Mediators with bombs?

In my field, Conflict Resolution, we have one strand of theory and thinking that I believe falls outside the purview of what our field is and should be, and that is the notion of "mediation with muscle," a term used to describe a mediation/negotiation style that is backed by a mediator's potential (and therefore threatened) use of harm toward some recalcitrant party.

This is not a true mediation at all, nor is such a person running such a process a mediator, in my view. One who plays this role is a sort of Godfather figure, an arbitrator who is first overseeing his squabbling charges in "frank and open" discussions and then twisting arms as needed to get a working arrangement. This was the role undertaken quite often and most spectacularly by the recently deceased Richard Holbrooke, architect of the "Mediator/Bomber" model.

Holbrooke was never to my knowledge a mediator, always simply a hardball negotiator, even when he sat in the mediator's chair and so-named himself. The best detailed history of his career is by political scientist Stephen Zunes. Zunes plumbs many sources, putting into context a career that is devoid of much diplomatic finesse and long on straightforward military threat. Holbrooke's own ego-saturated book arrogates unto himself a paternalistic militaristic approach even evident in the title, To End a War. Since, as Zunes pointed out, Holbrooke (and partner-in-war-launch Strobe Talbot) actually brought the US military directly into the Balkans wars, and since Holbrooke supported Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, we see the actual picture a bit more clearly. Start a war when in the US national interests as defined by elites like Holbrooke, stop a war when that war interferes with US national interests, almost always conceived of by the owners of the war economy. Obviously, when dealing with Croat neo-Nazis or Serb genocidal outlaws (who, for example, killed at least 7,500 unarmed civilian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica),
Holbrooke's methods were usually regarded as realpolitik, but to simply play militaristic power games in the name of justice is outside the ambit of Conflict Resolution and mediation.

Am I happy Holbrooke is dead? Of course not; I wish he were around to tell others about the errors of his ways, which is purportedly what was begun on his deathbed. I hope for the peace conversion of Robert Mugabe, Joe Lieberman and others, not their deaths. But the instant revisioning of warmakers' lives, most emetically after the deaths of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, is simply inappropriate, misleading, and poor education for the young idealists who are learning how to become involved in carrying conflict management forward. When we assume the US is an honest broker of peace even as it moved forcefully into the number one weapons exporter position, we buy into the same working oxymorons that Zunes brilliantly reveals.

Even more germane to our hopes for nonviolence is that such "mediators" discount and dismiss civil society virtually entirely in favor of elite war masters. First in Holbrooke's 1995 Dayton process and then in Ramboulliet in that January-March 1999 preparation for war, Kosovar nonviolent civil society leader Ibrahim Rugova was not even given a seat at the table (indeed, Holbrooke was the one who hoisted the KLA into prominence, as his famous photo with one of their fighters documents).
Leaving nonviolent leadership twisting is not a mark of a mediator, but of a hawk awkwardly pasting on some dove's feathers. The challenge to nonviolent civil society is how to overcome those massive forces, and it will take evermore wise and dedicated efforts to do that.

Who gets bail, who gets jail?

Wikileaks talks, murderers walk. Bradley Manning is in prison while the shooters who ripped up a dozen civilians, including a father and children who simply stopped to help a wounded man, are free. Videographic proof of murder is ignored and leaking that proof is regarded as the crime. Orwellian is a mild term for this.

Dick Cheney is still giving public speeches and traveling, while the man who revealed many of the lies around the illegal invasion and illegal conduct of war in Iraq is in Wandsworth prison in the UK. Julian Assange was granted bail by a judge responding to the overwhelming evidence and support, but he was then 'detained' further because bail is exorbitant and, it is strongly rumored, Eric Holder's US Department of Justice wants him extradited, even butting in line ahead of Sweden, who wants to interrogate him about sexual 'coercion' (even though both women note they had no fear of violence by Assange).

The UK failed to extradite Augusto Pinochet, a man who had directly ordered the state terror agents to kill thousands and torture at least 30,000 in Chile, but they may extradite Assange. This is a partial-birth abortion of justice unfolding right before our eyes. Assange neither killed nor threatened to kill anyone, whereas US conservatives are packing up and howling for his blood, literally (even as their money launderers are being charged with $400,000 embezzling for personal enrichment).

Reading major media nowadays is reading a media enriched and informed by Wikileaks, and Assange is not even credited, much less thanked, much less paid, for many of the revelations that form the basis for an untold number of new stories. As you read stories that look like the product of investigative journalism, look for credit. If none is given it is probably a result of Wikileaks. Otherwise, media are rightfully quick to frame their sources as a product of their own efforts. If they gave Wikileaks credit every time they ought to, we would see both sides of this phenomenon concomitantly. We learn much more about the Kazai government, about the Taliban, about warlords on all sides, and about where the US taxpayer monies are going, down war profiteer ratholes in a massive streams, while the primary person responsible for the investigative journalism that uncovered the stories is being prosecuted, ultimately by the very agents of those profiteers.

Assange and good journalism need our support. What many fail to note as they take various positions in this complex environment is well put by Israeli historian

Zeev Sternhell in a recent piece in Le Monde, translated by Mark Jensen, and that basic point is that you have sides, but not sides based on partisanship, not based on religion, not based on national origin, but rather based on enlightenment or fear of enlightenment. I would also assert that this is war system and peace system division, with Islamists, neocons, militarists of all stripes and all the war profiteers on one side, those who try to work for nonviolent human relations on the other, and the true latent power of civil society up for grabs. It is time to stop allowing the

Eric Holder/Alberto Gonzales
functionaries to grab our best. They serve their war system masters well but they do not serve enlightenment, peace, nonviolence nor the interests of civil society anywhere. They will wield that power until civil society stops them.

Don't point that head at me

Intellectual pointy heads. That's what many military troops seem to feel about academics who express respect for indigenous peoples and different cultures. But in 2007 the US military launched a Human Terrain Systems project that recruited social scientists, including political scientists and sociologists, but primarily anthropologists, in order to make the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan easier.

Human Terrain: War becomes academic, is a new film from Udris, and it examines this problem using 25 interview participants--some far more than others--and telling the story of one young anthropologist's tragic seduction and death by IED.

Michael Bhatia tells a fellow HTS embed that he always felt that he should have served in the military. "What do you think you're doing right now?" was the response. Bhatia even asked questions of the locals about how many men were off getting training to join the insurgency, something that skirted quite close to gathering intelligence for the military, which is what he swore they were not doing. The viewer senses that Bhatia really genuinely wants to help the locals, wants to honor and protect them, but he is just another infidel to many, since he is there under the protection of the US military and to serve that military and that occupation. His research in Afghanistan was clearly tilted toward security issues.

While Montgomery McFate and other enthusiasts for more anthropology service to the military make their excellent points, Catherine Lutz makes the clearest points of all when she sums up by noting that the basic question of whether to go to war is skipped by those who are involved. The job of the social scientists is not to help make war and occupation more humane and more successful, but to devote ourselves to figuring out how to stay out of war in the first place. McFate and those who argue for more academic service to military ends are operating downstream from that question and therefore miss the true center of this issue.

The film is well worth seeing, with points and counterpoints belying any facile analysis, but which ultimately does suggest that we may not be able to change the game, but we can at least stand as firmly as possible against the game changing us. Jarat Chopra, one of Bhatia's mentors at Brown University, threaded complex viewpoints into a multitextured opinion, as he is also a military culture expert, but on behalf of the UN peacekeepers rather than any national military. Even the US military HTS members are kinder, gentler, more professional killers (one of them refers to himself almost exactly like this) rather than just bloodlust killers of civilians.

For the peace side, for the nonviolent side, these questions roll over into Lutz's far more profound challenge to the decision to go to war in the first place. It is all about human agency, about never ceasing in our efforts to change that master narrative, to push the conflict toward negotiation and discourse, dialog and collaboration, rather than escalation, bigger guns and more cleverly concealed IEDs. The film is worth watching and, I hope, will show our young budding scholars that embedding with the military is simply serving an agenda of coercion and occupation. It is an effort to warp hearts and minds, not to really help create conditions that will foster friendship. I will never be friends with the troops who are from another nation and who have big guns and occupy my country, never. It doesn't take an anthropologist to understand that human universal. What it takes are many citizens offering nonviolent resistance in host and client states both.

Holy terrors

More religious terrorists were convicted today of multiple felonies in the US. This cell of five desperadoes comprised two priests aged 81 and 60, an 84-year-old nun, and two women--66 and 60--with criminal records. These radical Christians call their cell the Disarm Now Plowshares and they cut security fences and hiked into the Trident submarine base at Bangor, Washington on 2 November 2009.

I've known four of them for a few years. Sr. Anne Montgomery, 84, is the senior member of this crime ring and has many felony convictions on her record, including all those accrued from eight Plowshares actions since the original one on 9 September 1980, when she and seven others went into the General Electric nuclear warhead factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where they took some of the warheads and hammered them (no, there were no radioactive nor explosive elements yet installed--none of the Plowshares actions has ever endangered anyone except those who wield hand tools to dismantle the weapons components). She has also taught children at some of the absolute worst schools in Harlem and has also spent lots of time walking Palestinian children to and from school in areas of illegal Israel settlements, where the settlers were pelting little children with stones. Anne has herself been injured doing this. It was certainly a brave and proud moment for the United States Marines who finally arrested the five elder activists. The first thing they did was to hood them. Yes, the mighty Marines hooded a then-83-year-old nun who must weigh all of 91 pounds.

I suppose the military is under the impression they are gaining in respect, being as they have all the guns to shoot unarmed camera men and laugh about it from the safety of their helicopters in Baghdad and they have the big guns that allows them to hood a skinny old priest in his 80s. Yes, I suppose they believe they deserve respect. Hmmm. I respect their humanity. I have exactly zero respect for their behavior and beliefs. Zero. It is astonishing they believe they are operating in the national security interests of the people of the US. If they can make a tiny slip of an elderly nonviolent nun into an enemy combatant, sign me up for her division.

This Plowshares movement is dedicated to reifying the Biblical mandate to "beat swords into plowshares," Isaiah 2:4. Since that 1980 beginning there have been more than 100 such actions worldwide. Anne Montgomery has participated in eight of them, and fellow defendants Steve Kelly, SJ, and Susan Crane have each done four of these highwire nonviolent actions. Fr. Bill Bichsel, 81, and Lynne Greenwald, 60, have each done other nonviolent acts of resistance to militarism.

Since the beginning of this movement the armed forces, the prosecutors and some corporate media functionaries have referred to Plowshares resisters as terrorists. This is an interesting classification, since all these actions have been done quite carefully to avoid harming anyone and in fact are done with the express purpose of slowing down the abilities of the military to kill more people.

Underneath all the other reasons to engage in extreme nonviolence in resistance to militarism is an unexpected gift of community. I saw many people today at the federal courthouse in Tacoma that I hadn't seen in years, and I made some new friends as well as finally meeting some I had only known through prison correspondence. My friend Nancy Newell drove us up there and, like the Liechtenstein army that goes out to battle with 59 troops and comes back without firing a shot with 61 because they made two new friends along the way, we came back to Portland with Sr. Megan Rice, a nun I had only known from prison correspondence when she served two hitches of a half year each for her nonviolent trespass at School of the Americas, where the US army trains Latin American troops in better methods of state terrorism. Megan was a joy to meet and spend time with. Now she's a friend of Whitefeather Peace House, where we all had a late lunch today.

So our five intrepid friends are out until March 28 sentencing. At least the long arm of the law sees the silliness of locking them up in the interim. Now if we could just see the amazing contradiction of giving a Nobel prize to Obama for making some nuclear reduction noises without a single action to achieve that, while convicting people of felonies who actually physically go out there to get the job started.

WWSD?

The Progressive is a magazine, that is to say, it is part of the press, and we in the US have this thing called Freedom of the press, enshrined in the First Amendment. So when the government agents descended on my friend Sam back in the day, back when he was Managing Editor of The Progressive, and told him and the Editor-in-Chief, Erwin Knoll, that they could not publish an article on making the H-bomb by a young writer named Howard Morland, Sam and Erwin fought back. The year was 1979, height of the Cold War and the beginning of the Euromissile crisis that would grow hottest in four years.

Sam told me about their encounter with federal agents who threatened them, and about the bizarre separate trials, one of which was like something we might expect from the Ayatollah's Iran--or the Alberto Gonzales Department of Justice, and now such things look more likely with Eric Holder's hand at the helm. One trial was a 'normal' prior restraint effort to get the judge to shut down the issue of The Progressive and one was an 'in-camera' trial. Neither Sam nor Erwin would consent to classified status and so were not allowed at their own trial and their lawyers were not allowed to discuss it with them. Excuse me? True.

Eventually, as the First Amendment asserted itself into the arguments, the government dropped its case and the article was published. We in the US live in a democracy to the extent we are free. The Founders saw that much. Take away freedom of the press and all the rest seems to follow.

And now they are after Julian Assange, who, unlike Howard Morland and Sam Day and Erwin Knoll, is not a US citizen, never committed any crime on US soil, and who is basically a journalist who has simply investigated better than all US media put together. The case against him is already being cooked and, to quote a very interesting blogger who just calls her/himself bmaz:

Eric Holder and the DOJ cannot possibly find jurisdiction to charge American contractors who torture and murder people in the course and scope of their employment by the U.S. Government abroad, and cannot charge CIA supervisors and OLC lawyers who patently admit to destruction of evidence and conspiracy to commit war crimes; however, the same DOJ is now suddenly able to be so legally creative as to find a path to charging a person under the Espionage Act who is not a U.S. citizen, owed the U.S. no duty under citizenship and treason provisions, committed no act within the jurisdiction of the U.S. and who is a member within the general definition of “press” and who only published purported whistleblower leaks given to him. It is amazing how the DOJ is willing to go out on that “limb” when it wants to, but can never so travel when the interests of justice really demand it to.

Assange showed the world proof of US murder of Reuters cameramen in Baghdad--and Bradley Manning is in prison for it now when he should have gotten a medal and a promotion--torture all over our global reach, and Holder has chosen to prepare a case to extradite Assange to stand for his actual crime, the temerity to effectively take on and expose US war crimes.

Assange has been an astonishingly effective nonviolent warrior. We should return the favor and stand in his defense by any nonviolent means at our command. I think Sam would have.

Nonviolence, transparency and the hatred for Wikileaks

Can we gain a bit of rational perspective on the ravening, howling bloodlust of those who have decided that Julian Assange is obviously the problem? Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst and journalist I've relied on for years to decipher and rationally explain the law has been bitten by one of the rabid corporado wolves and has in turn joined the pack, saying about Assange that, "he is well beyond sympathy from anyone I'm aware of."

Yoo-hoo! Jeffrey! Be aware of lots of us!

I don't expect Jeffrey Toobin will ever be aware of me, but I hope he's now aware of the computer experts who are punishing the corporations who have joined the effort to shut down Wikileaks. Amazon, Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and other corporations with whom Wikileaks has done business and who have ended their services to Wikileaks have in turn been under cyberattack from defenders of democracy.

Democracy? How is a cyberattack on Visa a defense of democracy?

Julian Assange and those who have gathered secret government and corporate documents and released them to media outlets (and please bear in mind that Wikileaks has not released much at all beyond that which the corporate media itself has released) are helping make government more transparent and, one might hope, more accountable. When we learn about the completely illegal conduct of the US military that ought to help us decide to rein them in. Instead, the government vilifies the messenger, Wikileaks and the founder, Julian Assange. When Assange is asked about the legitimacy of a US Secretary of State giving illegal orders and he responds, well, if she did then she should resign, why is that out of order?

Revealing information about misconduct is now espionage, according to many. We expect this authoritarianism from the rightwing pundits and politicians, but as Tom Hayden points out, the pack is growing to include more and more erstwhile liberals.

Gunning for the messenger is hardly a brave or rational approach. Let's slow down, actually investigate these revelations, and decide if the public has a right to learn about public policy. Many of us are so weary of the patriarchal militarism that we cannot and should not have a democracy because we are not in authority and we have no need to know nor right to know and, to complete the tautology, "If you knew what they knew, you'd understand why they need to do what they are doing."

Ultimately, Wikileaks goes to the heart of why violence is undemocratic. Violence breeds secrecy, violence indeed mandates secrecy, and nonviolence, which is based on transparency, is far more healthy for democracy. Indeed, nonviolence and democracy are effectively twinned and are coevolving. Sadly, violence and secrecy have long coevolved and we see it manifesting in the lies about Wikileaks that refuse to die, even when exposed again and again, what Glenn Greenwald calls zombie lies. Wikileaks makes these documents available to corporate media, corporate media publishes some of them, and corporate media is immune to attack, yet Assange is targeted.

There are so many new pieces of the truth that it will take a good while to sort it all out. At least let's thank Julian Assange for starting to peel away some of the veils and knock down some of the walls, and let's defend him.

More change for less kaching

'Tis the season to give, to really think about how to find some of the fruits of our labors to donate to organizations that do good work. But how do we think about this? We live in an era when funds are scarce and yet, as it turns out, many nonprofits still treat their operations like a business that competes in the for-profit world, that is, a business that must expand and increase the salary of its executives or risk losing these high producers to another organization.

Some of us are disgusted by this entire model. It has always bugged me, but of course I come out of the world of poverty and low level community organizing, so I'm biased, I confess. When I started finally accepting some pay for doing community organizing, working for Waging Peace in northern Wisconsin, we three organizers paid ourselves $4/hour. We told our donors they were getting a lot of bang for their buck and they agreed. We only disbanded, finally, when one of us went back to school (me) and one retired (the wonderful Madge Michels-Cyrus). We personally knew our donors and cared for them. They knew our lifestyles--cabins in the woods in all cases, solar and woodfired--and they knew they could count on us supporting their local groups across the northern stretch of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. We didn't come in to lead them; we came to support them. We did trainings, not takeovers. We didn't compete; we collaborated.

So when I look at the salaries of nonprofit executives, up some four percent in 2010 to almost $150,000, I gag. The head of the Wildlife Conservation Society brings in more than $725,000. The CEO of the YMCA of Greater Houston squeaks by on a bit more than $661,000, and the Grand Poobah of the rightwing Heritage Foundation manages on $947,999. Don't you just want to send him $1 to help him get over at $948,000?







Some of the charities display the most (greedy) family values, that is, that find a way to compensate multiple members of the same family, include Christian Relief Services, which pays out $151,000-$166,000 to three members of the Krizek family. Or how about the three members of the Jones family in the Feed the Children nonprofit, who make $167,000-$258,000? That very pious Trinity Broadcasting Network has at least three members of the Crouch family pulling in $214,000-$419,000. And of course there are the various charities that telemarket, often resulting in up to 95 percent of the donations received via phone solicitation going to the for-profit telemarketing firms.







I personally give nothing to the big ones. It's hard not to feel churlish walking past the Salvation Army bellringers, but their CEO tries to hide his income and the organization admits that other officials make more than $150,000, leaving those bellringers out in the cold, quite literally. I save my few extra $ for the Nuclear Resister, Mercy Corps, the Center for Intercultural Organizing, Oregon PeaceWorks,

the Homeless Children's Playtime Project,

and a few others (including the one I work on, PeaceVoice, for the Oregon Peace Institute). I know the people where I give. I trust them and I know that they live modestly and do good work. I am fairly abrupt with telemarketers and save them and me by almost instantly saying, "Sorry, I never donate by phone," and then I quietly hang up. The American Red Cross and the United Way and UNICEF all need to get by without me, which they certainly do, paying their CEOs huge salaries and devoting massive amounts to overhead, offices, and a relatively small percent to providing actual services and help.

Open your hearts, but use your mind. Show kindness, but be calculating. Save your change for a group that will actually work for change. Then give until it hurts, or at least until it pinches a bit. You'll recover and you'll help many others too.

Peter and the wolf

My old friend Peter Edmunds is living far from his Minnesota roots, where he used to run a log building restoration company. He's now down in Deming, New Mexico. How sweet. Another snowbird, retired to bask in the sun.

But Peter's story has no such ending. He and his wife, Polly, have started Border Partners, a cross-border Deming-Palomas, US-Mexico initiative operating to help facilitate appropriate technology, food sharing and schoolchildren empowerment. They have also wandered into a dangerous drug and border war with their nonviolent programs.

From Peter's notes earlier this week, on 2 December:

After several months of comparative calm the savagery in Palomas returned to the front of everyone’s consciousness this week.

When I arrived on Monday morning for my Wind Power Class with the Palomas high school students, Luis, one of our key Palomas facilitators, immediately advised me, saying:

"I want you to go home, back to Deming. No one is on the streets, and we are all being very cautious.”

His hurried explanation revealed the latest horror:

Over the weekend the Mexican Federal Police and the military--equipped with helicopters and armored trucks--raided the town, arresting 25 people. Then, acting on a tip, they began to excavate an area located about ten minutes south of town. The army unearthed twenty victims at a clandestine mass grave site there. The seventeen men and three women have been buried there within the past year. The victims included two people from Deming who went missing in October.

Reading about all this from a distance is one thing; having wonderful friends in the thick of it is another. I can still see Peter running his log building crew. He employed me once in a while when I needed some cash, even though I had no skills in that area, but Peter is a loyal man. If he decides you are worth his friendship, he goes all the way. He kept many peace activists working for many years before his "retirement," which has only turned into full-time unpaid work for others less fortunate.

Bringing solar power to Mexico is coals to Newcastle, but to a Newcastle without a coal plant. Peter has been a hobby alternative energy developer for many years. I still laugh when I think of his efforts to create a waste paper adobe in northern Wisconsin. The mad inventor had me helping him after I was released from prison for one of my plowshares actions (dismantling part of a nuclear command facility). Peter actually paid my to hang out as he did his Gyro Gearloose experiments with bales of old newspaper and a homemade slurry. Now he's in adobe country at last, probably living in a newspaper palace, walls full of old headlines and Doonesbury comics.

As my generation slides into retirement, I cannot think of a better couple of role models than Peter and Polly Edmunds. They've been living lives of service for decades and used their log restoration company to help those of us who were nonviolent activists earn a living to support our real work of nonviolent resistance to militarism. Now they are spending their golden years still giving, to those who are trying to survive in our southern border war zone.

If you can afford a few dollars for such a worthy effort, please visit their site and donate this season.

Shame on Scrooge Congress

The American people have a government dedicated to enhancing the freedoms, rights and well being of the people--rich people, that is. As record numbers of families face foreclosures, as unemployment hovers officially at approximately 10 percent (far higher in many communities of color), and as the budget hawks eyeball cutting Social Security, help for Americans with disabilities, and public education yet again, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Banana Republicans rise to defend the elites in Richistan.

Like the mafia only with far more reach and power, they are linking help to America's unemployed to extended tax cuts to the most wealthy millionaires and billionaires. No free pass for the elites, no help for people who cannot find work in a country with less and less work to find. As Christmas approaches, they make deals that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. It is truly Governance by Scrooge.

For a good overview of one primary part of the problem, take 13 minutes of your day and listen to Bernie Sanders. In this remarkably illuminating speech, Sanders delineates the collapse of the middle class by the numbers. The gathering of income and wealth at the very top and the impoverishment of Americans is stunning. The Hypocrisy Index of the Republicans and their Democratic slinkdogs is pegged at Maximum.

From the transcript, which has been started by a young fellow named Tim Novotney:

Mr. President in the year 2007 the top 1% of all income earners in the United States made 23.5% percent of all income. The top 1% made 23.5% of all income more than the entire bottom 50%. That’s apparently not enough. The percentage of income going to the top 1% nearly tripled since the 1970′s. In the mid 1970′s the top 1% earned about 8% of all income. In the 1980′s that figure jumped to 14%. In the late 1990′s that 1% earned about 19% and today, as the middle class collapses, the top 1% earn 23.5% of all income, more than the bottom 50%.

People need to read these numbers--Bernie cites many more, but this is one key set--and consider the human stories behind these stark statistics. The more we humanize these numbers, the more outraged we become at Congress allowing the rich to continue to crush everyone. That wind chill we are feeling is not seasonal winter cold, it's the stagnant atmosphere of our economy as we plummet from middle class down to poverty, thanks to the insatiable greed of the war system.

Bernie doesn't cover that part, but in fact it is the war system that is responsible for these numbers. The military spending of the US correlates pretty much perfectly with the destruction of the economy--exactly backward from the common wisdom that war is good for the economy. War is horrible for the economy. War creates fewer jobs per $billion spent than does any other sector of the economy. It is capital intensive, not labor intensive. It is only good for rich people's economy and they live in a different one than the rest of us.

So we can keep our eyes shut and focus on meaningless trivial inanities or the flatly outrageous--where was Obama really born? why does Julian Assange still breathe when Mike Huckabee, Tom Flanagan (Canadian Tory--Republican), Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin want him dead? what can we learn about pro football today to give real meaning to our lives?--or we can listen to Bernie and start to make plans to replace all Republicans and many Democrats as they continue to betray us daily. The Ghost of Christmas Past could show us the human stories of the numbers Bernie Sanders lays out for us--time to help the Scrooges into retirement so we can turn this around. It will take a lot of work to replace these people, but their loyalty to Richistan is clear and we need representatives loyal to human security and justice. The strategic planning should start now.

Nonviolent gift-giving

Few who espouse and try to practice nonviolence are so Gandhian that we can feel entirely integrated and settled in our daily manifestation of our philosophical commitment to nonviolence. We try, we stumble, and sometimes we fail without even knowing it.

It's very hard to purchase using the best nonviolent standards. Even plastic bags are often made with animal fat. Imagine the irony of your vegan groceries carried home encased in that.

Out biking yesterday I was listening to Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? and he interviewed the older fellow who runs Lehman's, a sort of Amish-culture-type hardware in Ohio, where various communities still try to live in the old Anabaptist simplicity. The discussion ranged from butter churns (he presented Michael with one) to haysaws to old fashioned, non-plastic, non-electric children's toys. Indeed, the online catalog's toy section is sweet and inviting. The catalog has great sections on alternative lighting, non-electric tools and all the various permutations on living like the various Anabaptists who eschew technology to varying degrees and who, coincidentally, are so much easier on the Earth and on each other, living in a more nonviolent lifestyle by far than our mainstream American culture.

One key point that the Lehman's guest made to Michael Feldman was that most of what they sold would not change from year to year and that they also sold parts so that when something broke or bent in one of their products, the entire thing was not discarded into our trash stream, but instead repaired by a search for the part and the time taken to keep it fixed. They talked about buying a kitchen appliance that could be handed down through the generations and kept functional because the parts could still be ordered to keep it in good order. There is something beyond environmental about that; I enjoy tea from the same cup my father drank from each morning when I was a boy in the 1950s. That deep emotional connection must have some validity in attachment theory of raising healthy children and I'd suggest that the more we surround ourselves and our families with such transgenerational items of daily life the healthier our culture will become. We cannot have that so well in a disposable economy so attached to hyperconsumption instead of human values.

Of course I am writing this on a laptop that my grandfather never imagined, let alone possessed, and which is relatively ephemeral (a good reminder to back it all up!), so I do not make any of these observations in any judgmental fashion, just a note to self: think about this more during this silly season of shop-til-you-flop. I'm still pondering the best gift for the six-year-old in our peace house, the girl who has everything (and whose mother's eyes roll every time I, or anyone, gives this lovely child another toy). I already gave her an antique carved goat that my grandfather gave my grandmother, so I'll have to perhaps think of giving her an experience--a movie or play or other event. What a Gandhian challenge in our stressed out plastic culture, the gift for the six-year-old with everything.

The real basic values of nonviolence might show us the way through this season and on. While the rightwingers clamor and claim that Obama is not a US citizen, we might reflect on whether Jesus could produce his birth certificate (let alone his reborn papers). As we watch the Koreas turn to their respective nuclear Godfathers, we might rethink purchases of cheap Chinese consumer goods and instead try to direct more of our pre-tax income to savings, to defer federal taxes until our government evolves into a less militarized force in the world.

In short, it's all connected and we are all called to do our best. None of us are Jesus and none of us are Gandhi but we can show our good intentions in the smallest devotions of daily life.

Red Notice: Dick Cheney

Julian Assange embarrassed the US government, exposed the corruption and illegal violence in layer after layer of the war system, and peeled away the layers of obfuscation shielding some of the unsavory relationships amongst those who rule us.

That plus sex without a condom will get you a Red Notice from Interpol, the new laughingstock of law enforcement worldwide. They can't find Joseph Kony, who has abducted more than

30,000 children and displaced more than 1.6 million Ugandans, but since Kony has 60 "wives" and at least 42 children I would imagine it's safe to bet he has sex without a condom, so if Interpol would add that last charge they might be able to successfully conclude their long search.

Dick Cheney never used a condom when he raped Iraq and screwed the American people, so maybe Interpol could see about finding the architect of an illegal invasion that slaughtered thousands of civilians and ripped off more than $1.5 trillion from the US taxpayer.

The legions of US politicians who went along with Cheney and Bush are culpable too. These are elected officials who voted in favor of an invasion that they knew was illegal--the UN and IAEA were both clear that there were no WMD in Iraq and Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein loathed each other. Now they are pouncing on Wikileaks and on Assange, with Joe Lieberman muscling influence to force Amazon to yank server support and Hilary Clinton sending out edicts forbidding State Department staff from looking at the Wikileaks website even in their own homes.

Sigh. Julian Assange has been doing the investigative yeoman's work for the major media of the world for a while now, providing primary source material including video of US military murdering unarmed journalists and shooting children. He should get a Nobel, a Pulitzer, a Congressional Medal of Freedom, and an Academy Award. He should certainly have the gratitude of the media, who got this all for free when they failed to turn up much at all with their for-profit operations.

While the mainstream media has parroted the fiction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other lethal liars for a long time, it would be overtaxing our imagination and suspension of disbelief to even attempt to write fiction this bizarre.

We owe Assange a great debt and we owe the world some apologies and reparations for the real, actual, lethal and costly crimes he has uncovered.

Revenge: Slippery slope to hell

One week ago in our town of Portland, Oregon, a young man who apparently saw his mission as revenge allegedly tried to blow up more than 10,000 friendly families and individuals who were at Pioneer Courthouse Square for the annual Christmas tree lighting. The FBI sting operation produced an affidavit in which the young man is reportedly on record as saying he has been wanting to join jihad since he was 15.

This is called passive-aggression, that is, we formulate vengeful ideation and plot or hope to gain enough power to strike back at perceived wrongs. It's how we operate as individuals and as groups when we are at our worst. It's natural and we can override those impulses but part of that depends on our social norms, which are less stable than ever, thanks to a globalization of everything and therefore an instantaneous validation for virtually everything.

The best revenge is to live well, not to seek to hurt others. If I crush someone, they naturally will want to hurt me. If they succeed, I naturally will want to try to crush them again. A young Muslim watches television and sees US troops in a mosque in Iraq, shooting unarmed and injured Iraqis. He reads about US troops raping a Muslim girl and killing her and her family. He sees countless images of US soldiers smashing in doors in cities in Iraq and Afghanistan, screaming in English at terrified Muslim civilians as little Muslim girls in hijab cry. He learns about the death toll of Muslim civilians mounting in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and he feels his rage rising. Maybe he even decides to give up all his easy privileges in the US and tries to go to Yemen to join jihad. When he does, he has entered the cycle of revenge and it's a matter of time until he does something that will likely fuel more conflict, more desire to kick down the doors of more Muslims, and the spiral of destructive conflict continues.

And so after the 1999 end of the Shining Path 30-year terrorist insurgency in Peru, the Shining Path is back. How odd? No, how normal. Conflict recurrence is the norm, not new armed conflict, for the majority of armed conflicts on Earth. It is almost always largely due to unresolved grievance and revenge.

Indeed, by the latest published data analysis, Peace and conflict 2010, active armed conflict remains at levels well above the Cold War period, when we had the standoff of the imperial peace of Pax Americana v Pax Sovieticus, when 7-35 armed conflicts were in play from year to year, trending upward from eight in 1946 to 38 in 1987. We are at approximately 26 now and most are recurrences. 2005 was the most striking example of a jump from 20 armed conflicts in 2004 to 27 in 2005, entirely because of seven recurrences of armed conflict that had been 'settled.'

Sometimes fresh offenses trigger recurrence. Often it happens because all the stakeholders were not at the negotiating table and the peace was unstable enough so that spoilers succeeded in unraveling the agreement. Often the fighters have literally no other way to survive than to pick up the gun again, and society can either become rampant with crime or revert to armed struggle, the impacts of which are similar for the citizenry. War crimes? How redundant. War is crime.

At the end, the lesson is that signing a peace of paper declaring the peace is a very nice thing to do and ought to precipitate a big celebration--but the peace requires harder work than did the war in some emotional ways, including most importantly the new social norm of the end of retribution. As long as we value vengeance, and act on that value, we will pay dearly and so will our children and our grandchildren. The costs of war are intergenerational, lingering, and increasingly insurmountable as we make those mistakes repeatedly without correction. It is emotionally easy to do and it is literally a slippery slope to hell.

Nonviolence requires redacting revenge from our menu of emotional options. That is harder and is a seemingly Sisyphean climb out of our difficulties, but the alternatives to nonviolence are all worse. Kicking down countless doors or fantasizing about blowing up Christmas tree celebrants are ultimately so costly to all that we will be required to rethink revenge. Unlike our Hollywood consequence-free conquests, reality revenge has a pricetag that requires periodic payments and payback, and usually turns our loved ones into targets. "There ain't but one way out." Nonviolence.

References
Hewitt, J. Joseph; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Gurr, Ted Robert (2010). Peace and conflict 2010. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

How to neutralize Wikileaks

The US government is suffering from a rash of Wikileaks embarrassment, with many of our most unsavory bad manners revealed for the whole world to see. The US mainstream media has joined the howling mob of corporate and political forces eager to lock up Julian Assange or even kidnap him and render him over to the torture fiends in Hosni Mubarak's basement. What should we do about this if we like the idea of nonviolence and good government but not the idea of a clumsy, red-faced America barging around on everyone's bad side all the time?

The little book Getting to Yes with its method of principled negotiation would help us strategize a way forward, I believe. We could think about that method, which eschews the hard edged positional stance all dug in like we see Hillary Clinton, and it also rejects the abject surrender of accommodation. Instead, advises negotiators Roger Fisher, Bill Ury and Bruce Patton, let's assess this conflict and find a way out of it so that everyone gets quite a bit of what they want.

What if a good mediator could arrange for frank and safe talks with Assange? What would he want? What do we want? Some possible outcomes from the two sides:

• Good government
• Secure communication
• Nonviolence
• Enhanced security for the American people
• Enhanced security for all people
• An end to war
• An end to corruption
• Cessation of embarrassing leaks

Why would any of this be a problem for our government? Why would any of this be a problem for Julian Assange? There are many possible outcome paths that would meet all these conditions and gain all these results. The easiest would be for us to hire Assange and clear him to access all government and corporate records and ferret out corruption so that we could quietly fix it before it became embarrassing. Yes, some of it might be so egregious that it would require public announcements of apology and policy change. For example, shooting unarmed journalists should not be swept under the rug. We should be grateful to Assange for uncovering this and we should instantly release Bradley Manning with a letter of commendation, as we compensate the families of the murdered newsgatherers and other Iraqis. We should regard this as a prompt to pull out of Iraq completely and simply offer aid through the UN, Mercy Corps and other agencies with zero US military presence.

Assange is giving us the chance to reinvigorate our democracy and reset our relationships in the world. Let us get to yes and work with him. His efforts are heroic and helpful. Why do we wish to make enemies of someone who is trying to help us become a better nation? He is acting in the interests of truth and transparency, two of the strongest pillars of real democracy. If our diplomats can't handle revelations calling Putin and Medvedev 'Batman and Robin,' tough. The real services of Wikileaks are way past that minor silliness and into the basics of good governance and integrity.

Thank you, Julian Assange.

Let them not be in vain: Learn a new way

This what I just received from the US Department of Defense:

DOD Identifies Army Casualties

The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of six soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died Nov. 29, in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when an insurgent attacked their unit with small arms fire.

Killed were:

Sgt. 1st Class Barry E. Jarvis, 36, of Tell City, Ind.

Staff Sgt. Curtis A. Oakes, 29, of Athens, Ohio.

Spc. Matthew W. Ramsey, 20, of Quartz Hill, Calif.

Pfc. Jacob A. Gassen, 21, of Beaver Dam, Wis.

Pfc. Austin G. Staggs, 19, of Senoia, Ga.

Pvt. Buddy W. McLain, 24, of Mexico, Maine.

They were assigned to the 1st Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.

For more information, please contact the Fort Campbell public affairs office at 270-798-3025.

These young Americans are now dead, the latest US mortalities in the war of occupation that has dragged on much longer than World War II, longer than the Soviet Union occupation of Afghanistan, and with no promised end in sight. Indeed, every time President Obama talks about getting out, he is attacked rabidly and mercilessly without quarter by Republicans, by Fox News BeckHannityLimbaughO'Reilly types, by Tea Party Know-Nothings and by Sarah "The Refudiator" Palin. They all do so in the name of "the troops," all of whom are sacralized heroes, of course.

It is really really really time to stop. It is so misguided to stay in Afghanistan, where these armed emissaries we send are viewed as infidel occupiers and indeed, not only are their deaths celebrated there, but this occupation is just the sort of thing that fuels the insane desire to plant bombs in our village squares at times of joyous family gathering, such as the Christmas Tree Bomber allegedly did last Friday evening in Portland.

Please. Let us learn nonviolence. When we study war we see what we get. If the deaths of these six could teach us that it's time to learn another way to manage conflict, their deaths will not have been in vain. Otherwise, I'm deeply certain that they are and that is a crime.

Nonviolence in defense of the sacred tree

The theories of Conflict Resolution are related to those of Nonviolence, and are found in synthesis in many Native American practices and in many Native American leaders. The violence attributed correctly to Native Americans was the violence of the desperate and doomed defender. Other Native Americans have shown quieter, less costly ways to protect those who are vulnerable even as they make progress in resistance.

Robert Phillip Burnette, Sicangu (Brulé) Sioux, often was a proponent of nonviolence and acted as mediator during some of the most potentially violent Native American political events of the 1960s and ‘70s, including the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., and the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. (Josephy: online)

Absolute nonviolent advantage: principled negotiation

The use of any violence makes anyone vulnerable to manipulation and fabrication. We see this in Portland with the Christmas Tree Bomber now--the 19-year-old who will now be a trope for Somali-Americans specifically, for Somalis in general, for Africans, and for Muslims. Just like the US ethnic cleansing and genocide of Native Americans under the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that was made palatable by portraying Native Americans as bloodthirsty, our flagging war enthusiasm will be pumped up by images of Somali jihadis with truck bombs swarming our innocent village squares. Winona LaDuke's work of fiction told it truthfully:

“How about a short video on the kind of equipment the Indians have in there that we can release to the media?” Agent Simpson suggested. “It’s worked before, putting the fear of God in most Americans. We show some bazookas, some heavy firepower, a mound of bullets. That gets people on our side right quick.”
(LaDuke: 189)

One of the primary principles in conflict management is that a productive path is the generation of an agreement to strive toward mutually acceptable standards. Best practices, those policies that result in fairness, are only reached in a true consensus if negotiations aren’t pursued with a threat of violence. A movement for social change or protection is served poorly if it is oppressed by soldiers and police who have been given carte blanche by a populace more afraid of the activists than they are of the police. When demonstrators use tactics that make most citizens grateful for the thin blue line of police protection from dangerous demonstrators, the chances of that group of demonstrators achieving much more than a few headlines are almost nil. Indeed, Dr. King pointed out fewer people were killed in 10 years of nonviolent Civil Rights struggle than in one night of rioting in Watts. (Ansbro: 245)


Further, the Civil Rights movement produced two historic acts of legislation--the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965--while the rioting in Watts produced a fear of blacks unprecedented in the US, a fear that clamped shut all progress in legislation. Certainly Native Americans have learned the risks of armed resistance—though too many obdurately cling to a warrior ethos that doesn’t incorporate a nonviolent warrior’s practice.

Certainly the most outspoken of these Native American analysts who reject nonviolence is Dr. Ward Churchill (honorary doctorate, not awarded for actual degree program, a poseur in the academy and in the activist revolutionary world as imaged),

who wrote Pacifism As Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America, a screed so replete with factual errors it would scarcely merit a mention, except it is an influential document. His work has been widely cited and relied upon by those who have attempted to hijack the Global Justice movement and other movements, including the opposition to the war in Iraq. His critique of pacifism includes such egregious errors as “Gandhi’s followers perished by the thousands.” (Churchill: 47) No. The struggle for independence in India never once rose to the level of war as counted by official statisticians. His followers did perish by the hundreds once, at Amristsar, in their nonviolent demonstration, but, unlike an insurgency, there were few deaths, mostly beatings and imprisonment. It was horrible, and was (to paraphrase another W. Churchill, that old racist Winston, in his comment about democracy) the worst way to gain independence—except for all the rest.

Indeed, whenever violence was used in that struggle it retarded the movement’s progress. Churchill gets it all exactly backward from historical facts as eyewitnesses, including the cameras, give us. Churchill also simply gets the description of pacifism all wrong, including his critique of Jewish lack of opposition to Hitler until it was too late, which was not an expression of pacifism whatsoever, but of passivity, a distinction well known in the field but which has eluded Churchill entirely. Essentially, he blames any victims who do not rise up shooting--and yet he isn't himself shooting in the defense of anyone. It is an odd twisted mirror of George W. Bush, the one who evaded Vietnam, sending in thousands of troops to kill and die in a country that is rejecting them.
The “let’s you and him fight” school of thought is appealing to some, but most Native Americans and most nonviolent actionists do not engage in it. Defeat is depressing when nonviolence is employed and terrible when violence is the method of resistance. No one said it more eloquently than Black Elk:

“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...
The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
—Black Elk, Sioux holy man
(Black Elk: online)

sources
Ansbro, John J., Martin Luther King, Jr.: Nonviolent Strategies and Tactics for Social Change. NYC: Madison Books, 2000 (original, Orbis, 1982).
Black Elk, online: http://msnbc.com/onair/msnbc/TimeandAgain/archive/wknee/1890.asp?cp1=1.
Churchill, Ward, Pacifism As Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 1998.
Josephy, Alvin M., “Burnette, Bob,” online: http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_005000_burnettebob.htm
LaDuke, Winona, Last Standing Woman. Stillwater MN: Voyageur Press, 1997.