History tends to look kindly upon Winston Churchill, and for good reason—he wrote a lot of it and he was on the winning side of the greatest power struggle in the modern era. But alternative histories, such as Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, have shown Churchill as a warmonger, ultra-nationalist and antisemite of Hitlerian proportion. Almost every action he undertook either provoked, prolonged or intensified the war—such as rejecting plans for peace or the safety of German Jews, starving innocent people in Europe through a naval blockade, imprisoning England’s German population (which included Jews), and goading an attack on his own people.

Repeating these criticisms is not only an important step toward setting the record straight, but also making Churchill’s well-worn path to war less appealing. Metta Center for Nonviolence Education founder Michael Nagler recently expanded upon this point in an op-ed comparing General Petraeus’s stubborn refusal to pull troops out of Afghanistan to Churchill’s equally obstinate declaration that he would not “preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.”

What was Churchill’s mistake? I believe there were two of them, or perhaps more accurately, one big one showing up on two levels of reality. Churchill notoriously missed the source of Gandhi’s power and the depth of determination he had roused in the Indian people. At a dinner party in Cairo, the South African leader Jan Smuts, reflecting on his own defeat at Gandhi’s hands, said the reason they had failed to stop him was that they had been unable to appeal to people’s religious feelings. Churchill, always obtuse on this point, is said to have snorted, “Nonsense; I have appointed many bishops,” and went on to preside over precisely what he denied would happen.

But there is a deeper lack underlying this one: ignorance of the fundamental fact of human nature, that violence is the wrong way to build democracy, win friends or stabilize anything worth keeping. Destructive means – and no one can deny that military means destroy people and property, indeed the planet itself – do not bring to pass constructive ends. That seems to be an underlying law of human dynamics that we ignore at our peril. General Petraeus and everyone who still dreams of a military resolution to the horrors that militant means have created in Afghanistan seem to simply miss this.

Nagler goes on to explain how the positive energy of nonviolence will have greater longterm positive effects on Afghanistan than war:

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The history of nonviolent social change is filled with injunctions to refuse compliance with unjust laws and policies. As Gandhi once famously said, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” Reflecting on the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. observed that “what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system. … We were simply saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system. From that moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation.” In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau mapped out the terrain in ways that would later influence both Gandhi and King:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? … It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. … Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

These teachings were alive and well during the demonstrations in Arizona against SB 1070, the state’s anti-immigrant law that was partially struck down by a federal judge two days before it took effect. In recognition of the larger issues raised by the bill, as well as the realization that open persecution of “illegals” would remain official state policy going forward, hundreds of people took to the streets on July 29th under the banner of the movement’s mantra, “We Will Not Comply.” Almost 100 people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience during these protests, and a clear message of the refusal to cooperate with injustice was communicated to both local officials and an international audience alike.

While many of the events of that day have been well-reported, the opening salvo that set the tone of noncompliance and civil resistance seemed to slip by almost without notice. It was, however, a poignant and powerful action that reflected the best qualities of the nonviolence paradigm. Here is my recollection of what transpired that night as SB 1070 was to take effect: Read the rest of this article »

One of the most difficult challenges posed to the antiwar movement in the 20th century was that of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Once the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he drifted away from nonviolence on the eve of World War II, insisting that in a fallen world like ours, violence would sometimes be necessary.

Today The Immanent Frame published my interview with sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, author of, among other books, Terror in the Mind of God and Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. He has written extensively about Gandhian nonviolence, but he was also a student of Niebuhr’s at Union Theological Seminary, so he has some unique insights about the legacies of the two men. The interview covers a lot of other ground (including reflections on Juergensmeyer’s own interviews with terrorists), but here are the relevant passages:

NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?

MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people’s minds when they’re so seized with passion about a struggle that they’ll go out and kill in such horrible ways.

What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.

I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.

NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?

MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.

NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr’s thought play into how you think about violence?

MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn’t understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn’t give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent’s position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don’t think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.

Over at openDemocracy, Shelley Anderson has written a nice article that explores why nonviolence – which she beautifully describes as “a continuous and radical struggle to stay human by always recognising the humanity of others” – is not better known. She begins by telling a moving story of nonviolence at work:

The scene: several years ago in a Dublin sidewalk café. Two human rights activists, one African, the other North American, are talking at the next table. I sit at another table, an unrepentant eavesdropper.

“I must tell you this story,” the African lawyer said. “Some women from both sides of the conflict had been secretly talking to each other. A message from the other side was smuggled to the wife of a local military commander. The women learned that her husband has been ordered to attack a nearby village. In the message, the women beg her to stop the attack.

“The wife is in a quandary. How can she stop a military attack? Time is running out. Then she has an idea. She goes to her husband and tells him that she must go shopping the next day in that village. Her husband tries to dissuade her but she insists she must go. She knows the attack is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Her husband is in a panic. He calls off the attack. The women succeeded!”

Most nonviolent success stories are similar to this one, she argues, in that they are not written down because they are “anecdotal, anonymous and above all, ordinary.” Many proponents of nonviolence have made this observation. Gandhi perhaps said it best in Hind Swaraj, which he penned in 1909 on a return voyage from London to South Africa:

The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars in the world, it still lives on.

Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of this force of love or of the soul.

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With the conclusion of the G20 protests in Canada, the inevitable post-mortem dissection has begun in earnest. Activists prepare to file lawsuits, organizers vow to do things differently next time, police pledge to investigate further, the media highlight the purported “destruction” before moving on to the next big story, and world leaders promise to continue their efforts unhampered by the misguided protesters. And, as is by now par for the post-protest course, pretty much everyone seems to cast blame on “the anarchists.”

More recently, in the aftermath of the Oscar Grant verdict in Oakland, the media fan the flames by blaming the few stray acts of window-breaking and looting on “self-described anarchists,” while police officials emphasize that this de facto terrorist segment justifies their conduct vis-à-vis protesters in general. More rifts develop in the streets, and although a tenuous solidarity is at times expressed as well, the lasting images once again are of anarchists acting in seemingly unproductive ways that put the interests and safety of larger movement contingents in jeopardy.

These are but two recent examples of a phenomenon that has been regularly played out in North America since at least the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Antipathy toward anarchists seems to have increased steadily since then, not only from corporate elites and law enforcement officials, but from a number of fellow movement participants as well. Ironically, this comes at a time when interest in anarchism among activists has greatly expanded, and likewise when its impact upon American activism in general has seen a strong resurgence in recent years.

Critical voices regularly chastise anarchists without indicating that they fully understand what anarchism actually is. But anarchists as well oftentimes seem to act in contravention of both historical and political senses of what anarchism represents. This is further made problematic by the basic fact that anarchists generally eschew doctrinaire definitions and ideological litmus tests, suggesting that people ought to be free to define their own actions and ideas in the manner of their own choosing. And yet, a kind of orthodoxy that increasingly seems like “fundamentalist anarchism” may be taking hold among some sectors that posture as “real revolutionaries,” who denigrate as “pathological” those who would seek to deploy their version of anarchism in less spectacular ways than overtly “smashing the state” by striking at some of its symbolic targets.

Interestingly, this plays right into the hands of the caricature of anarchism as violent, bomb-throwing, chaotic behavior that seems to be the first question one gets asked when their anarchism is presented in mixed company. Indeed, I always enjoy getting that inevitable query: “Isn’t anarchism just violence and destruction?” To which I usually reply: “How many people would you estimate have been killed by anarchists in the last hundred years? Now, how many would you say have been killed by liberals, or conservatives, in that time frame? If a lawyer or corporate manager were here before you now, would you ask about the blood on their hands or just let it slide as part of business as usual? The state didn’t save us from the violence of anarchy — it simply monopolized it, institutionalized it, and expanded its role in our lives.”

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a series of workshops on “Anarchism and Nonviolence” in the U.S. and Canada. As one might expect, spirited conversations ensued in which many powerful young voices felt challenged by the notion of being nonviolent in a world that in their lifetimes has appeared as inherently violent. Indeed, these issues get at the heart of matters of ethics, tactics, and visions for the future, comprising some of the most basic concerns for social movements and individual consciences alike. One of the exercises we did in these workshops was to create a working definition of anarchism, and then one of nonviolence. Comparing the two lists, many overlapping values emerged: self-governance, rejection of domination, respect and mutual aid, antiwar and anti-oppression practices, solidarity, a radical egalitarianism, and the politics of “prefiguring” the future society. Further, it was pointed out that both notions, (an)archism and (non)violence, trace their linguistic origins to the negation of something — yet have developed proactive self-definitions despite an initial reactive framing.

And the synergies don’t end there. Among the anarchist milieu, we find figures such as Emma Goldman, who dabbled in the use of revolutionary violence in her younger days but came to reject it in her later years. She once told her comrade and coconspirator Alexander Berkman that “violence in whatever form never has and probably never will bring constructive results,” and further elucidated her position that “methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose.” In the end, Goldman saw nonviolence and revolution as intertwined:

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The ousting of Kyrgyzstan’s President back in April by violent anti-government protests was followed by more violence in June, as the Uzbek minority found itself a convenient scapegoat for the economic woes facing the country. In the aftermath, at least 2,000 Uzbeks were dead and some 375,000 displaced. Hundreds of Uzbek businesses and homes were also looted and burned to the ground. As a result, some fear a Rwanda-type situation is brewing. If so, does that mean it is up to the typically indifferent international community to intervene?

In a recent piece for Common Ground News Service, University of San Francisco professor S. Francesca Po and UC Berkeley professor/founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Michael Nagler wrote about another option that draws on Gandhi’s dream of a Shanti Sena or “peace army.”

The idea behind the Shanti Sena was that trained non-violent volunteers would live in a place with conflict long enough to gain the confidence of the locals as a truly neutral third party. They would then provide services to promote peace in times of tension: abating dangerous rumours and misconceptions, accompanying vulnerable persons under threat, mediating when asked and – if need be – interposing themselves between conflicting parties if it was too late to defuse tensions.

This practice is more commonly known as “unarmed civilian peacekeeping” and it has had tremendous success, despite the fact that it’s largely ignored by mainstream media.

For instance, Peace Brigades International has been active in conflict regions since 1981, Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1990, and Nonviolent Peaceforce—co-founded by WNV contributor David Hartsough—since 2002.

Kyrgyzstan could benefit from this kind of a neutral, non-violent third party presence to teach and demonstrate to the local population that ethnic violence does not solve anything – but non-violence just might.

In Kyrgyzstan in particular, peace armies could act as a protective force, escorting and defending targeted minorities like the Uzbeks. Nonviolent Peaceforce has already sent an exploratory team to the southern Caucasus, where there have been multiple interstate and ethnic conflicts in the recent past. With an invitation from the new Kyrgyz government, and international support and funding, Nonviolent Peaceforce could get to work in southern Kyrgyzstan and help the country transition – peacefully – into a parliamentary democracy.

Every time non-violence has been used correctly it has been a brilliant success – and almost every time, barely anyone notices. Until the media catch on, it’s up to the public to get informed about unarmed civilian peacekeeping. For if we know of no alternative, we may continue to flounder in the old dilemma of violence or inaction.

The recent attack on the Mavi Marmara has inspired discussions of the techniques of nonviolence in the mainstream media. Here at Waging Nonviolence, we have already lamented what appears to have been a lack of discipline on the part of the protesters. However, an interesting commentary by Lane Wallace in The Atlantic shows how misunderstandings about the basic principles of nonviolence play a role in skewing coverage of and opinion about the events.

Information is still murky, but what Wallace gets right in her piece is that Gandhi was insistent that one should always defend oneself with nonviolence, not physical force, if one is able. When the Israeli military raided the ship, they hoped to send the message that the blockade of Gaza would remain firm. In the aftermath, Israel has claimed the activists had terrorist connections.

By breaking from strict nonviolent discipline, the activists played into this narrative, giving it a measure of plausibility and shifting the field of interpretation. Wallace says, expressing the sentiments of many:

[T]here is at best a naivete, and at worst a disingenuousness, in provoking a fight and then complaining noisily that a fight broke out. The activists decided to take on the Israeli military. It doesn’t matter whether the military should have resisted their passage to Gaza, in a moral sense; the fact remains that Israelis had been very clear that they were going to take whatever measures were necessary to stop the boats. So the activists knew they were going to meet resistance. […] There are no lack of individuals, groups, or nations who use violence as a means to an end. But if you decide to step in that world, you can’t complain when your opponent uses violence in return.

Wallace is sympathetic to nonviolent activism and her piece is an indication of the extent to which the Free Gaza movement has lost control over the interpretation of the events. Even while inspiring worldwide condemnation of the unjust Gaza blockade, what has most disturbed me is the character of much of the outrage it has inspired. The Turkish president’s assertion that Turkey will “never forgive” the killing of the ten protesters, protests in Ankara featuring hardliners burning Israeli flags and offering chants of “death to Israel.” This in turn has predictably inspired protests by Israeli hardliners equating Turkey and Hamas and claiming, “We came with paint guns and got lynched.” Israel’s bellicose actions and statements are of course responsible for this, but the activists on the Mavi Marmara bear some responsibility as well.

However, Wallace makes a critical, faulty assumption in her analysis of nonviolence and one that is frequent among those who are casual observers of it. She writes that the problem with the flotilla was that it “went into the confrontation looking for conflict, to draw attention to their cause.” Citing Gandhi and King she says that “[q]uiet, uncomplaining courage is harder and less satisfying than provoking an opponent.” Unlike the Gaza protesters, when “Martin Luther King, John Lewis, the Freedom Riders and the rest of the non-violent protesters for civil rights set out, they knew what they were walking into. And if we admire their courage, it’s because they walked into a hailstorm without so much as a word of complaint.”

Both Dr. King and Gandhi were very keen to use nonviolence to inspire confrontation and they did so in conjunction with some of the most profound words of complaint the world has ever known. Even in particular instances of direct action, “complaining” was important (think of C.T. Vivian confronting Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma). They were also persistently held responsible for being agitators who caused violence. The purpose of nonviolence is to put the violence that is the lifeblood of segregation and colonialism on display and excavate the hatred and fear that drives it. The problem with the flotilla was not in provoking and revealing the character of Israel’s death grip on Gaza. The provocation worked perfectly in demonstrating that only deadly force can support Israel’s current policies. The problem is that by failing to stick to the principles of nonviolence the Free Gaza movement failed to take the opportunity that was given to them.

Nonviolent means usually have a more direct relationship to political outcomes than violent means. When militants fire rockets into Israel for the purpose of protesting the Gaza blockade, the substance of what they are doing is completely divorced from the political outcome. When a flotilla of aid tries to break the embargo, there is consistency between the means and the ends. But attacking commandos—even those trying to stop a flotilla—is not. Maintaining consistency in means and ends can be extremely difficult, but it is why Gandhi thought the methods were more truthful.

Wallace both underestimates how difficult it is to maintain nonviolent discipline in the face of highly trained uses of violence and misunderstands the purpose of nonviolent protests. But her impressions of nonviolence are not uncommon and something those of us who use nonviolent means should keep in mind going forward.

Apparently Glenn Beck has taken a fancy to nonviolence. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer he recently made “a metaphoric plea for a Gandhi-and-Martin-Luther-King-inspired nonviolent resistance to what he claims is the government’s march toward socialism.”

“Get God on your side, and then pick up a hammer,” Beck said Saturday at a tent-revival-meets-politics rally that nearly packed the University of Central Florida basketball arena. Quoting Gandhi, he took the hammer to an anvil onstage and said: “With nonviolence, take your hammer and pound that truth every day, and everything that doesn’t fit, toss it out! We have the truth . . . With nonviolence, be the anvil of truth every single day!”

The Orlando rally was the first of at least two heavily promoted, daylong American Revival events featuring the TV-and-radio star and some of his favorite pundits, designed to answer a question that might have seemed ludicrous just a year ago but which on Saturday attracted followers from up and down the Eastern Seaboard, including the Philadelphia region:

Now that Glenn Beck has captured everyone’s attention, just where exactly is he trying to take America, anyway?

Beck plans to slowly roll out the answer over the course of 2010. He’ll be publishing a not-surprisingly apocalyptic political thriller this spring, hosting an audacious rally at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in late August – on the 47th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech there – and has claimed he’ll release another book right before the fall elections with a 100-year plan for reviving America.

Of course the one major thing stopping Beck from being the next great nonviolent leader is the very “anvil of truth” he references. If we were to follow what Gandhi said and reject “anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence” we would have to reject most of what Beck says because to be truly nonviolent you must have a just cause. Most of Beck’s rhetoric is based on lies (calling Obama a socialist and likening him to Hitler), as well as a violent agenda (opposing health care and other would-be social services that save lives).

It is interesting, though, that he chose to promote nonviolence. Perhaps he realizes its power of persuasion and the legitimacy it tends to give to a particular movement. Unfortuantely he has yet to realize his ideaology doesn’t fit with nonviolence. You can’t tell people to be nonviolent at the same time you tell them the apocalpyse is coming and that they’d better “stockpile food.”

Watch out for that anvil, Glenn.

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:
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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.

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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.