Discussion about changes to a Syrian street name, via The Highest Monkey.

The opposition in Syria is not waiting for Bashar al-Assad to depart before drawing up new maps of their country. According to a recent Washington Post report, activists have been using a Google crowdsourcing program, Map Maker, to rename major streets, bridges and thoroughfares after their own heroes. The purpose has been to erase the remnants of the Assad family’s 40-year rule and to memorialize nonviolent challengers who have died during the course of Syria’s almost year-long uprising. Stefan Geens, author of the Ogle Earth blog, which tracks Google Maps, told the Post that Syria’s is the first rebellion of which he knows where activists have used online mapping programs to rewrite history.

Syrian human rights organizations believe that more than 7,000 people have been killed since the start of the revolt in March 2011. That this sustained mobilization has remained essentially and remarkably nonviolent makes the Syrian government’s wonton killings all the more wrenching and heartbreaking. The tragedy hit home for me personally, excruciatingly, with the death of Marie Colvin, whom I knew, one of the greatest war reporters of recent history, who was killed on February 22 in Homs. An exemplary journalist for London’s Sunday Times, her mother told television correspondents that Marie viewed her job as an act of bearing witness to the horrific events upon which she reported.

The Syrian movement’s use of online mapping programs is alluring. Yet before we become exhilarated with the creative use of new technologies, we must remember that nonviolent movements usually appropriate the latest, most advanced technologies. The painting over or removal of street signs and name plates, furthermore, is a long-practiced method in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. Scholar Gene Sharp included this sanction in his famous list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, first published in 1973 (and continually being modified in evolving campaigns). He places removal or replacing of signs in two categories: “symbolic public acts” and “citizens’ noncooperation with government.” The Syrians, at least so far, seem to be engaged in the former. Perhaps the best example of this method as noncooperation, however, occurred after the crushing of the Prague Spring, which began in what was then Czechoslovakia in January 1968.

As I have written elsewhere, the period of liberalization called the Prague Spring ended as the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops with tanks from five Warsaw Pact countries across the borders into Czechoslovakia on Tuesday, August 20. Sharp recounts in the second volume of his Politics of Nonviolent Action that, three days later, Czechoslovak Radio announced that arrests were imminent. Activists issued an appeal for people to obscure or paint over street signs and number plates, and to make illegible name plates of apartments. Highway directional signs were to be repainted throughout the country. By Thursday evening, many street markers were already obscured, along with directional postings on highways. By midday Friday, Prague was awash with handouts and leaflets urging the removal or repainting of street names and signs denoting significant buildings and factories. Sharp cites Robert Littell’s The Czech Black Book: An Eyewitness, Documented Account of the Invasion of Czechoslovakia for its account of the newspaper Prace reporting, “There was a lightning reaction to this appeal. Prague streets have lost their names!” He also credits Littell for noting that another newspaper, Lidova Demokracie, reported that hundreds of thousands had joined the action:

Prague names and numbers have died out. For the uninvited guests, Prague has become a dead city. Anyone who was not born here, who has not lived here, will find a city of anonymity among a million inhabitants. … [L]et us follow the slogan: The mailman will find you, but evil-doers won’t! Bravo Prague and other cities that followed and follow its example!

Sharp also cites the 1966 Czech film Closely Watched Trains, by Ostre Sledované Vlaky, made well before the Warsaw Pact’s “allied socialist” invasion, which depicted people changing the names of railroad stations during the Nazi occupation in order to confound the invaders. Railroad workers could prevent trains from reaching their destinations until hours or days after the schedule on timetables.

According to Sharp, the removal or alteration of signs and placemarks as a nonviolent method of political noncooperation is “most likely to be effective where the troops or police are quite unfamiliar with the territory, where the country or layout of streets is especially bewildering or complicated, and where the population is unwilling to provide accurate directions.” Indeed, during World War II, Winston Churchill ordered the removal of all street names and sign posts on Britain’s highways so that, in the event of a Nazi invasion, the enemy would have the utmost difficulty finding their way from one town to another and locating specific addresses.

What the Syrians are doing on Map Maker is emblematic, rather than constituting a form of outright noncooperation. In this regard, Sharp notes that in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942, the “Little Wolves” group of young resisters stole the “For Germans Only” signs that were displayed at fine restaurants, movie houses and hotels in Warsaw. They made multiple copies. One night these signs were strung onto hundreds of the capital’s lampposts and trees, locations that the Germans had used as gallows to hang Polish nationalists. Sharp cites Jan Karski’s 1944 war memoir, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, for its description of how the underground Polish government ordered the Poles to rename most of the country’s thoroughfares and streets. Along with streets newly named after Polish patriots appeared Roosevelt Street and Churchill Boulevard.

We welcome online mapping programs to the ever-growing inventory of nonviolent methods. It may be an even more potent sanction than those using it in Syria are aware.

• 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.

I had fond memories of cafes where we sat arguing about Camus and Marx (not that we read the latter), which was a really good thing, but none of us, as far as I remembered, was fully aware what was happening to the earth, not to mention getting our hands dirty in her by growing food, or building composting toilets; a few of these people, by contrast, had come fresh from their organic farms up in Oregon, still in coveralls. And then the most important change, in my view: we had been in a state of near-total ignorance about nonviolence. They were considerably more sophisticated of nonviolence, and happily that awareness has taken another leap in the last few years.

But one thing that had not sat well with me in 1964 was not much improved in 2005 and is still an issue today in the amazing #OWS movement: the issue of leadership.

Leaderless movements, to be sure, are not the aimless, decapitated things they are taken for by mainstream commentators, and OWS in particular has dealt with the issue good-humoredly. I believe it’s Occupy CO that anointed a border collie, Shelby, with her backpack, as their official spokescreature. “She is more like a person than any corporation,” they said.

More to the point, leader or no leader, it is succeeding to some degree in keeping order and charting a course for itself — backing away somewhat from contested sites and switching “from places to issues,” wisely. Yet for this and any future progressive movement I feel that a philosophy, a vision, and a strategy for realizing that vision will be essential, if for no other reason than the clear, consistent, and compellingly simplistic message of conservatives. And for all this, as well as sheer efficiency, leadership could be of enormous help.

Can we have a kind of leadership that could help us stay more focused, more efficient, than the “horizontal,” everything-by-consensus style that has been the political culture of progressive movements? Can we relax somewhat the ideological aversion to leadership that has come to dominate progressive thought — and, I think, slowed the movement down — and open ourselves, to some kind of discriminating leadership that will not inhibit individual responsibility — for many of us feel, myself included, that individual responsibility lies close to the core of the world we want?

I believe that we can; in fact, this kind of leadership was one of Gandhi’s most striking achievements. No one was able to evoke the self-leadership potential of his followers while still giving tight focus to huge campaigns — calling off whole Satyagrahas (campaigns) when even a few people were unable to contain their own violence, directing the switch to “constructive programme” when direct resistance became unworkable, etc. Some feel it was Gandhi’s greatest contribution to turn ordinary men and women into heroes. As many of us know, when he and virtually the whole leadership was arrested during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 leadership devolved, successfully, onto every individual.

Yet, while it may seem counterintuitive (most of my students were shocked to hear this), in the heat of struggle Gandhi said, “I am your general, and as long as you want me to lead you, you have to give me your implicit obedience.” How is this different, to take an extreme example, from Hitler telling his generals when he launched the disastrous campaign in Yugoslavia (a blunder that in fact cost him the war), “I do not expect my generals to understand me; I expect them to obey me”?

Well, in two ways. For one thing, there’s that qualification, “as long as you want me.” Gandhi said he would drop out the minute the people did not want him, and did exactly that when the congress Party couldn’t see their way clear to following his pacifism in WWII. Secondly, he did want his people to understand him. From the earliest days in South Africa he toiled day and night to bring them along, often insisting they understand in detail the full significance of anything to which they agreed. Moreover, his concept of “heart unity” — that if people want one another’s fulfillment they are one despite any differences of class, status, or whatever — applied to leadership. Never did he feel superior in anything but responsibility and the willingness to suffer to anyone following him. As he said, “Diversity there certainly is in the world, but it means neither inequality nor untouchability.”

Of course, Gandhi sets the bar pretty high! But a high bar makes the qualities we need at least visible, something to strive for. The opposite of bad leadership, then, may not be no leadership, but good leadership — and followers alert enough to tell the difference.

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. 

Being the product of public schools (City Forever!), I know little about World War I save for the usual Archduke of Austria (right?) assassination business. And (confession time) despite being a member of the board of the War Resisters League (the venerable secular pacifist organization mentioned in Thomas’ article), there is much I do not know about the history of pacifism in my very own country. Notwithstanding, I finished reading the article and dutifully put a hold on Louisa Thomas’ book at my local library (thank goodness we still have those). Thomas’ great grandfather was Norman Thomas, a perennial socialist presidential candidate, member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and conscientious objector to World War I along with his brother Evan.

The conscientious objector, as Norman Thomas wrote in 1917, is

persuaded that the supreme force in the world is Love and that Love can only win by its own weapons, which are never the weapons of violence. He is accused of ethical optimism, but he is too much of an ethical realist to preach to great armies the modern doctrine that they go out to kill each other with bayonets, bombs, big Berthas and poisonous gas in a spirit of love. He may believe in dying for one’s country, or for ideals; but not in killing for them.

The brothers certainly struggled and suffered for their country and their ideals. Evan was tried and convicted for refusal to serve. Initially sentenced to life in prison and hard labor, his prison term was eventually reduced to 25 years. He was freed after a successful appeal in 1919.

Once released, Evan campaigned on behalf of those who remained in prison. According to a POV Backgrounder accompanying the film Soldiers of Conscience, “Of the 450 conscientious objectors found guilty at military hearings during World War I, 17 were sentenced to death, 142 received life sentences and 73 received 20-year prison terms. Only 15 were sentenced to three years or less.” The sentences of all were eventually commuted after the war, but the brutality and isolation took its toll on these men.

Two other Thomas brothers—Ralph and Arthur—volunteered for service and fought in WWI in the army. This is the family story that Louisa tells, and I look forward to reading it!

All and all, the Fall of 2011 seems like a good time to be reading about the historic roots of pacifism. Not only is there is a crop of serious, scholarly and well-written books out there, but as the United States enters the 10th year of war against “terrorism,” peace activists need new ideas and new energy (at least I do), and perhaps mining our illustrious and difficult past is a good place to start. Also on my list (and in a neat stack on my living room floor) are the following books:

• A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds by Martin Duberman
• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio
• Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement 1933-1983 by Lawrence Wittner

I also put a hold on Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion (1914-1918) at the library, after reading his recent interview with Waging Nonviolence.

Off the cuff (by which I mean, without having read these or very many other books about historical opposition to war), it strikes me that there is a lot of loneliness and suffering between the dust jackets of each of these books. I don’t expect to see pacifism spelled out in shiny neon or atop a Broadway marquee in any of the books I have set aside for myself.

I have at least read most of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II and the End of Civilization, and since that versatile and prolific author is experiencing a mini media hurricane these days (Baker, Baker everywhere), I will have to get it back from the person to whom I lent it and read it again. The book, as I recall, is dedicated to

the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They’ve never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.

Which reminded me of how Louisa Thomas’ New York Times essay ends:

[W]ar has a way of coming home, eroding our democratic culture as well as our safety. American pacifists of the past knew that, and we need people like them today: people who don’t believe war is inevitable, who will challenge what we assume and accept, and who will work to end it.

There you have it. Stirring and important words. Words to stake ourselves to. Words to work on. Pacifists were right (are right); the belief that war is not inevitable must endure. While it doesn’t exactly pay the bills, draw sellout crowds or result in many invites to fancy cocktail parties, it is something. In fact, it is better than the fruits of war: a heap of dead bodies, a tab of bi(tri)llions of dollars and the seeds of the next one flung into the four corners for the winds to sow where they will find fertile ground. Anyway, time to get reading.

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.

You approach the totality of the war through miniature, through partiality. When taking up the project, did you say, “I want to tell a new story about World War I, how do I do it?” Or did you have the idea of doing a character-driven study of World War I first?

For years, I’ve been fascinated by World War I: the destructiveness, the foolish expectations, the way it changed everything, the nobility of those who resisted taking part. I wanted to evoke what it was like to live through that period, and to live through it, on the part of the resisters, feeling faced with a difficult moral choice.

I like to tell history through assembling a group of characters, and so I went about assembling a cast for this story. The casting calls took years! I was a year and a half into the research before it occurred to me I should center it around some divided families, and make most of the other characters connect to them in one way or another. From then on it became easier to see the book’s shape.

I found To End All Wars rather subtle from an ideological point of view. It is clearly an anti-war book—whatever that means—but there’s something hard-to-define about its politics. On the one hand, someone could read the book and say: “This is a poignant story about the tragedy of war, one that drives home how insane and terrible the Great War was.” And that’s true. But it also has a more basic kind of anti-war sensibility.

I do think of the book, and myself, as having an anti-war sensibility. I find much to admire in the spirit of the pre-WWI socialists, people like Jaurès and Hardie. But today we would have to say they were naïve in their expectation that class loyalties would prove stronger than national ones. I still like their spirit, however.

Is To End All Wars a book that tries to recover a neglected socialist political tradition in the West? Should contemporary anti-war movements look to socialism as a necessary part of their project?

As for socialism itself, I certainly think it’s possible to imagine a society that is far more democratic and egalitarian economically than is our increasingly stratified society today. But I don’t think the recipe that socialists of that era were working from is sufficient. I would love to see a society that had far lesser disparities of wealth than we have today, but that still harnessed the entrepreneurial spirit. Just how we get there, I don’t know.

Nor do I think creating the good society of this sort would necessarily be a guarantee against war. Every conceivable kind of society in history has waged war at one time or another.

Your narrative vividly captures the significance of the Russian Revolution for the Western anti-war movement. I think this reality has been very much lost in popular understandings of the war today. From several of your protagonists’ points of view, the revolution was an anti-war revolution, because it marked the exit of Russia from the war. Were you struck by this part of the story? 

You’re right, both 1917 revolutions in Russia were seen in the West, and by some who took part in Russia, as anti-war revolutions. It’s easy to see why they generated so much enthusiasm among Western anti-war types. I’ve long had an interest in Russian history, something I indulged at book-length in my 1994 book, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. One thing that has always fascinated me is how many otherwise intelligent Westerners were besotted with enthusiasm for the early Soviet Union. Certainly the revulsion against World War I was a part of that, although there were many other motives as well.

As you show, prior to the war hundreds of thousands socialists and labor-types really believed that workers would never fight one another. Were they foolish to think this way?

Yes, they were naively idealistic. I think they far underestimated the appeal of tribalism among nations, and the ability of governments to manipulate that feeling to get the populace to support unconscionable wars. That problem is still with us today.

In many ways, your book is a story of bold social experiment. Many of the protagonists are dedicated to novel visions—from women’s suffrage, to workers’ rights, to free love, to collectivism. Yet when it comes to military strategy, your story is mainly one of stultification, of failure of vision, of a kind of worship of the past. Do you think that there is a relationship between the failures of strategic vision that you identify in the English commanders and their political and social conservatism?

Yes, I think there is probably some connection between conservatism in military strategy and in politics. However, in most societies at most times, people in power are loath to give up or devalue the pathways by which they got there. Despite novel weaponry, the same thing exists today. Putting aside for the moment the question about whether we ought to be fighting our current wars at all, and just looking at things tactically, drones have made fighter planes obsolete. But what Air Force officer wants to junk all our fighter planes? None. This is the pathway through which the leading Air Force generals rose. I think that’s rather analogous to generals being attached to the similarly obsolete horse in World War I.

The Second World War is—at least and especially in the United States—held up as the “Good War,” in sharp distinction to the Great War, the “Bad War,” the unjust war. Would you write a book about WWII? Would it be an anti-war book in the same vein as To End all Wars?

No, a book I did about World War II would be somewhat different in spirit. I don’t think of it quite as the Good War, though, because so much bad came from it. It did stop the Nazi conquest of Europe and the Japanese one of Asia, and that was a good thing, but it didn’t stop the Holocaust, it led to oppressive Soviet domination of all of Eastern Europe, and it killed some 60 million people. Still worth fighting? Probably, because I think Hitler and the Japanese might well have killed still more—see Timothy Snyder’s recent book Bloodlands, and what he says about Hitler’s quite explicit plans to let some 30 million Slavs starve.

Relatedly, did you read Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke? 

I didn’t, unfortunately.

Amid numerous differences, I see certain similarities between Baker’s book and To End All Wars—the careful and dramatic presentation of rather shocking facts about the conduct of the war.

There are indeed a lot of shocking facts about World War II that could be presented, although on balance, had I been alive at the time, I think I would have fought in it—and in retrospect today still think that would have been the right decision, though not without having some doubts.

Why did you write this book now?

I would have written it 20 or 30 years ago if I could have figured out the right way then! It’s been at least that long that I’ve been fascinated with the subject. I wrote it now only because it was now—or, rather, when I started writing it half a dozen years ago—that I finally figured out how to tell the story. That being said, I hope the book does have particular relevance to the senseless and unnecessary wars we’re in today.

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?

WNV: Why do you say at the outset of the essay that you don’t expect most people to be persuaded? Is pacifism really such a lost cause?

NB: No, pacifism isn’t a lost cause—in fact, most people, even generals and headbanging bar brawlers, act peaceably most of the time, or we’d get nothing done. “I’m not going to kill you” is basic to all cooperation. But during wars, pacifists are often in the minority and their arguments (so I’ve found!) make people really mad. Over time, these same people may and often do change their thinking, but it isn’t going to happen all at once. An inductive “nonviolent” approach to argumentation sometimes helps.

WNV: What do you think American pacifists can do now, or should have done, to stop wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya?

NB: American pacifists made heroic efforts to end those wars, using every channel available. They deserve our thanks. Afterward, when more people acknowledge that a military attack was a mistake, it helps to go back and see who really understood what was going on. I find it incredibly moving to see how right they were. Being able to stop a war isn’t the only reason for protesting a war. You may fail, but you still want to get it on record that there was an obvious better way as it was happening. The objection to any war has to be steady and constant, and one way of objecting is to re-examine historical touchstones. I wrote Human Smoke and “Why I’m a Pacifist” to recall, as others have, that the war resisters of World War II offered paths out of the horror at the time. Their steadiness and belief in reconciliation can help us now. We need new heroes. I’d rather think about Jessie Hughan, Abe Kaufman, Dorothy Day, Rabbi Cronbach, or Vera Brittain than Winston Churchill.

WNV: What business does a novelist have to write on matters of war and peace anyway?

NB: Tell that to Tolstoy.

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.

My proposal, “The Instant & Efficient Comprehensive & Synergetic Omni-Solution,” is a customizable, interdisciplinary, collaborative, philosophical approach to social change. It’s a conceptual framework within which to investigate our inherent interconnectedness and shared responsibility for the health of one another and our environment. SOS is at once a call to action, a compendium of possible strategies, and a means of describing, documenting, and contributing to do-it-ourselves revolutions currently underway around the world. It draws parallels between simple, emotionally-rewarding, system-defying action—such as line-drying laundry, freecycling, and home-growing food—and more complex, radical measures undertaken by those demanding basic human rights and an end to oppressive regimes. By cultivating a willingness to commit to small actions, one may become psychologically prepared to participate in and initiate larger ones.

Through the Synergetic Omni-Solution website, the SOS Facebook page, interviews with visionaries and activists, interdisciplinary art installations, and happenings such as the weekend of SOS launch events to be hosted by Ballroom Marfa in late April in Marfa, Texas, I plan to compile examples of innovative works in progress by others, connect dots, and gather collaborators. As the project proceeds, data will be collected from those in a wide range of fields—alternative agriculture, music, art, politics, history, philosophy, economics, and social, political, and environmental activism—and condensed into concise, comprehensive, strategic booklets, posters, videos, and multimedia guides to be disseminated digitally and via alternative media outlets.

To carry Beuys’ proposition a bit further, perhaps infusing actions with purpose and personal creativity not only makes us into artists, it makes us into activists as well. Realizing the power we have as individuals to shape the world may be the most efficient, accessible, renewable resource available to us—and also the most often overlooked. By approaching issues that affect us all from the standpoint of how to create the greatest health for the greatest number, through shared information and compassionate action, together we have an opportunity to craft a trimtab that’s more beautiful and efficient than anything any one of us alone could have imagined.

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.

In addition to being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, today also—and quite fittingly—marks the 50th anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous speech coining the term “military-industrial complex” and warning Americans of its consequences. The speech, which came at the very end of his two term presidency, is made all the more haunting by the fact that Eisenhower was a war hero, a celebrated five-star Army general who led the Allied invasion on D-Day. He knew the military from the inside better than anyone, and he believed in it. Yet, in the Cold War’s escalations, he could see the subtle danger of a society running on a permanent wartime economy—as the United States was then and continues to be today.

There’s an eloquent tribute over at NPR (hat tip to Liz). It suggests that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is a kindred spirit of Eisenhower’s—he has a portrait of the former president in his office—and, indeed, this month he announced the first cut to the military budget since the end of the Cold War. But, as SocialistWorker.org reminds us, this “cut” is actually just a smaller increase. The Washington Post reports, though, that the bipartisan political will seems to be forming in Congress to curtail our wasteful and dangerous military spending:

Gates said the cuts are a result of the “extreme fiscal duress” facing the country. But they are also an acknowledgment of a rapidly shifting political sentiment on Capitol Hill, where senior Democrats and Republicans alike have suggested in recent weeks that defense spending—which accounts for a fifth of the federal budget [or 54%, all told]—is no longer a sacred cow.

This is an opportunity that needs to be taken advantage of. As people at home are hurting financially, they’re going to be less and less willing to pay for disastrous wars abroad and needless new weapons. It’s time for our addiction to the military economy to stop; it’s time to finally hear President Eisenhower out.

Over on her blog, Sojourners editor Rose Marie Berger has a nice post about a story of nonviolence from World War II that I had never heard, but sounds quite amazing. She writes of the work of photographer Norman Gershman, who in recent years has documented the stories of Albanian Muslims who at great risk to themselves hid more than 2,000 Jews in their homes over the course of the war.

According to a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about an exhibit of Gershman’s photographs of these families that has traveled extensively around the world:

Gershman said it wasn’t just Muslim families who shielded Jews from the Nazis, but also Orthodox and Catholic families. All of them were motivated by an Albanian code of honor called “besa,” a concept that can be translated into “keeping the promise,” Gershman says. The Albanian villagers were motivated to risk their lives by the simple concept of helping one’s neighbor.

[...]

Before the war, Gershman estimates from his research, only about 200 Jews lived in Albania, a country that is about 70 percent Muslim. During the years of occupation, 10 times as many Jews streamed into Albania to escape persecution from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy. Gershman says it was the only country in Europe where the Jewish population grew by the end of the war.

Gershman’s work was also published in what looks like a beautiful book, Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II.

As we’ve noted on this site, this is not the only story of Muslims saving Jews during World War II, despite the fact that there are no Arab names among the 20,000 non-Jews recognized at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem. PBS ran a documentary earlier this year called Among the Righteous, that told the previously unknown story of how many Arabs did help Jews in parts of Nazi-occupied Tunisia.

This story from Albania also reminds me of the nonviolent resistance in Denmark and really every other country that I know of where people risked their lives to save Jews during World War II, in that where anti-Semitism was not rampant and people saw Jews as their brothers and sisters, they were often able to avert the Holocaust. The problem is that because anti-Semitism was so widespread throughout Europe, in many places the local populations were either passive or actively cooperated with the Nazis in their effort to exterminate the Jews.

Earlier this month, over at Think Progress, the widely-read Matt Yglesias wrote about his take on nonviolence, which I found rather surprising:

If African-Americans had spent the 1950s mounting a campaign of violence against southern law enforcement and political officials, you can easily understand viewing that as a justifiable response to past and continuing wrongdoing. But in practice, such a course would have been hugely counterproductive to the goal of garnering political support among northern whites for meaningful civil rights legislation.

[...]

I think the general moral of the story is that non-violence is a tactic whose potency people pretty systematically underrate. When the force being resisted is one you also sympathize with, it gets easy to see that non-violence would work better. But when the force being resisted is one you’re both frightened of and embittered against, the tendency is to be blind to this.

Over the years I’ve come to adopt a pretty extremist view on this, and I think I’m even prepared to accept the reductio ad Hitler case. Had it been feasible to coordinate the population of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. into a mass campaign of non-violent resistance to German occupation I think that would have brought even Hitler down. The problem there is essentially about how difficult it is to sustain collective action rather than about the need to fight evil with violence.

Of course, I agree with him on all of these points, including the potential that nonviolent resistance had in stopping Hitler. In fact, 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.

Given these stories and many more, I’m convinced that had their been a commitment to nonviolence and a far deeper knowledge of nonviolent strategies and tactics across Europe, the Nazis could have been stopped with far less bloodshed and destruction.

History tends to look kindly upon Winston Churchill, and for good reason—he wrote a lot of it and he was on the winning side of the greatest power struggle in the modern era. But alternative histories, such as Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, have shown Churchill as a warmonger, ultra-nationalist and antisemite of Hitlerian proportion. Almost every action he undertook either provoked, prolonged or intensified the war—such as rejecting plans for peace or the safety of German Jews, starving innocent people in Europe through a naval blockade, imprisoning England’s German population (which included Jews), and goading an attack on his own people.

Repeating these criticisms is not only an important step toward setting the record straight, but also making Churchill’s well-worn path to war less appealing. Metta Center for Nonviolence Education founder Michael Nagler recently expanded upon this point in an op-ed comparing General Petraeus’s stubborn refusal to pull troops out of Afghanistan to Churchill’s equally obstinate declaration that he would not “preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.”

What was Churchill’s mistake? I believe there were two of them, or perhaps more accurately, one big one showing up on two levels of reality. Churchill notoriously missed the source of Gandhi’s power and the depth of determination he had roused in the Indian people. At a dinner party in Cairo, the South African leader Jan Smuts, reflecting on his own defeat at Gandhi’s hands, said the reason they had failed to stop him was that they had been unable to appeal to people’s religious feelings. Churchill, always obtuse on this point, is said to have snorted, “Nonsense; I have appointed many bishops,” and went on to preside over precisely what he denied would happen.

But there is a deeper lack underlying this one: ignorance of the fundamental fact of human nature, that violence is the wrong way to build democracy, win friends or stabilize anything worth keeping. Destructive means – and no one can deny that military means destroy people and property, indeed the planet itself – do not bring to pass constructive ends. That seems to be an underlying law of human dynamics that we ignore at our peril. General Petraeus and everyone who still dreams of a military resolution to the horrors that militant means have created in Afghanistan seem to simply miss this.

Nagler goes on to explain how the positive energy of nonviolence will have greater longterm positive effects on Afghanistan than war:

Over half the world now lives in a society that has seen huge changes – almost all of them positive in nature – emerge in the wake of a nonviolent uprising or movement of some kind; what Jonathan Schell calls “the unconquerable world,” the will of aroused people, is quite real.

That process has not happened yet in Afghanistan; but we must remember that the second greatest nonviolence advocate in Gandhi’s train, sometimes called “the Frontier Gandhi,” was Badshah Khan who raised an “army” of over 80,000 Pathans – the very people whom we are now fighting – pledged to complete nonviolence of behavior and played a great part in dislodging British control in what was then the North West Province of India. How would it work today? This much we know: the “wrong stuff” is not working, and the “right stuff” – nonviolence – is there to be developed. As it stands, however, those who call their use of violence a “job” are keeping themselves and all of us from carrying out the real job of every person alive: discovering how to live in peace by creative, nonviolent ways of dealing with one another and our difficulties. From Winston Churchill to four-star General Petraeus, we need to question and confront the overconfident leaders who seem to be oblivious to any other form of power than militarized empire.

If Churchill is rolling over in his grave at such wide-eyed optimism that can only be a good thing.