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:

Read the rest of this article »

Friday marked the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That’s 65 years of mourning for a city that lost 150,000 people in almost an instant. But it was the first year the city of Hiroshima marked the somber event with a US envoy present.

In a statement to the press, US Ambassador John Roos said, “For the sake of future generations, we must continue to work together to realize a world without nuclear weapons.”

As author and longtime opponent of nuclear weapons Robert Jay Lifton told Democracy Now! in the above video:

… the traditional American response to August 6th has been to justify the use of the weapon on many of the media, saying that this cruelest weapon ever devised saved lives rather than took lives. This is a reversal of that position. It’s joining in the commemoration of a tragedy and the embrace of an anti-nuclear position. So I take it to be extremely important.

Having attended Hiroshima anniversary vigils in past years—where even members of the Japanese Embassy were too uncomfortable acknowledging our presence for fear of embarrassing their modern-day US allies—I can appreciate the historic magnitude of this gesture by President Obama. At the same time, however, it is sad that such a simple—and no doubt, long deserved—act would carry such weight. After all, Obama hasn’t physically moved any closer to fulfilling his commitment to abolitish of nuclear weapons.

That being said, this is no time for activists to dampen this truly important moment. It’s an opportunity to keep the dialogue open about nuclear weapons and continue pushing for their abolition.

PBS aired a documentary last night called Among the Righteous that attempts to answer the question: Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust? The answer, as the PBS narrator puts it, “might change how Arabs view the Holocaust and how Arabs and Jews view each other.”

Since it was established in 1953 by the Knesset, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, has recognized some 20,000 non-Jews. None of the names, however, are Arab. But as this documentary shows, many Arabs did help Jews in parts of Nazi-occupied Tunisia.

PBS has a website loaded with resources connected to the documentary, where you can not only read about some of the uplifting stories, but also find out when the program airs again.

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.”

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.