yesterday in response to Obama’s dismissal of nonviolence during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. As often as the new peace laureate references the influence that Gandhi and King have had on his life, he was sure quick to write off any alternative to war in dealing with our most pressing problems.

So, I decided to tell a few stories of how nonviolence worked against the Nazis, and provide a few pieces of evidence that the threat of terrorism will only be exacerbated by sending more troops to Afghanistan. To check out the whole piece, click here.

The picture above was taken by Ed Hedemann, a good friend from the War Resisters League, at a protest that I took part in on the day Obama delivered his speech. We walked from the UN headquarters in New York to the military recruiting center at Times Square. I volunteered to carry a coffin –  made of cardboard and drapped in a black cloth - and wore a protest shroud bearing an image of a civilian killed in Afghanistan by a US bomb, which brought home the real human cost of the war in a way that I have never experienced by simply holding a sign.

Thankfully, there was a lot of media covering the demonstration. For whatever reason, the irony of Obama accepting the world’s most prestigious peace award on the heels of making the decision to escalate a bloody war was too hard for even the mainstream press to ignore.

For anyone who speaks German, the video of an interview I did with Reuters during the protest can be seen in an article on the website of Die Zeit, the largest weekly German newspaper. To watch that clip, click here.

Last June was the 27th anniversary of one of the largest protests in history, when upwards of one million people gathered on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park to rally against nuclear weapons while the UN held a Special Session on Disarmament. Two days later 1,600 demonstrators were involved in acts of civil disobedience at the consulates of five countries.

One of the seminal figures of this movement was author Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 book The Fate of the Earth reinvigorated the anti-nuclear movement with its rallying call for a nuclear freeze. Though still very much focused on the issue today, Jonathan has started to pursue climate change with a like-minded passion, which is fitting given the similarities of the two movements. (Something about protesting outside a UN meeting sounds all too familiar right now.)

I met him at the Brooklyn Bridge March for Climate Leadership, which was one of 5,000 plus actions that took place on October 24, the 350-organized International Day of Climate Action. Although very little came of the march, it ended up being a great opportunity to hear Jonathan trace his interest in the issue back to when his good friend Bill McKibben first started writing about global warming two decades ago.

Not long after that, we sat down for a more formal discussion of climate activism. Drawing from his deep knowledge of nonviolent movements–which was the focus of his 2003 book The Unconquerable World–Jonathan offered tactical suggestions for climate activists, compared the threat of climate change to nuclear war and spoke of the general mystery surrounding the rise of mass public movements.

Bryan Farrell: Why has it taken so long for a climate justice movement to emerge.
Jonathan Schell: We just haven’t seen all that much in the way of social movements recently. We had the anti globalization movement in late 90s which flared up and died away. We also had the antiwar movement against the Iraq War but that also has kind of died away. There just hasn’t been much energy in social movements. Why that is is a very deep question. It’s a crippling disability when it comes to changes in policy that are on a deep and fundamental level, whether that’s changing the economic system or opposing these wars and the whole imperial mindset behind them or addressing global warming. If you just look historically, it’s very hard to find fundamental change in policy that wasn’t preceded by a very powerful social movement. So if you don’t have that card in your deck, I think it’s incredibly difficult to get fundamental change. In terms of public awareness [climate change] has been stronger than some of the other movements. Certainly it’s been longstanding and there are lots of strong organizations. Read the rest of this article »

At Religion Dispatches today, there’s an interview with Sharon Nepstad, a sociologist of religion with a worthwhile-looking new book: Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement. There’s lots of interest in it, but an especially useful part of the discussion takes on questions of protest method in a nonviolent paradigm:

To what extent are certain strategies used in protest violent?

The question of the line between violence and nonviolence is an ongoing debate within peace movements. My own research on the Catholic Left-inspired Plowshares movement is an example of a group that really pushes the boundaries by destroying and damaging military equipment. The debate over property destruction has not been settled within the peace movement.

But what I respect about the Catholic Left is that in the 1960s they were ones who began to say that sometimes protest is not enough. There had been hundreds of protests against the Vietnam War but the government didn’t change its policy or position. So the Catholic Left started to call on people to interfere with the government’s capacity to wage war. These activists asked: “Would it be violent if people dismantled the gas chambers in Auschwitz?” Some activists were still opposed to property destruction as a resistance tactic, but the Catholic Left activists argued that they were saving lives by destroying draft cards or by attempting to disarm weapons of mass destruction.

Even traditional Gandhian tactics can be violent if they are used in a coercive manner. The Gandhian concept of satyagraha emphasizes that we ought to search for the good in our opponents; we ought to persuade them as we implement nonviolent acts of noncooperation. But if a nonviolent tactic is carried out in a coercive way, or if it is done with the view that the opponent should be humiliated or degraded, then it becomes a violent form of resistance. It is something that I think activists have to be constantly reflecting upon. The division between violent and nonviolent tactics isn’t always as clear-cut as we think. In my opinion, it has a lot to do with the spirit in which a campaign is conducted.

It’s definitely worth reading more at Religion Dispatches. And don’t miss a review of the book at Times Higher Education.

As mentioned on this blog before, President Obama’s frequent citation of nonviolent leaders as his heroes is completely inconsistent with, well, just about every aspect of his job. The most obvious, of course, is leading the military. And unfortunately Obama has not approached the task any differently than his predecessors. He is dead set on maintaining our presence in Iraq, bombing Pakistan and increasing troops in Afghanistan. So, to show just how inconsistent this is with the beliefs of his heroes, Rethink Afghanistan compiled a video that combines clips from the movie Gandhi, Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnman speech, and a documentary on Cesar Chavez.

Have you experienced strained or broken relationships in your family or among friends because of serious differences in politics, moral values, or religious beliefs?  These differences, which are important, can sometimes make it seem impossible for two people to get along, or to relate to each other.  In a recent HSBC television commercial, however, a beautiful story is told.  Despite serious differences in values, it is possible for “opponents” to be in a relationship and to love each other.

The woman featured in the commercial – a Greenpeace activist? – engages in direct action and civil disobedience in an effort to halt deforestation.  Later, when she is bailed from jail, we learn that her partner is one of the loggers.  (As she was cuffed and hauled away, he walked past her with a chainsaw in hand.)  From the jail, they ride home on a motorcycle, showing affection for each other.  When we see their extreme differences in values, we wonder how this relationship is possible.  How could they love each other?

Mohandas Gandhi, in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, writes:

Man and his deed are two distinct things.  Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked, always deserves respect or pity as the case may be.  ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.  This ahimsa [nonviolence] is the basis of the search for truth.  I am realizing every day that the search is in vain unless it is founded on ahimsa as the basis.  It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself.  For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator.

Gandhi practiced this ahimsa.  He never excluded anyone from his search for truth and struggle for justice.  He refused to build walls between himself and the “opposition.”  Instead, he listened intently for others’ values and their “pieces of the truth.”  Before making any public statements condemning police mistreatment of Indian immigrants in South Africa, Gandhi would approach the Police Commissioner, in good faith, to hear his side of the story.  If plantation laborers registered complaints about working conditions, Gandhi didn’t jump to conclusions.  He included the owners in his fact-finding mission.  Gandhi “hated the sin but not the sinner,” and we are challenged to do the same.  It is easy to be judgmental and sectarian in our fight for justice and defense of values, but Gandhi shows us another way.  His supreme confidence in the truth dispelled any fear he had of “opponents.”  In this commercial, HSBC gives us a glimpse of ahimsa in action.

Guernica magazine has a new interview with Robert Thurman, once a Tibetan Buddhist monk and now professor of Buddhism at Columbia. He’s also co-founder of Tibet House and the father of actress Uma Thurman. Here, he discusses the prospects of a new world order based on nonviolence and the realistic—and perhaps even violent—steps it may take to get there. Guernica asks him a lot of the questions that are so often asked of folks advocating violence. His answers might surprise some; take, for example, how he replies to the familiar question of what to do when an invader comes into the house:

You have to oppose whoever it is. You have a right to defend yourself and you should try. But you should try to do it with minimal violence. For example, if you’re in a place where the breaking in is very, very likely, I guess you should be well trained in martial arts. You should be well armed and well trained about the arm, then hopefully not use it. Or if you have to use it, shoot for the legs. Be like Grasshopper, if you remember the old Carradine show Kung Fu. You should be forceful in opposing and defending, but without hatred.

It’s far from a pacifist position. The Tibetans didn’t violently resist the Chinese, he explains, not out of principle, but because they weren’t strong enough to be successful. If they had been strong enough, they would have practiced a restrained and defensive military campaign. “Buddhism is pragmatic; it’s not fanatic,” he says. “We have surgical violence within nonviolence.”

Despite the advice to keep a gun in the house, he’s a staunch advocate of demilitarization and imagines a global order based in detente toward nonviolence.

It would not be a Buddhist strategy, however, in the current moment on the planet to completely, unilaterally, and 100 percent disarm because then we could be pushed around by anybody. That’s not what’s being advocated. What’s being advocated is a genuine slow process of disarmament. I have a slogan. I call it shifting from MAD to MUD. It means switching from Mutual Assured Destruction to Mutual Unilateral Disarmament.

Thurman’s answer to another inevitable question—the one about opposing Hitler—insists, thankfully, that there may have been alternatives available to the bloodiest war in human history. The mistake people often make is to assume that a nonviolent solution should mean no suffering on either side. Thurman points out that the cost could be quite high, but almost certainly not so high as what actually took place.

People point to the Holocaust, but the Holocaust went on in the middle of the war and the war was not stopping it. And then you never know had there been nonviolent resistance what would have happened. Had the Germans killed a couple million in France and England and here and there before realizing there was no point in occupying any country because people in the country simply would not feed them, they wouldn’t work for them, they wouldn’t do anything even if they killed them, that might have saved how many total million that did die in the World War, maybe forty or fifty million. I don’t know the number. But a lot.

A key to Thurman’s thinking, according to the interviewer, is a sense of perpetual optimism. “What keeps you so optimistic?” she asks.

It’s a moral duty. What that means is that you have to shift focus, you have to up level. If you look only at the negative things that are going on—not that you shouldn’t look at them, you absolutely should because you have to do something about every single one of them—then they infect you with their negativity. You become angry and depressed and desperate, and then you’re going to react with negativity.

He grounds his answer in an anecdote from Gandhi:

An American woman who was his disciple said, “How do you avoid getting too depressed or hopeless and all this?” And Gandhi said, “What I do when something terrible like this happens is I reflect on the great mass of people in the country or even in the world.” There was this one place where two or three hundred people were shot by some British, and then there were fifteen or twenty police killed by a mob in such and such other town, and other bad things probably happened here and there, probably some murders in the country and a few things. But hundreds of millions of people cooked dinner for each other, helped each other washing the dishes, helped each other cross roads, brought water from a well, restrained themselves from feeling angry with their neighbor when they might have started a fight, calmed down in some situation where they could have escalated. The larger fabric of society involves people interacting with some degree of altruism and empathy for each other, some degree of self-restraint, or the whole place would be in flames.

It is this insight that we hope to draw from here at Waging Nonviolence. In the “Experiments with Truth” posts, we see day after day how much is really going on—in terms of nonviolent work for justice—that so rarely sees the light of ordinary news coverage.

One last thing. At the end, he recommends The China Study, an important recent book about diet. My mother’s crazy about it, so I feel a filial duty to pass that along as well.

Originally designed after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 to help the US Navy repel unwanted approaching boats, the non-lethal Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has not surprisingly worked its way down to the level of local law enforcement.

At two different town hall meetings and a sand castle building competition in San Diego recently, local police had the LRAD – which generates a narrow beam of intense sound that can be physically painful and even permanently damage hearing – on the ready in case any shenanigans broke out.

This is the first I’ve heard of this weapon being deployed domestically at political gatherings, although I’m sure it won’t be the last.

In a recent episode of Bang Goes The Theory, a new popular science show on the BBC, the team sees whether the LRAD can be defeated by a ridiculous looking sound proofed helmet. To see what happens, check out the video.

David Hambling over at Danger Room puts this latest effort at “foiling non-lethal crowd control weapons” in context:

Ever since police and security forces started using non-lethal weapons for crowd control, people have been looking for ways to counter them, trying everything from onions, tinfoil and Viagra.

Take tear gas, which has been around in various forms since the First World War and has been a regular feature of demonstrations from Seattle to Tehran to Khartoum. Experienced protesters expecting a blast of tear gas bring eye protection in the form of goggles and use a bandanna soaked in water or vinegar as an improvised gas mask. Real pros bring actual gas masks. An alternative approach is to use onion juice, which allegedly reduces the effect, a technique which is used everywhere from Israel to Iran. Read the rest of this article »

Our friends at Nonviolent Peaceforce have been busy. First of all, if you’re not familiar with their work, check out this new 18-minute video about what they do:

Ready to do something about it? Starting in a few days, leading up to Gandhi’s birthday, NP is organizing a “12 Days of Peace” campaign as a way for people to take part in the struggle for peace. Each day, there is something you can do, in coordination with others around the world:

Monday, Sept. 21
Celebrate United Nations’ International Day of Peace by working a day for peace – donating all or a portion of your day’s wages to a non-profit, non-governmental organization seeking to foster nonviolent peacekeeping worldwide.

Tuesday, Sept. 22
Sign the Peace Alliance’s petition to create a Department of Peace with a cabinet level Secretary of Peace on the presidential staff (www.thepeacealliance.org).

Wednesday, Sept. 23
Write a blog post and/or a status update on Twitter and Facebook noting that you are marking The 12 Days of Peace.

Thursday, Sept. 24
Re-establish and re-connect with a past friend, relative or colleague with whom you’ve had conflict.

Friday, Sept. 25
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, and/or a letter to your Congressperson expressing support for nonviolent, unarmed peacekeeping in conflict zones worldwide.

Saturday, Sept. 26
Visit a community park with your friends and family for a picnic or gathering in celebration of peace and harmony among those closest to you.

Sunday, Sept. 27
Conduct a prayer for, or meditate upon, peace.

Monday, Sept. 28
End your day by enjoying a piece of music that demonstrates peace to you, such as “Imagine” by John Lennon or “Peace on Earth” by U2.

Tuesday, Sept. 29
Watch the 18-minute film Civilian Unarmed Peacekeeping: Building a Nonviolent Peaceforce, documenting the social and economic benefits of unarmed civilian peacekeeping as trained Nonviolent Peaceforce workers seek to create a safe space for peace within conflict areas. View at: http://tinyurl.com/n7xvl9.

Wednesday, Sept. 30
Spend time with your children and family discussing the social and healthful benefits of practicing peace among their friends and community.

Thursday, Oct. 1
Plant a rock for peace. www.plantingrocksforpeace.org

Friday, Oct. 2
Celebrate Gandhi’s birth anniversary – and the U.N. International Day of Nonviolence – by borrowing Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth – from your local public library.

If you’re interested in taking part, let us know. We’d love to hear about it, and we’d be happy to be your blog of choice for September 23’s activity. Send in your experiences and we’ll post them.

Photos of Obama's hero's include Dr. King (top middle) and Gandhi (lower right)

President Obama’s speech to the nation’s students earlier this week sparked an outcry (as well as some boycotts) from the far right over fears of “socialist indoctrination.” The administration did its best to assuage such fears by making the text of the speech available to schools beforehand. But what they didn’t prepare for was the question asked by a ninth grader named Lily: “If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”

Obama stumbled, forgetting that the correct answer was Ronald Reagan, and instead blurted out the name Mahatma Gandhi and called him, gasp, “a real hero of mine.”

Of course, the real joke here is not that Obama fell into the conservative trap by naming a radical like Gandhi as his hero. Hardly anyone took notice, perhaps because few people regard Gandhi as a radical. What little they know about him they associate with independence from Britain. And we Americans have no trouble embracing that notion.

The real joke, that seems lost on just about everyone, is that the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world looks up to perhaps the most staunch pacifist who ever lived.

Obama then laughed about the imagined situation of having dinner with Gandhi, saying, “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn’t eat a lot.”

Haha. That’s hilarious. What a funny joke about Gandhi’s practice of fasting to the brink of death so that his followers would stop using violence.

But seriously, don’t you think dinner would be strained for a different reason? Oh, say the fact that Obama is waging two wars, using drones to drop bombs on his Pakistani friends and increasing what’s already the world’s largest defense budget?

Obama is clearly familiar with Gandhi’s sayings since he borrowed one for his election campaign. So what doesn’t he understand about the one that goes: “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”?

Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Obama is a smart man and I’m sure he’s well aware that Gandhi devoted his life to nonviolence. He did after all lightly trace Gandhi’s influence on subsequent generations for the students, explaining how “the non-violent movement in India” inspired Dr. King and César Chávez.

But as much as Obama may understand the importance of nonviolence, it doesn’t seem to translate into practice. He’s not exactly the right person to be telling students to learn from “people who are able to bring about change, not through violence, not through money, but through the force of their personality and their ethical and moral stances.”

At least not at this point in his life. The presidency has a way of forcing good men to do terrible things.

Take former President Jimmy Carter, for instance, who called the nuclear arms proliferation “a disgrace to the human race” when he was running for office. Then, as soon as he became president, he built the Trident nuclear submarine base in Georgia. His administration also maintained an enormous military machine and aided right-wing tyrannies abroad.

But in the years after his presidency, Carter has worked hard for peace, particularly through the establishment of his own non-profit organization that promotes nonviolence and social justice. In fact, he is set to receive the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award from James Madison University’s Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence later this month.

Perhaps Obama will find himself there too one day. And he will feel greatly honored to receive not just the award, but the accompanying replica of his hero’s shawl. It just won’t be for anything he’s done as president.

According to Time magazine, “Phase 2 ” of the Iranian protest movement has begun.

Six weeks after millions took to the streets to protest Iran’s presidential election, their uprising has morphed into a feistier, more imaginative and potentially enduring campaign.

The definitive tone of this proclamation is very interesting. For starters, the article doesn’t exactly explain why “Phase 2 ” has begun at this particular moment. Other mainstream media outlets have made similar claims over the past few weeks. And much like the others, Time seems to be relying on wishful editorializing more than concrete reporting.

Tactics may be evolving to deal with the crackdown on mass street protests—such as the boycott of goods advertized on state-controlled television, attempts to overload the electrical grid and “blitz” street demonstrations—but there is little sign of them having any kind of effect on the Iranian regime. And, therefore, it’s hard to imagine a “potentially enduring campaign” emerging.

Furthermore, the situation seems to have changed very little from when it started over a month ago. Back then, Middle East expert and foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes described the protests as “scattered” and “lacking in discipline.” Time calls “Phase 2 ” as “unorganized” and “largely leaderless.” The only difference between these two descriptions is the conclusion that follows. For Zunes, a scattered and disorganized protest movement is “easily suppressed,” whereas for Time it’s “only just beginning.” Except that it’s not. How can it be the beginning if it’s Phase 2? Read the rest of this article »

I just stumbled across this cartoon. And everything about it confuses me. I sort of feel like Elaine in that episode of Seinfeld where she drives herself crazy trying to understand the meaning of a New Yorker cartoon, only to later find out from the editor that he didn’t understand it either—the joke being that the New Yorker gets away with printing nonsense because everyone just assumes it’s over their head.

Well, this cartoon has that same New Yorker smarter-than-thou quality to it, with text that almost seems like it was thought up by someone other than the artist. Except, instead of soliciting readers, the artist went straight to the guy who writes Ziggy and asked him to slap some depressingly ironic text on it.

My friend Jason, who illustrates his own great web comic, speculated that the two amorphous bearded blobs are supposed to be philosophers, wise men or perhaps even gods on Mount Olympus and they’re essentially riffing on the old adage that “violence never solves anything.” Except, they’re taking it one step further and essentially saying nothing works.

Well, of course that’s not true. Aside from the scores of historical case studies showing the effectiveness of nonviolence (against everything from the Nazis to murderous dictatorships), there are countless smaller efforts taking place every day, which we try to mention on this blog.

While I don’t think the artist’s intention was to knock non-violence per-se (although he does seem to have a history of doing so), it’s the de facto acceptance of defeatism this comic seeks to elicit that bothers me most. That’s not to say we can’t take or even make a joke about nonviolence.

Another friend reminded me of a story Dan Berrigan tells about getting stuck in an elevator at some courthouse for a hearing on one of his many civil disobedience actions. Amidst the stalled crowd of prosecutors and other government workers unfriendly to his actions, he joked, “We’re used to going nowhere.”

How is that different from this cartoon? Well, the joke isn’t that nonviolence is a lost cause. It’s that nonviolence is the only cause, and therefore involves a persistent stubbornness that one must joke about to retain sanity.

That being said, I still don’t think I entirely get what’s going on in this comic. Jason, who seemed to have come as close to understanding it as anyone I’ve asked, offered up one other possibility that I like a lot more: “Maybe they’ve been cut in half as a result of their original violent approach to ’solving things’, and now they can’t get their nonviolent approach to work either because they got no arms and legs to move around with!”

Thus proving Gandhi’s famous saying: An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Perhaps this should have been posted a while ago, before the Michael Jackson news fatigue settled in, but like a lot of people I’m only now—by way of nostalgic revision—starting to truly appreciate his artistry. Beyond the undeniable excitement of his music and performances, however, I’ve come to see there’s a great deal more to his persona than the paparazzi and our consumptive Western media culture are willing to show us.

For instance, by way of the Times of India, I learned that Michael drew great inspiration from Gandhi* and took to heart his famous saying, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” In a speech he gave at Oxford Union in 2001, Michael spoke about his own experience of learning to forgive his father for the beatings and detachment he suffered as a child, taking that all important nonviolent step of loving and understanding your enemy.

I have started reflecting on the fact that my father grew up in the South, in a very poor family. He came of age during the Depression and his own father, who struggled to feed his children, showed little affection towards his family and raised my father and his siblings with an iron fist. Who could have imagined what it was like to grow up a poor black man in the South, robbed of dignity, bereft of hope, struggling to become a man in a world that saw my father as subordinate … My father moved to Indiana and had a large family of his own, working long hours in the steel mills, work that kills the lungs and humbles the spirit, all to support his family. Is it any wonder that he found it difficult to expose his feelings? Is it any mystery that he hardened his heart, that he raised the emotional ramparts? And most of all, is it any wonder why he pushed his sons so hard to succeed as performers, so that they could be saved from what he knew to be a life of indignity and poverty?

He closed his speech with the Gandhi quote and told those who felt let down or cheated by their parents to resist the urge to push away and instead give them “the gift of unconditional love, so that they too may learn how to love from us.”

Somehow, through all his sufferings—at the hands of an abusive father and a parasitic media—he became and remained a loving and forgiving person. And yet, we never grant him credit for this hard work of the soul. All we can do is focus on his eccentricities, and maybe, if we’re feeling empathetic, as we have these past few weeks, we’ll accept them as a manifestation of his lost childhood and an ever-demanding media spotlight. At our worst, when we have no empathy, we dismiss that which we don’t like or understand about him as perversion and deviance.

As such, a man who was all too human—vulnerable to abuse and objectification, sympathetic to warmth and kindness—can never be seen as anything more than a freak of circumstance, a non-human. This is the real tragedy of Jackson’s legacy. May he forgive us.

*Gandhi and King both appear in his “Man in the Mirror” music video, above.

Greenpeace, with help from radical pranksters The Yes Men and thousands of volunteers around the world, produced and distributed a million copies of a paper looking exactly like the International Herald Tribune, but dated December 19, 2009 and carrying the headline: “Heads of State Agree Historic Climate-Saving Deal.”

The stunt was reminiscent of The Yes Men’s fake New York Times that came out late last year and announced “Iraq War Ends.” The difference this time around is that the paper is being used as a vehicle to launch what’s being called a civil disobedience database. According to the press release, BeyondTalk.net “is part of a growing network of websites calling for direct action on climate change.” The site asks people to consider pledging to commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience “in order to get our leaders to make the right climate change choices.”

Here’s what Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men said in the press release:

Non-violent civil disobedience has been at the forefront of almost every successful campaign for change… Especially in America, and especially today, we need to push our leaders hard to stand up to industry lobbyists and make the sorts of changes we need.

The significance of the paper’s date is to show what could happen the day after the UN climate talks are scheduled to end in Copenhagen. Environmentalists consider that meeting to be the last and best chance to seriously reduce carbon emissions.

Who knows if this “hopeful news pandemic”, as some are calling it, will inspire action, but it seems to have a better chance than most appeals since it taps directly into that Gandhian philosophy of being the change you want to see.