Protesters participate in one of the May Day rallies in early May, 1971. Photo credit: Star Collection, DC Public Library; © Washington Post

April may be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, but May is the month of exuberant mass action. We’re currently in the thick of the latest iteration of May mobilizations for justice and peace, with the worldwide protests that got rolling on May 1 and the actions that will take place later this month in Chicago focused on the NATO summit. May actions are a venerable tradition, reaching back to Emancipation Day in 1886 when — also in Chicago — 340,000 workers went on strike demanding an 8-hour workday. Since then, by design or coincidence, numerous May protests — perhaps egged on by the feisty vitality of spring and its alluring promise of rejuvenation — have been momentous.

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Today, March 16, marks the 44th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. When the story broke — first in Europe, while American media and politicians ignored and doubted the merits of the account, and then in the U.S. after Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting — the American political machine under President Nixon went into high gear to contain whatever domestic or international blowback there might be. It took more than a year for the American public to know a massacre had even happened and much longer to understand the full details of the so-called “isolated incident.”

Outrage over another massacre, this one decades later and in Afghanistan, is much more prescient, but the American political establishment remains stubbornly predictable. The Obama administration has had to apologize again to the Afghan people for another tragic “isolated incident.” This time, a lone American soldier — it’s always one bad apple — stationed in Kandahar left Camp Belambay in the middle of the night on Monday, March 12, walked more than a mile to the village of Najibian, broke into multiple homes and indiscriminately shot and stabbed men, women and children. Sixteen Afghan civilians — mostly poor farmers and their families — were murdered by an Army sergeant for no reason other than being Afghan.

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Police confront demonstrators in Chicago near the 1968 Democratic National Convention headquarters.

The title of Todd Gitlin’s new essay for The Nation—“Will Occupy Embrace Nonviolence?”—is enough to fill activists both young and old with worry. In addition to the fear that Gitlin may be providing simplistic prescriptions to the complicated contemporary movement, it is also true that Gitlin has some ahistorical blind spots regarding the false dichotomy of violence and nonviolence which render him a less-than-reliable source on some issues relating to intensified tactics.

In the Academy-Award nominated documentary The Weather Underground, Gitlin compared that controversial organization (which engaged in many high profile bombings but took great care never to cause more than destruction of property) to the murderous dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Never a pacifist himself, Gitlin’s strategic perspective has been more than a little bit compromised. The lessons of the 1960s and 1970s are portrayed in far more nuanced and complex fashion by former pacifist, former Weather Underground member and current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert, jailed for his participation in an armed robbery with members of the Black Liberation Army, in which two police officers and a guard were killed. In his new book Love and Struggle, Gilbert makes clear that while there is much remorse over grievous errors made, the youth of a previous radical upsurge were more than just a grouping of militarized crazies.

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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.