Hastings on nonviolence

Unrest in peace: Marv Davidov crosses over

2012-01-15T21:42:00.000-08:00

It was 1968. He was in his mid-30s and I was just 17, a young and new activist, fired up by exactly the same two issues that he worked on, and led us in, Civil Rights and ending the war on Vietnam. His ramshackle office was on the West Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, my hometown. I stopped in to find out more. He was alone, thick black hair, wide smile, stentorian yet intimately friendly voice, ready to give a youngster his time and explain what they were doing. More than two hours later, I finally left. In that period, he screened the new 'commercial' they were about to run on local television and described the support they were giving to African Americans living in extreme poverty in the Mississippi Delta country. He was patient and instructive, encouraging and generous.

Marv Davidov just crossed over. He was 80, giving interviews up to the end. He taught three generations of us to be better activists in his campaigns such as Liberty House, Honeywell Project and the resistance to Alliant Techsystems military manufacturing. Whoever is doing movement history or social change analysis and has a course on the use of humor, should have a unit on Marv "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Gefilte Fish" Davidov.

Marv led thousands of us in nonviolent resistance to Honeywell in the 1980s. They were making guidance components for Pershing II missiles and still making the infamous anti-personnel cluster bombs so ruinously cruel to civilians from Vietnam to El Salvador and then on to Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever Honeywell or its hand-off corporation, Alliant Techsystems, could peddle them to brutal governments.

When agents provocateurs infiltrated us in the 1960s they were the ones leading the way with bricks and stones, committing relatively minor acts of violence but managing to turn the public against the Honeywell Project. Marv never stopped his activism, but it took the aftermath of the first Plowshares action in September 1980, as the defendants in that one toured the country speaking, to reignite the Honeywell Project. Fr. Carl Kabat, in one of his wild talks (his fire-breathing only dampened by his foaming sputtering) challenged a Minneapolis crowd to do something. Sister Char Madigan asked what would be most helpful. Marv said, "How about restarting the Honeywell Project?" So they did.

Honeywell was one of the top Pentagon contractors, taking in $billions annually, running 13 factories in the Twin Cities area during the Vietnam War and they just kept selling those criminal weapons, a huge and powerful corporation. Marv the impoverished activist and a couple of nuns v a behemoth war corporation with plants and offices worldwide? Snort. As if. Honeywell had been eating well at the public trough for decades.

In a decade, Honeywell sold off almost all its military operations, denying publicly that grassroots activism was a factor. So the grassroots activism continued against the spin-off until they moved to Virginia. In other words, Marv or the ones who came after Marv won ever single struggle.

I was so happy that St. Thomas University's Peace Studies program put that old Jewish activist to work as an adjunct--Marv had no academic credentials, he was a living peace and justice movement encyclopedia who offered first-hand accounts to students of his actions and his friends actions, friends like Barbara Deming, Staughton Lynd, John Lewis, Diane Nash and many hundreds more--people who changed US history toward peace and justice in hundreds of ways. What a gift to those students.

Was Marv perfect? He was not. He was the Abbie Hoffman of Minneapolis, prone to bipolar disorder, and would work nearly 24-7 to get a big project done successfully and then would call and pour his heart out for hours, distraught by the deterioration of movement relationships. He had many of therapists--we heard Marv and we comforted him in his hours of need. We knew his heart was in for life and he needed us to hold that heart for him or it wouldn't work. We begged him to stop smoking. He told me, "Well, I know it's hurting me; I'm not schizophrenic about it, not like the war profiteers who are killing the Earth they live on." Good point, Marv.

If we had 1,000 Marv Davidovs the 1,000 rich and powerful ones who presume to control the lives of millions would have no chance. Marv created many young activists and so he lives on. He taught me things I learned nowhere else and now I pass them along to my students. Marv Davidov is dead--long live Marv Davidov!

Justice and nonviolence: Pair boards the ark of the moral universe

2012-01-13T03:50:00.000-08:00

How do we address conflict in ways that reduce violence and increase justice in human relationships? (Lederach, 2003, p. 20)

John Paul Lederach asks the key question for our field of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution. How we answer that question determines our future as a species.

Morally, the very least we can do is work to decrease violence. This makes justice possible because it it means that the citizenry can work democratically to seek justice rather than having a ruler use violence to impose his version of justice.

It is easy to wrestle with the question of violence and nonviolence. Nonviolence is vastly superior in every way. But to properly understand this, we need to grapple with the notion of justice, since we find so many misusing that term to justify horrific crimes.

Is the system of laws all that there is to the concept of justice? If so, we have achieved what some have called natural law, that is, law that aligns with some perfect cosmic, universal justice. In the era of the Lawgivers, the dictators who presumed personal juridical omnipotence, the likes of Hammurabi and Moses

claimed to have a hotline to God. They gave us versions of the retributive justice approach, an eye for an eye, which has informed the laws of many nations from East to West, North to South. No, my liberal friends, these precedent-setters were not just the progenitors of the philosophy of laws that have been self-inflicted in the West. They both arose in what we now call the--what?--Middle East. They gave us this extraordinarily cruel tool called the law and it is the basis of Roman-English Law as well as Sharia. What?! Yes, the foundations are the same.

No, I don't mean that Roman or English Law quotes on and on from the Qur'an, like Sharia Law does. But Mosaic Law starts with that twisted idea of justice--equal harm for harm and so does its later follow-on, Roman Law, as does its other even later scion, Sharia Law. While much is different, the bedrock of inflicting vengeance rather than seeking compensatory and relational repair is more or less equally in the building blocks of both. The corpus of Roman-English Law has really resisted more than accepted the influence of Jesus, that is, the idea of reconciliation, and of course Jesus is no real influence in Sharia Law either.

I am not arguing that a new model of justice, a restorative model, should be based on some faith in Christ, only that the idea of Jesus, at least as given in the Bible, would seem to align with many of the indigenous approaches to justice that focus on relational repair rather than meting out revenge as justice. Yes, Jesus lines up quite well with many indigenous philosophies of justice and seems to be fairly squarely opposed to the retributive models, whether they are other indigenous, Confucian, Roman-English, Sharia, or the dictatorship of the elite representatives of the proletariat as we have seen and continue to see in communist countries.

"The arc of the moral universe is long," said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "but it bends toward justice."

Looking at the universe through the lens of violence results in a very fuzzy image of justice. Looking at the universe through the lens of zero-sum (to the extent you win, I lose, and vice-versa) also results in a poor image of justice. But bending those lenses toward nonviolence and reconciliation slowly brings it all into proper Conflict Resolution, a clean vision of where we need to go. Thank you, Dr. King. May we all gain a more clear image of the path of nonviolence as it leads us toward a better future.

References

Lederach, John Paul (2003). The little book of conflict transformation. Intercourse, PA: Good Books..

Evolving away from extinction

2012-01-11T19:45:00.000-08:00

Conflict can be understood as the motor of change, that which keeps relationships and social structures honest, alive, and dynamically responsive to human needs, aspirations, and growth. (Lederach, 2003, p. 18).

When John Paul Lederach writes about conflict, he makes it sound like conflict is our BFF. Excuse us, John Paul--how were our wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq that which kept "relationships and social structures honest, alive, and dynamically responsive to human needs, aspirations, and growth"? When my neighbor with the barking dog tells me to go to hell, how is that conflict helpful at all?

What Lederach is really writing about--and what he practices in our society and all over the world, for decades--is conflict transformation, that is, a transition from the negative sorts of conflict to positive. That war can be transformed, though it would be best to intervene much, much earlier, to turn the path toward a constructive, productive conflict that produces keen insights in response to hard challenges. That should be the essence of democracy, the system that theoretically eliminates violence from politics because we peacefully transition with universal suffrage.

Where the Lederach model is so helpful is when we try to improve the essence of the best of democracy, which is not the tyranny of the majority, but rather the protection of the minority. Democracy is not supposed to be the dominant ethnic group deciding who can be discriminated against in a 'free' country. Lederach was writing about the escalation of conflict using methods that would generate social change where it was needed, which is almost impossible to achieve using anything except nonviolence and its higher levels of conflict skills.

When coercion is necessary to protect the vulnerable, it is most effectively accomplished using the Lederach thinking, so that the coercion isn't as likely to produce sustained resentment, but is rather more likely to produce wider appreciation for the stories and humanity of all parties to a conflict.

So, yes, conflict is our new BFF, if we use it to achieve more positive growth, structural nonviolence, a deeper mutual respect among conflictual parties, and a blunting and mitigation of the natural human desire for revenge. The only ones to get even with are those who helped you. Nonviolence can eliminate the revaunchist by making him reasonably satisfied and less desirous of sharing his pain, since no pain is inflicted with nonviolence. This is our evolutionary path, if we wish to see this evolutionary experiment continue.

References

Lederach, John Paul (2003). The little book of conflict transformation. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

Dear Warmongers: Re-assess your campaign

2012-01-04T00:44:00.000-08:00

Didn't you feel a little blip of happiness when Herman Cain decided to 're-assess' his campaign? Admit it, you got that little thrill today, too, right, when Rick Perry announced he was heading back to Texas to 're-assess' his campaign. According to The Washington Post, "The Texas governor’s campaign blanketed the Iowa airwaves with more than $4.5 million in TV ads -- more than any other candidate -- but came in fifth place, garnering only 10 percent of the vote as of late Tuesday." Shucks.

And now, finally, Americans have begun to respond to the long and persistent pressure from so many of us who have been criticizing the military budget for being destructive, bloated and obese for so long. Secretary Panetta announced that the New Normal for the Pentagon will be One War at a Time.

Just go re-assess your campaigns, warmongers.

OK, maybe I'm counting my war profiteering cuts before they actually take place. We will see how it actually plays out, when the actual Republican RomneyNominee starts attacking Obama for being a wuss on war. We may see a total reversal, though that would be sort of like ebola, which doesn't spread far because it spreads so fast that it kills off its hosts before they can live long enough to move much among potential victims. So far, our Pentagon budget has been more like AIDS, a slower killer of the economy.

In the midst of all this, as the Taliban opens an office to thinkpeace in Qatar (OMG!), the warmongers must be getting nervous. The only way to keep profits at that ebola level--which, it seems, they are now addicted to--is hot war. If I were Iran, I'd start taking the US blufftalk more seriously. The war profiteers loved the two-war strategy and now that it may be an addiction that we will no longer support because it's killing us, they have to arrange their wars Just So. One at a time.

So, Iran, we hope you back off. You are dealing with some greed-crazed warmakers and every stupid move you make strengthens the likes of Rick "Loose Nukes" Santorum. Yikes. We continue to try to take away their powerful hold over the economy and our taxes, but we are only making slow progress. Please re-assess your campaign to get The Bomb. We know, we know--it's nuclear apartheid that Israel has them, the US has them, and you are not allowed. But the right thing to do is to get rid of all of them, not build more to 'even out' the evil.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year that the people finally get the governments under control. There are some promising signs. Let's keep up the pressure.

A long lineage

2012-01-02T23:33:00.000-08:00

Talk to many young activists in the US and you would believe the world of grassroots politics really began with the Occupy movement. Right, before three months ago, nothing happened. I read a piece the other day by two young (or at least woefully inexperienced) activists who boasted that the Occupy movement was really something:

Despite the jeering of the corporate media, the Occupy movement is not going to fade away, burn out or be crushed like the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. The Occupy movement is going to change the world.

OK, then. I'll try to keep a grip on the safety rail.

On the other hand, what did that movement want? Did it achieve its goal? How hot is that, if most Americans could not even tell you what the goal of a movement might be?

Let's try to keep a bit of perspective.

It's true, the Civil Rights movement faded away. That's because it won civil rights everywhere it tried to. It was hijacked by the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers and succumbed to riots, so it was unable to continue its agenda, but every time any movement in the US goes violent it gets crushed. Otherwise, it usually wins.

The radical movement to fight homelessness was sort of started long before the 60s or 70s, but it did reasonably well--some towns much better than others, of course. Still, if the writers cared to look for it, that movement not only continues and often succeeds, it actually has developed institutions that address those issues. The combination of the Catholic Workers, the late Mitch Snyder and his Center for Creative Nonviolence, and in Portland, Oregon, Sisters of the Road Cafe, have spun off many other functioning alternative institutions that help.

The radical movement to end the war in Vietnam would have succeeded much earlier if it wouldn't have had all the 'radical' help from violent warmongering opponents of war, like the Weather Underground. Once again, get violent if you want to prompt the crushing of a movement.

The safe energy movement also had roots far before the 1970s, but that is the decade it got big. I see no sign that it has faded away, been crushed, or burned out. The battles continue, and have been ongoing all along. It's just a broad front, in case the hotshots from Occupy who wrote the bragging piece hadn't noticed. Oil, nukes, coal--even tar sands. We have been both fighting the bad actors and developing alternatives all along. It could be, however, that our young writers have failed to notice the multicolored thread that runs throughout these movements, going back to the 60s and 70s and much further.

I assume that because we only had some victories and have not completed the process of abolishing nuclear weaponry, the writers believe we have burned out, faded away, or have been crushed. Really? We have pressured governments pretty impressively from the grassroots side. We prodded them into the INF treaty in 1987 and into closing down plants and bases. Yes, we have more to do. Go get 'em, Occupy. We occupied them a lot, from Greenham Common to Seneca Falls, to our little peace camp in the north of Wisconsin. We have won our share of these struggles and welcome the newbies. We may be dying off, but we have not been crushed, faded away, or burned out. If all we have done doesn't enable you to finish the job, we vote to be disappointed.

The sustainability movement of the 1970s (and earlier) has grown, literally, into a massive organic agricultural system. The pups who wrote the piece have zero idea what we faced when we started organic farming all those decades ago. They clearly take those struggles for granted, if they've even thought about them.

The list goes on. Native Treaty Rights were essentially unheard of by the general public until the 1970s and many of them have now been restored, without discernible burnout or crushing or fading. Native activists continue to win more than they lose. I didn't see any Occupy statements about Native Rights (OK, I cannot keep up, I admit, and I would bet eventually they mentioned that issue in at least some towns).

We have a long, long history of grassroots movements in the world, in the US, and they didn't start, nor did they stop, in the 60s and 70s. That is poor thinking, ahistorical, and all of us should approach history with humility and a willingness to learn. When the youth start dissing the struggles that allowed them to start so far down the road, it is a demonstration of arrogance and hubris that suggests tough times ahead. When the youth launched the successful rebellion in war-torn Serbia, they did it with lots of energy and respect for all.

Gay rights have been a long, long struggle and that movement gets it. Young people, trust me, you would not recognize the world that Act Up and many other organizations have changed.

I hope Occupy does change the world. I hope they learn that others have too. We are a species that will suffer a great deal before we rise up, but rising up is what many many have done all along. We owe them. I'm old and may be personally fading, but the movements have been in play all along, as millions of us well know.

In a million dollar minute

2011-12-31T04:35:00.000-08:00

The Pentagon is currently charging the US taxpayers approximately $1.9 million per minute, 24/7/365 (24/7/366 in 2012). The American people are beginning to understand that this is a lot of money and that some of it might be better spent on other things. Y'think?

A glance at the graph showing the escalating per capita levels of US citizen (not taxpayer, we mean your 2 month-old daughter and your 83 year-old grandmother) mandatory commitment to paying for nuclear weapons pointed at...at....at the viability of the environment of planet Earth, for starters, is fairly overwhelming. We each, on average, pony up more than $4,000 each year to buy a range of services, largely devoted to forcing others to do what we want.

How it breaks down:

Budget Breakdown for 2012

Defense-related expenditure	2012 Budget request & Mandatory spending^[18]^[19]	Calculation^[20]^[21]
DOD spending	$707.5 billion	Base budget + "Overseas Contingency Operations"
FBI counter-terrorism	$2.7 billion	At least one-third FBI budget.
International Affairs	$5.6–$63.0 billion	At minimum, foreign arms sales. At most, entire State budget
Energy Department, defense-related	$21.8 billion
Veterans Affairs	$70.0 billion
Homeland Security	$46.9 billion
NASA, satellites	$3.5–$8.7 billion	Between 20% and 50% of NASA's total budget
Veterans pensions	$54.6 billion
Other defense-related mandatory spending	$8.2 billion
Interest on debt incurred in past wars	$109.1–$431.5 billion	Between 23% and 91% of total interest
Total Spending	$1.030–$1.415 trillion

Since the average US citizen pays approximately $8,500 in federal income taxes each year (again, this is deceptively low, since there are far fewer actual income tax payers than there are citizens), this means that half your income taxes, roughly, go to some aspect of the military. We can't put everyone to work, but we can pay for US bases in most of the nations on Earth. We can't have Medicare for all, but we can clutter space with military satellites. We are cutting public education and leaving our children in the lurch while we deploy thousands of troops to....Australia???

If the Occupy movement ever gets its focus, this is where you start. There is no greater single problem source than our military spending:

The more you spend on the military, the more you pollute.
The more you spend on the military, the fewer jobs you create or maintain.
The more you spend on the military, the less you can spend on the goods and services of life.

It is time. 2012 should be the year we get a grip on this. Resolved.

Resolved: We won't get fooled again

2011-12-30T08:29:00.000-08:00

The armed forces have fleeced the taxpayers for decades via confidence games like cost-plus and no-bid contracts. This is so egregious and the secret is so open that, for example, the navy even incorporates a 'confidence level'--that is, a percentage--that admits they have some, little, or no clue whether their projected costs for a weapon or any other item will be met--and if they do have a clue, they are not telling us.

This corrupt system rewards sloppy work and careless bidding by passing off all costs associated with either to the taxpayer. When I was in the carpenters union in Minneapolis a few decades ago as a young man, I was taught bidding and it was hammered home that a bid is a bid, not an estimate. If you submit a bid, and then sign a contract to deliver on that bid, you ate any cost overruns. Bidding was regarded as a serious science, as honest competition, not a game to entice an investor into a rat hole money suck. Too bad the American taxpayers aren't granted the same honest policies. When the newest class of gargantuan aircraft carriers is considered, for instance, the confidence level is officially 40 percent, meaning that there is a 60 percent chance the navy's projected figures are low--and that is by the navy's own reckoning. My challenge to the navy would be, show us a list of projects that have come in at projected price. Chances are the real world confidence numbers would be less than five percent. And many of the projects are so far off that costs can double, triple, or even worse, revealing the extreme scam of the entire process.

But even more basic is the need for all these weapons in the first place, something any politician or even Secretary of Defense notes at his or her peril. Walter Pincus has been writing about the military forever in The Washington Post--in the 1970s and 80s we used his investigative reporting to bolster our case to shut down a navy nuclear command facility (which we did)--and he notes this threat to common sense:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates touched that third rail in May 2010 when he told a Navy audience that although the plan was to use 11 carrier strike groups through 2040, the service should “consider the massive over-match the U.S. already enjoys.” He then asked: “Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one? Any future plans must address these realities.”

Gates was instantly attacked and condemned by politicians and navy brass for his stumble toward honesty. The realities to which he referred are firmly rejected by the conflict industry--the elite class of those who profit from war or war preparation. The contractors don't have to launch the attack directly; they have underwritten the campaigns of the congressional members who, they know, will take up that cudgel.

Meanwhile, a look through a typical day's Pentagon contracts--here is a list of those for 29 December 2011--gives a glimmer to many related problems.

The daily hemorrhage of the money taken directly from your paycheck is simply gushing. Contracts start at more than $100 million and go on and on from there. This is money committed sometimes well into the future, burdening us all for a long time.
Many of the contracts are add-ons to so-called fixed-price bids approved in the past. They are another form of corruption, another path to cost-plus uncontrolled spending, and they are not put out to open bidding, but simply awarded to the original contractor with a giant Approved As Usual rubber stamp.
The war system is so elaborate and has its tentacles around so many pieces on the board--corporate media, electoral politics, university research, local economies--that you can see its pervasive grip in the intentional diversity of its contracting locales, even including my 'peace' town, Portland, Oregon. This is how they guarantee their votes. What member of Congress will vote against the DoD budget and risk howling outrage over "lost" $millions in fed spending in the district? When you have a budget of $1 trillion it's easy to make sure than all 435 congressional districts are milking that one. Sure, many districts ring up massive net losses (tax money sent in to the Pentagon v tax money spent by the Pentagon in the district), but that doesn't quiet the special interests who are pocketing the porcine profits of death.

To help us understand all these numbers and trade-offs, the National "Yes--We're Wonks" Priorities Project creates tools and charts, the basic one being the discretionary budget 'pie' (see above). Yes, NPP is 'over-matched' by the Pentagon propaganda machine, but they hold their own with far fewer resources. They are one of the best of our ground-truthing organizations.

It is time to clean house. The war profiteers have learned how to game us. They are the engine and we are the fuel. This is wrong. The ship of state should not be an aircraft carrier. We have other ways to relate to the people of planet Earth and 2012 should be the year we advance the latter and scuttle the former.

Irrational national belief and grief

2011-12-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

Propaganda. That's what Hugo Chavez uses to cover his ugly tracks when he imprisons judges who don't rule the way he wants. That's what Fidel used for decades of enslaving the Cuban people and making them feel happy to be in chains. Josef Goebbels was the master of propaganda, turning an otherwise educated and cultured nation into goose-stepping genocidal maniacs who would cheerfully machine-gun crowds of civilians who tried to flee the Nazi clutches.

Of course, we would never engage in such lowlife practices here in the beacon of liberty's light, the United States of America. We know how to criticize our politicians (well, except for Dear Leader Ronald Reagan and other Founding Fathers).

Seriously, what is up with the North Koreans? Grown men and women gnashing and wailing in public as though their infant daughters had all suffered cruelly before succumbing to some dread plague--how can we humanize these nutbars?

In truth, we share much more with them than we do with some other people from other cultures.

Watch Fox News. As Stephen Colbert so ham-handedly spoofs it, the rippling American flags, screaming eagles and hagiographic idolization of all aspects of all Dear Leaders who embrace corporate-friendly postures is Just So North Korean.

And look at poverty caused by, amongst other factors, military spending. North Korea has the highest rate of militarism in the world. The DPRK spends a higher percent of its gross national product on its military than does any other nation and it has for years, even though various lists omit them or have incomplete data for their budgets. They have followed the Songun policy since the end of the Soviet Union, that is, military first. During famines those in the military suffered much less and officers not at all. Here in the US, we have the world's largest military budget and while unemployment remains high and home foreclosures stay rampant, we hold our military expenses as sacred--that budget dips last. Songun. It doesn't even need translation. Criticizing military expenditures is like dissing Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il. Just wait until the 2012 election campaign really heats up and you'll hear it beaten daily.

Watching the poor schmucks in North Korea now just breaks the heart. They live in a Stalinist totalitarian state. When else do they have a chance to express how much grief they feel about everything? Crying for Kim Jong-Il? Please. They are crying for themselves. They are left out of the world. They work hard and they just suffer and must remain silent. This is their rare opportunity to express themselves and let out all their pent-up grief about their wasted lives and ruined nation--and while it seems like unity behind their tyrannical leaders, it also looks like about an inch from a flip to a Pyongyang Spring. Let's not be too smug. As we continue to ruin our economy with massive military overspending we are given many more opportunities to express ourselves and our grief cannot compare--yet--with the impoverishment and iron-fisted enslavement of North Korea. They should be teaching us many lessons right now. Lessons that help us overcome our own vulnerability to propaganda.

Speaking up once is the first and last act of nonviolent resistance in a nation like North Korea. They each have an excuse for suffering in silence. If we fail to speak up, we who have so many more rights and so much more access to the goods of life, what is our excuse?

In the god of war we no longer trust

2011-12-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

Over the decades, I've done a fair amount of direct counter-recruitment, from confronting recruiters at post-secondary fairs, tabling at such events, leafleting outside recruiter stations and supporting the outstanding efforts of Communities for Alternatives to Starbase and the War Resisters League as they work to end recruiting in public schools. But I've always acknowledged one point to the recruiters, even though it's one that never occurs to them. At some point I frequently say some variant of, "What I do know is that until we the people learn how to defend ourselves with nonviolence, we will always hire people like you to do it for us."

This never occurs to the recruiters because the assumptions are hard-wired ahead of that logic, which is to say, we need a military, period, so then the only questions revolve around how we run it. It would never dawn on them that a trained and committed citizenry would be willing and able to offer nonviolent defense. Why would it? That concept, civilian-based defense, is a marginal concept barely even taught in college courses on strategic nonviolence. Why? Because it is the last step in a long process of demilitarization and therefore way way down the road from teaching people how to organize a nonviolent campaign to affect some relatively minor public policy.

But if we frame it differently, we can at least show bursts of the possible. What about the nonviolent victories against opponents who have proven themselves capable of torture, assassination and ongoing brutality? For a moment, at least, the nonviolent masses awakened to their power and exercised it.

However, the problems come when we think about designing and developing a peace system, that is, a system that doesn't need a military. How would a nation without a military meet an invading force? How could a nation without a military stop foreign governments from just rolling over it and grabbing land, natural resources, and enslaving people? From a Euro-American, that is Western, point of view, it is illogical. We were the colonial masters of the world so we not only know what foreign governments do to innocent nonviolent friendly people--because our ancestors did it, again and again, all over the world--we know that we live materially opulent lifestyles as a direct result and changing all this will change how we get to live.

Sigh. This is all true. We will, however, either do the right thing (now that we've exhausted all the alternatives) or our nation-state will cease to exist in its present form. We can either plan for a post-military world or prepare for ecological and economic ruination, harbingers of which have been present and growing more pervasive for years.

War is not god, or, if it is, the end times are near. We are not hard-wired for war any more than we are hard-wired for peace. This is all about choice, even though path dependency suggests war and more war. It is past time to break out of that path, to stop being co-dependent on a military that is not about constructive conflict but preps for and commits destructive conflict.

Will this transition be easy? No. Some version of it, however, is required. Seven billion of us, now industrialized and consuming natural resources at an unnatural pace, can no longer afford this model of conflict management. Just when we are heading into more conflict on our crowded planet, the old ways of managing conflict are proving dramatically and disastrously unsustainable. Analysts like Michael Renner (and others at the Worldwatch Institute), Michael Klare, Michael Ross (we need a Symposium of the Michaels on Conflict and Sustainability) and many others have been connecting the dots for decades, but the splotches are now connecting themselves. Only truly out-of-touch nonviolent analysts ignore economic and environmental concerns and only the most provincial economists or ecologists fail to see the primacy of dealing with military impacts.

It is past time to take stock and start. God did not ordain the military to rule over us in the US, no matter what poor legislation Congress passes to the contrary. Allah did not grant the Egyptian military the right to conduct virginity tests on any women it fancies. We will launch the solutions from the grassroots or they will not be launched. We will invent, test, modify and maintain a nonviolent security system and we will prosper as a species, or we will stay with the model we now have and stick with a strategy we see is losing. The choice is ours.

Congress: Public service or self-serving?

2011-12-27T04:37:00.000-08:00

I suppose by now the assumption is logical: those voters are STOOO-PID. We keep putting them in and back in and back in some more. Congress is a club of one percenters who are simply masters of talking the talk. Almost none of them walk the walk.

Most Americans have no real problems with someone getting rich. Hey, if it's done honestly, if it's because they are smart and learn how to produce something that we can all use, we don't seem to begrudge them success.

But we don't like it when they succeed because they are corrupt and that is exactly what we don't like about Congress. Many members are directly guilty of these corrupt behaviors:

They have massive stock portfolios that, by the laws they pass, remain largely hidden from the public.
They own stock in war profiteering corporations and they vote to fund the wars.
They own stock in financial institutions and favor those institutions with laws that encourage wild gambling for high returns (from which members of Congress profit) and then they vote to bail out those institutions with hundreds of $billions.

This is corruption and it's systemic in Congress. We are not talking about bringing home a few taxpayer-funded pencils for their kids. The depth and breadth of this corruption is rivaling the worst dictatorships. We are ruled by a gang of Banana Republicans of both parties, millionaires who vote against the social safety net unless it is there for their corporate investments (like the wildly hypocritical Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania car dealer and Congressman who rails against taxes on the wealthy, and against unemployment benefits, and yet benefited handsomely from the GM bailout). And it's getting worse, not better, as documented by "an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group":

While the median net worth of members of Congress jumped 15 percent from 2004 to 2010, the net worth of the richest 10 percent of Americans remained essentially flat. For all Americans, median net worth dropped 8 percent, based on inflation-adjusted data from Moody’s Analytics.

When Congress accomplishes at least some of the following, we may finally find some trust in them:

link their pay to the national median pay.
get the money out of elections (there are many ways to do this).
stop accepting donations--and stop seeing lobbyists--from DoD or DoD contractors.
stop accepting donations--and stop seeing lobbyists--from for-profit corporations.
mandate a freeze on all their wealth development for their period of service (no stocks, no bonds, just normal savings accounts).

If these conditions are too odious, these people should not serve. Our regulators need to begin with themselves. We can require this or we can continue to watch TV and worry about inconsequential irrelevancies. We can continue to act like redirected inmates of the mental health unit or we can start to control our own country. We live in a--hello?--democracy.

Vietnam to Iraq: US tastes defeat again

2011-12-26T08:12:00.000-08:00

The institution of war as practiced by the US was once a conflict management method used for two things. One, gain and defend sovereignty, which is to say freedom from foreign rule. Two, gain and defend land and natural resources that belonged to other people, which is to say become the foreign rulers.

Examples of the first sort of war might include the Revolutionary War and World War II.

Examples of the second sort of war include invading and seizing the sovereign nations of Native Americans, or overthrowing other nations and installing dictators (e.g. most Central American countries at least once, Hawaii, the Philippines).

But the new sort of war is what we saw in Iraq and largely in Vietnam. It is a function of the Doritos paradigm, that is, consume all you want, "We'll make more." Military profiteers from the private sector profit from a war win or a war loss. What hurts them is peace. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney profited quite personally quite massively from the entire Iraq debacle, beginning to end, as did their entire owner class of war profiteers supplying the military with ordnance, body armor, vehicles, weapons, privately contracted transport, and, no doubt, Doritos. The war system is poor for the taxpayer, since military spending creates far fewer jobs per $billion spent than other sectors. The war system is poor for the military members who bet their lives that they can survive long enough to enjoy the life they joined to enhance and who then lose that bet by suffering lifelong wounds to body, mind and spirit--or who are among those who die directly in the war.

So why do the elite owners get us into war instead of profiting from peaceful enterprise? Because war profits are obscenely high, corruption is massive, and the outright theft of taxpayer money is never easier and never so massive. "National security" is the magic phrase that occludes the view so this can all transpire and the taxpayer will either never know or, if there is a Julian Assange out there exposing the corruption, it can be treated as an aberration rather than a system feature. Too bad about Halliburton overcharging for gasoline in Iraq starting immediately in 2003, but let's keep using their contracting services. "Money in a gunnysack" diplomacy buys off local "leaders" who then feed the US media, bravely embedded behind bristling guns, all sorts of GIGO opinions and assurances. Garbage In, Garbage Out is the proud motto of the embed, or at least it should be.

At least we have Harper's Magazine and other challenger media who offer an unembedded POV and let us know that, oh, by the way, that Big Deal Official End of the War Ceremony in Bagdhad was a made-for-TV farce:

At a 45-minute ceremony in a fortified compound at Baghdad International Airport, U.S. military officials declared the end of the Iraq war. Iraq’s president and prime minister did not attend, and local reporters were not invited.

So our new sort of war is just Extreme Profiteering, even if we flee Vietnam with our tails between our legs or exit Iraq with their country and ours in shambles. There's a flag-waving pride in that, I'm sure, for the owners of the largest military contractors. For the rest of us, we pay for it and suffer, but our suffering is nothing alongside what the people suffer in the countries where we go to 'liberate' them.

War crime is redundant. Serving the country is something nonviolent peace, justice and environmental activists do. Serving the corporate war profiteers is the job of the military.

Can 2012 be the year we finally change that equation?

Pentagon investigates itself: We are innocent

2011-12-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

The US military message machine never sleeps, is everywhere, and spends $billions on being dominant in the category of conflict turn-to sources for members of the American mainstream media. Editors want experts and they want experts who have been on the ground and can offer informed analysis. Editors are also on a budget and don't much like forking over the travel funds to those experts. It's best when the experts are just on tap, free, funded by others, and who speak and write authoritatively.

So you pay for it, not CNN, not Fox, not ABC, NBC, or CBS. You pay for it out of your taxes, not The New York Times, not The Wall Street Journal, not The Washington Post. The Pentagon handles all these experts and they handle mainstream media. They do this in the name of a free press. Can you feel the smirk?

After some 2008 stories exposing some of this, Congress asked the Pentagon to investigate itself. More than three years later, the DoD inspector general says no problem. Like the torturers in Bahrain busily self-investigating and declaring that mistakes were made but we are a great government so shut up and stop your whining, the Pentagon finds that its propaganda machine may need some fine tuning, but it's working pretty well. DoD to taxpayers: Shut up and pay up and like it. From the NYT:

The inquiry found that from 2002 to 2008, Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon organized 147 events for 74 military analysts. These included 22 meetings at the Pentagon, 114 conference calls with generals and senior Pentagon officials and 11 Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Twenty of the events, according to a 35-page report of the inquiry’s findings, involved Mr. Rumsfeld or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or both.

What's not to like? When you see these uniformed experts saying "I've been to Iraq nine times" or "I was on the phone with the Secretary," you can feel like you've personally contributed--because you have. If you work for a living, you are paying for this propaganda. And the military message machine employs almost as many in their various activities as does the entire US State Department and more than most major media corporations. Sales are booming. Social norms are putty in their hands.

Meanwhile, we have more than 500 members of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, most of whom are peace academics, who are funded to travel to controversial conflict zones by zero tax dollars. When we go, we hustle our own funds or pay out of pocket. We study, research, analyze, and teach. We actually know far more about alternative methods to violent conflict management than do all the military experts, active or retired, but editors rarely contact us for that knowledge, and it's hard to blame them. When a source has access, had been there, and is a retired member of an organization that specializes in conflict (never mind that it specializes in lethal force and destroying infrastructure), why not rely on them?

As usual, we on the peace side have our work well and truly cut out for us. We have experts who could save the US taxpayers hundreds of $billions and save hundreds of thousands of lives. There are alternatives to the military methods. When the editors are interested, they should look us up.

Bowing to the future and to the past

2011-12-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

I spent yesterday with Glenn D. Paige, 82, a man born just a half year after Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1929. He's a public peace intellectual, walks slowly but thinks fast ("I talk too much") and he took me to breakfast on a veranda restaurant overlooking the warm Pacific at the north end of Honolulu. I would need a few months of such meals with him to properly understand his life--so far--and his contributions to peace in the world. After breakfast he drove us to his temple, the Dae Won Sa Broken Ridge Korean Buddhist Peace Temple in the Palolo Valley. It is remarkable. It is how Paige quiets his racing intellect, which still sprints even as he ages into his 80s.

Paige's academic life as a political scientist began as a linguist and Korean expert, which naturally followed his military service in Korea, a nation that he says is a classic case of one culture split into two by war and politics. His dissertation dealt exhaustively with the decision-making processes that drew the US into that war and was informed by his own observations, access to top officials in both cultures, and his study of Korean culture and language, as well as two more germane languages, Chinese and Japanese. He was on the straightforward Political Science/Security Studies academic success path, with degrees from Princeton, Harvard, and Northwestern Universities.

He was enjoying his 'short stack' of pancakes in the warm trade winds ("I'm freezing") and he suddenly stopped. "Then, in 1974, I had a sudden change. It was like an electric charge ripping from the tips of my toes up through me to the top of my head. Three words came, but silently. I mean, it wasn't a burning bush where I fell over--I said nothing--but the three words were clear: 'No more killing.' And then I wondered, 'Now what?'"

Academically, Paige reviewed his first book, which was his dissertation, and critiqued his own conclusions. I can only imagine the academic nerve it took to do that. His political science research and his civic engagement ever since has been devoted to nonkilling. The integrity to embark into areas where political scientists fear to tread is another classic--it is why tenure exists. He was able to pursue his intellectual challenges without the usual trepidation of the anxious scholar, tiptoeing a half-inch into new territory with phobias about validity. Paige just decided to Go For It and did. He found his intellectual home at the University of Hawai'i and never looked back.

Well, maybe he looked back all the time, and forward too, but with a different goal and analysis. His central question has been, "Is it possible to have a nonkilling society?" His answer is "Yes." His research has been on 'how' that can be accomplished and maintained. He worried decades ago about "So, after we achieve a victory with either violence or nonviolence, how can we maintain a nonviolent society?" This is now beginning to be central to our field of Peace and Conflict Studies, with a great deal of research into the post-peace accord process. Paige did a great deal of the early work and continues to push for more publications via his Center for Global Nonkilling, now directed by a young scholar, Joám Evans Pim, who is busily edited a series of peer-reviewed books on the topic of Nonkilling from the viewpoints offered by various disciplines and fields of study.

As I entered my senior citizen years and am still struggling to learn more about how we can evolve toward nonviolence as a species, I am so buoyed and bolstered by spending some valuable time with one of the pioneers who helped put this into play. Paige's 2002 book on Nonkilling is now translated into 23 languages "with 16 more coming," he says, and is being used by people where they live around the world. "It was rejected by the normal academic political science publishers," he told me, "but with happy consequences. I just put it online for free downloading and now it's in use."

His ideal scholar is a "researcher, a teacher, and is involved in giving back to our world, in helping to spread the knowledge where it can be used." That makes Glenn D. Paige a model for how the academy can actually serve the polis. Mahalo, Glenn. Live long and may nonkilling philosophy prosper.

Firehose of your tax money gushes to Libya

2011-12-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

So, how is that violent liberation working out for 'ya?

How much did the US spend trying to topple dictators Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? Oh, that's right, like Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos, those brutal, corrupt, murdering leaders were essentially installed and supported by the US. We spent zero helping the nonviolent revolutions in those countries.

OK, so how about other nonviolent liberations, especially those who overthrew enemies of the US? Well, almost nothing. $25 million to bring down Milosevic in Serbia. Just about nothing on the entire Velvet Revolution, which finally succeeded after decades of $ trillions spent on superhyperApocalyptic weaponry all pointed at the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Can we pick out a pattern here?

On the other hand, when we tally up the pricetags for Iraq ($1 trillion and counting, as we leave 5,000 highly paid contractors behind), Afghanistan ($500 billion and counting), and, lately, Libya ($1.1 billion just on DoD armaments, not counting State Department security expenses nor unknown but substantial intelligence operations), we see some barebones beginnings of the explanation for our national financial meltdown.

Remember in the early days of justifying the invasion of Iraq, when we were told again and again that this would eventually cost the taxpayers nothing because the grateful people of Iraq would gladly pay us back with the massive oil revenues that would obviously start flowing their way once liberated? Similarly, I recall Libyan dissidents in diaspora confidently assure us on National Public Radio interviews that Libyans would obviously repay NATO for all expenses once Gadhaffi was removed and Libyans controlled their own oil money.

The lies don't get much more transparent and egregious than these, yet they continue to be told and, amazingly, believed, apparently. At least it's working out for China. They are snapping up that Iraqi oil. At last it's being used for a government that really supports human rights...

The facts are that liberation using nonviolence is not only far less bloody, far less expensive, far less destructive to infrastructure and the environment, but it has no blowback (well, unless you count the Occupy movement as blowback from Arab Spring, but the US didn't fund any part of the Arab Spring anyhow). The blowback from supporting or launching violent liberation is tremendous, as we saw on September 11, 2001. We will likely see much more, sadly, from all the violence we since unleashed or in the Central Asia, Middle East, North African region. Six thousand US mortalities and more than $1.5 trillion so far, all to do what nonviolence could have done for a tiny fraction. And the costs will go on and on.

The news today is just one example. Now, after wasting that $1.1 billion+ on violently getting rid of Gadhaffi, the US is going to pay untold $ millions to buy up weapons from the insurgents. You can't make up stuff like this. Cosmic karmic account registers are ringing all over the place. The US piece of the Arab Spring is a costly, bloody, ongoing farce.

We are so radically in need of a rapid evolution in our methods of conflict management. Hello? Earth to Obama! Earth to the military! Come in! Humanity here--can we talk? Nonviolence can do all the good things you say you want done without any of the bad things that only violence can trigger. Can we make 2012 the Year of the US Nonviolence Conversion? It is overdue.

Our great debts, some eternal, some related and fixable

2011-12-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

Thanks to our addiction to war and war preparation, as well as the costs of war that drag on long after all US troops are out of the invaded country (whatever that country may be), we are in debt, massively. Our first debt is not financial, it is a debt owed to the Iraqi people for inflicting an invasion that brought in violence and took the stops off other violence. Just as al Qa'ida can never repay the debt they owe to victims of 9.11.01, the US can never repay the debt to Iraqis for our 2003 criminal invasion and all the violence that continues to erupt even after we are officially gone. That debt is eternal.

As to our financial debts, some think it's due to overconsumption. That's true, but you have two sorts of overconsumption and they have a dialectical, mutually exacerbating relationship.

One, military overconsumption. We have built and manufactured the most gargantuan arsenal ever assembled on Earth with the most military bases on the sovereign soil of the most nations in human history.

Two, consumer overconsumption. Americans are all about shopping and less about producing. They choose lower prices and thereby often support sweatshops and child labor. Wal-Mart's Big Lie about buying American is a bit like a jihadis faith in being a suicide bomber as his path to paradise and 69 virgins--an easy sell to addicted consumers who desperately want to believe.

The sick positive feedback loop (with negative consequences) is clear: We build more guns and bombs so we can enforce the global theft of human and natural resources that enriches us unfairly and through the use of violence and intimidation, resources that feed our consumer habits, which in turn make our militarism necessary.

Guess what, shoppers? Guess what, militarists? The feedback loop is shutting down, slowly but surely. Why is this? For a number of reasons, including (but not limited to):

a long nonviolent push against devaluing nonAmerican lives from the Global South.
a peace movement that has featured valuing the lives of US troops as well as foreign civilians.
a long, strong rise in a global movement by the oppressed to insist on fairness.
the slow acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
demonstrations of alternative methods of liberation using nonviolence.
case studies of peace processes that are teaching humanity other ways to resolve conflict.
case studies that show, again and again, how violence costs everyone (except the profiteer and power-seeking elite, as the Baghdad man-on-the-street says clearly in this short video, following more escalation of post-US withdrawal violence).

So, we can do it nice or we can do it rough, but we need to push ahead with alternatives to both negatives, to overconsumption by both the military and civilian sides. What better time to do it than now, when we can stop supporting sweatshops and child labor by giving holiday gifts that come from other sources? Vote with your holiday shopping and later on in 10 and one-half months, vote with your ballots for more peace and justice, radically reduced military, and boycotts of all goods from all countries who are in violation of basic human rights.

Capital punishment: Robert Reich v Corporadoes

2011-12-21T08:10:00.000-08:00

Review: Reich, Robert B. (2010). Aftershock: The next economy & America’s future. New York: Vintage.

At 4 feet, 10 inches, Robert Reich really needed to be named David, since his tendency is to go after at least some Goliaths. His 12th book, Aftershock: The next economy & America’s future, is a quick read and helps a Peace and Conflict Studies guy understand a bit more of the historical threads that have joined in our collective fiscal noose tightening around our national neck as we stand at the cusp of an unknown future. He has some interesting notions about cutting us down from that dangerous place and getting us moving more positively--and some missing information that should be in his analysis.

His framing of American capitalism history is instructive. He writes that the 1870-1929 and 1980-2010 periods were mostly about concentrating wealth into ever smaller, ever richer, numbers of owners. The brief 1947-1973 period of greater equality and more robust social safety net, when wealth disparities weren't as dramatic, is what he calls the Great Prosperity.

We are just about where we were in 1928 in terms of concentration of wealth and Reich says that's no coincidence. He is a certified smart guy (summa cum laude from Dartmouth, J.D. from Yale and editor of the Yale Law Review, Rhodes scholar at Oxford) (where he was buds with Bill Clinton), and he'd make a great Secretary of Labor (as he was in Clinton's administration), though he gives too many passes to bad US foreign policy and fails to connect some big splotchy dots. Is that because he longs to be back inside an administration and can't get there by fingering the military budget as the real Goliath?

I think my reservations about Reich--as much as I would seriously wish for him or someone as pro-labor as him to be Secretary of Labor--are mostly around my bewilderment at his willingness to almost default to a Kennedyesque "he may be a sonofabith but he's our sonofabitch" attitude about many of the horrific foreign dictators we installed and supported during his period of Great Prosperity, which was the period I'd call the Height of American Empire. Reich doesn't use Kennedy's phrase, but he paints that period so golden and rosy when, in the reality of that time in so many places, there was real violence and structural violence with the US at the helm. His frame on the time was that it was a period of containment of the communist menace, which, if that is the entire story of the Cold War military, would be closer to the Just War doctrine, but instead it was a period of huge extractions of human and natural resources at by a process called robbery.

Reich would be a great policy czar for our American labor force--he is quite pro-union, he urges and economically justifies universal Medicare, he calls for and logically supports a massive extension of the Earned Income Credit in what he calls a reverse income tax to subsidize lower incomes, and he argues cogently for free public universities. But he should not be allowed to meddle with foreign policy, because that brutal extractive style of US imperialism did create the Great Prosperity for just one working class--the US American working class--and that is a Bad Deal for everyone else, as virtually all the Global South will attest.

His heroes are almost all rich men of a pragmatic self-enlightened sort. Marriner Eccles, for instance, was the capitalist to whom Franklin Roosevelt eventually turned to help think about getting out of the Great Depression. What Reich calls "Eccles insight" was basically that the government needed to go into more debt to pull out of the economic doldrums. Reich accurately notes that the FDR administration did great things with the social safety net as a result--Social Security, etc.--but that his spending on job creation wasn't nearly enough until everyone was employed in World War II.

So read Reich's book. He is tough on the greedheads like Henry Paulson and the other Robert--Rubin--who served alongside him (Secretary of Treasury) with the Clintstones. He has many great and defensible ideas, though I cannot call him a peace and justice person based on this book. His understanding of growing American resentments is helpful, for example when he notes, “Societies whose living standards drop experience higher levels of stress than do societies that never had as much to begin with—and the deeper the drop, the higher the stress” (Reich, 2010, p. 90). He looks at a great deal of research, but in an accessible way, making him a public intellectual with great ability to translate jargon into readable ideas.

But also be aware of the history he glosses over. To be fair, he has exposed the military in other writings, including calling the current DoD a "jobs program" that we cannot afford, since it creates few jobs per $ billion spent. This is not a holistic approach, but his ideas are worth keeping alive in our national conversation. He says we need to make fundamental changes and he's more right than he even displays in this book.

Selective long term memory

2011-12-20T05:05:00.000-08:00

As we listen to saber rattling and information about Iran's threat to Israel, to the Saudis, to Iraq, to the US and to the entire world, let's remember a few things, a problem for many Americans in some cases.

"All the suspected hijackers were from Saudi Arabia (fifteen hijackers), United Arab Emirates (two hijackers), Lebanon (one hijacker) and Egypt (one hijacker)" (Wikipedia). All were Arabic. None were Iranian.
The CIA was complicit in the Bush regime lies about Saddam Hussein's WMD.
The highest members of the Bush circle--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Powell, plus press secretary Fleisher and Judith Miller of The New York Times--all lied about Iraq's nonexistent WMD.
These liars said Saddam had thrown out UN WMD inspectors. Never happened.
The Bush regime team lied about Saddam's alliance with Osama bin Laden. As if. Saddam outlawed al Qa'ida and bin Laden issued a death fatwa on Hussein.
This same group of liars told us the invasion of Iraq would be relatively inexpensive and that, with all their oil, the Iraqis would repay us anyhow in just a couple of years.
They either failed or feigned failure to anticipate the robust insurgency from Iraqis who wanted their country back.
The Bush neocons did just about everything possible to encourage a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq and they got it.

I vigiled with others every Tuesday outside the large multi-branch armed forces recruiting center on Broadway in Portland all during the worst of the war, when Fallujah was set on fire and casualties on all sides were terrible every day. I told many recruiters, all bound to argue with me, that "eventually, you will leave Iraq, and for that matter Afghanistan, and you will not leave a peaceful country behind. They will violently sort themselves out for themselves and you will have only accomplished getting more people to hate America." This, more or less, was the very message that the very conservative warrior, Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, offered us when we brought him here to Portland State University to speak.

This is exactly what is happening and will happen in both countries. War is simply not the answer. Just Say No. Remember. Never Forget. We are a smart species and can find alternatives, as we saw in Tunisia and, for the most part, in Egypt and across much of the Middle East and North Africa (except where we offered our military 'help' in Libya).

We can remember the things that matter--we are all deeply informed about the Kim and Kris Konflict, the details of the NBA lockout, Lindsay Lohan's addictive self-sabotaging record--so let's get on our knees and pray we don't get fooled again. No one except the one percenter elite from Richistan can afford it and no one can morally or ethically justify any more war. Let's start a season of peace that lasts for years. Let's put our people back to work by redirecting the first 75 percent of the Pentagon budget to job creation and universal health care. We can do this if we decide upon it.

Invisible woman and choice

2011-12-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

When I want a real lesson in conscience and the power of nonviolence, I turn to--comics and movies. Excuse me? Yes, Hollywood and comic books are real gold mines, though most of it is pyrite at best.

So, when Earth is under threat of destruction in the film Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and the henchbeing of the Destroyer Galactus (Silver Surfer) is prepping our planet for His palette, Invisible Woman confronts the space dude:

Silver Surfer: I have no choice.

Invisible Woman: What do you mean, you don't have a choice? There's always a choice.

There it is. We make our choices and we are responsible for them, if not to Galactus, at least to ourselves. While we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights to help us think about some of our rights and responsibilities, we also have societal pressures to violate what we might suspect is good behavior. Isn't this true for all of us?

Oh, I had to join the military. I was poor. I wanted a college education. I had no job. It was the poverty draft.
I had to kill those people, even though some were children. I had orders. In the military, there is a chain of command and harsh discipline for failing to obey a command.
I need to drive a car. That's just how it is.
Obviously, I had no choice--I had to call the police. How was I to know they would shoot the guy dead?
I'm a cop. The guy had a knife. I had to take him out--what other choice was there?
He hit me. I had to defend myself. No other option outside of just getting smacked down more.

But choice is always present, even in a dictatorship, even in dire circumstances, and certainly in a society with multiple options for getting an education, for getting work, for surviving and thriving without joining an organization that uses violence, even lethal violence.

Thank you, Invisible Woman. I wish more invisible women would help us confront these choices we attempt to evade or deny.

Klarity: No Newts is good Newts

2011-12-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

Four key trends will dominate the future of American energy behavior: an increasing need for imported oil, a pronounced shift toward unstable and unfriendly suppliers in dangerous parts of the world; a greater risk of anti-American or civil violence, and rising competition for what will likely prove a diminishing supply pool.

—Michael Klare (2004, p. 23)

Michael Klare is a well known expert on the intersection of war, peace and energy policy. His analysis and predictions have been accurate and sought after by alternative and mainstream media (at least the outliers such as National Public Radio, or at least the occasional host such as Terry Gross, who interviewed Klare on 30 June 2010 during the worst of the massive BP oil spill). Listening to Michael T. Klare and following his advice when he began his analysis into this confluence of problems would have saved the world a few wars, some killer sanctions, lots of global climate catastrophe, and the global economy.

What? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?

Not really. The first time I heard Klare speak was in the late 1980s and I have been following his work ever since. He is a mentor to many of us in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies and his work has opened vistas for many of us who have sought to work to better connect and intersect the vast studies of environmental problems, energy source and consumption issues, conflict management methods, war, and peace. Yes, it's true that many others, from Margaret Mead to Bucky Fuller to Paul and Anne Ehrlich to Noam Chomsky and more have come before Klare, connecting some of these parts of the larger whole. But in his niche--energy policy and foreign conflict policy--Klare is the turn-to expert in our field. Others are in there squarely with him with their own niche expertise--e.g. Ian Bannon, Michael Ross, Len Siegel, Paul Collier--but he remains at the leading edge of analysis and comprehensive scholarship in this particular confluence of subjects.

Some might try to put the likes of Al Gore into this group, but the inconvenient truth about his analysis is that he is not a peace person, makes no mention in his Nobel Prize-winning Powerpoint of methods of conflict management, and simply leaves out the question of militarism, the eight-ton crossbred elephant gorilla in the global room. Klare looks straight into the giant addict's eye and delivers straightforward rational analysis based upon the data from the environmental impact side, the war costs abyss, the geopolitical struggle for hegemony power circus, and he makes eminently sensible policy recommendations that would mitigate the downsides of all these areas of concern.

Time to make Michael T. Klare Secretary of Energy and Gene Sharp Secretary of Defense. We need some serious change, informed by decades of serious study and real world application. US democracy needs to be far better informed to be effective and to avoid the poor decisions we make when we are informed by corporate militarist intelligentsia such as Newt Gingrich, a Ph.D. without a conscience who operates cleverly and remorselessly. We could use some Klarity because No Newts is good Newts.

References

Klare, Michael T. (2004). Blood and oil: The dangers and consequences of America’s growing petroleum dependency. New York: Henry Holt.

Inspiration as strategy

2011-12-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

“Feeling good, not engaging in violence, or being willing to die, when you have not achieved the goals of your struggle, does not change the fact that you have failed” (Sharp, 2005, p. 436).

I am a veteran of the Plowshares movement, that is, a tiny global campaign to disarm directly, by hand, using simple hand tools, in an effort to do a few things, including (this is not the same list for each of us who have done this, but it is meant to include the rationales I have heard from others and written about myself, though I am in the minority view with regard to some of these overarching goals):

to bypass all the military, legal, and governmental barriers to disarmament and decide to simply start the process by hand, unilaterally.
to act in accordance with one's most profound ethical, moral, or faith and spiritual obligations.
to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice one's freedom, one's material possessions, one's property, one's business relationships, one's time with loved ones, one's health and even one's life in order to begin disarming ourselves.
to challenge others to do something, even something minor or relatively easy.
to refuse to be a part of a war system.
to use the most powerful nonviolent methods at our disposal to show that not all power comes from bombs and guns.
to tell the rest of the world that there are some who disagree completely with the model of violence and threat of violence.
to make and take a stand for the children, for the next ones to come, to hand off a better world to them.

While the movement has anti-nuclear weaponry roots and the majority of the acts of direct disarmament have been directed at components of the nuclear arsenal, several of them have been done on 'conventional' weapons. The idea at heart is to personally interpose, do something real but effectively symbolic, and then to take personal responsibility for one's actions.

There have been more than 80 of these sorts of acts of direct disarmament since the original King of Prussia act by eight radical nonviolent peacemakers on 9 September 1980. The chronology of the actions from 1980-2003 was compiled by Catholic Worker and Plowshares resister Art Laffin. My own efforts were from 1985 and 1996, the first alone and the second in partnership with Donna Howard. Artie gets a few facts wrong in both of these descriptions, but he captures the sense of all the actions he describes. He is our movement historian and we are all grateful to him and his collaborator on the book about the movement, Sr. Anne Montgomery.

What I have come to realize over the years is the strong connection between mass movements of low or no risk--such as peace demonstrations, vigils, electronic organizing--and the high-risk nonviolence such as Plowshares or international accompaniment--is that the high risk actions can help convince others to also get involved in some way. Every Plowshare action resets my commitment to peace more firmly than if all I ever saw was a street demonstration or a social media posting. Every time I read about a Muslim Peacemaker or Christian peacemaker or Peace Brigades International or Nonviolent Peaceforce action I am far more challenged to carry on than when I learn about a petition or a peace march. This is just how we are. The peace warriors help us act in smaller ways, just as Rosa Parks helped Montgomery African Americans boycott the buses and walk every day for a solid year. The actions of the many are vastly more effective than the actions of the few, but the 'concentrated' acts of a Phil Berrigan or Susan Crane can draw us to the 'dispersed' acts like walking, talking and writing for peace.

Fortunately, we can reframe our high risk actions when we connect them to mass actions. Did Rosa Parks succeed? No, she was arrested and fined. She failed. But the instant that masses acted in smaller ways to support her goal, she was a wild success and she changed American history. It is this dynamic that the Occupy movement overlooks when it sticks to a 'leaderless' dogma. We need inspiration in order to get masses of us to give our perspiration. So failure and victory are often a matter of framing and persistence. Learning these skills is strategic. Being strategic will give us more nonviolent victories.

References

Sharp, Gene (2005). Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential. Boston: Extending Horizon Books.

Nonviolence, natural resources, and secession: The Congo case study

2011-12-15T19:08:00.000-08:00

When the people of Congo cast out the outrageously cruel and corrupt Belgian colonial occupiers in 1960, they did so mostly nonviolently and they elected Patrice Lumumba, charismatic populist leader who refused to play the standard colonial handoff game of praising their former masters. He instead excoriated the unjust imprisonment and torture that he and others had endured in their struggle for liberation. It was a speech that straightened the backs and stirred the spirit of Congolese as they listened to tiny transistor radios all over their large country.

It was a speech that started a chain of events that ultimately cost Lumumba his life and cost the Congolese their future of peace and prosperity they had earned and deserved. The speech rightly shamed the Belgians all the way back to their corrupt King Leopold, a nineteenth century cruel megalomaniac who arrogated the region to himself, demanding free labor and natural resources, and simply acting monstrously, without human conscience. The Belgians were embarrassed by this lack of decorum by Lumumba and conspired with the CIA and some corrupt Congolese, primarily from the mineral-rich Katanga region, and assassinated Lumumba on 17 January 1961. Eventually, the Mobutu Sese Seka regime operated for decades, pretending Congolese nationalism but conspiring endlessly with foreign corporations--and U.S. military aid--to profit enormously from oppressing Congolese and extracting their natural resources at bargain basement prices. Those resources were so abundant that Sese Seka enriched himself so massively that his regime was labeled a "kleptocracy."

The rise of the leaders of Katanga, primarily Moise Tshombe, was largely due to influences from foreign mining corporations and the business-friendly CIA. Katanga declared itself sovereign on 11 July 1960, intending to take full advantage of its natural resource wealth, but Sese Seka subsumed them successfully. Freedom for Congolese and the life of Lumumba were forfeit in the deal. The violence and corruption continue in Congo, where they suffered the largest land war since World War II, mostly over a combination of resource capture, especially copper and cobalt, and the misuse of tribal and ethnic conflict to fan the flames. Listen to Wangari Maathai for a wise and accurate analysis.

Ian Bannon and Paul Collier note that "resource wealth tends to promote civil wars...by giving people who live in resource-rich areas an economic incentive to forum a separate state" (p. 27). We see de facto separate states in many regions where guerrilla armies capture territory and gain from resource extraction. We have yet to see a nonviolent insurrection based on greed for natural resources. Violence is the best way to go after valuable natural resources for private profit. Nonviolence is good for the public interest. The difference shows up with remarkable frequency of pattern.

References

Bannon, Ian and Collier, Paul (Eds.) (2003). Natural resources and violent conflict: Options and actions. Washington DC: The World Bank.

We don't need no stinkin' jobs (Need to secede)

2011-12-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

Every time Congress spends another $billion on the Department of Defense, jobs are created. That is what the Republicans and all good hawks claim. Mitch "Broken Record" McConnell, their leader in the Senate, rails against any tiny incremental tax on the rich as a tax on the "job creators." And if Obama dares propose that a bill of his would hire anyone to do any actual work that results in benefits to society (e.g., building high-speed rail that brings us more in line with a European infrastructure for moving people and goods far more efficiently, in which China is investing heavily, for excellent reason), he is labeled as tax and spend.

Meanwhile, the US pulls out of Iraq, thus saving $billions for the taxpayer, right? Wrong. Those troops are parking in Kuwait. The net number in the region is the same. Troops who come home are being replaced by troops going over. It is a farce.

While we continue to watch the fiscal Niagara Falls thunder your money into the deep Pentagon Pool of Liquid Assets, we are told that economic drought is forcing massive drawdowns in the relative trickle of government assistance to every class of Americans except the rich. Hundreds of thousands of poor people, primarily single mothers seeking to simply work for a living, are now told that the one most critical piece of their tiny slice of government help--a subsidy to their child care provider, who makes it possible for them to work or go to school--is cut off.

How much do child care workers make? Very little. How much do the single mothers make? Very little, or they wouldn't qualify for this small but crucial amount of help. So, for a very small investment, we create many jobs. Or, thanks to Congress, we destroy them. Congress: the Job Destroyers, led by the likes of John "Don't Dare Tax the Rich" Boehner. Astonishingly, these people refer to the $662.4 billion they just authorized for the Pentagon FY 2012 budget--far more than any other military on Earth and a figure that does not include many military items, such as, oh yes, nuclear weapons and veterans' benefits--that obese budget is called a 'cut.'

In the midst of this set of grotesque machinations, the new "defense" authorization has violated and vacated much of the Bill of Rights, so be ye advised that Congress is making a bid to overturn what the Founders sought to enshrine in the Constitution 220 years ago. It will be legal to 'detain' you or any other American indefinitely without charge or trial, or kill you if deemed desirable. It is the next step toward tyranny, the very sort that precipitated the American Revolution. And watch the others who claim to love the Constitution so much, like Chief Justice Roberts, when this matter comes before them. This is a litmus test and we are seeing the essential anti-democratic colors of Congress and Obama revealed with this latest.

If the Occupy movement has any legs, it will pick up this critical issue and walk toward a nonviolent New American Evolution. We need to secede (this is not a new idea, especially in places like Vermont, home of our most robust secession movement). Time to care for each other, since the federal government is abdicating that role in favor of enriching the one percent. Really. We don't need a government that steals jobs instead of creating them, that seizes and tears massive chunks out of your paycheck in order to feed those who are already bloated, and which now empowers itself to lock away those it decides are inconveniently opposing those policies or otherwise irritating it. Something is quite, quite wrong and we need to make it right.

The Bell Curve of conflict

2011-12-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

"Conflict is normal in human relationships, and conflict is a motor of change" (Lederach, 2003, p. 5).

John Paul Lederach and I were talking in the hall about the basic introductory texts in our field of Peace and Conflict Studies. I was complaining about them. "They are all about conflict reduction and elimination, and they are mostly granularized at the nation-state level," I groused. We were at his home base, the Notre Dame Kroc Institute, a center of conflict research, teaching and, with such outstanding faculty as Lederach, practice. I was learning a lot.

Lederach nodded vigorously, and said, "Exactly. We have to teach that there are many times we need to escalate conflict, not de-escalate it. Injustice is conflict and needs more of it to achieve real peace."

This is why nonviolence is so crucial. Those who favor preparing for violence by having guns and bombs often believe or at least claim that they need the threat of violence to keep violence from breaking out. This deterrence theory has some merit, of course, but the costs every time it fails are tremendous and too often the rationale is a fig leaf for maintaining injustice by threat of violence.

Nonviolence, on the other hand, is transformative when it is used with assertion and with strategic effect, since it tends to bend that moral arc of the universe closer to justice without committing more injustice to get there. Violence, wrote Fanon (1961), is cathartic and liberating for those who are oppressed, but at what price and can that price be lowered?

There is a Bell Curve of conflict, where too little allows injustice to fester, as Dr. King told us in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, but too much is dysfunctionally destructive. The sweet spot, of just the right amount of conflict, will drive our parties toward sustainable and satisfactory solutions. That is the distinct advantage of nonviolence over the immorality of apathy and the unnecessary wreckage of violence, which virtually always spurs revenge, even if that revenge takes generations. This is why nonviolence=conflict transformation=conflict resolution. Violence produces no resolution, just a perpetual downward spiral of destruction.

Liberating ourselves from violence is the next evolutionary step--a Nonviolent Evolution, using that Gaussian pattern of maximal effect. Sign me up.

References

Fanon, Frantz (1968). The wretched of the earth: The handbook for the black revolution that is changing the shape of the world. New York: Grove Press. (original Francois Maspero, 1961).

King, Jr., Martin Luther (1963). Letter from Birmingham jail. http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Lederach, John Paul (2003). The little book of conflict transformation. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

Post-war is pre-war and wealth is poverty

2011-12-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

Civil wars are bad business, creating or exacerbating most woes from which humankind suffers, such as:

poverty
noncombatant mortalities and casualties
HIV/AIDS and other STDs
hunger
pollution of water, air and soil (thus food and drink)
drug trafficking
child sex trafficking
oppression
violence
low or no foreign direct investment
violent crime
disease
lack of health care
lopsided overspending on military

Sadly, the post-civil war nations are the most likely to fall back into violent conflict, with only a one percent decrease, on average, of that likelihood every year after the end of the hot war, according to UCLA conflict researcher Michael Ross (2003). Thus, post-war is pre-war, at least statistically.

"One of the most surprising and important findings is that natural resources play a key role in triggering, prolonging, and financing these conflicts," notes Ross (p. 17). Indeed, according to World Bank conflict researchers Ian Bannon and Paul Collier (2003), the outbreak and ferocity of civil wars is vastly increased as a function of exportable high-value natural resources. Ross calls it "the resource curse." Wealth is poverty.

So, under these circumstances, assuming we are in favor of ending wars in Africa, the Middle East and across the world, what can we do, as US Americans (I apologize to all non-US western hemisphere people for every time I am referring to my countrypeople in the US and I forget to modify American with US)?

Since the US is the largest arms exporter, we should support any and all efforts to curb and halt this war profiteering, making blood money on misery all over the world, whether those efforts are being launched by elected officials or nongovernmental organizations.
We should support any and all efforts to sanction any country that sells arms, period. Boycott, UN sanction, unilateral sanction--there are many possible routes to effective arms transfer reduction and elimination.
Supporting any and all aspects of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration from the UN or any other party.
Encourage investment in post-conflict societies from the small to the large, but focused more on value-added products (crafted or manufactured) than raw natural resource-based.
Support US or most nongovernmental organization humanitarian assistance that has zero military component.

Is this a low priority for US Americans who have other worries right now? Perhaps. It is hard to keep track of everything, all issues, every initiative on all vital problems and potential solutions. But if you hear from peace groups that some good legislation is in the works, tell your elected officials you support it. If you have a chance to work for and vote for a real peace candidate (Dennis Kucinich! Barbara Lee! Bernie Sanders! Save us!), please please do. In this season of peace, make it a priority for a minute. Every bullet we export might as well have a US taxpayer name etched on it and there may be a child on the disastrous end of that bullet. If you wouldn't pull the trigger, don't pay for the bullet, and if they make you pay for it, vote them out.

References

Bannon, Ian and Collier, Paul (Eds.) (2003). Natural resources and violent conflict: Options and actions. Washington DC: The World Bank.

Ross, Michael (2003). The natural resouce curse: How wealth can make you poor. In Ian Bannon & Paul Collier (Eds.). Natural resources and violent conflict: Options and actions. Washington DC: The World Bank.

Let them eat bombs

2011-12-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

Is Grandma losing some of her Medicare coverage? Tell her to join the all-volunteer Army. Is your six-year-old daughter booted out of aftercare at her elementary school because you can't afford the fees? You really should get her down to the recruiter's office to sign up for Delayed Entry--maybe you can help her negotiate a signing bonus that will cover her jacked-up school lunch costs too. And you, you layabout, you say you are being foreclosed on because they downsized your company and you can't find work and your mortgage company is making its move? Well, why on Earth don't you seek Pentagon contractor work? According to the hawks, they are huge employers. Do we have to spell it out for you?

Of course, the liberals are always trying to convert us all to Islam and surrender to al Qa'ida on the days they aren't trying to capitulate to the commies. They send their messages in pumpkins, which is well known, so we have broken all their codes and understand their devious unChristian plans. Today, however, the pumpkin is The New York Times, in which they have an unsigned editorial promoting abject surrender, cleverly disguised as fiscal prudence. Unsigned? That means their editorial board agreed on it, which sends a strong signal that they have consolidated their anti-American white flag message designed to brainwash us all into cowardly subservience to the jihadis who want little girls educated. Wait. The commies who want Grandma to have health care. No. The fifth-columnists acting as the fourth branch. Yeah, that's the ticket.

The disloyal cut-and-run Congress, if left to their own devices, seem ready to cut our beloved Pentagon back to 2007 levels of hyperspending. What to do? Next thing we know, Obama will get a government jobs program passed and unemployment will be reduced to three percent. He's such an Ayatollah socialist. Some outliers continue to line up with the wimps who want health care. Ask yourself, are you a loyal corporate-loving American or do you want to just give in to pressure from the losers who just pander to old women and little girls?

So rally hard to save the Poor Pentagon. The fate of Lockheed executives, few of whom even remember how many mansions they own, is at stake. Be a real American. Write your elected official and tell him to save all the war profits now!

Don't be evil

2011-12-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

The US military is the largest polluter on Earth, so large that they can't seem to pay to clean up their own messes, even when they get as much money every year as all other militaries of the world combined. It is pathetic that they can just contaminate wherever they go and offload the cleanup onto others.

Most recently, Google stepped in and offered to pay the cleanup and decontamination costs for the Navy at Moffett Field Hangar One, where the old siding was classified as toxic. Google gets a lease on the historic, 200-feet-tall building, so they bargained a save for the poor beleagured Navy and got some hangar room for their executive aircraft in the bargain. The irony of a nonmilitary corporation bailing out the richest military in world history is itself rich.

Where else can this sort of thing happen? Can Bill Gates fix Hanford, Washington, where US atomic pollution has been contaminating the Columbia river since the mid-1940s? Perhaps another Seattle nonmilitary corporation, Amazon, can help turn the Puget Sound Trident base back to its Douglas Fir, Cedar and Hemlock rainforest pristine state if we ever grow a national conscience and dismantle the Trident fleet.

Those who propose redirecting military spending to other areas frequently meet a "what about the military jobs?" challenge. If even a relatively small portion of the $1 trillion annual military spending were to go to bioremediation and other cleanup work as needed, that would employ more people than all the armed services and their capital-intensive contractors combined. This is vitally needed work and it's drastically underfunded, even as we contemplate war on Iran, more massive military budgets for our belligerence, and a continuation of nosedive into debt. The rationale behind so much of this toxicity is so immoral, so evil. Save money, save the Earth, save jobs and create even more. This is a serious change but we have serious problems. Marginal moves will not work. Thanks, Google, now help us repurpose the American economy toward peace and ecological sanity.

Show them and let them show us

2011-12-08T21:38:00.000-08:00

Missionizing, proselytizing, blandishing, preaching, lecturing, and otherwise patronizing people is not a way to convince us to act like you. Live well, love well, give much, enjoy life, be fair, be generous, and we will want to learn from you and be more like you. Is your philosophy kind? Is it helpful? Is it conducive to the success of all? That seems quite attractive to us and we want to emulate you, no matter what the name of your belief system.

Thanks to the idea that you can shove democracy down people's throats at gunpoint and bomb them into the Jeffersonian spirit, even democracy has a bad name in many parts of the Earth. More astonishingly, even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which turns 63 on December 10, 2011, has been disrespected and rejected by some because it's lorded over as though 'The West' alone has respect for human life. That is seen as astonishing arrogant hypocrisy by those from 'The East' who suffer frequently under our bombs and occupations. There is only one way to 'sell' human rights: practice them toward all.

Governments all over the world claim to speak for their countries and Muslim leaders rejected the UDHR, substituting their Cairo Declaration. However, in actual recent post-Arab Spring polls, the people themselves favor freedoms, including equal rights for women. They gained the right to express themselves and that is what they say. Afghans and Iraqis will struggle with all of this because they have suffered occupation by a massive armed force with overwhelming weapons in the name of democracy and human rights. Crowing that we are there to protect women and then leaving is a guarantee that women will suffer far more than the women who joined in freeing themselves alongside their brothers in Tunisia and Egypt and it will be much better for women in general if and when the nonviolent Arab Spring succeeds in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Arab world.

Should the UN have a role in promoting human rights? More Kenyans (94 percent) than US Americans (70 percent) think so. The majority of people polled--from democracies and authoritarian governments alike--were in favor of more UN promotion and monitoring of human rights.

Nonviolence is the promise for more human rights and more democracy. People who watch others learn from them and if we live lives of nonviolence and guarantee all humans all rights others will want to copy the best of who we are. Shooting them with drones in the name of democracy and human rights is a failed and failing policy. Let's learn from those we presume to teach. Very few of us want a Hamas-style government because we can see them oppressing their own. Just like the US giving a wonderful practice--democracy--a bad name when it's associated with violence, an Islamic theocracy gives Islam a bad name when it's conflated with violence. US troops kicking in doors won't recruit anyone to a love for our form of government any more than Islamic clerics sanctioning death by stoning for adultery does anything but drive most of us away from Islam. We can see the violence and we Just Say No Thanks. Very few of us want a Syrian Bashir al-Asad or an Ahmadinijad, let alone a Taliban-style religion, just as most Iraqis now express more nostalgia for Saddam than faith in their US-installed democracy. We showed them pain and told them to like it. Unsurprisingly, they don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the US driving force behind the UDHR and called it a sort of Magna Carta for all. Using nonviolence to enforce human rights is how they are both achieved in the means of seeking them and keeping them. A completely nonviolent foreign policy and a much deeper respect for domestic civil and human rights would have more of the world more excited to learn from us. We we eliminate enemies by making them into friends. How radical.

Happy Pearl Harbor Day! love, US military

2011-12-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, is officially closed. It is 1,126 acres of prime real estate just five miles from the Atlantic Ocean, with the Shrewsbury River on the east boundary just 45 miles south across Raritan Bay from Brooklyn. Now the locals are wondering what is to become of it and what it will mean, since it was closed as of September 15.

Base closures are a big issue in many ways. Closing a base is sometimes pure political punishment. Frank Pallone is the congressional representative from the district and has been since 1993. He is a Democrat.

But the larger issue and the one often under most radar is the clean up of bases. They are usually environmental disasters, toxic, hazardous, poisonous, often radioactive and scary to anyone contemplating making the land habitable, recreationally attractive, tourist-friendly, or even commercially available. That land is often a booby prize.

This is a daily concern in most states as a direct result of the impunity and immunity sought by and granted to the US military with regard to any pesky environmental laws, most of which originally flowed from the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. The military has always considered itself above those laws and Congress and the courts almost always agree.

The opinions of the public are not always so sanguine. It takes many years, lots of grassroots fundraising, and a huge amount of people power to get good environmental protection passed, funded and enforced in a democracy. Then, after we've made the democracy work for all of us, and work to protect our children from poisonous air, water, soil and food, the military usually fights against the people, rips apart democracy, and pollutes as much as they like. If the Chinese or Iranians polluted the New Jersey groundwater, we'd think about nuking them. With 'protectors' like the US military, who needs foreign invaders?

The solution? Nonviolence. Learn to govern using nonviolence. Learn to involve the entire citizenry in nonviolent defense against invasion and occupation. Learn to live with other nations instead of rattling sabers at them. Nonviolence won't pollute your rivers and lakes. Nonviolence won't make your drinking water unsafe, nor will it contaminate your food or air.

So the citizens of New Jersey are hoping for the best. Very costly bioremediation has helped in some of these cases. In others, the groundwater is actually flammable and poison. The military has a long and inglorious ecological history. Democracy needs a better friend than violence and the preparation for war.

This is what victory looks like

2011-12-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

“The degree of effectiveness of nonviolent struggle must, of course, be compared to the degree of effectiveness of violent struggle in achieving the avowed objectives for which it is applied, not simply in physically crushing the other group” (Sharp, 2005, p. 436).

I know a hard-charging administrator who seems to regard almost all relationships and all interactions as a question of who will come out on top. He seems to believe that the more another's stock decreases, the more his stock increases. He is successful. He is a rising star. Few people like him. His analysis of relationships is zero-sum, even though others succeed too and win friends. That is because they understand that making others into winners is part of winning ourselves. It's called collaboration.

When the amazing activist David Dellinger was a track star at Yale he competed in a national meet and actually slowed down by a split second so he could reach out and grab his friend's hand and cross the finish line together in one meet. He cared more about the relationship than he did about beating his friend. They were both winners instead of one winner and one loser. While this is a simple illustration, we can think along those lines when we start to think strategically about nonviolence.

As Gene Sharp writes, when we assess nonviolence--which, after all, is going to succeed sometimes and fail sometimes--we need to compare it to the alternatives, not just assume that if it ever fails it's not perfect and therefore not worth trying. There are two alternatives to nonviolence: passive acceptance of whatever conditions are imposed and violent opposition. Assuming few would support passive acceptance of injustice or oppression, the comparison needs to be made between nonviolence and violence but it needs to be based on stated goals, not on who annihilated whom.

The problem then becomes almost a necessary default to maximalist goals, which is how Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) approached their study. After all, who is going to take up arms to get migrant workers rights or affirmation of treaty rights or to save a Redwood? If you raise an insurgent army you generally have the overthrow of a regime in mind. Any other violence is a halfway measure even more likely to fail miserably than a full-on armed uprising, which at least stands a chance of victory a quarter of the time.

Yes, a quarter. And so when they studied it, Chenoweth and Stephan found that, given maximalist goals of regime change, nonviolence works about twice as often (53 percent) as does violence (26 percent). That is a fairly dispositive finding, radically statistically significant.

In short, victory belongs more often to those who use nonviolence, even when they are after a new government or head of government. That is what victory looks like. Nonviolence.

References

Chenoweth, Erica, & Stephan, Maria J. (2011). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Dellinger, David (1993). From Yale to jail: The life story of a moral dissenter. New York: Pantheon.

Sharp, Gene (2005). Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential. Boston: Extending Horizon Books.

Having hope and changing the odds

2011-12-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

“While we are unable to transform this world overnight, we can take important steps to change it, to solve its problems, lift its oppression, and minimize the many applications of violence” (Sharp, 2005, p. 1).

I teach nonviolence, peace studies, conflict resolution, environmental connections of resources to violence, peace journalism, and a few other courses from time to time. Part of this teaching is to look frankly and full frontally at the problems. This often has the unintended but sadly anticipated effect of shattering ideals and hopes. Looking at the US history of invasions and exploitation can erode a student's faith in the nation. Understanding the overwhelmingly destructive results of our massive war system can make a student nearly paralyzed.

That's when I fight back against hopelessness. It is not an option. It is a duty. And it is realistic.

Without hope, we are inactive.
Without hope, we see no point in doing the right thing.
Without hope, we teach our children poor ethics.
Without hope, we fail to do our most minimal share.
Without hope, we doom our species and harm others.

We have no realistic option except to hope. Hope motivates us. Hope recruits. Hope, even in the face of the overwhelming appearance of loss and destruction, is what gives us our only chance for success. If we don't owe that to ourselves, we owe it to both our children and our ancestors. Hope is not something we wait for; we make a decision to hope.

This is why books about nonviolent success are so vital. They are all stories of winning despite overwhelming odds. They are true case studies of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Gene Sharp was the first one to seriously start to research, gather, present and analyze these cases of nonviolent success and that is why he is the grandfather of the study of nonviolence. Reading his opus, Waging nonviolent struggle, is learning why hope is both possible and required.

Get his book. Read it and weep. Read it and learn. Read it and see how and why hope is at the heart of this method of struggle, the real hope for humankind. It is impossible to logically lose hope in this moment of Arab Spring and Occupy uprisings, both phenomena now accounting for victories great and small, and both holding great promise and huge hope.

References

Sharp, Gene (2005). Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential. Boston: Extending Horizon Books.

Beyond violence

2011-12-03T21:30:00.000-08:00

A world without violence is impossible to realistically expect. Violence will always be with us. So, argue the defenders of the war system, how can we realistically challenge the idea of a military strong enough to defend our nation by whatever means are necessary to do so?

That is a bit like saying we will always need to clip our toenails so why object to the guillotine? The question is not how much violence is Just Fine to use in meeting our goals, but rather how can we eliminate the stranglehold that violence has on our economy, our emotional well being, our social norms and our spirits and souls? How can we prevent violence and protect ourselves from it in a smarter and more sustainable way than our current model? Violence amongst hunter-gatherer cultures is usually rare. Can we not achieve at least what 'primitive people' do?

We now invest in violence as a protection against violence. We invest so heavily that we virtually guarantee that more violence will result. Our military spends us into poverty and poverty produces enormous conflict, as though irony doesn't exist. It is astonishing.

Meanwhile, we have ungodly numbers of weapons freely floating in our streets and stashed in our homes, weapons that take the lives of innocents every day, lives lost on the altar of fear and sacralization of murderous arsenals.

With that sort of protection who needs attackers? When our own military robs us all blind, who needs foreign thieves? When the gun manufacturers enable the slaughter of American children who needs invading brutalizers?

And so it's all about taking new risks in order to avoid the old ones. We can do so on an individual basis, though ultimately it's a collective game, violence reduction and nonviolent alternatives. I can, as an individual, refuse to own a gun, which I do. I can refuse to call the armed police to protect me. I can be a conscientious objector and refuse to enter into the military, which I did as a young man. All these alternatives are great and I wish they were more prevalent. But only when we decide in mass numbers to change our norms and our actions will we achieve the real goal, an alternative to the war system.

What would it take?

If we refused to pay for war--if we made it harder to collect war taxes and we elected more and more officials who would reduce the military--we would begin the transition.

If we developed strong networks to provide for our common security first at the neighborhood level and then in a network of communities, we could begin to collectivize our unconquerability. Refusing to cooperate with violence starts as a value and moves into a commitment, gaining strength as we learn local mutual support and care. The general strike is how a people can make it impossible for others to conquer them--e.g. when Oakland police engaged in brutality against Occupy and Occupy shut down major portions of the city, yet received praise from the mayor. That's the beauty of nonviolence; you can defeat your opponent and they will often inflict relatively few costs, possibly even expressing admiration for you. Building associations of mutual support is how oppressed minorities can strengthen their hand.

There are, admittedly, things you can do with violence that you cannot accomplish with nonviolence. These include:

invading other's lands.
stealing from others.
ruling others with a vast wealth gap.
maintaining extreme poverty alongside relative wealth.

Let us acknowledge that. If we are willing to forgo these activities we can achieve the other goals using nonviolence, inflicting costs upon oppressors that help convince them to come bargain with us. This is true at the individual, local and national level, but it will take discipline and commitment to achieve. Meanwhile, until we do, we experience all the costs and benefits of violence. Some of us Just Say No Thanks.

Pledge protection

2011-12-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

When a herd of us (19) went to our US Senator's office to offer nonviolent resistance to that Senator's failure to pledge to never vote any more funding for the occupation of Iraq, we brought our own pledge with us. That pledge was signed by each of us and kept in our pockets. It was also sent to media, given to police, to the senator's staff, and to several Homeland Security officers who ultimately arrested us.

The pledge:

Nonviolence Pledge for March 20, 2006 Action

I pledge to engage only in nonviolent behavior during my participation in the civil resistance action at Ron Wyden’s office in Portland on March 20, 2006 and any events that flow from that action, including, but not limited to, while in police custody, when in court, when publicly presenting to anyone about this action, and if participating in any follow-up actions. This is a commitment for this context only and does not necessarily

imply a lifetime commitment to nonviolence or to any of these behaviors under other circumstances.

· I will not bring weapons, illegal drugs or alcohol.

· I will demonstrate positive regard for the humanity of all.

· I will not engage in physical violence.

· I will engage in nonviolent resistance to war.

· I will not engage in verbal violence (no threats of bodily harm, no screaming

· or swearing or attacks on anyone's character or identity).

· I will make every attempt to communicate nonviolently (with calm, with reason,

· with openness to each human being) or be silent.

· I will not run.

· I will stand or sit, or, if need be, I will quietly and calmly walk away.

· I will not engage in property destruction (even that which I may regard as

· nonviolent).

· I will engage in clear actions that condemn war and militarism.

· I will not engage in acts of costumed street theater or other diversionary

· tactics.

· I will remain dignified and allow no one to take that from me.

This pledge blunted any possibility of a failure to impress everyone with our sincerity, our nonviolent commitment, and our determination to offer resistance to injustice and militarism. Indeed, our press coverage was favorable, Homeland Security officers were sweet as pie, and the Senator changed his tune, his tone, and became a leader in calling for an end to the occupation.

Was that so hard?

We were nice to everyone, we never chanted anything, we allowed all constituents to pass through unimpeded or molested by us, and everyone parted friends, a job well done. We won, and the Senator won. Homeland Security was not portrayed as evil, so they got off easy, and we kept the focus on the issue: GET OUT OF IRAQ. We moved a Senator to do the right thing.

Of course we didn't pander to anyone, we didn't allow in anyone who wouldn't sign the pledge, and so we were elitist and exclusive. Tough. We achieved our goal and that, I hope, is good enough.

This builds trust. More and more Occupy actions are seeing the value in this. It is one of the best hopes of the movement.

Occupy Oz

2011-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

Australia is very worried about an attack from China.

Huh?

Yes, we all must have missed that international headline. But sure enough, President Obama has announced that US troops are moving in with the Ozzies. Occupy Oz?

Lucky thing the US has such a budget surplus that we can deploy more troops to more nations, especially ones that are in such desperate need.

Is this the only way we can show friendship to anyone? Bring armed troops onto their sovereign soil? Occupy their country? When will this practice be seen for the sheer stupidity it is? We still have 50.7 million without health care coverage, including 8 million children, even after the so-called socialist Obamacare (which generated 23 million new customers for insurance corporations). We have enormous numbers of children who hate school because all the life has been drained out of it from budget cuts and No Child Left Behind teach-to-the-tests days of dryhole boredom. We have a government ready to shut down and Congress with an approval rating (nine percent of Americans) two points lower than the communist party and six lower than Paris Hilton, but we need those American troops stationed in Oz.

This is why so many of us have hopes that the Occupy movement--our current best hope for change toward peace and justice from nonviolent civil society--gets its act together. Here is a tiny town Occupy that is all about positive peace and is showing a real American spirit of community: Occupy Mosier. For a longer, more fun version, watch the eight-minute movie. No drugs, no faceless enraged masked agents, just local accountable and personally identifiable good souls. This is what Eldridge Cleaver meant when he said that whatever we do for change in the US should have a Yankee Doodle slant to it. Real folks, real diversity, not a one percent ersatz "movement." Occupy Mosier just stopped Wal-Mart--not bad for a tiny town grassroots effort. Let's roll.

Dealing with agents provocateurs

2011-11-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

Again and again, movement after movement, it is proven that agents of the state or corporations infiltrate movements and cause disruption, in-fighting, discrediting, escalation of destructive conflict, justification for violence against the movement (even lethal violence), and even the end of campaigns or organizations. How can we immunize ourselves against this perennial problem? There are two major steps with many smaller sidesteps to each:

First, create an image of the movement that is nonviolent and only seeking justice by peaceable means. We see this accomplished historically by many movements that went on to victory, even despite outbreaks of violence by those who proclaimed themselves seeking the same nominal ends, or goals. The image of the movement needs to assure everyone that it sees no distinction between the means and ends.

Second, defend that image from those who attempt to discredit or flip it. Use all possible opportunities to stress the nonviolent nature of the movement and be specific. Use the word nonviolent in all public outreach and internal documents. Set that tone and standard. This seems redundant but it is inoculation with booster shots on an ongoing basis.

Image creation
How can an image be created? There are a number of steps to this:

decide on code of conduct
publicize code of conduct
enforce code of conduct

Decide on code of conduct
This requires a decision first by each individual in the leadership of the movement (there is no such thing as a leaderless movement, just alternative forms of leadership). Some may have specific conduct they will not be willing to be associated with. They must make their specifics known and the movement leadership must decide if that is acceptable. At this point, in some movements, leadership may lose one or more leaders if no consensus is reached or if the majority are unwilling to adopt a rigorous code of conduct that excludes violence. The final code of conduct agreed to by the leadership should be simple, basic, and minimal, and then sent to the larger movement for additions. For example, if 75 organizers agree on just one simple item such as "We will not engage in nor threaten physical violence as we wage this campaign," that is a deal-breaker for each and all. Anyone who cannot sign on to that for the duration of the campaign is not considered a member of that campaign and whatever conduct that person or persons use is explicitly described as separate from and not approved of by the campaign.

The membership may add elements, such as, "We will not threaten or engage in property destruction as a part of this campaign." Or, "We will not use expressions of hatred or objectification of anyone as a part of this campaign." The code of conduct is a document, then, that the campaign uses in its outreach to recruit, to the media, to the police and to any party with whom it negotiates, such as city officials or others who may be stakeholders. The code becomes the image by its declaration and enforcement.

How does a movement enforce its code and thus defend its image and protect against agents provocateurs?

First, the code should be ubiquitous and should be one of the sets of filters that applies to all decisions. If someone in a meeting suggests an action or value that falls clearly outside the consensed upon code, that is regarded as patently inappropriate. If there is insistence upon that sort of behavior, again, that person or persons should be invited to start another organization or campaign as such behaviors have already been rejected by your movement.

Peace monitors who are identifiable (arm bands, hats, t-shirts, name tags or other clear visuals) should help everyone keep the code of conduct uppermost. Often a small handout with the code on it given out to everyone is enough to help foster an atmosphere of image projection and protection. Done routinely, a standard becomes accepted and calls for any other behavior become immediately recognizable as out of bounds within the context of your campaign. This does not need to involve moral denunciation, just a stated and restated code that makes your movement much less vulnerable to anyone who might try to hijack it. It also becomes very hard to smear your work with the behavior of someone who claims to be with you but is acting outside your code. In a crowd without a clear code of conduct, agents provocateurs have an easy time of it and will assist in wrecking your image and make the public grateful for all police action against you.

There is no perfect guarantee of immunity, but these measures, though they may seem difficult, really have worked quite well for many movements. They are the best protection against the threats of agents provocateurs, who often look like the most radical but are often the ones setting up the rest for attack and who pose the most serious threat to the movement. Those who say these measures or something like them are unnecessary have not had much experience with movements that succeed and those which fail. We can always learn how to do this better, but this is at least a good start toward protecting your people and your campaign.

The sinking Occupy movement

2011-11-08T07:41:00.000-08:00

The Occupy movement is submerging faster than it's growing. There are two manifestations of an underlying primary problem causing this in my town, Portland OR, and I suspect it's not entirely dissimilar elsewhere.

Symptom #1: Street people magnet
As one of my students and a devoted Occupy worker put it, "What street person WOULDN'T be attracted to free food, no serious rules and protection from police?" That sums up a situation that may seem delightful to those who romanticize street folk but the reports are coming in from many Occupy encampments of police starting to raid tents and find meth, other drugs, inevitable incidents of schizophrenic breaks, fist-fighting and so forth. Street people suffer the hardest, but they also spread their suffering around. This is not their fault, but a movement that cannot handle this influx cannot pass muster with the general public.

Symptom #2: Violent 'radical' flank
The so-called anarchists, or black bloc, or whatever they call themselves, are a mixture of ultraleftists, romantically confused adventurers, spoiled brats, immature teen rebels without serious analysis, dedicated but underinformed activists who genuinely believe violence is best, and testosterone-addled young males. They are never in the majority, or even the sizable minority, of any mass movement, but they are loud and kinetic. They are often conflated with the street people though they are quite different in almost all cases. Again, any movement that cannot handle this general grouping will falter and slide in the view of the 99 percent the movement claims to speak for.

The underlying problem in both cases? It's lack of analysis and the spine to do something about it. The problems both involve achieving a modified consensus about a behavior code and then growing the backbone required to implement it. If Occupy is meant to be a social service refugee camp it will also not be a serious movement at this time in our history. If Occupy embraces a diversity of tactics that includes violence it will lose any chance for a diversity of people that includes most of the 99 percent. If Occupy realizes this and cannot understand that it needs to evict anyone failing to sign on to a nonviolent code of conduct for all actions associated with the movement, including an alcohol-and-drug-free encampment, it will sink.

OK, I am writing categorically and I could be proven wrong. I am an academic and should know better than to make those sweeping statements. I admit I am worked up about this because I am tired of watching mass movements get hijacked by fringe elements who enjoy the rumble and really don't care about public policy change or corporate policy change. I take hits all the time, usually behind my back, for making these unpopular assertions. But I've seen it all again and again and again and it's sad that so many in so many movements fail to learn that if we don't discipline ourselves, here comes the police to do it instead. Is that a happy result? And when the armed agents of the state come, they will do so with the full approval of most of the citizens because most of the citizens firmly reject rape, sex offenders, meth use, stabbings, and violent threat (including threatening one of my students with a gun), all of which have occurred recently in Occupy Portland.

The best aspect of all this may be that activists start to learn how to avoid or, when necessary, deal with these presenting and inevitable challenges. They are all surmountable. My hope is in the young activists, learning bitter but valuable lessons. When they come out next time they will do so with a strategic plan ahead of time and, I hope, they will teach us all some new ways to make gains toward peace and justice.

Who are we?

2011-11-06T07:13:00.000-08:00

So, we wonder, how would we characterize a nation that had invaded or intervened militarily in various other sovereign nations some 73 times in 55 years? Militaristic? Bellicose? Imperialist? Domineering? Brutal? Arrogant? Power-hungry? Ruthless? Pitiless? Hegemonic?

“Between World War II and the end of the last century, the United States led seventy-three military interventions throughout the world, almost double the total from the preceding fifty-five-year period.”

—Pilisuk, Marc (2008). Who benefits from global violence and war: Uncovering a destructive system. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. (p. 2).

Ewps—that nation would be US. That raises even more questions.

But it also produces an opportunity.

We wonder, for instance,

how to balance the budget? Um, stop spending ungodly sums on military intervention (almost a $billion just on Libya alone)?
how to stop terrorism? Well, perhaps we could stop stepping on other people and enraging them?
how to create jobs? Hey, if our military and military aid didn't suppress collective bargaining in Colombia, Indonesia, and many other nations, perhaps some of those jobs could begin to drift back to the US.
how to create even more jobs? Duh. Stop spending our taxes on capital-intensive military contractors and spend instead on labor-intensive infrastructure, education, public works and feeding everyone.
how to stop killing others and sending our young over 'there' to get killed? Does that even rise to the level of deserving a response? Just Say No to more intervention.

Once we listen instead of dictate—listen to the Global South and our own internal Global South, better known as the Occupy movement—we will get along, we will share this world more equally with everyone, we will find much more peace and we will find a new power we haven't felt, possibly ever before.

References

Pilisuk, Marc (2008). Who benefits from global violence and war: Uncovering a destructive system. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International.

Sunset for American Empire

2011-11-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

As we in the various movements have been warning for decades, America is sliding downhill fast, globally. Of course, it's blamed on everything but the massive, record-shattering, conflict magnet military expenditures.
"Subprime loans"
"Darn Chinese"
"Obama"
"Bailouts"
"Government regulation"
"Welfare"
"Medicare"
And so the fantasies continue. We can fix it all by spending more on the military and controlling more of the universe. We can fix it all by eliminating all government help for the poor. We can fix it all by allowing industry to pollute like they used to. Why don't we go back to the good old days when we could send in the Marines, shoot thousands of indigenous people and install our own strongman to help our companies extract cheap natural and human resources?

Some are helping the youth to understand this. Right now the National Priorities Project and the American Friends Service Committee present youth responses to the question, What would you do with a trillion dollars? Youth get that you cannot spend that on the military every year and expect the economy to flourish. They see the fallacy that you cannot give that much in tax cuts to the most wealthy and look for job creation. They totally understand that pouring that amount into the wars in the Middle East has not helped our society to sustain, much less advance.

We are an empire sinking slowly into the sunset, well on our way to becoming just another nation, but how we exit empire will determine how the rest of the world treats us--and let's not forget that we've armed them well. Will we pretend that military power is ruling Earth? Will we spend our way on useless ecologically disastrous weaponry and military actions until there's nothing left to bioremediate our wreckage?

Leave it to the One Percenters from Richistan and we are doomed. If the 99ers don't take back control, real control--not Fox-mediated, Rush Limbic-propagandized war-warped ersatz democracy--we will continue to lose more and more, faster and faster.

The choice is entirely ours. The Occupy Movements may not be clear on much, they may be too alienating for many middle-class Americans, but they are a manifestation of radical discontent with the Big Lies of flag-toting, gun-waving nationalism. They could use your help in finding the way to clarity, to a real radical nonviolence, disarmament and genuinely new evolutionary way forward. If you can't help them, get into a political party and never stop agitating toward making that party stand for something new, something nonviolent, something with real peace content and forward motion. Compromise with war profiteering is Just So Second Millennium. Let's finally enter this one.

A hero of mine and a new book

2011-10-29T08:56:00.001-07:00

Everybody wants to know
Why I sing the blues
Yes, I say everybody wanna know
Why I sing the blues
Well, I've been around a long time
I really have paid my dues

—B. B. King, "Why I sing the blues"

S. Brian Willson has been around a long time and he has really paid some dues. He's been on the rightwing side, the leftwing side, in the world of the all-American jock scholar warrior and in the world of the empathic nonviolent defender of all humanity. In between he has suffered direct, massive, permanent and life-threatening, life-altering violence from his former comrades-in-arms, the US military. He has been willing to sacrifice and the war system has taken him up on that willingness, even more than he bargained for. He turned 70 this year on a birthday he shares with my old political mentor, Walt Bresette, with Vietnam vet Ron Kovics, and with the United States of America, the Fourth of July.

Now he's speaking about his second book, a memoir, Blood on the tracks: The life and times of S. Brian Willson, and he's visiting the various Occupy sites, bringing his message to them and their messages to each other. Willson's memoir pushes out at 410 pages of the history of one thinking person's interface with the war system.

As a young conservative law student at the Washington College of Law at American University Willson volunteered to spend time in jail where the experiences were so horrific--including having a man's gangrenous foot literally come off into his hands!--that "my conservative veneer began to crack" (p. 21).

Just a few years later, as he served in Vietnam, it cracked all the way through when he was assessing bomb damage. Turns out the bombs were napalm and he encountered many burned and disfigured Vietnamese, culminating with his crisis when he stared at one young mother, napalm-burned to death with her three babies in her arms in a village. "From that moment on, nothing would ever be the same for me" (p 48).

To hear Brian tell his story out loud, watch Democracy Now! from October 28, 2011. It's an hour well spent.

I first heard of Brian when he and three other vets fasted on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, an open-ended fast looking for signs that the US would not tolerate the ongoing "low-intensity" warfare against Nicaragua, a war he saw much like a Vietnam in our backyard, only done by proxy thugs instead of US troops.

In some ways, Brian is much like many other veterans for peace, in that he doesn't practice violence but he supports the rights of others to use violent resistance to empire. Is he a pacifist? Perhaps, perhaps not. But he knows what the price of resistance is and who pays. He saw it in Vietnam, and then saw it again when visiting Palestine, El Salvador, Nicaragua and other places. Mostly, he has paid a heavy price himself.

I've spent a fair bit of time incarcerated or otherwise in the judicial system (on house arrest, parole, probation, etc.). I've picked up a couple of peace felonies and nonviolent misdemeanors, but I have no concept of what a really high price on my resistance might be, nothing like Brian's price.

I had never met Brian, but I remember exactly where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing when I heard about the attempt by the US military to murder him. It was September 1, 1987, and I had organized a work party for my dear friends Paul Heinrich and Sue Pope, two activists in the various solidarity movements with those opposing US hegemony in Central America. Paul and Sue were building a large solar home on a beautiful south-facing slope in northern Wisconsin, north of St. Croix Falls. We were listening to Paul's transistor radio, tuned, as always, to WOJB, the tribal station, and the report came on about Brian. He had been sitting on the railroad tracks at the Concord Naval Weapons station in blockade of trains of weapons bound for Central America. The train, instead of slowing, accelerated and cut off his legs, broke many bones, and took out a piece of his skull, essentially scalping him. We all stopped swinging hammers and carrying lumber and just listened, horrified. We all knew who Brian was and we were aghast.

Brian's account of his long journey back from the hell of surviving such a murderous attack weaves throughout the history of resisting US imperialism and the consumer culture that drives it. It is a poignant political and blunt personal story, written from the heart by a smart man who has been places most of the rest of us can only imagine without real basis for understanding. His story is one of developing deep human empathy and one that teaches it. It is not an easy read but it is an inoculant against the tendency to objectify everyone in different groups. It is a direct challenge to each of us to be as powerful as we can in our stances and actions for peace and justice. Tough medicine for the soul, but we should take it.

Many years later, Brian moved to Portland, where I live, and we have become friends. We don't always agree on everything, but we always respect each other. Brian will be one of my heroes forever. He lives his ideals and, even with prostheses, walks his talk more than almost anyone I have ever met.

This is a book that we should assign to all high school students. I'd like to see them all read 10 pages per week, all year, and discuss it every week in class for a little while. It's a tough one, but Brian also writes with honesty and humility, the two qualities of the best memoirs. His story is a long one. I hope it's much much longer. He has been there, done that, and has come back from the dead to give us a great deal of wise perspective.

B.B. King can take us out:

Now Father Time is catching up with me
Gone is my youth
I look in the mirror everyday
And let it tell me the truth
I'm singing the blues
Mm, I just have to sing the blues
I've been around a long time
Yes, yes, I've really paid some dues

Blind man on the corner
Begging for a dime
The rollers come and caught him
And throw him in the jail for a crime
I got the blues
Mm, I'm singing my blues
I've been around a long time
Mm, I've really paid some dues

Brian, we who love justice say thank you. May you see the world you envision.

References:

Willson, S. Brian (2011). Blood on the tracks: The life and times of S. Brian Willson. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Dying of consumption

2011-10-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

In a single average year, the U.S. military uses enough fuel to run the entire mass transit system of the nation for 22 years—1.589 trillion BTUs—and that does not count the energy used to manufacture military hardware.
—Kent Shifferd (2011, p. 90)

In our various peace and justice movements I have heard (and said) for decades that it is a deep irony that so many of meet only after burning dinosaurs to physically get together.

Of course, we mostly burned fossil fuel from ferns and other plants, since the greenery on Earth always vastly outweighs the animal life, but the point was that we need to consume something to fight the conflicts often caused, in part, by our overconsumption of nonrenewable resources. At least we who are on the peace and justice and nonviolent side of the issue acknowledge our own part in the problem. We try to get better. It's easy where I live, in Portland, where I am in a car only 2-3 times annually, and that more as a courtesy to the driver, not because I need a ride. My bike and the bus or train are amazing hereabouts. Of course, I just flew to Memphis to be with my academic tribe of Peace and Justice Studies Association members, but that is a once-per-year fuel expense. As soon as my schedule settles down, I will do the right thing and take the train to such conferences, at least those in the landmass of North America.

The societal costs of managing conflict should be run through a cost/benefit analysis that includes energy consumption and all the costs that implies. Getting the amount of peace and justice required to keep our world out of war would require a substantial investment in moving people and the goods of life around, certainly. That substantial investment can be viewed as cancelled out by two factors.

One, the movement of troops, which would probably be about the same as moving nonviolent conflict workers around to help intercede, interpose and help overcome violence.

Two, the movement of completely superfluous luxury foods and other goods can be eliminated and instead the basic necessities can be shipped to those most in need.

By making those two conversions, we probably come out just about equally, but then we have all the rest of the military consumption, that is, the manufacture and movement of the vast arsenals. This is what accounts for a great share of the massive energy consumption of the military. The US military is the only one that Shifferd looked at in particular, but that is the one that counts most. China and Russia manufacture lots of military materiél and export lots, but we "lead." We are also the only nation with serious overseas military bases, some 1,000 or more if we count all the small ones, and on the sovereign soil of about 150 of the 193 nation-states on Earth. That is a lot of materiél in motion. Even the military worries about this and is trying to go hybrid on some vehicles to stay in business even with the fuel shortages that it helps cause. And for those on the peace side who wonder why we should have so many trainings, consider that the military trains constantly, and is learning how to use high tech to reduce consumption in some trainings.

The positive feedback loop of more consumption leading to more conflict leading to more consumption leading to more conflict leading to more consumption leading to more conflict is a form of Idiot's Delight that threatens our national security far more than Saddam ever did and more than Ahmadinijad does now. With protectors like our military, who needs foreign despots? Unless we determine that we want to stop this cycle (in part by starting to cycle) it will run us over in its vicious spiral to death and destructive consumption. The one percent from Richistan profit from this conflict/consumption loop and the rest of us lose. Cut off the military and save energy, lives and money, massively. Time to interpose right here, right now, at home.

References

Shifferd, Kent D. (2011). From war to peace: A guide to the next hundred years. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Dismantling three myths that block our movements

2011-10-27T18:28:00.000-07:00

Creating peace means creating a whole culture.

--Kent Shifferd (2011, p. 110)

What does Shifferd mean by this? That we must wait for peace until we create its culture? No. He means we must not stop with merely achieving an end to a particular incidence of violence; if we really want sustainable peace and justice we will never stop creating social institutions and personal practices, education and economic models, that foster peace and justice. What goes on in the kindergarten room is as crucial as what goes on in the Ivy League seminar. The minimum wage is a good thing, but we also need a maximum wage. We cannot create sustainable peace when we teach our children more about war than we do about peace. Getting more wealth to poor people is no more important than helping us all do without food shipped long distances (unless we use the ancient muscle or wind power to transport it). Unless we reflect and improve toward equality and sustainability we will unravel.

I hear dicta from many who think fairly shallowly, in my view, about peace.

Paralyzing myth #1:
"You can't make peace with anyone else, nor in society, without achieving inner peace."
This is one of the most disempowering and false statements, used to justify inaction and to avoid risk. It is like the inner Goebbels Big Lie, repeated often enough to be eventually regarded as true. Sorry. There have been plenty of peace campaigns that have succeeded by many participants who had not achieved inner peace at all. Waiting for individual perfection before working to reduce and eliminate the damage of violence in and between societies is a vain, narcissistic and incorrect justification for allowing terrible things to occur. Gandhi was prone to a great deal of self-doubt and stress. Martin Luther King, Jr. grappled with issues endlessly, facing his own mortality without adequate defense from a vast array of enemies. Through it all, both men created much peace in our troubled world. We are all lucky they didn't wait around for the mood rings in their respective navels to indicate the state of Inner Peace so vaunted by those who wish to offer lame excuses for noninvolvement. Just say it: I'm nervous and too afraid or too lazy to be involved. Here, I'll model this: I am too weary and busy to do enough for the Occupy movement. If I had more fire I'd be doing my share. Is that so hard? Can we admit it when others are doing more? Can we just say, "Thank you for doing the tough work of trying to create a movement, however messy it may be, toward more justice"? Give credit to others instead of making excuses for our own inadequate actions.

Paralyzing myth #2:
"Working on reforms isn't working for real change."
Really? Well, if we would like to actually achieve something beyond moral righteousness and posing we will think strategically about the most our movement can achieve, draw bright lines around that goal, ignore other wish list items, and get about the business of winning that goal. If it's to desegregate buses, win that before trying to demand the demolition of all forms of all racism. Does that mean your very broad goal is abandoned or that you no longer really want an end to all forms of racism? Obviously not. But if you can establish your movement as serious and as able to win something, you will recruit in large numbers. Those who fancy themselves as more radical, as those who taunted you to really step up and go for utopia, will still be on the sidelines, ineffectually engaging in maximal goal masturbatory rhetoric. You may safely ignore them.

Paralyzing myth #3:
"Peaceful methods only work against those who also use peaceful methods."

This is a favorite of those who get so scared of the police that their little raging frustrated spirits would rather demand the right to violent self-defense than actually produce victory. Of course, nearly all who use this line of argument completely fail to actually engage in violent insurgency themselves, but they'd like everyone to think of them in those Guevaran terms. Some even wear berets and sport Che-style beards or hairstyle, not to mention surplus military clothing. They need to create their own Romantic Revolutionary Daycare Center for the Walter Mitty School of the Vainglorious Vanguard. They do not belong in the street with those who are willing to persist in the much tougher work of converting others to support the campaign. And of course, historically, the violent ones who do manage to effect regime change traditionally use that violence next on their own people, declaring all new dissidents as enemies of the revolution. What you win with the gun you must keep with the gun.

While so many have notions of "the revolution," in fact, it is what we do every day, and how we do it as individuals and in concert with each other in great and small groups, that produces evolution. Evolution toward peace and justice can indeed happen in large gulps, but it must be preceded by creation of that sort of culture and it must be followed by the same.

References

Shifferd, Kent D. (2011). From war to peace: A guide to the next hundred years. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.