Responding to the accelerating challenges of our time—endless war, environmental destruction, and a financial system that works for fewer and fewer of us—a global movement for fundamental change is gaining momentum.

Quickened by the Arab Spring, the ongoing May 15 movement in Spain, the grassroots uprising in Greece, the student movement in Chile, the month-long occupation of the Wisconsin capitol earlier this year, and many other campaigns chronicled on this site, we are entering a period where the potential for sustained and urgent people-power to tackle the monumental problems facing the planet is growing.

“Sustained” is the watchword. While the one-day protest will continue to be an important tool in the social change toolbox, organizers are increasingly turning to multi-day, multi-week, and multi-month campaigns. They cast a vision of sustained action—and then see if people will say “yes” to it using the most powerful language they have at their disposal: their own bodies.

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Since Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself last month—inspiring a national uprising in Tunisia—nearly two dozen attempted self-immolations have been reported across the Arab world, three of them fatal. It is believed that most were political acts committed by people suffering from economic despair and political oppression, leaving many Arab leaders fearful that further uprisings may follow. This raises important questions about the dynamics of self-immolation and whether it is not only a legitimate form of protest, but also a strategic form of resistance.

To better understand it within the context of nonviolence, I turned to Michael Nagler, president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education in Berkeley, California. I began by asking him about the history of self-immolation, its ties to culture and religion, and whether we in the West should be careful to pass judgment.

While there are traditions within cultures (think of the Samurai code) and religions (Buddhist monk or monks appear to have set themselves on fire in Ancient Athens, prompting St Paul’s comment “if I give myself over to be burnt” in 2 Corinthians) that countenance self-immolation to various degrees, it is surely an act that impacts others in a universal, not to say shocking way.

The question is, what is the message it conveys? Buddhist monks immolating themselves in Vietnam had a desired effect, while the American who tried it in front of the White House did not. So while the statement “I no longer want to live” is universal, the interpretation of it is potentially positive in a culture (like Buddhist Vietnam) that places a high value on and understands the significance and power of self sacrifice, but not necessarily in a go-getter culture like our own.

Islam seems to me somewhere in between. The concept of martyrdom seems to have originated among Jews about two centuries after Christ, and Gandhi said of the martyr, Imam Hussein, “I learned from Hussein how to achieve victory while being oppressed.” However, there is a big difference between martyrdom and self-immolation, because the latter is voluntary while the former is only accepted.

Let’s take the case of a fast unto death, because Gandhi did accept and actually practice it, as we know, to good effect (that’s an understatement!). What people rarely realize is that there are five rules for such a drastic act, some of which might be met by the contemporary self-immolaters:

1. You must be the man or woman for the job, i.e., really in possession of your will to live. Gandhi and the monks of Vietnam qualify. I doubt most of the imitators of Mohamed Bouazizi do.
2. The audience you intend to reach must be a ‘lover,’ in Gandhi’s language: someone who has enough of a bond with you to be moved. I doubt this obtains in our case now.
3. It must be a last resort. I don’t think other means have been exhausted here.
4. The demand you are making on the opponent must be doable. I worry about the vagueness of what the contemporary martyrs are protesting. Bouazizi and the Korean farmer who killed himself at the World Trade Organization meeting in 2003 were simply at their wits’ end and could not go on living.
5. It must be consistent with the rest of the campaign, or movement.  In other words, the Irish fasters in Long Kesh prison, some of whom did give up their lives, more or less threw away the gesture because the rest of the revolt was not at all nonviolent at that time.

All this being said, there is yet another important difference between a fast unto death and self immolation: in a fast you are ready to give it up the instant the opponent has responded: you are trying to persuade him. With that accomplished, the fast has done its work and you go on living together. But when you immolate yourself you are not having a ‘conversation’ with the opponent. No reconciliation, for example, is possible. For this reason, I suspect Gandhi would have been horrified at what these imitators are doing, without in the least blaming them. He would have accepted their courage but tried to show them a better way.

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Back in 1969, I voyaged into New York City at Christmas time—not to see the tree in Rockefeller Center, or midnight mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or even to shop. I went to Times Square to see John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s billboard: “War Is Over! If You Want It.”

I stood on the sidewalk and my eyes teared up. I loved John Lennon and was touched by the words “if you want it.”

This will be the first Christmas since that day that I will not hear John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas” on the radio, drifting from unsuspecting places into our subconscious psyches. But I hear the words, the chorus, the anthem.

While I have grown up too cynical to believe it is over if I want it to be, I have been profoundly moved by the witness of too many to know that I can’t wait for someone else to declare war over. I must do my part, which is why I wish I could go to Washington D.C. on January 11 with Witness Against Torture and participate in a 12 day fast and period of sustained action to remind us all that 170 men remain imprisoned in Guantanamo.

I have been traveling to D.C. for these actions since Witness Against Torture began mounting them in 2006 and a community of friends has been built up around this action. I shall miss it and my friends next month, but at Christmas, I give thanks for the joyous gift of Witness Against Torture’s presence in front of the White House, Department of Justice, and halls of Congress and Senate in years past. Wherever they can be this January to remind us that men and women languish unjustly around the world, the spirit of John and Yoko’s message will be seen in action.

Bud Courtney is currently serving on a Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq.

On December 13th, a Tacoma-based jury declared five Disarm Trident Now Plowshares activists “guilty” of trespass, felony damage to federal property, felony injury to property, and felony conspiracy to damage property. The charges against the Disarm Now Trident activists resulted from their November 2, 2009 Plowshares action at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base, which is located just outside of Bremeton, Washington. The activists, who will be sentenced on March 28th, 2011, each face a potential prison sentence of ten years.

According to the Disarm Now Plowshares blog:

Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart sister from New York; Bill Bischel, S.J., 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma Washington; Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland; Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton Washington; and Steve Kelly, S.J., 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland California … cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Navy base during the night of the Feast of All Souls … They then walked undetected for hours nearly four miles inside the base to the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific (SWFPAC). This top security area is where the Plowshares activists say hundreds of nuclear missiles are stored in bunkers. There they cut through two more barbed wire fences and went inside. They put up two big banners which said “Disarm Now Plowshares: Trident Illegal and Immoral,” scattered sunflower seeds, and prayed until they were arrested at dawn. Once arrested, the five were cuffed and hooded with sand bags because the marine in charge testified “when we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them…so we did it to them.”

After the jury rendered their verdict, Father Steve Kelly “faced the jury, and all the Disarm Now Plowshares defendants stood with him with their hands raised in blessing as he said, ‘May you go in peace and have a safe, happy holiday.’” These words and loving gesture well encapsulate the profound spirit that animates the witnesses of Plowshares activists and their supporting communities, as well as that of generations of nonviolent peace activists and actions that root the Plowshares.

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Over at the Independent, the always insightful Johann Hari had a wonderful article last Friday on the power of protest, and how you can’t forsee the impact that taking a stand can have.

Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.

Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.

Hari then writes that evidence suggests protesters might very well have stopped Presidents Johnson and Nixon from dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam, even though they may have thought they were not having an effect at the time.

He also offers another inspiring example from that terrible war of how, as Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world”:

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

Over on PBS’s POV website, you can now watch The Most Dangerous Man In America, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and the courageous release of the 7,000 page Pentagon Papers in 1971, until October 27. So check it out while you can!

Forty years ago last week, on May 4, 1970, soldiers opened fire on unarmed antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and shocking the nation.

As Nick Spencer explains at Al Jazeera:

Of the Kent State killings, President Richard Nixon’s adviser Richard Haldeman wrote in The Ends of Power that the 67 rifle bullets fired that day would, metaphorically, ricochet right back into the White House.

“Kent State, in May 1970, marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downhill slide toward Watergate,” Haldeman writes.

[...]

The heart-rending snapshot of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming in anguish, was taken by student photographer John Filo. It would help mobilise some four million outraged students in the nation’s first and only nationwide student strike, just days after the killings.

“That clearly had a powerful impact on congress, they started seriously to end the war in Vietnam, they started to cut off the funding” said Alan Canfora, a survivor of the shootings, and an activist who wants Barack Obama, the US president, to open a new investigation into the events of that day.

Unfortunately, despite extensive photographs, audio recordings and video footage of the shooting, no one went to jail for the killings.

PBS’s Tavis Smiley, a disciple of Cornel West and a powerful force for elevating public discourse, has done a tremendous service by framing his second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports around Martin Luther King Jr.’s most controversial speech: the speech, one year to the day before his assassination, when he stated his opposition to the Vietnam War. The show, which premiered last night, can be watched online as well.

What makes Smiley’s program particularly brave is the way in which is insists that King’s speech that night at Riverside Church is entirely relevant today. We have our first black president; in her invocation at Obama’s inauguration, Diane Feinstein spoke of the history of nonviolent struggle that brought him there. Yet, he is a war president. Like Johnson during King’s time, Obama has an ambitious domestic agenda being tragically thwarted by his commitment to pursuing wars abroad and feeding the military machine. Obama most explicitly distanced himself from King’s antiwar commitments in his Nobel Prize speech last year. Smiley insists, as in his evocative interview on Talk of the Nation, that Obama is wrong to make this separation. King was not some naive outsider who spoke out against violence only because he didn’t really have to deal with it. King carried enormous responsibility. Violence tempted him, but he knew it had to be resisted.

This is Smiley, on Obama’s Nobel speech:

Had the president stopped by giving Martin King his just respect—as he did, to his credit—it would have been okay. But when he turns the corner and then says, essentially, that Martin’s philosophy wouldn’t work in today’s world, he goes on to say that Dr. King didn’t know al-Qaida, as if to suggest that Martin didn’t understand evil, that Martin didn’t understand violence, that he himself had not been subjected to it. He was stabbed at one time. His house was bombed.

He gave a famous speech about the fact that he—when stabbed in New York at a book signing, the blade was just a scintilla away from his aorta. He turned that into a great speech when he got out of the hospital. Because he received a letter from a little white girl who said, Dr. King, I read the newspaper that had you sneezed that blade would’ve moved, ruptured your aorta and you would’ve drowned in your own blood. And King gives a great speech out of that hospital called “If I Had Sneezed.” It’s a powerful refrain, Neal, about what would’ve happened in his life, what he would’ve missed if he had sneezed at that very moment.

So King understood violence. Of course, he’s assassinated in Memphis a year to the day later after giving this speech. So when the president suggests—and whether directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally diminishes in that Nobel speech Martin’s powerful, nonviolent philosophy, it tweaked some people, and you’ll see that in the presentation Wednesday night.

Let’s stop putting words in Martin’s mouth, who knew that it was nothing short of racism to expect nonviolence of oppressed minorities at home while packing them away in ships to do enormous violence abroad: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems,” he said that night in Riverside. “But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.” Nonviolence on American streets and the massacre in Vietnam represented an impossible contradiction that no political convenience could soothe. “For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Speaking this way cost King his popularity, and it cost him his good relationship with President Johnson. His advisers counseled him against it, for all the harm it might do to the civil rights movement, but he wouldn’t let them stop him.

“I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences,” said King at Riverside, “and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.”

One of the most annoying traits of nonviolence skeptics is that they tend not to hold violence to the same rigid standard of success. For skeptics, nonviolence must always work right away, after only one attempt. If it doesn’t, then it’s a failure. Can you imagine a US military general giving up on violence after a loss or set back? Of course not. A good general is persistent and learns from his mistakes. So wouldn’t the same be true of a person waging a campaign of nonviolent resistance?

More annoying than the skeptics who take this position, however, are nonviolent activists who give up after a couple failures. It’s as if they believe what the skeptics are telling them, when history clearly shows that nonviolence works, but almost always after a long campaign with many ups and downs. In an interview aired on Democracy Now! yesterday, Noam Chomsky expounded on this point:

You just can’t become involved part-time in these things. It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or, you know, you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. I mean, things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work. I mean, we’re not allowed to say nice things about the Communist Party, right? That’s like a rule. But one of the reasons why the New Deal legislation worked, you know, which was significant—you know, just changed the country—was because there were people who were there every day. Whether it was a civil rights issue, a labor rights issue, organizing, anything else, they were there, ready to turn the mimeograph machines—no internet—organize demonstrations. They had a memory. You know, the movement had a memory, which it doesn’t have now. Now everyone starts over from fresh. But it had a kind of a tradition, a memory, that people were always there. And if you look back, it was very heavily Communist Party activists. Well, you know, that was destroyed. And it’s one of the—the lack of such a sector of dedicated, committed people who understand that you’re not going to win tomorrow, you know, you’re going to have a lot of defeats, and there’ll be a lot of trouble, you know, and a lot of things will happen that aren’t nice, but if you keep at it, you can get somewhere. That’s why we had a civil rights movement and a labor movement and so on.

The rest of the interview is well worth watching, as Chomsky goes into rare detail of his own activist history during the Vietnam War. Although it’s clear Chomsky believes in nonviolent action, it’s often ancillary to his normal foreign policy talking points. That’s why this interview is so refreshing. It’s a reminder that even the man who knows perhaps the most about the evils of this world hasn’t ever been willing to give up.

A recent AFP article looks for answers to this question by talking with activists from the Vietnam War-era and students involved in opposing the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are of course many reasons for the decline of activism at universities, which have historically been a hotbed for anti-war activity.

Mounting economic and academic pressures on today’s youth, intimidation by authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the “good” war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.

Tom Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, pinned it squarely on the privatization of conflict.

“Students were the bulwark of the anti-Vietnam war movement because students were being drafted, full stop,” Hayden said. “Ending forced conscription radically diminished the possibilities of future student anti-war protests.”

The article also points out that young people today are “marching with their fingers instead of their feet.”

Some, including myself, question how much pressure this type of activism really puts on those in power to change course.

Stanley Aronowitz, a Vietnam anti-war organizer, insists online petitions do nothing but entrench users in the “anti-reality” of Internet activism.

“I don’t believe petitions do anything,” he said. “They are what middle-class people and intellectuals do to convince themselves they’re getting somewhere.”

Aronowitz, now a sociology professor at City University of New York, acknowledges that new social technologies on the Web — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — have mass mobilization potential.

“But they also privatize people’s lives to much more of a degree than when people had to go to meetings and act collectively.”

A student who runs the Student Peace Action Network also suggests that the use of new “non-lethal” weapons, like the taser, keeps some from taking to the streets or speaking out.

If that is the case, however, I think it simply reveals the lack of conviction of young people today, because activists in the 60s often risked their personal safety to challenge to the war in Vietnam.