“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.

As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.

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Photo by Magharebia, via Wikimedia Commons

You may not have heard of it, but the West African country of Mauritania has what is probably one of the most vibrant and active protest movements in the world today. Protests drawing tens of thousands of people (out of a total population of just three million) take place almost weekly in the capital Nouakchott, with many smaller protests happening on a daily basis around the vast country. The protests are overwhelmingly nonviolent — even in the face of frequent violent suppression — and have been going on since February 2011.

It would be comfortable to file these protests as another part of the Arab Spring: Mauritania is on the southern reaches of the Saharan Arab belt, and large-scale protests here started with the self-immolation and subsequent death of Yacoub Ould Dahoud, an action mirroring the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, which set off the revolt in Tunisia. As in other Arab countries that experienced large-scale protests, Mauritania is governed by an autocratic regime whose leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, originally came to power through a coup d’état.

But while these similarities exist and the pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world surely have been a source of great inspiration for local activists, Mauritania merits a second look.

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Sign held up in New York's Bryant Park on May 1. By bdogmac, via Flickr.

The fallout from May Day can be felt in every sector of Occupy Wall Street. Some people say it was one of the greatest days since the movement began and are excited for what comes next. Others left with a sour taste in their mouths, whether by the lack of aggressive actions, or by the police state erected in Lower Manhattan, or by simply being worn down from overwork. In some cases, relationships with one another have strained and frayed. Having helped see the project through from conception to reality, my own feelings are mixed. I’m burnt out, taking a break to get perspective, and scared for what might come next. But I also saw May Day as a project that fulfilled the main objectives we had for it and meanwhile created a model for how to organize long-term projects in the future.

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On the first day of a recent nonviolence training for a mix of scholars, students, journalists, and religious and tribal leaders in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, I asked what they knew about nonviolent civic mobilization. A number of them responded “women’s rights,” while some said “democracy,” and others “pacifying people.” They were all familiar with the term “nonviolence” and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — also known as “Badshah Khan” and the “Frontier Gandhi” — whose nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God”) movement against the British Raj is well known in Afghanistan. But participants had no real knowledge of the details of this movement, nor of the underlying ideas or practical implementation of nonviolent action.

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Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post.

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

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Some Occupiers just want the banks to act more reasonably; others want to abolish capitalism. Most cruise to meetings on two wheels; others hate bike lanes. In Minneapolis, as in places across the United States, Occupy Our Homes has brought union members, anarchists, lawyers, grassroots organizers, democrats and veterans all under the same roof, united by a common goal of saving homeowners from eviction and full neighborhoods from displacement. They might not all share the same vision of utopia, but housing justice work is demonstrating that, for today’s era of activism, humanity can trump ideology.

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• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would not be allowed to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

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Original headline about Operation Spectrum.

On May 21, 1987, 16 Singaporeans were arrested and detained in a crackdown called Operation Spectrum. About a month later, four of the original 16 were released, and another six arrested. They were branded as Marxist conspirators out to “subvert Singapore’s political and social order using communist united front tactics” and detained without trial. Most of the detainees were lawyers, community workers or entrepreneurs. As the 25th anniversary of the crackdown approaches, activists are using the opportunity to raise questions anew about the repression of dissent in the country.

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London student protest, via Bowalley Road.

For the better part of a century, some visionaries have been trying to break out of the dominant belief that there are only two means of forcing change: reform through elections and revolution through violence. The rigidity of that binary choice still strangles thinking today.

A Norwegian, for instance, once wrote to me that there simply wasn’t enough direct conflict in the country to use the word “revolution”; as I have described in detail before, the Labor Party got enough votes in the 1930s so it could finally create a coalition government. An election seems to have made the change. But that view focuses on politicians and electoral forms and overlooks the main scene of the conflict, which was mass direct action in the economic arena. To say that the change happened through elections is to mistake the effect for the cause.

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