A mural by students at Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy in Chicago depicting the realities of NATO.

As NATO forces find themselves under fire in Afghanistan, NATO’s spokespersons are taking to another battlefield to win the hearts and minds of an increasingly skeptical populace: Chicago Public Schools. Last month, the Chicago Tribune reported from a sixth-grade classroom where representatives from the Chicago NATO Host Committee gave a primer on NATO and its member countries to the Walt Disney Magnet School on the Northside of Chicago.

According a Host Committee press release, the classroom visits and programming are part of a whole series of events “designed to engage and educate residents about the upcoming NATO Summit.” Other events include sponsored sports competitions, culinary classes and specialized menus at Chicago restaurants featuring NATO member countries’ heritages, and a three-part speaker series:

The first will focus on the future of the transatlantic alliance, the second will examine American leadership in the 21st Century, and the third will give Chicagoans an opportunity to hear from visiting NATO leaders.

A Host Committee spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comments on the goals or content of the CPS programming.

Chicagoans are not likely to hear about the civilian deaths that NATO “covered up” during the 2011 Libyan uprising against Col. Qaddafi or the migrants left to die at sea after NATO failed to respond to distress calls. Furthermore, a recent NATO report leaked to The New York Times reveals what many already know: NATO is the U.S.’s wingman and can barely function without it. Alongside a faltering mission against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, NATO is facing a crisis of legitimacy as citizens of its member countries are mobilizing for protest and anti-NATO education en masse.

“AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) is working to combat the pro-NATO discussion happening not only at CPS but in general as well,” explained Barbara Morenoan, an AFSC intern, by email. Moreno has helped put together a number of resources to challenge the NATO narrative and has taken its presentations advocating protest to Chicago Public Schools. Along with students from Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy, AFSC has created a mural depicting the realities of NATO.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, nearly 500 people were arrested in protests at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels in early April. The protests reveal the increasing anti-militarism and anti-nuclear sentiments among many Europeans.

“We neither want the anti-missile shield, nor intervention by NATO in Libya or Afghanistan, nor nuclear bombs that are illegal in our country,” said Benoit Calvi to Agence France Presse about the April 1 action.

As the NATO summit nears, drawing protesters from around the world, local resistance is increasing. On Monday, clergy, along with labor leaders, announced their opposition to NATO at the Chicago Temple; the United Methodist Church, located in the Loop, is the oldest church in Chicago. Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Phil Blackwell, two long-time Chicago leaders, both stated their intentions to march against NATO. The Chicago Temple, in conjunction with SCUPE — a Chicago consortium of cross-denomination seminaries — announced a Chicago-wide discussion amongst pastors on NATO, the G8 and economic justice, following by strategizing for action.

The May 20–21 meetings are less than two weeks away and the summit’s theme — “CHICAGO 2012 — the Global Crossroad” — is uncannily prophetic as thousands of protesters plan to converge in what may be the largest demonstration against NATO in history. And the lead up to those protests will see more educational events and teach-ins all over the city as to why people should be concerned about NATO.

Occupy Chicago’s “People’s Summit” will take place on May 12–13, featuring speakers and workshops about developing protest actions for the NATO summit as well as visions for inhabiting a world without NATO.

Other Chicago churches are also hosting education classes. The Maryknoll Affiliates have organized a program, “Peace through the Lens of Faith: A Reflection on G8 and NATO,” for Catholic churches, and it is being hosted in Chicago-area parishes across the city. Meanwhile, St. Luke’s Lutheran in Logan Square has a four-part series on how people of faith can respond to conflict in the world.

In an email, organizer Joe Scarry explained that St. Luke’s hopes that by the time neighboring congregations join together for morning worship before the May 20 NATO protest, the community will “have a greatly expanded understanding of the significance of NATO, of our own responsibility for addressing the growing militarism in the world, and for coming up with ways that conflicts can be resolved without violence.”

Members of the First Lutheran Church of the Trinity, although media spokespersons denied to comment, are apparently planning a fast at city hall to protest Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s invitation to NATO and highlight the suffering and war it causes.

Rev. Loren McGrail, from Wellington Avenue UCC, which is also planning to be involved in the protest, explained how the Protest Chaplains connected to Occupy Chicago are gearing up for the May protests as they meet this weekend to discuss what kind of response that they as pastors will have during the NATO summit.

“We want to be able to provide emergency pastoral care, kind of like street medics or peacekeepers, to people coming to the protests,” said McGrail when I spoke with her by phone.

So is this what the legacy of NATO has come to: people questioning NATO’s legitimacy in church and NATO selling itself to middle-schoolers? Anti-militarism is becoming much more prominent in economic justice movements like Occupy, signifying that the “global crossroads” in Chicago may be a pivotal moment for the growing worldwide opposition to institutions like NATO. Just as NATO is losing the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, the slick advertising of “Peace and Security” campaigns and target-audience programming suggests NATO is facing a crisis of legitimacy around the world.

NATO’s attempts to re-brand itself and distance itself from egregious human rights violations and faltering missions will only be further complicated in May when all eyes are on Chicago. And as NATO’s security and counterinsurgency experts know all too well, whoever controls the narrative controls the conflict. Unfortunately for NATO, it may be losing both in Chicago.

The "Dog" nuclear test during Operation Buster-Jangle at the Nevada Test Site on November 1, 1951. It was the first U.S. nuclear field exercise conducted on land; troops shown are a mere 6 miles from the blast.

It remains the most bombed real estate on the planet. The Nevada Test Site — recently renamed the Nevada National Security Site — is 1,360 square miles of sprawling desert north of Las Vegas. A nuclear weapon was detonated there on average every eighteen days from 1951 through 1992. In the 1980s the spiritually-rooted Nevada Desert Experience (NDE) launched a campaign with the audacious goal of ending this practice. For the next decade its effort gained traction, with thousands of people from across the U.S. and around the world converging on the site’s southern gate to protest, pray and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. Other organizations, including the American Peace Test (APT) and Greenpeace, joined NDE in this struggle. In 1988, three thousand people were arrested in a ten-day action organized by APT at the Nevada Test Site.

Against all odds, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was established in 1992. NDE and many other organizations had built a global movement that mobilized people-power on every continent to create the conditions for an end to nuclear testing. One hundred eighty-two nations became signatories. Though Bill Clinton signed the treaty in 1996, the U.S. Senate has yet to ratify it. (Just today Physicians for Social Responsibility called on the Senate to take this up again.) Nevertheless, the United States has maintained a moratorium on full-blown nuclear tests for almost twenty years. While the nuclear threat is as alive as ever, the world is no longer subject to the numbing horror of this dress rehearsal for Armageddon and its environmental, political and moral fallout.

NDE just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Since the promulgation of the CTBT, people within the organization have periodically wondered if it should declare victory and close up shop. The answer has been a resounding “No.” NDE has stayed put, with a focus on the nuclear and non-nuclear projects that continue at the test site and the dramatic surge in drone warfare coordination at nearby Creech Air Force Base. At the same time, it continues to vigorously support the Western Shoshone nation in its struggle with the U.S. government, which violated the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley by confiscating Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute land to build the site. In addition to a weekly vigil, NDE organizes a “Sacred Peace Walk” from Las Vegas to the test site every spring, and an annual commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August.

From the vantage point of three decades, there are a couple of lessons that may shed light on the challenges and opportunities of building movements for change today.

First, this movement did not begin with a clear strategy. It was founded by a handful of people who ventured into the desert to bear witness to present and potentially future nuclear destruction. Franciscan sisters, brothers and lay people seeking a way to mark the 800th birthday of St. Francis of Assisi followed their hearts to the test site, where for 40 days they maintained a presence during the Christian season of Lent. Their witness culminated in nonviolent civil disobedience as 19 people crossed onto this top-secret nuclear facility and were arrested.

Several years ago, I published a book about this movement, and a recurring perception among the organizers I interviewed was that NDE lacked a strategy, and that this had hurt the effort. What I began to appreciate, however, was that a different kind of strategic thinking had been at work. This was one not based on a SWOT analysis or models of community organizing, but on relentless persistence: ongoing presence, action and occupation. (For example, a Peace Camp was established outside the gates of the facility where people would stay for long stretches of time, including a former defense worker, Art Casey, who spent two years there.)

This continuity established a growing legitimacy and visibility, which attracted people to this largely invisible site at a time when the emerging anti-nuclear weapons movement, stoked by the Reagan administration’s military buildup, was looking for tangible and concrete focus. Once people woke up to the fact that the government was still exploding nuclear weapons in the western part of the United States — and had not stopped in 1962 when the tests went below ground — people wanted to get involved, and a growing number of them thought about going out to the desert for themselves.

What helped translate this longing into making the long drive, boarding a plane or hitchhiking from the nearest interstate on-ramp was the peaceful atmosphere that NDE sought to create from the beginning. Nuclear weapons symbolize and embody mega-violence. What is needed, the founders reasoned, is not more violence but mega-nonviolence. This involved engaging in a Gandhian experiment with truth, which for them meant striking a balance between resistance and openness in their relationship with test site personnel and the local sheriffs.

They didn’t think of this strategically — in fact, they thought of this as a spiritual discipline — but in a strange way it turned out to be hyper-strategic. Over months and then years, an insistence on transforming “us versus them” thought and action established relationships at the test site that reduced the likelihood of violent interactions with employees and law enforcement. This, in turn, created a climate that attracted many more people to the campaign than a violent one likely would have. This relatively peaceful atmosphere, created at the edge of a nuclear firing range, emboldened a growing number of people to risk arrest and to face the consequences.

This atmosphere was not inevitable. It could have gone very differently, depending on the predilections of either side. The protesters had asked for a meeting with the director of the test site beforehand, which had turned out to be a powerful encounter. And from the very first day they took action at the site, they were scrupulous about maintaining the spirit of nonviolence. At the same time, the head sheriff who dealt with them was fairly new to police work and made it clear, through his words and actions, that he would respect the right of people to protest.

NDE had no illusions about the evil that the test site, and the larger nuclear weapons system, represented. At the same time, it held to what the late feminist writer Barbara Deming called the two hands of nonviolence: noncooperation with violence and steadfast regard for the opponent as a human being.

For the first year or two, the local county court meted out punishments in the range of a few weeks to several months, but as the numbers increased, the county threw up its hands. It did not have the resources to prosecute and jail an increasingly steady stream of anti-nuclear advocates. It announced that, except under highly unusual circumstances, it would issue citations but not act on them. This opened the floodgates. Soon, large numbers of people were making pilgrimage to the test site and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience.

For some, this meant that risking arrest at NTS had little value. Anne Symens-Bucher, an NDE organizer, saw it differently. For her, NDE actions became a kind of school or training ground for civil disobedience. The peaceful atmosphere that NDE fostered became a place where many people risked arrest for the first time. It prepared them to work for an end to nuclear testing back in their own communities, including taking nonviolent action there.

A few years after this movement began, Symens-Bucher described the vision of NDE’s experiment in truth:

I have become wholly convinced that something is happening at the Test Site which is difficult – if not impossible – to articulate. It is, however, experienced. I have witnessed time and again, people participating in the vigil and going home changed. Something is happening at the Test Site, and it is happening not because we are organizationally efficient, but in spite of the fact that we are not. People of faith and goodwill are being drawn together in the Nevada desert and together they are bringing life and goodness and re-creation to a place of evil, death, and destruction. The location is perfect: the vastness of the desert, the desert in all its stark beauty. It is a beauty which is appreciated slowly, over a period of time … It is conducive to prayer, meditation, soul-searching, purification. It is as if people are able, in the setting of the desert, to reach down into their depths and discover what is good and what is the gift in themselves and in each other. This goodness, this gift, this power, this life-force collectively brought-forth, becomes tangible. Bonds are formed. Community happens. Love is made real. And out of this love, we are able to confront the evil in the desert. Out of this love we are able to heal ourselves, each other and the earth upon which we stand. Because of this love, nuclear weapons testing will end.

And end it did. NDE’s commitment to ongoing action, in season and out, contributed to a political groundswell, which, as I have traced elsewhere, was key to the establishment to the CBTB and a U.S. moratorium on testing. This shift was the result of many important clear and defined strategies, which are crucial to the success of all movements. But it was also the result NDE’s nonviolent “unstrategic strategy.”

I don’t have a TV. But I am always being exhorted to watch The Rachel Maddow Show.

One of the reasons I don’t have a TV is that if I had one, I wouldn’t be watching high-minded, informative news shows like hers. I would be completely hypnotized by the worst of the worst; eye candy dregs like CSI: Miami, The Mentalist, the new Hawaii Five-0 and Two Broke Girls (which I have yet to see).

Let my fixation be a cautionary tale to all the well-meaning parents out there wanting to shield their children from the corrosive effects of overexposure to TV: outlaw TV, and they will be forever in its sway. Let them watch it, and it will make them discerning consumers.

I can still read, though. For my birthday a friend gave me Maddow’s new book: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. My eighth celebration of year 30 was only a few weeks ago, but I have already chewed through this hard-hitting, spirited and lucid book.

Maddow is already a household name, with a trademarked wit, a loyal following and a large bully-pulpit. She is also endowed with the intellectual fortitude and homespun wisdom to pull out a new take on one of our most important and least interesting topics — militarism. And it seems to be working. This week, Drift is number 12 of Amazon’s Top 100 — right above the newest Stephen King fantasy and below Marlene Koch’s cook book urging obese Americans to Eat More of What You Love (in low sugar, fat, calorie form). That juxtaposition is worth its own blog post, but I digress.

Maddow is no pacifist. In fact, she told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that many of her family members have been in the military, and that “had it been legal for openly gay people to serve in the military in the time I might have been considering signing up. I think service is honorable, and that was always inculcated in me.” But her commitment to service does not keep her from being critical (in a way that is both detailed and conversational) about the overreaches of the military — from the nuclear weapons complex, which she calls “an $8 trillion fungus among us,” to the corrosive role of secrecy. “[I]f we are going to use drones to vaporize people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Air Force should operate the drones, and pull the trigger. And we should know about it,” she writes. “The chain of command should never be obscured by state secrets.”

The book traces how the United States lost touch with the Founders’ ideals about the role of military power and force in a democracy. She begins her opening chapter (“G.I. Joe, Ho Chi Minh and the American Art of Fighting About Fighting”) by describing Thomas Jefferson’s concerns about standing armies: “never keep an unnecessary soldier … not for a standing army in a time of peace.” This chapter is a 19-page survey of two centuries of American militarism that brings us from that Jeffersonian ideal through the last days of the Vietnam War, when “the questions of how we provide for the common defense, how we apportion our limited resources to the military, how we prepare for war, and whether or not we go to war were back where they belonged, out in the open, subject to loud and jangly public debate.”

And then in a series of chapters tackling the U.S. invasion of Grenada (remember that!), the U.S.-financed Contra proxy war in Nicaragua and other military misadventures of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Maddow demonstrates how that debate went underground again, bringing us to the situation of the last decade where the United States is neck deep in a multi-front war costing trillions of dollars and involving millions of people, but where “half the American public says it has not been even marginally affected.” She harkens back to the founders, who, she says “chafed at the idea of an American standing army” to “disincline us toward war as a general matter. Their greatest advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war … for us to feel — uncomfortably — every second we were at war.” Now, she writes “war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.”

And this is where it gets a little tricky, because Maddow is at pains to say that this is not anyone’s fault. No one made that happen. Not even all the elements that benefit richly from this system.

The name of the book is Drift not Grift or Rift of Sift. “[W]e’ve drifted off that historical course,” she writes in the introduction about the checks government is supposed to place on military power, “the steering’s gone wobbly, the brakes have failed. It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to serve theirs.”

This assertion makes her book a lot more accessible and a lot more engaging. It allows her to get into the nitty-gritty without having to build a criminal court case against the Lockheed Martins and Halliburtons and the very lucrative and effective revolving door between military contractors and the Pentagon, Armed Forces and Congress. Maybe these are all tired points anyway. They have been made so many times that they become a sort of short hand — Ike’s MIC is alive and well. (In President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address he warned of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military industrial complex,” which has created the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power…”) This does not put you between a diet cook book and a Stephen King novel on Amazon’s best seller list.

Not painting a picture of the back rooms where cigar smoke swirls and billion dollar deals get made allows Maddow to offer a fresh perspective that is motivating and empowering. It makes items on the to-do list at the end of the book seem almost doable, like:

“Let’s quit asking the military to do things best left to our State Department, or the Peace Corps or FEMA…

“Let’s wind back the privatization of war and the military’s dependence on contractors for what used to be military functions…

“Let’s ensure our nuclear infrastructure shrinks to fit our country’s realistic nuclear mission…”

The list goes on and it makes sense. Let’s DO IT!

Did it happen yet? No? Why not?

If it is all so commonsensical, why isn’t it happening? Was it just drift that led to each of these areas (and so many others) getting out of whack? Did it just happen the way the grass grows wild at her local water system? Does anyone or any entity benefit from the militarization of foreign aid? Who reaps the rewards when military functions are privatized? Did anyone push for the doubling of funds for the nuclear weapons complex at a time when President Barack Obama is publicly committed to seeking “a world free of nuclear weapons”?

There are forces at work. They are not rogue elements. They are not in back rooms. They conspire in plain sight, and they rely on the fact that we are too busy watching the dimples crease Simon Baker’s handsome face in The Mentalist to pay attention to the ways in which they are bankrupting our country and undermining our democracy.

Eisenhower urged that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Rachel Maddow’s book makes us all a bit more alert and knowledgeable and ready for the challenge.

She dedicated Drift to Dick Cheney, begging “oh, please let me interview you.” Maybe now that the former vice president has a new heart, he will say yes.

Early in the morning on February 25, the United States Air Force test-launched a first-strike, nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) despite the largest anti-test demonstrations in almost 30 years. The launch took place in the dark fog of night at 2:46 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) on the central California coast, firing the missile to the other end of the Ronald Reagan Missile Range in the Marshall Islands over 4,000 miles away. Despite the military’s ability to follow through with the test, the offensive nature of delivery systems and the threatening message of their test flights is growing in significance in anti-nuclear circles around the globe.

The next test-launch was scheduled for March 1, extremely soon after last Saturday’s test, but was canceled abruptly on Tuesday, just as a media campaign began to cancel the test. March 1 is the anniversary of the tragic “Castle Bravo” test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll for which the swimwear received its name. That test dropped radioactive fallout on the people of Rongelap, leading to catastrophic health and genetic problems that continue to this day, necessitating the on-going evacuation of their island. It also sparked the Japanese anti-nuclear movement which had been prevented to exist under the U.S. occupation that followed World War II. The Lucky Dragon #5 fishing vessel, a Japanese ship, was also caught in the fallout of the March 1 test.

The test-launch of a Minuteman III on July 28, 2011, was a rare failure necessitating the destruction of the missile mid-flight. A subsequent test scheduled for September 21, 2011, the U.N.-designated International Day of Peace, was postponed as a growing chorus of international opposition was decrying the contradiction of a peace-loving nation testing such a thing on that special day.

Following on the energy of the demonstration last Saturday, a group of activists spoke on the phone on Monday to develop a quick, proactive plan for the next 48 hours to try to stop this week’s second test. The group decided to address people’s comments to both President Obama and also U.N. Secretary General Moon. The groundwork for the outreach had been well laid already, and key communities to reach were identified: Japanese activists, people from Micronesia, downwinder groups, Native land rights organizers, faith-based networks, etc.

Testing warhead, bomb and delivery systems all violate the spirit of working towards nuclear disarmament to which the United States has obligated itself. The February 24 protest began at 5 minutes to midnight—the current setting of the Federation of American Scientist’s “Doomsday Clock”—in the hopes that public pressure would force President Obama to turn away from his pro-nuclear budget (with increases for both nuclear weapons and power). The test-launch of ICBMs makes hypocrites of U.S. foreign policy planners who demand a stand down of nuclear ambitions from countries they’re hostile to, while further upgrading our own weapons of mass destruction. The quantity and quality of U.S. nuclear weapons dwarf all others; we must not wait for other nations to pull back, but must increase the rate of dismantlement of our own nuclear weapons.

Daniel Ellsberg, who as a military analyst for the RAND Corporation in the 1960s developed strategic plans for the Secretary of Defense MacNamara and later leaked the lies of Vietnam war planners in what became known as the Pentagon Papers, crossed the line at the base and was taken into custody along with 14 other men and women in an act of civil resistance. “They cannot be allowed to test these lightning rods of doomsday without arresting American citizens. We need to push this. It takes public pressure through education and public protest,” Ellsberg said at the rally before entering the base. Twenty-nine years ago, Ellsberg was also arrested at VAFB with hundreds of others who went into the back-country of the huge base to disrupt launch plans for another ICBM, the MX missile, which ultimately was not deployed, largely due to public pressure. Ellsberg continued by stating, “No one in this country should have their hands on the destruction of the world. We can’t trust these folks with the future of humanity.”

Ellsberg also pointed out that Cold War deterrence was based on various lies and mistakes, like when U.S. plans were based on the thought that the U.S.S.R. had 1,000 missiles but actually only had 4 at that time. Current war plans continue to be based on misrepresentations, including those regarding Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the ongoing nuclear programs of Israel, Pakistan and India.

Our peace actions and civil resistance at VAFB, and at the Nevada Test Site, Y-12 Plant in Tennessee and elsewhere in the expanding nuclear “bombplex” all are part of an international effort to wake up the public and our leaders to the immorality, illegality and stupidity of maintaining nuclear capabilities. The U.S. program encourages horizontal proliferation. All nuclear weapons must be eliminated. “Theirs” are bad; ours are at least as horrific. The move to make ICBMs dual use—meaning they carry nuclear or non-nuclear warheads—further increases nuclear danger by potentially confusing adversaries into thinking they’re under nuclear attack.

With about a hundred demonstrators braving the damp cold of the designated protest area outside of Vandenberg, other important attendees crossed the line in an “anti-test”: David Krieger, founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and his wife Carolee committed their first-ever acts of civil resistance and were exhilarated by the experience. Cindy Sheehan, who’s son was killed as a soldier in Iraq and who has become an outspoken peace activist, also was cited and released. Judy Talaugon, a grandmother and descendant of the local Chumash people blessed and welcomed the protesters. Importantly, Paul O’Toko, an elder from Micronesia and founder of Indigenous Stewards International, brought a sizable group including several of his children—although they did not engage in the trespass itself. Fr. Louis Vitale, a frequent presence at VAFB and other demonstration sites said, “I would gladly give my life even to delay a missile launch.”

Direct Action, by Luke Hauser.

Thirty years ago today a handful of us nonviolently blocked the South Gate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a top-secret nuclear weapons lab in Northern California.  Most of us were sentenced to a week in the local county jail. It was my first arrest.

Though LLNL successfully fended off years of mounting opposition—it continues to operate to this day—a surge of global anti-nuclear resistance in those years created the conditions for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which 157 nations have signed) and a string of arms control agreements. Our little action, organized by the Livermore Action Group (LAG), was a modest contribution to that groundswell.

As the Occupy movement gears up for its second wave—and as people from around the world ready themselves to protest the NATO and G8 summits in Chicago in May—my thoughts turn to that winter morning three decades ago when another movement was beginning to gain traction and when I, who had stood at the water’s edge for some time, gingerly waded in. While civil disobedience is only one of many tools with which to make social change, it was this particular practice that quite rapidly introduced me to a way of being that, to me, was a foreign but increasingly meaningful path with its own language, lineage, set of expectations, and peculiar ability to be taken seriously under the right conditions.

In his novel Direct Action, Luke Hauser captures the heady intensity of Livermore Action Group from 1982 to 1984, when it organized dozens of actions and built a network of nuclear resisters organized in hundreds of affinity groups throughout Northern California.

Livermore Action Group was part of a planetary network in the early 1980s that created a new wave of the global anti-nuclear movement employing nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, including indigenous communities, women’s communities (e.g., Greenham Common Peace Camp maintained for years at the edge of a U.S. air base in Britain), Greenpeace, The Freeze, SANE, CND, American Peace Test, Abolition 2000, Atomic Veterans and the Nevada Desert Experience.

With roots in the women’s movement, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, LAG in turn nourished the U.S. Central America peace movement, the LGBTQ movements, the disability rights movement, the anti-globalization movement and many others.

After the civil disobedience action on March 1, 1982, I joined Spirit Affinity Group.  My life was changed irrevocably by this circle of passionate and wise people—Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, Sandee Yarlott, Ron Stief, Kathy (later, T’Shala) Vahsen, Bruce Turner, Jim Bridges, Bob Russell, Pat Runo and the late Rick Cotten—as most of us, like the characters in Hauser’s book, lived the life of nonviolent resistance full on for those few, intense years.

Against the backdrop of the times—the accelerating arms race, the total war of so-called low intensity conflict and the bitter sting of Reaganomics— we created or participated in a string of actions for change. We joined the flotilla of rowboats that Shelley and Jim Douglass organized to nonviolently confront the first Trident submarine in the waters of Puget Sound in the summer of 1982; we chained ourselves to a 25-foot mockup of the MX missile in the roadway at LLNL; and we repeatedly occupied the offices of the Salvadoran consulate in San Francisco to engage the U.S.-backed wars in Central America.

In June 1983, we joined 1,100 others who were arrested at LLNL as part of the International Day of Resistance. We were held for two weeks in makeshift tents on the grounds of the county jail as most of us stayed put rather than submit to a sentence of two years probation, which likely would have severely undermined the local anti-nuclear movement. The authorities finally relented on this issue, and we were brought to endless rounds of arraignments in groups of fifty.

I will never forget my 3 a.m. arraignment.  As I waited for my name to be called, a young man sitting in the row in front of me was summoned. When he was given a chance to speak, he said, “Your honor, I did this action totally as a lark. My friends were going to get busted, and so I decided to go along for the ride.  I didn’t really know anything about it. But after two weeks of workshops on the national security state by Daniel Ellsberg (who had been arrested with us), practicing consensus and living with hundreds of men in a non-competitive way—thanks to you, judge, now I’m an anti-nuclear activist!”

In her foreword to Direct Action, long-time activist Starhawk wrote:

Hauser’s novel recreates the emotional and political milieu of the anti-nuclear blockades at Livermore Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the San Francisco Financial District. The nonviolent direct actions of the 70s and early 80s against nuclear power and nuclear weapons were the forerunner of a style of organizing that came to fruition in the blockade of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. Many of the assumptions about nonhierarchical organizing, and many of the tactics and strategies that inform the global justice movement today were pioneered at that time.

As we take the next step in this global justice system—including the 99% Spring and its call for 100,000 people to be trained in April in nonviolent direct action—we recall a few of the roots of the contemporary emerging worldwide movement, even as we have the opportunity to build something more powerful and enduring.

The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

Since the mid-1990s, Douglass has peered clearly into the void of The Unspeakable by making a protracted study of assassination and its meaning. His raft of books on the power of nonviolent action that preceded this focus—including Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God— prepared him to unearth the place of premeditated, targeted killing in the maintenance of the state; in the reinforcement of a culture rooted in the saving power of violence; and (as Douglass brilliantly and soberly illuminates) in the attempt by systems of domination to suppress and extinguish the nonviolent option.  For fifteen years he has been engaged in a long-term research and publishing project focused on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first book that appeared was JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. This carefully researched study, published in 2008, tracks President Kennedy’s gradual shift from a traditional Cold Warrior to a covert peacemaker who was engaging with his putative enemies to defuse volatile international crises and to attempt to build a more enduring peace on the major fronts of his day, including Vietnam, Berlin, Indonesia, Cuba, and the barreling nuclear arms race. Douglass assembles convincing evidence that Kennedy was assassinated because of this pursuit of the nonviolent alternative.

Before completing his next projects on King and Malcolm X, though, Douglass began researching the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. As he explained in a 2011 talk at Marquette University, it increasingly became evident to him that what he was discovering about Gandhi’s assassination could shed light on the dynamics of the assassinations that took place in the U.S. in the 1960s.

This week—as we marked the sixty-fourth anniversary of Gandhi’s death on January 30—Douglass published the fruit of this research: Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth (Orbis Books). This summary highlights Douglass’s findings:

While researching [the Kennedy assassination], Douglass learned from Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Indian liberation leader, that his grandfather had been killed by a conspiracy involving powerful nationalist forces within the Indian government—not a lone gunman. This led to Douglass’s rigorously investigating thousands of documents on Gandhi’s 1948 murder. He now provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why. “Gandhi’s murder, followed by the repression of its truth,” writes Douglass, “forms a paradigm of killing and deceitful cover-up that U.S. citizens would soon have to confront in our own government.” No other contemporary writer is exposing the mechanics of assassination as methodically and bravely as Douglass. But because he is a Catholic independent scholar and activist most well-known for his writings on nonviolence and suffering, this book is more than a fresh look at historical circumstances: it’s spiritual spelunking into the depravity of unchecked political power.

Douglass has devoted his life to illuminating the potential of nonviolent action to create options in a world caught in a web of violent and unjust forces—especially by engaging with, having faith in, and loving the enemy. He has done this through his writing, but even more importantly, he has done this by pursuing his own Gandhian experiments with truth. Here are two examples.

In 1979 Douglass, Rosemary Powers and John Clark engaged in nonviolent action at Naval Submarine Base Bangor, the Pacific homeport for the U.S. Navy’s Trident submarine fleet in Washington State. They scrambled over a security fence with the hope of making their way to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC), a nuclear weapons storage area at the center of the base. As Douglass wrote in “Pilgrimage to Ground Zero” in Sojourners magazine (March 1980):

Our plan was to walk through Bangor’s woods, crossing six roads patrolled by naval security, and eventually climb over SWFPAC’s two high security fences in order to pray at “the physical site of an evil we all refuse to see, and thus refuse to take responsibility for”—as we put it in our advance leaflet to the Marines, passed out at the base three weeks earlier.

In the course of our pilgrimage to SWFPAC we spent 12 hours undetected on the base, continuously pursued by helicopters, civilian security guards, the Naval Intelligence Service, and hundreds of Marines as we climbed fences and crawled through the brush… We were finally arrested near a conventional weapons site just short of the high-security fences of SWFPAC.

In meditating on this anti-nuclear pilgrimage, Douglass noted the urgency of finding a way to “break the hypnotic spell nuclear weapons have over America.” He explained that:

After reflecting on the absurdity of the situation—what does one do in the presence of an H-bomb?—we decided that the only thing we could do was to go to SWFPAC, in a pilgrimage to that point of responsibility. Once there, we could only ask God’s forgiveness and mercy for our responsibility in creating such weapons, and pray for the power to be transformed in our collective conscience to a responsible, loving people capable of disarmament.

The following year—on January 6, 1980, the Feast of the Epiphany—Douglass and Clark again made their way inside the base. After not being detected on the grounds of the 7,000 acre facility the first day, they spent an all-night vigil in the woods in preparation for the next day’s events:

The next morning we used stepping stools and rug remnants to climb over the 12 foot-high double security fences enclosing SWFPAC… We walked alone and unimpeded to the first nuclear bunker. It was like a tomb—huge sliding concrete slabs shut under a small mountain of earth. We stood in silence for several minutes on the concrete entry, joined hands, and said aloud the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then we walked on to the next bunker, and prayed there in the same way. We continued our nuclear Stations of the Cross for six bunkers before we were arrested.

The spirit of this Gandhian nonviolence is also conveyed in the text of the leaflet distributed to the Marines at the base beforehand:

We know that it is your responsibility to guard these nuclear sites. We ask you to consider carefully in advance our attempt to join you there. We know that by government regulations you are “authorized to use deadly force” in protecting nuclear weapons. Brothers, we ask instead that you lay down your arms, for the sake of all our lives. We know that you are good people, and that you love and respect life.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—whose courageous vulnerability contributed significantly to the nonviolent struggle for the eventual restoration of democracy in Argentina—James W. Douglass in these and many other actions has communicated his hope for profound social transformation in his own vulnerable body. And like Gandhi—whose vision and embodiment of soul-force continues to challenge and change our world—his hope has been enduringly vested in a transformed relationship with the enemy.

In this time of a growing national security state which increasingly depends on the proliferation of “targeted killings”—one of the faces of The Unspeakable today—may each of us be inspired by Douglass’s words and deeds to take nonviolent action to transform our lives and our world.

Fifty years ago Thomas Merton was doing everything in his power to sound the alarm about the peril of nuclear apocalypse.

Merton, a Catholic monk best known at the time for his many books of contemplative spirituality, poetry, and compelling autobiographical reflection, had suddenly taken the full measure of the atomic threat in 1961. Between October 1961 and October 1962 he penned a flurry of letters to friends, activists, artists, and intellectuals vigorously and prophetically urging a new way forward. These 111 “Cold War Letters”—supported by numerous essays and poems he also produced at the time on this subject—were part of an effort by Merton to create (as theologian and activist James W. Douglass put it in the foreword to this collection that was finally published in 2006) “a spiritual chain reaction counter to the Bomb.”

With Merton’s birthday approaching (had he lived, he would have turned 97 next Tuesday, January 31), it seems an appropriate time to remember—but also to learn from—this pilgrim for peace and how he “waged nonviolence.”

At the far end of the 1950s, Merton began to reframe his understanding of his identity and vocation as a monk. Casting off an earlier separation from humanity that he had avidly and pietistically embraced when he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani south of Louisville, Kentucky in 1941, he came to see that, not only was he part of the world, he was called to love it. This stance did not mean, though, uncritically accepting the world as it is. Indeed, it meant prophetically challenging systems and patterns of violence and injustice that prevent the fullness of love from flourishing. Part of loving the world included critiquing it.

This took many forms. He wrote a series of books and articles against war, beginning with an essay published in The Catholic Worker newspaper entitled, “The Roots of War.” He wrote widely against racism and in support of the Civil Rights movement. He published a book on Gandhi, and supported and endorsed numerous peace initiatives, including the Catholic Peace Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

He, like many other advocates for peace and justice before and since, was also being tracked by the government. Several years ago I received a copy of files kept on Merton, which had been obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request made by Robert G. Grip, a reporter at a television station in Mobile, Alabama. The collection of documents that was declassified and released is slim but illustrative:

The United States federal agencies queried were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) main headquarters and Louisville office, and the U.S. State Department’s offices of Passport Services and the Central Foreign Policy Records. The request yielded a letter intercepted by the CIA from Merton to [Nobel laureate] Boris Pasternak in 1958 while covertly monitoring letters between the United States and the Soviet Union… The FBI offices revealed information kept on Merton in regards to his involvement with the peace movement (mainly the Catholic Peace Fellowship) and in helping conscientious objector Joseph T. Mulloy.

In support of Mulloy’s application for CO status, Merton wrote a letter dated February 19, 1968 (at the height of the Vietnam War) to Local Draft Board 47 in Louisville, Kentucky, which found its way into the file:

As spiritual advisor, I have been consulted by Joseph Mulloy, who is seeking to follow his conscience in opposition to war. I believe he has every right to do so & also believe that his rights are being denied him. Consequently, doing my simple duty as a priest, I have given him encouragement & support in his fight for his right. I would like to make clear that such support is a religious matter and is not to be construed as an illegal act, nor is it political. It is essential for the preservation of American democratic values that the rights of conscience be respected even, indeed especially, in matters involving violence and war.

This activity probably prompted one of the more intriguing pages in the file. A May 1968 document from the Kentucky State Un-American Activities Committee argues that “a closer look should be taken at the questionable activity within the Roman Catholic Church of Louisville and Kentucky,” based on some “findings” passed along by a group named Catholic Concerned Citizens. Most of the document is blacked out (apparently to protect the privacy of those named), but at the top of the list there is a paragraph on Merton, which concludes “he is of an undesirable element and should be considered the #1 target of your committee.”

Many things likely motivated such vitriol, but, coming just a couple of months after the anti-draft demonstration, it probably is rooted in the conviction that religion and politics don’t mix, especially politics of the progressive variety. But, as Merton indicates in his letter supporting Mulloy, he sees the matter differently. Not so much that religion and politics “mix” as there is a deeper unity they share. This is rooted in one of Merton’s fundamental spiritual tenets, articulated in his prose-poem “Hagia Sophia”:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

The profound indivisibility of reality calls us not only to become aware of the sacredness of every being but also to recognize that a step taken to heal the torn or frayed web of life is not primarily a political tactic but a deeply spiritual act.

As the 1960s progressed, Merton functioned as a spiritual advisor not simply to individuals like Joseph Mulloy but to a growing global network and even to peace and justice movements. (Many years ago, a theologian I met in graduate school told me that during the Civil Rights movement, which he actively participated in, he would occasionally take a long drive to Merton’s monastery. For a few hours, Merton would go AWOL and they would drive the back roads of the area and talk strategy and spirituality.)

But this unique form of spiritual direction (most of which we would call “distance learning” today, since he rarely left the monastery) grew out of his 1961 encounter with the horror of war and its preeminent modern symbol: nuclear weapons. He intuited the logic and trajectory of this latest, technologized version of the myth of redemptive violence. Hence he wrote his Cold War Letters, which Douglass called “a form of praying in the darkness, a search for light with the companions he addressed, a night of the spirit when everything seemed lost.” Douglass frames the crisis Merton was wrestling with:

As he wrote these letters…in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Merton saw clearly what was at stake in the Cold war. It was the survival of the human race—survival not only physically, from inconceivably destructive weapons, but also spiritually from the ways in which we made the weapons our gods and obeyed their commands….

In a letter to Archbishop T. D. Roberts in London, he feared the situation “amounts in reality to a moral collapse, in which the policy of the nation is more or less frankly oriented toward a war of extermination…step by step we come closer to it because the country commits itself more and more to policies which, but for a miracle, will make it inevitable.

And, as Douglass sketches in his foreword (and illuminates in stunning detail in his comprehensive book, JFK and the Unspeakable) the miracle briefly came to pass. President Kennedy rejected the Pentagon’s plan to launch nuclear war over Cuba and worked with his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, to defuse the crisis. (Douglass’s book goes on to copiously document how this peacemaking between enemies continued, often in secret, with regard to Berlin, Indonesia, and the achievement of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty until Kennedy’s death.)

But Douglass does not leave it there. He draws the parallels between the crisis of the nuclear arms race of the 1960s and the current war on terror. Like Merton, we are faced today with a monumental crisis: endless war with physical and spiritual death and destruction for millions.

With the increasingly reckless saber-rattling concerning Iran of late, the horrific prospect of a new and even more lethal war has every chance of gaining virtually unstoppable momentum. And so we, like Merton, face a choice: More of the same or a “Great Turning”?

As Merton wrote in one of the Cold War Letters to activist Jim Forest: “Really we have to pray for a total and profound change in the mentality of the whole world.” At this late hour, we are each called to this “total and profound change”—which, like Hagia Sophia/Holy Wisdom, discerns the “hidden wholeness” by which we are all connected—and, in turn, called to put this transformation into concrete, visible and profoundly nonviolent action.

Happy birthday, Tom. Thank you for your life and your enduring light.

• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

Eleven members of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Washington State are on trial this week for blocking the entrance to Navy Base Kitsap-Bangor, the Pacific coast Trident submarine base that, according to Ground Zero, contains the largest concentration of operational nuclear weapons possessed by the United States.

Two back-to-back trials, stemming from civil resistance actions that took place May 7 and August 8 of last year, will be heard in the courtroom of Kitsap County District Court Judge James M. Riehl, who has indicated that he will allow the defendants to talk about why they blocked the road. In November he denied the government’s motion seeking to prevent the defendants from discussing nuclear weapons or international law. In what is likely to be a narrowly circumscribed way, these defendants will attempt to put nuclear weapons on trial, even as they are being tried.

In August, four of those in the Kitsap court moved a 44-foot inflatable Trident II D-5 missile replica onto the roadway to symbolically close the base. These included my colleague Betsy Lamb—a long-time advocate for justice and peace who graduated from a yearlong training program several of us facilitated at Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service—and Tom Rogers, a retired navy submarine commander. This was Rogers’s first arrest, which he discussed in a local newspaper interview:

It was the culmination of a process of discernment and deciding if it was the right time for me to do that. Getting arrested was a step I hadn’t taken. I’d been at Ground Zero for eight years and I’d been very active, I’d testified at trials, I’ve written things, I’ve done a lot of work. But I was always dubious about the value of getting arrested. Four of us decided we would symbolically close the base by dragging that big inflatable missile into the road, and closing the base. And that’s what we did…

In the years following the end of the Cold War, I became less and less comfortable with the concept of nuclear deterrents when there really wasn’t anybody out there that we were deterring. What we were doing was spending a whole lot of money not to be any safer. It made me mad as a former naval officer who dedicated my life to the Cold War–that’s what I did–and as a taxpayer, and as a resident of Kitsap County, because the continuing presence of the weapons at Bangor is a danger to people and the environment, even though the folks out there do as good a job as they can.

When he was asked if he felt justified breaking the law, he said:

In 1996 the international court of justice, which is the judicial arm of the United Nations, was asked for a judgment on whether nuclear weapons were illegal. And after a year of hearings and deliberations, they came back and said unequivocally, that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law. That came out of … the Geneva Accords. If you look at those, it’s obvious that the use of nuclear weapons is illegal under those accords.

Now here’s the leap. I believe that deployment of nuclear weapons on board Trident submarines that are on alert patrol and can shoot those weapons within 30 minutes at anybody in the world constitutes a continuing threat of use. So we believe that the United States is doing something illegal.

Tom Rogers’s arguments are virtually the same ones I heard in the early 1980s when I first joined the anti-nuclear weapons movement.

In 1982 I traveled with several other members of Spirit Affinity Group (the nonviolent action group I had recently joined while studying at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.) to western Washington to take part in a powerful nonviolent action organized by Ground Zero.

Founded in 1979 by Shelly Douglass and James W. Douglass, Ground Zero organized a series of civil disobedience actions at the Bangor base, which was the Pacific port of the Trident submarine fleet that was just then coming online. Robert Aldridge, who had quit his job at Lockheed where he was involved in the development of the Trident system’s sea-launched first-strike capability, inspired this campaign.

In the summer of 1982 the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, was scheduled to be armed for the first time.  Ground Zero organized a daring nonviolent reception for the Ohio in which it planned to deploy people in rowboats to meet the submarine as it glided on the surface of Puget Sound on its way to port.  If all went well, the plan was for the wet-suit clad nuclear resisters to clamber aboard the hull and offer the crew bread as a sign of life and nonviolent alternatives. In his account of this action, Matt Dundas writes that the 46 people who took part first underwent an intensive training and then, beginning on August 6, waited six days for the arrival of the Ohio:

On Thursday August 12, between 2 and 3 a.m., night watchers spotted large numbers of Coast Guard cutters stirring in the canal, and the activists were awakened. The group sprung into action, saying prayers, donning wetsuits, and boarding their meager vessels. But their publicity had preceded them. In a surprise move, the Coast Guard staged a preliminary seizure of several boats and protesters. Guardsmen carrying M-16s and handguns met them at their docks and made many arrests before the Ohio was even in sight.

In the ensuing confusion, a handful of boats got away, while others were overturned and flooded by the Coast Guard. Video footage taken at the time shows protesters getting washed overboard by high-powered Coast Guard hoses…

The boats that got away from the initial Coast Guard onslaught tore toward the “National Security Zone,” a 1000-yard perimeter around the submarine, a boundary that once crossed meant risking [a] ten-year prison sentence and $10,000 fine. Undeterred by the consequences, Ruth Youngdahl Nelson rode in her son Jon’s 16-foot motorized rubber boat as it raced from the law. A Coast Guard boat caught up with them and brought them to a halt. As a Guardsman on the cutter was about to hose the team into the sound, the 78-year-old Ms. Nelson declared boldly, “Young man, not in my America.” The Guardsman hesitated, and then lowered his hose as the group escaped for another run at the Ohio before finally being stopped and arrested.

Dozens of people were arrested. I was part of the support team for my affinity group members—Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, and Bruce Turner—who now lay face down on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter, for the moment a makeshift brig. I was in a canoe with Pat Runo, another member of Spirit, and a troupe of Buddhist monks who were soulfully beating their drums.  The sound had been choppy all day but now it was eerily quiet and smooth as glass. We circled the ship slowly again and again, with the drumbeat letting our friends know that they were not alone and offering a blessing to them and to the entire world, including their temporary captors.

Hours later the arrestees were transferred to buses and transported to King County Courthouse in nearby Seattle. Though they faced years in jail and large fines, their federal charges were quietly dropped a few months later.

This event proved pivotal for me. It gave me a glimpse into the power of nonviolent action and the state’s response to it. It demonstrated the willingness of human beings to take a nonviolent and determined stand, using the most powerful symbol they possess: their own vulnerable bodies. It even showed how such actions could help raise the visibility of one’s concern–there was enormous media coverage in the Pacific Northwest of the action but, more importantly, of the reality of the Trident submarine in our midst. As someone from Washington State, this was especially moving to me.

As our friends on trial this week know, this work is far from finished.

The anti-nuclear weapons movement is now in its seventh decade. In 2012 it calls each of us to find powerful, creative, and nonviolent ways to withdraw our consent from nuclearism’s still looming shadow and its central role in reinforcing systems of violence and injustice.

It is going to be a long, cold winter. That is what meteorologists are warning throughout the country. AccuWeather.com’s Long Range Forecasting Team says the United States should be preparing for “another brutal one” this season, with the Midwest bearing the brunt of the assault.

For most in the northern parts of the country, preparing for winter means making sure your oil tank is full, checking your storm windows or sticking sheets of plastic over your windows and plugging any new drafts. But, this year, it might be time to take the fight to stay warm to Washington, D.C.

Why? Because inside that cold, cold Beltway, they are spending money on war instead of keeping Americans warm! Sounds simplistic? Well, listen to this.

The price of fuel is going up. USA Today reported in October that “homeowners who use heating oil will see their bills rise 12% to $2,124 from $1,906.” Folks who heat with propane or natural gas are also going to see increases. At the same time, more Americans are slipping (try “plummeting,” “careening”) into poverty. According to census data, another 2.6 million people joined “the poor” last year making the official count of poor people in the United States 46.2 million—the highest number in half a century.

In 2011, the United States allocated $4.7 billion to fuel assistance programs throughout the country. If you were poor, cold, had a place to live and could prove all three, you could fill your tank for most of the winter on the federal government’s dime under a program called Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). It was great!

For 2012, the Obama administration proposed a 45 percent cut in these home-warming, life-saving funds—suggesting $2.57 billion for heating assistance in 2012. Not because there were fewer cold or poor people, but because the government is trying to be leaner. It is certainly being meaner. The National Energy Assistance Director’s Association says that the federal program assisted 8.9 million households—an increase of 54 percent since 2008. Further, the Association projects a record 9.4 million households will need heating fuel assistance in 2012.

The fight is on. The Senate has restored the funding somewhat, pushing the cut to $3.6 billion, and in the House lawmakers settled on $3.4 billion.

With the economy in the toilet and a new fiscal crisis every other day, this one program seems like small potatoes. With the spectacular (although unsurprising) failure of the “Super Committee” last month, the stage is set for even deeper cuts to vital social programs like LIHEAP.

Let’s review the Super Committee’s. In the face of soaring deficits, the deal was: 12 members of Congress, six from each side of the aisle get together and come up with a plan to cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion over ten years. If they could not do it, the sword of Damocles that hung over their heads was automatic cuts to the military budget and social welfare spending. The simple solution of raising taxes on corporations and the very wealthy was a political impossibility, despite the fact that people in the United States pay some of the lowest taxes in the world.

So unless a new solution emerges from the bipartisan morass, we are looking at serious cuts to domestic and military spending come 2013. The big number is $500 billion in cuts—sounds dramatic, right? But, over ten years. $50 billion a year. Not such a huge problem, unless most of these weapons systems are political boondoggles rather than security necessities. Ah, yes… that is the trouble, isn’t it?

Given that the war in Iraq is over and all U.S. troops are slated to be home in time for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanza, cutting the military should be a piece of cake, right? Especially since the Pentagon is going to try and wind down the Afghanistan war by 2014. No problem-o. We should have heating assistance and other social welfare programs back up and running in no time, right?

It’s true, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are expensive, and ending them should mean big savings. According to the “Costs of War” research project by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the final bill on these military operations and their long term economic consequences will run between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion. It is hard to wrap our puny brains around numbers this big, but one way to think about it is that the higher end of that estimate would provide heating assistance to poor Americans for the next one thousand years.

But, even with the big wars “winding down” (hey, we can hope, right?), the United States being the United States, we still find ourselves mired in ill-timed kerfuffles that cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Hey, even our little “no boots on the ground” military foray into Libya—commenced in the midst of our most dire economic straits in decades—cost a pretty penny. The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that—excluding the inevitable covert aid—the total direct expenditures of America’s role in Libya are approximately $1.1 billion and counting.

No one asked us (or the majority of the Libyan people, for that matter) if we’d rather see gruesome images of the murder of Muammar Qaddafi or more money for fuel assistance in this country. The United States’ less than heroic role in the Libyan revolution is a topic for another day, but I will just say that I appreciated the thoughts of Serbian nonviolent activist Srdja Popovic on the matter: “I personally don’t think that foreign military intervention can bring democracy in any place in the world.”

Back to cutting the military budget. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta must know that these cuts could be coming down the pike beginning in two years. But he is not planning for it. In fact, as The New York Times reported a month ago, he is actively not planning for it. He was in my backyard in November telling shipbuilders and submarine builders at Electric Boat in Groton that such cuts would “totally hollow out the force.” When we hear such rhetoric (Panetta sounded a little Valley Girl there, didn’t he?), we need to remember that this is the same force that is building airplanes that cost $18,000 an hour to operate. Workers at Electric Boat will build two nuclear powered and nuclear capable Virginia Class attack submarines this year, each with a price tag of about $2 billion. Do we need them? The Navy says yes—we need 12 new subs. The Arms Control Association and the Brookings Institution say we can more than make do with eight, which would save $120 billion over the lifespan of the subs. I say we need none—the only ones who need ’em are the weapons manufacturers—Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics and a handful of others—that make so much money off of building them. Why should we be lining their pockets? Not to mention the fact that each one of these subs is equipped to carry 16 nuclear missiles; the fewer we have, the lower the chances are of nuclear Armageddon, right?

To put the hand-wringing over cutting the military budget into perspective, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments notes that beginning to enact the automatic cuts to basic defense spending for 2013 would mean a Defense Department budget of $472 billion—which is about what the United States was spending in 2007 (adjusted for deflation). Not exactly the dark ages, and still way out in front of our rivals and enemies.

I see no reason why the same government that pays $18,000 an hour to operate a fighter plane we don’t need (to say nothing of how much it cost to develop and build the fool F-22s—hundreds of billions), that spends $2 billion to build submarines we don’t need (and shouldn’t have), that gives tax breaks and big loopholes to private corporations like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, and yet this same government can’t find a few extra billion dollars to make sure that poor people are warm and safe this winter.

There is a bipartisan push, particularly among members of Congress from northeastern states, to get the LIHEAP refunded at $4.7 billion for next year. You can learn more and get involved by visiting http://www.liheap.org/ and clicking on your state.

It means choosing people’s welfare over weapons. And it is only right.

• Building on the largest opposition rally in years Monday, Russian protests spread to more cities on Tuesday as demonstrators denounced federal election results—resulting in hundreds of arrests.

• On Tuesday, thousands of young Yemenis in Sanaa continued their sit-in, despite President Saleh’s signed agreement that he would step down, declaring that their revolution is far from over. This followed demonstrations which erupted on Sunday, as residents of Taiz marched in protest of immunity provisions given to the outgoing President.

• Greenpeace activists infiltrated a French nuclear plant Monday and hung a banner on a reactor building in an attempt to expose nuclear national security weaknesses.

• Dozens of Occupy D.C. members were arrested late Sunday in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to dismantle a structure that they were building for shelter.

• Thousands protested at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, calling for a strong international plan to address climate change.

• Animal rights advocates in Taipei, Taiwan gathered by the hundreds on Sunday, condemning the conditions of animal shelters throughout the country.

• In India on Sunday, thousands marched and several began a hunger strike to show their support for the decommissioning of a damn in the interest of protecting local farmers.

• Kashmir witnessed protests and sit-ins on Saturday as residents of Srinagar decried the police’s use of pepper guns in breaking up demonstrations the day before.

• On Saturday, secular Tunisians held a counter-rally in front of Parliament, opposing a group of Islamists who were calling for female university students to wear a full-face veil.

• Thousands in India blocked train tracks Saturday, agitating for compensation to be given to victims of the industrial accident at Bhopal in 1984.

On Saturday night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, just before the third act of Faust began, a man began yelling from the audience, “Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street!” It had neither the rhythm of a chant nor the participatory quality of the usual “mic check” that has been used to disrupt so much lately, interrupting public figures including Michele Bachmann, Scott Walker, and Barack Obama. (Maybe having the quorum for a mic check would have cost too many tickets.) It was first received with a boo from someone on the opposite side of the theater, but that was quickly drowned out by a round of applause—something like what a singer might receive at curtain call for a decent performance in a supporting role. The protester was carried away by the NYPD.

Presumably this comes as part of Occupy Lincoln Center, which on December 1 held a protest attended by Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. That night, the Met performed Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha. One sign read, according to the LA Times, “Gandhi would be pepper sprayed.” Like the other Occupy actions under the umbrella of Occupy Museums, these protests oppose “cultural institutions that serve the nation’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of the vast majority.” (It doesn’t help that people aren’t being allowed to protest on Lincoln Center’s plaza—apparently, it’s Koch-Blocked. Or that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s media is one of Lincoln Center’s chief funders.)

More from Occupy Museums:

We believe that institutions promoting a cult of celebrity, unfair labor practices, extreme commodification of art, and which trivialize or glamorize political struggle and protest are only the logical outcome of an entire culture stolen from the people by the 1%. We point to the visual promotion of corporate or private sponsorship seemingly without limit—as if this small group, not the public, truly own our cultural commons.

Some people at the December 1 protest reportedly complained about the high ticket prices at the opera; to that, Seth Colter Wells at The Awl responds well:

[A]t the Met, the most expensive opera tickets are indeed expensive, but you can stand behind the orchestra section—or even sit at the upper reaches of the house—for less than the cost of an IMAX showing at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 multiplex up the road. This persistent fiction of “elitism,” and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer you not ever cost-compare a Family Circle seat to Satyagraha alongisde a 3D screening of Transformers 3. … [W]e can take a page from Adbusters‘ “every dollar spent is a vote” ethos and decide what do with the $20 bills that we do control.

It’s also worth mentioning the $20-25 rush tickets for orchestra seats, or the Met’s “Live in HD” program. Still, those programs depend heavily on 1-percenter donors, so point taken: there needs to be more public support for the arts.

There’s a better point these protests call us to consider, though: are we really listening to the operas themselves?

Both Satyagraha and Faust carry quite radical messages. Glass’ work confronts us with the politics and spirituality of Gandhi’s life. When this production of Satyagraha first came to New York in 2008, as I wrote back then, the Met even put on a publicity blitz with messages on posters like “Could an opera make us stand up for truth?” and “Could an opera make us warriors for peace?” Reasonable questions. As usual, though, audiences attended, reviews came and went, life went on. It was just marketing, after all.

The new production of Faust—an opera composed in mid-19th century France—has a polemic of its own. Director Des McAnuff sets it during World War II, with Faust as a nuclear scientist. Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that would fall on Japan, dangle overhead behind him. It’s a conceit that works remarkably well with the libretto and is remarkably damning—literally, to hell—for a country that for more than a half century has built its quest for global dominance on possessing enough nuclear weapons to bring about the end of the world at will. (The Met has previously taken on similar issues with performances of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic.)

Why, then, are these operas not treated as revolutionary? Why are they not causing their establishmentarian funders to stand up (“for truth”), leave, and take their money with them? Probably the simplest answer is that the productions enjoy the benefit of what’s now quite distant hindsight: it’s easy enough to pretend that the empire Gandhi opposed and the Promethean dawn of the nuclear age are past. Of course they’re not. But they’ve now taken ostensibly different forms, which somehow makes it conveniently optional to translate these operas’ implications to the circumstances of the present.

The Occupy presence, for all its rough edges, might at least lend the performances of works such as these the urgency they deserve. This is not polite social commentary, the protesters say—this is a crisis. This is our crisis. Listen harder.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

The 792nd consecutive weekly vigil outside of Alliant Techsystems in Minneapolis in August.

As I mentioned in this space earlier, I was recently in Barcelona at the War Resisters International’s seminar on War Profiteering and Peace Movement Responses. It was a really interesting time to be a Yankee abroad. The streets in the city center filled up with protests against budget cuts each evening, and everyone at the meetings was talking about OccupyWallStreet in slightly awed and disbelieving tones—as though to say “even the U.S. of A. is getting with the program.”

I was repeatedly asked where I thought the Occupy Movement was headed, a question I cleverly avoided—“look, is that a tapas bar over there? How do you say, ‘more wine, please’ in Spanish?” It is a good question, but as Donald Rumsfeld used to say: “that’s above my pay grade.”

At the end of each long day participating in different seminar tracks (war and exploitation of natural resources, exposing the bad guys, new trends in war profiteering) and workshops on how to research the arms trade, use social media and campaign against drone warfare, we gathered in the city center for the Trobada, convened by the Center for Study of Justice and Peace (Centre d’Estudis per a la Pau JM Delàs). Lots of people turned out for these nightly events, the one at which I presented drew more than one hundred people on a Friday night (but no one in Barcelona eats dinner before 10 pm anyway).

I spent my 20 minutes trying to sharing some of the peace movement responses to war making and war profiteering. The people of Barcelona found this helpful and inspiring (at least those who were there, or at least that is what they told me) and so I thought I would use my blog post this week to share some of what I said there.

When we spend all our time focused on exactly what is wrong and how big and powerful the wrongdoers are, we can inadvertently give short shrift to the people organizing and struggling and (sometimes) winning, so I want to share some snapshots of U.S. resistance. The international news media has focused some attention on the Occupy Movement, but here are some things you are probably not hearing about:

A few weeks ago, a small group gathered in Washington to protest the annual weapons showcase at a fancy hotel. Representatives from every major weapons manufacturer came together, looked at the latest killing technology and made deals. They also ate very expensive meals—the Air Force Association and Lockheed Martin sponsored a $330 a plate banquet. Outside protesters held signs and read from a statement:

We cannot let the arms merchants, who are displaying the latest killing technology and weapons, conduct their gala banquet without protest.  We seek to give voice to the victims who have suffered and died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere as a direct result of U.S. warmaking, and weapons, like the Drone “Predator” and “Reaper” bombing planes, produced by the arms contractors participating in the Arms Bazaar.

At the beginning of the month, there was a week of action against nuclear weapons and the militarism of space organized out of a small town in Maine that is home to General Dynamics’ military ship building enterprise. The week of action encompassed thousands of people around the world. I like thinking about this group of people in particular. It seems like the script of a sci-fi movie—the battle between the powers that have colonized the heavens for military domination and the communities that want to see the billions of dollars and brilliance of scientists and engineers harnessed for the good of this world.

And on October 2, in Minneapolis, a small group of activists celebrated Mahatma Gandhi’s 142nd birthday and discussed what will happen next, now that Alliant Techsystems—the weapons manufacturer they have protested and vigiled and trespassed at is closing its operations in Minnesota and moving to the Washington, DC area. This cluster bomb maker wants to be closer to its customers. The group has been there every Wednesday morning for 798 weeks. If you know of a good place to vigil, give Alliant Action a call.

Also, last weekend, on the other side of our huge nation, Catholic Worker communities from around the country gathered in Las Vegas, Nevada. The acolytes of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who believe in the works of mercy, personalism and adhere to a radical vision of redistribution of wealth and power out of the hands of the bosses and bishops and experts and intellectuals and into the hands of the poor gathered in the city that best exemplifies my country’s quest of mindless entertainment, wealth without labor and rapacious consumption of resources. They met and prayed and shared and resisted. Many occupied the Nevada Test Site where nuclear weapons were tested above and below ground for decades and Creech Air Force base where military drones operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are based.

Inspired by the Arab Spring, another group began an open-ended occupation in Washington, DC in a park called “Freedom Square” last Thursday.

These are just a few of the peace movement responses. And there are so many more! Despite the bleak outlook and the dark times, the United States is a nation up in arms: struggling, resisting, and organizing. It is a cause for hope.  We cannot get overwhelmed, we cannot get tired or despondent in the face of all of this. We must continue. We must share information and analysis, we must strategize together. We must.

Bonnie Urfer exudes calm and strength. Her eyes twinkle and her voice stretches o’s like a Wisconsinite. On Wednesday, Judge Bruce Guyton called her a “prolific criminal.”

Prolific? Sure. Bonnie has been an activist since the 1980s. Working with a group called Nukewatch out in the forests of Wisconsin, Bonnie has tracked nuclear waste and materials shipments, cut down the Extremely Low Frequency poles that studded her sylvan landscape to communicate the first strike orders to nuclear submarines, and been arrested dozens of times. Criminal? Not when nuclear weapons are illegal (at least according to international law—which by treaty is our law too), immoral and just plain useless.

But Bonnie is prolific in her artistic gifts as well as in her resistance.

Earlier this summer, my then-almost-husband Patrick got an envelope marked:

Irwin County Detention Center, Oscilla, Georgia. This letter is being mailed by an inmate/detainee of this facility. The Administration has not reviewed the contents. I.C.D.C does not assume responsibility for the written contents.

Inside was a card drawn by Bonnie (above). She inked it with just the cartridge of a pen because the jail does not allow the women to have real pens. It was signed by Jean Gump, Sister Ardeth Platte, Sister Carol Gilbert and Bonnie Urfer and congratulated Patrick and I on our upcoming wedding. These women, in their 60s, 70s and 80s, were awaiting trial for “trespassing” on to the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Security Facility last July in an action organized by the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

The Y-12 facility is nestled in the rolling hills of Tennessee. In 1945, its scientists and engineers fabricated “Little Boy”—the nuclear weapon used to incinerate 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Today, under the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Administration, the site processes uranium for the new hydrogen bombs being built to replace W76 warheads on Trident submarine ballistic missiles.

Sister Carol shared their daily jail routine in a letter. It mentions, among other things, how much prisoners pay for phone calls: 50 cents a minute for out-of-state numbers.

In her sentencing statement, Bonnie relates what she and her cell-mates experienced in jail and asked:

Do I begin a campaign to highlight the illegal starvation diet in the Blount County jail, for which no one has been arrested? Do I join the effort to condemn the practice of overcharging mostly dirt poor inmates for phone calls, and commissary, so that corporations and counties receive greater kickbacks?

Bonnie received an eight month sentence, meaning she’s slated to serve an additional four months on top of the time she has already spent in jail.

Jean Gump, the first of the 13 activists to be sentenced, received time served earlier this week. Father Bill Bischel, a Jesuit priest, was sentenced to three months in jail. In his statement before the court, he pointed out to the judge and prosecutor:

When we threaten other nations with nuclear weapons, we can hardly say we are bent on peace, sisterhood and brotherhood. Nagasaki and Hiroshima have shown us the terrible destructive power of these bombs. We can do something as a nation instead of using our power to show Afghans around, we can share with one another, enter into a dialogue.

On Friday, Sr. Carol Gilbert Sept. 16 and Sr. Ardeth Platte, Dominican nuns and members of the Jonah House Community, will be sentenced.

Keep an eye on the Nuclear Resister blog or OREPA’s website for daily coverage of the sentencing of brave and resolute peace activists and nuclear resisters.