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This episode of Nonviolence Radio welcomes Mel Duncan, the founding director of Nonviolent Peaceforce and longtime peace activist. Mel talks to Michael and Stephanie about a proposal to bring unarmed civilian protectors to Gaza. Unarmed civilian protection, or UCP — the practice of protecting vulnerable groups by having well trained unarmed people accompany them in areas of danger — has been shown to be extremely effective, even in places entrenched in violent conflict. Too often we are told by conventional history and mainstream media that the appropriate, and indeed, only ‘realistic’ response to violence is yet more violence. Mel encourages us to question this assumption:
When we’re presented with these kinds of situations [of violent conflict], we have been fed, so often, that the only way to deal with that is by bringing in the drones and the jets and the 2,000-pound bombs, that we see what is counterintuitive. When we see entire neighborhoods blown up, and blown up, and blown up and the response by policymakers is, let’s do it more, that’s counterintuitive. And so, what we’re doing is rational and intuitive and speaks to the core of the human spirit.
UCP, already practiced (though rarely reported) by organizations and individuals all over the world, has been successful in Sudan, in the Philippines, in Colombia — even in parts of Palestine — to name only a few places. UCP meets violence with the courage to create a different path, and in this reminds us of our core decency, kindness and the incredible strength we show when we choose to act from love.
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Stephanie: Greetings, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
On today’s episode, we speak with Mel Duncan. He’s the founding director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, as well as serving as their UN representative for six years. For over 25 years. Mel has been successfully applying nonviolent protection methods in violent areas around the world. He retired from Nonviolent Peaceforce last October, and he’s soon to be a great-grandfather.
We speak to him today on Nonviolence Radio about a proposal, it’s available at WagingNonviolence.org, it’s called, Now is the time to send unarmed peacekeepers to Gaza and the rest of Palestine.
The idea is that hundreds of unarmed civilian protectors could be quickly deployed to support Palestinians in securing a more sustainable peace than armed forces ever could. Mel has a concrete plan ready for when a ceasefire takes place. At the end of this interview, he provides information on how you can get involved. So, let’s turn now to Mel Duncan.
You have a radical proposal for the tensions in Israel-Palestine, and specifically in Gaza. And we’d love to talk to you about this. So, your proposal is on Waging Nonviolence. Tell us, what it is and what inspired you to write this?
Mel: I have a reasonable proposal for sustaining a ceasefire and creating a space so that there can be enough of a cessation of hostilities, that people on the ground can do the work that needs to be done to create a sustainable peace on the ground.
The radical ideas are bombing and killing and maiming and starving. Those are the radical ideas. To deal with violence nonviolently, in a sustainable way, is a very reasonable idea.
And so how it got started was last October, we convened the first meeting of the Community of Practice of organizations and people doing what’s come to be called unarmed civilian protection or accompaniment.
And there are now at least 61 organizations working in 30 areas of the world who do some form of nonviolent peacekeeping and civilian protection and violence prevention in areas of violent conflict. And I say “that we know of” because there are many more that we don’t know of, and the number continues to grow. Selkirk College in British Columbia is keeping a database of this and so that’s how we know that number.
Well, people came together to continue to grow this community of practice. That is an under-told story about people around the world who were stepping forward and protecting themselves and each other and preventing violence, using effective, now well-known, methods.
And we came together to enhance our respective abilities, to challenge each other, to tackle emerging issues that we’re all facing in terms of, how do we do this kind of work with increasing digital insecurity and with increasing climate violence.
But also, to help spread this methodology. Because it is something that many people can do. That’s part of the beauty of this. You don’t need millions of dollars. You don’t need a college education. You do need to be well. You do need to be organized. You do need to be disciplined. But lots and lots of people can, and do, this kind of work.
Most of the people from around the world who landed for that event in Geneva, landed on Oct. 7. And so, we came in hope, and we were greeted with horror – including the chair of the board of Nonviolent Peaceforce, Lucy Nusseibeh, who is from East Jerusalem. She had left Tel Aviv before there had been any news that morning and when she landed in Geneva, the news was all over the screens.
Now, that did not debilitate people who had come together because they were used to dealing with bloodshed. There were people landing, getting off planes from Ukraine, from Colombia, from Myanmar, from Guatemala. But it did give people a deeper sense of our purpose and our unity.
And it was really from there that the first proposals flowed. Lucy gave the opening remarks – Lucy Nusseibeh, the chair of Nonviolent Peaceforce’s board, from East Jerusalem – and she challenged us at that point to see what would be our potential of working in the occupied territories.
And so, it really has been since then that this proposal on a small scale has grown. What we’re looking at is how do we mobilize at least 100, if not more, people who are well-experienced now, at doing unarmed civilian protection in areas of violent conflict? How do we bring them together, and with a refresher training and then context training from Palestinians, deploy them to do exactly the work that is being called for by groups like the UN Security Council and the UN Human Rights Commission?
What they’re calling for are things like: the efficient and effective redistribution of humanitarian aid, that has, as we all know, has been blocked; the accompaniment of vulnerable people; inter-positioning between conflicting sides; protective presence in areas that are under threat; ceasefire monitoring.
Those are exactly the kind of methodologies that Peace Brigades International, that Community Peacemaking Teams, that Fellowship of Reconciliation, that Operation Dove, that Nonviolent Peaceforce, and so many other groups, have been doing in areas of violent conflict now for decades. And we have hundreds of people throughout the world. For example, Nonviolent Peaceforce has veterans from over 35 countries out there.
So, there are people who have worked in violent conflict, have done these methodologies, who could be mobilized quickly, trained and deployed at a fraction of any cost of any kind of military intervention that’s either being utilized or contemplated.
And so, at this point, we’re at the stage of sending an assessment team that will be working with colleagues on the West Bank and in Gaza to look at exactly how we might do our work and work with local partners. Because we only can do our work being strongly rooted in local communities, and to enhance those relationships and then to build on that.
Stephanie and Michael, I might add –—and I know that you are one of the few media outlets that reports on this — that there are now currently over a dozen groups that are at work in the West Bank right now doing this work. There are people, well-trained civilians, often Israelis, who are protecting Palestinians against attacks by settlers.
There are internationals who are coming, for example, with Operation Dove, or with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Project (that’s a part of the World Council of Churches), with the Jewish Center for Nonviolence that’s recruiting at this very moment for people to come for the olive harvest. And all of these groups are doing very good work. They’re all relatively small scale. They’re doing their work and it’s working. What we need to do is to support them, to help to expand that work, and then to push into Gaza as quickly as possible.
Michael: Mel, that was such a good synopsis, such a great overview. It’ll be very, very valuable. One question that I had was about getting in. It was hard to get into Gaza even before this all started, and it might not even be easy for foreign internationals to get into the West Bank, by my understanding. So, what is that situation, as far as you?
Mel: There are some internationals who are getting into the West Bank. As you know, that has become more and more difficult. But it is possible. Right now, there are very, very few internationals who are getting into Gaza. But there is broadening discussion on a ceasefire. And as that ceasefire conversation continues to grow, we have to look at what is there that will bring a sustainable period of calm during that ceasefire. When there is a ceasefire, there will be openings.
And there, right now, are calls to send in military peacekeepers. For example, the Arab League has a call to send military peacekeepers. That’s okay. I’ve worked a lot in the field with UN peacekeepers, Blue Helmets. I know what they can do, I know what they can’t do. They cannot do the kinds of things that I just listed. That is not what they’re trained to do. They are secundant military forces. They are trained to force people to stay apart. And they often are able to do that.
But as we’ve just seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo, after 20 years, the government of the Congo has asked them to leave because they don’t believe they’re successful. And in fact, Nonviolent Peaceforce, among others, are being asked to come in.
And if we are really going to look at what is going to create the space and lay the groundwork during a ceasefire, and I’m answering your question, Michael, by saying that ceasefires will create openings. And if we have not done this work of organizing and training and having people at the ready, then military forces by default will go in and that will extend the conflict.
Stephanie: I thought it was interesting in your proposal, how you answer this question about sending in UN peacekeepers, and you give the example from South Sudan about accompanying women and how he had been doing that work successfully without incident and supporting these women. And the UN peacekeepers said, no, sorry, we can’t do it. That’s too dangerous.
Mel: Yeah, that’s a very specific example of women going for firewood and leaving areas of, which really were Internally Displaced camps, but for various reasons were called protection of civilian areas in South Sudan. We were working in one where there were 100,000 people. Women had to leave every day to collect firewood, and then they had to come back and cook on these little, tiny plots of land where their families lived side by side by side.
And these are the areas that are being bombed in Gaza right now. I mean, I just can hardly stand to think about it. But anyway, these women in South Sudan would go out and collect firewood and routinely would be assaulted, either by government military, or by rebel forces. Rape is a weapon of war and is used all the time.
What we found is if we sent 3 to 5 of our unarmed civilian protectors with 10 to 20 women, they were never attacked. And that is true for a four-year period. We had one example of an attack where a soldier attacked one of our people, but we were gratefully able to de-escalate and get away. And he later came back and apologized when he sobered up. But it worked. No woman was assaulted during that four-year period.
I advocated from Bentiu, where that camp was, to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, to headquarters of the UN in New York, for their armed peacekeepers, of which they had, well, there were 14,000 armed peacekeepers in South Sudan at the time that they start accompanying women into the bush.
And I was told by – I’ll name names – Hervé Ladsous, who was the undersecretary general in charge of peacekeeping, that it was too dangerous. And he knew exactly what we were doing. And, you know, he’s right. On a very basic level, he’s right. Because the more armed that you are in that situation, the more you put yourself at risk. And our people were at less risk because they were unarmed.
Stephanie: Thank you for explaining that. I think also, you spent six years working as the Nonviolence Peaceforce rep at the United Nations. So, you also have some of these keen insights into the language of the UN when they say, then the Security Council made their proposal in March calling for a ceasefire, saying, we need to get food and supplies in.
And you said they didn’t leave it. They left it closed off or vague on how they would do that. And so, then they just become suggestions if you don’t have a concrete plan. And so, what you’re trying to do is to fill in that resolution with a call to be concrete about how we’re going to do that. And so, you’re offering some –
Mel: We can fill in all those blanks. And with the funding and political background, it can happen quickly.
Stephanie: Oh, here’s a tough question for you, maybe. But what makes you think that people are going to sign up to get killed. Because I think with, like recruiting for the military, there is a poverty draft. There’s nationalist nationalism, there’s civic duty.
With nonviolence, you can’t lie to people about what they’re going in for and what the risks really are. Right? So, what kind of support do you have for people as they’re contemplating possibly risking their lives?
Mel: There is a higher threshold of risk with this project than most. We don’t shy away from that. We’re very clear. People sign up because they believe in something bigger than themselves, and because they believe they can be a concrete part of creating a world that’s necessary for our grandchildren. And I can say now, great-grandchildren. And while it is risky, I want to be clear that we don’t do this work to make ourselves martyrs.
As the executive director of Nonviolent Peaceforce, Tiffany Easthom, says, martyrdom is not a sustainable strategy. So, we take our security extremely seriously. The lives of our civilian protectors are every bit as precious as the lives of anyone else. And so, we have very well-developed and strict security protocols, within a risky situation.
But when we recruit, we’re clear that if people are not interested in working within that kind of system, which does become hierarchical, if our security officer says this is not a day to go out, we don’t go out. That is not overridden. And it’s not like, oh, I feel like going out today then. I’ll go anyway.
These are very strict security protocols dealt upon analysis on the ground of what the conditions are at that moment which can only be done working closely with local partners. And that’s one of the reasons why that local connection is so important. So, while we do accept risk, we don’t invite it.
Michael: Well put.
Stephanie: Yeah. We’re saying that’s well put. And it seems like the purpose of hierarchy – in some way, the hierarchy can be misused in so many ways, which makes people want to rebel against it. But to be able to see when, in some situations, when you can really have trust in that process as well, I think, is really important. And I imagine that’s part of the training that people go through as well.
Mel: Yeah.
Stephanie: Is that right?
Mel: And our veterans respect it. It’s the rookies that don’t. But after you’ve been in the field for a year or two, you’d say, oh, I’m going to listen to her. She knows what’s going on out there. I’m going to listen.
Stephanie: And now, just a little bit more on the difference between working with local partners on the ground and coming in as third parties, because I imagine that there already are organizations in Gaza, for example, where my first thought was like, why not just train people who are already there on the ground?
So, I’d like to understand better why you want third parties in there, versus just finding ways of training people who are already there on the ground, who may be able to get vests on and do it without third parties arriving.
Mel: And you’re right that a lot of effective work is being done right now by local groups on the ground.
For example, as we’ve seen with the local humanitarian caravan groups that have been protecting the aid convoys going into Gaza and protecting them from being attacked by settlers on the West Bank. And that’s being done by Israelis and Palestinians working together. And that, first and foremost, is what needs to be done. And supporting that work is essential.
There’s also an international element that needs to be inserted to make sure that the whole world’s watching and knows about this and continues to know about this. We have to use the tools that are available to us very strategically. And often the understandings, the connections, the cultural literacy of local groups are totally unsurpassed.
And so, of course, that is the tool that’s necessary for the strategy. But there’s also times when the identities of outsiders provide protection. And so, when that’s called for, that has to be inserted. And oftentimes that’s mixed.
For example, in South Sudan now two thirds of the people working for Nonviolent Peaceforce are South Sudanese, and one third are international. And so, they work together. And you mix, and you deploy, who’s most effective to deal with the particular situation. So, you have to have all those tools at hand. And there are situations in Gaza when we’ve been talking to our colleagues where they say that local people just will not be able to protect at this moment. We will need to have that international presence there, and on an ongoing basis.
Michael: My comment was, what you said about weapons not protecting a person in this situation or many others, reminded me of an anecdote about Peace Pilgrim. She was wondering whether she should take a pistol as she went around the country, and she spoke to a friend of hers who was a police officer. And he said that is the most absurd, counterproductive thing you could possibly do.
You know, if you have a gun with you, you will be attracting trouble. So now we’re now seeing this on a big scale. That was my comment.
Mel: We will not go out in the field, or I shouldn’t say “we,” I retired from Nonviolent Peaceforce at the end of October. So, I’m working with the consortium on this proposal for Palestine.
But in the case of Nonviolent Peaceforce, we will not go out in the field with someone who’s armed.
And so that means we’ve shown up at some times, and there have been UN colleagues there who have had to have armed guards, and we’ve had to say, we can’t go with you. If you lose the arms, we can go with you. But if you have an armed guard, we can’t go with you.
Michael: So, what we’re doing is counterintuitive. And that leads me to another question. You talked about having the world know about this, Mel. And as you know, that’s been a dimension that has interested me from the get-go with Nonviolent Peaceforce. How do you do that? Do you have embedded media? Do you go back to your base at night and get out your laptops and write reports? How does that work? And how can we help you?
Mel: Yeah. You’re helping us right now. And we need to make sure that all of our people coming from throughout the world are connected into their local medias and are reporting back what’s happening. We need to continue to report to the media, who seem to be so caught up in this redemptive myth of violence. I don’t believe that what we’re doing is counterintuitive. I think it’s counterpropaganda. I think most of our daily life, we act on our intuitions, and we act nonviolently.
When we’re presented with these kinds of situations, we have been fed, so often, that the only way to deal with that is by bringing in the drones and the jets and the 2,000-pound bombs, that we see what is counterintuitive. When we see entire neighborhoods blown up, and blown up, and blown up. And the response by policymakers is, let’s do it more. That’s counterintuitive.
And so, what we’re doing is rational and intuitive and speaks to the core of the human spirit.
Michael: Wow. Beautiful. You know, Gandhiji was challenged during the period when there was an imminent threat of a Japanese invasion. And he actually said that someone challenged him and said, “What will you do if a Japanese bomber comes over the ashram? They can’t even see you.” And he said, I would go out and look up at that pilot with love. And that was Gandhi. Now we’re going to head for the air raid shelter and then love him from there.
But what this is leading me up to, Mel, is that it’s easier to see how third-party intervention and interposition would work when you have parties on the ground. But a lot of the damage that’s being done in Gaza is being done by robotic machines that are being guided from Tel Aviv. You know, how do we get to them?
Mel: Being guided by drone – yeah, the drones? This was part of what we were dealing with in Geneva and looking at, these looming threats of modern warfare, and that we need to continue to communicate the human reality and the human face that is at the receiving end of this vicious technology. And I know that that’s being done, and certainly not only when we saw what the drones did to our colleagues working with the World Central Kitchen, but also with the thousands of families that have been bombed and killed.
We need to continue to show what the human cost is of this and what we’ve seen, and this is somewhat of a tragic comment, was that often the human costs of internationals are, in public and the international domain, considered more valuable. And that’s even a hard sentence for me to get out.
But I go back, and some of your listeners will remember Ben Linder in Nicaragua in 1987. He was really the only American during that whole period. We started sending – ‘we,’ I mean ‘we’ was a big group – but I was in the first group that went in January of 1984 to the Nicaraguan border with Honduras during the Contra War.
During that seven-year period and through 1991, there was only one international that was ever killed. And that was Ben. And that was in 1987. His death did more to stimulate the numbers of internationals coming there and widening the protection that was happening. And no Nicaraguan was killed when there was an international presence.
And so, we do know that there’s power in that international presence. And I hold up Ben as a hero that many people have forgotten, but I never will. And again, we don’t do this to make ourselves martyrs. Thousands of people have done this work, and we will continue to do it. But we do accept that at times that some of us will die.
Stephanie: That seems like an important principle in nonviolence itself, though, is the willingness – when the dehumanization is intense enough, the willingness to offer one’s own life. That’s Nagler’s escalation curve. He’s sitting right next to me. He created it. So, it’s definitely a familiar dynamic.
And I just would like to ask about how people can contact you, get involved. What’s the organization holding this, or is it just a group of people or what?
Mel: Well, I’m very happy to say that Nonviolence International is partnering with us, and we do need money. Tax-deductible gifts can be made to Nonviolence International so that we can get our team to Palestine as quickly as possible.
We have a growing number of people who are stepping forward. We do have veterans of unarmed civilian protection who are contacting me and saying, you know, put me on the list. So that’s encouraging.
And some people I know well who are saying to include me; David Hartsough’s saying, include me. And to specifically answer questions, people can write to me at Mel Duncan1314@gmail.com, and I’ll be happy to interact with people. We can do this, and it is the time for us to do this. We really need to do this now.
Stephanie: Hey everyone, you’re here at Nonviolence Radio. I’m Stephanie, I’m here with Michael, my co-host, and we were just speaking with Mel Duncan about his proposal to scale up unarmed civilian protection work in the West Bank, in Gaza, in particular. If you want to find out more, you can contact Mel at the information that he provided at the end of his interview.
We turn next to the Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler.
Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler, and this is the Nonviolence Report for the end of June 2024.
I’d like to start off with, a report, a brief report on the Freedom Flotilla, a set of boats that is sailing to Gaza, as they did in 2010. This last weekend, they arrived in Ireland at their Cork harbor. After visiting various ports across Europe, the flotilla will sail to Gaza, that is the plan, where it will physically challenge Israel’s illegal maritime blockade of Gaza, using nonviolent tactics, as they say.
The flotilla is a project of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. A bunch of civil society organizations, everything from New Hampshire Peace Association, on across the country and across the world. Grassroots groups from many countries. And they’ve been challenging this illegal and inhumane blockade since 2011. When I say illegal, that is illegal in international law.
Now, this is a classic example of what might become a purely symbolic gesture, which doesn’t mean a useless one. They are aiming to, and this is a quote, “To raise awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people and enlist support from people along the way,” that is all the way across Europe, all those ports that they visited, “who can put pressure on their governments to demand a permanent ceasefire and help ensure self-determination and fulfillment of all human rights for the Palestinian people.” That’s a direct quote from their description of their activities.
So, I say it might be just symbolic because they might be stopped as they were in 2011, there were even some fatalities involved in that episode, and they still will have made visible part of the brutality of the blockade.
And that is indeed a classic nonviolent strategy. You offer to do something positive, something constructive. It’s blocked by the opposition, and that makes them look bad. And that way we really have what we like to call a win-win situation, or putting them in, what we call, a dilemma action. Where if they don’t stop us, we’ve made a tremendous advance, and if they do stop us, we’ve made a symbolic advance in terms of public opinion.
A lot of US participants have joined with thousands of volunteers from all over the world. One of those US participants was Ann Wright, whom we knew from resigning from the government over the attack on Iraq. Something which I’m going to get back to in the second.
And she has long been a part of what they call the International Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Which has been spending 14 years, despite killings and kidnappings of volunteers, despite confiscation of boats and supplies by the Israeli Navy. And in fact, one Palestinian recently said, “I really believe that this will help raise the spirits of the people of Gaza.”
In related news, there was a protest in Dublin recently, and they had a clever slogan and I like to share with you, “Respect Existence, or Expect Resistance.” Respect existence or expect resistance. Very clever.
Now there’s one United Nations official on Saturday who said that, “Brand new words are needed to adequately describe the devastation Israel has wrought across Gaza in its US backed assault. Tens of thousands of people across the globe have marched in solidarity with the Palestinians to demand an end to this, quote, ‘ongoing Nakba,’” Nakba being the Arabic word for catastrophe.
Now, recently, an Israeli activist who really impressed me with his insight and his brilliance, his name is Shir Hever. He gave a brilliant interview on Patreon and another one on what’s called the Electronic Intifada. Intifada being the term for resistance, or shaking off in Arabic.
Shir’s report really outlined and laid open for us to understand some of the complexities of the war, and especially the so-called BDS movement, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.
Now, here’s just a few of the takeaways from Shir’s report. About 200 young people have refused service, refused military service in Israel. And to refuse military service in that country is more of a statement and more of a powerful and courageous act than it would be, say, in the United States.
Now, half of them have just pretended to be crazy, as Shir himself did, or use some other devices to get out of military service. Okay, so sitting here from my point of view, I say that does slightly vitiate the effectiveness of that refusal. Ideally, okay, again, I’m not telling them they should have done this because I’m not in that position, and I’m not under that kind of threat.
But if they wanted it to have the maximum impact from the nonviolent point of view, they should not have pretended anything. They have said, “I refuse to participate in this immoral war,” and face the consequences, which are serious in Israel. And so, this kind of risk in this kind of suffering is where satyagraha really gets its power. Sometimes, if you wait as long as we’ve waited with this disastrous occupation, it does require very serious risk and suffering to turn it back.
On the other hand, and again, this is something that Shir Hever has been pointing out, Intel has canceled its plans to build a $25 billion plant in Israel. Partly because the workforce that would be available is now fighting in Gaza. Partly because it’s beginning to look as if the economy of that country has no future. It might collapse very soon.
There’s a coordinated campaign against McDonald’s because they handed out free lunches to soldiers at one point. That campaign is working. There’s a chain called Pret a Manger, “ready to eat,” which has also canceled plans to open a chain in Israel.
So, it is beginning to look, this is my observation, it’s beginning to look as if this war, which Israel is carrying out against Gaza, might, in fact, be the, somehow the, the end of that country. People have used even stronger terms for that, which I don’t think I’ll repeat here.
But I don’t think the country can sustain what it’s doing, even with the massive military and diplomatic support of the United States. What the Israelis will do, I am not sure. I really think it’s anybody’s guess. And I’m pretty sure that even they don’t know what they’re going to do.
It is kind of tragic, and it does illustrate how violence begets violence. They have a very war-like, hawkish regime. With Netanyahu as the Head of State, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, he really has a very, very hawkish, desperate, angry war cabinet. And no country can expect to have a sustainable future with that kind of leadership.
Unfortunately, it is that kind of leadership that comes forward to take power when countries are in a desperate situation. So, there you have it. That is the violence spiral.
Now, in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, a politician that I’ve been following with interest for quite some time, has caused quite a stir by speaking out against this “plausible genocide” that’s the language of the UN, and stating that as Prime Minister, their elections are coming up, he would not allow arms sales to Israel. Unfortunately, there has been a kind of blackout of his comment by the corporate media. There you have it, you know. They cannot always be trusted. We really, really need alternative media to know what’s happening in the world.
Again, to get back to that genocide issue. According to the International Court of Justice, Israel has killed almost 38,000 people, many of them children.
Now, let me go on to share some resources for all of us who are eager to try to do something for this situation. Paul Chappell, a good friend of ours and a peace colleague, and he has founded the Peace Literacy Institute in Southern California. And peace literacy is a very important subject. Very important way to help build peace in perhaps a future generation.
And the Peace Literacy Institute is now offering training in the form of online courses. Educators are being invited to viewings, and they have a new essay that has been published. So that’s from the Peace Literacy Institute.
Now, The Undercurrent is the name of an excellent movement newsletter, and they seem to be proliferating, these newsletters of ours. This one, The Undercurrent, I think, is being mailed out to subscribers of Waging Nonviolence. The recent issue is just packed with movement news, including news of a new film by Glen Alton, which will feature our friend George Lakey. And they have an interview by George talking about, his life and his activism. Looks like the title will be “Citizen George,” and it’s almost finished.
A few words now on the topic, which seems to always attract the most interest and attention. I’m not too comfortable with that fact, but it is a fact. Namely, the climate. And I’m not for a moment saying that this is not critically important. It’s not intersectional with all the straightforward peace news.
Bill McKibben, a very good friend of ours who was a reporter for The New Yorker, is rarely optimistic.
But he does have some good news now on the technology of green climate protection material. For example, the Chinese are researching a battery that would base on salt, sodium chloride, instead of silicone. I need hardly tell you there is a lot of sodium chloride in the world, and it’s not buried under Bolivian, the way lithium is.
I happen to be among those who, now growing number of people, have an electric vehicle. The problem with them is the range and the charging time. I usually have to plug mine in all night to get up to full charge. Well, with this battery that the Chinese are working on, it looks like you’ll be able to charge a car like mine in ten minutes. That makes it a much more attractive prospect, and we might just be on our way to phasing out fossil fuels, at least for transportation, which is a big chunk of the pollution that they create.
Now for a protest action, and I’m getting this from Rivera Sun. Greenpeace, that organization, has succeeded in pausing a gas drilling project. They did this by occupying an ocean drilling rig.
Meanwhile, Edinburgh, Scotland will no longer allow ads for airlines, sports utility vehicles, cruise ships and fossil fuels. And here in the US, Vermont has become the first state to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate impacts. And not a coincidence, perhaps, that Vermont is the state of Bernie Sanders.
Now, interestingly, still in our hemisphere, Mexico has elected its first female president, and she happens to be a climate scientist. So, these are glimmers of hope, and it’s really important to hold on to them and give ourselves encouragement in this long and arduous task of making immense change in the way we live, the way we do business, run our economy, and our conflicts.
Again, an International Week of Action has blockaded numerous private airports across Europe, and other places in the world, putting pressure on super wealthy people to pay attention to the climate crisis. Activists shut down the Mountain Valley pipeline construction for five hours here in the US. And a German hunger striker is demanding that the chancellor admit the urgency of the climate crisis. And that is just for starters. There are full roundups that you can find on the web that will give you other stories about successes in the climate struggle.
I’d like to share with you a quote from a book called Verbal First Aid by two women authors who are addressing the difficulties that young people and children are having mentally, and therefore physically, in our age.
Here’s the quote: “Science has demonstrated that words, thoughts, images, and memories actually generate an instantaneous cascade of chemicals, causing a physiological reaction within us. This reaction is most marked when we are in crisis, panic, fear, or pain. But the good news is that our thinking makes a very real difference. And not only for us, but for the people that we want to help.”
So, they’re encouraging us, and I’m getting back to the quote now, remember, what we think determines what we say and how we say it. What we say and how we say it determines to a great degree how we facilitate healing in ourselves and others.
I just wanted to add to this that now there’s a very active field of research in what’s called non-local consciousness. Which supports the whole model of a nonviolence effect on a deeper level than what these two authors, Judith Prager and Judith Acosta, are describing here.
And that is when, say for example, you put yourself into a nonviolence frame of mind by overcoming anger or fear that’s risen up in your consciousness, let’s say in the face of some kind of injustice. So, you go through that struggle and transform that fear or anger into a positive counterpart. Even before you act, your mind has made an impact on the social field.
And this is what is called non-local consciousness. Your consciousness directly affects, though perhaps not perceptibly, the consciousness of others. And as Prager and Acosta say here, once you’ve changed people’s consciousness, you’re going to change what they say and what they do.
An interesting example has come up now of what we always call the gray area in the field of nonviolent action. And that name of that gray area is property destruction. One of the things that makes property destruction less effective than other forms of nonviolent action is that you’re not changing people’s minds, you’re just thwarting them. You’re knocking the weapon out of their hands rather than persuading them to put it down.
Okay, let me be perfectly clear. There are times when you absolutely must do that in an emergency. But when you’re not in an emergency, it can seem like an easy way out to destroy property, be it a missile base or a missile or what have you. But it is not very effective in changing hearts and minds.
Now, the example that I want to share with you is not terribly destructive. I’m happy to say. Here it is. Two organizations, Extinction Rebellion, that I think we’ve mentioned before, and Scientist Rebellion, have sprayed black paint on several mega yachts in a marina port in protest of the eco, social, and climate crisis. These, you know, recreational vehicles are burning up carbon-based fuels in a way that’s completely unnecessary.
Other activists, in the meantime, stormed the port facilities with a banner. It said, “Fossil subsidies plus luxury tourism equals climate crisis plus drought.” And they marched along the docks. Now, I said this was not a terribly destructive form of property destruction. And that’s because it was biodegradable paint that could be washed off. So, I think they made their point without actually destroying property, which is a very good idea.
Here and there we have talked about a very disturbing aspect of violence in our world, particularly because it occurs among very young people. And that’s the question of bullying in schools. And most schools have adopted the traditional approach of blaming and punishing the ones who do the bullying. But, you know, there is a whole other approach to crime. In Switzerland, for example, they have adopted what they call a no blame approach.
They don’t do punishment. Instead, they focus on empathy, tolerance, and respect. And this is something that’s been done elsewhere as well, with great results, instead of being punished, the bully, used to call them that, are invited to help their victims. To help the bullied student. Now, this may sound counterintuitive if we adopt the normal approach towards violence that most people have these days, but in a 2008 study where they looked at 220 cases of bullying, this approach, what they’re calling the no blame approach, was successful in 192, or 87% of those cases. And in most of the schools it only took 2 or 3 weeks for the bullying to stop.
That is a very hopeful development, and I want to end with one other. There’s a group in Austria that’s calling itself Die letzte [German], which means The Last Generation. In other words, before climate destruction.
And this group has reminded me very much of the early days of the Greens. The Green Party in Germany, [German]. Because on their list of values, for example, the very first value is [German]. I’m doubly happy about this because [German] means nonviolence, and because it’s a very good, term for nonviolence. The first term that was a general use in Germany was [German], which meant the loss or absence of violence, but [German] means freedom from violence, which, I think, is much more graphic, very helpful.
So, what are these young people doing? We have established regular information evenings, trainings, protest marches, that’s inevitable, open gatherings, and they invite people to come and join them in their book clubs. And they have a popular European institution, the [unintelligible] table, where the whole family or a whole family of interested parties can get together for meals. And so, this is a good example of the younger generation stepping up.
Finally, I hope you have had the chance to see our film, “The Third Harmony.” And if you did, you saw some wonderful observations, especially about training and strategy, which were made by a Methodist Minister, Jim Lawson. He studied in India, and in many ways was an important leader, in fact, an architect, of the civil rights movement.
Well, Reverend Lawson has just passed on, on June 9th in Los Angeles at the age of 95. He was a true hero of the rising force of nonviolence. And we’re delighted to close our report by honoring him.
This has been Michael Nagler for the Nonviolence Report. I hope you benefited from this report, and it may have inspired you to look for more nonviolence news all around us in the coming weeks.
Stephanie: Hey, everybody, you’ve been here at Nonviolence Radio. We want to give a big shout-out to our mother station, KWMR, to all the people who work on the show, help make it possible, including Mark Armstrong, to Matt and Robin Watrous, thank you very much for your support, Annie Hewitt, Sophia Pechaty, Brian Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence, thank you. To everybody in the Pacific Network that helped syndicate the show, as well as our friends at KPCA in Petaluma. And to our guest today, Mel Duncan.
To you, all of our listeners, if you want to learn more about nonviolence, check us out at MettaCenter.org. That’s Metta with two T’s. You can find the show archived at NonviolenceRadio.org. And until the next time, everybody, please take care of one another. Bye.
Thank you all for this report and the dedicated people around the world who are working to change the way we settle conflicts. The nonviolent approach is what I hope to see become the standard of practice rather than the destruction and devastation that armed forces create in our world.
Judy Timmons, Nonviolent Peaceforce Midland, MI, USA