On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.

In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:

We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.

With this easy-to-learn song, O4O hopes these blockades will spread across the country, and effect what Gargamelli called “a people’s moratorium” that would create “real negotiating power between homeowners and lenders.” The next singing auction blockade is planned for February 17th in Queens.

The question for all those, whether using black bloc tactics or not, who consider adding to the Occupy movement tactics of either property destruction or violence: Do you want the issues of injustice to be talked about, or your bricks? In my own definition, property destruction is not the same as violence—there can be very significant differences between the two. But in this historical-political situation, the impact of either is similar; they give an easy out for people who don’t really want to talk about injustice.

I don’t, however, recommend Chris Hedges’ recent essay, “The Cancer in Occupy,” as a model for how to respond to the black blocs. Demonizing, calling people names, using the giveaway metaphor of “cancer” (I’ve had cancer) is about as far away from effectively opposing a tendency one disagrees with as it’s possible to get.

We have such good models in the tradition of nonviolence. Dr. King, James Lawson, John Lewis and so many others in the Civil Rights movement who had to respond to those willing to advocate violence showed us how to do it. They were themselves mentored by people like A. J. Muste whose largeness of spirit in dealing with defenders of violence went all the way back to the 1919 Lawrence, MA, textile strike.

Dr. King, for instance, famously had a public dialogue with Malcolm X, and I myself was involved in a radio broadcast debate between Malcolm and Freedom Rider Albert Bigelow. But less well-known to the public were the thousands of hours spent by SNCC and SCLC organizers dialoguing with advocates of violence wherever they found them: bars, pool halls, on the street, in church basements.  Bayard Rustin seemed to have unlimited patience in going into the wee hours of the night over whiskey with black comrades who believed the time had come to include violent tactics. Rev. James Orange, a strongly-built staffer for the SCLC, was given the job in the Chicago campaign of winning over the largest and toughest African American gang, the Blackstone Rangers; Jim was beaten up repeatedly by gang members to test his courage and sincerity before he was finally led to the gang leaders who agreed, in the end, to join the campaign and be nonviolent “peacekeepers.”

The issue of the appropriateness of property destruction and/or violence is, like any other aspect of community organizing, not settled by blanket statements or posturing but by getting in there and dialoguing, over and over again.  Advocates of nonviolent action need to learn from the Civil Rights movement and the field of community organizing in this way—there really aren’t any shortcuts.

I personally am as furious as anybody about the oppression that’s dealt out by the 1 percent, and my background as a working class gay person give me plenty of stories I can tell about injustice. But my hope for those now devoting themselves to Occupy is to keep your eyes on the prize. We already have in this country the model provided by heroic African Americans of how to stand up to violence—whether from the police or the KKK—in a way that keeps a city’s or nation’s attention on the real issues.

If, in good conscience, you just can’t stand for what looks to you like ineffective nonviolent struggle, then launch your own campaign with your preferred tactics and see how it works out for you. The public debate between Ward Churchill and me might be useful as you think about strategy. And if anyone else would like to debate me publicly on this subject, let me know.

Mosaic on Bamako, Mali's Martyrs Monument, commemorating the 1991 protests. Click for source.

As the one-year anniversary of the Arab Spring is being celebrated in the media, some journalists have asked, “What about the rest of Africa?” Lisa Mullins of PRI’s The World put it this way on January 24: “The pro-democracy revolts of last year … got people in sub-Saharan Africa wondering if they’d ever see an African Spring. That hasn’t happened.”

Yet it has happened before, as my research assistant Max Rennebohm recently reminded me, and it could happen again. There was a startling wave of pro-democracy struggles in Africa—seven countries with mass people-power campaigns—around the early 1990s. All seven were sub-Saharan: Benin, Madagascar, Cameroon, Mali, Togo, Malawi and Kenya. As with the Arab countries currently in the headlines, the seven from the early ’90s had varying outcomes. What is striking is that, on our Global Nonviolent Action Database’s success scale of 0 to 10, while one was rated 4 and another 7, the rest scored 9 or 10.

Following through

Benin was one of the most successful among the seven. High school and college students launched the campaign there with a student strike in January of 1989. The dictatorial government immediately tried to crush the campaign with troops and arrests. Rennebohm describes what motivated the students to act; the economy had been failing and the government wasn’t paying out student scholarship money—nor salaries to teachers and civil servants.

Inspired by the students’ bold action, the teachers and civil servants themselves began striking. The campaigners attracted allies despite—or because of—government repression; the broader movement added a demand for democracy to their economic grievances. By the end of a 15-month struggle, the government yielded on both counts: the economic demands that began the campaign and the demand for a democratic election that arose during it.

In Madagascar, the ruler Didier Ratsiraka had been in office for 15 years, and in the late 1980s the economy was going from bad to worse. Researcher Elena Ruyter writes that a broad coalition of opposition groups launched a general strike in May 1991, followed by mass demonstrations. They demanded that Ratsiraka step down in favor of free elections.

The government responded with guns and grenades. When the National Council of Christian Churches failed in its mediating attempt, many churches threw their support behind the campaign. The military began to back away from Ratsiraka, which forced him to accept a transitional government and free elections.

Madagascar illustrates a general strategic principle of any struggle: a campaign’s success may be only temporary unless campaigners take additional steps to defend the victory. Although Ratsiraka was ousted—he ran for president in the free election, lost and went into exile—he returned to the country in 1997 and resumed the presidency.

Women holding up more than half the sky

In both Mali and Kenya, women played important leadership roles in successful struggles. In the Malian case, as Aly Passanante and Max Rennebohm tell us, repression escalated soon after the campaign’s start, even though 100,000 people joined the initial demonstration on March 17, 1991. Days later, troops opened fire on students and other protesters and killed at least 22 people.

Women then stepped up, taking a highly visible role in demonstrations because of cultural taboos against killing women. Even though the women didn’t quench the violence fully—soldiers did kill five of them—they had an impact.

As a result, the Malians regained their momentum and mounted a general strike. Many soldiers put down their weapons and joined the protesters. In that atmosphere, a group of military officers arrested General Moussa Traoré (just a week and a half after the campaign began!) and promised free elections. A national congress of civil and political groups soon drafted a new, democratic constitution, and Malians democratically elected a new president.

Kenyan mothers between 60 and 70 years old launched a direct action campaign with a public hunger strike in 1992, camping in Freedom Park across from the parliament building. They demanded that the dictator release their sons who had been detained as political prisoners. Researcher Aden Tedla explains that the women, led by Wangari Maathai—who later received a Nobel Peace Prize—rapidly gained public support. Police beat up and tear-gassed the women. Three of the mothers stripped off their clothing, shook their breasts, and shouted “What kind of government is this that beats women! Kill us! Kill us now! We shall die with our children.” The police retreated.

The movement grew rapidly as the news spread, and many kinds of nonviolent methods, as well as riots, were tried. There was a general strike. The mothers continued to occupy the moral high ground through the growing tumult, and their sons were finally released to them. It would take more extended struggle to democratize Kenya, though; conditions were not as ripe as in Mali. But the 1992–93 campaign initiated by the bold mothers gave Kenya an important step forward.

General strikes: the downside

In the African pro-democracy wave, the campaigns in Mali, Togo, Madagascar and Benin all included general strikes, as did Kenya’s—although it’s unclear how widespread Kenya’s strike was. As anarchists and socialists have long claimed, the general strike can be a powerful nonviolent method. Cameroon, however, reveals a downside of the general strike, which seems to be related to timing.

By April 1991, pro-democracy organizers had managed to gain a rough unity of many political parties who opposed the authoritarian government of the Cameroonian People’s Democratic Movement. The stage was set for a direct action campaign. Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa tells us that students were among those taking the initiative, and the government didn’t hesitate; in five days, eight demonstrators were killed and several were wounded.

The movement responded by declaring an immediate general strike across Cameroon: “Operation Ghost Town.” The plan was to strike from Monday to Friday, giving the people a chance to restock on weekends.

The government responded by creating a new organization to act as the enforcer, sometimes even outstripping the military in authority and violence. The government also began a crackdown on mass media. It asked for and received international aid, evidently having decided to wait out the campaigners.

This strategy worked. By October, the strain of the strike on the population was too great; too many people were suffering without enough signs of progress. The coalition splintered, and many of the factions agreed to a negotiating conference with the government. The conference failed to achieve their hopes.

The fact that the Cameroon campaign started with a general strike at the beginning—while the other campaigns relied on multiple tactics early on, saving “the big one” for later—raises a strategic question for further study: is the timing of a general strike critical to its success?

The embedded dictator: a contrast

Dictatorships can have remarkable staying power; Togolese President Gnassingbe Eyadema was in power for 23 years by the time the 1990 pro-democracy campaign started. Malawi’s President Hastings Banda had been ruling for 30 years when the 1992 campaign began.

Rennebohm tells us that the Togo campaigners had two goals: a national conference to set the stage for democratic reform, and the resignation of Eyadema. A ten-day campaign was initiated by students and shortly blossomed into a general strike. The organizers quickly gained such wide participation that Eyadema announced the legalization of political parties in addition to his own, and he accepted a national conference. Once the pressure of direct action was off, however, the dictator was able to outmaneuver the campaigners and remained strong enough to defeat several military coups. He remained in power until his death in 2005.

The Malawi campaigners also wanted to legalize political parties and end single-party rule; in the short term, they wanted to release political prisoners. Their campaign went from March 1992 to June 1993, GNAD researcher Lindsay Carpenter writes. In Malawi, the leadership was taken by Catholic bishops rather than students and opposition politicians, and the bishops leaned hard on the church’s infrastructure and support from the pope to build their campaign.

That didn’t stop Banda from arresting the bishops, nor did it keep the university students from joining the struggle. In this context the army decided to stay neutral; junior officers even protected the students from the police and encouraged them to protest. When tapes were discovered in which government members discussed assassinating bishops, the people responded with even larger demonstrations.

Three thousand textile factory workers went on strike, demanding democracy. The Presbyterians and other Protestants, as well as Muslims, joined the campaign. Because Banda wasn’t getting support from his army, he organized his own enforcers, the Young Pioneers, to beat and intimidate protesters, supplementing his police. Later in the campaign, however, the army intervened to disband the Young Pioneers.

Banda realized he was finished and a free election was set. His own party, in control for thirty years, was defeated, and democracy came to Malawi.

Even while the Global Nonviolent Action Database includes dozens of cases of sub-Saharan African nonviolent action going back to 1906, we realize that there are thousands of cases we haven’t yet researched. But there is at least enough to know that the common assumption that Sub-Saharan Africans don’t do nonviolent struggle is just an unfounded stereotype.

• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

Egyptian protesters participating in a silent stand on June 6, 2011, at Kasr Al Nil bridge. By Zeinab Mohamed, via Flickr.

The starting point for a movement of mass action usually cannot be pinpointed to a single moment or person. This is true of the 2011 Arab Awakening, despite the temptation to credit Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia or Wael Ghonim’s prowess on Facebook in Egypt; such struggles defy simplistic explanations of origin.

“I don’t want to take much credit; the revolution was leaderless,” Wael told 2.8 million listeners on BBC’s Radio 4 recently. Encircled in a tight studio in London’s Portman Place BBC headquarters, along with Paul Mason, economics editor for the BBC program Newsnight, newscaster Andrew Marr had convened the three of us to discuss the topic of “Revolution.” Egypt’s revolution, our conversation made clear, was far from spontaneous. For years, Egyptian activists were sharing knowledge, organizing and learning to think strategically.

Wael is a 31-year-old Google executive in charge of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa who helped to catalyze the movement centered in Tahrir Square last year. On June 8, 2010, he saw a photograph of a young Egyptian who had been, in his words, “horribly tortured.” The visual proof of Khaled Mohamed Said’s atrocious June 6 fatal beating by secret police in Alexandria struck a chord throughout the  country, in part because the 28-year-old was middle class. Weeping over “the state of our nation and the widespread tyranny,” Wael saw the image as representing “a terrible symbol of Egypt’s condition.” He decided to create a page on Facebook called “Kullena Khaled Said,” or “We Are All Khaled Said.” Some 36,000 joined the page on the first day, many writing comments, and thus a conversation began to occur that could not otherwise have taken place under Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

Explaining that he had never been an activist before, Wael wrote in the first person and in colloquial Egyptian dialect, rather than classical Arabic, with “a lack of conspiracy.” He avoided using political phraseology and wrote personally as “an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on Kahled Said and motivated to seek justice.”

Wael credits Mohamed Eisa with sending to the page’s email account the idea for the “Silent Stands,” a critically important tactic used in the build-up to what would eventually become a national movement. The concept was that individuals would stand in a human chain for one hour, wearing black and carrying a Qur’an or a Bible for quiet reading. “We wanted to send out a clear message that although we were both sad and angry, we were nevertheless nonviolent,” Wael writes in his new book, Revolution 2.0. Reckoning that they could not be arrested for wearing black, they started their first single-file stand at 5 p.m. on June 18, 2010, calling it “A Silent Stand of Prayer for the Martyr Khaled Said along the Alexandria Corniche.” Purposely designed to circumvent physical confrontation with the security apparatus, Wael writes, “The goal was for members to summon the courage to take positive action to the street.”

The next stand was in Cairo. They carried out this type of vigil five times, with participants turning their backs to the street, sometimes with three or four kilometers of silently praying Egyptians. A thousand people took part in Khaled Said’s public funeral. The April 6 Youth Movement also organized an event to denounce Said’s murder in Cairo, and Wael’s hopes rose.

The April 6 movement had been launched in 2008. Among its Internet-savvy organizers was Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer, who, in March of that year, urged young Egyptians to support the 26,000 textile workers planning to strike on April 6 in the town of Mahalla al-Kobra. For more than a year, workers had been striking across Egypt, protesting high inflation and unemployment, but their actions were not coordinated. When the Mahalla strikes were violently repressed in March, with police killings of strikers, Maher and his allies called a nationwide general strike for April 6. Maher was brutally tortured by the police a few weeks after the strike. “Security forces were in disbelief,” Wael says. “How had opposition youth groups emerged without any political affiliations, Islamist or other?”

Naming themselves after the April 6 action, members of the movement participated in online tutorials with organizers of Otpor! (Resistance!), the Serbian student movement that unified 18 competing political parties and the general population to bring down Slobodan Milošević in 2000. The April 6 movement even sent one of their group, Mohamed Adel, to Belgrade in 2009. Learning from Otpor trainers about how they had organized, and why it was critically important to avoid violence, Mohamed came back talking about “unity, discipline, and planning,” carrying films and teaching aids. The April 6 movement modeled its logo after Otpor’s and adopted Otpor’s organizational approach, in which all were equal, making it harder for authorities to pick off so-called leaders. By 2009, some 76,000 were involved and posting on its Facebook page.

Practical and tangible lessons came into Egypt over a period of years through a variety of channels. The Otpor leaders had formed a network of activists that included experienced veterans from nonviolent struggles in South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine. The Egyptians tapping into Otpor were therefore learning from a global interchange. Scholars Maria Stephan and Stephen Zunes visited Cairo in 2009 to work with liberal academicians and reform-minded civil-society actors. For five years, some Egyptian activists and bloggers had been meeting with people central to nonviolent movements across the world, comparing notes. This is how they met the Serbian veterans.

Seeing Tunisia’s success, the April 6 movement sought to capitalize on Egypt’s annual Police Day—a January 25, 2011, holiday that would commemorate a police revolt suppressed by British colonial authorities. Wael Ghonim used Facebook to marshal support. If 50,000 people were willing to commit to march on the day he posted, the demonstration would be held. More than twice that number signed up. On January 25, the numbers turning out in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez took police by surprise. April 6 made common cause with Mohamed ElBaradei’s supporters, some liberal and leftist parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Wael Ghonim tweeted:

Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.

On January 28, the Day of Rage, Mubarak’s regime blocked the Internet for five days. Egyptians outwitted this measure by relaying through other outlets. A print shop reproduced a 26-page pamphlet for instant circulation. As police used tear gas and water cannon against demonstrators, the pamphlet, “How to Protest Intelligently,” warned people not to disseminate the plan through Facebook or Twitter, because both were monitored by the Interior Ministry. Listing the democracy movement’s demands and calling for tactical unity, it asked for “strategic civil disobedience” in winning over of the police and army “to the side of the people.” It called for disciplined, positive slogans and language. As demonstrations spread across the country, some of the biggest rallies occurred when the Internet was down.

Social media alone are not causative. Nonviolent movements have always appropriated the most advanced technologies available in order to spread their messages. When fighting with the force of ideas, rejecting violence or militarized methods, the reframing of old grievances as wrongs that might now be  corrected requires argumentation and teaching. People must be helped to see that deep-rooted predicaments can be amenable to direct action. Wael agreed when I made this point on the BBC: “We’re trying to give too much credit to social media, because it’s a new thing,” he said.

Indeed, far more important than media, pre-existing conditions or the political culture in the Arab rebellions were two other factors that helped give rise to revolt: 1) The existence of a civic capacity for sustained action and protracted long-term resistance—mosques, churches, labor unions, networks of professional and other organizations, and groups that have gone underground. 2) The sharing of lessons and knowledge from other movements, and the dissemination of historical insights among guiding activist intellectuals. Political thinking affects strategic planning. Both of these forces involve human agency—individual and collective.

On the 17th day of protest in Tahrir Square, the waves of strikes that had been ongoing since 2006 widened. They spread throughout all of Egypt.  After 18 days—January 25 to February 11—Mubarak resigned from the presidency, his legitimacy destroyed.

Egyptians had been organizing themselves long before they would fill Tahrir Square. Enough of them in sufficiently dispersed centers of society had obtained the knowledge and a level of preparedness to build a national mobilization of noncooperation. This included the country’s dispirited civil-society groups. It included young activists, some of  whom had been learning from experience abroad and organizing through online social networks. It included working-class people who had been trying to improve their lot by striking. Ultimately, the refusal of laborers to show up for work in the days just before the Mubarak resignation was the last prop to be pulled away from Mubarak’s regime. Working in diffuse groups, Egyptians knew how to organize, how to withdraw cooperation and how to handle the unexpected. As they confront Mubarak’s successors, they will need this knowledge for their continuing struggle.

Volunteers for InterOccupy.org meet at the Occupied Office in New York City. Photo by the author.

As Occupy camps spread around Southern California in early October, a small group of occupiers located at City Hall in Los Angeles reflected on our experiences setting up a camp and our first assemblies. “It’d be awesome to see what they do in San Diego,” I remember saying, sitting in the comfort of Occupy LA’s People’s Library. “Do you think the cops will even let them put down tents?”

The librarian replied, “We should help them. We should be there so that their first GA isn’t as bad as ours was.” But, as we would soon learn, both the challenges and the potential of coordinating Occupy assemblies would be far greater than that.

I drove to San Diego on October 6th to meet with their General Assembly’s facilitation team as they marched around downtown, eventually settling in Children’s Park. We talked about the idea of having a team of people ready to keep the peace and teach horizontal democracy. Then, a week later, after moving the camp to the Civic Center and doggedly resisting pressure to leave, OSD was given an eviction notice. Occupiers were pepper-sprayed when they decided to defend one lonely tent in the middle of a public space. I raced down to San Diego to help arrange bail funds that night. Curiously, another person, a young man dressed in a Tommy Bahama shirt, also showed up and claimed to be from Occupy Wall Street.

He suggested that remaining members of OSD break off into smaller groups and spread out around the city. He disrupted the General Assembly several times to say that the cops were going to move in soon, but that OWS was sending “1,000 people to OSD to fortify their camp.” I was perplexed, because if this person was really from OWS, he should know how to build consensus rather than cause disruptions. On my way back from San Diego, I stopped at Occupy Long Beach to check in with them. There, one occupier mentioned that his girlfriend at Occupy San Francisco heard 5,000 people were coming from OWS to OSF to prevent eviction. Infiltration was afoot, but I had no direct line to OWS to confirm or deny these rumors.

I went back to OLA dismayed, eager to find someone with a connection to OWS on the ground. I thought about sending an email—but to whom, and how would I know their information was reliable? At that time, most emails that were sent around occupations went unanswered for a variety of reasons, including inability to access computers and Wi-Fi at the camps. Fortunately, the brother of someone at OLA, Jackrabbit, was at OWS. Jackrabbit was patient with my paranoia and assured me that there wasn’t a plan from OWS to send anyone to California. In fact, they don’t even have 5,000 people at OWS. I relayed the info back to San Diego, and the infiltrator’s response was to further divide the General Assembly by stating that OWS was going to denounce OSD as an occupation. He disappeared from OSD the next day and never returned. Crisis averted, with just a simple phone call.

The last week of October, I received notice that the OWS Movement Building Working Group would be hosting a conference call with other occupations on October 24th. The OLA Occupation Communication Committee set up a speakerphone in the media tent at our camp and dialed in. There were over one hundred people on that call and nearly 40 occupations represented. At the end of it, OWS asked for volunteers to help set up the next call—and thus began the early makings of InterOccupy. The first “Call Planning” meeting happened via telephone the following Thursday, when we decided on some protocols for rotating the hosts of the Monday night general call and soliciting agenda items. Occupy Philadelphia led the charge on the second general call, and OLA took up the third—albeit with technical support from OWS when the bomb squad showed up at OLA that night. After much debate, this small call-planning group settled on registering the domain name InterOccupy.org and started a call calendar.

Before the encampments suffered eviction, the calls provided a sense that the movement was much bigger than any one camp. It felt truly global when I heard an occupier say “Goodnight, from Italy” on a call in November. OLA hosted a call for sharing advice on peaceful resistance among occupiers all over the country. By December, InterOccupy was arranging calls for large-scale actions such as the West Coast Port Shut Down—but most of its organizers still had not met one another.

After the evictions, we decided that it would be important to meet in person to improve our services. I bought a plane ticket to NYC in mid-December, as did an occupier from Portland. Occupiers from Philadelphia drove up, while members of OWS arranged places for us to stay. Others from Kalamazoo, Stanford, and Reno called in to the three-day meeting. In a sunny apartment in Manhattan, we established some best practices for getting new voices on the calls, set up a series of subgroups for administration and expanded our call services. InterOccupy evolved from a group of distributed occupiers to an organization intent on providing a platform for truly horizontal communication. Clay Shirky, the New York University professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, attended the meetings, where he talked with us about decentralized communication and described the structure of Occupy as “loosely connected clusters of tightly connected groups” united by “satisfying and effective ties.”

InterOccupy is able to put horizontality at the forefront of its mission to foster coordination across general assemblies and working groups. It’s meant to expand the way rhizomatic plants mature, with growth spreading out, rather than up. Any occupation can ask for a call, and no one agenda is given priority. The content of the calls, therefore, is up to the movement itself, with the goal of aligning strategy and actions, not to efface the autonomy of local assemblies.

Because many of us started out traveling and connecting with other occupations face to face, we knew that the virtual network is strengthened, both emotionally and effectively, by physical encounters with one another. Modeled on the communication networks in the American revolution, Occupy Philly designed a network model called Committees of Correspondence. CoCs are encouraged to spread information about the actions of other occupations, inform local working groups about upcoming calls through InterOccupy and arrange face to face regional meet-ups. This model greatly increased the density of ties between occupations and, in doing, the volume of calls through InterOccupy.

Using this model, Occupy So Cal in Long Beach recently hosted the first regional gathering with 50 occupiers from 10 occupations attending. We discussed how to better facilitate our communication, how to work together towards the proposed May 1st general strike and how to combat corporatism nonviolently. A second meet-up for Occupy So Cal is in the works for February 11, and InterOccupy is helping to coordinate it. Currently, others working with InterOccupy are on an OWS bus tour, spreading the model of CoCs around the northeast.

Because face-to-face communication is as central to this movement as the latest technology, InterOccupy seeks to provide channels that amplify voices and ideas of the Occupy movement, while simultaneously deepening regional networks. As InterOccupy organizer Nate Kleinman says, “We lay the tracks, someone else has to drive the train.”

This article is published in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council’s Possible Futures project. Learn more about Possible Futures here.

A checkpoint run by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Baba Amr, a poor district in the southwestern part of Homs. Photo from Der Spiegel.

Say the words, “Free Syrian Army” in nearly any gathering of Syrian expatriates lately, and their faces break into wide smiles of appreciation. Say the same words to people in Syria, and they say, “They will liberate us.” This sentiment is growing all over Syria, as the defected soldiers that make up the FSA wage battle against their pro-regime counterparts. But will such optimism last?

Nearly 11 months into the Syrian uprising, ordinary civilians, once certain of the effectiveness of civil resistance, are losing hope. They turn to the FSA for protection. The world has been in awe of the Syrian revolution and its peaceful activists (“How brave!” “Such tenacity!”), who vow to oust the Assad regime once and for all, and the peaceful protests continue daily. However, many of these demonstrations are protected from Assad’s army and snipers by the FSA, where and when possible. The presence of the FSA at protest sites has re-energized protesters, who are coming out in increasing numbers even as the regime escalates its violence against them.

Given the FSA’s popularity in some communities, many argue that the full-scale militarization of the Syrian conflict is inevitable. But FSA successes in Zabadani, the eastern belt of the Damascus suburbs, and Homs, among other areas, have given Syrians renewed hope. Their hope stems not from the thought that military help is coming from the West or NATO, but that it comes from home-grown forces: brothers and fathers and uncles who could not face the thought of shooting at their own unarmed people, and who defected. As of this writing, FSA soldiers in Zabadani are facing a massive assault by regime forces, and the FSA has vowed to fight back until “we are all free or we are all dead.” Its determination has inspired others to go out and protest despite the fighting.

Is this the end of peaceful resistance in Syria? Does the emergence of the FSA mean that nonviolence is a thing of the past? Apparently not. Protesters now seem emboldened by their protectors, and have engaged in ever more creative forms of peaceful civil disobedience.

Today, the city of Hama commemorated the massacres of 1982, in which Hafez Al-Assad, Bashar Al-Assad’s father, killed as many as 40,000 people in just over a week. (It’s a sad irony that over the past year, more than 1,000 people have been killed in Hama alone by the junior Assad, including more than a dozen today; more than 6,000 more from around the rest of the country have died as a result of the continuing crackdown.) In preparation, the entire city of Hama shut down on Thursday as security forces descended upon the city to thwart any commemorative demonstrations. Much to the surprise of Assad’s security forces, residents observed a general strike throughout the city—but not before painting streets red and throwing dye into the famous water wheels on the Orontes River. Activists spray-painted graffiti on the walls: “Hafez died, and Hama did not. Bashar will die, and Hama will not.”

In Daraa, another flashpoint city (aren’t they all, at this point?), protesters clapped in union and chanted, “He who kills his people is a traitor.”

All over Syria, in virtually every city, town and village, pro-democracy activists distribute leaflets, create new anti-regime songs, draw caricatures and stage plays to voice their opposition to the Assad regime. The nonviolent part of the movement is still very much alive.

Across continents and oceans, Syrian activists in Toronto, London and Vienna are staging flash mobs in public spaces to let the world know what is happening in their homeland. In Manchester, England, nonviolent activists created a video, “The Whole World Supports Syria,” which shows young people from around the world holding up signs of city names, victims’ names or inspirational messages.

In Washington, D.C., Ottawa, Berlin, Cairo and other world capitals, Syrian activists are doing sit-ins at Russian embassies and consulates to protest Russia’s staunch support of Assad in the United Nations Security Council. Detroit, Chicago and LA are holding sing-alongs and fundraisers to buy and deliver medical supplies.

Another form of nonviolent resistance are the Twitter campaigns designed to stretch the Friday protests in Syria into the weekend, worldwide. One of them is directed by the Free Syrian Twitter Army against the “minhibakjis,” the pro-Assadists who like to intimidate and harass Syrian activists around the world. The FSTA focuses on the minhibakjis by sending targeted messages just to irritate and annoy the enemy. The FSTA has simple rules: no profanity, no personal attacks and tag all tweets with #FSTA.

For now, at least, the nonviolent movement remains alive and thriving. Scholars of civil resistance understand full well that short-term gains by the FSA today do not necessarily mean a democratic Syria tomorrow. And while the FSA enjoys popular support in certain cities now, many activists—especially those watching events in Egypt—wonder whether they might be trading one military dictatorship for another. Historically, an armed revolution tends to lessen popular participation; however, thus far in Syria, that hasn’t been the case.

It has been three weeks since the protests in Romania started. For the moment they have quieted down, as bad weather is keeping a lot of protesters in their homes. The most determined of them remain to shout in the streets, especially those fighting to protect the Rosia Montana area from mining, one of the longest activism campaigns in post-communist Romania; about 30 people invaded the environment minister’s office on Tuesday. There is also a small crowd of middle-aged and elderly people, who have been organizing themselves and are present in the streets day after day.

The goals of the protests appear to be the fall of the current government and a renewal of the political class. Claudiu Craciun, a lecturer at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, is one of the people who has been leading the crowd in University Square, and the speech he recently made in the European Parliament presents what the people hope for. “We want to trust politicians,” he said. “We want to trust democracy. We want to trust public institutions.”

People have called upon union leaders, also, to renounce their political affiliations, end their corrupt management and start representing the people whose dues support them.

There have been some difficult times for the protests. The 15th and 19th of January were the most violent. This was when a small group of protesters started throwing rocks, bits of smashed pavement, and fireworks. The ruling politicians responded by calling the protestors different names—like ”worms,” “oxen,” and “o mahala inepta si violenta,” meaning a stupid and violent mob—trying to attract the media at their side and to make the protests look ridiculous. They almost succeeded.

That is, until the riot police began to take center stage. Thinking that the media was backing them, the police turned against all of the protestors. The law states that the riot police are meant to ensure order, discipline and safety of a demonstration. If violent actions occur, they should intervene to stop the persons responsible. But this is not what happened.

Numerous videos uploaded on the Internet show the abuses that ensued. Some of them document riot police hitting women and children; others show protestors being dragged up to police wagons and beaten until they couldn’t get up anymore.

After these incidents, Bucharest began to feel like a police state. The center of the city was encircled by police wagons, checkpoints with attack dogs, and riot police carrying guns with live ammunition. To get to the protests, you had to pass through various checkpoints. Anyone looking suspicious would be stopped and searched—as I found out for myself. At one point some police officers took me off the street, led me to a tent near the protest zone, and started to search and interrogate me with verbal and physical abuse. After they videotaped me, and saw they had no excuse to take me to a precinct, I was let go. These riot police seem to be doing everything in their power to intimidate people into not joining the protests.

The situation started to change when the media turned against the police, especially after videos appeared on the Internet showing riot police targeting journalists who were on duty. Meanwhile, groups of activists began encouraging one another to protest nonviolently. They started to hand out brochures enumerating the rights of free expression they have as citizens. Given Romania’s repressive history, many people aren’t aware of this. “It’s good that people are in the streets,” says organizer Mihai Bumbes. “Now they must learn to protest.”

Several symbolic, nonviolent actions were orchestrated to show that the intentions is not to fight the police but to protest peacefully. People informed international human rights organizations of the police abuses, and Amnesty International decided to respond to their request by submitting a letter to the minister of the interior.

The riot police have suffered a serious blow to their legitimacy, as the media and much of the Romanian population looking at their behavior with fear and disgust. This constitutes a major win for Romanian human rights groups, which managed to publicize the true nature of the riot police, a state institution that only activists and certain football fans have had firsthand experience with. These groups’ efforts may lead the way for an accurate and just investigation that could compel the ministry of the interior to change its policies.

Above all, these demonstrations have sparked a change in the way Romanians understand values like solidarity, democracy, civic participation and freedom of speech—each of which are rights that they have possessed for more than 20 years but have not been accustomed to exercising. Perhaps the police will learn, too.

Last weekend, Pax Christi Metro NYC honored Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ as part of its Peacemaking Through the Arts Winter Benefit. Outside, the weather was icy, but, inside, friends gathered from as far away as Montreal, Canada, to celebrate Dan. I was invited to give a “testimonial” about a man I had known since birth. It was a tough assignment, but I thought I would share it with the Waging Nonviolence community. I did not really talk about all his many accomplishments; those are well documented in many places, including his autobiography, 

It is hard to sum up a life in a few sentences, especially when the man living that life so boldly and so fully is sitting in the front row and is smiling wryly and with tolerance. This assignment makes me think about retirement—it brings up a lot of iconic images, doesn’t it? You know; the gold watch for years of dedicated service, the gilded plaque etched with platitudes, the break room or Elk Lodge or church hall party. And then the life afterwards: golf, fishing, carnival cruises, and a fun and stimulating hobby like carving duck decoys or learning French.

Some people never retire. Dan Berrigan has never retired. And we are here to say thank you and thank God for that.

Everywhere I go I meet people who express to me overwhelming love and admiration for my uncle. They mention his poetry, his prose, his bold activism… but most of all they talk about his time. Many of you know this and have experienced the gift of my uncle’s time and attention.

Uncle Dan, you spend so much time with people. And I know the delight you take in their accomplishments. You meet their sorrows and disappointments with empathy and compassion. You give gentle advice without judgment or hector. Your advice has literally shaped the lives—and for the better—of so many people.

Uncle Dan, for so many people, you are a critical link, a life link to a church that has disappointed and alienated so many. An institution that has forgotten or dismissed the man we are taught to follow, the man who prayed and thought and acted on his feet and with his friends, who made a poem out of his life and always had time for children, for women, for the sick and the disabled, for the disenfranchised, for the castigated and the cast-asides. You keep the gospels alive in a cynical time. You bring us back to Jesus, to that man. And you bring the church out of the darkness and the pomp, you free our brother Jesus from its clutches and you bring the sacraments out to us: to the soup kitchen, the picket line, the occupied block, the AIDS clinic, you bring the church to where people are.

I revel—in a slightly awkward sort of way—at these encounters, basking in the refracted glory of my Uncle Dan, agreeing wholeheartedly with how awesome he is and recalling all of our own far-reaching, hilarious, profound and life-altering discussions.

“Well, we solved it all, haven’t we?” he’ll sum up. Or, sometimes, “Come on, we’ve been good long enough,” he’ll quip, and we pour a drink.

I stand here on behalf of  my family—but really on behalf of all these people who celebrate you Dan—far too many to be in this room. And on behalf of all of them, I say: thank you for leading, thank you for listening, thank you for loving.

I would love to give you a gold watch and a holiday cruise to honor your ongoing non-retirement. But instead, I will share the gift of my own poetry. Yep, you heard it here first: Dan Berrigan is not the only Berrigan kissed by Calliope.

A little background. Every Christmas, members of the Jesuit community choose a secret Santa. In addition to a small gift, the men write each other limericks. They are often read in Don Moore’s inimitable cadence. I love this tradition. Limericks unleash the poet inside each of us, and so, to close, I offer my own limerick:

Uncle Dan, you are inspiring
For peace, synapses are firing
Your words are so kind
Brilliant is your mind
So please, no thoughts of retiring.

And because one limerick is never enough, here is another (and I promise it is the last):

Berrigan, you’re second to none
The struggles for justice are won
Love, all for the least
You’re more than a priest
We are all your daughters and son.

That’s it. After Liz McAlister (my mom) and Bishop Tom Gumbleton both spoke, Uncle Dan got up and read a real poem. He wrote it soon after September 11, 2001. I had never heard it before. Far cry from limerick, but good (nonetheless).

Parable

Once on a time
the heart, a sure compass
voyaged
by torrid demarche, portage, storm

to the Land of Basilisks, Neros
tarnished Judges, Dementia
enthroned, Commissars born
thumbs down.

Heart
crossed the border surreptitiously—
was shortly seized.
Crime; “Demeaning
the peoples’ and the state’s integrity,
displaying
for public viewing
a decadent artifact.”

“Honor, the accused was apprehended
distributing in a public place
a drawing entitled ‘Self Portrait,’
portraying
a human frame naked, arms outstretched
a bird suspended from each palm

and in blank mid rib cage
a curious organ
otherwise unknown.”

• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

A policeman fires tear gas toward Bahraini anti-government protesters in Sitra, Bahrain, Jan 30. The US decided to sell military equipment to Bahrain.

After a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain was delayed this fall following widespread criticism from human rights groups and some in Congress, it was revealed last week that the Obama administration is now moving forward with a new arms deal to the country, without any formal notification to the public. As The Cable reports:

Our congressional sources said that State is using a legal loophole to avoid formally notifying Congress and the public about the new arms sale. The administration can sell anything to anyone without formal notification if the sale is under $1 million. If the total package is over $1 million, State can treat each item as an individual sale, creating multiple sales of less than $1 million and avoiding the burden of notification, which would allow Congress to object and possibly block the deal.

We’re further told that State is keeping the exact items in the sale secret, but is claiming they are for Bahrain’s “external defense” and therefore couldn’t be used against protesters. Of course, that’s the same argument that State made about the first arms package, which was undercut by videos showing the Bahraini military using Humvees to suppress civilian protesters.

The hypocrisy of it all is not lost on Bahrainis, or likely another other people struggling for democracy in the region or around the world. As Nada Alwadi, a journalist from Bahrain who was jailed for covering the uprising last spring, said in an email interview:

Many Bahrainis were really shocked by the latest news that the Obama administration is going to go ahead with the arms deal with the Bahraini government, especially since the oppression against protesters in several areas in Bahrain has never stopped, if not become more serious. Bahrainis feel that by going ahead with this deal the United States is sending a message to the Bahraini government that they support them on using these weapons against their own people, which has huge implications on how the United States is perceived. The outcome of such a development, if proven right,will result in growing the frustration towards the United States as a super power which supports its allies even when they are killing their own people.

The Bahraini government seems to have gotten this message loud and clear as well. Only days after the news broke, Bahraini police fired tear gas into the cells of protesters who were on hunger strike to protest their detention.

Despite the lack of support from the U.S. or attention from the mainstream media, Alwadi insists that:

the movement is still alive and active either on the streets or on social media. Since the Saudi troops entered the country and cracked down on the protesters last March, it was impossible for tens of thousands of people to gather on the main streets again. However, protesters managed to be creative and find other ways to maintain their visibility. Over the past few months, and since the release of the BICI report, several events have been organized by protesters, such as “Occupy Budayie Road,” which resulted in the arrest of many protesters and the killing of young boys… And many Bahrainis expect serious developments on the first anniversary of the uprising on Feb 14.

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.

With the authorities in the Siberian city of Barnaul refusing to permit opposition protests since December 10, activists have deployed a creative tactic to voice their opposition to the recent disputed parliamentary elections.

According to the Guardian, rather than take to the streets themselves, and risk arrest or worse, they set up a public display of:

dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

This unorthodox action threw the police for a loop, who asked prosecutors to investigate its legality. As protest organizer Lyudmila Alexandrova said:

They tried to tell us our event was illegal – they even said that to put toys in the snow, we had to rent it from the city authorities.

It is this kind of overreaction that organizers should hope for. By revealing so clearly the absurdity of the state’s attempt to crackdown on dissent, while getting a laugh in process, actions like these will likely only galvanize the opposition.

To see more photos of the display, click here.

Minnesota winters can be brutally cold, full of ice and snow, and drearily bleak come this time of year. And while this year’s winter has been unexpectedly mild and inconsistent, with temperatures fluctuating from well-below freezing to the high 40s—likely due to the instability of climate change—we still look for ways to escape cabin fever. The Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF), on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, was just the break I needed. But it was also an inspiring weekend full of hopeful films, cinematic social critique, information tables, and workshops on the environment and activism.

The festival, which began in Winona in 2006, shows films from Mountainfilm—a film festival held in Telluride, Colorado in May that takes its films on tour throughout the rest of the year. Mountainfilm “is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.” Likewise, the FRFF—whose films are a combination of the Mountainfilm Tour and locally or regionally-submitted films—has a similar mission:

The Frozen River Film Festival identifies and offers programs that engage, educate and activate viewers to become involved in the world. These programs provide a unique perspective on environmental issues, sustainable communities and extreme sports.

For Winona, the festival is also a time to learn and celebrate the unique landscapes and fertile soils of the Mississippi driftless area that was carved out during the last glacial age. FRFF Director, Crystal Hegge, highlighted the new film about regional legend Aldo Leopold, Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time, that capture’s the conservationist character of the festival: “(Viewers) will be able to ask questions about what’s going on here in Winona, and how they’re utilizing [Leopold's] message and creating a great landscape for the Winona community.” In a small community like Winona, the festival really brings the community together for important conversations that are sparked by the common experiences of viewing a film and hearing rarely-told stories.

One of those rarely told stories, and winner of the FRFF People’s Choice Award, is Dakota 38. The film is a moving re-telling of the mass execution of 38 Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 by the order of President Lincoln in Mankato, Minnesota. The film is a stark reminder of the ugly and often unjust history of how the Dakota were forcibly and violently removed from their ancestral lands, including Winona, and how little of that history most Minnesotans actually know. Nonetheless, the film retraces a healing journey for Jim Miller—whose vivid dream of the execution sparked the journey—and others who decided to ride 330 miles on horseback to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution.

David Holbrooke, Festival Director for Mountainfilm, spoke with me over the phone about the role film and festivals can have in positive social change. “The documentarian is one of the last of the truth tellers,” Holbrooke said, “and we celebrate those filmmakers and storytellers who bring issues to light in untarnished ways.” Mountainfilm’s origins, telling the stories of climbers and mountaineers, were about doing things that haven’t been done. At its core, Holbrooke sees Mountainfilm as being about pushing the limits about what is possible and going places where others have not gone.

The intersection of sports, culture, and the environment appeals to a large swath of people—some of whom are already engaged in issues of social change, but many who are not. Each block of film sessions contains anywhere between two to six films that vary in length from as short as a couple of minutes to as long as a feature-length film that is guaranteed to pique one’s imagination and raise the consciousness to a new level.

The films are an eclectic mix that really do inspire, educate, awe, and touch the viewer in many different ways; some do so very deeply, such as The Economics of Happiness which reveals the serious social, economic, political, and environment challenges humanity faces. But when the film, which tells about the ills of globalization, ends on a hopeful note about the positive and successful potential of “localization,” the viewer is inspired to hook up with one of the many practical alternatives or organizations documented in the film. The Economics of Happiness was also paired up with two other films: Mr. Happy Man and Yelp. There was a unique pedagogical process at work in that Saturday evening film session. In Mr. Happy Man, we meet Bermudan Johnny Barnes who spends his days standing on a busy intersection spreading his love to all who pass by. It is a simple, genuinely love-filled gesture that spills out even across the silver screen. Following that uplifting exposé, Yelp‘s rant against technology causes the viewer to ponder the distraction and disruption that technology may be causing in our lives. The film ends with a climatic crescendo, urging us to “UNPLUG!” After having been calmed by Johnny Barnes and willfully considering our relationship to technology, The Economics of Happiness gives a coherent and digestible debunking of capitalism’s growth at all costs and how it is effecting the planet, communities, and individuals while modestly presenting viable alternatives. The filmmakers are even hosting a conference featuring the film’s interviewees in March.

“The world can be a better place than it is now and our filmmakers and guests [speakers] help us get there” said Holbrooke, who first saw the now Academy Award-nominated film Gasland at the Sundance festival and then played it at the Mountainfilm in 2010. “I had never heard of fracking until Gasland,” admitted Holbrooke. “And it’s happening miles from us in Telluride. It’s happening miles from my home in Brooklyn.” Past guests at Mountainfilm have included Tim DeChristopher and Port Arthur, Texas community organizer and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Hilton Kelley, who is featured in this year’s tour film My Toxic Reality.

“We look for people who are out changing the world. We need hope and solutions and we want to tell the stories of those who are fighting for what they believe in. We are in extraordinary times and we need extraordinary people taking extraordinary measures. Mountainfilm celebrates those people.” At the FRFF, one of those people is Jim Tittle. Clips from his forth-coming documentary on silica-sand mining (a key ingredient needed for fracking), The Price of Sand, debuted for the Mississippi River community that is facing the growing threat of such mining that creates open pit mines along the river and in nearby farm country. The film screening was accompanied by a panel discussion and also included opportunities for folks to get involved with organizing against the mining companies to pass town and country ordinances in favor of protecting the river bluffs.

In a testament to the role arts and film have in organizing and training activists, Peaceful Uprising, the organization co-founded by the now-imprisoned climate activist DeChristopher, had a powerful presence over the weekend by leading a workshop on civil disobedience—attended by about twenty people—and presenting the film-in-the-making Bidder 70. Hegge met Peaceful Uprising in Telluride at Mountainfilm’s 2011 festival and invited them to the FRFF.

When Ken Butigan writes about “mainstreaming nonviolence,” I think workshops on civil disobedience and nonviolence at film festivals (and well attended, for a small town like Winona) may just be what he had in mind. It is exciting to see the tools and awareness needed for nonviolent social change becoming more commonplace and celebrated.

• Just after the National Park Service’s noon deadline Monday, by which protesters in Washington’s two Occupy D.C. camps were required to decamp, protesters fought back by stringing up a giant blue tarp in the middle of McPherson Square, which they called the “tent of dreams.”

• Belgium’s first general strike in almost two decades brought parts of the country to a halt on Monday in an anti-austerity protest aimed at the new government and at EU leaders meeting in Brussels.

• Hundreds of Romanians protested on Saturday against a plan to set up Europe’s biggest open-cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town, joining a wave of anti-government rallies.

• Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world’s poor.

• Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• Argentina’s powerful truck drivers’ union blocked postal distribution centers in several cities on Monday to protest the firing of 200 workers.

• About 200 Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to re-open their church and stop intimidation by Muslim hardliners.

• Last Sunday, dozens of Detroit’s undertakers drove a motorcade of hearses through the city’s most violent neighborhoods to protest the high murder rate.