What was the Times expecting?

On what should be a sad occasion, I’ve found myself uplifted by the many great remembrances floating around the internet of Howard Zinn’s long and productive life. They serve as a reminder that a life well lived is to be celebrated, not mourned. His single greatest accomplishment was not writing A People’s History, but living an active life worthy of inclusion in such a book. He stands as an equal among the American heroes he wrote about for his organizing and speaking out against the Vietnam War, which, on one occasion, as Daniel Ellsberg recalled, led to him being beaten and arrested by police.

I was fortunate enough to have my own interaction with Zinn a few years ago. I was in the midst of discovering the power of nonviolent social movements and had come across his famous article “A Just Cause, Not A Just War,” published a few months after Sept. 11. Being somewhat blinded by my own passions and interests, I seized not upon his wonderful message that war is inherently unjust and must cease no matter the cause, but on this one little statement:

There might be situations (and even such strong pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil would be justified.

It struck me as an unfortunate disclaimer from a man I wholly admired, in an article I otherwise loved. Furthermore, I was not aware of any justification for violence given by Gandhi or King. So I wrote him and asked for an explanation. To my surprise, he wrote back:
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• Hundreds of Notre Dame University students and faculty members gathered on campus yesterday to demand more equality for LGBT students. The protest was in response to an anti-gay comic strip which appeared in the student paper a few weeks ago.

• Climate activists in South Lanarkshire closed down one of Scotland’s main coal terminals yesterday when one of the protesters chained himself to a digging machine. This led to 11 coal trucks queuing at the terminal’s gate and prevented a coal train being loaded.

• Dozens of people gathered in front of Camp Phoenix, an ISAF military base in the eastern part of Kabul, to protest the death of a civilian by NATO forces. They blocked the road that links the Afghan capital to eastern provinces.

• Roughly 100 members from the UAW and Teamsters unions and their supporters gathered outside the Japanese Embassy in Washington yesterday to protest Toyota’s decision to close a California plants and hire nonunion carhaulers.

• Hundreds of students and alumni packed the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson yesterday to show their support for higher education funding and their opposition to proposals that call for merging some Mississippi universities.

• About 1,400 construction workers defied a court order to end their strike at the $13 billion liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia. The strike started Jan. 22 to protest Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s plans to make the workers change accommodation every month instead of providing permanent housing.

• Five concerned parents barricaded themselves inside a primary school in Glasgow this week to protest proposals to shut down the school. It was the latest in a series of school occupations which have taken place over the past year.

• Thirteen people were arrested Tuesday at a protest outside the White House against US militarism abroad. The activists lay down on the sidewalk after reading the names of Americans, Iraqis and Afghans killed in US wars.

• Activists with Witness Against Torture gathered yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Capitol to protest the voided deadline President Obama set for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo. Some held banners on the Capitol steps reading “Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” while others performed a “memorial service” for the three detainees whose deaths were covered up by the military. 42 were arrested.

• About 500 villagers from the Afghan province of Ghanzi chanted slogans against the United States and the Afghan government as they carried the wooden coffins of four recently slain civilians by NATO forces to the provincial capital.

• Three environmentalists in West Virginia set up tree-top platforms 60-feet in the air Thursday morning to protest a mountaintop removal blast site run by Masset Energy.

• About 100 inmates at the Varick Federal Detention Center in Lower Manhattan refused to go to the mess hall on Tuesday morning and gave guards a flier declaring they were on a hunger strike to protest detention policies and practices.

• 1,200 employees at the Indian unit of mobile handset maker Nokia Corp. in Mumbai went on strike yesterday to protest the suspension of some of their colleagues.

• Thousands of French public sector workers went on strike yesterday and took part in demonstrations across the country to protest plans for job and spending cuts.

• Hundreds of ship builders went on strike yesterday to protest 370 layoffs and the outsourcing of some operations at STX Finland’s shipyard in southwestern Finland.

• Several hundred UC Berkeley staff, students, and faculty held a noon rally on Wednesday to protest UC administration plans to privatize bus service at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 14 were arrested after they linked hands and surrounded a shuttle bus.

Our good friend Kathy Kelly, who is also a contributor to this site, sent along a nice article a couple days ago – which ran on Common Dreams and several other sites – about the staggering human and financial cost of the many wars that the United States is currently engaged in. She also examines how our violence is only exacerbating the problems of terrorism and extremism, while the average Afghan continues to live in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Kelly then explains the campaign that Voices for Creative Nonviolence has launched to address these concerns:

The U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law to abridge the right of people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.  We are deeply aggrieved by the folly of these wars. Our right to free speech is irrelevant if we don’t exercise it, and so we intend to raise the lament of those who bear the brunt of our wars but whose voices seldom reach U.S. government figures.

For two weeks this January, leading up to the date when President Obama is due to submit his budget for Fiscal Year 2011 to Congress, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and friends will gather in Washington D.C. for a “Peaceable Assembly Campaign” project.  (www.peaceableassemblycampaign.org)

We’ll be meeting with elected representatives to raise questions about the folly and the crime of war, holding daily vigils at the White House, and engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to emphasize our refusal to cooperate with the war makers.

Please join us in this year-long campaign, whether in Washington D.C. this month, or participating locally where you live.   Visit the Voices website, www.vcnv.org, to learn more about ways to become involved, both locally through this coming summer and in the Days of Resistance in Washington.

We’ll be there from January 19th through February 2nd.

• About 500 striking Algerian workers blocked a main road near the capital on Thursday—the latest in a series of outbreaks of unrest over price inflation and living conditions. They were confronted with lines of riot police equipped with water cannons and armored vehicles.
  

• When the Olympic torch passed through Manitoba yesterday it was trailed by seven horses carrying leaders from native communities, who were drawing attention to the plight of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada.

• Over 800 members of UNITE HERE Local 2 and 400 supporters blocked the San Francisco Hilton’s main entrance for several hours to protest the hotel chain’s proposal to cut starting wages for new hires by 25 percent.  140 were arrested.

• About 5,000 demonstrators gathered yesterday in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan to protest the deaths of children in an explosion on Wednesday that they blamed on U.S. forces.

• Five activists in Homestead Florida are fasting to protest the deportation of immigrants with families.

• Several thousand DeKalb County school employees dressed in black yesterday to protest the superintendent’s $15,000 raise, which comes after the board slashed their pay increases and implemented a one-day furlough.

• Fujitsu workers in east Manchester, Warrington, Bolton and Crewe are taking part in a 48-hour walkout as part of the UK’s first ever national IT sector strike to protest redundancies, pay and pensions.

Here is the latest webcomic from our friend Jason Laning, who wrote the post on anarchism earlier this week. As always, visit his site to see it in its original size or check out his other work.

• The streets of Qom, Iran’s holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners on Sunday. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.

• More than 3,000 female Burmese workers at a bra factory in Tak’s Mae Sot district again went on strike on Monday over an assault on two of an employee’s relatives by four security officers.

• In New York City, students left school early on Monday in a walk-out to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to stop giving students free Metrocards. The youngsters left school at 2 pm and gathered in front of the MTA’s headquarters to demand that the agency find a way to fill its $400 million budget shortfall that won’t force students to pay to commute to city schools.

• Some 300 municipal staff began a sit-in at the Town Hall in Alcoy, Spain on Monday against the local government’s decision to sack nine workers, saying they will remain there until this afternoon.

• Over 5,000 indigenous, Afro-Colombian and farming community members are occupying the community center of Piñuña Negro in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. A crowd of all ages has gathered at the highest government office in the area—the Police Inspector’s office—to demand negotiations with local and national government representatives and an end to military and paramilitary harassment and coca eradication programs that are causing thousands of residents to be displaced.

• Hundreds of Palestinian citizens on Monday evening participated in a sit-in organized by Hamas Movement near Salahuddin terminal on the Palestinian-Egyptian borders in protest at the building of a steel wall on Gaza borders.

• A protest at the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) on Monday drew attention to the contribution of the New Zealand business to climate change. A sit-in occurred, blocking the entrance to the building, and police arrested nine activists. The protest featured ‘Radical Cheerleaders’, a samba band, and around 80 diverse protestors.

• The Islamabad Bar Association (IBA) on Saturday protested near Sihala police training college in Islamabad to urge the government to expel the US private security company Blackwater, which lawyers said was operating inside Sihala college.

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.

At the end of November, just before Obama announced the escalation of the Afghan War, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), with the help of World Can’t Wait, staged a unique and powerful protest at the Westlake Center in Seattle.

As a form of “street theater,” the veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, dressed in their military uniforms and pointing imaginary guns, stormed through the crowd, tossing other protesters – who were disguised as innocent civilians going about their business at the shopping mall – to the ground and arresting them.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer explains the reaction from the passers-by:

But many people were caught off-guard by the unorthodox scene… where lines of young kids waited their turn to ride the carousel and shoppers hurried by with their bags.

As the “soldiers” screamed profanities at the “civilians” on the ground, many frightened young children were asking their parents what was going on. Meanwhile, some adult shoppers walked by – seemingly oblivious to the freaky scene.

Dubbed “Operation First Casualty,” members of IVAW first carried out this unusual type of protest, which gives onlookers just a small taste of what war is like for ordinary Iraqis or Afghans, at various locations in New York City back in 2007. After getting significant media coverage, IVAW took their show to Washington, San Francisco, and to Denver during the Democratic National Convention.

Since I first heard of this idea, and saw pictures and videos of these actions, I thought they were a brilliant and shocking way to dramatize the ugly reality of war for the average American. They also provide great opportunities for those of us in the peace movement to work closely with veterans to resist the ongoing wars.

My only regret is that these types of protest cannot be more widespread. If ordinary people were simply to dress as soldiers and carry out this street theater, critics could legitimately argue that that they don’t really know what war is like. And I wonder if it would offend sympathetic veterans, who are or could potentially be our allies. Any thoughts?

• 19 Greenpeace activists were arrested on Monday in Ottawa after dodging security and scaling two of Canada’s Parliament buildings where they unfurled banners that read “Harper-Ignatieff: Climate Inaction Costs Lives” and “Stop the Tarsands” in French and English.

• 29 people were arrested Monday morning for blocking the entrance to Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon, CA. They were protesting efforts by Chevron to undermine the fight against global warming.

• More than 30 youth activists from around the world  staged a “die-in” on Monday outside the main plenary at COP15 with the message – “The World Wants a Real Deal” and “Real Deal Saves Lives”.

• Over 300 coalfield residents and their allies rallied at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection yesterday to protest the blasting of Coal River Mountain and support a transition to a clean energy future.

• More than 200 people were arrested in Tehran on Monday during protests by tens of thousands at universities nationwide, marking the biggest anti-government demonstrations in months. Thousands continued protesting for a second day yesterday, as Iran threatened a tougher crackdown on the opposition.

• Hundreds of Afghans took to the streets yesterday to protest the killings of 15 civilians by U.S. forces during an overnight raid on Armal village.

• Crow Creek Sioux tribal members and supporters in South Dakota are planning to set up tepees on land auctioned by the Internal Revenue Service. Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue intends to fast and pray on the land “until I drop.”

A new coalition of antiwar groups called End US Wars has organized an emergency rally at the White House this Saturday, December 12th, from 11am to 4pm, to call for an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drone attacks (and covert ops) in Pakistan.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, former Sen. Mike Gravel, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, Chris Hedges and a host of antiwar leaders will take part and speak at the demonstration.

If President Obama does not meet these demands, the coalition promises to step up opposition, which will include supporting real antiwar candidates in the next election.

(One group that seems to be planning more dramatic action beginning this March is called Peace of the Action. Their site says participants will “bring forward a historic escalation of Peace Activism like we have not seen in the United States in a long time.” Without getting more specific, they plan to disrupt “business as usual” by committing “courageous deeds of civil resistance [on a daily basis] until our demands are met.”)

If you live in DC or can make it there, the protest this weekend will be a good opportunity to voice your opposition to our never-ending wars. And if you can’t get there, organizing a rally in your local area in solidarity with this action would be just as important.

Click here for the Event Guide, including map and transportation arrangements.

Get regular updates here as a Facebook fan of End The Wars.

Click here to read the Open Letter to the President.

More than 250 people held a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. Military Academy in West Point on Tuesday night to protest President Barack Obama's decision to escalate the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan.

• Other protests against the escalation of war in Afghanistan were held in New York, Minneapolis, and many other cities across the country.

• A peaceful Boston University counter-protest of more than 200 people faced six picketers Tuesday afternoon from the Westboro Baptist Church, who held signs with messages such as “The Jews killed Jesus,” “God hates fags” and “Thank God for AIDS,” outside the Hillel House.

• Six of 31 national museums in France were closed because of a strike on Wednesday over planned job cuts, including the Georges Pompidou Center, which began the strike 10 days ago.

• An undocumented Mexican immigrant, who has been living in the United States for 20 years, recently began a hunger strike in front of the White House, calling for President Obama to pass comprehensive immigration reform by the end of the year, as he’d promised.

• Finnair canceled more than 20 flights Wednesday as ground staff extended a walkout to protest outsourcing of cargo and baggage services and the transfer of hundreds of workers.

• Dozens of people have demonstrated outside the Canadian embassy in Mexico City against the killing of an anti-mining activist. The protesters blame the death of Mariano Abarca on a Canadian-owned mining company, Blackfire Exploration Ltd , which is operating in the southern Chiapas state.

• Daimler workers in Germany have walked out in protest at the company’s plans, announced on Wednesday, to assemble Mercedes C-Class models at its US plant in Alabama and shift German production from Sindelfingen to Bremen.

• Striking workers at a local supplier forced Fiat to halt production at its Termini Imerese plant in Sicily for a second day Thursday, to protest against the company’s decision to stop making cars at the plant after 2011.

As the President mulls over how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, in a recent article for Truthout, Jeff Leys wrote that the antiwar movement seems to have gone missing over these past several months. Apart from the action on October 5, in Washington and other antiwar events around the country on October 17, he unfortunately seems to be right.

Nevertheless, we can and must step up the pressure. For those interested in taking action, Leys suggests joining the Peaceable Assembly Campaign (PAC) – the latest effort by our good friends at Voices for Creative Nonviolence to challenge the militarism that is so pervasive in our country.

From January 19 through February 2, the PAC will maintain a two-week vigil at the White House and engage in regular acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, starting on the day President Obama enters his second year in office, continuing through his anticipated State of the Union address to Congress, and concluding on the day he is to submit his budget for 2011 to Congress.

Then after February 2, the Peaceable Assembly Campaign will focus its work upon Congress. Similar to the Occupation Project effort of 2007, the PAC will organize lobbying – both legal and extralegal (i.e., civil disobedience) – in the home offices of representatives and senators who do not commit themselves publicly to oppose additional funding for the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

You can become involved with the Peaceable Assembly Campaign at www.peaceableassemblycampaign.org.

A recent AFP article looks for answers to this question by talking with activists from the Vietnam War-era and students involved in opposing the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are of course many reasons for the decline of activism at universities, which have historically been a hotbed for anti-war activity.

Mounting economic and academic pressures on today’s youth, intimidation by authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the “good” war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.

Tom Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, pinned it squarely on the privatization of conflict.

“Students were the bulwark of the anti-Vietnam war movement because students were being drafted, full stop,” Hayden said. “Ending forced conscription radically diminished the possibilities of future student anti-war protests.”

The article also points out that young people today are “marching with their fingers instead of their feet.”

Some, including myself, question how much pressure this type of activism really puts on those in power to change course.

Stanley Aronowitz, a Vietnam anti-war organizer, insists online petitions do nothing but entrench users in the “anti-reality” of Internet activism.

“I don’t believe petitions do anything,” he said. “They are what middle-class people and intellectuals do to convince themselves they’re getting somewhere.”

Aronowitz, now a sociology professor at City University of New York, acknowledges that new social technologies on the Web — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — have mass mobilization potential.

“But they also privatize people’s lives to much more of a degree than when people had to go to meetings and act collectively.”

A student who runs the Student Peace Action Network also suggests that the use of new “non-lethal” weapons, like the taser, keeps some from taking to the streets or speaking out.

If that is the case, however, I think it simply reveals the lack of conviction of young people today, because activists in the 60s often risked their personal safety to challenge to the war in Vietnam.