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:

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• Hundreds of climate activists cut through a perimeter fence and occupied land at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters on Wednesday to protest its multi-billion pound loans to the oil and mining industries. They expect at least 500 activists to gather for a day of direct action against RBS on Monday.

• Some 600 demonstrators blocked the main highway linking the Afghani capital of Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad on Wednesday to protest the mounting civilian death toll in US-led raids in the war-torn country.

• Nearly two dozen people, some in wheelchairs, blocked a major intersection in front of the California Capitol in Sacramento for several hours on Wednesday afternoon to protest proposed budget cuts to in-home health care services. They were subsequently arrested.

• About a dozen demonstrators who gathered in front of the San Diego county clerk’s office yesterday to demand the issuance of marriage licenses for same-sex couples were arrested after refusing orders to disperse.

• More than 100 Bronxites rallied at the midtown offices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac yesterday to demand that the lending giants cut down on predatory landlords who neglect their properties and ignore renters’ rights.

• About 200 people blocked a major highway outside of Cairo on Wednesday to protest daily power outages that have hit many parts of the country.

• A group of desperate job-hunters—who’ve been out of work so long their unemployment benefits ran out—staged a protest rally on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street yesterday to demand that the Senate pass the Tier 5 unemployment extension.

• A crowd of approximately 35 gathered at JP Morgan Chase’s offices in San Francisco on Tuesday to demand that banks and private equity firms pay California counties millions in overdue real estate taxes related to corporate acquisitions stemming from the economic crisis.

• Four Greenpeace activists climbed onto the roof of Poland’s environment ministry in Warsaw this week to protest the government’s lackluster defence of the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, one of Europe’s most precious environments.

• Employees at the Mott’s apple processing plant in Williamson, N.Y., have been on strike for at least two months with no end in sight, as the company insists on wage cuts despite posting record profits.

• A crowd of about 300 villagers in Kabul blocked a main road in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday to protest the killing of three innocent villagers by US Forces. In the first six months of this year, 386 civilians were killed by NATO or Afghan government forces.

• Police arrested five of about 100 protesters gathered outside a Minneapolis hotel yesterday, trying to deliver petitions to commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star game out of Arizona because of that state’s new immigration law.

• Expatriate Kashmiris and Pakistanis from different parts of the United Kingdom staged a big demonstration in front of 10-Downing Street on Thursday to protest against British Prime Minister David Cameron’s remarks on issues of Pakistan and Kashmir.

• Several Greenpeace activists were arrested after rappelling off the Calgary Tower yesterday morning to hang a banner attacking the relationship between the oilsands industry and government.

• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in the southwestern Helmand province to voice their anger at the killing of a 65-year-old man by US troops. Another demonstration was held in the southern Oruzgan province over the alleged desecration of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, by US forces.

• Two men carrying Mexican flags in protest of Arizona’s immigration law ran onto the outfield during the seventh inning of the New York Mets’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks Friday night at Citi Field. Prior to the game, about 40 people across the street from the ballpark chanted “Oppose racism!” and “Boycott Arizona!”

• Several hundred Red Shirt protesters defied a state of emergency in the Thai capital on Monday to stage a symbolic protest, with hundreds of people sprawling on the ground and chanting, “People died here!”

• An estimated 30,000 people, consisting of tourists and residents, linked hands on the Thai island of Koh Samui on Saturday afternoon to protest oil exploration due to start in the Gulf of Thailand.

• Advocates for New York City’s community gardens delivered fresh produce to the steps of city hall Monday to protest the expiration of the Garden Settlement of 2002, which protected community gardens from real estate developers.

• About half the detainees at the 216-bed Campsfield House immigration centre in Oxfordshire Britain are refusing meals to protest their prolonged detention and treatment, which has caused many to suffer from mental health problems.

• About 600 employees of a Volvo bus plant in India have been on strike for a week to demand better pay and the return to work of four colleagues suspended following a dispute at the plant.

• This past Friday, in Bryant Park  in New York, Medicare celebrated it’s 45th birthday with a flash mob of over one hundred singing and dancing protesters that warned President Obama’s newly created Deficit Commission to keep their hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

• South African government ministers met with public sector workers’ unions to try to end an open-ended wage strike by 210,000 teachers, nurses and other state employees that began last Thursday and prevent it from spreading.

• Greek truck drivers’ associations say they will continue a protest that has halted fuel supplies across the country and is hurting tourism, despite an emergency order by the government to force them back to work.

• Hundreds of hotel and restaurant employees and supporters were arrested around the US Thursday in coordinated civil disobedience against the Hyatt Corporation. Fifteen cities saw protests.

• A group of families of political prisoners gathered in front of the office of the General Prosecutor to protest the lack of information about the situation of their loved ones, especially those political prisoners who went on hunger strike in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison last week. Meanwhile, it was reported yesterday that anti-riot units and Special Forces barged into the facility  after learning of prisoners’ mass hunger strike.

• More than 200 Afghans participated in a rally in the capital Kabul on Sunday to protest the alleged NATO killing of 52 civilians on July 23, in the Sangin district of Helmand province.

• Some 800 dockers and activists staged a rally in Indonesia on Saturday to demand that a major port operator honor a negotiated agreement.

The last month has seen 6 Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, bringing our country’s total to seventeen. Yet even with a federal election looming and 61% of Australians wanting troops brought home our involvement in the war has bipartisan support. In fact, far from raising questions over our mission there, these deaths seem to only strengthen the government’s resolve to remain. The same seems to be true of the U.S. and many other NATO countries.  It strengthens their resolve not because it makes the mission there any more necessary, or more strategically important, but because of a principle called “the sacrifice trap.”

This psychological principle works through an escalating commitment to a failing course of action, ironically in order to justify that course of action.  The more one sacrifices in pursuit of a particular objective, the more difficult it is to change course from that objective, and the more stridently it will be defended.  Often we experience this when they are put on hold by a telephone company. Our dogged commitment to the call seems to grow the longer they make us wait.  This is not because we don’t want to hang up, but because we feel the time spent will have been a waste if we do.

The more soldiers who are killed in the course of this war, the more committed some governments seem to be to it.  It is partly a matter of saving face – no one likes to admit they have made a mistake, let alone governments or countries.  But greater than that is the sense of investment, which must be seen to bear fruit, even in the most fruitless course of action.  Furthermore, the greater the “investment,” the more the prize seems to be inflated in importance.

During the Talisman Sabre joint US/Australian military exercises in 2009, my friends and I had many conversations with soldiers from Australia and the U.S., many of whom had spent time in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. To my surprise, almost without exception, they expressed the futility of the task there.  Some had lost good friends. But they were under orders, they said, and their families relied on the income they generated from the army.

It is believed that as many as 25 percent of US soldiers are looking for a way out of the military, yet don’t feel able to leave.  Having committed their lives to the military – and in many cases, committed acts they regret – the stakes have been raised to unacceptable levels to admit that they have been wrong.

The only way out of the sacrifice trap is to give those involved – soldiers, the military hierarchy, and government – a way out that enables them retain their dignity and reduces the cognitive dissonance between knowing their actions are wrong or counter-productive and doing it anyway.  Ironically, the more stridently the left pillories their actions, the less likely it becomes that it will change course, because it forces them deeper into the jaws of the sacrifice trap.

I wonder then whether the latest Wikileaks scandal might actually backfire on the voices for ending the war. If it leads to demonization and harshness, it almost certainly will.

Of course, toning down the criticism of the war does not mean that people should not be held accountable for immoral actions, but demonizing them will only hinder the process of necessary change.

There seems to be a delicate balance in this between personal pride and personal cost. Several countries have of course already backed out of their involvement in the war, but they have been countries with relatively little invested in terms of personal pride. Nations seem to have seen their way clear to withdraw when the cost outweighed the pride element.

If a rigorous cost-benefit analysis were to be undertaken – including accounting for the reality of property destruction, injury, and loss of life on all sides – I am certain it would reveal that the war in Afghanistan is really in no one’s national interest, and that there are numerous other, less costly options to achieve the stated objectives.  But until such advice is heeded, further commitment to this “war without end” will continue to be a disservice to us all – especially to those soldiers putting themselves at risk at the behest of their government.

It’s out: an enormous trove of documents about the war in Afghanistan yesterday appeared on Wikileaks (whose servers currently seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic) together with comprehensive reports by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. The leak represents no less than a historic act of civil disobedience; consisting of 92,201 US military internal records, this is the largest leak of classified material in history. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, may be a criminal in the eyes of the US government, which has roundly condemned his work even while begging for his help to plug up his sources (this administration has been harsher with informants than its predecessor). A 22-year-old American intelligence analyst in Iraq named Bradley Manning has already been arrested for, under the online handle Bradass87, funneling the documents to where Wikileaks could arrange to publicize them. He wrote in an online chat of the trove, “it[']s beautiful and horrifying … It’s public data, it belongs in the public domain.”

To Assange and Manning, and to many others, keeping records like this classified is far worse a crime than releasing them. Explore the documents, particularly at those three outlets above which have had access to them for several weeks, and see the dark impression they convey about what has really been going on in Afghanistan. The Guardian summarizes:

• coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents

• Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

• a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

“The war logs” inevitably bring to mind Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War. What impact will this leak, which is considerably larger, have?

The documents all date from before December 2009, when the new “surge” was launched, so they don’t tell us anything about its progress. But they do suggest the true challenges that it faces, with a clarity which the public didn’t have access to when it put its continued support behind Obama’s war last year. If we had known then what we know now, would Congress have allowed itself to fund the surge? And, if things are getting so much worse, why does the administration continue to insist on escalating?

Some who have opposed the war since its beginning back in 2001 may feel the temptation to be gratified that Afghanistan has become so much the quagmire that we predicted. That apologists for the war continually use military successes, such as they are, to retroactively justify military force only encourages the war’s critics to claim failures as a kind of vindication—which in turn makes the critics vulnerable to accusations of siding with the so-called enemy. No—what these documents portray is nothing other than a disaster, one to be regretted by all and forcing all to come to grips with what we are actually dealing with: a dreadful war and a government unwilling to admit it.

What the trove reveals, also, is how information resistance may be a form of resistance par excellence today. Bringing the truth to light like this, on such a massive scale and in such a concerted fashion, lends new meaning to Gandhi’s call for “truth force.”

At 1am this morning, Democracy Village – the antiwar protest camp on Parliament Square in London that began on May 1 – was finally brought to an end. According to witnesses, it took about 60 bailiffs, with the assistance of police, to remove the remaining protesters after a few tied themselves to scaffolding.

The activists involved, however, do not appear discouraged. According to the AFP:

“People from ‘Democracy Village’ are going to carry on with this protest. We’re not going away,” said Pete Phoenix, a 36-year-old protester with blond dreadlocks and sunglasses.

“Lots of areas around the city are going to be taken over in the next few days and weeks.

“Our spirit is stronger after this eviction,” he told AFP, saying the camp had “raised awareness around the world” about Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The BBC is reporting that some are even planning on returning to their makeshift camp on Parliament Square once the fences that have been erected are removed.

While Democracy Village was started by antiwar protesters, they were over time joined by an eclectic  mix of climate change activists, pro-democracy campaigners, anarchists and the homeless.

According to Maria Gallastegui, who has run a vigil for Gaza in the square for four years, in its 11 weeks the camp changed from being “from 100% activist to 30% activist and 70% homeless.” This led to many activists focusing more of their energy on helping those in need than direct action.

The eviction order will not affect Brian Haw, the most well-known protester at Parliament Square, who has camped out there since 2001 to protest Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, Haw was never a fan of Democracy Village, calling the protesters “deliberately unreasonable, even depraved and outrageous.”

While it was probably not a wise move strategically to include activists pushing so many different issues in the camp, or to allow alcohol and drugs on the premises, they were no doubt fighting the good fight.

U.S. Army description: "A Soldier from Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (Airborne), watches cattle run for their lives while a CH-47 helicopter prepares to land on Landing Zone Shetland during Operation Saray Has July 19 near Forward Operating Base Naray, Afghanistan."

The rather shocking and sudden way in which a recent Rolling Stone article brought about the forced resignation of the top U.S. general in Afghanistan has, together with other milestones, churned up some long-ignored questions about what allied forces are doing there in the first place. In recent weeks, the 1,000th U.S. soldier was killed there, as well as the 300th Brit, and the war became officially the longest in American history. More and more, mainstream voices are beginning to question what is now, fully, Obama’s war.

At the New York Review of Books blog, Garry Wills writes that “McChrysal does not matter“; if there’s one take-away from the Rolling Stone piece, it isn’t the general’s insubordinate remarks but that the time has come to, as Wills puts it, “get out!”

The conflict around McChrystal will only matter if it is the occasion of recognizing what a fool’s errand he was sent on. Any military replacement will only repeat his calls for more time, more troops, more recognition of the failed policy of “counter-insurgency” (COIN). Hastings’s real point is signaled early in his Rolling Stone piece:

The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

In June 11th’s New York Times, I was struck to see, on the front page, an article about Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s expression of doubt in the very foreign troops propping up his fragile regime, while on the back page columnist Bob Herbert argued that it is probably time for us to leave. Then, two days later, the newspaper reported on a treasure trove of mineral deposits in the country—which, it turns out, isn’t really news at all, but seems to have been re-announced in order to appeal to resource-hungry cynicism in the hopes that it might renew people’s commitment to the war effort.

From McChrystal’s insubordinate remarks to the new-old minerals, there is a campaign afoot to distract the conversation from the basic questions toward which more and more observers are beginning to drift: Are the foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan doing any good? Have they ever? Do we have any idea what they’re really supposed to be doing there in the first place?

The danger is that people will—they already have—become simply resigned to an endless and pointless war because they don’t know any better or feel they have any choice. There is a choice. We have to begin devoting ourselves to developing practical, realistic, nonviolent strategies for how foreign troops can withdraw from Afghanistan with a minimum of cost to the people who live there, as well as for how a political arrangement can be brokered that will finally bring some stability to the region. This is not a utopian, unrealistic proposal. What’s utopian and unrealistic is the combat mission that has been dragging on there, continually firing the coals of radicalism since 2001. Finally the mainstream is beginning to come around to the fact that a non-military resolution—rather than military resignation—is the only sensible way forward.

Inspired by Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s call to be prepared to bear significant costs for peacemaking, my small group of antiwar activists in Melbourne, Australia decided to “up the ante” and try some actions that might be potentially more costly than anything we had done before resisting the war in Afghanistan. This was back in October 2009.

We spent months researching Afghanistan—the geography and politics, as well as the war. We also spent some time placing these events in the context of our Christian faith, asking some hard questions about our activism: were we too focused on symbolism and not enough on effectiveness? Were we too focused on effectiveness and not enough on means?

This culminated in our action at Swan Island, a highly secretive military base in southern Victoria, Australia, near the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. The island also houses a yacht club and public golf course, all accessible via a bridge which is guarded during the day and locked at night. The base itself provides training for Australia’s elite SAS troops, who are playing most of our combat role in Afghanistan, as well as ASIS, or Australian Secret Intelligence Service (our equivalent of the CIA in the US). We figured if we could disrupt the activities of this base, we could probably disrupt some of the preparation for and implementation of the war.

So in the early hours of March 31 (the week before Easter) Jacob Bolton, Jessica Morrison, Simon Reeves and myself went to Queenscliff and swam the short distance to Swan Island.

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As a New Zealander, I was both delighted and concerned to discover that my country is considered the most peaceful in the world by the 2010 Global Peace Index (GPI), a publication developed by an international panel of peace experts in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit and published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

On one hand, I think the world needs initiatives like this. The study’s founder, Steve Killelea calls the GPI “a wake-up call for leaders around the globe”, and I hope he is right. But, given the factors it examines—such as levels of violence and crime within a country, plus military expenditure and wars—the GPI unfortunately glosses over some interesting realities.

First, if you do believe peace can be achieved at the end of a gun, it unfairly vilifies countries like the United States who, though they account for 54 percent of global military spending, tend to use this spending to ensure the “peace” of their allies and neighbors. So countries sheltering under the military wings of a world power can happily slide up the index by letting the US (and the other top spenders like Russia, the UK, France and China) slide down.

Being a strong believer in nonviolent solutions to conflict resolution, I commend the GPI for bringing people’s attention to the scale of military spending by these countries. Most of the time I think what the US would call “ensuring peace, freedom and stability,” is just another name for exploitation and empire-building. Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of this so-called “peace” are never challenged about their complicity in global conflict.

A New Zealand soldier with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Province on July 8, 2008.

And complicit we are.

The New Zealand government sent troops to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. They have been there ever since. According to Jonathan Steele of The Guardian between 20,000 and 49,600 people may have died of the consequences of the invasion. It is estimated that in Afghanistan there are 1.5 million suffering from immediate starvation, as well as 7.5 million suffering as a result of the country’s dire situation.

No matter. The NZ government uses rhetoric about “security” and “fighting terrorism” as a justification for the continued involvement of the NZDF (Defense Force). The language used by the government creates the image of altruistic action by the military. Soldiers are “peacekeepers” sent to do “reconstruction”—which obscures the reality that the Afghani government was installed by the US for economic reasons. It was only after the media revealed that the NZSAS (Special Air Service) was there that the government admitted to their involvement. They loudly trumpet the “reconstruction team” as “humanitarian aid” when in fact they are there to prop up the US military occupation.

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• Hundreds of Los Angeles students at Lawndale High School walked out of class Wednesday to protest a controversial decision to transfer the school’s top teachers to a neighboring school.

• Around 3,000 South Africans marched in Durban Wednesday to denounce FIFA and their government for spending 33 billion rands (4.3 billion USD) in preparation for the World Cup while millions live in poverty. Also, dozens of security workers walked off the job hours before the Brazil-North Korea soccer match Tuesday to over a pay dispute.

• West Virgina residents opposed to mountaintop removal mining rallied at the capitol in Charleston on Tuesday. The group, which calls itself  ‘Appalachia Rising’ is attempting to rally Appalachian residents opposed to mountaintop removal to join in a mass demonstration set for Sept. 27 in Washington.

• Protesters gathered outside the office of U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) on Wednesday to demand that Perriello vote against allocating an additional $33.5 billion to fund the war in Afghanistan.

• About a dozen activists rallied on Wednesday in Samara, in central Russia to protest a new law which they say will lead to the commercialization of education in their country.

• In Nepal, indigenous groups, with the backing of  several opposition parties have promised to launch a strong protest movement against the construction a controversial 269 metre dam if surveying and evacuations of villagers go forward. The Sapta Kosi Multipurpose Project dam will submerge at least 50 Nepalese villages.

• Fourteen people were arrested in Denver on Tuesday during an immigration rights protest for kneeling and blocking traffic in front of the Federal Court House.

Islamabad– “Our situation is like a football match. The superpower countries are the players, and we are just the ball to be kicked around.” This sentiment, expressed by a young man from North Waziristan, has been echoed throughout many of our conversations with ordinary people here in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Most are baffled that the United States, with the largest and most modern military in the world, can’t put a stop to a few thousand militants hiding out in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Just about everyone we have spoken with, Pashtuns included, has little to no sympathy for the Taliban or their tactics. Many people have lost limbs, homes and loved ones to the brutal assaults of suicide bombers or the indiscriminate violence of IEDs. Yet, people expressed frustrated confusion over uncertainties regarding U.S. government goals in relation to the Taliban. Some believe that the United States might be working with the ISI (Pakistani Intelligence Services) or at least not working against them, to enable continued Taliban resistance. If there is no resistance, according to this view, a military presence in the region cannot be justified. Nor can a so-called humanitarian presence further flood the Pakistani and Afghan economies with millions of dollars in aid that most often lines the pockets of the politicians, elite bureaucrats, and United States corporations involved in construction and security.

The fact that very little aid money has reached the impoverished and war weary people who need it most has been confirmed to us by members of the Afghan and Pakistani governments, human rights organizations, Non-Governmental Organizations and several very unfortunate families forced to live as refugees. As Hyder Akbar, a Pashtun working on NGO assessments in Afghanistan, said to us, “If you are pouring 100 million dollars into a tiny and impoverished province like Kunar and seeing no results, you’re obviously doing something wrong.” But, several seasoned analysts agree that money alone can’t solve problems faced by impoverished people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Both Dr. Mubashir Hassan, former finance minister of the Peoples Party of Pakistan, and Nur Agha Akbari, from the Ministry of Agriculture in Afghanistan, strongly believe that efforts to bring people out of poverty in South Asia must be initiated, at district and village levels, through consultation with grass roots, indigenous community groups. Mr. Akbari stressed that there is still an opportunity for the United States government and people to play a positive role in Afghanistan, but that role will not be possible until the United States stops giving orders and starts listening to community groups living in Afghanistan.

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On Tuesday, a woman in London stopped traffic in front of the House of Parliament for five minutes after taking off her clothes and sitting on top of a black taxi cab to protest the war in Afghanistan.

While getting naked in public is definitely a way to draw attention, I question whether it is really a method that should be used to promote any cause, unless exposing your body has some very direct connection to the issue at hand.

In general, I tend to agree with those (here, here, here and here) who critique PETA, for example, for using nudity and sex to promote animal rights. What are your thoughts?

• Thousands of people formed a human chain in Okinawa, Japan yesterday to protest the movement of a US military base there.

• 500 Afghan villagers demonstrated outside their governor’s office on Friday to protest a recent US-backed raid that killed civilians.

• Thousands of villagers in India facing displacement by steel giant POSCO are staging sit-in protests during what they have dubbed “resistance week,” which lasts through May 21.

• Communications worker union members marched through Johannesburg, South Africa demanding wage increases.

• Women vendors in Nagamapal, India staged a sit-in yesterday to protest continued price hikes. The sit-in condemned a government official’s visit to the region and shops and businesses were also closed in protest

• 160 Russian tractor factory workers have begun a hunger strike after not being paid for five months. They are also fundraising for a plane ticket for President Medvedev to come and mediate.

• A gay pride parade meant to protest rights violations against sexual minorities was violently disrupted by police in Belarus on Saturday.

• People gathered in the Maldives last week, clad in red shirts, to protest rising electricity tariffs.

• Saturday was International Day of Protest for Lolita’s Retirement, in support of an orca whale at Miami’s Seaquarium, who lives in the smallest whale tank in North America and possibly the world.

• Gun control activists protested outside an NRA conference in Charlotte, NC, saying discussion of gun violence was missing from the conference.