The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

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So much of the ugliness that the American wars have brought into the world over the past decade has been invisible, hidden from view by being unrecorded, unremembered, redacted, spun, censored, or glorified. For those not in the way of falling bombs and night raids, or those whose families haven’t been torn apart by deployment after deployment, the wars have been easy enough to ignore. We’ve all seen enough, though, to know better. We should know that this ugliness hasn’t done, and cannot do, any good. Yet the ugliness has, as a whole, left Americans discouraged and irresolute. Maybe it will take beauty to finally show people the courage to pay attention and act.

That’s the idea behind 10 Years and Counting, a new initiative hatched in the Adirondack compound of the Blue Mountain Center, an activist and artist residency community nestled beside a high-country lake. 10YAC’s goal is this: between September 11th and October 7th of this year—marking the 10-year anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war in Afghanistan—launch an artistic groundswell by coordinating protest and arts events around the country. Their network includes activist groups, including Code Pink and the War Resisters League, as well as arts organizations and galleries. To see some of the visual art, poetry, music, and performances they’ve been gathering, take a look around the 10YAC blog.

But art, for 10YAC, is not quite an end in itself. “One of the most important visions” of the project, according to Alice Gordon, program director at Blue Mountain, is to see “as many Americans as possible getting onto the streets for peace around the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.”

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The Economist has seen fit to lend its sole obituary in the latest issue to Brian Haw, “peace campaigner,” who died on June 18th. For ten years, he camped outside the British Parliament in protest of his country’s wars abroad. At first, the onetime evangelist was considered, by the likes of Tony Blair, something of a welcome curiosity. Then they realized he was serious.

The authorities soon got tired of him, though. Westminster Council tried to remove him because he was a nuisance and “obstructing the pavement”. It failed. By 2005 Tony decided he’d had enough of the name-calling. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act said Mr Haw had to give six days’ notice, if you please, of any demonstration within a kilometre of Parliament. How could he do that? The High Court ruled against it, and said he was legal. But the police never acted as though he was. Any morning they might wake him up with a siren, whoop, whoop, Are you there Brian, yank up his plastic, rifle through his private property right in front of Parliament. Who was abusing whom then? In 2006 78 of them came to tear down his wall of pictures, smashed it, trashed it, left it like a bomb site. Left him with one sign. He stayed, of course.

Those familiar with war protesting in Washington DC will liken him to the great Concepcion Picciotto, “The President’s Neighbor.”

President Obama’s landmark speech on the Middle East at the State Department today is, in many respects, a vindication of the nonviolent revolutions that ousted longtime dictators in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year. He declared, rightly:

Those shouts of human dignity are being heard across the region. And through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades.

The momentum of those and other uprisings throughout the region have given him license to make some pretty serious statements. First, he declared support for the ongoing popular movements in countries like Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and backed it up with massive aid packages to the fledgling post-revolutionary governments in Tunisia and Egypt. Second, he called for renewed Israel-Palestine peace talks based on the 1967 borders, to the dismay of Israeli leaders. He compared the Arab Spring’s activists to Rosa Parks and the Boston Tea Party—the gist being, We are with you.

Perhaps more than you might like.

No speech about the Middle East would be complete, of course, without mention of the three theaters where the US military is fighting these days: Af-Pak, Iraq, and Libya. Observes Amy Davidson at The New Yorker:

It was […] striking that, when it came to the countries in which our military is actively, directly committed, Obama’s words were among the least straightforward of the speech. On Afghanistan, he asked that we accept ambiguous terms about indefinite actions—breaking momentum, beginning to come home, continuing a transition—as meaningful ones. Iraq is variously a success story, a cautionary tale, and, oddly, an example of how “sectarian divides need not lead to conflict.” On Libya, he asked for credit for stopping a massacre and the spread of “the message” that force could keep one in power; this had to be artfully said, however, as people are still being killed and Qaddafi has not fallen.

He says all this while denouncing the Syrian regime’s use of force against its people, and al-Qaeda, and Iran. Again, rightly. But, as always, the call for nonviolence stops at the US and its supposed interests. Passing by the AIPAC website today—AIPAC being the major US lobby supporting Israeli militancy—one learns that it was just announced that Obama will appear at their 2011 policy conference. He can’t have said anything too unsettling, by their lights.

Such double-standard-bearing, double-talking use and misuse of nonviolence isn’t new in the rhetoric of and around this Nobel Peace Prize laureate. It began from the first words of his inauguration ceremony, when Diane Feinstein extolled from the steps of the Capitol the nonviolent civil rights movement that made Obama’s election possible in the first place, even as he promised to step up the war in Afghanistan. And today’s major Middle East speech certainly echoes his last one, in Egypt: Nonviolence for everyone else, wars without end for the US.

How many more revolutions will it take for the president to hear to the advice he gives to others for himself?

Osama bin Laden in 1989 in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden is dead. You’ve seen the news. US troops stormed the mansion where he was hiding, an hour’s drive from Islamabad, in the backyard of Pakistan’s elite military academy. President Obama came on TV last night and announced—victoriously, but without much bravado—what he described as “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.” He called for unity, like the country experienced after 9/11, when George W. Bush’s approval ratings were soaring. There have been celebrations in the streets of US cities. The stock market even got a spike. But what is there, really, to celebrate? The death of a man? The end of the war on terror?

Celebrating becomes tough when you considers the cost. Bin Laden’s persona has been the totem justifying US war policy since 9/11. The idea was to get ’im, dead or alive. Soldiers have been taught to fantasize about someday nailing him, issuing the payback that he’s had coming since 2001. Politicians have promised his head as the ultimate prize. To that end, there was an invasion of Afghanistan almost ten years ago now, which started a war that is now bloodier than ever. (The CIA reports that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda operatives in that country.) Then there’s Iraq—a country that the US invaded while giving various elusive reasons, most designed to somehow link Iraq to the bin Laden totem in people’s imaginations.

The cost, exactly? There have been as many as a million people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. More than $1 trillion of US money down the drain. And for what? Ask the architects of this war on terror, and they’ll say that all the armies, and the air strikes, and the torture chambers have been rooting out al-Qaeda and global terrorism for good. But, if you could ask bin Laden today, or yesterday, he might have smiled.

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With the US now prosecuting three wars abroad, NPR asks why more people aren’t on the streets. In the article, Linton Weeks and the folks he interviews offer several possible reasons, including the lack of a draft, which helped mobilize the peace movement against the war in Vietnam, greater control over coverage of war in the mainstream media, and the fact that the “defense” industry is now such a large part of our economy.

Executive vice president of the CATO Institute David Boaz argues that the movement was deflated and has never recovered from the election of Barack Obama:

To buttress his assertions, Boaz cites a recently published study of anti-war protesters. The research was conducted by Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University. It concludes that the anti-war movement in America evaporated because Democrats — inspired to protest by their anti-Republican feelings — stopped protesting once the Democratic Party achieved success in Congress in 2006 and then in the White House in 2008.

One other factor that has made organizing against war more difficult, but isn’t mentioned in the article, is the dramatic decline in US casualties in war since Vietnam. In Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans were killed. Thanks to the growing use of robotics, the privatization of war and improvements in medicine, among other reasons, in Iraq and Afghanistan just over 6,000 US soldiers have died – essentially one-tenth the US casualties in Vietnam.

These are the challenges that the antiwar movement faces. Given these changed circumstances, how can those opposed to the ongoing wars still motivate people to take action? In what ways can the peace movement make the true costs of war real to more Americans, who seem to be worried about everything but war?

And perhaps those aren’t even the right questions to be asking. Maybe it’s more a question of creating a new type of activism that is more appealing to folks who have never gotten involved before.

• On Saturday in Pittsburgh, an estimated 500 opponents of impending Port Authority service cuts participated in a peaceful protest march and rally.

• As the Iraq war hit the 8-year mark on Sunday, hundreds of people, many of which were veterans of previous and current U.S. wars, gathered in front of the White House to protest with the war and current occupations.

• Three first-year Tibetan students from Delhi University on Saturday marched bare-chested from Rajghat to Jantar Mantar to pay their respects to 21-year-old monk Lobsang Phuntsog.
  

• Protesters interrupted a speech by Sunoco Inc. chairman and chief executive Lynn L. Elsenhans in Philidelphia on Thursday, sparked by layoffs and other business decisions made by Elsenhas.

• Environmental activists and opposition political figures staged a protest in Taipei Sunday against the government’s plan to continue the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant project, as Japan battled to bring its quake-damaged nuclear plants under control.

• About 200 workers at two refineries staged demonstrations on Sunday, demanding higher wages, as a series of concessions by Oman’s veteran ruler Sultan Qaboos bin Said have failed to quell discontent and unrest.

• On Saturday in Pakistan, a token hunger strike was observed on second consecutive day by the members of All Sindh Education Department Lower Staff Association (ASEDLS) in front of the Karachi Press Club (KPC) against failure of the provincial government in resolving their problems.

• On Friday in Michigan, hundreds of local high school students walked out of their classrooms to protest budget cuts proposed by the state legislature.

Last week I noted that the nonviolent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which are now spreading throughout the region, have generated more interest and positive coverage of nonviolence in the mainstream media than I have seen in my lifetime.

Probably the most surprising praise for nonviolent action came last week from Max Boot, who is a hawk and outspoken advocate for military force. In the conservative magazine Commentary he wrote:

It is fair to say that [Gene] Sharp and [Peter] Ackerman have been indirectly responsible for more revolutions than anyone since Lenin or Mao — and, unlike the avatars of “socialist” upheavals, their work made the world a better place, helping to create numerous liberal democracies. It is hard to think of worthier recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee should act soon — Sharp is no longer a young man and his work deserves recognition while he is still around to enjoy it.

I wonder how Boot reconciles his appreciation for the power of nonviolence to unseat dictators with his support for the war in Iraq, which has led to such incredible suffering and death. I suppose he would argue that Saddam was a unique case where nonviolence would not have worked.

Nonviolent movements, however, have brought down so many dictators around the world in recent decades that there is no reason why Saddam should be considered an exception. Even academic studies, like “Why Civil Resistance Works,” are beginning to demonstrate from a purely pragmatic perspective – with extensive evidence and hundreds of case studies over the last century – that nonviolent action is simply far more effective than using violence in political struggle.

And regarding the Nobel Peace Prize, my hunch from reading interviews with Sharp is that he would not want to take credit away from the people on the ground who risk their lives in nonviolent struggle. As Sharp rightly told the New York Times last week, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

Last week, I was on Russia Today (RT), Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel, to discuss ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s role in the Iraq war and the use of torture on the day that his new memoir Known and Unknown was released. Click here to watch the video.

Kathy Kelly is constantly on the frontlines. Whether in her Chicago neighborhood, where she lives in a tight-knit community, or in the Middle East, Kelly is determined to document firsthand the plight of people whose countries have been torn apart by war. As founder of the Nobel prize–nominated anti-war group Voices for Creative Nonviolence—and before that Voices in the Wilderness—Kelly travels extensively to war-torn countries to see the effects of US foreign policy in order to better tell the stories of those who suffer from it. Though her actions have resulted in numerous arrests and heinous government fines, nothing seems to stop her.

I caught up with Kelly at her home in Chicago this fall, before she left on a trip to Pakistan. [She is currently with a delegation in Afghanistan]. The packed house, with both residents and strangers coming and going, was emblematic of the activist’s constantly bustling world. In our conversation, she discussed her influences, the ever-changing neighborhood in which she lives and its impact on her, surviving prison life, and the meaning of tax refusal.

James M. Russell: What kindled your activism?
Kathy Kelly: I was an impressionable child and I can think of two things that impressed me the most. When I was a child, hands down, it was the nuns. Most of the ones assigned to my South Side Chicago parish were young and cheerful; we didn’t have mean nuns that were wrapping our knuckles. The ones I grew up with shared everything in common and lived a simple life. There wasn’t a question in my mind that I would become one of them. And then things changed radically. Then everything changed in the Catholic Church and nuns were living independently and driving cars.

Watching the film “Night and Fog” in high school, about the remains of the Nazi death camps, was a very transformative moment for me. Seeing it evoked a sense of never ever being a passive bystander … but nevertheless, I went through the Vietnam War like Brigadoon in the mist. I never got involved in the anti-war activism at that point in my life. Later in life, what changed me was coming up to the soup kitchen in this neighborhood and realizing that there was tremendous poverty in my city. I think that when people are directly in touch with impoverishment, there’s a conversion that almost has to happen.

JMR: How have you continued to change?
KK: I didn’t grow up with a very strong sense of personal courage. But in my adult life because of very wonderful mentors and some situations that kind of demanded the jump, I now understand it: that courage is the ability to control your fears. So in evolving, I’ve been able to identify some fears and learn about controlling them so that I wouldn’t be governed by it. And that was mainly though watching people who I admired very much and realizing, “well I would rather have what they’ve achieved in their lives.” And I learned that they had achieved by governing life through their values.

So there’s that and there’s also the joy of dropping out of consumer culture. I haven’t dropped out completely, but in the ways I have, I’m very happy. There’s just a lot of time that gets consumed in consuming and owning. If you don’t have to do it, there’s a certain sense of release.

JMR: Why did you decide to become a war-tax refuser?
KK: When it dawned on me that my neighbors didn’t have food, that the youngsters would be remarkable if they made it though their teenage years, and that people in my neighborhood were sleeping in abandoned buildings. There’s no way I was going to go to a teaching job and spend much of my teaching day trying to teach youngsters about opposition, radical opposition to nuclear weaponry and then take a third of my income and then pay for nuclear weapons and the rest of it. It wasn’t even a question once I realized, and I thought “Of course! What a relief! I don’t have to pay those taxes.” I never will pay those taxes and since the day that I first made that determination, there hasn’t been a doubt in my mind. I will never pay federal income tax.

JMR: Do you identify not just as a war-tax refuser but as someone who ultimately exists to refuse, or in better terms, resist the oppressive systems under which we live?
KK: I do not want to be too speculative but refusal affects one’s personality. I can say when I went to maximum-security prison for one year I didn’t refuse to work. I worked. I got fired from just about every job I had until I ended up picking up cigarette butts in the middle of the prison. I somehow emerged from that situation with a little more backbone in terms of readiness to refuse, almost with a kind of an edge to it. You know, the edge that would say, “Are you gonna make me?” I don’t want that to be my approach so I get opportunities to work on that when I’m in public settings and people disagree with me. I think that’s one opportunity to really try to reach out a friendly hand. And also when we get hate mail to try and answer it in a respectful way without, you know, communicating that you’re buckling. So it’s a skill, maybe almost an art form to learn how to engage in refusal and resistance without creating enmity… or deepening enmity.

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