Every Wednesday since 1992, a group of South Korean former World War II sex slaves and their supporters gather outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to demand compensation and an official apology from Japan, which ran a system of military brothels before its surrender in 1945. At yesterday’s gathering, many people carried signs with the number 900, signifying the landmark number of protests these so-called “comfort women” and their supporters have staged over the last 17 years.

According to an LA Times article that ran back in April:

Japan’s response has been mixed. After the war, the government maintained that military brothels had been run by private contractors. But in 1993, it officially acknowledged the Imperial Army’s role in establishing so-called comfort stations.

Conservatives in the political establishment still insist there is no documentary evidence that the army conducted an organized campaign of sexual slavery — a contention challenged by many researchers.

Only about 93 confirmed “comfort women” are still alive. Back in the early 90’s when activists first brought light to the issue by seeking out survivors, only 234 came forward. Many were too embarrassed, while others were likely lost to mental illness and disease. But the ones who remain and show up to the protests, have been described as “part Golden Girls, part adamant activists.”

A number of them live together in a home established by Buddhist organizations and philanthropists. They are cared for by a staff, as well as each other. The Japanese government has offered to set up a fund, but the women have refused it. They prefer that the government accept full responsibility for their suffering.

Although many may not live long enough to hear such an official apology, their example of steadfast protest should be a reminder that nonviolence isn’t always about results. Sometimes it is about speaking the truth, consistently and tirelessly without worry of effectiveness.

Even so, few would dare say these feisty old women, most well into their 80’s, haven’t had some effect. After all, organizations have formed to help them, international press are writing about them and even the US Congress has called on Japan to apologize and “accept historical responsibility” for the sex slavery.

At yesterday’s rally, one of the organizers shouted, “There should not be a 1000th weekly protest.” It seemed to come with the tacit understanding that there almost certainly will be, if necessary.

Over at Foreign Policy In Focus, I had an article yesterday in response to Obama’s dismissal of nonviolence during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. As often as the new peace laureate references the influence that Gandhi and King have had on his life, he was sure quick to write off any alternative to war in dealing with our most pressing problems.

So, I decided to tell a few stories of how nonviolence worked against the Nazis, and provide a few pieces of evidence that the threat of terrorism will only be exacerbated by sending more troops to Afghanistan. To check out the whole piece, click here.

The picture above was taken by Ed Hedemann, a good friend from the War Resisters League, at a protest that I took part in on the day Obama delivered his speech. We walked from the UN headquarters in New York to the military recruiting center at Times Square. I volunteered to carry a coffin –  made of cardboard and drapped in a black cloth - and wore a protest shroud bearing an image of a civilian killed in Afghanistan by a US bomb, which brought home the real human cost of the war in a way that I have never experienced by simply holding a sign.

Thankfully, there was a lot of media covering the demonstration. For whatever reason, the irony of Obama accepting the world’s most prestigious peace award on the heels of making the decision to escalate a bloody war was too hard for even the mainstream press to ignore.

For anyone who speaks German, the video of an interview I did with Reuters during the protest can be seen in an article on the website of Die Zeit, the largest weekly German newspaper. To watch that clip, click here.

The earliest Christian emperors (including Constantine I himself), as a matter of course, waited until their deathbeds to be baptized. They knew, in a way so many of our Christian leaders have forgotten, that the violence they felt compelled to enact in office was utterly antithetical to Christian teaching. Only when they knew they would do no evil—when they knew they couldn’t possibly do anything else‚ actually—was it safe to wash their sins away in baptismal water.

As he accepts his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo today, only days after announcing his decision to commit tens of thousands more American troops to Afghanistan (not to mention contractors and drones), President Barack Obama sounds like he wishes he could do as the emperors did. Receiving a prize for peace is something he’d like, perhaps—just not yet, while there’s still dirty work to be done.

I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. … But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. … I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

Nevertheless, he took the opportunity to insist on the inevitability and necessity of making war in today’s world. He begins by justifying the ever-familiar disjuncture in American politics: celebrating the nonviolent legacy of civil rights while retaining the right to exercise catastrophic violence abroad:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Once again, it is breathtaking to hear a politician declare that violence is the best answer to the threat of al Qaeda after it has been failing for seven profoundly costly years. Or that the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen was the best possible response to the crisis in Europe of the 1930s and 40s. We say no; we say better ways are possible (see, for instance, Bryan’s recent essay on WWII). They’re simply not tried with the appalling tenacity, commitment, and perseverance that we seem so eager to devote to war-making.

As the Nobel Committee itself said, the prize came to Obama as a challenge, a “call to action.” So far, he has failed to live up to it. He has failed, in turn, to challenge the world order to live up to higher ideals, to renounce violence and imperial habits. He knows that his practice falls far short of even his ideals. But why should a president be expected to do differently than Rome’s emperors?

I think it’s time, finally, that one should.

We often hear about the trauma inflicted on those who fought in some of the U.S.’s less glorious wars—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Less often do we hear about the toll that World War II exacted on the souls of those who came home alive and “victorious.” It doesn’t take defeat and rampant war crimes inflicted on non-Europeans to damage a psyche. This remarkable video, from the people at Story Corps, reminds us how even the most ordinary act of killing in a “good” war leaves the survivor scarred forever.

86-year-old World War II veteran Joseph Robertson fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Over 60 years later, he still can’t forget one soldier he killed there.

Guernica magazine has a new interview with Robert Thurman, once a Tibetan Buddhist monk and now professor of Buddhism at Columbia. He’s also co-founder of Tibet House and the father of actress Uma Thurman. Here, he discusses the prospects of a new world order based on nonviolence and the realistic—and perhaps even violent—steps it may take to get there. Guernica asks him a lot of the questions that are so often asked of folks advocating violence. His answers might surprise some; take, for example, how he replies to the familiar question of what to do when an invader comes into the house:

You have to oppose whoever it is. You have a right to defend yourself and you should try. But you should try to do it with minimal violence. For example, if you’re in a place where the breaking in is very, very likely, I guess you should be well trained in martial arts. You should be well armed and well trained about the arm, then hopefully not use it. Or if you have to use it, shoot for the legs. Be like Grasshopper, if you remember the old Carradine show Kung Fu. You should be forceful in opposing and defending, but without hatred.

It’s far from a pacifist position. The Tibetans didn’t violently resist the Chinese, he explains, not out of principle, but because they weren’t strong enough to be successful. If they had been strong enough, they would have practiced a restrained and defensive military campaign. “Buddhism is pragmatic; it’s not fanatic,” he says. “We have surgical violence within nonviolence.”

Despite the advice to keep a gun in the house, he’s a staunch advocate of demilitarization and imagines a global order based in detente toward nonviolence.

It would not be a Buddhist strategy, however, in the current moment on the planet to completely, unilaterally, and 100 percent disarm because then we could be pushed around by anybody. That’s not what’s being advocated. What’s being advocated is a genuine slow process of disarmament. I have a slogan. I call it shifting from MAD to MUD. It means switching from Mutual Assured Destruction to Mutual Unilateral Disarmament.

Thurman’s answer to another inevitable question—the one about opposing Hitler—insists, thankfully, that there may have been alternatives available to the bloodiest war in human history. The mistake people often make is to assume that a nonviolent solution should mean no suffering on either side. Thurman points out that the cost could be quite high, but almost certainly not so high as what actually took place.

People point to the Holocaust, but the Holocaust went on in the middle of the war and the war was not stopping it. And then you never know had there been nonviolent resistance what would have happened. Had the Germans killed a couple million in France and England and here and there before realizing there was no point in occupying any country because people in the country simply would not feed them, they wouldn’t work for them, they wouldn’t do anything even if they killed them, that might have saved how many total million that did die in the World War, maybe forty or fifty million. I don’t know the number. But a lot.

A key to Thurman’s thinking, according to the interviewer, is a sense of perpetual optimism. “What keeps you so optimistic?” she asks.

It’s a moral duty. What that means is that you have to shift focus, you have to up level. If you look only at the negative things that are going on—not that you shouldn’t look at them, you absolutely should because you have to do something about every single one of them—then they infect you with their negativity. You become angry and depressed and desperate, and then you’re going to react with negativity.

He grounds his answer in an anecdote from Gandhi:

An American woman who was his disciple said, “How do you avoid getting too depressed or hopeless and all this?” And Gandhi said, “What I do when something terrible like this happens is I reflect on the great mass of people in the country or even in the world.” There was this one place where two or three hundred people were shot by some British, and then there were fifteen or twenty police killed by a mob in such and such other town, and other bad things probably happened here and there, probably some murders in the country and a few things. But hundreds of millions of people cooked dinner for each other, helped each other washing the dishes, helped each other cross roads, brought water from a well, restrained themselves from feeling angry with their neighbor when they might have started a fight, calmed down in some situation where they could have escalated. The larger fabric of society involves people interacting with some degree of altruism and empathy for each other, some degree of self-restraint, or the whole place would be in flames.

It is this insight that we hope to draw from here at Waging Nonviolence. In the “Experiments with Truth” posts, we see day after day how much is really going on—in terms of nonviolent work for justice—that so rarely sees the light of ordinary news coverage.

One last thing. At the end, he recommends The China Study, an important recent book about diet. My mother’s crazy about it, so I feel a filial duty to pass that along as well.

I had a piece on Huffington Post over the weekend about Quentin Tarantino’s WWII revenge-fantasy Inglourious Basterds, a film in which a band of Jewish soldiers brutally terrorize Nazis on their way to take part in a plot to kill Hitler and other high ranking Third Reich officials.

Like other recent WWII movies—Valkyrie and Defiance—Basterds reinforces the myth that only violent resistance could have worked against the Nazis. To counter this myth, I present several prominent case studies of successful nonviolent resistance against the Nazis—any one of which would make for a great film.

Ultimately, my point is to say that it’s time to move on from the stale and misleading storyline that violence is what saved us from the Nazis, when there are so many positive stories of ordinary people triumphing over what we often consider the greatest evil to ever walk the earth.

A couple of interesting political graphic novels drew attention in the New York Times this week. One is a reworked online version of the 2003 award-winning graphic novel Persepolis, while the other is an updated reincarnation of the old DC Comics superhero Unknown Soldier. Both raise some serious questions in regards to nonviolence.

Persepolis 2.0, as it’s called, reshuffles the black and white drawings of the original book (which is about the 1979 Iranian Revolution) to tell the story of the mass protests that took place in Iran this year, following the disputed presidential elections. It’s an interesting concept given that the new authors (who have taken on pseudonyms) were able take images meant to depict events from 30 years ago and apply them to current events.

While it seems that much of the storyline focuses on the very legitimate protests against the repressive Ahmadinejad regime, there is also a major focus on the elections being rigged, despite there being no concrete evidence of this. Futhermore, Persepolis 2.0, does a good deal of propagandizing to make Moussavi out as the hero, when, as discussed on this blog, his corporate/upper class interests need to be challenged as well. Finally, Twitter and Facebook are referred to as providers of the “real info,” when in fact, though undeniably valuable, they have led to a great deal of misreporting and confusion.

All of this is not surprising, considering the authors, like most of us, “experienced the election and its aftermath from afar.” Much like Western media coverage of these events, which lacked on the ground reporting, their authority is rather suspect. While we all sympathize with and commend the bravery of the protesters fighting repression, there are still many questions about this so-called “Green Revolution” that need to be answered. Read the rest of this article »

The BBC does a great service by adding to the D-Day anniversary fray a reminder that the “good war” was hardly as rosy as so often remembered.

Far from being an unmitigated success, Mr Beevor found, the landings came very close to going horribly wrong.

And far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy.

The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing.

The bombardment of Caen, Mr Beevor said, could almost be considered a war-crime (though he later retracted the comment).

Many historians will retort that there is nothing new in Mr Beevor’s account.

Again, the controversy is not about whether such horrors were committed by Allied forces, but whether we need to be reminded of them.

After all, the scale of destruction is already well-established.

Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.

[…]

As for the destruction of Caen, it has long been admitted that it was militarily useless.

Yes, we do need to be reminded. Again and again, World War II is taken as an example of war done right, for a good cause, against an evil enemy. If it happened then, the logic goes, we should be able to do it again. War anniversaries are important opportunities, against the urge to bask in some false glory, to recall the horror of what happened and commit ourselves not to let it happen again.

At the end of the report, Hugh Schofield of the BBC succumbs to the cheerful narrative that gives us war after war after war.

But in general, France has gone along with the accepted version of the landings and their aftermath—that of a joyful liberation for which the country is eternally grateful.

That version is the correct one. France was indeed freed from tyranny, and the French were both happy and thankful.

But it is still worth remembering that it all came at a cost.

Yes, but what good can that memory do us when fuzzy stories are allowed to blur over human carnage?