Paying them to PSYOP us

In early 2005, many Americans were shocked to learn that the Bush administration was spending $254 million annually, twice what the Clinton administration spent, on public relations contracts to produce and distribute hundreds of ready-to-serve news segments broadcast on local and network stations.
--Frances Moore Lappé (2006), Democracy’s edge (p. 229)

How does democracy survive and thrive if it cannot emerge from an uncontaminated pool of public discourse? Just as we rejected the McCarthy-era House of Unamerican Activities abuses, so too are we now confronted with the problem of funding the very slicksters who pump out propaganda directed primarily at eroding our democracy enough so that they stay in power. Paying people to fool us is not why we pay taxes, thank you very much. Well, we wish it weren't. The $254 million mentioned by Lappé is a little slush fund alongside the ongoing tsunami of Pentagon propaganda funding, some $4.7 billion in 2009, employing more than 27,000 just to sell the war department's line of thinking to citizens from Birmingham to Basra, from Kansas to Kabul. They have the ironic chutzpah to call their Pentagon operation Joint Hometown News Service and when they produce news pieces for radio, television, advertising, opinion columns for newspapers, commentary for talk radio, and 'news' stories online, in print, in audio files or on film, they do not reveal that this is Pentagon-prepared. It has sent me back to re-read that old classic, Animal Farm. There it is, the new truth. The funny thing is Orwell was satirizing the commie governments of the left, but nowadays it's the militarized governments--and I personally see militarism from any quarter as a functional rightwing stance--who are using this approach less crudely and thus more effectively.

Spinning this self-referential news loop can spiral back to haunt us when those who actually believe in an informed citizenry seriously decide to help democracy, as when Wikileaks opened up a can of whupass in the form of 92,000 leaked documents in July 2010. In that opened can we found that the Pentagon was using the same fool-the-natives trick in Afghanistan as they used so speciously in Iraq, which is to pay editors and others to plant Pentagon-friendly stories in those countries. The covering structure is called provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan, presumably in the image and likeness of a US colony).

If we are trying to suggest to the world that a theocratic government is not appropriate, why do we do everything at our disposal to erode the faith that we hope develops, the faith in a free press, the faith in an informed citizenry, the two faiths that buttress the overarching faith in the people that is faith in democracy?

References
Lappé, Frances Moore (2006), Democracy’s edge: Choosing to save our country by bringing democracy to life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Jasmine revolutionaries

What we see now in Tunisia is wondrous with dangerous challenges and potential for beauty or catastrophe, democracy or theocracy, peaceable liberation or bloodbath. The forces working to undermine this uprising, which has already succeeded in deposing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (who ruled since 1987 as a dictator in practice) in what is being called the Jasmine Revolution (for the national flower and the general nonviolent conduct of the protesters), are numerous and both internal and external. Statements of support are sometimes genuine, sometimes superficial, and the whole affair makes the powerful very nervous. When those in power are jumpy, everyone else is at risk.

Reporters, reflecting this general fret, seem to be sure to inquire on the ground or in interviews via phone, What about fundamentalists? Is this an Islamist revolution? The subtext is always, Will this former client state of the US now be on the side of the terrorists? Will we see a state that violates human rights like Iran? A nonviolent revolution is great, but is the result going to be even more polarizing than the original problem?

Tunisia is, after all, the most northern country in Africa, on the Mediterranean Sea, and has a long history of complex conflict with Europe, including the Punic Wars with the Roman empire that resulted in some of the earliest environmental warfare when Cato the Elder convinced his Romans to attempt to make Carthage more like the Sahara to the south, by salting the fields to make agriculture impossible.

That failed, and Tunisia has long been an agricultural exporting nation from its northern fertile farmlands. Massive corruption, proven by recent Wikileaks documents showing the enormous flow of resources to the Ben Ali clan, may have been the final triggering bit that brought so many thousands into the streets in what became a de facto general strike.

Part of the shakiness of the West is that, following the Lebanese civil war of 1982, Tunisia hosted Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is certainly related to the jubilation amongst the citizens of Gaza that has been so widely reported recently. The other anti-democratic governments in the region and in the rest of the Arab world are frightened too, even those hostile to the West, such as Syria, whose leader squeaked out his latest victory in the polls with just 97.6 percent of the counted votes. That kind of democracy, the kind with one party on the ballot and your thumbprint alongside any write-in vote, is indeed threatened by the kind of Jasmine Revolution in the neighborhood. Indeed, from Saudi Arabia to Syria, Arab dictatorships have suddenly decided to lift some austerity measures and have been more generous to their people. Thus, whatever happens, the Tunisians have already helped common folk throughout the region.

May the flowers of nonviolent revolution continue to blossom in peaceful turmoil.

Misquoting and misunderstanding King

Historian William Loren Katz brought to my attention the egregious misuse of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr by Pentagon counsel Jeh C. Johnson on 13 January 2011. In his speech about Dr. King, Johnson incorrectly claimed that, were he alive today, Dr. King would have supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is positively Goebbelian and Orwellian in its bald backwardness. Of course, what do we expect from an institution that has chaplains bless atomic bombers in the name of Jesus, as they are about to go incinerate scores of thousands of civilians? What else is new for a warrior organization that--in a mirror image of al Qa'ida or the Taliban--drenches its rhetoric in pseudospirituality, sending in born-again Marines with white phosphorus weapons to burn people alive in Fallujah? The evangelicizing of the US military toward a view of a heavily armed, vindictive Jesus is a well documented phenomenon, so why would we expect anything different when it comes to warping the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr?

Just for the record, Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr were nonviolent. Hello? The Prince of Peace did not fool around when he noted that those who live by the sword die by the sword. He not only refused armed protection, he reputedly healed the Roman slave, Malchus, whose ear was cut off by one of Jesus's well meaning followers. Whether Jesus did this or not, his words as we read them in the Bible were all about healing and forgiveness, never about using violence to attack or defend. He carried no weapon except his own personhood. Martin Luther King Jr agonized and prayed over this very question in the 1950s, when his home was bombed on 30 January 1956 and he owned a handgun for protection of his family. King's prayer resulted in his own disarmament, when he and Coretta made the decision that advocating for nonviolence meant that he could neither have a gun nor have armed bodyguards, a very radical departure from the norm but one he clearly felt was a watershed in his own effort to live a truly spiritual life in accordance with his faith.

Donald Rumsfeld lied about WMD in Iraq and he lied about Saddam Hussein being in cahoots with Osama bin Laden. Pentagon spokespeople lied about the Gulf of Tonkin and the lies stretch all the way back to the casus belli of the Spanish American War. They lied about the dangers of radiological weapons to humans, about the effects of Agent Orange, and about Gulf War Syndrome, denying compensation to foreign civilians and US military personnel alike. Why would we expect the officials at DoD to suddenly start telling the truth about Dr. King or anything else? When they are caught in those lies, they stutter about bad intelligence or unclear circumstances, but the pattern is stark.

I know soldiers and Marines who really have gone into these wars with intentions of helping, and often they do, exhibiting great skill and care. We've talked and we've agreed to disagree about the necessity of being armed, but I will freely assert that plenty of US military members really strive under dangerous circumstances to help Iraqis and Afghans on the ground, in the countryside, villages and towns. What I find such a betrayal is that their commanders at the highest levels continue to manufacture false statements about so much and thus put civilians and US troops alike at greater risk. Dr. King was clear as a bell that a nation that continues to spend its treasure on military adventures while cutting social programs is approaching spiritual death. The Pentagon is pushing us toward that spiritual death even as it is shoving our environment and economy over the cliff.

It is time to take King seriously and rethink our entire notion of security. His vision has a future for all. The Pentagon vision is a nightmare of lies and violence.

Solving the shooting problem

Looking at any phenomenon we can ascribe three sets of causal conditions: necessary, contributory, sufficient. The outcome is impossible to achieve without the necessary causes, the outcome is more likely to be achieved by adding more contributory causes or by making existing contributory causes more powerful, and the outcome occurs when all the necessary causes are met and enough contributory causes are powerful enough to reach sufficient.

So, for example, we can look at the shooting in Tucson and speculate that the causes may be described something like this:
Necessary: exposed victims, gun and ammunition availability, motive, willingness to kill, ability to shoot victims.
Contributory: lack of funding for mental health care system, poor oversight of gun dealers, limitless gun and ammunition manufacturing, incendiary and objectifying public and political speech, cultural predisposition toward violent solutions to conflict, little or no conflict management education or training for children or young adults, glorification of violent warriors, nation at war, sacralizing violent warrior conduct, violent movies, violent video games and more.
Sufficient: all the necessary and some combination and level of contributory.

Understanding causation in this way helps to separate arguments that tend to place all blame on one condition or the other. We can discuss any occurrence more rationally when we don't blame it all on one cause, such as gun and ammunition availability. We can speculate about how to mitigate the chances that such tragedies will occur again by removing or reducing one or more of the necessary causes or the contributory causes. We can come to understand some of the complexity and teach ourselves how to think together toward solutions.

This also gives us all something to do. If, for example, I can vote for a person who is running for office with promises to fund more mental health outreach and treatment so that more potentially violent people can get relief and support before they descend into the stages where they might harm themselves or others, I can volunteer to help in that person's campaign, even if they have no intentions of addressing the other necessary or contributory causes. Or, if I'm a gun owner who would never hurt another, I can publicly announce that I am voluntarily giving up my gun because I am now convinced that only gun owners can bring about the changes in norms and laws that would possibly greatly reduce one of the necessary causes (necessary to the alleged shooter in Tucson, certainly, and to others such as the Virginia Tech shooter, the Columbine high school shooters, etc.). The individual opportunities for meaningful action open widely when we assess all these factors, don't they?

We will never eliminate violence, but any steps to lessen the amount and reduce the frequency of these episodes are to the public and private good. We will never eliminate cannibalism either, but we've fixed our laws and norms to attenuate that problem radically, haven't we? We will never eliminate slavery, but we've addressed most laws and most norms to greatly reduce such outbreaks globally. We have the tools and training to get these jobs done; what we lack, often, is the calm public discourse and courageous individual decisions to implement the many aspects of potential solution. We as an intelligent society full of intelligent people can approach this collaboratively if we intelligently choose to do so.

Our duty despite the evidence

Last night I went to a peace meeting and at some point in the discussion I raised my hand and was eventually called on. I started to talk about the use of media in promoting nonviolent struggle and how that helped recruit more sympathizers and helped lead to some victories. I was interrupted by a woman who has been an activist for as long as I have--decades--and she went into a long harangue about our failings, our lack of victories and achievements and that she had no hope and that organizing anything was not worth it. Since she had interrupted me, I continued to try to finish my thought for my final sentence, but she kept talking over me and someone said, "Listen to her, Tom." I did. Her statement turned that meeting around. When someone else tried to say something, she responded. When a group self-facilitates that poorly, so that amongst 25 or so in attendance one person is allowed to respond in turn to everyone, that meeting is victim of a self-fulfilling prophesy and is indeed not worth the time. When she responded to yet another person and the group allowed her to dominate it, I felt called to the kitchen to do dishes, which was a much better use of my energy.

Why would anyone hope and continue to organize when things were hard? Isn't that the time to sensibly give up? I think Cesar Chavez thought about that and made his clear and lifelong decision.

We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause.

Chavez went on to say:

We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.

Indeed, when the poorest of the poor, the most downtrodden with the least reason to hope, when those people decide, en masse, to get a job done, they succeed far more often than they fail. I'm glad Cesar Chavez didn't look around him at the overwhelming racism, poverty, injustice and decide not to organize.

I think of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) who keep struggling year after year against the obscene injustice of the religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan, whether they are Taliban or whomever. These women have been attacked physically, morally, emotionally, financially, and as mothers, wives and daughters. They have nothing. No money, no schools, no jobs, no social safety net and no power that is discernible or traditionally understood. Yet they never give up. Never. They oppose US and NATO occupation just as deeply as they oppose the violence and brutality of the fundamentalist Islamists who rule when the invading foreigners don't. They have no reason to hope. I'm sure the woman from last night's meeting would tell them to stop. I'm sure they would tell her to please be quiet and let the planning proceed. And I have enormous hope that RAWA will prevail against all odds.

Hope is our duty, despite the evidence, despite the string of hard results and losses. Hope, sometimes, is the only thing we have left.

To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope.
--Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

Anyone who is working for a better world has hope. Anyone who has no hope should stay home or at least stay silent and allow those who have ideas and intentions to figure out what to do next. The sociologists who study social conflict and movements have pointed out again and again that the best way to recruit is to give hope, what they called raised expectations. We who come out in hope and dreams are not little children who need patronizing--or matronizing--protection from our own futile ideas of what might be possible. We need help, we need support, and we need everyone's contributions to the brainstorms that lead to new plans for change. Without everyone's creativity, we are poorer and slower to win.

The MLK they don't want you to know

You watch. Over the weekend and on Monday, the Hallmarked memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr will be sanitized and blackwashed until he is no more than a sentimental husk hoping that little children of all races will one day be able to play together. Then you'll see shots of just that, as if to indicate, well, thanks, that's all done, nice historical figure. Bye. One of these years they will probably launch the USS Martin Luther King Jr, a spanking new destroyer, or perhaps they will name a class of drone aircraft the MLK Ground Dominators.

But who was this King guy? What did he really stand for and how can we most accurately and sincerely honor his name and legacy?

Martin Luther King Jr was a radical pacifist who used Gandhian nonviolence and then, with others in his movement, improved upon it. Gandhi was the Henry Ford of nonviolence, inventor of the mass liberatory action. Gatling may have industrialized warfare with his machine guns, Napoleon may have industrialized the human side of war with his levee en masse, but Gandhi industrialized strategic nonviolent civil society uprisings and Martin Luther King Jr improved on the model.

How did he and his folks do that?

First, they weren't so sensitive to giving away their advantage once they had earned it. When Gandhi saw the British empire stressed during various wars, he dialed back on the resistance. By contrast, in Nashville, during the sit-in movement in 1960, the students were shocked at 5 in the morning when their lawyer's home was bombed and they immediately wired the mayor, demanding a meeting, pressing him that morning and gaining his admission that segregation was wrong and his pledge to work to end it. The Civil Rights movement watched various windows open and generally shot straight through, not holding back for some gentleman's courtesy, as Gandhi seemed to do.

And MLK was more consistent than Gandhi in some key ways. Although it took him a while to do so (several years after the frontline spokespeople such as Bob Moses), King denounced the war in Vietnam, whereas Gandhi volunteered to help the British or stood aside without objection during several wars. In what was both a stirring and powerful speech delivered in the Riverside Church in New York on 4 April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr said a great deal that mightily angered the federal government, from J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon B. Johnson, including:

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.

This is the Martin Luther King Jr who will be invisible in mainstream media as the US celebrates his birth as someone who delivered stirring speeches calling for reconciliation. But it is the birth of a hero for justice and nonviolence, a man who died with a (peace and justice) felony on his record and yet is the only American for whom we celebrate a national holiday. Dr. King's call for peace was powerful--the best speech of his life, in my view--but it will not be featured as we pretend to pay attention to the history of his life and contributions.

If he were alive today he'd probably be in jail for resisting the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, or perhaps for resisting our client state, Israel's, occupation of Palestine. At the least he would be reflecting on his evolved and holistic attempt to move to the next level of activism, past the termination of Jim Crow segregation and forward to ending poverty and stopping war. He never stopped evolving but the mainstream historians have gone to the period five years before he was murdered and regard him as forever frozen there, just giving an I Have a Dream speech.

Dr. King deserves full honors; he was a fearless and brilliant campaigner for human rights, civil rights, economic justice and peace. Our young people need to know who he really was. We cannot pretend in honesty that he would support the wars and corporate bailouts featured in today's America.

Choose life

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. Deuteronomy 30:19

The simplest, most direct definition of Johan Galtung's term, "positive peace" is "peace and justice by peaceable means." Galtung, the Norwegian peace scholar who did so much of our germinal thinking in our field, has longer and more complex definitions and explanations, all of which are quite valuable. I'm suggesting the bumper sticker version because we are part of a bumper sticker culture.

How does this connect to the Old Testament?

Our US approach to peace is what Galtung termed negative peace, the peace of empire, imposed peace, or peace at the point of a gun. The most benign form of it is the matriarchal peace, telling the children to stop fighting "or else." The most malignant form of it is that described by Niccolo Machiavelli in chapter five of The Prince, when he advises the ruler that the best way to rule another people's land is to install an indigenous ruler who will do the bidding of the distant Prince.

Here is how Machiavelli begins to describe this:

Whenever those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you. Because such a government, being created by the prince, knows that it cannot stand without his friendship and interest, and does it utmost to support him; and therefore he who would keep a city accustomed to freedom will hold it more easily by the means of its own citizens than in any other way.

This is why it takes so long to "train" the Iraqi police and soldiers or the Afghan police and soldiers. First, you have to convince them not to be part of the natural insurgency that is inevitably rising up to oppose the installed leadership. The days of the installed Reza Pahlavi--the Shah of Iran, so blatantly loyal to his US masters--are done. People get this and will not stand for it. So the Nouri Kamil Mohammed Hasan al-Malikis (Prime Minister of Iraq, former exiled hustler for anti-Saddam Shia guerrillas funded and armed by Iran and Syria) and the Hamid Karzais (President of Afghanistan) are the new breed. They fuss against their imperial patrons and publicly distance themselves from their sponsors much more than the poobahs of the past, but most of their people still get it. When the bags of cash walk in from Iran or the pallets of shrink-wrapped cash are fork-lifted off US military cargo planes, the people find out and know that their leaders are not as indigenous as all that.

So this is what we fund. And in the face of recession and joblessness and rampant home foreclosures and increases in homelessness, what is the response of our government, from Congress to the White House? Cut the life-affirming programs and spend more on death machines and propping up our puppets in various other strategic nations. Look at the chart. It shows 58 percent of our discretionary fed spending on military and even that is not accurate in the sense that it doesn't include items that are really military, such as Veterans Administration, most of NASA, and the entire nuclear arsenal, which falls, incredibly, under the Department of Energy.

We are choosing death. The natural outcome of all this is an increase in insecurity, not security, and an over reliance on violence as the way to protect and preserve, even though, as we see, that reliance so often ends in tragedy and bloodshed.

How basic is all this? This is fundamental. The choice toward death is one that defines us to the world and contaminates our very social fabric, sacralizing True Grit, gun-toting, shoot-first-style conflict resolution instead of respectful dialog and thoughtful negotiation.

Choose life. Get involved. Show yourself, your family, your neighbors and your fellow members of the polis that a growing number of us reject the death choice and embrace life. The time has come. The choices are more clear every day.

How many children will it take?

Clockwise, from top left: student council member Christina Taylor Green, 9; retired homemaker and secretary Dorothy Morris, 76; District Judge John Roll, 63; Giffords aide Gabe Zimmerman, 30; retiree Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and retired homemaker and volunteer Phyllis Schneck, 79.

Christina Taylor Green is a message spirit. She arrived on Earth on September 11, 2001, a day when terrorists armed with no more than boxcutters turned jet airliners into guided missiles and slaughtered almost 3,000 people, mostly civilians. Indeed, she was one of the babies featured in a book, Faces of Hope, that looked at one baby from each of the United States born on that day. The third-grader had been elected to her Mesa Verde elementary school student council and was at the meet-up for congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords with a neighbor adult, Susan Hileman. The two were holding hands when gunfire erupted.

For me, this child's death engenders the question, How many children will it take?

How many children will it take before the Rush Limbaughs and Sarah Palins stand down from violent imagery and rhetoric? Would it be so hard for them to find language that doesn't evoke killing, shooting and crosshairs? How debilitating to their effectiveness could it be? Do they believe they would lose followers if they honored the spirit of this child and abjured such language? Do they need the kind of followers who only respond to that imagery?

How many children will it take? How many before those who defend the Second Amendment finally agree that it doesn't apply to handguns, and if it does, it's time to repeal it? Ah, they say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Yes, but it seems that when given the option, murderers seem to choose handguns, don't they? Christina was not in fact stabbed, nor was she bombed, nor was she run down by a malicious driver. She was shot. That was the weapon of choice. A knife-wielding assassin would simply never have been able to kill six and wound 14 more. In a knife attack upon a public figure, Christina would almost certainly have been a survivor. Bombs are already outlawed. And how many times each year do murderers run a car into a crowd of people, killing six and injuring so many? We are not going to outlaw cars, since they are not designed to murder and since they transport us to work, to school, to shop, etc.

But handguns are different. Yes, hunters, I see your hands. I am not suggesting your rifles are part of this conversation. Just handguns, and that is what most of us who want to outlaw guns are talking about. Outlaw handguns. What is so sacred about them? Really? Against the life of Christina Taylor Green?

How about the 500 or more children who are killed accidentally by guns annually in the US? Well, you say, I keep my handgun locked. Sure, and do you inspect the homes where your child might go? Should the parents of 4-year old Dylan Jackson have swept the home where their child was at a birthday party, found a gun, picked it up and innocently shot himself dead in the chest?

Well, to paraphrase Madeleine Albright when asked if the thousands of Iraqi children dying every year because of the deadly sanctions program kept out many crucial medicines, "We think it's worth the price." Is that what handgun lovers believe? That without their handguns, the communist Muslim Obama government would take away their freedoms? Seriously? That, after all, is the stated reason for the Second Amendment, to prevent the government from infringing on the people. Since the US leads the so-called developed world in gun deaths per hundred thousand citizens, I guess we can safely say it's just lucky we have that Second Amendment, so we aren't oppressed like the Canadians, Scots, Finns and Japanese, all of whom have far lower rates of gun deaths than do we. I guess they are just too protective of their little children, willing to give up liberties to keep them alive. Oh, that's right, the only liberties they give up are the gun rights.

Guns are how we murder in the US (a higher rate amongst the nations studied than any except Colombia, even higher than Guatemala in terms of percent of murders committed by guns) and how we commit suicide. They make it easy. We like it easy, and the stories of hurt and killed children have not dented the gun lovers. 16,907 suicides in the US in 2004 were by gun, many of them by teenagers temporarily despondent and highly unlikely to end their lives in any other way. But there was a gun available, as there was when more than 50,000 lost their lives in the US to guns last year, and the year before, and the year before...even box cutters and jetliners can't approach those mortality numbers.

Really, gun lovers, just be honest. The lives of these children just don't matter much to you once we start talking about the sacred right to own your handgun, eh? Apparently, there is no number, no story of unspeakable tragedy, no little face that can pierce the armor you have around your love for your handguns. I get that. What I don't get is why the rest of us allow it to remain law and public policy.

Is crazy the new normal?

• Using violence against each other is nuts.
• If we do so in a moment of rage, that is temporary insanity.
• If we do so coldly and with premeditation, that is more permanently crazy.
• Rationalizing violence is a symptom of a deepening process of insanity.

Do these assertions, which are abnormal in our society and also many others, mean that I have myself gone 'round the bend? Could be; if we humans don't accept that our grasp on sanity is always a subjective and tenuous proposition, we are even less rational. But I cannot accept the acceptance of violence as a sane action. I am aware that this is not what the psychological texts tell us and not what most of the legal and political philosophies and religions of the world say. The science and the philosophy, then, of defining acceptable, sane behavior are both, in general, lined up to permit violence under some circumstances.
I regard this as a manifestation of our societal insanity.
Am I immune? Hardly. I have violent ideation and the occasional violent dream. I regard this as my mind's struggle with sanity. My behavior is sane, at least in my own estimation (the ultimate in subjectivity), but I acknowledge that my limbic system is capable of asserting itself when I am outraged enough. I cannot justify this, however, and my inner fantasies about violence, which are insane, will continue to confront what I hope are insurmountable obstacles to translating into action.
Sadly, these obstacles are far less serious for our culture in general. We are clever and we build as many loopholes for violence in defense of ourselves as possible, while closing the loopholes for violence against us. Like a reification of the fundamental negative attribution error (my bad behavior was caused by context, by the environment, and my opponent's bad behavior is a result of his flawed character), we try and try to write laws and get our courts to interpret them to call violence against us illegal and violence in our defense justifiable.
This is crazy. Clever, but nuts.
I would suspect that a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity will be the defense for Jared Lee Loughner, though any twists are still possible at this early stage of the investigation into the horrific shootings in Arizona.
Loughner may have regarded violence as the only option remaining to what he saw as an oppressive federal government stripping him of his freedoms. After all, as Sarah Palin, that paragon of probity, noted again and again, people like Congresswoman Giffords were in favor of an essentially Stalinist government that had decided to set up death panels to rule on who gets health care (illegal aliens, mostly) and who should die (your grandmothers, if you are hard working white Americans whose ancestors stole this land fair and square). To Loughner, to the head stomper in Kentucky, to the born-again Marines prepping to cremate Fallujah in 2005, to the Taliban, to the September 11 hijackers, to the bomb crews of the Enola Gay and Bockscar B 29s that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--to all these people and so many more, violence seemed perfectly sane responses to exigencies presenting themselves. Failing to see the context as they see it only means we have failed to objectively assess the processes that lead to violence because we choose to limit our analysis, again, to the violence of our adversaries as rationally inexplicable and our violence (or that committed in our names) as clearly rational under the circumstances.
And so we see justified violence on all sides and no primary challenge across the board. I make that challenge here and now.
And I'd suggest that until we see that challenge made general and made a part of our collective approach to the question of sanity and violence, we will see armies of tanks rolling through our clever loopholes and irregular forces of those we label terrorists dodging through the same loopholes, only coming toward us.
I am not claiming that those of us who practice nonviolence and reject excuses for violence are necessarily sane, but our behavior comes closer to what I believe is ultimately the most adaptive human behavior of all, and, one might argue, thus the most sane.

WWM&MD?

When JFK was shot on 22 November 1963, CBS reporter Ray Moore interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about what it means to face assassination, something that had been attempted on King and that had been threatened many times. King was sincere and measured, saying that he and Coretta had thought about it a lot and that "you become immune to the fear" after a period, just knowing that you've made a choice to take the risk because you are working for the greater good.

Malcolm X famously said that it was an example of the "chickens coming home to roost," that is, that America's violence to the world and to entire peoples would invariably manifest itself in such ways. He discusses this as a 'climate of hate,' and, ironically, that precipitated a chain of events inside and outside of the Nation of Islam that led to his own assassination.

Both men were profound, both were taking similar risks, both knew it, and, indeed, both paid the very same price. Malcolm X was murdered by gunfire 21 February 1965, and King by more bullets 4 April 1968. Both felt the heightening threats against them and a normal human forboding and both kept working for freedom up until their assassinations.

And now comes the 8 January 2011 terrible shooting of more public figures and others, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Judge John Roll and a nine-year-old girl, Christina Taylor Greene, born on 11 September 2001. Six dead, more wounded, and at this point Giffords is in critical condition. She was one of the literal targets of Sarah Palin, who had a gunsight crosshairs over Gifford's name on her, Palin's website (which she took down, but which has been saved by others). Giffords, a Democrat, had just won re-election over a Tea Party challenger. Of course Palin is only one symptom of this hate and violence syndrome. The Tea Party-backed Republican who ran against Harry Reid in Nevada, Sharron Angle, said that if the ballot box fails, there's always the "Second Amendment remedy." This goes back a long ways in American political life, and too often includes legitimation by top officials, such as Donald Rumsfeld's lamentation that we would have to invade Iraq because we couldn't effect the more efficient "single bullet solution."

Time to repeal the Second Amendment.

It is no longer--if it ever was--a wise idea to permit, promote and protect the possession of firearms by anyone. It is time to seriously disarm ourselves and understand the costs and benefits of doing do, as well as the methods by which to make it sustainable. We need to grow up.

The entire purpose of the Second Amendment was to make the government fear the people more than the people feared the government. That's great, but the fear should be not of physical harm, but rather political defeat. The Second Amendment spirit was pre-Gandhian understanding that even if you lost or never had power at the ballot box, there are other powers possible that don't involve violence. This was simply not known to the Founders and it's time to fix this. If we in fact developed a strong enough public opinion and commitment to change, we could achieve in a demonstration of that very power that makes the Second Amendment so obsolete, by using mass nonviolent noncooperation until that amendment was repealed.

Shut down the country with a general strike until the Second Amendment is repealed and you'd see the fastest-acting US government since December 1941.

We need to mature, to improve our democracy. Learning nonviolent mass power is the first, the major, and most important step.

Can't buy me love: US out of Pakistan

How does the US help nonviolent movements and organizations in other countries? It shouldn't. The task of the US government is to support the UN properly and otherwise leave civilians alone.

I've been thrashing around in this old nonviolence world for a while. On January 14, in 1969, there was a nonviolent takeover of Morrill Hall on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Black students met with U of M president Malcolm Moos and secured some promises for scholarships for black students and some other promises around curricula. Later that year I joined a second takeover that was meant to be, and was, a larger group, more racially diverse. The issue at hand was the broken promise the U of M had made to provide a certain number of scholarships to African Americans each year, a promise made in the aftermath negotiations of the first takeover. So a demonstration was called and, in those days, there was enough unity so that we were able to bring in antiwar students, young random activists like me, and the local African American community. The primary organizing group was the U of M Afro American Action Committee.

At one point, as we sat in the hallways, one of the local black leaders from a more radical organization called The Way (I was at that point the only white volunteer there and my friend and mentor, Jesse Lee, who was Educational Director, was the person who got me involved) was in visible conversation with a local politician. Someone shouted, "Threaten him with an endorsement!" We laughed, but that stuck with me.

It comes home to me hard when I read that, for example, the Sufis in Pakistan are being killed by their fellow Muslims because Sufis are favored by the US government, which has channeled some $1.5 million to Sufi shrine restoration. This brands all Sufis in Pakistan as suspicious US allies and thus betrayers of a Pakistan free of outsider control. Indeed, the more funds the US pours into Pakistan, the worse it all becomes, and we are about to witness that again, as US military aid to Pakistan is increasing. Soon, we may see military aid to Pakistan overtake the amount to Israel, which has been the recipient of more US military aid than any country. The truly clumsy way in which we are trampling and stumbling in Central and South Asia is astonishing. I mean, most of the half-million Pakistani armed forces are bunched up and bristling along the Indian border. I'm sure India is thrilled with us.

So, the US government openly supported Otpur and DOS in Serbia, helping to lead to the successful campaign to get Slobodan Milosevic deposed. Why did that work then and not now?

The secret is the movement in Serbia was widespread and completely nonviolent. No US troops were in Serbia. The people of Serbia trusted Otpur, since Otpur was not only nonviolent but quite transparent. When the Milosevic government tried to move on Otpur, they had no support from the Serb people.

In Pakistan, however, Islamic fundamentalists seem closer to the emotional state of the citizenry of that country, allowing the demonization of anyone taking US aid and permitting the targeting of civilians who take that tainted money. Sufis become the easy targets. Why on Earth would the oafish Americans barge in and give them checks when those funds are a death sentence to the recipients?

As Obama seems determined to pump good money after bad, the only way to change it is grassroots pressure. Please tell your elected officials to oppose and vote against military aid to Pakistan, which in the end is only redounding poorly on everyone except the Pakistan elites who are rightly regarded by the Pakistani people as purchased allies to the US. If we ended all military aid to Pakistan and redirected aid to Sufis through the UN, we would see a reduction in the terrible targeting of the most peaceful sect of Islam.

Boehner blitz: Reagan redux

John Boehner pries the gavel from her cold, dead...no, but he will be now the one with his mitts back on that power that Nancy Pelosi has wielded since 4 January 2007, placing him again two heartbeats away from the presidency and in a position to enact what his Tea Party buddies expect of him.

It is all reminiscent of the Reagan Revolution, when the Rs were going to pare down government, but what they meant was marrow-cutting on the human services side and fattening the military side so obscenely that 150 years of American savings were wiped out. David Stockman, Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, quoted Reagan when he, Stockman, tried to slow the ballooning budget for DoD: "Defense is not a budget issue." Boehner has already made that clear, so no one should be surprised when the prudential fiscal rhetoric and eviscerating budgets put us on a fast track to human misery while the military burps and wipes the expensive grease off its chins.

Healthcare, education, environmental protection, consumer protection, assistance to impoverished families with young hungry children--they are privileges that Boehner will eliminate insofar as he is capable and it will be with great Republican rhetoric about American toughness, American values, American hard work, and American freedom.

But being the military empire on Earth, in the oceans and in space is our collective human right. Huge military contracts will only increase as the language of austerity accompanies cuts that hurt millions of us. We will look nostalgically at the $7,000 military aircraft coffeemakers and the $425 hammers; the new privatized military will operate without rules but will take our paychecks until there are no more paychecks outside the military system to take, at which point the entire Pentagon Ponzi scheme collapses and our only hope is that it happens relatively nonviolently.

Ironically, Boehner takes the language of Gandhi and Getting to Yes (Fisher and Ury):

"When you say the word 'compromise,' a lot of Americans look up and go, "Uh-oh, they're gonna sell me out,'" Boehner said. "So finding common ground, I think, makes more sense."

Pathetically, that quote gives me a glimmer of hope. Hope that the common ground is more than merely the bipartisan love for the elite owner class, a mammoth military and guns guns guns for all. Hope that we who wish for the government to reduce military and increase human services and life-affirming programs will persuade our fellow Americans. I hope we find our voice and make the happiness and health of our children and all children that common ground in the coming period and beyond.

Driven into the clammy embrace

As Wikileaks is hounded and harassed by the various nefarious agents from the war system--the MilitaryIndustrialGovernment, that is--they are being shoved harder into the big hairy bear's huggy paws. Since the US government has successfully pressured Visa and Mastercard to stop processing donations to keep Wikileaks afloat, the Russians have been contemplating taking over that role with a National Payment Card System.

Of course if that happens we'll see the McCarthyites re-emerging like 1950s stiff-legged zombies justifying even more attacks on Wikileaks for being affiliated with those dirty Russkies. This Manichean Night of the Living Dead deja view of conflict will be an interesting moment for Wikileaks if it occurs. It's a minefield and we'll see who steps where and what explodes.

Luckily, Wikileaks is not accused of violence, just espionage. Also fortunately, there is no Wikistan where the citizens can be attacked by an imperial military. But flirting with Russian government money handling is a fraught problem too. This will probably turn more Americans (not to mention Estonians, Finlanders, Magyars and many others trampled or threatened by Russians over the years) against Wikileaks. Hey, it's a well-trampled path.

Often times a stance against an American corporation or two would justify overthrowing entire governments--just check in with Guatemalans, Iranians, Congolese, Chileans and many others. Combine that with any dalliance with Russians and the game was over. Patrice Lumumba was driven into the Soviet's arms by the Belgian/US aggression against his popular election and independent Congo spirit in 1960. This justified escalation, assassination and overthrow. That story is so familiar.

So, as tough as it may be, I hope Wikileaks is able to figure out another way to keep alive, financially. Maybe Michael Moore could take a page from the Karzai story and just deliver big bags of cash. Maybe we could start using snail mail and personal checks. How ironic is all this? The Internet is the fortress of Wikileaks investigative power and it's also the chink in the armor.

Like any serious and effective challenge to the war machine, Wikileaks is under attack. Like they did with investigative data gathering and dissemination, I hope they devise new systems of staying alive without getting drawn toward the flypaper of major power rivalry. The major power they appeal to and need to continue to develop is People Power, not just different nation-state power with a musty Cold War stench. I think they know this. I hope we can rise to help them.

Something to lose

My father's best friend was Al Opsahl (third from left, standing), a hockey player and commercial jetliner designer. My father and I and Al and his son David went camping together from when I was just four years old. They would set out from Seattle, where Al worked for Boeing, and we came from Minneapolis. We'd meet in the Rocky Mountains someplace.

So these camping trips were every few years starting in 1955 and on until the late 1980s. Al died in 1990, the best way anyone can, doing what he loved, playing in a Masters hockey tournament in Santa Rosa, California. Died with his skates on. My Dad cried.

But the salience to nonviolence is that Al and I were hiking one day in the Cascades around the cabin he built on Lake Chelan and we were discussing civil resistance. He shook his head, recalling the Civil Rights era and the riots. He said the way to keep civil order was to make sure people had enough so that rioting would not be a choice that many would make. "Give everyone something to lose," was his sum-up.

I've thought a lot about that. Al was not an activist, just a very good man and a quiet leader. Indeed, my Dad was in awe of him his whole life. They skated together as little boys and Al was the captain of the Southwest Minneapolis high school team (they won the championship). My Dad went into the Navy and fought in the Philippines, and Al was rejected because his arm had been broken as a boy and healed poorly. My Dad said that Al tried to even just volunteer to drive ambulance or anything, and, even though he was a premier athlete, they turned him down. He then became the captain of the U of Minnesota hockey team and then captain of the US 1948 Olympic hockey team. My Dad said everyone looked to Al for leadership and never for dominance, as he was quite quiet but when he spoke it was authoritative. I just enjoyed his wry Norwegian sense of humor and easy affect. So his words were few, but I've taken them to heart over the years as I've tried to understand nonviolence.

Understanding poverty, injustice, and brutality are factors in understanding why people rise up. But one key, relating to what Al said, was part of what Saul Alinsky taught, which is to create raised expectations. In other words, Al was partially right. They need to have something to lose, but Alinsky was more specific. Make people hope and they will more likely act. Fatalism is not so much a philosophy as a result of being beaten down with no hope in sight. Defeatism and apathy are the norm for long-suffering people who cannot see the glimmer of possibility. Lou Kriesberg writes about this in Constructive Conflict. The same population, suffering no more or less than they have been for a long time, will suddenly rise up. The difference is that they perceive a chance for something better and the risks seem smaller than the desperate need once they understand there is hope for change.

This is not magic and yet it's part of the magic of nonviolence, and such conditions can snowball once more people get hope because they believe they have been part of a partial victory. Good leadership fuels that hopeful sense and asks as much as possible from people while at the same time openly discussing risks and potential gain.

Skating and snowballs--good long winter thoughts on the power of nonviolence as latent and waiting. Americans have a lot to lose, but our military budget has wrecked our economy so badly that the losses are beginning to manifest for more. Now, how to help us gain that hope, that realization that we can staunch the losses without undue risk of losing what we have left. That is our challenge here in the US. I think we have a far better chance than a snowball in hell. The other lesson that I took from Al Opsahl and my Dad is one that Alinsky and Kriesberg clearly learned in their own ways too: a good camper always leaves the campsite in better shape than he or she found it. This applies to everything in life, certainly including conflict.

Orwell's dystopia emerging

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the rest. I think our collective New Years Resolution should be to show the world that nonviolence is the worst method of conflict management except for all the rest.

More and more tools are being developed by the violent side, contributing to the emergence of a society more invaded by Big Government than any in human history. The impulse has been there, from Hitler to Stalin to McCarthy, but the tools have been a bit lacking. The military has all the money, so they are devoting it to things like the total control forever fantasized by those who want total control. The latest is Gorgon Stare, the drone developed method of locking everything into the sights of the military, starting with a city and moving from there. From today's Washington Post:

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."

Of course the US military will decide what cities and who might be their adversaries. Kandahar? Oh, cool. That's over there, lock it down, make it so everyone is on camera when they can see sky above them, and so the military analysts won't have to guess where to point the missiles--er, cameras. Mogadishu? Great. Aden? Damn betcha. Prolly need to keep an eye on gay old Paree, too. Gorgon Stare down! Portland and Minneapolis will need to contend to be first US city so serviced. Portlanders may win that one, what with our failure to worry about terrorism so evident in our extrication from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2005.

This is what transpires when you ask the military to tell us, tell us, tell us everything you might ever want! No, really! Our stupid working class and evaporating middle class exist to fund you! Indeed, we work until somewhere between April 9 and May 17 every year just to pay our taxes. Since most of our taxes are federal and since the military gets about half the money withheld every year from your paycheck, that is a lot of our work year just laboring to slosh $trillions to the Pentagon. No fantasy is too outlandish for them.
As the nation pushes deeper into "recession" and more and more Americans are out of work for longer than two years, even as the war system rewards the elite owners, we will have to ask ourselves how this violence approach is working for us. On the nonviolent side we believe in transparency, not in invasion and occupation and becoming the Gorgon Staremaster of the world. This misallocation of massive resources is not endless, since it is how we hollow out the economy to the point of collapse. Housing bubble? Stock market bubble? What we really have is a Reliance upon Violence Bubble and when it bursts, woe unto America. A smarter plan would be Whoa unto America--stop funding the imperial war machine and start funding sustainable global citizenship for our nation and our people. Can we make 2011 the year we turn that around?

2011: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. Mohandas Gandhi told us something like that.

For the most part, strategic nonviolence is through the stages of being ignored and laughed at. In some general senses, the next phase is underway. In Iran, China, Zimbabwe, West Papua, Palestine Israel and other places with nonviolent movements, they are experiencing the crackdown, and have for some time. And in the politically partisan world, the left and the right alike, which have all their conflict eggs in one violent basket, are attacking nonviolence whenever they can. I mean, even the tiny Nonviolent Peaceforce conference in Boston was greeted by a tiny group of leftwing protesters because the featured speaker for the conference was Gene Sharp. All over the murky, smeary blogosphere we read mis-and-disinformation about Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution and another think tank, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, promulgated by doctrinaire lefties.

Sharp himself will turn 83 in a minute (b 28 January 1928) so I know he's down and dirty for a good brawl--seeing the cartoons of him, George Soros and John McCain plotting to overthrow the Islamic Revolution (created and disseminated, reportedly, by the Iranian government, and who knew the three could all speak fluent Farsi) showed his lust for global power. Sigh. That was good for a bewildered laugh. Gene has always been a combative pacifist, eschewing the moral arguments, even though as I've come to slightly know him and certainly know his works I see that moral proscriptions against killing inform his very fiber (which he would probably still deny). He's a bit fixated on simply showing that this stuff works and so take pains to avoid the namby pamby moral arguments.

ICNC is under constant attack from the Maoists, Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists and others who go apoplectic whenever two things happen. One, anyone supports civil society movements against enemies of the US. Two, anyone suggests that violent blood-in-the-streets revolution for liberation movements trying to overthrow friends of the US is not necessarily the best cost-benefit approach.

This puts the ultraleftists in a chauvanistic pickle. On the one hand, how dare anyone put the amazingly effective tools of strategic nonviolence in the hands of people who wish to use them to overthrow a regime that the US would also like overthrown? On the other hand, how dare anyone assert that stupid ineffective nonviolence could possibly substitute for good old American (scratch that) Bolshevik or Maoist revolutionary vanguard slaughter? While their arguments are beyond oxymoronic and well into the self annihilatory, at least they can shout and chant that ICNC and Gene Sharp are agents of imperialism in any case ("THIS IS WHAT IMPERIALISM LOOKS LIKE!" Repeat ad nauseam, fortissimo). And besides, Che was sexy and Gandhi most emphatically was not, so there there there.

To sum, prepare for the continuing crackdown from the Ahmadinijad-types and his buddies the uberleft, as well as the usual from Israel, Indonesia, and, sadly, Chavez in Venezuela, as well as others who may look like opposites from a cosmological orientation that is US-centric but who share a need to dominate by any means.

But hope for the best. May Aung San Suu Kyi lead her people to true democracy and may the Green Revolution finally succeed. May Palestinian nonviolence affirm Israel only inside the 1967 borders and launch the new nonviolent Palestine. May Robert Mugabe and Laurent Gbagbo sail off to the Isle of Deposed Dictators. And may Gene Sharp finally mellow and admit that his hard kickass rhetorical carapace only shields a mushy pacifist on the inside. We can hope!

Happy 2011. First decade of the new millennium down, mercifully. Now what?