Tired of the same old war promotion?

We read in scholarly studies in the field of communications that our papers of record feature analysis after analysis justifying war, justifying bombing, justifying enforcing no fly zones with yet more bombs. We read that Obama hestitated on Syria and allowed millions of ruined lives. We read that Libya was the exemplar of presidential conduct, liberating oppressed people with a few sorties.

Hogwash.

What methods of conflict management did the opposition choose? How serious was the initial repression of protest? What was the response of the protesters and their external friends? How did all that work out?

Ben Ali in Tunisia was the first down in Arab Spring. Then Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Both were clients of the US, both jailed journalists and clamped down on dissidents, including torture. Obama wisely STFU (kept quiet). US lack of interference allowed civil society to win.

Almost immediately the uprising spread to Syria and Libya and suddenly Obama was loudly declaiming about it all, much to the detriment of everyone on the ground. Colonel Qaddafi was the most despised US enemy in the MENA (Middle East-North Africa) and the previous despised enemy--Saddam Hussein--suffered a horrific endgame fate. As these known enemies of the US thought it through, they realized they might not be afforded the golden parachute of Ben Ali. As it went down, Osama bin Laden was added to that image-of-terrible-death in the middle of Arab Spring, on May 2. Then when Qaddafi was slaughtered, Assad knew what he had to do, slaughter all opposition. So instead of focusing our causal headlamp on US backfiring violence, we instead blast Obama for not attacking Syria.

Where is the peace scholarship on Libya and the effect of Obama's disastrous bombing policy? Mostly MIA. Instead of noting that Libya is now a failed state exporting jihadis to Europe, having killed the US ambassador Christopher Stevens, we read that it was "decisive" and a military success.

The relative costs of these uprisings have been overlooked by most, with some public peace intellectual exceptions, such as Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who point out in Foreign Affairs that the nonviolent Arab Springs were costly but the violent uprisings have been orders of magnitude worse, with zero positive results.

Tunisa, 300 dead; Egypt, 900 dead; Libya, 30,000 dead; Syria, 150,000 dead plus nine million refugees internally and crossborder. Really? We can't see a difference?

The moral rhetoric justifying military responses is bankrupt. It never ends. Major media sources these people day and night. We need Chenoweth, Stephan, Patrick Coy, Cris Toffolo, Elavie Ndura, Linda Johnston, Michael Nagler, Erin Niemela, Lawrence Wittner, Rachel Cunliffe, Patrick Hiller, Laura Finley, and many many more peace intellectuals in the major media, not the same tired losers who cost blood and treasure.

Can we tell our media to help instead of being dupes? That would be the best start we could make.

Memorial Day seized for peace

Remember Armistice Day? No, of course not; it was hijacked by the militarists and transmogrified into Veterans Day. A peace holiday stolen and flipped to war.

Remember Mothers Day, the day when, in 1872, Julia Ward Howe issued a proclamation, an appeal, to all mothers of the world? Now, instead of the radical peace holiday of its origins, we find it a sentimental Hallmark holiday, free of all thought except thanks, Mom, for sacrificing your full humanity so you could enable your sons to achieve their dreams. 'Preciate it.

OK, fine. Thirty years ago, some of us decided to make a move the other way. We chose Memorial Day in 1985 as a day of nonviolent resistance to militarism, and as a day to memorialize past, current, and future civilian victims of war. Yes, civilians. Remember them, war hawks? They are forgotten on all your war days, even though the vast majority of those who die at the hands of warriors are not, in fact, other warriors, they are civilians.

We did our commemoration at a thermonuclear command center in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a facility opposed, in counted official referenda votes, by more than 80 percent of the citizens of the UP. It was linked to another command center in Wisconsin, where the overwhelming majority of citizens and their elected officials also opposed that facility. Further, just three years prior, in the largest exercise of direct democracy in US history, the citizenry of almost half the states--every state except one (Arizona) in which the issue could be on the ballot--voted overwhelmingly to call for a nuclear freeze.

The original transmitter in Wisconsin linked by underground cable to the Michigan site.

Democracy had spoken; the Pentagon and President Reagan flouted that voice of the people, so we did our level best to act in nonviolent resistance to the anti-democratic nature of our own military and Commander-in-Chief. Four were arrested in nonviolent blockade of the military base. I went out with some hand tools, dismantled a portion of the command center, and turned myself in at the sheriff's office the next morning (had to enjoy some last pizza and beer with peace buddies before going to prison for an indeterminate period of time).

Does it get any more sentimental than that? Memorial Day 2015 is my personal 30th anniversary of my First Felony for Peace celebration. This time I'll have pizza with some peace families and enjoy my role as peace grandpa.

My country claims to be spreading democracy. But it takes all of us, on the ground, in civil society, to reify that, to renew it, to make sure that we practice what we preach, and we stop regarding war and warriors and bombs and guns as tools of democracy. The best tools are the nonviolent actions and commitments from our people.

We see the results here and abroad. Our violence, our bombs, our warriors, have produced ISIS. The harder we act, the more we kill, the greater the pushback. It took the lying, rogue Bush regime and the mighty American military killing enormous numbers of Muslims to bring back a caliphate, and yet the call is for more bombing, ground troops, more expense and destruction. Perhaps it's time to try a new path that might actually work. I am sick of Memorial Day glorifying war and honoring those who kill. They are killing noncombatants and turning even more noncombatants into violent insurgents. Time for more Peace Memorials and no more war memorials.

Glimmers of justice in the justice system

Does the US justice system work? Yes, if you are in the one percent. Yes, if you are a white cop. Yes, if you are white and your adversary is not. But that is not the story we hear from elites. They control the government. They control corporate media. It's not a conspiracy; it's simple self-aggrandizement, self-interest, self-absorption by people who have been getting away with a great deal for a long time. It's time to stop letting them control our minds.

For us to keep faith, they have to appear to give us one now and then. They did today, May 8, 2015, at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, when the three-judge Appellate Panel reversed the lower court's conviction of 85-year-old Megan Rice, a nonviolent nun, and two of her nonviolent co-defendants, Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, all three of whom have been incarcerated since they spraypainted messages of peace on a nuclear weapons facility 28 July 2012, nearly three years ago, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Michael, Sr. Megan, Greg just before prison

The Sixth Circuit ordered resentencing on a lesser charge--depredation of government property--which will almost certainly mean the three will be free to go just as soon as that resentencing happens.

Lions 500, Christians 1. Yay!

I'm a long-time friend of Greg, and his amazing wife Michele Naar-Obed. They are amongst the most dedicated, peaceful, faithful people I've ever known. I will be so happy when they are reunited. They have been separated by their resistance to war and nuclear bombs for much of their married life, with one or another in prison for nonviolent resistance or Michele off to work for peace in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams, where she was very nearly killed. They shared the raising of their daughter Rachel with the peace community, Sister Carol Gilbert more than any of the rest of us. I met Rachel when she was a curly-headed four-year-old, mom Michele just out of prison for hammering on a nuclear missile. We went canoeing. I got her a little Barney dinosaur life jacket.

I've been honored to host Sister Megan Rice a little bit in my peace house. She is a driving peaceforce of nature, gentle as the stream that rounds and polishes the jagged rocks of militarism. We are pen pals now.

One of the best observations I've seen on a justice system was in the film A Dry White Season, a tough one to watch about apartheid, made when apartheid was at its most furious worst, in the 1980s, starring Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando. Watch this scene and then, if you want some sense of how elated I feel at this rare indeed court ruling, pay attention at about 3:20 in this 1980 Peter Gabriel song. "You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire. Once the wind begins to catch, the flames just go up higher." Another great version (with the best lines at about 3:35), also from during apartheid, making it urgent, not just nostalgic. Perhaps the candle of resistance is approaching inextinguishable flame. I'm not sure how many hundreds of years of prison we who have spit in the eye of the nuclear beast have collectively served, but we are ready for more victories. We want nukes to go the way of apartheid. Gone.

My own history is that I have done two of these acts of direct disarmament, in my case dismantling a portion of a thermonuclear command facility. The first time it took the jury 13 minutes to convict me. I learned. I went out again and this time got some of the greatest lawyers possible. My co-defendant and I faced 15 years in prison and our amazing legal team worked for four months while we sat in jail awaiting trial. They beat the major charge--sabotage--for exactly the same reasons the Sixth Circuit just vacated the conviction for that charge, which is that none of us interfered with the defense of the nation. We addressed the most unsoldierly weapons ever invented--weapons that are far far far more destructive to civilians than to the military--and the courts had to recognize that if the lawyers manage to get the evidence actually admitted.

Congratulations, Sister Megan, Michael, and Greg!

Transforming the language of the unheard to persuasive and heard

When cops kill unarmed people of color what is the most effective way for an outraged community to address that ultimate injustice? Shoot back? Plead on our knees? Burn it down? Ignore it and hope it fixes itself?

The problems those movements wrestled with have ranged from the lack of dignity to outright murder and everything in between. None of our history is crystal clear and unambiguous; it is a complex, historically deep story with illimitable factors. Grand proclamations are wonderful rhetoric but tend to hide competing narratives of truth.

So here is a modest assertion: The movements that have achieved change in the US have generally been nonviolent.

Yeah, but what if we all rose up? asks the young angry one (full disclosure: 47 years ago I became one of the angry young ones for several years). We could make any change we want.

True. So if we know that if we all rose up we could make it so, why use violence?

Well, says the justifiably outraged one, burning down a few buildings is just a natural expression of the righteous rage we should all feel. Even your Dr. King said that the riot is the language of the unheard.

Again, you are right. However, two points may add to your view. One, there are always multiple natural expressions to any phenomenon, so why choose the one that will set you back instead of one that will move you forward? Two, Dr. King certainly did make that exact acknowledgement after saying that he felt that riots were the wrong way forward. Using a handful of his words out of context is grossly misleading, some might say effectively spreading falsehoods. He was being compassionate but he also wanted to be strategic and he was always clear that his moral and strategic selves were in alignment that nonviolence is the best method of conflict management. He told Mike Wallace:
I will never change in my basic idea that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. I think for the Negro to turn to violence would be both impractical and immoral.

Those who work hard to change how police act and react, to their murderous outbursts, are absolutely justified in rioting. Justifying most violent behavior is easy. But historically we overwhelmingly see that those riots are setbacks, they postpone the day when we can expect proper community policing equally in all communities. This is not a moral judgment, just my view as an analyst. As the father of two African American men I confess it is more strongly moral; rioters make my sons less safe. So do those who are apathetic. I argue that Dr. King helped lead many changes successfully and if we want to ask WWMD? the answer is that he would be out in the street with robust nonviolence. He would be speaking in greatly inspirational ways, urging strong and confrontive nonviolence. The ultimate irreducible mandate of nonviolence always has been and continues to be:
Heighten the confrontation and deepen the invitation.

It's the law--look it up

This week, the first week in April 2015, Marxist insurgents in Turkey gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a gift. First, they attacked and killed a prosecutor in Istanbul. Then one of them attacked a police officer in the same city.

A gift? 

Certainly. Erdogan's immediate response was to vow to hunt down the "dark forces" behind the two attacks. He now has justification for cracking down on his political opposition using any methods at all. 

Or does he?

Turkish activists showed that they do have a nonviolent civil society opposition with the beginnings of a large and disciplined force with commitment and resiliency. They demonstrated that beginning 28 May 2013 with a simple protest in Gezi Park in Istanbul, a protest of the government plans to bulldoze that park, but the protest quickly widened to oppose the increasing Islamisation of the country under Erdogan's more and more brutal rule. Eventually, an estimated 3.5 million of Turkey's 80 million people showed up in parks and encampments in some 90 locations in Turkey and in dozens of foreign towns featuring Turks in diaspora. 

Nonviolent Law #1: All violence backfires. 

So, while the opposition to Erdogan was recognized as almost entirely nonviolent, and even though the previous research on many other stuggles over the past century showed that the 3.5 million sustaining participants ought to have been enough to cause the end of the Erdogan regime, he clung to power and indeed is more Islamic and more draconian than ever. 

Turkish police and a demonstrator: Photo from twitter.com user @CemSa

The failure in Turkey is not unrelated to the context of violence backfiring from another source, the US and Europe. Muslims everywhere came under great and increasing pressure to regard the US and much of Europe as the enemy when Bush and Cheney lied to justify invading Iraq. The massive war crimes against that ironically fairly secular Muslim country have changed all the games, drawing the fastest growing religion on Earth toward a clash of civilizations faster and faster, leaving us looking at (and bombing) the new self-annointed caliphate under ISIS. Any country with a Muslim majority is now being sucked toward that clash and Muslims all over the world are vulnerable to the cycle of backfiring violence. Turkey, more committed historically to secularism than any Muslim majority country, is fast losing that rational, democratic, enlightened nature too, which is a true pity.

Humanists, peace-lovers, and liberals across the board have argued against and dismissed the Huntington notion of a clash of civilizations, but it's being created by our seemingly endless militarism, great exceptions like the new nuclear deal with Iran notwithstanding. It is painful to watch the stuck-in-the-ditch-of-violence approach as it either outright fails or manages to create an even larger problem each and every time. It. Never. Fixes. The. Problem. Nev ver. 

And so those who dismiss nonviolence as a western idea and who point to the general failure of Arab Spring and its sequelae such as Gezi Park really need to answer for the other half of the equation, that is, that violence is a western thing. Britain violently invaded and colonized Iraq in the early 20th century. The US not only overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran but then supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in its 1980s war on Iran, including supplying Saddam with the ingredients for chemical weapons, which he used against Iranians and his own Kurdish people (and which Iranian hardliners evoke to trump the 1979 hostage situation evoked by US hardliners). The US supports a Saudi royal family that is astonishingly misogynist and also conducts frequent beheadings in public. We support the counter-revolutionary brutal government in Egypt and we've massively armed Israel every year for decades with zero strings attached, no matter what their human and civil rights record. Our violence is utterly western. 

Nonviolent Law #2: All rulers are vulerable to committed nonviolent resistance.

It may well be that the autocratic governments of the region--from the royals in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Qatar or Bahrain to the generals in Egypt or the theocracy in Iran--are less vulnerable to nonviolence, requiring larger numbers, more discipline, and greater endurance than some other countries that fell to mass nonviolent movements. If so, then that is what is required. All despots can be taken down with nonviolence, but it may take that additional percent of the populace and additional period of time. And anyone outside the country in question needs to be very careful not to exacerbate the problem by getting directly involved except at the request of the actual people on the ground in their own country. 

We need a whole living body of law devoted to nonviolence. Research and practice, reflection and study, adaptation and commitment, analysis and innovation--these will conspire to write the entire corpus. Let's keep it going. It is what gives hope in the face of growing ignorance on all sides. 

Communication or verbal attack? Managing the sympathy gap

When a dictator (or cop, or boss, or whomever) overpowers you and hurts you, or attacks your friends and harms them, do you react with verbal attack? Do you engage in character assassination? If you do, is that violent or nonviolent?

It is neither. Nonviolent communication is a tough act but it is strategic. Verbally throwing down and launching ad hominem assaults is not violent, but it is not nonviolent. Some analysts call it "not violent," a sort of junk category into which they toss behavior that does not advance a cause, a campaign, or a movement, but is not physically violent. Some call it verbal violence. Whatever we call it, that sort of behavior is not strategic. It tends to produce more oppressive violence and it tends to dry up public sympathy for those who use that sort of pugnacious language.

Nonviolent communication, wrote the late Marshall Rosenberg (2003), "guides us in reframing how we express ourselves and hear others. Instead of habitual, automatic reactions, our words become conscious responses based firmly on awareness of what we are perceiving, feeling, and wanting. We are led to express ourselves with honesty and clarity, while simultaneously paying others a respectful and empathic attention" (p. 3).

Some of you are naturally great at this. Some of us need daily, even hourly, reminders. I certainly struggle with it when I'm outraged by hurtful conduct. My outrage is proportional to the gap between the level of hurt and the innocence of the victim. That gap is widest and open longest when the response is assertive nonviolent communication. That sympathy gap can shut fast if actual violence is the response but will also narrow significantly if the response is some sort of snarling reaction instead of assertive nonviolent communication.

Do brutes deserve nonviolent communication? Probably not. Do you want to build your movement for justice, for freedom, for environmental protection, for peace? Then be careful not to start closing that gap. The quintessential gap-slam came when the US was attacked on 9.11.01 and pretty much the entire world expressed dismay and sympathy until 7 October when the empire struck back. Since then it's been all downhill to ISIS. On a smaller but quite important scale, we saw the sympathy gap narrow significantly after the Ferguson, Missouri policeman murdered Michael Brown and nonviolent protests gave way to riots. The sympathy gap took a big hit in the Eric Garner chokehold murder when two NYPD officers were in turn murdered by an African American fellow who used social media before the murders to establish his motive and intent as related to the uprising against police violence.

Direct violence is the fastest and most certain way to smash the sympathy, but even verbal violence--even just hate-filled facial expressions and angry chanting--will start to close that gap and that gap is always directly related to recruitment of both supporters and activists. Using anything but strategically sound nonviolent communication is like leaving power and influence on the table. Someone else will grab it. Don't let them.

References

Rosenberg, M. B. (2003). Nonviolent communication: A language of life (2^nd ed.). Encinitas CA: PuddleDancer Press.

Death cults and marginalization

When I was just 13 years old, I started refusing to go to church with my mother and sisters. It was a church I had gone to all my young life. I had prayed hard. A lot. I tried to believe. It was, in my young eyes, just hypocritical. Later, I would come to call it a bizarre cult. I was raised Christian Scientist, following Mary Baker Eddy. The entire experience was due to my great grandmother, at age 16--who was born just five years after Lincoln was shot--being "cured" by Christian Science.

So, outside of that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

All religion in my family was intense and matriarchal. My grandfathers were both Catholic but I set no foot in a Catholic church until great grandfathers and others died. My father was a sketchy Lutheran because his mother was, and I have never once been in a Lutheran church. All that was irrelevant. I was a child in that family so I was a Christian Scientist because my mother, her mother, and her mother were. I had no use for doctors nor of medicine. Prayer would heal me. I was a perfect child of God. I was made in God's image and likeness.

Right.

My father let my mother take me to Christian Science church every Sunday. I liked the other kids. I strongly disliked most of the Sunday School teachers. Indeed, they were the ones who made me understand the hypocrisy.

But my father would not countenance the cultlike idiocy that many Christian Scientists practice, eschewing medicine. He made us get our shots and doctors' appointments. He kept it sane. When the notions of Christian Science are followed in any fundamentalist sense, people die needlessly. I would not generally call them a death cult but their reason-free faith produces pain and death that I saw up close and felt personally. They are marginalized by a culture that has enough faith in actual science and enough faith in the separation of church and state to allow this bizarre behavior in all but the most extreme cases, and the law even stays out of those, mostly.

How I wish my father could help out ISIS idiots today. They are like Christian Scientists on some cocktail of meth, crack, big guns, charisma, steroids, and head-banging diminished capacity. They say they want to take the world back to the seventh century and as for the end of the world, bring it on. They are emotional children without capacity for grown-up empathy nor diversity of thought. They literally have a capital punishment in mind and intent for much of the world.

Abu Mohamed al-Adnani said any opportunity to "shed a drop of blood" should be taken

And we do see that, with the stated intent, goals, and territory controlled by ISIS, they do want and intend to kill millions, perhaps billions, of humans. They currently control areas comprising some eight million people. They have taken areas in Iraq, Syria, Lybia, and are eyeballing Sicily. Italy wet its pants recently, and for good reason.

So? How can humankind stop this ghastly infestation?

We know violence doesn't work. Indeed, arguably, our violence, however justified by our doctrines, has produced the widespread ISIS terrorheart compassionless rage and urge to return to the glory years of a few centuries ago. So let's imagine that we abjure violence, that we see the necessity of inventing or synthesizing existing methods of engagement that use any and all methods except violence. Rather than the complex war machine with destruction as its practice and threat, what are elements of alternatives?

• negotiation
• stop all arms transfers to the region
• seize assets, including financial assets, of the terrorists and all their people
• promise no further use of military methods
• close US military bases in the region
• arrest and try ISIS personnel, even by abduction if necessary (Simon Wiesenthal model)
• massive support for nonviolent civil society organizations in the region
• promote peace education throughout region
• promote positive development in region
• promote treaties with all state and nonstate actors in the region to stop all violence
• empower the UN
• support interfaith initiatives in the region
• end import of oil from the region
• model and support transparency
• model and support environmental protection
• model and support indigenous sovereignty
• accept that the people and powers in the region will redraw their own maps that the European cartographers redrew for them during the age of colonialism and imperialism
• promote reconciliation
• promote reparations from countries that have benefitted unfairly from the oil found in the region
• elect US politicians who are smart doves instead of kneejerk hawks

There are many more professional, developmental, academic, and civil society initiatives that could slow, blunt, stop and reverse the violence in the region. We might still see some sort of caliphate, but it could be contained using nonviolent methods much more surely than the failed and failing attacks back and forth that we see now. Let's stop being a death cult and see if others might notice and follow our lead. Let's reduce ISIS to the joke it should be.