• In Portugal, as many as 300,0000 packed Lisbon’s Palace Square on Saturday in the largest rally against austerity and economic hardships since the country resorted to a European Union-International Monetary Fund bailout last May.

• In the largest protest against the government in months, thousands of opposition supporters marched through Manama’s streets today on the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Bahrain.

• Braving subzero temperatures, hundreds of thousands of Europeans across the continent took to the streets Saturday, protesting an international trade agreement many say will overrule democratic institutions, jeopardize civil liberties and stifle technological innovation.

• Thousands of protesters massed in Greece under heavy police watch Saturday after the government approved unpopular austerity cuts to get vital rescue funds and avoid the “chaos” of a default.

• Thousands of Japanese joined a march against nuclear power on Saturday as worries grow about the restarting of reactors idled after the March 11th meltdown disaster in northeastern Japan.

• Brazilian authorities claimed Saturday to have broken up strikes by thousands of police in two states after arresting labor leaders, but other police and firefighters had not quit their protest over pay.

• Thousands of Egyptians marched to the Defense Ministry on Friday to press demands for the generals to hand over power, a day before the first anniversary of President Hosni Mubarak’s fall.

• Hactivist group Anonymous took down the CIA government website on Friday.

As an activist for over seven years, I have witnessed numerous progressive organizations—even entire movements—fall apart due to internal conflict. Many blame this phenomenon on government infiltrators, which undoubtedly have played a role in sowing discontent and provoking violence within our ranks, but the presence of infiltrators alone cannot account for the general divisiveness that even the thoroughly inclusive Occupy movement has fallen prey to in its weaker moments.

Those in need of an example can look no further than what occurred in Oakland during the epic port shutdown last month. Conflict between Black Bloc anarchists and nonviolent activists propagated an easily exploitable rift in the movement during what should have been its finest hour.

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Egypt began its first round of balloting in November, one of the outcomes of the January uprising that ousted the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. This followed the military’s attempt to hold onto power by using draconian measures against renewed protests in Tahrir Square, where military and police killed 40 and injured 2,000. With two more rounds of voting remaining, it is small wonder that many Egyptians are afraid of what is to come. Early indications are that the Muslim Brotherhood will show well in free parliamentary elections, and the more doctrinaire Salafists will claim seats. Debates over the prospects for the Arab Awakening now rage as a result.

After a spellbindingly rapid series of events in the Middle East in the early months of this year, progress seems to have slowed. The liberal spirit that characterized those nonviolent revolutions appears to be dissipating in favor of old rivalries—as well as the specter that new forms of repression will simply replace their predecessors.

What’s happening now in Egypt and Tunisia—to say nothing of Bahrain and Syria—is also bringing back to the fore worn-out arguments claiming that nonviolent struggle works slowly, while violence is quick. Efficient, even.

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The execution last week of Troy Davis by the State of Georgia on the International Day of Peace was a painful blow to all sensitive people—really to all humanity, not to mention our prestige as a nation. Whatever may have been the “correctness” of the legal procedures leading up to it, it must seem to many no better than a legalized lynching.

Scholar René Girard, with his keen insights into the all-too-prevalent dynamic of scapegoating, ancient and modern (the latter more disguised but no less deadly), often cited lynching as a thinly disguised institutional form of that deadly reflex held over from (even) more barbaric times. By the sheer irrationality of its logic, the death penalty in the United States (and wherever else it is held over) must qualify as ritual. Homicides slightly increase in states where the penalty is reintroduced, and killing in order to show that killing is wrong does not deserve the name of logic.

A California prisoner not long ago who had gotten on in years waiting his turn on death row and had a heart condition by the time it came, told a guard on his way to his execution not to bother reviving him if he had an attack. “Of course we’ll revive you,” the official quickly rejoined, “we absolutely believe in the sanctity of life.”

In fact, we would maintain, all violence is irrational, which is why it is always counterproductive in the long run—and why it can be overcome despite its apparent ubiquity. Truth and nonviolence will overcome unreason and violence if we understand properly how to engage its power.

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

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

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When a country is shaken by violence, most people expect it to react in kind with force. We’re certainly reminded of that now, as we in the US approach the tenth anniversaries, respectively, of the 9/11 attacks and the hot-on-the-heels launching of the War on Terror. So what about the most recent act of terrorism in the news—Anders Behring Breivik’s rampage in Norway?

I was struck by a comment left here at Waging Nonviolence the other day by Susanne Kromberg, who wrote, “I am a Norwegian who is vainly trying to get The New York Times to cover the passive resistance that has sprung up in Norway as Norwegians under good leadership decide to demonstrate that only love is powerful enough to overcome hatred.” I didn’t know Susanne personally, but I wrote to her and asked to hear more.

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Helen Epstein’s new essay in the New York Review of Books begins by stating, clear as day, the disastrous violence of incarceration in the United States:

America’s prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in this country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our incarceration rate is now higher than that of any other country in the world. Many, if not most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness and should be in treatment; a similar fraction is made up of children under eighteen. Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug-related charges. Of those, most have no history of violence or drug dealing, and were arrested mainly for possession of drugs.

Sexual and other forms of abuse in prison are common, reported by some 20 percent of inmates. These “monster factories,” as the lawyer and author Sunny Schwartz calls them, do little to break the cycle of violence in society and may even accelerate it. Roughly two thirds of those released from US jails and prisons end up back inside within three years. Some studies suggest that the experience of imprisonment can be so brutal and humiliating that it actually makes men, in particular, harder and meaner, so that the crimes they commit the next time around are even worse than what got them incarcerated in the first place.

Sunny Schwartz, says Epstein, developed a program at the San Francisco County Jail in San Bruno, California based on the principles of restorative justice.

Restorative justice, as Schwartz explains it, is based on the concept prevalent in more traditional societies that offenders must also try to repair, as far as possible, the harm they have caused others.

The program has had some success, but Epstein makes abundantly clear that the tragic condition of the prison system cannot simply be resolved from within. They are part of a wider web of racism, policing policy, illegal drug trade, underinvestment in urban education, and so much more.

Restorative justice, it appears, can’t be just a one-way street. Yes, an offender should try to repair the harm done to his or her victims. But so also the society has to bear responsibility for the subtler violence that helped bring about the crime. There must be both personal and collective reparation. Neither can truly happen, I suspect, without the other.

I recently spoke with Jennifer Llewellyn, a leading restorative justice theorist in Canada, who told me about her new—and necessary—effort to extend the concept beyond criminal justice to state-level politics and diplomacy. Keep an eye out for that.