Half fast insurgencies

Most modern insurgencies last about a decade (Connable & Libicki, 2010). For most of those years, human mortalities are high enough to classify the conflict as a war, that is, in excess of 1,000 "battlefield" deaths. These days, an infant in a minivan who is hit by a Hellfire missile shot out of a drone is a battlefield death.

Try to find a nonviolent insurgency in which the mortalities rise to the level of classification as war for even one year. Then look at the timelines. Yes, it took Gandhi 28 years to complete the nonviolent liberation of India, but he was just the warm up act. It took African Americans in the Deep South just three months to end segregation in Nashville. It took a year for Filipinas to overthrow Marcos with nonviolence. It took about 10 months to topple Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia once nonviolence started.

So we can look to history and find Hundred Years War and a Six Day War. We can find decades of nonviolence unable to liberate either Tibet or Burma and we can find nonviolent insurgencies that are successful in days in Tunisia and Egypt. There are no hard and fast rules except, in the end, we get much more gain for much less pain with nonviolence.

References
Connable, Ben; Libicki, Martin C. (2010). How insurgencies end. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

Banana Republicans

There is one budget in our federal spending that is devoted to preparing to commit violence and actually committing violence against humans, the Earth, and all the things we humans have built. That would be the Pentagon.

There is one budget in our federal spending that accounts, year in and year out, for about half the discretionary spending authorized by Congress. No other federal budget comes close to the size of this whopper. That would be, yes, the Pentagon budget.

There is one budget in our federal spending that is rarely discussed in mainstream media. That would be, as we all know, the Pentagon budget.

Why is this? Why do all the other, life-enhancing, budgets--health care, education, environmental protection, housing, etc.--why are they responsible for our deficit? Why is Planned Parenthood slashed when it's time to institute austerity measures? Why is the United States Institute of Peace--a budget of microscopic significance that arguably could save this nation $trillions by avoiding wars--why is that budget suddenly the one to eliminate in order to tighten our belts?

Meanwhile, corporate robber barons living larger and larger flaunt their riches while middle class workers sink into poverty, widening the income gap in the US to banana republic levels not seen since the Great Depression.

Ah, we say, well, what can we do about it? We cannot just shoot the rich. We cannot defeat the US military if it wants all our money.

No, we cannot, nor should we, shoot the rich. But we can begin to even the playing field without shooting or threatening to shoot anyone. And we can defeat the US military even though it (and especially its contractors, such as the weaponeers) wants all our money. Think of what other people with far less power (we might think) have done with nonviolence in the past few years. A partial list:

• In 2011, in Tunisia, the people finally stopped allowing this.
• In 2011, in Egypt, they rose up.
• In 2005, in Ukraine, the people saved their democracy.
• In 2000, in Serbia, the people toppled their warmonger leader.
• From 1989-1991, Eastern and Central Europe arose and ended the Warsaw Pact domination of their societies and then ended the brutal empire of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union itself.
• In 1986, in the Philippines, the people evicted the US, stopped a civil war, and saved their democracy.

This is but a small beginning list of what nonviolent people power has done. Are we so sedated in the US that we cannot manage a wee bit of an uprising when it's needed? Those in need are in the minority for the moment. But if we could one time organize those who are already impacted, including homeless or in foreclosure, uninsured, underemployed and unemployed (the estimated 20 percent or more of adults as calculated by rogue economist John Williams), plus those who are getting closer to the line of disastrous consequence daily, plus those who might just care about others, we might have a movement with clout. We can reverse this trend toward militarized protection of the tiny number of elite at the expense of the rest of us, but we have to want it, we have to work together, and we have to commit to nonviolence (this is not a philosophical commitment to pacifism, as you may easily discern by looking at the button list above, but rather a strategic commitment to a method of conflict management that works). If those factors ever line up, the war profiteers will fall and the rest of us will rise. If we wait for them to make the decision--whoops, they already made it, and we are living the result. Only we can change this.

Obama lives up to all his promises!

Today President Obama ordered Guantanamo Bay Torture Center and Geneva Violation Facility shuttered and all prisoners turned over to a new center of Transnational Warrior Rehabilitation.

"The least I can do after these years of fruitless dithering," was his side comment as he signed the Order.

In a flurry of Executive Findings and Orders, the busy President commanded all troops out of Iraq within days and all US weapons out of Afghanistan within one month. "The peace prerogative of the president, the will of the commander-in-chief," was his note to the witnesses.

In a pleasant shock to humankind, he announced that the US would disarm, dismantle, destroy and dispose of all nuclear weapons within one year, or as quickly as those processes could be technically accomplished.

"Finally earned that old dusty Nobel I've got sitting on the mantle," he said with a wry smile.

Pakistanis were shocked into an apparent reversal of their public opinion showing that, until today, most citizens of that country regard the US as an enemy, when they heard that US leader Barack Obama had ordered the immediate cessation of all drone flights over their country, an end to all military aid to their corrupt ISI and military, and a dramatic increase in humanitarian aid to Pakistani nongovernmental nonviolent development groups. Radio and television polls in Pakistan, while nonscientific, seemed to reveal a sharp turnaround in public opinion as a direct and immediate result.

"The US is determined to make amends for decades of poor aid decisions that promote violence where we should be helping end the legacies of the colonial and imperial era," said the president as he issued his order.

In this most productive and sweeping set of presidential abrupt peace orders ever, the president ordered the Pentagon budget to serve true security in the following specific line items:
1. Shift all weapons monies to military base bioremediation for decades of pollution.
2. Close all bases located on any other nations' sovereign soil and use those savings to train 400,000 Americans in nonviolent de-escalation, interposition and intercultural conflict competencies.
3. Use remaining leftover funds to provide work, health and education benefits for all US veterans so that the social safety net for them is 100 percent effective.

"We will become a nation deeply admired and respected as the leader in the peace race," announced President Obama as he finished his historic day he called Hope and Change, Part One. He glanced at his wife and daughters who were beaming at him in the Oval Office. Michelle said, "We can't wait for Hope and Change, Part Two!"

Cheers on April Fools. Hey. Could happen. All we need is People Pressure One to make it so.

Consensus: Drawing the Venn

In the world of nonviolence, we either believe in the power of the mass movement and try to recruit toward that, or we stay in our tiny pure sectarian niches, willing to be happy in our own heavenward trajectory. The paradox arises when we consider that the more pure our image is in one sense--that we absolutely refuse to physically attack anyone and we concordantly refuse to support any party physically attacking anyone--the more we can convince our opponents to dialog and negotiate because they do not fear us.

However, as in the 2008 film The Duchess, about an 18th century wife of the most powerful peer in the British political system, when the woman (Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, played by lead actress Keira Knightley) enters a room and declares that she wants to make a deal, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, played by Ralph Fiennes, looks at her quizzically and says, "I don't make deals. Why should I? I am in charge of everything." What does this remind us of as we contemplate our image and our opponents? Hmmm...could it be that even those who are purely nonviolent must induce fear in the opponent?

Of course. It is a sort of bell curve. Too little fear and the Dukes can ignore us. Too much fear and they start shooting instantly. We need the Goldilocks approach. Not too hot, not too cold: we want that fear to be Just Right. But it's not a simple quantum of fear we need to engender; the quality of fear is paramount. Indeed, it is arguable that rather than the bell curve, we need to create a simple monotonic graph but it must be of the sort of fear that does not enable him to better rally his violent forces against you.

If the fear is growing that you are armed and hunting him and his forces, those forces can be convinced to attack you. If the fear is growing that you will make his power wither away the longer the struggle persists--and you give him every reason to believe it will persist--he will feel the pressure to negotiate now. But if he feels that the threat to him is already existential (e.g. Gaddafi in Libya), you've crossed the line of death, to use one of that dictator's old lines from the mid-1980s.

And how do you build a coalition? It needs one point of consensus. In Egypt that was getting Mubarak out with democratic, people-based nonviolence. In Libya, they are struggling to formulate a vision. Since the armed revolution is serious and it's taking casualties, the assumption is that they will decide the future of Libya if they prevail. This means everyone else has little to say, another indication of the anti-democratic nature of violence. This means the popular will is confused. That is the case in most violent rebellions. In nonviolent mass struggle, a coalition is necessary for victory; there is no substitute for people power in the case of nonviolence. If you don't have it, you lose. In violence, you can seize power even if you are not the majority, as long as the majority isn't engaged against you. This is not a democratic approach.

So consensus is far more important to nonviolent success than it is to violence. It requires a vision and a commitment to actualizing that vision. "Without a vision, there is no focus to a consensus and no reason for one" (Williams, 2007, p. ix).

In the end, a way to visualize the creation of consensus around a vision is to draw a Venn diagram with all the circles representing individuals in a team or larger constituencies in a community, statewide, national or transnational effort. The area of overlap helps bound the vision. Achieving that overlap is easy in some cases, tricky in others, but without it, an effort is not based on consensus and will lurch along rather than move steadily ahead.

References

Williams, R. B. (2007). More than 50 ways to build team consensus (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Libya: Wrong turn

US President Barack Obama, right, and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi pictured during the G8/G5 summit in L'Aquila, Italy Thursday July 9, 2009. (AP Photo/ Michael Gottschalk/Pool)
Who could possibly believe that after Tunisia and then Egypt showed that Arab civil society was capable of disciplined nonviolent regime change in less than three weeks with fewer than 100 mortalities each, that it would be a good idea to use violence in Libya?

Oh, Obama, I guess. Since the Arab Street had so successfully outflanked the war system, apparently the Libyan Arab Street needed to be derailed and brought back to the place where we can properly stereotype it as rabidly violent and undisciplined. Nice going, Obomber.

The conflict industry seems to generally panic at the use of nonviolent civil society resistance, especially when it's massive and persistent. And even some of the so-called peace people jump to call for violence in these cases, despite overwhelming evidence that violence is simply not the solution.

Some colleagues in peace education actually supported a no-fly zone. This example of analytical deficit is disappointing at best; who do we think enforces a no-fly zone? How is it enforced? Who benefits and who dies? The answers lead straight back to the problem of violence. It always sounds cleaner and clearer on paper and from the talking heads than it looks like on the ledger sheets of human profit and loss after the fact.

Others actually believe the rebels need armed support. How do you make nonviolent resistance irrelevant and nonexistent? Ramp up violence. If the US wants to show that the terrorists are actually correct, we should make sure we pour arms into a conflict in Muslim lands and, just to make sure all Muslims get it, we should send in pilots in war birds to bomb.

Naturally, more and more Libyans will take advantage of the 'help' offered by Obama and they will mostly do so in one of two ways.

Al Qa'ida types will use US military involvement to rally Muslims of all nations in opposition. This may not seem logical to Americans, but watch. It's just what will happen. We are once again the hated Crusaders, thanks to Obama.

Gadafi will use this to solidify his own power. He will be the champion of his people, standing up to the Washington bully. He is once again the brave leader, thanks to Obama.

We are now conducting massive violence that is making the armed rebellion more protracted, giving it hope, calling its bluff, and thereby ensuring it will end with more dead and wounded than if the armed revolt had simply been crushed or deterred promptly.

Is our Bomber-in-Chief mad? Stupid? Evil? No, just beholden and uncreative. He owes his power and position to forces that represent not democracy but an oligarchy that profits from the war system. This is the lobbying power that selects its puppets from amongst the most charismatic yet malleable, and, sadly, the independent aura cast by Barack Obama in 2008 is revealed again and again to be the chimera of the new millennium. Yes, he's smart. And basically sane and probably genuinely if superficially nice. But getting elected to the presidency of the US probably also requires more moral flexibility than anyone with a strong conscience can muster.

Perhaps we will see the best outcome of the current spiked levels of polarized incivility in Washington DC and our government will shut down. When Obama was slow to respond to the nonviolent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it gave nonviolence a chance to succeed in an environment much more untainted by external meddling. Egyptian revolutionaries were free to embrace and thereby coopt and defang their own military. I know it's a pipe dream, but I fantasize about a long government shutdown that leads us out of so many violent conflicts. We are, after all, by far the largest arms dealer in the world. Close it down and violence might take some time off. We can dream.

Ending war & stuff

Most of what needed to be invented to end war has been invented. Now what we need to do is to spread the knowledge of these developments and inspire even more people to join the ongoing work of changing the behavior of individuals and governments (Shifferd, 2011, p. 11).

"That was horrible. If you wanna end war 'n' stuff, you gotta sing better."
--Arlo Guthrie, comment to the audience during the live version of Alice's Restaurant

So, a minor project--end war. Impossible, you say. Necessary, I say. And it takes practice, as we see Through the Looking Glass:

Alice laughed, "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Kurt Vonnegut noted once that after Slaughterhouse Five came out he was standing in the punchline, so to speak, at a party, and another in line asked if the novel was an antiwar book. Yes, said Vonnegut. Why don't you write an anti-glacier book? asked the man, obviously pronouncing that being antiwar was as practical as being anti-glacier.

So, we ask, how do we transform believing impossible things to achieving impossible things? Try this six-point program and get back to me in 20 years:
1. Establish peace, nonviolence, and conflict resolution education in all schools from K-graduate school.
2. Fund ever-increasing numbers of training programs for citizens who wish to be part of a multinational nonviolent de-escalation force that operates in conflict zones.
3. Shift funding from military intelligence to civil society conflict intelligence and turn that knowledge into ongoing Societal Conflict Early Warning Reports.
4. Ban all weapons of mass destruction and use powerful economic sanctions to enforce the ban, enabled by UN inspection teams that have access to all nations.
5. Deny the shifting of costs from corporations and consumers to taxpayers and otherwise pass laws that mandate internalizing all costs, so that the US military, for example, can no longer be the security service for Exxon and other huge profitmaking ventures.
6. Develop a coalition of political, religious, labor, business, academic and environmental organizations that put increasing nonviolent muscle behind these sorts of initiatives in the US and in all other countries.

See? Six very possible and very difficult and very long-term things before the war system has us for breakfast. If we start seriously today, this could take up to 20 years, but since the war system has been developing for the past several thousand years, that seems fairly quick, now doesn't it? Fund it by pilfering from the war budgets in small amounts (to them), just a few $billion at a time...soon they will find it hard to justify most of their budgets and--voila!--we are on the road to economic recovery and environmental sustainability.

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

Consensus: When it counts

Consensus is not a nonviolent phenomenon all the time. Achieving consensus to bomb Libya from amongst the political players who tend to use violence was not a nonviolent exercise or outcome, obviously. But if we hope to achieve significant political victories, we will learn that consensus is the basis of coalition and unity and is sine qua non to a challenger movement.

My father and I took a trip from Minneapolis to Vancouver Island in 1993 and it was a hot year for nonviolence on the route. In the mountains in British Columbia, we met the Sri Chimnoy runners and the next day I ran with them on the island. Then we went to Clayquot Sound on the Tofino side, the west of Vancouver Island. The lumber companies were about to log off the magnificent Old Growth there and folks were arriving from all over Canada to offer nonviolent resistance. The resulting actions of blockade, tree sits and trespass produced the largest mass trial in Canadian history with some 932 defendants (Walter, 2007, p. 249).

Some scholars see the heart of social movements as interest-based, that is, who gets what resources and how do we get our fair share? Others interpret such large social movements as expressions of identity-based grievance. Walters (2007) offers a good literature review of these two approaches and their respective roots and champions. In the field of conflict resolution, we would welcome the consideration and acknowledgment of both strong factors. Either perspective shows the possibilities for unity on the one hand, division on the other, and from the standpoint of strategic nonviolence, we want to maximize the unity by producing a consensus with clear boundaries. So, if we wish to preserve the ancient forests because we are interested in the forests as a scenic resource for our vacation time, we are interest-based. If we are tree-hugging, wind-kissing prairie fairies, we are an identity group and will engage as identity conflict with the lumberwagon bar oil, cleat stomping skidder driving loggers, the identity group who wants to desecrate our woodland temple.

In our field of conflict resolution, however, we hope to use adult education to help achieve a consensus that can transform such a complex conflict into something everyone can live with. The worst possible idea is to formulate a complete plan and present it as a fait accompli, as though you are the Mediator Cavalry, riding in to save the day. The first order is to listen, then acknowledge, then elicit, then synthesize, and then seek real consensus.

Listening takes many forms and is best done so that it doesn't further fan the flames. One-on-one listening is time-consuming and still the best. Absorbing the vents and rants professionally without taking sides is far easier in an atmosphere that won't erupt into ad hominem attack. It takes serious preparation to do this in a public session, setting a tone of controversy with civility.

Eliciting ideas is also done in a variety of ways and the important point is to get many of them. This part of the process of seeking consensus cannot be short and generalized. It needs to continue until the well runs dry, at which point the facilitator or mediator may offer a suggested synthesis created entirely from what was proposed by the stakeholders. That is the moment of truth. Can consensus emerge? Can the identities be honored while dividing the resources? If so, the perfect integration of identity-based and interest-based conflict transformation has occurred. Diane Nash and Nashville Mayor Ben West achieved it by the use of many of these methods when they shook hands on the courthouse steps in 1960, ending segregation there. It may be a tough process and may take more insight than we think we have, but the alternatives are all worse.


References

Walter, P. (2007). ADULT LEARNING IN NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CLAYOQUOT SOUND RAINFOREST. Adult Education Quarterly, 57(3), 248-263. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
http://ca.srichinmoyraces.org/node/3645

Military attacks Earth: The peaceful atom

What does nonviolence have to say about the explosions caused by earthquakes and tsunami waves at the power plants in Japan? Everything. Nonviolence would have prevented the whole shooting match.

The entire civilian nuclear electricity industry everywhere on Earth got its start as a way to justify and follow the primary and original product of atomic fission research: The Bomb. Nuclear research might have plodded along for another long while before anyone would have stupidly suggested, "Hey, we've got a way to vaporize water, so let's slow it down and we can produce steam, which will turn a turbine and then make electricity. OK, it's a little like using a toxic chainsaw to cut a pat of butter, but I'm just spitballing here, maybe it would make a funny story for The Onion."

Ha. Ha. The peaceful atom is a bomb.

If the world had been serious about nonviolence after Gandhi showed how it could be used in 1908 in South Africa, perhaps nonviolence could have been used to stop World War I and certainly to stop Germany and possibly Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Without a Pearl Harbor-triggered war in the Pacific, there might never have been a Manhattan Project, no nuclear weapons, and thus no atomic electric power industry and no problems for the Japanese, for the Ukrainians or for any of the many victims of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power ever since.

There have been numerous studies and recommendations for designing and applying powerful economic sanctions, embargoes, travel bans and other nonviolent instruments of great force. And make no mistake, sometimes force is needed and it's time for bareknuckled nonviolence. If Japan had been unable to get steel and other key goods from the US and the international community as soon as the news of their cruel attacks on China reached the world, their ability to mount a stunning attack on the US Pacific fleet would have been dramatically reduced and slowed, and likely would not have happened.

We as a nation dealt with other nations on an anarchical might-makes-right basis then and now. Effective nonviolence seems to be the province of the people, of civil society. And now it will be up to us to stop and reverse the new trend to build more nukes here and abroad. No one will do that if we the people do not. Much has been made by government and their credulous media functionaries of the safety procedures, the strict licensing requirements, and the failsafe redundancies built into commercial nuclear power plants.

Really? If so, the answers to these questions should be reassuring:
How many times has the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied any license?
Who insures nuclear power plants?
Where is the transuranic nuclear waste buried?
Who insures the citizenry from the possible effects from a nuclear waste accident?

The NRC and its predecessor agencies have denied no nuclear applications. No one insures past a set amount against nuclear power accidents, nor against accidents from nuclear waste, because the power industry refused to build any nuclear power plants until Congress relieved them of liability with the Price Anderson Act. The transuranic nuclear waste--the nuclear waste that is composed of totally unnatural radioactive elements that are found neither in Nature nor the universe until 1945--has no permanent disposal site. Indeed, when we went through two attempts by the Department of Energy (owner of the nuclear weapons and nuclear waste) to site it in Wisconsin, I was quite involved from the beginning. Our Technical Advisory Council eventually declared there was "no safe geologic repository" possible for such material.

We owe the entire nuclear debacle to a mad need to commit an act of state terror on the Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is all another bad outgrowth of civilian harm from the military. Nonviolence could have prevented it all and can still help mitigate it in the future.

Baking a smaller pie

One of our standard tropes in the field of Conflict Resolution is that we conduct the best mediation if we help the parties in conflict "bake a bigger pie." What we mean by this is that perceptions of a fixed pie usually mean a zero-sum, win-lose struggle for more pie per party rather than honest efforts to brainstorm ways to get each party more of what it needs and wants. If, for example, I can give you something that means very little to me but which is dear to you, and in exchange you give me something that is of little import to you but is highly sought by me, we have baked a bigger pie. We each get more of what we want and give up little of consequence.

Now comes the federal budget wars. Time to bake a smaller pie.

Each year the War Resisters League develops a pie chart to show how the federal discretionary budget is spent. It includes all documentation and explanations of calculations, and shows a far more accurate picture of how our income taxes are spent than the standard budget of all federal income and expenses including social security and other trust funds, since both those funds fall outside the discretionary spending category.

What is so maddening about the mass media national discussions about the budget is that there are boundaries to what is discussable. We can chew on cutting home heating for poor elderly but not a Pentagon budget that is lost and wandering, completely obese and out of control. This conversation, however tightly controlled by government sources and corporate media, has not completely fooled the public. A recent study at the University of Maryland reveals that most average Americans are able to correct the federal deficit better than either the White House or Congress. We are taken for fools, but we are not. Oh, we have our misled Tea Party Animals, but most of us get it.

What is missing is that we have not made this a priority, probably because, in the past, gnashing and wailing over the debt and deficit has resulted in some painful cuts followed by prosperity but no massive changes in most of our lives. The politicians have predicted 27 out of the past two recessions and have cried Budget Wolf! so often that we yawn and hope most of the shrapnel misses most of us again.

However. We are actually seeing what happens with enough failure to stop the really massive hemorrhage, the Pentagon spending. Entire sectors of the American economy have plummeted into oblivion or startling lows with no prospects of return. There is no return on the Pentagon dollar because it tends to serve multinational corporations, not the American people. Back when we were a nation of freebooters whose military was used to globalize injustice for the easy profits for American businesses, America's workers and middle class benefited at the expense of the workers of other countries. Multinational corporations have discovered that they could train other countries' workers to do our jobs and have done so. Those jobs are gone forever; American workers are no longer the best or most productive and that is the basic antipathy by Republicans for any of our unions, public or private employed. It is painfully obvious that multinational corporations will shaft American workers faster than they used to, since the workers, they believe, will remain loyal to the war system no matter what. Just pour them some Fox News SpinJuice to wash down that smaller piece of the budget pie and you can redirect them against each other, as usual.

So we'll see how that all works. Can the misinformed continue to hijack our national discourse or will we slowly see the common sense most of us possess implemented at the top? That will depend on civil society here and what we will endure. The pie is smaller and our shift to sustainable simplicity will get out ahead of it or we will see deeper suffering ahead on a diet of poison pie.

89 years since US women's nonviolent enfranchisement

On 27 February 1922 the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was unanimously upheld by the US Supreme Court, cementing it firmly as a complete victory for a nonviolent campaign waged politically beginning in 1878 and in the streets beginning in 1916 and continuing all during World War I. When an amendment survives a court challenge all the way to the Supremes it also has the solid backing from Congress (two-thirds of both houses) and the states (three-quarters of their legislatures). These legislative hurdles brought the 19th Amendment into being in August 1920. Then a serious and completely unsuccessful court challenge met by unanimity of the court completed that triumvirate.
(Map showing states with full suffrage for women--green--partial suffrage, and no suffrage--red--just prior to passage of 19th Amendment)
How often have we been told, "Yeah, you have your opinion, but you can thank the military for your right to express it and for all your other rights too"? Many times for anyone who challenges militarism in the US. I've heard it for decades and from coast to coast.

Really? Tell that to the women who, during World War I, led by Alice Paul, the Ph.D. Quaker scholar activist, stood in all weather, every day, outside the gates of the White House with banners that asked, "What about democracy at home, Mr. Wilson?" and those women were beaten by uniformed members of the US military. Nonviolence brings liberation despite, not because of, the military. Nonviolence gains and defends our rights despite, not because of, the armed forces.

Movements for liberation have proven that it is a poor tactic to make an enemy of the military no matter which country we consider, but neither should nonviolent actionists be dependent upon nor petrified of the armed forces. Women in Britain threw bricks and broke windows in their campaigns for suffrage and they started their street actions years before the US women. They won their suffrage in 1928, eight years after the American women. So much for the blinding speed of violence versus the slow plod of nonviolence. Turns out that the only thing blinding about violence is literally blinding eye for an eye.

From Tripoli to Tripoli

Tripoli is a small unincorporated town in northern Wisconsin.

Huh?

Tripoli is a big city, capital of Libya, and is under siege from an insurrection.

Of course, there is also Tripoli in Lebanon, a city about half the size of Libya's tumultuous capital, but also on the Mediterranean. The Med, a small sea compared to the Atlantic or Pacific, is ringed by Europe, the Middle East and Africa, quite a richly diverse, polluted, busy and contested body of water now and stretching back through history.

In Wisconsin, Tripoli is pronounced TRIPle-eye, and is as rural as you can get, generally quite peaceful, and they do play rocket launches for fun. Seriously.

But Wisconsin in general is experiencing its own insurrection as their new governor attempts to kill off collective bargaining for public employees. Governor Walker is a Tea Party Republican whose goals are not so much to balance the state budget as they are to destroy labor rights. The union essentially offered a package of concessions that would meet all the stated goals of the Republicans but the Republicans in Wisconsin will not rest until they have taken away the right to collective bargaining for public employees. It is no coincidence that this is happening during a recession; indeed, Walker is acting much like the governors of the 1930s in the Upper Great Lakes, who called out the National Guard to quell labor unrest as unions first organized there--in Wisconsin, in 1934, to crush the Kohler strike, specifically.

As a young man I knew that our region's governors had called out the National Guard to suppress labor and I recall talking to one of the Guard members, then retired, and he recalled being incredibly scared and ready to shoot, since strikers were not nonviolent. "I was not even 20 yet and they wanted to kill me, so I was ready to defend myself," he told me. That was in Minnesota, but the story is the same worldwide, then and now. Violence against the armed forces is just about the poorest tactic available to those agitating for social change.

In Tunisia and in Egypt, the contours of the resistance and democratic uprising were nonviolent, with occasional forays into the dysfunction of violence. In Libya, sadly, the resort to violence has been more frequent, and Gaddafi is all too happy to escalate and prolong the battle. He now fears for his life, his troops fear for their lives, and black Africans are being attacked and slaughtered because Arab racism has determined that all black Africans are mercenaries hired by Gaddafi to kill civil society resisters. This spiral is predictably tragic on all sides. Where there is little or no particular commitment to nonviolence nor discipline toward a nonviolent set of means, the means quickly transmogrify to violent battle and targeting based on a presumption of guilt, as we see again and again.

It was quite touching to read recently of the message sent by Kamal Abbas, General Coordinator of the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services in Egypt to the public employee union members of Wisconsin, including the beautiful line, "I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us."

And so, from the shores of Tripoli, to the other shores of Tripoli, to the lakeshores and streambanks of yet another Tripoli, the world is learning the lessons of nonviolence and methods of uprising. We harvest what we sow. Gandhi said the means are the ends and this is what we see.

.

Tapping into creativity

Social conflict is both complex and organic, yet consists of identifiable ecological elements. Pruning a conflict by reaching an agreement between contesting parties will produce growth of that conflict elsewhere and once it has been determined where that growth has begun, good management can continue to transform that conflict from destructive to constructive.

Some struggles trend more toward an intense conflict but waged within legitimate bounds and by shared rules. Some conflicts are marked by such a fatigue that all parties are motivated to regard the agreement as an entree to continued progress. Some have known so many atrocities that the slightest spark can shift away from the agreement back to destructive conflict. Some situations reveal ersatz agreements that are really momentary and cynical pauses in ongoing hot conflict aimed at total victory. Some agreements manage to exclude or offend significant parties and thus become the basis for further destructive conflict. Some agreements are imposed as a victor's 'agreement' with vanquished foes, and may eventually produce the re-emergence of a reconstituted adversary.

Two features of a conflict are particularly significant for settlement and subsequent conflict sequences: the adversaries’ goals and the adversaries’ balance of resources (Kriesberg, 2007, p. 296).

This is where nonviolent struggle is so superior. Goals are transparently announced and ultimate goals are not obscured. Thus, Martin Luther King Jr was able to discuss complete freedom for African Americans as the ultimate goal, with incremental, winnable goals that obtained in any campaign. His opponents were not credibly able to say that he wanted African Americans to rule white people, that he wanted the Soviets to invade, or that his goals were at all unreasonable. When violence is used, credibility is damaged because the real goals are not trusted and even unreasonable ultimate goals seem possible.

This then relates to the transparency about the complex of resources at the command of the parties. If a violent force can assassinate key members of an adversary, it is assumed they would and security is mounted to prevent that. Everything is veiled by worst case scenarios. In a nonviolent movement, the worst case is that someone who has ill gotten gains may have to share them, either power or money or access to other resources. Surprise moves are feared and efforts are made to deny the adversary access to his resources. This encourages pre-emption and the descent back to destructive conflict.

We see now the improbability of honest agreements with constructive outcomes for someone like Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, who has been bombing and strafing his own people and who has foreign mercenaries slaughtering demonstrators in the streets. Gaddafi has been ranting death to all who oppose him and these ultimata have effectively precluded negotiation. His removal is virtually the only outcome acceptable to Libyans. On the other hand, even long-ruling strongmen like Hosni Mubarak can negotiate a peaceful transition to the extent they do not physically attack their own people. Mubarak goes to a resort and the army assumes temporary control while Gaddafi paints himself into a smaller and smaller corner. He has generalized the terror and so has generalized his opposition. His isolation is completing itself and his negotiating power is diminishing daily as he refuses to agree to anything except complete victory--which he has already lost.

Conflict resolution and nonviolence are all about creativity; it takes all our energy to brainstorm options that can give everyone enough of what they need. Someday our world will witness nonviolence so massive and disciplined that even morally bankrupt state terrorists like Gaddafi will be able to the wisdom of coming to agreement. We have certainly seen the strong hints of that in the current sea change in the Arab world, which is bound to move south into black Africa to begin to replace rulers who have arrogated decades and $billions to themselves. Tahrir Square and Tunisia have put them all on notice. I'm sure they are all trying to consolidate their resources now, so Horn of Africa and West Africa movements will need to anticipate that learning curve and get out ahead of it. Nonviolence requires step-ahead creativity.

References
Kriesberg, L. (2007). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Ecology of struggle: Permanent change

We frequently hear and may even use phrases such as "settle once and for all," or "permanent agreement," "fix this for good." These may be meant to be metaphorical or tongue-in-cheek hyperbolic, but that seems unclear to many and the package of assumptions affixed to any such thinking should be unpacked and dealt with or nonviolent civil society may gain a bit of awkward power and quickly lose it, inviting unwanted results. In short, the fabulous gain of obtaining an agreement with another party in a conflict is a bit like buying an apple tree with the goal of espaliering it against your sunny south-facing brick wall. Just as training your apple tree to grow flat against the wall takes up to five years of close time-consuming pruning, monitoring, bending, tying, and blossom-picking, so too will your conflict require high maintenance post-agreement or it may grow inevitably back into destructive conflict.

The only permanent reality is change. Even a well made machine eventually rusts--"stainless" steel is not stain-proof. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and ecosystem management rely on shifting forces to maintain the appearance of homeostasis, or ecological stability predicated upon self-regulation. Diversity and systemic adjustments are the only constant requirement for best security and stability. If civil society finally discovers and uses its latent power, it will be best served to self-analyze and learn to keep that power in reserve. This is the difference internally between a healthy democracy and one that is more like two corn snakes in an otherwise empty terrarium, eying each other not as mates but as meals. Indeed, this is what we see increasingly in the US democracy, looking like a beta version of something that missed its chance to evolve.

An agreement may help prevent a conflict from deteriorating into a protracted destructive conflict. It can help to settle one contested issue among many or to manage how the conflict is waged. The conflict may escalate moderately and be settled and then escalate constructively again and be settled again repeatedly. The struggle remains within bounds the adversaries regarded as legitimate or as acceptable, oscillating in moderate intensity (Kriesberg, 2007, p. 294).

This constructive conflict that accepts and even requires periodic escalation is the difference between the assertion of a healthy relationship and the passive-aggressive dysfunction we see so often when we believe that we've solved something "once and for all." We are correct with the "once" but incorrect with either "for all time" or "for all parties." This is simply how our infinitely complex human systems operate and they require devotion to process or the process becomes explosive and toxic.

There are always conflict management systems in place or there are accumulating grievances. This axiomatic for a relationship of any kind. We all develop small grievances as we engage in any relationship and there are two places we can put them. One is on our stack of grievances that are openly heading for management. These are going on the agenda and will be handled in a civil and transparent fashion. The others are going into the trash can that never gets emptied, where they attract emotional rats and pathogens, festering and spreading out into other areas, affecting other relationships, and giving a false sense of security, much like recruiting an armed force of the poorest young men and women, training them to kill, and equipping them with a deadly arsenal, as though that will manage conflict. What we see instead is this loots our economy, prevents our growth as a mature society that can engage meaningfully with others, poisons our environment and sets up a dynamic of intimidation and resentment, invasion and resistance, between our society and others.

Agreements are great beginnings. A well constructed agreement is one that provides for adaptive management and one that agrees to devote resources to managing the conflicts that are natural sequelae to any agreement between conflicting parties. A good agreement assumes that constructive escalation is a desirable phase of any nonviolent conflict management systemic design, a safety feature that ensures creativity forever, once and for all, permanently (ha). This is an ecology of peace, a system of dialectical structural nonviolence.

References
Kriesberg, L. (2007). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Spending our way to solvency

Republicans are using a chainsaw to trim the discretionary spending this Year of the Scared Rabbit. One of the ways in which they are saving big money is ending the threat of peace research and conflict resolution training programs for Americans. What if such spending revealed the complete idiocy and ethical bankruptcy of continued armed occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the drone warfare conducted in those nations, Pakistan, and, soon, Yemen and Somalia?

The United States Institute of Peace is not a pacifist organization, nor is it leftwing, but still, in terms of exposing the poor cost/benefit outcomes of funding the Pentagon, it is a clear and present danger, so the Republicans killed lots of fluttering birds with one budget stoning. Looking at USIP as a percentage of the Pentagon budget request (untouchable by Ruling Republicans), we find that USIP is 0.008 percent of the FY11 DoD budget. That's about 0.079 percent of the FY11 State Department budget, or less than 18 cents per American.

Each soldier in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers about $1.2 million per year. Bring 39 of them home and you have the entire budget of the USIP, the only tiny piece of the US budget devoted to seeking alternative methods of conflict management. Put another way, call a pause to the war in Afghanistan for three hours and you've just saved more than the entire USIP budget.

So, it's a very good thing the Republicans are eagle-eyed sharp on this budget, slashing the real threats to corporate profits, such as USIP. Put some of that peace research into play and we might not need about two-thirds of the highly profitable war spending that currently makes certain that the wealthy increase the gap between themselves and the sinking middle class in America. Thanks for watching out for the war profiteers and making sure we continue to fund all bloody US interventions and occupations, Republicans. Under your leadership, we can plot our bright future straight back to a new synthesis of the Great Depression and the McCarthy Era. Outstanding.

Wikileaks lifts fig leaves

The sub rosa quid pro quo character that marks the relationships between MENA monarchies and the succession of the colonial British and imperialist US hegemons is in massive flux currently, thanks to that darn pesky civil society uprising that barely notices borders in the Middle East and North Africa. All parties are in Full Scramble mode, looking for duct tape to fix broken axles and aspirin for organ failure. Deals are proposed and rejected, made and reviewed, and nothing is steady. For the people who have suffered under these nested layers of robber barons, only major reform will prevent more revolutions, and the faces of despots will almost certainly be removed. The very same is true for the outliers who have been hostile to the US but oppressive to their own people. The Arab world is rightfully rejecting the likes of US puppet Hosni Mubarak as it also shakes off fake freedom fighters like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Those band aid bargains, thrown like golden apples at the justifiably enraged crowds, may produce momentary hesitation in reform and revolution, but a great deal will be required to produce eventual stability.

An agreement to settle a conflict may put the fire out for good, but too often it only suppresses the flames and leaves smoldering ashes that later burst into flames. An agreement may contribute to the conflict’s gradual constructive transformation, resulting in a stable and equitable relationship between former enemies. On the other hand, the settlement may turn out to be only a pause in a protracted destructive struggle (Kriesberg, 2007, p. 294).

To begin to understand the long overlord relationships in the region, and thus the long simmering and deepening resentments of the people, we can look to the contrails of the British dominance and then the replacement of American influence saturation. In Bahrain, for instance, the intelligence services were run for decades by a Brit, Col. Ian Henderson, a former British colonial police officer. Of course, Bahrainis knew this, and they knew in principle that the US had effectively taken over that role, but when Wikileaks revealed US diplomatic cables that proved that the current Bahraini head of intelligence, "Khalifa bin Abdullah al-Khalifa, another member of the ruling Sunni royal family, 'unabashedly positions his relationship with the U.S. intelligence community above all others,'" the Shia majority knows by the proven evidence that the oppression they experience is a product of the US. The US 5th Fleet bases in Bahrain and the Pentagon has been the military provider and supplier to the royal Sunni family's military.

These long standing relationships have essentially funded state terror against civil society in all the leftover monarchies propped up by the US. Monarchies are easier to corrupt and control than are messy and shifting democracies, so the US, seeking control over the oil region, has always favored monarchies over democracies in the MENA, whether Arab or Persian, all the while trumpeting the false message that we are everywhere with our military to defend and promote democracy. Democracy is the last thing the US has wanted in that region and is now what the people will finally take, using the only power the militaries cannot defeat, civil society that is determined to be free.

References
Kriesberg, L. (2007). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Big cost, no benefit

Just like we've been saying all along, the false 'intelligence' used to justify invading Iraq was known then and being more and more confirmed now, with the following bit being the latest:

"I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."
— Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, aka "Curveball," admitting to WMD lies used to justify the Iraq War

So, Janabi is proud as any four-year-old of his great achievement. I'm sure we'll find the stub someday that shows he got his $million bribe from the neocons in power to lie about this. The disingenuous part, of course, is that only the ignorant believed him then, not the neocons who featured him, not the cowed and subservient intelligence officers and certainly neither men most likely to know, Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and Mohamed ElBaredei of the IAEA. Blix headed the most invasive inspection regime in history and ElBaredei had all true WMD information. They virtually begged Bush and his crime ring not to invade. Now we have the likes of Richard Perle claiming, like Bush ultimately did (after proclaiming his absolute faith in it in order to get into war), that this was an intelligence failure. No, it was a failure of integrity, not knowledge.

Indeed, Blix fought against this asinine and illegal invasion and noted caustically a month or two later, when no WMD were found (see Greenwald's "Uncovered" for much more):

It is somewhat puzzling, I think, that you can have a hundred percent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction’s existence and zero certainty about where they are.

But just to note the analysis offered by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall as this thing ramped up, they claimed that Iraqis could do this themselves, using civil society nonviolent uprising. It was a brilliant plan, executed ultimately--by Tunisians, Egyptians, and is underway elsewhere in the Arab world. They had faith in civil society's latent but quite real power then, no matter which society chafed under oppressors--dictators friendly to the US, hostile to the US, military juntas, communist dictators, theocratic dictators, fake democracy dictators--and their analysis was ignored by the left who were against the invasion of Iraq but never have understood nonviolent power. Perhaps the first glimmer of light is appearing to them as Arabs have burst forth to force a tsunami of uprising where few thought they could do it. Students of strategic nonviolence never doubted it. The piece by Ackerman and DuVall, widely ignored then, should be seen as a massive forehead-slapping moment for the US and Iraq and all the critics of nonviolence.

References
Ackerman, P. & DuVall, J. (2002) With weapons of the will. Sojourners.
Greenwald, R. Uncovered transcript.

War: The luxury Republicans can afford

The Tea Party is getting its way, jamming their Know Nothing philosophy into the very heart of our representative democracy with a budget out of the House cutting $61 billion from every life-affirming program they could slash. Widows, children, impoverished elders, people with disabilities--every vulnerable class of people we've struggled to protect from ravening marketplace cruelty over the pasts 75 years--the Republicans tell us they are forfeit to the God of War. Congress was kinder to Americans during World War II. The Republicans in control now, for the most part, have never known much but privilege, and have for the most part not lived in a society without at least a minimal safety net. So these brave free marketeers are perfectly prepared to sacrifice an old woman who cannot afford to heat her room or a child who has no health insurance. Who needs Consumer Products Safety? They are sanctimonious about the money that goes to their overlords who profit from war, however. Defense? Can't touch that.

Education for our children? Zap. Protection for our water, air, land and food? Poof. Not to mention the little frills like seeking peaceful methods of conflict management and trying to develop an informed public--the United States Institute of Peace and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are zeroed out with this batch of warmongers who never met a weapons system they wouldn't fund.

Where is the outrage? We need a Gandhi to call a general strike. The shutdown of the government is a great start and it's looking somewhat likely. Shutting down Madison is a fine response to that merciless governor's attack on working people. Let the model spread to the cities with representatives who vote for a budget that doesn't feature massive Pentagon cuts.