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.

In the month of May, one million South Africans demonstrated against apartheid (1986); 1,400 people were arrested protesting the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire (1977); the Freedom Riders challenged racial discrimination in interstate travel (1961); hundreds of schoolchildren were arrested during the civil rights movement’s historic Birmingham campaign (1963); the Poor People’s Campaign challenged economic inequality (1968); a general strike spread across France calling for social change, eventually mobilizing ten million people (1968); and millions protested U.S. immigration policy across the nation (2006). These, as the invaluable This Week in History attests, are only a small fraction of the many historic social struggles that have been launched in the month of May.

Here is one of the most notable.

Forty-one years ago today — May 3, 1971 — thousands of people were arrested in Washington D.C. as they clamored for an end to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Though no one could have known it at the time, this event proved to be the movement’s last monumental mobilization. There would be other national and local demonstrations before the war finally ended in 1975, but nothing would match the sheer size and intensity of this powerful drama played out on the streets of the nation’s capital.

In 1970 the U.S. had escalated the war by invading Cambodia, which led to nationwide demonstrations, including those where soldiers had fired on demonstrators, killing four at Kent State University in Ohio (May 4) and two at Jackson State College in Mississippi (May 14). In February 1971 the U.S. invaded Laos. For many in the still burgeoning anti-war movement, this raised the possibility of even greater escalation, including a ground war in North Vietnam. In response the movement threw itself into organizing a series of demonstrations, slated to take place from late April through early May.

In his book The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, political scientist Tom Wells details each of these actions, including a five-day witness by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) that began on April 19 and featured an encampment, guerrilla theater at Arlington Cemetery, a contingent marching to the Pentagon to turn themselves in for war crimes and the drama of hundreds of vets returning their medals.

This was followed on April 24 by half a million people marching from the Ellipse behind the White House to the Capitol. A week of protests followed. There was guerrilla theater on Capitol Hill, Congressional lobbying and a series of civil-disobedience arrests: 151 Quakers in front of the White House, 200 demonstrators blocking the doors of the Selective Service System (the military draft), 224 at Health, Education and Welfare, and 370 at the Justice Department.

Not only does Wells chronicle the actions of the anti-war movement; he also scrupulously charts the U.S. government’s considerable efforts to surveil and checkmate the movement. (In fact, one of the book’s major points is that policymakers began to shape the policy of the war itself in response to the growing power of the anti-war movement.) This attempt to track and counter the movement was true of the late April actions. Wells provides pages profiling the innumerable ways President Nixon’s aides schemed to delegitimize and disrupt these events, including getting a court injunction against VVAW’s base camp on the National Mall, and then going back to the judge and asking it to be rescinded when the vets wouldn’t budge — but this was especially evident with regard to the May actions that followed.

The slogan of the May Day actions was “If They Won’t Stop the War, We’ll Stop the Government.” Organizers sought to do this by using mobile tactics, in which small groups of people would occupy intersections and then move along to the next one before being arrested. As the Rainbow History Project recounts:

Rather than mounting a single massive protest they took a page from women’s movement organizers and structured the protest around smaller cohesive groups or “tribes” that were assigned particular sites and tasks within the protest.

The Nixon administration did not take this impending action lightly, as Wells recounts:

The administration took steps to keep May Day under control. CIA agents penetrated May Day groups. [Presidential counsel John] Dean tracked incoming intelligence on the protesters. “There were detailed briefings on the precise transmission frequencies of the demonstrators’ walkie-talkies, which would be monitored,” Dean writes. The White House readied its basement command post for monitoring demonstrations.

While the government had originally planned to let the Washington, D.C. police handle the protesters, it eventually shifted to a military response, as this summary underscores:

While protesters listened to music, planned their actions or slept, 10,000 Federal troops were quickly moved to various locations in the Washington, D.C. area. At one point, so many soldiers and marines were being moved into the area from bases along the East Coast that troop transports were landing at the rate of one every three minutes at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland. Among these troops were 4,000 paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. These troops were to back up the 5,100 D.C. Metropolitan Police, 2,000 D.C. and National Guard that were already in place. Every monument, park and traffic circle in the nation’s capital had troops protecting its perimeters. Paratroopers and marines deployed via helicopter to the grounds of the Washington Monument.

On Sunday, May 2, the government revoked the permit that allowed the 17,500 demonstrators to continue to camp in West Potomac Park (which the demonstrators had renamed Peace Park). Police wearing riot gear knocked down tents, used tear gas and formed a phalanx to force campers out of the park. Some people left Washington, but 10,000 of them regrouped in other parts of the city for the next day’s action.

On May 3, while troops secured intersections and bridges, police swept through the city using tear gas and arresting anyone who looked like a protester. (For a video report, click here.) While many demonstrators were nonviolent, some used trash cans, tree limbs and parked cars to impede traffic. Police dispensed with standard arrest procedures, not even bothering to charge protesters with specific offenses. “Martial law might not have been declared,” Wells writes, “but it was in effect.”

Before the morning was over, 7,000 people were arrested and held behind a fence erected adjacent to RFK stadium. This was the largest number of arrests in a single day in U.S. history. By the afternoon, most federal employees (except those who inadvertently had been arrested) made it to their jobs. Over the next few days, the total number of arrests would grow to 12,614. (Click here to read former government analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s brief account of this event and a follow-up action in Boston in which he and Howard Zinn participated. Ellsberg’s largest contribution to the anti-war movement would become clear less than two weeks later when the New York Times began to publish the top secret Pentagon Papers he had released.)

Four decades on, there are many potential lessons from May 1971 that might be helpful in our own time.

First, Wells’ book convincingly chronicles how the government, even as it often ignored the anti-war movement in public, devoted an enormous amount of time and energy paying attention to it. It worried about the movement’s ability to persuade the nation (and even other parts of the government — for example, 500 Federal Employees for Peace rallied across from the White House during the May Day actions) to end its support for the war.

Second, its massive militarized response to a movement of unarmed citizens emphasizes the lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to defend its policies.

Third, the peace movement had succeeded in making a compelling case to the nation that the war must end — polling data at the time confirmed this — which was demonstrated, in part, by the sheer numbers of people that sustained these actions.

Fourth, while the police sweeps and indiscriminate arrests initially posed a potential public-relations problem for the administration (and Wells documents the propaganda counteroffensive Nixon’s people pursued), immediate polling data suggested that public reaction to the May Day actions was decidedly negative, with Wells citing polls showing 71 percent of the public disapproving of them.

This relates to one last lesson that we might especially mull on today. The May Day mobilization turned out to be the last enormous, national anti-Vietnam War event.

There are likely many reasons for this, but one may be the tactics that were used. While the power of May Day 1971 was rooted in the planned dispersal of demonstrators to intersections across the city, this also led to a lack of organization and nonviolent discipline. The government was able to use this to justify its draconian strategy. More significantly, it may have weakened the appeal of mass action for the larger public at a time, ironically, when it increasingly opposed the war.

These lessons may offer food for thought for all May actions, including our own.

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.

The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a growing group of young peacemakers in Afghanistan, released the following statement after the attack:

A grieving mother in Kandahar, holding a dead baby in her arms, said, “They killed a child. Was this child the Taliban? Believe me, I haven’t seen a 2-year-old member of the Taliban yet.”

This Afghan mother is questioning the global war against terrorism, asking us who the Talib/terrorist is, her 2 year old sleeping child or the U.S. military whose soldier killed her child along with 15 others.

We, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, join her in grieving and questioning. We call for all to stop killing, to be calm, non-violent, brave and kind to one another, as we discuss how to end the Afghan war. We prefer the decisions of our Egyptian and Iraqi friends, that is, we wish for non-military, diplomatic strategies, not military strategies that have destroyed our land over the past 4 decades. We believe that nonviolent international relations are what all of humanity yearns for, and we look for a world in which violent acts like the Kandahar killing spree are resolved in peaceful ways.

Meanwhile, President Obama, along with British Prime Minister David Cameron, were sticking to their guns as they spoke at a joint press conferenceon Wednesday. “If we maintain a steady, responsible transition process, which is what we’ve designed,” said Obama, “then I am confident that we can put Afghans in a position where they can deal with their own security.”

“We will not give up on this mission, because Afghanistan must never again be a safe haven for al-Qaeda to launch attacks against us,” echoed Cameron.

Their comments come in the midst of criticisms and questions regarding the U.S.-NATO strategy in Afghanistan. The long-term plan, known as the U.S.-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement, creates an alliance of semi-permanent U.S. military bases, was stalled in negotiations in early March. U.S. geopolitical interests rest on its ability to maintain a military and political presence in the region. These interests lie in what Pepe Escobar calls “Pipelineistan,” the “the immense energy battlefield that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean.” Considering what is at stake for U.S.-NATO powers and interests, it makes the shoddy apologies and short-term memory repulsive.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, calling the incident “inexplicable,” said:

[It] will certainly cause many questions to be asked. But I hope that everyone understands in Afghanistan and around the world that the United States is committed to seeing Afghanistan continue its move toward a stable, secure, prosperous, democratic state.

That goodwill Clinton is hoping for seems dubious. It was only about a year ago that the Afghanistan “kill team” story was reported by Der Speigel and Rolling Stone. The Kandahar killing spree incident comes out of that same unit, reports the BBC, which suggests this is anything but isolated. That seems to be a good place to start asking questions about continued U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

While American analysis, including a recent New York Times op-ed, has been quite critical of the U.S. military’s continued deployment and treatment of soldiers with mental health issues and PTSD, the tragic incident in Kandahar compromises the military’s own counter-insurgency strategy of winning over the populace.

Prince Abdul Ali Seraj, in an Al Jazeera interview, remarked on the reported nervous breakdown the alleged soldier was suffering:

[C]razy or not crazy, it is very difficult for the Afghan person to distinguish between a crazy person or a non-crazy person. All they can see is one American soldier coming to their homes and killing their loved ones. This is going to have an adverse reaction in Afghanistan.

The political consequences from Monday’s massacre are already rippling through Afghanistan. The New York Times reported on Friday morning that the Taliban have canceled negotiations and President Karzai has demanded that U.S.-NATO troops begin leaving Afghan villages immediately. The announcements make the Obama administration look rather foolhardy in its attempt to convince the American and Afghan publics that the 2014 withdrawal strategy is working just fine. U.S. Representative Raul Gijalva with Michael Shank co-wrote an editorial for The Huffington Post calling for an expedited withdrawal to begin before the Chicago NATO summit in May. Their call is finding increased support in the U.S. Congress and among the American public. President Obama would do well to heed that call, particularly if he wants to avoid another infamous 1968 event this spring.

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.

So it was with great relief that I read through Gitlin’s essay, which is filled with useful insights and important reflections about concrete issues which the movement is now facing. His trouncing of the new Chicago protest law is nothing short of classic (calling it a “full frontal abuse of the First Amendment”). Gitlin rightly suggests that indignation and mockery of these new statutes are “eminently called for.” This essay, therefore, is not only to applaud Gitlin, but also to note for us the one portion of his article which calls for greater scrutiny.

Gitlin writes:

I was on the streets of Chicago in August 1968 when provocative disrupters among overwhelmingly nonviolent protesters were infiltrated by provocateurs and beset by rampaging police, producing a televised spectacle that had the perverse effect of encouraging a disengaged public to side with the police against what they thought were dangerous and frivolous revolutionaries—even as the Vietnam War declined in popularity. Let there be no romanticizing of those who “upped the ante” toward militancy, indifferent to the fact that 95 percent of America was politically on their right—or of the few hundreds whose stagy vandalism (“Days of Rage”) a year later sounded the death knell for a mass student movement.

Two points here are worth both further reflection and study.

The first, his claim that the public sided with the police following the Chicago 1968 Democratic National Convention, is a controversial perspective at best. The vast majority of commentary on the subject suggests that the mainstream of America was shocked and angered at what was clearly a “police riot,” which Norman Mailer called “the siege of Chicago.”

The second, that the Days of Rage and the fervor which surrounded them sounded the demise of the 1960s student movement, is much more widely accepted as fact within progressive academic and activist quarters. Many of those directly involved in the Days of Rage actions themselves register regret at the affects and failures of that “campaign.” But I believe that it is necessary to at least examine—in a clear and dispassionate way—the underlying features that led to the diminishing of mass student protest post-1969. One wrong-headed protest or one sectarian organization may certainly have had a negative effect (and hindsight is always 20/20), but an explanation for the entire “death knell” necessitates a clearer and deeper analysis to determine its full causes.

Any thorough analysis of the end of “the Sixties” must at least also look carefully at: the role of the illegal FBI Counter-Intelligence Program; the effects of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the general turn towards more self-consciously “revolutionary” approaches to social change; the shifts in the way the war in South East Asia was being waged—militarily and otherwise; and the changing nature of a student-specific movement post-1970 Kent and Jackson State massacres.

These points are important not only for the sake of telling an accurate history, but also because we are entering a period where—with the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago in mid-May (including the oft-celebrated date of Malcolm X’s birth), and presidential conventions coming up in Florida and North Carolina this summer—we will need to work carefully to break free from the scripts that are all too common for both “nonviolent” and “diversity of tactics”-type actions. If the Occupy movement has taught us anything, it is that people are tired of choreographed, pre-scripted actions which lack any sense of small-group autonomy or real-life empowerment. Progressive organizers have not made gains by underestimating the risks people are willing to take for the possibility of meaningful change.

Embrace nonviolence? Surely yes! But a creative, constructive, militant nonviolence is needed to inspire a greater percentage of the 99% than we’ve yet impressed or mobilized.

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.

So far they have. Recent cases include the two weeks of civil disobedience at the White House in August (where 1253 people were arrested opposing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline) and the Occupy Wall Street action that has now entered its third week and is spawning similar actions across the nation.

And now, beginning today, thousands of people are launching an ongoing nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC.

“October 2011,” while pegged to the tenth anniversary of the US war in Afghanistan, has a much broader goal than ending this war. It seeks “a democratic, nonviolent transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and sustainable solutions,” and lists 15 core issues that it calls on the country to face, including the runaway power of corporations, deepening US militarism, the criminal justice system, and equal access to quality education.

Ongoing nonviolent action is not easy to sustain. The timing has to be right, the context has to be right, and the organizing has to be right. Sometimes the situation is so immediate and life and death that it can light the spark for sustaining such action, against all odds, like the ongoing weekly nonviolent protests in Palestine. In all cases, sustained action requires a deep commitment, a vision, and a willingness to enter the roller coaster of emotions and perceptions—from elation, connectedness, and the power of doing something truly meaningful to fear, boredom, and the creeping feeling that this doesn’t matter at all.

If things move together in the right way, the action may contribute to a political or cultural shift for the good.  At the same time, long after the event is over, we can savor the power of connection and significance we experienced together there. Often rooted in a vision that transcends ourselves—the healing of ourcommunity, our society, our wounded and sacred world—this action can itself offer an experience of healing and transformation. We recognize that we have been part of an enduring struggle for justice that has been deeply immediate and gritty, and at the same time deeply symbolic of the world we long for.

How, though, can we cultivate this sense of commitment, solidarity, vision, and a willingness to take up the roller coaster of enduring action for change?

One way that October 2011 has nurtured this is by asking people to take a pledge.

On the one hand, one can see such a pledge merely as an organizing device. On the other hand, the power of such a device is rooted in the depth and potential of such a commitment.

A pledge, in its deepest sense, is a solemn promise or agreement to do or not do something. Our lives and our history are woven together by such promises. A pledge obligates us to action or to taking a particular approach or direction. It is a way of saying to ourselves and to the world: “This is serious. This important. In fact, this is so important to me that I will commit myself to this matter and make good on my agreement. I will deliver.”

Public pledges have played an important role in organizing campaigns and movements. Gandhi, for example, at numerous moments invited his cohorts to make a pledge to undertake action. Rooted in a tradition of religious vows, he regarded such pledges as sacred commitments and urged people to think very carefully about making such a promise. When the South African government proposed the Asiatic Registration Bill that would require all Indians and Chinese persons in the Transvaal to be fingerprinted and to carry a registration certificate, the assembled were asked to pledge their refusal. But Gandhi cautioned them about such a pledge:

Gandhi rose to remind the audience that a pledge was serious business. It was easy to make in the excitement of the moment but was everyone ready to accept the risks of jail, beatings and perhaps death? ‘Everyone must search only his [sic] own heart,’ said Gandhi, ‘and if the inner voice assures him he has the requisite strength…then only should he pledge himself.” After he finished, the entire multitude rose and swore to disobey the law even if it meant going to jail.”

Once back in India, Gandhi consciously used a pledge in a labor dispute over the wages of mill workers. In addition to counseling the workers to remain nonviolent and disciplined, he asked them to take a pledge that they not return to work until an adequate increase was established. The pledge became a key aspect of the campaign, as Judith Margaret Brown explains in Gandhi, Prisoner of Hope:

Daily the pledge was repeated at the evening meeting, and processions through the city carried banners exhorting workers to keep the pledge. When the owners offered terms lower than those stipulated in the pledge, the workers’ refusal to work became a genuine strike.

Moreover, Gandhi organized a pledge of nonviolent action to resist the hated anti-sedition Rowlatt Bills that proposed to continue martial law in India after World War I.

There are many examples of pledges being used to organize nonviolent action. A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, written and signed by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, William Sloane Coffin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber, was a commitment by the signers to support draft resisters during the Vietnam War and a call for general resistance to the war.

I have been involved in two pledge campaigns: The Pledge of Resistance and the Declaration of Peace. Seeking to end US wars in Central America in the 1980s, 100,000 people took a pledge to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience or other forms of nonviolent witness. Between 1984 and 1990, thousands of US citizens were arrested for nonviolent action as part of the Pledge. The scholar Christian Smith has documented the effectiveness of this campaign in his book, Resisting Reagan: The US Central America Peace Movement. Since then, a number of “pledges of resistance” have been organized—including one focused on the US war in Iraq and another one concentrating on climate change.

The Declaration of Peace was a campaign in which thousands of people committed themselves to take action backing a declaration calling on the US to create a comprehensive plan to end the US war in Iraq. It organized a series of events across the nation from September 21-29, 2006, which contributed to making the Congressional elections six weeks later a referendum on the war. The DOP campaign continued for the next few years.

Pledges can be effective vehicles for organizing and mobilization. At the same time, their power is rooted in the commitment of each pledge signer to withdraw consent from injustice and violence and to support nonviolent options. Such personal commitment is needed now more than ever. As this crucial season of broadening action unfolds, each of us is being asked: What will I commit to in order to build a more just and peaceful world?

What pledge will we write, sign, and deliver on?

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.

While self-immolation may lack the constructive attributes of a nonviolent act like fasting unto death, it is, as Stratfor’s Rodger Baker recently explained, “a method of public death that doesn’t harm others in the same way that suicide bombings or attacks of that sort do.” This raises the question: does self-immolation deserve less criticism, particularly in a region where suicide bombing might be unfortunately more expected?

Immolation is vastly preferable to suicide bombing, of course.  But it’s not perfect.  It has the difficulties enumerated above, and it sends a message that there is nothing else one can do, while in reality other nonviolent options are usually available if you happen to know what they are (as so few of us do). This is by no means to overlook the courage of all people driven to that extreme; but it is to say that such a thing is to be contemplated only as a really last resort. And its results, as we can see, are hit or miss, unlike the famous fasts of Gandhi.

In the Garwahl district of the lower Himalayas, tradition relates that centuries before the Chipko (tree-hugging) movement began in the early 1970s hundreds of villagers had thrown themselves off a cliff when the local Raja began deforesting their land for his own profit. So their sacrifice was not entirely in vain: it had some effect on the Raja and left a legacy that the Chipko people could pick up.

In the rare case where suicide does have a powerful political impact, as in Tunisia, it is tough for advocates of nonviolence to relate. But there are important lessons to be learned, as Nagler explained.

We should take from the act the courage and self-sacrifice it implies without thinking to imitate it directly in the same form. We progressives (or whatever we are) often make this mistake: to focus on tactics without understanding their underlying dynamic… This is an opportunity to get some nonviolent principles before the eyes of the public, who badly need to know that nonviolence is not some hapless, hit-or-miss action but a science with discernible principles we can all learn to use much better than we do at present.

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.

This spirit was well expressed, for example, by theologian William Stringfellow, who, during an autumn of 1968 Baltimore gathering in support of Catonsville Nine activists, exclaimed: “Death shall have no dominion!” Or, currently, as Lynne Greenwald wrote in a recent Disarm Now blog entry: “Now more than ever I am convinced that this [Plowshares] is the community I want to remain a part of, and with whom to continue working towards the creation of a world without violence. This community embodies the world we previously dreamt and have had glimpses.”

The animating spirit and nonviolent act of the Disarm Now Plowshares provides a clear and stark contrast to the spirit of death and destruction that wields its iron fist at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base. The Disarm Now blog reports:

The eight Trident nuclear submarines home ported at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor each carry 24 Trident D-5 nuclear missiles. Each missile carries up to eight warheads, each one having an explosive yield of up to 475 kilotons, over 30 times the destructive force of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.

Additionally, Bangor is home to SWFPAC where nuclear warheads are stored ready for deployment.  Located just 20 miles west of Seattle, it is home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal, housing more than 2000 nuclear warheads.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the 2,364 nuclear warheads at Bangor are approximately 24 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal, more than the combined nuclear warheads than China, France, Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan.

In his book, The Nightmare of God, Daniel Berrigan, S.J., a Catonsville Nine and Plowshares Eight activist, writes that few in our society recognize the “mortal danger” and depraved spirit of nuclear weapons. “It isn’t so much that we have The Bomb,” he continues, “as that The Bomb has us.”

The importance of the Disarm Now activists and action—indeed of each of the over 150 Plowshares actions since 1980—is that they show us how not to be held captive by The Bomb. Each of the activists has spent the better part of their lives working in service to others, risking numerous arrests on behalf of peace, living unencumbered by consumerism, building loving communities, and, in some cases, risking their lives in war zones. Given the possibility of a ten year prison sentence, they demonstrate what it means to “pay the price” that peace in our world demands of us.

Having lived in community and acted with Steve Kelly, Anne Montgomery, and Susan Crane, I can attest to the radiant, compassionate, and courageous spirit of these good people. A sharp intake of breath, upon my hearing of the guilty verdict and sentencing date, was soon followed by a moment of prayer and praise: praise to those who are awake, praise to those who work for peace, praise for those who dare to love. Now it is up to each of us—in our own daring and imaginative and loving way—to “cut through fences, plant sunflower seeds, and proclaim that way of peace not war shall be ours.”

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.

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.

A recent New York Times piece about the anti-nuclear weapons work of Rev. Carl Kabat, included a picture that says it all.

Cara Degette/Colorado Springs Independent, via the New York Times

The story tells of his early work with the Berrigan brothers during the Vietnam War. Despite a life of hardship and imprisonment for his convictions, he continues the struggle into his old age:

At 75 he continues his crusade against nuclear weapons at missile silos across the United States, armed with a hammer and a pair of bolt cutters. He usually wears a clown suit, in homage, he says, to St. Paul’s words: “We are fools for Christ’s sake.”

Though his actions are mostly symbolic — the authorities have always seized him before he could damage a live missile — he has spent half of the last three decades in state and federal prisons.

His most recent protest unfolded on a quiet dawn last month, when he drove down a country road outside Greeley, a few hours north of Denver, used the bolt cutters to cut a hole in a chain-link fence, wedged his aging body through and stepped atop the silo of a Minuteman III nuclear missile coming up from the ground. He had enough time — about 45 minutes — to drape antiwar banners from the fence, say a prayer and try without success to open a hatch leading to the silo before he was arrested by Air Force security personnel.

Don’t miss the rest of the article. We are, indeed, fools if we fail to hear Kabat out.