• South Korean protesters calling attention to the women forced into sexual slavery during WWII reached their thousandth weekly demonstration on Wednesday. Marking the occasion, a statue honoring the victims was erected in front of the Japanese embassy.

• Chicago activists progressively interrupted a school board meeting on Wednesday in an act of nonviolent resistance—eventually forcing the board members to retreat out of the room—in protest of proposed changes to low-income schools.

• Demonstrators opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline staged a ‘human oil spill’ in front of Speaker John Boehner’s office in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

• Portugal’s top trade union confederation CGTP on Monday launched a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies.

• Employees of the Lahore College for Women University in Pakistan held a boycott of classes for the second day on Tuesday, demanding better terms for school workers.

• Thousands of taxi drivers in Guinea Bissau went on strike Tuesday to call for an end to police extortion.

• Disabled persons in Athens held a rally on Tuesday to oppose further austerity measures being considered by the Greek government.

• Inmates at seven Kyrgyzstan prisons coordinated a hunger strike on Tuesday to agitate for better living conditions and meals.

• Around 200 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes on Tuesday and marched several miles to stage a sit-in at district board meeting, decrying cuts to school budgets.

• Thousands of public sector workers in Cyprus staged a three-hour stoppage Tuesday in protest over government moves to freeze salaries for two years as part of an austerity drive to avoid an EU bailout.

• A network of progressive South Korean Christian groups began a four day hunger strike on Monday to protest vote buying and corruption in the country’s largest Protestant association.

In the spring of 2005 I stood on the roof of the Student Union building in Berkeley, overlooking Sproul Plaza, where I had lived through the exhilaration of the Free Speech Movement four-plus decades earlier. Milling about behind me were about thirty or so young adults, the youth contingent of the first Spiritual Activism Conference convened by Rabbi Michael Lerner and myself. It was impossible not to compare “then” with “now,” and I found the comparison instructive, even inspiring.

Listening to them, I ticked off the critical mistakes we had made in those heady days of protest, and it was immensely reassuring to note that the folks around me had made a lot of headway correcting them. Back then we were, of course, dead set against racism, or tried to be (the FSM was an aftershock of the Civil Rights movement) but these young people were totally color blind. I heard even more progress in an area we had barely touched on: fully integrating women as true equals. We famously “didn’t trust anyone over thirty” (that became a bit awkward for me in ’67 when I slipped over the line!), but the concept of “mentor” had subsequently come in to make it acceptable to benefit from an older person’s experience — absolutely critical for a movement facing, as we still do, sophisticated, if wrong-headed, opposition.

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In the Guardian earlier this week, Savitri Hensman has a nice article about the amazing life and writings of André Trocmé, who is one of my favorite nonviolent heroes, forty years after his death. She writes:

Trocmé was no armchair scholar. Nor was he an easily swayed follower of cultural trends. He is best known for his remarkable work as pastor of Le Chambon, a French village, in the early 1940s.

Jewish people in France – including those who had escaped from other parts of Europe – found themselves in mortal danger when the Vichy regime agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany. “The duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences,” he and his fellow-pastor Edouard Theis urged their Protestant congregation. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel.”

Under the leadership of Trocmé and his wife Magda, the villagers saved the lives of thousands of refugees, hiding them and smuggling some to safety across the Swiss border. He was arrested and held for some weeks, after which he went into hiding, and his cousin Daniel died in a concentration camp. But the villagers continued to shelter those in danger, despite the risk to themselves.

This incredible story, which is perhaps the most powerful example of how nonviolence could work even against the Nazis, is recounted in a wonderful book called Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed that I couldn’t recommend more. Hensman also mentions one of Trocmé’s own books, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, which is also a must-read and can actually be downloaded for free here.

This is my debut column for Waging Nonviolence. After a long break from writing and publishing regularly, this seems like a good place to get my “land legs” again (or is it my web legs?). I have a lot of admiration for Nathan, Eric, Bryan and all the rest of the WNV folks, and am excited to be part of this project.

I don’t have a “beat” yet for my column. While I used to write a lot on militarism and the arms trade, I’m no longer working for the Arms and Security Initiative and not following those issues as assiduously as I did when it was my paid job. So, we will just have to see where this takes us. Tempted as I am to write about September 11th ten years on—to join my voice to the chorus (or cacophony) of remembrances—I will try and hold that for next week.

I finally got around to reading Sunday’s New York Times this morning (due to Hurricane Irene it was not delivered to my New London, CT apartment until after 8 a.m. on Monday). Of course, I flipped right to the Style Section and the Vows Column. But after getting my requisite dose of modern love and conspicuous consumption, a long opinion piece in the Sunday Review section grabbed my attention. “Give Pacifism a Chance” was written by Louisa Thomas, author of Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Faith and Will in World War I. 

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Adam Hochschild is a National Book Award-nominated author and co-founder of Mother Jones. His work has brought alive the plight of history’s victims, from the Belgian Congo to Stalin’s Russia. In his new book, To End All Wars, Hochschild, an American, turns to the British experience of the First World War.

While the horrors that faced the ordinary soldier on the Western Front occupy a central place in the popular history of modern war, Hochschild focuses on a less-well known group of losers—those British citizens who passionately resisted the war, from socialist agitators to radical suffragettes to embittered enlisted men. In a montage of personal portraits and family dramas, Hochschild shows us how a relatively few, outspoken women and men from every class of society sought to prevent, and then to end quickly and fairly, what they saw as a hopeless conflict organized by out-of-touch men of privilege.

World War I famously inaugurated the modern age of total war, but Hochschild’s protagonists believed in an alternative modernity, one characterized by transnationalism, sexual and racial equality, and economic justice. To End All Wars takes us back to a time when such an enlightened world could seem less a utopia than a reasonable alternative to the ruling class’s livid fantasies of imperial and colonial dominion.

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Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno wrote a fun little piece for YES Magazine about the use of humor in activism. They highlight five of what they call the greatest moments in “laughtivism.” Some are familiar, such as the Yes Men’s own impersonation of Dow Chemical and environmentalist Tim DeChristopher’s disruption of an oil and gas auction. But at least two of their selections were completely new to me, including one amazing story of a fake newspaper produced by the Belgian resistance during WWII satirizing the Nazi occupation. Click on the image below to read more of the details.

Anyone who makes even a modest habit of speaking out against war in public soon runs up against the inevitable, supposedly unanswerable question: What about World War II? (We have a whole category devoted to it.) It’s meant to be the ultimate stumper. This was the “good war,” wasn’t it, the war waged by the “greatest generation” against the evil incarnate of Hitler and imperial Japan? There was simply no other choice before the forces of goodness and truth but to leap into the single most deadly undertaking in all of human history. Right?

That won’t work if you’re talking to Nicholson Baker. In an extraordinary cover story in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” Baker explains how learning about World War II was actually a big part of what made him a pacifist in the first place. “In fact,” he writes,

the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists.

His thinking began drifting this way during the Gulf War, and continued to evolve through the sequence of American military operations since. In the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in talk about bombing Iran, he noticed that World War II kept coming up. It kept being used to justify one war after another. Every new enemy only had to be painted as another Hitler to ensure public support.

By 2008, Baker published Human Smoke, a book that collects documents, newspaper reports, and notable utterances during the lead-up to World War II, revealing how determined the Allied leaders were to fight at any cost. But, because of its form, we don’t get much of his own voice in that book. “Why I’m a Pacifist” is a chance to hear more directly from Baker himself about how he came to the conclusions that he did about the war.

I was so thrilled with the essay that the moment I put it down I wanted more, so I wrote to Baker with some questions about what he’d said. Our exchange was as follows:

WNV: Why did you decide to write Human Smoke the way you did, and why now write about World War II again as you do in Harper’s?

NB: Human Smoke deals atomistically with the beginnings of the war because I thought that was a good way of conveying the confusion and sadness of what was going on. You have to pause and think moment by moment in order to feel the gradual disintegration of civil restraint. The book stopped at the end of 1941. The Harper’s piece mostly concentrates on events from 1942 on, and it’s an effort to take up one big question: Were the pacifists right in calling for an immediate negotiated peace?

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In a discussion about Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Glenn Beck’s show on Wednesday, Dinesh D’Souza reiterated the myth, believed by almost everyone, that nonviolence simply could not have worked against the Nazis.

DINESH D’SOUZA, KING’S COLLEGE: Well, Gandhi had a different situation. The British were very different than Hitler. They were tyrannical and that they were ruling India. But Gandhi’s strategy, which was non-violence, mass protest, lying in front of the train track, is very dramatic. But if Hitler had been in power, the trains would have kept going.

BECK: Right.

D’SOUZA: One of my professors used to say, if Hitler was in power in India, Gandhi would be a lamp shade. It’s kind of a harsh way of putting it, but he would have dealt with Gandhi…

The problem with this argument is that it is factually untrue. When it was tried during World War II against the Nazis, nonviolence was remarkably successful. As I’ve mentioned on this site before:

I devoted the final chapter of my Masters thesis (which can be downloaded and read here) to stories of the successful use of nonviolence during World War II, of which there are many.

For example, using nonviolent methods, the people of Denmark, Finland and Bulgaria, were able to save virtually their entire Jewish populations from the Holocaust. And then there is my favorite story about the courageous nonviolent resistance mounted by the French village of Le Chambon.

It’s important that we continually challenge this myth, because World War II is time and again used to justify violence and war today, as Glenn Beck is not-so-subtly doing in this segment.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In 2007, the Buckminster Fuller Institute began offering an annual $100,000 prize to the individual or team who could present the most practical, efficient, viable way to make a poorly functioning aspect of the existing reality obsolete. Bucky called this kind of solution a “trimtab,” named for the tiny rudder on an enormous ship that is ultimately responsible for steering. I wasn’t ready to enter the competition that year, but from then on, my mind began working around the clock on the riddle of the trimtab. What universally accessible and implementable strategy could bring as many people on board as possible, inspiring contributors to take immediate action using whatever materials may be at hand?

I began to study and implement appropriate technologies and permaculture. I started a Facebook group called USE HALF NOW to explore the notion that more mindful consumption may be an efficient place for many to begin (at least for those of us living in “overdeveloped” countries). I studied the wildly successful conservation and Victory Garden campaigns introduced in the U.S. and Britain during World War II. Leaders called on citizens to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” and people ably complied. I wondered, what if a similar campaign could be put forth today? What if people were simply invited to have a stake in creating a healthier, more peaceful world? What if the sense of helplessness, disempowerment, and defeat that seems to pervade our culture could be overcome, simply by suggesting that each of us contribute to the solution in whatever ways make the most sense to us? Perhaps the fastest-acting, most accessible trimtab would not appear as some new magic-bullet “green” technology—instead it might come in the form of a radical  mental shift.

The German artist Joseph Beuys practiced social sculpture, a kind of art-activism that called upon audiences to participate. He believed that everyone, by infusing even the most mundane action with a sense of purpose and creativity, could contribute to ones’ own health and the health of society and the environment at large. By so doing, he proposed that “everyone is an artist” of their chosen vocation. Beuys taught that in order for social transformation to be truly constructive and enduring, methods used to achieve it must be as holistic and inclusive as possible.

21st-century advances in internet technology and network accessibility offer extraordinary new tools for the contemporary social sculptor. Interactive initiatives based on the dissemination and sharing of information have far greater potential than during any other age in history. Inspired by the developing power of virtual networks, the spirit of the 1940’s conservation campaigns, and the Buckminster Fuller Challenge itself, after four years of deep consideration, it finally seemed that an opportune moment to present a formal application to the Challenge had arrived.

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In the summer of 2009, an 18-person interfaith delegation from Tacoma, WA came together to organize a trip to Japan to interact with atomic bomb survivors as a means to resist nuclear weapons. Their trip also coincided with the 64^th anniversaries of the atomic bombings. To help publicize their journey and continue the spirit of reconciliation after the trip, the Journey of Repentance decided to have a documentarian follow them while on their trip. I was that lucky documentarian tasked to prepare and direct the international production.

Once filming had completed, the Journey of Repentance persuaded me to continue working on the film in the editing room. The result was Free World, a 38-minute film that documents the group’s history of civil resistance to the nuclear weapon stockpile in the Puget Sound of Washington state, as well as their interactions with the Hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The filmmakers and the Journey of Repentance invite you to watch the film to learn more about what this group boldly set out to do to help the disarmament movement along. If you have already seen the film, you have already taken a step toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Thank you for this first step, but please do not let it be the last.

To purchase a DVD or Public Screening Package please visit www.freeworlddocumentary.com.