Nonviolence unplugged

Suffer the little children. This is a poor child born with radiation-induced birth defects from the Chernobyl power plant accident in Ukraine in 1986. The Soviet government was willing to bet that its nukes would work well enough. It was a poor bet.

There is a debate now raging about the virtues of nuclear power; some see president Obama's new nuclear power plant funding as a good bet because it will reduce carbon consumption and give the US more energy independence. It is a bet we cannot afford to make.

From a nonviolence point of view, the entire nuclear cycle from uranium mining through production of nuclear electricity production or bombmaking through managing the transuranic and depleted uranium wastes for thousands of years is violent indeed.

Solar electricity is nonviolent. If the government would lend me $25,000, interest-free for the first 10 years, I could afford to install enough photovoltaic solar panels and the other requisite hardware to drastically reduce my electric dependence on the grid. Otherwise, I cannot afford it, and I suspect many homeowners are in that position. Where I live in Oregon the utility allows us to pay a bit more for a higher percentage of our electricity from renewables, which of course I do, and I've contacted the citizens' utility board asking if Pacific Gas and Electric is honest about this. Supposedly, they are. I'd rather see the panels on my roof, wouldn't you? I cannot currently afford it.

But we cannot afford more nuclear gambling either.

Nuclear power is so dangerous that no utility would build a single power plant until the government agreed to mandate a very low limit on utility liability in the event of catastrophic accident. It was called the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, passed in 1957 and updated since. Otherwise, nuclear power plants are completely uninsurable and corporations require insurance or a law granting them immunity from civil and all legal prosecution for their muck-ups. Once again, we find an industry operating with immunity and impunity, only avoiding the sloppiness that produces nuclear disaster because disasters mean that utility customers aren't sending in their payments.



There is a reason Chernobyl is referred to as the final warning. That 1986 meltdown in Ukraine took the life of a river to save the lives of the citizens, and it took 28 lives from acute radiation poisoning immediately and identifiably, many of whom were treated by Dr. Peter Gale, the American leukemia specialist who volunteered to go help and who wrote a book about it after.

















Had there been epidemiological studies done after it might have been possible to place numbers on the mid-term and long-term excess deaths attributable to that accident. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the terrible Ukraine economy this simply didn't happen, to my knowledge. Did hundreds more die? Thousands? Was the health of tens of thousands affected, or millions? After all, the radiation readings in Sweden spiked and that is the only reason the USSR admitted that the catastrophic accident even occurred. Radiation wafts on the winds. The atomic poison pie is easily cut into millions of servings as it becomes airborne and waterborne.

Look at the histories of uranium mining and the places chosen to store nuclear waste--never mind the places chosen by the nuclear weapons countries to test bombs. Indigenous peoples are the usual hosts. Dump it near the reservations, where they are demographically weak and where we can kill babies with less public concern. Pueblo, Navajo, Pima, Yakima, Lakota and other tribes have disproportionally borne the environmental human health costs of our anti-life experiment with nuclear power.

So, what is the nonviolent solution?

First, nonviolent resistance to nuclear power. A mass movement will be required, and it needs to be a mass movement prepared to commit mass civil resistance.

Second, massive conservation. From the Thich Nhat Hanh admonition to mind our daily activities and become less supportive of violence to insistence on massive investments in electric conservation measures (e.g. affordable installation of insulation in millions of homes and buildings that now waste electric heat or air conditioning), conserve and reduce consumption.

Third, commit to mass purchase of safe and clean electricity that doesn't include 'clean coal' or nuclear. Essentially, drive down costs by driving up scale of production by safe means.

Fourth, get new laws that remove subsidies from nukes. No more Price-Anderson. No more taxpayer-funded storage of the waste that is produced at every stage. Internalizing all costs in all forms of energy production would suddenly make solar and wind the cheapest of all.

I suspect getting any of this done would require a citizenry prepared to engage in mass nonviolent action. This doesn't mean running out to get arrested, necessarily, but paying attention to votes by politicians, instituting measures in our homes and businesses, and education of ourselves and others. Right now, the nuclear industry is using our mainstream media as a weapon of mass deception and our obligation is to counter that.

References

Robert Peter Gale and Thomas Hauser (1988). FINAL WARNING The Legacy of Chernobyl. New York: Warner Books.

http://www-pub.naz.edu:9000/~menglis6/Chernobyl.htm

From Adolph, with hate

From a journal of Edvard Brakstad, a Norwegian teacher exiled to the worst Arctic workcamp with about 500 others as punishment for refusing to teach Nazism to children.


Yeah, your nonviolence can work sometimes, but what about the Nazis? Or, as Ho Chi Minh claimed about Gandhi, if he would have offered nonviolent resistance to the French he could have met his God much earlier.

The facts in these cases are counterintuitive. Nonviolence really did pretty well against the Nazis. Not perfectly--but then violence didn't work perfectly either. The Soviets offered nothing but violent resistance and lost more than 14 percent of their entire population, even though they never lost their government. Norwegians mostly offered nonviolent resistance, lost their government and lost .32 percent--that is for every thousand Soviets alive in 1939, 140 were killed in the war. For every thousand Norwegians alive in 1939, 3 were killed. Raw numbers are ghastly: 23,954,000 Soviets and 9,500 Norwegians.

Norwegian religious leadership was supplanted by the Nazi puppet regime of Vidkun Quisling, eponymous with traitor ever since. The Norwegian religious leaders treated the Nazis and quislings with civility and civil disobedience, simply ignoring Nazi ecclesiastic leaders.





Teachers refused to teach the mandated Nazi curricula, the Supreme Court resigned, sports coaches ignored the Nazi values and symbology, even though the Nazis had assumed that Norwegians were pure Aryan and would naturally accept Nazism (Jameson & Sharp, 1963). But Norwegians had been at peace with the world for more than 220 years and had no interest in the hate-filled violence brought in by the invaders. They had no particular desire to kill Germans for invading either, and for more than three years practiced mass nonviolent noncooperation, from 1940-1943, losing very few to the Nazis. Later in the war the Norwegians undertook more violent resistance and casualties mounted.

When Nazi lecturers gave classes at the University, no one attended. When coaches refused to train with Nazi methods, most athletes boycotted events and sports leagues dissolved. 12,000 of the 14,000 teachers in the country refused to teach Nazism and 1,300 were sent to camps. 500 more were sent to brutal camps in the far northern frozen region. They maintained solidarity. For the first three years, Norwegian mortalities were kept astonishingly low, to about 100. Only when violence started did casualties really begin.

So Hitler hate met Norwegian nice and was nicely defeated, at least until the Norwegians had been taught to hate too. When humankind learns to maintain nonviolence even in the face of violent hatred, we will learn how to more surely overcome it.


References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

http://www.infonorway.com/?norway=essay/war/diary

Jameson, A.K., & Sharp, Gene. 1963. “Non-violent resistance and the Nazis: The case of Norway.” In, Sibley, Mulford Q. (Ed.). The quiet battle: Writings on the theory and practice of non-violent resistance. Boston: Beacon Press.

Jobs, morals, and warbots

"The U.S. military is by far the biggest designer and purchaser of weapons in the world. But it is also the most inefficient."
--P.W. Singer, Brookings Institute, Wired for war: The robotics revolution and conflict in the 21st century. (p. 256)

We are supposedly heading down the rabbit hole into a future of warbots waging destruction on all US enemies all over the world without endangering any more Americans. All we have to do is fork over all our money and accept far fewer jobs created per $B spent on security and, oh yes, ignore human rights and the rules of war.

Warbots are one extremely naive and touchingly simplistic science fiction. Meanwhile, they are generating massive funding for the rich elites who have been gorging at the bloody war trough all along.

Ethics, morals and unenforceable rules of warfare as understood by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court--in other words, the closest thing humanity has to a consensus on when it is permissible engage in war and how war must be conducted--all these are avoided or assuaged by the corporate and research profiteers because they interfere with business.

As Cicero noted back in the day, in war, the law is silent. We make these laws, but when the Predator and Reaper warbots attack targets and kill civilians, no one is held accountable under any law. We may proclaim from the margins, but in fact there are no bodies willing or able to enforce the rules of war on...what...the 'pilots' 7,000 miles away? The commanders? Centcom? President Obama?

Civilians--many utterly innocent, many children--are killed with these godawful things. Jane Mayer in an Oct 26, 2009 story in The New Yorker, reported that in one instance in Pakistan, "a drone targeted the wrong house, hitting the residence of a pro-government tribal leader six miles outside the town of Wana, in South Waziristan. The blast killed the tribal leader’s entire family, including three children, one of them five years old. In keeping with U.S. policy, there was no official acknowledgment."

Science fiction holds that we can digitize human rights, ethics, even emotions and morals. Let's see that in benign civilian applications long before we test it out on poor tribespeople in Central Asia or the Middle East. If we cannot get robots working productively and making moral choices and legally correct choices in the US doing good civilian work, we cannot morally set them loose with weapons.



















References

Jane Mayer (26 October 2009). The Predator War: What are the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program? The New Yorker.

Singer, P. W. (2009). Wired for war: The robotics revolution and conflict in the 21st century. New York: Penguin.

Outvasion...

"DOD Announces Return of Facilities in Belgium

The Department of Defense today announced that it will return ten buildings at Florennes Air Base, Belgium, in 2010 to the host nation of Belgium.

The return involves ten empty buildings, which formerly housed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Tactical Leadership School. The school relocated to Spain's Los Llanos Air Base in June 2009, therefore the buildings are now excess to DoD's needs.

The return of the buildings will have no impact on Department of Defense personnel.

U.S. Forces Europe has begun the process of returning the buildings to the host nation of Belgium. The annual operating cost savings by returning these buildings is estimated to be approximately $1.8 million.

For additional information regarding this announcement, please contact U.S. Air Forces in Europe Office of Public Affairs at 011-49-6371-6558 or pa.ops@ramstein.af.mil ."

--DoD news release, 19 Feb 2010

The US has a military presence in 153 of the 194 nation-states on Earth, some 1,000 (approximately) bases large and small. This is an astonishing and abiding source of anger against the US. It costs the US taxpayer, the working Americans (not the rich and not the war profiting corporations, since they pay specialists to find them loopholes). The base of empires provides fewer jobs per $B spent than any other sector of the economy (except NASA, which itself is about 80 percent military-related expenditures).

So, feed three birds with one hand. Shut down these bases and mandate that a US military presence only be in the US or littoral waters, for starters, and the savings would rock the economy back into the black. The people of the world would be thankful and the levels of anger against the US would subside, reducing the appeal of the terrorists, ending most of their recruitment ability. Converting the US military to actual defense-only would potentially create enormous numbers of jobs, if we did so with a formula that provided for job creation as well as deficit reduction.

We could use another 250,000-500,000 Peace Corps volunteers--low-paid, high-value--all around the world, focused in the areas of great need. The goodwill that these volunteers could create is enormous. Shutting down just a few overseas military bases could both pay for those volunteers and reduce our budget deficit, depending on the size and budgets of the bases shut down.
















Imagine the good done in our own nation by 1,000,000 AmeriCorps/VISTA volunteers. Achieve this and more budget deficit reduction by closing more overseas bases.

The needs are enormous and the focus of this massive effort--which would need many logistics and analyst workers itself--could be thought of as that three-pronged effort to:
1. radically improve the US image globally.
2. reduce the budget deficit.
3. create jobs for US workers.

This is a doable, sensible idea--so it probably has no chance of success in our dysfunctional democracy. Time to break the logjam and start the flow of a stream of of rational approaches to our problems. Much smarter minds than mine are ready to prepare and execute real programs that can usher in a new US identity and prosperity with--not at the expense of--the rest of the world. They are tired of being invaded. Time for us to outvade and create something far better for ourselves and everyone else.

Radioactive fear of violence destroys trust

"Nonaligned proponents of disarmament also labored under the heavy burden of being identified with Communism."
--Lawrence S. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A short history of the world nuclear disarmament movement (p. 50)

State University of New York historian Wittner has written a valuable history here, and in the above quote referred to a period when the initial global response to atomic weapons was quite negative from the grassroots. Outside the US, few from the non-industrialized world had much good to say about superweapons of mass destruction, owned by the rich, white, and powerful. Immediately following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, opposition emerged and grew.

But it dampened when the Soviets blew off their own bomb and started supplying their new insurgency weapons--just developed in 1947--to poor people suffering from the last gasp of colonialism and the first sharp thrusts of globalizing imperialism. The AK-47 and the Soviet bomb shot massive terror in the capitals of the West; they easily created a climate of fear of all things Soviet and communist throughout that world. The East easily did the same to their people. The Cold War struck fear into so many hearts and polarized the planet so severely that the movement to end nukes when it would have been relatively easy to do so began to fizzle. It slipped badly from 1950-1953, the most intense period of McCarthyism. Peace was a dirty commie idea in the US. How well I remember--well, OK, I was only two years old, so my nonviolent activist career was not quite fired up yet.

But I grew up knowing that if anything was successfully labeled communist, it was feared and rejected, possibly violently. Young activists had to be as careful about avoiding that pejorative as young activists now had better steer clear of linkage to al Qa'ida if they'd be interested in affecting US policy in a good way. If you oppose the policies of your government and your government is a belligerent, that government will try to smear you with charges of being a tool of the enemy. Being nonaligned, being independent, being avowedly and demonstrably nonviolent, was and is the best way to inoculate against such traducement.

Yes, there were some then who were so enraged that they chose identification with communism with a sort of Maoist posture of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, coupled with the logical coda, all power comes from the barrel of a gun. Those were the ones who were too full of hate to care about effectiveness. It's the same now. We have to learn how to stay true to our struggles and avoid being smeared with the tar of violence. The path is sometimes quite tricky and yet worth it.

If we really hope to disarm nukes, our enemies must become our opponents and then our partners. We can most quickly achieve that with unilateral disarmament, the non-coercive inducements that earn trust and destroy the harm of propaganda. This is true in the streets and the suites.

We see it working in a backward fashion from that good model with the opposite history of nuclear proliferation. Make a new enemy and you guarantee the desire for nukes. Make a new friend and induce a desire for disarmament. This is not old naivete; this is new pragmatism.

References

Wittner, Lawrence S. (2009). Confronting the Bomb: A short history of the world nuclear disarmament movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Induced nonviolent satori

The law of karma is actually very scientific. There is always a connection between cause and effect. It’s like the light of a star, isn’t it? The light that we see now was initiated so many light years ago, but there it is.
—Aung San Suu Kyi, The voice of hope (p. 87)

Aung San Suu Kyi is one of our nonviolent sheroes whose inputs have so very much affected the outputs in her country of Burma (Myanmar). I love what she says about karma being like starlight. You may not see it now, it may take some time to get here, but you know it's on the way.

Does this mean we are all called to be perfect every minute? Are we to operate under the karmic law that says we must live by our engaged conscience or fail?

I don't think so. I have known no one personally in my life who has managed this--everyone has moments of weakness, meanness, greed, selfishness and hopelessness. We cannot hold ourselves to such high standards that we give up.

But to understand that, like any system, the inputs will affect the outputs, can help us to know that karmically speaking, we ought to behave with as much assertive civility and courageous compassion that we can muster at all times. Our behaviors toward our children affect how they treat other children, which affects how those children develop, and so forth. Our nonviolent trainings accrete in the hearts and minds and increasingly intuitive skill banks of all of those we train in various nonviolent responses. Making nonviolent competencies more intuitive is nonviolent satori--intuitive enlightenment.

Enough good produces good. It is not ours to expect our snowflake of the good to start the avalanche of nonviolent social change; it is up to us to make those snowflakes of the good as often as we can.

The avalanche is coming. We may not see it now, but we know it's on the way.


References

Kyi, Aung San Suu, and Alan Clements (1997). The voice of hope. New York: Seven Stories Press.

In good faith

In the 1980s the US military under Reagan was an extremely dirty actor everywhere in Central America. The 'advisors' in El Salvador trained and equipped the Acteal Brigade that massacred more than 900 at El Mozote, including many little children--plus murdering the religious women pictured above. The Contra--leftover terrorists from US-installed Somoza in Nicaragua--were killing civilians in their "low-intensity" war against the Sandinistas. The generals in Guatemala were assassinating local leaders and terrorizing Mayans who wanted land reform, killing them by the thousands with American weapons. US troops in Honduras advised counterinsurgency Honduran troops on the techniques of terror.

It was a human rights debacle of bloody proportions.

Nonviolence? What a pipe dream. The FMLN, the Sandinistas, the UNRG--all violent opposition to US hegemony. Where was the space for nonviolence in this bloody regional war?

But it was also happening. Peace Brigades International was saving lives with accompaniment. Witness for Peace was building capacity on the ground. Pastors for Peace were operating to bring in resources for the poor.

Even when they were stopped, nonviolence had an impact. Central Americans have deep respect for religious workers and when they are attacked even the arrogant US forces are held to account somewhat.



Pam McAllister described one of these events from 1983 in Honduras, when 150 religious women from various denominations traveled there and because the US was so dominant and meddling, most of the women were not allowed to leave the US. Those who made it to Honduras were on a plane together that was stopped before it could dock at the airport, on the tarmac, by US armed troops in uniform, with US helicopters circling overhead.

The international media was on hand in Honduras, but also had published photos of the women in various religious dress, packing their sleeping bags, trying to begin their Pilgrimage to Honduras at the Miami airport. The images of faith-based nonviolent women of good intention were more powerful in the end than the US armed troops who turned them back. The public opinion in Central America and the US was clearly in favor of these nonthreatening women and it was yet another exposure of the state-sponsored terrorism of the US in the region. "The women's attempt to reach Honduras was covered by all three major news networks in the United States" (McAllister, 1988, p. 15).

When we struggle with nonviolence, it is not about gaining turf or territory; it is about the much more important ecology of human hearts and minds. Let the military take the hill; we will always own the high ground.

References

McAllister, Pam (1988). You can’t kill the spirit: Generations of women’s resistance and action. Philadelphia: New Society Press.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo/_new/081011-US-latin-america-hmed-10p.hmedium.jpg

Standing at the confluence

We stood at the place where the Kicking Horse river joins the Yoho river in Yoho National Park, part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site, five contiguous national parks, wild and free and, well, yoho! (Yoho is the Cree word for astonishingly magnificent.) One river was rushing and clear, one was rushing and cloudy. It was quite a sight. While both had likely come off some part of the Columbian icefields, the clear river had come in and out through some tarn--a glacial meltwater-fed mountain lake--which settles out the particulate around which a snowflake formed scores of thousands of years ago. The other river was straight off the icefields with all the ancient particulate still suspended in the water.

Kicking Horse river

One might call the theories of conflict resolution the clear river, the settled river, the dynamic but less opaque waters. The theories of nonviolence might be the more cloudy, straight off the frontlines of struggle with all the human emotional particulate still suspended in the jumping, dancing, loud and wild waters.

The Kicking Horse and the Yoho rivers combine to form a more powerful river and you can see that it takes a ways downstream before all the waters are commingled, which adds to the drama of the scene. Like the combined river of much more power, the addition of the theories of nonviolence to the practice of conflict resolution--and vice versa--produce a much more robust model.

Of course the great masters have already done this. I am only trying to identify when they do and how they think about it and make it work.

Gandhi used forgiveness and reconciliation in his nonviolent campaigns, starting with his original work in South Africa. He forgave the Muslim man who almost beat him to death, an amazingly powerful act of self-sacrifice for the greater cause, and the allegiance of Muslims to his leadership was made immeasurably stronger for that.



Dr. King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham jail about using direct action to get to the negotiating table.

Cesar Chavez overrode some in his United Farmworkers Union struggles who wanted to make it a Hispanic-only organization, using the conflict resolution principle that all stakeholders belong at the table.

In their germinal volume Getting to Yes, Harvard Negotiation Project researchers Roger Fisher and William Ury recommend some tactics that are essentially nonviolent resistance and noncooperation--offering to leave negotiations when one party is using dirty tricks until they can recommit to not doing so.

In this instances and many more, the theories of conflict resolution and nonviolent action complement, serve, and strengthen each other.

If you get a chance, paddle in both streams and in the confluence. It's wild and sometimes not too clear, but the joy and frisson makes it all worth it.

Rage and recruitment

Alexa makes her statement about civil liberties under a patriotic clampdown, and about who gets to talk to millions with their feartalk, hatespeech, and wartalk.

"I personally think the shouting and especially the obscenities were counterproductive. The demonstrators who did that may have discharged a lot of anger. However, instead of shaming the attendees, they pushed them to harden their position."
--Activist who was part of protesting Karl Rove speaking to the World Affairs Council in Portland, Oregon 10 February 2010, for which Rove received a $25,000 honorarium

Mom Terri and I stood with the great folks who stood in the damp chill outside the Arlene Schnitzer Hall on Broadway in downtown Portland last night. Five-year-old Alexa was on my shoulders--it's hard to be half the height of a close-pressed crowd, so she alternated from Mom to Tom. Karl Rove was inside. Hundreds had paid various sums to hear him 'debate' Howard Dean.

Suddenly someone 10-15 yards up the crowded sidewalk bellowed, "War criminal!" I felt little Alexa's entire body tense in fear. This was a learning moment. I suggested we take a little walk around the block and we did.

As we rounded the corner, we met several police standing with their horses--was there a riot scheduled? Five big horses for 50 protesters?

"What a beautiful horsie," I said about the first one and walked closer to the barricade. I looked at Terri and could practically see Alexa's smile reflected in her relaxing, smiling face. The cop said, "This is Ian." We all admired Ian. I asked the cop, "So, are you here to arrest Karl Rove?" He smiled and said I was not the first to suggest that.

I love the folks protesting Rove and was proud to join them. They are a self-selecting, self-limiting group, rightfully enraged, with hearts hurt badly by their compassion for war criminal Rove's millions of victims--it's hard to describe one of the architects and promoters of the illegal invasion of Iraq in any other way. But they will never grow their numbers by bellowing obscenities and part of the entire purpose of each movement event is recruitment. By now, only the hard core show up, shout, and go home in anger and disgust that more didn't show up.

Some of them smoke. That precipitated another walk around the block. Who could smoke next to a five-year-old and not expect the Mom to start getting nervous and want to leave?

Again, these are my people. I love them all. But if I could wave my wand and institute some changes in how these events are organized and conducted, I'd make these changes:

1. At the organizing meetings we would establish quite specifically the expected tone, spirit and image of the event and of each participant.

2. We would form and train a Vibeswatcher crew who would be identifiable and who would be our own reminder monitors. They would work in pairs and try to make sure that each protester was given a small handout explaining behavior expectations for all. They would be there to help, to greet, to watch, to de-escalate any situations, and to help preserve and enhance the image of the protest as sincere, intelligent, thoughtful, and assertive but not aggressive.

3. We would find some musicians who like to lead others in songs that uplift, celebrate nonviolent resistance to militarism and injustice, and give us a sense of projecting nonviolent power, the kind of power that can transform and convert, not crush and smash. We would allot some funds to make some songsheets so everyone could sing along.

4. We would have a media team to work with media to make sure they understood our concerns, our anger, our determination to call attention to this issue, and our determination to do so in ways that are both powerful and gentle.

5. We would be sure to have a police liaison team to stay in relationship to the police so that cops would tend to be less involved and not eager to thump someone. While it was nice to meet Ian, it would have been more logical to have just 2-3 cops on hand, not 20-30 with horses--unless they really were planning to arrest Rove and parade him on horseback in a downtown Portland perpwalk.

Yes, this all sounds like a lot of organizing.

It is. It's only worth doing if we want our numbers to grow and are serious about achieving that. Yes, there are many other strategies and tactics that would also help. This is just a little start--prompted by the start I felt when little Alexa was gripped suddenly in fear of my friends. I'd sure like to change that.

Don't give peace a chants

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
--Emma Goldman

Looking at the joy in the celebrants in Chile after they ousted Pinochet in 1988 by a plebescite vote they worked so hard for, I think of the steely-eyed, stern-jawed humorless ultraleftist/anarchist activists who frown on anything other than angry chanting. I laugh to myself. The suffering of the Chilean people was tremendous and they won their freedom after so many years of brutal repression in a struggle that refused to continue with the paradigm of meeting violence with violence, hate with hate, militarism with militarism. Those Chileans had every right to demand that everyone be angry at the massive injustice inflicted on them by the Pinochet regime, made possible by US arms and training. Instead, they leapt, they hugged the police who had been so brutal, they sang joyously, and yet they did not forget.

The U2 concert in Santiago in 1998 featured a less joyous, profoundly moving version of their song Mothers of the Disappeared, about a group of women who exhibited enormous courage in Chile, based on the radically brave women of the Madres de la Plaza del Mayo in Argentina.


Music is moving, music is upbeat, music captures a collective creativity missing in chanting "One, two, three, four! We don't like your effing war!" ad nauseam. Other chants are even less informative, and even grossly inaccurate. "The whole world is watching!" is usually chanted when almost no one is watching, though "Almost no one is watching!" probably wouldn't catch on. Please give me some funky drumming, some basic three-chord guitar any day over "Ain't no power like the power of the people and the power of the people don't stop! Right on!" Please! No more! Yes, those are my own tooth marks on my own forearm. Stop, please! Sing!

Even when a song is sung just to give each other strength it means so much more than a taunt at the cops. The Civil Rights refrain, "I ain't scared of your jail 'cause I want my freedom, I want my freedom, I want my feedom. I ain't scared of your jail 'cause I want my freedom. I want my freedom now," evokes images of brave black kids singing away their fear in the teeth of oppression that earnest young whites in modern northern towns just can't fathom.

Bring back the music. Bring it on and sing it on!

References

http://www.wri-irg.org/nonviolence/nvsd11-en.htm

photo of Madres in Buenos Aires:
http://mariastravelblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

Orange Revolution is dead--long live the Orange Revolution!

The Queen is dead--long live the Queen! is the call of those who bemoan and grieve the death of a good governor and celebrate the peaceful and orderly transition to a new good governor. The embodiment of the traditional rule is dead and succession is successful to a new ruler, so the institution of the Queen and the new Queen alike should live long.


The Orange Revolution is dead--long live the Orange Revolution!

One narrative about the Orange Revolution (I wasn't there; I am offering this in good faith from multiple sources):

In 2004 Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych ran against each other for the presidency of Ukraine. Yushchenko not only had broad support as standing in opposition to the now unpopular Kuchma regime, but he had probable financing from Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, who opposed Putin and the Kuchma-Yanukovych intended succession. Yushchenko also had a coalition with the charismatic Yulia Tymoshenko--the woman who just lost the election to Yanukovych.

It was a very dirty campaign by Viktor Yanukovych, a man who had served prison time for robbery and who was chosen from a field of obscure potential successors to Kuchma. It is not known how much Yanukovych knew about the tactics, but it was obvious he was prepared to engage in his own minor dirty tricks.

The Yushchenko campaign chose orange as its color for banners, pennants, etc., and the Yanukovych campaign chose blue. Publicly, orange dominated. The dirty tricks from the Putin-affiliated Kuchma security apparatus included police spies on the Yushchenko campaign as well as free trains for the Yanukovych campaign. But the dirtiest trick was the ricin or dioxin poisoning of the frontrunner Yushchenko on September 5, 2004, at a dinner with Kuchma's security people who were supposed to be helping with security for all presidential candidates. The poisoning didn't kill the handsome, popular Yushchenko, but sickened him and permanently pocked and disfigured him. He looked visibly aged by decades.


This kind of underhanded, criminal and ghastly behavior has a long and dastardly history in the Soviet Union, one which Putin carried forth to Russia, and it seems simply now a part of that political menu of options. Grigory Mairanovsky was a Soviet poisoner who earned his Ph.D. for devising such hideous assassination techniques, and from Gorky to modern Russian journalists, the criminal attacks continue. The original claim was that Yushchenko was poisoned with ricin, a biological toxin relatively easy to manufacture, but the more common claim now is that he was dosed with dioxin. In any case, it was both horrific and it backfired, with his support growing even more fervent when he survived the attempt and came back to campaign, weakened and disfigured, weeks later.

While many observers agree that Yushchenko won in November, the results were muddied and the December 26, 2004 runoff was more monitored and the consensus from neutral observers internally and externally was that Yushchenko won by approximately a 52-44 percent margin (Åslund & McFaul, 2006, p. 3).

It took a public occupation of the government squares and buildings from November 22-January 23, 2005 (the most intense period Nov 22-Dec 8, opposing the official declaration of a Yanukovych victory), when the peaceful but amazingly persistent frigid weather protests by scores of thousands kept the issue moving toward the Supreme Court, which finally declared Yushchenko the victor.

Subsequently, Yushchenko was unable to move the economy forward and the looming threat of Russian interference or even invasion helped convince enough Ukraine voters to put in the now moderated and somewhat more sophisticated Yanukovych.

The strength of nonviolence is not its ability to make money or engage in the pothole politics that can decide elections. The strength of nonviolence, as always, is that it enables change without violence and with much more grace.

The Orange Revolution is dead. Long live the Orange Revolution!

References
Åslund, Anders & McFaul, Michael (Eds.) (2006). Revolution in orange: The origins of Ukraine’s democratic breakthrough. Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

www.smh.com.au/.../2004/12/16/1102787153891.html

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/wp-content/uploads/orange-revolution.jpg

Nationalism and the natural need to hammer

Mohandas Gandhi thought a great deal about nationalism, since his nation was stolen from him before he was born and subsumed into a foreign colonial empire. He advocated a nationalism that would practice nonviolence in all its relationships, internally and externally.

Ah, but not in our modern era, we presume. Not in a time with F-16s, global strike force, 1,000 military bases on the sovereign soil of other people's lands. This is a Utopian fantasy.

Perhaps. If so, I suspect Mother Nature's evolutionary experiment with extreme cognition--humans--will come to a close sooner rather than later. The human, ecological and opportunity costs are so staggering with this model of conflict management that any future dependent upon it looks like a flaming meteor plunging into oblivion as it burns through the oxygen of reality, of limits, of carrying capacity, of extinction.

Still, as long as there is a chance for change, we are called to consider, to contemplate, to converse, to collaborate, to take collective action. The stakes could not be higher; our children, our scions, our species, depends upon this transformation. If it is theoretically possible, we should figure out how to make the attempt.

In his tract Hind Swaraj, Gandhi called for a home rule--complete sovereignty for India--that would be inclusive of all religions and would reject the divide-and-conquer mentality. He pointed out that, for long stretches of India's history, "Hindus flourished under Moslem sovereigns and Moslems under the Hindu....With the English advent quarrels recommenced" (Gandhi, 1938, p. 43).

Gandhi is credited in the literature in the field in which I teach--Conflict Resolution--with inspiring the first strand of it, what is now called Alternative Dispute Resolution. ADR is based upon principled negotiation, the popular version of which is explained in Fisher and Ury's Getting to yes. It is based upon four principles, one of which is basing our analysis of potential solutions to conflict on interest rather than position. Often our interests are compatible if we search hard enough, even though our positions may be polar opposites. Indeed, Gandhi wrote about that presciently.

"The Hindus, the Mahomedans, the Parsis and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow-countrymen, and they will have to live in unity, if only for their own interest" (Gandhi, 1938, p. 43).

Overcoming our narrow positions and selfish prejudices is a huge challenge for us as humans who have generations of foraging and hoarding encoded in our instinctual behaviors. We tend to keep our things and organize personal and collective defense against anyone, enmifying them, casting them out of our place of privilege. Transforming that selfishness into enlightened self-interest will be tough. It will mean overriding the reversion to violence and moving forward to nonviolence. It will mean recycling the tools of death into tools of healing and hope, and that may involve nonviolent force, as envisioned in another spiritual tradition, expressed in the Old Testament, Isaiah 2:4, that we shall beat swords into plowshares.
That is the most progressive, enlightened form of recycling of all, and I believe Gandhi would heartily approve.

References
Fisher, Roger, & Ury, William (1991). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. (2nd ed.). New York: Penguin Books.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. (1938). Hind swaraj or Indian home rule. Ahmedabad: Navajivan.

Yippies, yuppies and speed of change

Humor is so key. With humor, even the hard edge of opposition becomes softer. I watched the full version of Bill O'Reilly v Jon Stewart and in that light Stewart absolutely creamed him because he has a great sense of humor that O'Reilly--tough and smart though he is--utterly lacks. And to make it worse for O'Reilly, he called Stewart names, called those who work with Stewart names, labeled everyone, and was just arrogant and combative. Stewart met all this with humor and it was like the incredible hating Hulk v dancing Wu Li Master. Stewart allowed O'Reilly's power to just wash out, stepping aside to let the force of O'Reilly spend itself into a sort of ineffectual alluvial fan of insult and sneers. There are no better exemplars of the dysfunction of full frontal patriarchy than O'Reilly, who is the personification of finger-wagging, patronizing lecturing.

Some like that style (most white males--wonder why?) and cocoon themselves into the O'Reilly self-righteousness, purblind to any analysis other than a Manichean dualism that someone like Stewart can flatten by deflating the pomposity. So we continue in our Estado Unidense way...

Historical humor
The Youth International Party (Yippies) were really basically political hippies. We were in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention. That was the first time I was almost arrested--and at that time talked my way out of it because I was simply not prepared. At age 17 I was just getting my sea legs as a member of various social movements and I was philosophically all over the map, as are most 17-year-olds. But the older ones, like Abbie Hoffman, were appealing to me because he in particular was always so funny. When he started getting hyper-confrontational, I loved that too, at my immature age.
I was drawn one week to nonviolence and the next week to working with the Black Panthers, which I did--though I never committed a single violent act, just approved of their self-defense (which turned out to be the most useless and dysfunctional approach, teaching me lessons that have stayed with me).

My generation was empowered by the Civil Rights movement and by the global decolonization movement, as well as the general disgust with the black-and-white attitudes of the corporate post-World War II generation, my parents. Still, most of us were coopted and became our fathers and mothers in most significant ways, losing our Yippie youth into the next youngish phase of the so-called Young Urban Professionals, yuppies. I chose a different hippie homesteader path, going after a solar cabin built in the north woods, but I was a weird one. The yuppies are aged baby boomers now, and we achieved little, in my estimation, so that is now passed along to youth to take it much further.

Rise up and achieve quick change
On the speed of revolution, do not make the error of assuming nonviolence is slower than violence. That is statistically not the case at all. Historical examples abound and the use of the counterfactual is helpful.

How long would it have taken for African Americans to wage war against the US and get Jim Crow segregation ended? Any such insurgency would have been mercilessly and totally crushed. A hint of that came about during riots, when all the casualties were on one side, but you just won't find the poor minority of 11 percent militarily prevailing on the most well equipped military on Earth. The paucity of, and incorrectness of the Che Guevaran triggering event theory has been shown to be generally completely useless and counterproductive. You don't have a riot leading to revolution, nor do you assassinate a George Bush--or Obama--and expect any outcome other than society reacting against you, radical leftists and teabaggers (respectively) notwithstanding. Mistaking wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin from the woefully underinformed teabaggers at their convention for some kind of potential actual violent American Revolution2 is a radical rightwing fantasy of radically unrealistic delusion.

And apply the timeline question to Nashville, where Jim Crow segregation was the law from 1896 (Plessey v Ferguson) to 1954 (Brown v Board of Ed) in education, 1956 in city buses thanks to the Montgomery campaign, and then 1960 in Nashville. The college students looked at 64 years of 'legal' segregation in the winter of 1960, trained and did sit-ins, and won by Easter. That is fast. Violence would have been costly and worse than slow.



Or look at the Philippines in 1986. Four days of nonviolent People Power masses in the streets and they overthrew Marcos, who had successfully defeated violent insurrection for more than 20 years! Violence is fast? Not.

But that is counterintuitive. We are in a culture saturated with the idea that violence is fast. That is part of the bubble around it that needs to be punctured.

Mixed methods

What of the perennial question of the value of violence in making nonviolence more effective. The value is negative.

When violence is used it makes the nonviolent activists much more vulnerable, since the nonviolent ones are the transparent, public ones who own their actions. Following any sneak violent attack, the government feels the need to attack someone and they usually choose the easiest targets. This is true in both domestic protest and war. This was true in India, in the US, in Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Colombia and probably many other places. This is partially addressed in the Stephan and Chenoweth (2006) study but also in many histories of social movements.

Violent resistance often strengthens the oppressor's or occupier's resolve. We saw it in India, when Gandhi was on the verge of independence in 1930 following the Salt Campaign, when some violent insurgents killed some British officers in the Chittagong Hills Tracts. The British announced their intention to remain in India despite great world pressure to leave (Fischer, 1982).

We see it now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The violent insurgents blow up US troops and we hear lots of rhetoric about not leaving and not even having a timetable to leave or we only aid 'the enemy.' Yes, a long violent insurgency can eventually get an occupier to leave, but the costs could have been so much lower using nonviolence.

Making the dominant party afraid, smashing them publicly, is simply a great way to invite a smashing response. Why choose the path of the most pain for the least gain?

For those who can, watch the "We Were Warriors" segment of the PBS film A Force More Powerful, the episode focusing on the African American students desegregating Nashville, Tennessee. Please imagine a violent attack or two on the merchants in Nashville during the 1960 struggle to desegregate the city. Do you think the mayor, Ben West, would have come out on the side of the college kids, as he did when the movement was entirely nonviolent (even though he opposed them at first)? On the other hand, bombing the black attorney's house (Z. Alexander Loobey) was probably undertaken with the same notion of really making the other side (the college kids) give up fast. As the A Force More Powerful film narration noted, violence can backfire, and clearly did. It not only strengthened the resolve of the kids, it changed the mayor's mind and he did so in the context of his citizenry changing their minds. After all, the movement was purely nonviolent in response to the violence of the hoodlums and the state. The sympathy grew quickly for those who posed no threat, only a persistent call for justice and fairness, even in the teeth of police dogs, bombs, and incarceration.

It wasn't until there was violence--riots, Black Panthers, etc.--that all the gains stopped (no more legislative victories, no Supreme Court victories, no improvement in social indices), so the argument that mixed methods work is generally weak and sometimes flat out backward.

Gandhi knew that his nonviolence would be taken more seriously if it were genuine and if it were accompanied with a structural analysis. Here he is exhibiting that in a photo taken of him intentionally visiting with the working class British women whose very jobs he was threatening by his khaddi campaign in India, when he spun his own cloth, when he led bonfires of English clothes to demonstrate the freedom from foreign dependence. The women loved him and supported his struggle, even though they knew it was hard on them. They saw the justice because his movement allowed them to see it by the loving insistence on it.


References
Fischer, Louis (1982). Gandhi: His life and message for the world. New York: Mentor (original 1954).

Stephan, Maria J.; Erica Chenoweth. 2008. Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. International Security, 33, 1: 7–44.

Public commitment=recruitment

In his volume on Kingian nonviolence, philosopher John J. Ansbro (emeritus, Manhattan College) preserved the Commitment Card, signed by all the civil rights actionists in the Birmingham campaign in the summer of 1963:

"I hereby pledge myself--my person and my body--to the nonviolent movement. Therefore I will keep the following ten commandments:
1.Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
2.Remember always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation--not victory.
3.Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love.
4.Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
5.Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
6.Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7.Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8.Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9.Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10.Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration."

Imagine the effects that this pledge would have had, amongst them, likely, but not limited to:
~The commitment, made publicly and collectively, was much more serious than just a vague set of guidelines
~Each individual would feel much more beholden to the movement to abide by these conditions
~These standards, the same for all, gave the movement an independent and objective set of criteria that transcended personalities or political power
~Observers were essentially invited to compare this strong commitment to a groundtruthing reality
~Media were predisposed to accept this tone and tenor of each demonstration once the movement both committed and demonstrated adherence to these elements
~Anyone not acting in compliance with these commitments would not logically be regarded as a part of the movement, and their conduct would not so easily tar the movement

In any campaign for which I train I introduce a pledge, differing in many ways from the Birmingham pledge, but with the same general purposes and, if the movement is well run, the same successful results.

By tightening up the standards within any movement the sympathy will grow and thus political recruitment will follow, as well as actual recruitment of more participants. This lesson is a key component of many of the most successful campaigns and really enhances chances for victory much sooner and with more sustainable outcomes.

References
Ansbro, John J. (2000). Martin Luther King, Jr.: Nonviolent strategies and tactics for social change (2nd ed.). Lanham MD: Madison Books.

Accessing our creativity

Last night Nonviolent Peaceforce trainer Terri Shofner led a good group in a training she called Nonviolence Works, a lovely phrase with a couple of different meanings. I can almost see the all-electric vans full of highly trained conflict workers headed to a hot spot to interpose and de-escalate. On the side of the vans are logos of the gears of conflict and its nonviolent resolution with the organizational name, Nonviolence Works.

We did several great activities, from nonviolent bingo (Peace Loteria) to Massaging our World as visualized on the back of the person in front of us in our Nonviolent Rubdown Circle (great way to envision healing of each person who had taken the weight of the world on her or his shoulders), to a film and discussion.

The film was the episode from A Force More Powerful on Denmark under Nazi occupation during nearly the entire duration of WWII (which I used to think of as a long time, until Bush got us into Afghanistan and Iraq). The film showed the range of resistance tactics tried against the Nazis and the costs associated with each one.

Danes tried sabotage and work slowdowns and limited stoppages and strikes. They developed underground leadership that had great authority and eventually decided that the work stoppages achieved more benefit with fewer costs than any other tactic.

The Danes could possibly have avoided losing the relatively few they did to Nazi occupier murder had they been versed in the theories and dynamics of nonviolence, but I think part of what this means is not relying on historical episodes coupled with elements of theory from across the disciplines (which is really what Gene Sharp tries to explicate in his own way in his book Waging Nonviolent Struggle, and which other theorists since have done much more explicitly). In short, I think the best of both worlds--theoretical grounding and creative, evolving adaptive management) is what we really want (and I absolutely hope for each time I engage in action planning, action, and debriefing): use extant theory to make gains and blunt losses even as you experiment into new areas to test other possibilities of improvement and evolution of our most advanced nonviolent methods.

Use theory but strive to push it forward. In the Danes' case, of course, they ONLY had Gandhi and his contemporary analysts and evaluators, so they had a rich but still limited corpus of theory at their disposal. India hadn't even achieved freedom yet, so nonviolence was not too attractive in many ways. The Danes invented what they could, as you note, and evolved from almost a full stop to learning a great deal. Much of what they learned could really be attributed more to the history of labor strikes beginning in the late 19th century and maturing across Europe and the US through the early decades of the 20th century. The costliest components of their campaigns were more related to the maladaptive violent anarchists of the late 19th, early 20th century and the strongest and most successful pieces were taken (or could have been taken) from the most nonviolent but most committed labor actions. Gandhi's hartal was a more distant lesson that they weren't necessarily thinking about at all.

When the moral chips were really down--when the Nazis first ordered the Danes to execute saboteurs and then ordered the roundup of the Jews of Denmark--Danes showed their colors. Parliament dissolved rather than execute Danes for wrecking Nazi war production. Danes saved almost all their Jewish citizens by heroically hiding them and getting them into small fishing boats and across the sea to Sweden.

Imagine a world in nonviolent noncooperation with the Nazis. Perhaps they could have moved nonviolence forward by massive practical and theoretical leaps with such experimentation. Perhaps some of the 40 million who died in World War II might have lived. The more we can advance the theory and practice, the more sophistication and access to both creativity and control over our own destiny we can also access.

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

CBA for the Earth: Nonviolence sustainable v Violent shock doctrine

From today's news as distributed by Len Seigel:
EPA: Pump Rialto groundwater and cleanse it of perchlorate

By JANET ZIMMERMAN
Riverside Press-Enterprise (CA)
February 3, 2010

Federal environmental regulators on Wednesday unveiled a $29.3 million plan to clean up a Rialto Superfund site by pumping tainted groundwater and treating it to remove perchlorate and other toxic contaminants.

The water then could be delivered to homes and businesses.

The 160-acre industrial site north of Interstate 210, between Alder and Locust avenues, was used by private companies and the government to store, test and manufacture munitions, rocket motors and fireworks.

Perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel, and the industrial solvent trichloroethylene, TCE, were spilled or dumped on the ground and seeped deep into the aquifer. Spreading for miles southeast of the site, the contamination is the Inland region's largest uncontrolled plume of perchlorate in a drinking water supply.

In any intelligent democracy, one would expect a sort of cost-benefit analysis for methods of conflict in general and for each conflict. What would that indicate for us?

As the story above indicates, even if the weaponry is never fired or launched, its manufacture leaves a toxic trail that persistently poisons. Indeed, the Pentagon and its attendant industries are the source of the most Superfund sites--those places deemed most in need of remediation from hazardous and toxic pollutants in soil and water--of all sectors of the US economy. To produce more such sites than the oil and gas industry is an amazing feat of disastrous proportions, but war and preparation for war has that ecological cost.

Nonviolence might have some ecological costs too. Cutting flowers to stick in gun barrels is very hard on the daisy field. And how many aspens have fallen to provide pulp for the leaflets we so remorselessly distribute?

And the oil story itself figures prominently in the cost-benefit analysis of conflict. The Pentagon is the world's largest consumer of fossil fuel. Approximately one-third of the military is devoted to protecting oil; this brings us to the benefit part of the analysis.

During the height of military conflict in any oil region, the prices skyrocket and profits soar as a result. Oil corporate owners and top oil corporate officials make record bonuses and dividend income. During the bloodiest part of the war to occupy Iraq--2005-2006--Exxon continued to shatter previous records for profits, making more than any corporation in human history. Two oil men occupied the White House while 130,000 of the troops under their command occupied the oil-rich Iraq. How blatant must the conflict of interest become before we question our conflict managers and their methods?

The pollution of our Earth and our political process could be greatly mitigated by making different conflict management choices. The greater our progress toward nonviolence the more we clean up our land, our rivers, our lakes, our air and our political Superfund sites in DC, from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.

CBA & conflict management methods

From Department of Death:
The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their vehicle with an improvised explosive device Feb. 2 in Zabul province, Afghanistan. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.

Killed were:

Capt. Daniel Whitten, 28, of Grimes, Iowa; and

Pfc. Zachary G. Lovejoy, 20, of Albuquerque, N.M.

I am sick to death of these notices. This awful daily, bloody notices, all composed exactly the same, as if they've been done by typing variables into fields.

On the same day, today, I got my other daily Department of Death notice:

CONTRACTS

NAVY

Oshkosh Corp., Oshkosh, Wis., is being awarded $158,382,797 for fixed-price delivery order #0064 under a previously awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract (M67854-06-D-5028). This delivery order is issued against exercised priced options for the purchase of 388 logistic vehicle system replacement production cargo vehicles and 15 tractors. Work will be performed in Oshkosh, Wis., and for this delivery order, work is expected to be completed by July 31, 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Marine Corps System Command, Quantico, Va., is the contracting activity.

Cape Environmental Management, Inc., dba CAPE, Inc.*, Atlanta, Ga., is being awarded a maximum $60,000,000 cost-plus-award-fee contract for remedial action services at various sites within the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC), Pacific area of responsibility (AOR). The work to be performed provides for remediation of any media contaminated by solvents, petroleum, oils, lubricants, metals, acids, bases, reactives, polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticides. Work will be performed at various sites predominantly in Hawaii (70 percent) and Guam (25 percent), and other areas within the NAVFAC Pacific AOR including Japan, Okinawa, Diego Garcia and other areas in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (5 percent). The term of the contract is not to exceed five years with an expected completion date of January 2015. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was competitively procured via the NAVFAC e-solicitation Web site with five proposals received. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Pacific, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is the contracting activity (N62742-10-D-1804).

Computer Sciences Corp., San Diego, Calif., is being awarded an $11,000,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, cost-plus-incentive-fee and firm-fixed price contract for the OCONUS Naval Enterprise Network (ONE-NET) server farm refresh designed to provide integrated data services to the fleet users overseas. The contract includes four one-year option periods which, if exercised, would bring the cumulative value of the contract to an estimated $25,000,000. Work will be performed in San Diego, Calif. (25 percent); Yokosuka, Japan (25 percent); Manama, Bahrain (25 percent); and Naples, Italy (25 percent). Work is expected to be completed by February 2011. If all options are exercised, work could continue until February 2015. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The contract was competitively procured via the Federal Business Opportunities Web site and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command E-commerce Web site, with an unlimited number of proposals solicited and two offers received. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic, Charleston, S.C., is the contracting activity (N65236-10-D-5826).

Triton Marine Construction Corp., Bremerton, Wash., is being awarded $8,186,057 for firm-fixed-price task order #0002 under a previously awarded multiple award construction contract (N62478-09-D-4018) for repair of wharves B22-B24 at Naval Station Pearl Harbor. This project will repair the wharves which have deteriorated through years of use and exposure to the marine environment. The work includes selective removal work, concrete rehabilitation, marine concrete, refurbishment of marine hardware, metal fabrications, coating of waterfront steel structures, pavement markings, oil-spill containment booms, low pressure compressed air, water distribution, sanitary sewer, exterior salt water distribution system, electrical work, and incidental related work. Work will be performed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and is expected to be completed September 2011. Contract funds will expire at the end of the fiscal year. Six proposals were received for this task order. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is the contracting activity.

Arete Associates, Northridge, Calif., is being awarded a $6,000,000 modification to a previously awarded cost-plus-incentive-fee contract (N68335-08-D-0012) for a Phase III Small Business Innovation Research project under Topic N06-002, entitled "Sea Surface Slope and Elevation Statistics to Support Radar Performance Modeling." This modification provides for the development of a capability to extract ocean surface wave slopes over a sizeable patch at a high spatial resolution using passive polarimetric sensors. Work will be performed in Washington, D.C., and is expected to be completed in March 2014. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This Phase III contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, Lakehurst, N.J., is the contracting activity.

AIR FORCE

Spaceport Systems International, Lompoc, Calif., was awarded a $48,000,000 contract which will provide for future launch spaceport services for the Launch Test Squadron within the Space and Missile Systems Center/Space Development and Test Wing. At this time, $300,000 has been obligated. SMC/PKN, Kirtland, N.M., is the contracting activity (FA8818-10-D-0022).

Lockheed Martin Corp., Marietta, Ga., was awarded a $9,419,947 contract which will exercise an option for installation of a quantity of eight C-5 aircraft with C-5 avionics modernization program kits and 1 lot of step van maintenance under a firm fixed price effort; and under a time and material effort, Installation of the consolidated load panel avionics modernization program. At this time, the entire amount has been obligated. 716 AESG/PK, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33657-98-C-0006,P00233).

NorthWest Florida Contractors, Inc., Fort Walton Beach, Fla., was awarded an $8,096,083 contract which will provide all plant, materials, labor, equipment, and all operations in connection with the construction of various reinforced concrete targets on specified test areas as shown on contract drawings, at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. At this time, the entire amount has been obligated. 96 CONS/PKA, Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., is the contracting activity (FA2823-10-D-0006).

*Small business


Who dies and who profits? If we don't use up this stuff, how can we justify making more and making the obscene levels of profits that we do? If we don't get attacked now and then, how can we justify going into hot conflict and really raking in the war profits?

If these people ever wanted to convince critically thinking people that there was no link between the attacks on 9.11.01 and war profits, take out the profits. Let all war materiel, all parts of the arsenal, all industry that services the Department of Death, let it all be government or non-profit, truly patriotic, no shareholders, nothing but jobs at regular pay for Americans. War for wages instead of war for record profits for the elite. Until Congress passes such laws, it's going to look like a conflict of interest for a corporate shareholder to pontificate about patriotism and pocket the profit even as foreign babies and our young soldiers are dying.

Am I claiming Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld paid for, ordered, or otherwise planned the September 11, 2001 attacks? Nope. Did they help cause those attacks? Absolutely. They had policy roles all the way back to the 1970s and 80s, when some of this business was set into motion. They were part of the set-up for Saddam, obviously, having spent time in the region, Rumsfeld even meeting Saddam and helping him get his components for his chemical weapons. As the old 'joke' goes, How do you know Saddam has WMD?" "We saved the receipts."

It's the heart of the war system. The war budget needs an enemy tough enough for perpetual fear, sparking it up with the occasional attack, so that we do exactly as we see, spending more on the military than at any time in history, than the rest of the world combined, and spending less on basic human needs. Basic human needs are not as profitable. War profits are the highest obtainable and a lightweight opponent can be puffed up and generalized. Watch out for all Muslims! They are terrorists and if they say they aren't, why don't they go find and exterminate those who are? Be afraid! Pay up and shut up! The generals know more than you do! We are at war! They have the information needed to make all your decisions for you, so good patriots shut up and pay up and vote for whichever of the two war candidates the two wings of the war party allow to run.

Of course it's not sustainable. The costs are so enormous we are cutting way past the bone, into the bones of future generations, but even that has a limit. The system will collapse.

The only possible hope is nonviolence. It is a messy, goofy way to resolve conflict. Winston Churchill, in a sober moment, once dryly observed that democracy is the absolute worst form of government, except for all the rest. Just so, nonviolence is clearly the worst form of conflict management, except for all the rest.

Nonviolent serenity prayer

Global warming is the threat. You cannot protect Frosty, but Alexa is worth every sacrifice.

Please give me the strength to protect the vulnerable and the innocent, the perspicacity to see where I cannot possibly help no matter how much I am willing to sacrifice, and the wisdom to know the difference.

One of the most persistent and wonderful nonviolent resisters in the world, Max Obuszewski of Baltimore, said some years ago that he would never again engage in a "hairshirt action." By that he meant of course that he saw no promise in getting arrested just to save his own spiritual butt. He wanted to be convinced that there was a chance he'd be effective. This makes a great deal of sense under most circumstances.

Interesting, though, the fluid dynamics of nonviolence. Push some of it into this situation and it may come burbling up over there, possibly much later.

Franz Jägerstätter was a young Austrian father who refused Nazi conscription and was beheaded for his conscience. Too bad he never got that nonviolent serenity prayer, eh? Pointless. Fruitless.

But his story was published after the war and read many years later by Daniel Ellsberg, one of the ancillary architects of the Vietnam War who was so disillusioned he was wondering if he could make a difference by sacrificing himself and telling the truth about Vietnam. Ellsberg said he had a couple of significant influences on his decision to go public--which in fact immediately put him at risk of life in prison--and that the total and unconditional sacrifice of Franz Jägerstätter was one that helped him make his decision.

So Franz Jägerstätter's pointless sacrifice had zero effect on the Nazis or WWII and had a profound effect on a later generation's war on the other side of the Earth. If someone had said in 1943 that would be the case in 1971 he would have been diagnosed as loony.

In his wonderful Civil Rights memoir, John Lewis tells many stories of experiencing a crisis of faith in nonviolence and Just Doing It. But his opening and titular metaphor, of little children joining hands and collectively achieving the mobile gravitas necessary to hold together a home explains it as well as anything. Putting our hands in one another's and holding on tight to what we believe is a lesson we can learn young and it may work suddenly when we are 30 or 40 or 60. The longer I live, the more faith I have in nonviolence for its own sake. Frosty still didn't make it, but his image is his immortality and the inspiration for his snowy scion in the future.

References
Lewis, John (1998). Walking with the wind: A memoir of the movement. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Indigenous nonviolence and victories

My friend Walter Bresette and I had a decade of dialog about nonviolence and Native resistance. It was collaborative learning and strengthened our mutual respect and friendship via a long, involved vigorous discussion that began as almost complete disagreement.

Walter taught me enormous lessons about indigenous identity, rhetoric, posture, and political affiliations. I also learned what it was like to know and work alongside an actual charismatic. He could begin talking to a group of scattered and unfocused people and in five minutes they would be crowding forward to hear him.

While others in Native communities taught me further lessons about this, Walter was the first; Native identity is not an identity that appears to be calling for revolution, but rather for simple justice for vulnerable and deserving people. The general partisan approach is nearly always counterproductive with Native peoples and this is a great resonance with those of us who are committed far more to nonviolence than to a political party.

These are important overlaps, relationally with Native leaders and with the public. This identification lowers the levels of fear concomitant to raising the levels of sympathy and wish to support or protect (and sometimes the latter segues into the former on a good day). Walter showed me how to get Republican governors to back tribes and I showed him the power of nonviolence. As he began to use them in a complex weave, he began to agree with some of the points I was making, theoretically, even as I was learning all the other coalitional leadership and relational lessons from him.

Native leaders have also taught me the most about spirit and resistance.

I began to request that either Walter or Whitefeather come bless and smudge whenever we did nonviolent resistance, which they each graciously did for the rest of their lives. They showed nonviolent resisters a good road to becoming so centered that nonviolent resistance was like breathing; it became its own reward.

This made each act a victory in the sense that not only had the war system failed to make us apathetic or violent, but we felt so much more as if we were doing what Aldo Leopold advised in his essay, "Thinking like a mountain." Kneeling in the dirt, as John Trudell said, is really placing us in our power. For me personally, nonviolent resistance was never more powerful than when done in that attitude. Miigwetch, Walter and Whitefeather.

References
Pallares, Amalia. 2002. From peasant struggles to Indian resistance: The Ecuadorian Andes in the late twentieth century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

How a movement gains power: Daffodils in Africa

"The 22 women arrested in Pumula today have been released without being charged. As lawyers from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights were unavailable to attend to the matter, WOZA National Coordinator, Jenni Williams, and Magodonga Mahlangu attended the police station and met with the Officer in Charge, Assistant Inspector Chimani. He advised that the members had already been released and apologised for arresting them, saying that the officers concerned did not realise that they were WOZA members. WOZA would like to acknowledge the professionalism of Assistant Inspector Chimani but call on him and other police officers to stop the arbitrary arrest of Zimbabweans."
--from WOZA, 2 February 2010

Magodonga Mahlangu and Jenni Williams are Zimbabwean women whose stature in their homeland has been on the rise since they began organizing for basic family services and human rights as Women of Zimbabwe Arising, a movement dedicated explicitly and overtly to nonviolent direct action. They've been jailed numerous times, and are seen by Robert Mugabe as an irritant, yet they are in truth more dangerous to his fading rule than any armed revolt might be.

Under the leadership of these two women, many previously powerless women have learned to lead, to confront government injustices, and to organize in their own communities. Mahlangu and Williams are international travelers--I met them at Oxford University in 2007--and, as the account above indicates, still activists in operation on the ground.

They have refused to back down. They have refused to excuse violence. They have refused to be coopted and they have refused to use hatred. Their combination of qualities have made them so potent that actions which might well have resulted in their own arrest and imprisonment in the past are now successful actions resulting in mass un-arrest, one of the most difficult and rare tasks any movement can accomplish.

There is no doubt that Zimbabweans are bitter and angry and would love some vengeance for the crimes of Mugabe that have left them penniless with paper money so inflated it's probably best used as cooking fuel. Yet WOZA keeps a beautiful spirit of steady and committed nonviolence confronting the injustices and brutalities of the Mugabe forces.

We who live in privilege can take lessons and inspiration from the strong and powerfully gentle uprising that puts me in mind of the flower power little five-year-old Alexa described so well when we were walking in the park past the daffodil shoots that were about four inches high and on top of them was the patch of soil that had covered the bulbs, pushed up into the air and held by the shoots. "Those are strong plants!" she said. "They have muscles!" The little daffodils now waving in the breeze are strong enough to hold up the Earth and the Women Of Zimbabwe Arising are just such exemplars of human gentle power.

Negotiate or nonviolent action? Yes

Nonviolence is not shirking from engagement, and it's not an attempt to crush the opponent. It's a third way. It seeks dialog. It listens. But it also insists that it must be heard. When, for example, we tried to get Senator Ron Wyden to take some leadership on the occupation of Iraq in 2005, we did not threaten that we would shut down his office, that we would campaign against him, or anything so blustering. I prepared a little leaflet to explain that we simply felt unheard and we were determined to be able to voice our analysis and intentions to him. I titled the brochure, Nonviolence is negotiation. My inspiration came straight from Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Here is an excerpt:

"You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue."

This approach is soft power but it is power. It is not power-over, but power-with. It seems to some as adversarial, but it actually seeks consensus and collaboration. The idea of a fine nonviolent campaign is that everyone is an ally or a potential ally.

There need be no contradiction between nonviolent action and negotiation. Indeed, it's best assessed and employed as a precursor, not a monological attempt to shout more loudly.

My friend Walter Bresette could really deliver a powerfully angry speech. When he and others used nonviolent direct action to stop trains carrying millions of gallons of acid across Bad River Ojibwe reservation in northern Wisconsin they were angling toward and achieved a seat at the negotiating table. They won their struggle. This is how we can Just Say Yes to both nonviolent action and negotiation.