This Saturday, April 14, Occupy Wall Street groups and assemblies from neighborhoods around New York City will join with allies in labor unions and community-based organizations for a “Spring Awakening.” Discussions about this citywide assembly began in December. Now, it is being billed as the kickoff for upcoming actions — especially May Day — and an opportunity for collaboration between Occupiers, older organizations and the public.

“We hope to pull new people in,” says Colby Hopkins, one of the organizers, “by creating a welcoming environment for families and interested people who have not yet taken up activism as a lifestyle.” The second half of the day, Hopkins adds, will be a facilitated assembly that helps organizers and activists “foster and strengthen networks.”

Far from just a day in the park, planners hope to plant the seeds of something new — a democratic mechanism through which disparate organizations can come together to strategize about how to combine their campaigns to attack the root causes of shared problems, including corruption and the unchecked political influence of the 1 percent.

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Illustration of self-defense, from James E. Homans' 1908 New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information.

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

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Anyone who has researched, taught, written or published on the subject of nonviolent struggle appreciates the headaches of vocabulary. Gandhi himself suffered the pains and perplexities of language, as in this passage from Satyagraha in South Africa:

None of us knew what name to give to our movement. I then used the term “passive resistance” in describing it. I did not then quite understand the implications of “passive resistance” as I called it. … As the struggle advanced, the phrase “passive resistance” gave rise to confusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to be known only by an English name.

The English word nonviolence is not much better. It is ambiguous and multifaceted. My students, for whom English is often a second, third or fourth language, frequently complain that the word “nonviolence” says what it is not but does not tell us what it is. The ability of average people to study this subject with linguistic precision, however, has lately taken a quantum leap with Oxford University Press’s publication of Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts, by the scholar of nonviolent struggle (and Waging Nonviolence contributor) Gene Sharp.

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Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.
Paul Mason
Verso Books (2012)

Seasoned activists from many of this country’s 20th century movements gathered for an extraordinary weekend in Birmingham with Narayan Desai — a prominent biographer of Gandhi who spent decades living with him in the ashram before going on to become a leader in Gandhian nonviolence in his own right.

In the midst of such widespread protest I thought it odd that, of the sixty or so participants, more youth were not attracted to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn, nearly firsthand, the spirit, tactics and strategy that was able to liberate India from the British Empire. We enjoyed the privilege of experiencing the spirit of Gandhi from one of the last living practitioners of satyagraha who knew Gandhi intimately. But, I wondered, what is the relevance of their weathered experience for today’s unfolding global revolutions?

The scale and depth of the worldwide protests of the past few years — with 2011, in particular — are unprecedented. Paul Mason, in his new book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, details the arrival of these global uprisings that are youth driven — and, in many places, prominently nonviolent.

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Che Gandhi, courtesy Beautiful Trouble and Andy Meconi

When contemplating “The Marriage of Gandhi and Che,” the subtitle of my contribution to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, I was originally thinking of something frilly with lace — perhaps an off-white gown of appropriate drama. Confronting this challenge of representation, Agit-Pop co-founder Andy Meconi came up with a more iconic image expropriation: the smiling old soul superimposed onto the dashing beret. Two great faces that face great together.

This week’s formal release of the OR Books publication put together under the auspices of Agit-Pop and the Yes Labs (“assembled” rather than edited by Andrew Boyd with Dave Mitchell) is indeed a cause for celebration. Bringing together more than seventy authors in a collection of two-page mini essays, Beautiful Trouble looks at interdependent theories, principles, tactics and case studies. Though largely written by a younger generation of agitators, including Waging Nonviolence’s own Bryan Farrell, Nathan Schneider and Eric Stoner, the book includes pieces by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, Arun Gupta, Nadine Bloch, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and many others. Accompanied by a growing website of supplemental materials, the toolbox package seeks to put the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change makers. Written in an engaging style and format and chock-full of photos, cartoons and visuals to incite and inspire, the book is sophisticated enough for antiwar and human rights veterans, while being easily accessible for newcomers.

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As I flew in from Illinois, the thunderstorms over Birmingham cleared long enough to let us land in good order. I had come to Alabama to attend a retreat featuring Narayan Desai, one of the last living disciples of Mohandas Gandhi, who made the trip there from India at the invitation of longtime activists and authors Shelley and Jim Douglass. Born in 1924 in Gandhi’s ashram, Desai has consistently undertaken Gandhian work for eight decades, and has recently published a 2,300-page biography of Gandhi. It was not only deeply moving to spend three days last week in the presence of this life-long Gandhian, but to do so in Birmingham, the site of one of the civil rights movement’s most iconic struggles.

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Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success. Read the rest of this article »

Women working in a solar engineering lab at Barefoot College. Photo by Miki Kashtan.

One of the challenges that nonviolent campaigns face is how to engage those in power. Whether it be the British officials, as in Gandhi’s case, or the 1 percent, as for the Occupy movement—seeing and appealing to the humanity of those whose actions we oppose is central to practicing nonviolence.

While I have known this for years, it wasn’t until a recent trip to India, where I visited an unusual school created for the poor called Barefoot College, that I learned in full just how far this principle goes and began to wonder how we might practice it in a place like North America.

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A protest sign at an anti-Gandhi rally in San Diego last year reveals the tensions that still exist between India's independence leader and minority groups.

When I first heard that Gandhi was viewed as “the enemy” by many Dalits in India (formerly called “untouchables”), I was dumbfounded. How and why could Gandhi be seen as having betrayed the Dalits when he opposed untouchability even in the face of active discomfort on the part of close associates?

Last month, while I was in India teaching Nonviolent Communication to 120 people, including a significant number of Dalits, I had the opportunity to explore this question further. During a session called “Gandhian Principles for Everyday Living,” a topic about which I have written at length, one of the 60 people present expressed anguish, pain and anger towards Gandhi. He was a Buddhist, like many other Dalits who had chosen to follow the Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in leaving behind centuries of mistreatment under Hinduism.

I dedicated much of the two-hour session to hearing and understanding his experience. I learned more about the power of deep empathic reflection than about the issue itself. With the presence and active attention of an entire group, he experienced a profound shift in his perception. In the end he said: “Perhaps it’s personal pain from my childhood and all the experiences I had that I just attached to Gandhi.” He didn’t actually know the details of what Gandhi was held accountable for. Nor did I.

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The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

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