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?

Fox News: Execute forgiveness

Tucker Carlson is a Fox News commentator, self-proclaimed Christian, and a believer in the death penalty for those convicted of cruelty to dogs. If they're black. OK, I made up the second sentence. I'm trained in recognizing Fox Code. Michael Vick is black. He was convicted of killing dogs and he served two years in prison for that crime. He is now speaking cross country on behalf of the Humane Society and apologizing, though his 'debt to society' is paid. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals say they are glad Obama called the Philadelphia Eagles coach to thank him for giving Vick a second chance.

Did I mention that the president had made that call? That is what prompted the kerfuffle. The black president, trying to cover up his Kenyan Muslim birth certificate, we presume, is going deep-end sports and military in an effort to wow and woo Republicans, his new wannabe base. But Tucker Carlson noticed that Obama is maybe spending his time on things that don't merit presidential opinion, which is a fair point. Obama should maybe keep his administration on task. We have Afghan civilians to slaughter.

Speaking of Christian behavior, here are Carlson's very words:

I’m Christian. I’ve made mistakes. I believe fervently in second chances. Michael Vick killed dogs in a heartless and cruel way. I think, firstly, he should have been executed for that.

Dick Cheney killed Iraqis and Afghans in a heartless and cruel way, as did George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and the entire US military. That's a lot of executions to contemplate. Is Fox News now suggesting that killing dogs is the same as killing children? I'm a vegetarian and I believe in live and let live, but when I hear that misanthropic and capital punishment retributive confluence it I admit I am nonplussed. Vick was never facing capital punishment and, duh, in fact there is no state in the US that makes dog killing a capital offense. Dogs are routinely euthanized in the US, animals are slaughtered all day and night for food, Sarah Palin is out there shooting caribou and whatever else wanders into her gunsights (excuse me whilst I fantasize a Palin-Cheney hunting trip), and suddenly Fox News is going to fix animal cruelty by executing a black football player who committed and was convicted for and served sentence for his crime. So! Tell us, Tucker, what other new categories of crimes should be upgraded to the death penalty? Spanking your child while Black? Being Black? Being Green? Wearing bow ties? (OK, I see the case for that, but still...)

Of course what is really happening here is the latest Leap-On in the HateObama campaign from the right. I probably disagree with Obama as much as does Rush Limbic or Pinhead Patriot Bill O'Reilly or Tucker "Dogs-Are-Only-Human" Carlson--but for the opposite reasons that all of them do--and yet I still like Obama as a person. They never did, not even for a nanosecond. Tucker Carlson looks like a trope for white male privilege and Obama's background was so tough no one can quite nail it down. He is the offspring of a black man and a white woman, which is unbelievably threatening to some white guys, though they would never in a million years admit it. That is part of what I mean by the Fox Code. This entire Michael Vick imbroglio reeks of it.

Violence will never solve violence. Michael Vick and Tucker Carlson should both be on parole for a while, forced to eat vegan together and their combined salaries could help fund a no-kill animal shelter. I'd love to watch them promote it as a team. For a minute.

Trouble overseas? Send in the Mennonites!

As I'm in Hawaii attending and presenting at an international education conference (that's my excuse, in any case), I grabbed a book on impulse at Powell's at the Portland airport. Mennonite in a little black dress, by Rhoda Janzen. An airplane read.

I rarely make such impulsive purchases and even more rarely am so glad I did. I had the first section finished by the time the delayed flight took off and I finished the book late last night in my room in Honolulu. It was brain candy with organic scholarly vitamins and nonviolent conflict management trace minerals embedded in the delightfully tasty prose. If Janzen taught Nonviolence 101 it would be an outstandingly popular class.

She is flat out funny. She is barenaked honest, whether that redounds on her, on her family, or on teachers or society in general. Those two qualities in a memoir--this is possibly the best memoir I've read--are what pulls the reader through page after page, looking for new bits and for the new ways the lietmotifs will reappear.

I want to meet her mother, an old-school Mennonite whose outlook on life is so sunny it turns lemonades into lemony snickets-of-the-gods, and who, we learn, will reliably gross out all and sundry with graphic medical descriptions of ghastly pus and blood, rot and scat, at the dining room table. It has to be the best weight-loss program ever; even after, the images of decomposing flesh would ruin any sudden urge for some Menno Kartoffelsalat or raisiny Persimmon cookies. Hey, it's working for me here in Hawaii. Food looks grotesque and I'm a fairly simplistic vegetarian. What this would do to a bevy of Menno kids facing a lard sandwich lunch sack is beyond my capacity to image, or at least I'd like it to be.

The entire book goes down so easily and yet we get powerful insights into Mennonite pacifism conflated with patriarchy, a sort of nonviolent Talibanic world in which a girl can emerge into womanhood capable of both societal challenging and quiet victimhood. Rhoda is liberated from some of the Mennonite anti-intellectualism at a young age, rising to her various graduate degrees and even her status as Poet Laureate for the University of California two years, but she suffers tremendous verbal abuse and catastrophic physical intimidation from her bipolar, bisexual husband, who destroys furniture and other household objects in rages and calls her every nasty misogynist term imaginable, even in public. She reflects on her tendency to Just Take It and ascribes at least part of that to the Mennonite problem of failing to teach any meaningful assertiveness to their daughters.

Still, as Janzen describes in those embedded bits, the Mennonites abhor war and will all resist it. They proselytize, but not like Jehovah's Witnesses. They are about deeds, not theological argumentation. They serve without as much doctrine. She says they beat Gandhi to the punch, so to speak, in resisting war by refusing to cooperate and suffer consequences instead (e.g. the pogroms in Europe that were only relieved by Catherine the Great inviting Mennonites to colonize part of Ukraine, which they did quite successfully). However! She doubts many Mennonites would join him in fasting, as the Menno family and culture and society is so utterly food-centric. No skinny vegan ascetics otherwise living very simply indeed in Mennonite enclaves. Sausage-fed pacifists all, ready to help humanity.

Indeed, far beyond the brief of her thoroughly enjoyable book, Mennonites established the Mennonite Central Committee, which offers volunteer service to Mennonites and non-Mennonites, and I have friends from the world of nonviolence who have done just that. They have globalized this service and do more on the ground around the world to establish structural nonviolence than all the Human Terrain components of DoD and State combined, which not surprising at all but I thought I'd stick in a little jab. After all, I just got a request from a grad student in the Beltway power schools to refer him to the literature of nonviolence in Afghanistan, which set me off, I can tell you.

Meanwhile! Toss yourself a favor. Buy, borrow or check out this little book and end the Old Year or start the New Year with something that will renew your love of reading. Grad students and academics nota bene: it's not too late. Some academics can still write palatable prose and Janzen rehabilitates the entire genre in one easy read.

References
Janzen, Rhoda (2009). Mennonite in a little black dress. NY: Henry Holt.

Loss is just a stone's throw away

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Fletcher Summer Institute at Tufts this June, where we met the leader of the pretty much nonviolent movement to save the small Palestinian town of Budrus from bifurcation by the Separation Wall, an Israeli project futilely designed to gain security for stolen lands by walling off sections of the Palestinian portion of the West Bank. Earlier this month, the Christian Science Monitor asked in an article if the Budrus model was still viable.

They looked at various Palestinian villages and pointed out that the Israeli Defense Force was more active than ever and that other villages had not managed to replicate the Budrus success in rerouting the Wall. But the idea that this model will prove replicable is not credible when one looks at the film Budrus and notes that the "nonviolent" resistance included rock throwing by young men. This means the Budrus model is doomed.

One Israeli soldier was hospitalized in Bilin, another village that many leftwingers are touting as a purely nonviolent struggle. Getting hit in the head by a rock is violence. Period. The standard response that, well, those IDF soldiers have all the weapons and really are the violent ones is hogwash now and was hogwash when it was first claimed, as it so often is. To make the claim that relatively minor violence committed by the overmatched violent force in an asymmetric conflict equates to nonviolence is ignorant or disingenuous--false in either case.

To understand why and how a conflict method might work requires honesty, not partisanship. Believing that one side is entirely just and the other side is entirely unjust is a person's prerogative, but to allow that to color interpretations of what nonviolence might be is incorrect analysis.

In the end, we are still waiting for "The Palestinian Gandhi." Or the Palestinian MLK, or the Palestinian Cesar Chavez, or the Palestinian Dorothy Day. We are waiting for that person to emerge as a publicized leader of a disciplined nonviolent movement, something we haven't seen in Palestine and which guarantees that Israel will continue to justify what most of the world recognizes as unjust occupation of land that doesn't belong to them. If the strict nonviolence of Ali Abu Awwad or Mazin Qumsiyeh is adapted by actual movement of Palestinians, they have a chance for success.

Is this fair? Of course not; conflict forensics is not about who is on the side of justice more than another party. It is about deconstructing the dynamics of conflict and making professional observations, which is what I am doing in this case. Yes, making long-distance judgments about what might work and what might not are not brave, nor are they always accurate. Conflict science is not about being a radical; it is about trying to be accurate, which, one hopes, is helpful to some.

Here's hoping Mazin and other Palestinians who eschew stone throwing, not to mention bombing and sniping, are listened to and emulated so we can see movements that succeed more often in Palestine. You cannot reach hearts and minds by hitting people in the head with rocks any more than Israel can gain any friends by such massive criminal enterprises as Operation Cast Lead two years ago, which killed some 1,400 Palestinians, far out of proportion to the violence of Hamas then and now.

Israel v Palestine: First one to adhere to absolute nonviolence wins. This is completely counterintuitive in both societies and it's closer to the truth than what the leadership of either society demonstrates.

We are all Bradley Manning

Our top-down strategies can’t fix our problems, whether they be homelessness, joblessness, environmental devastation, faltering health care, failing schools, AIDS, or discrimination. They can’t be solved simply by giving orders or by applying new technologies. They’re complex and interrelated; they touch us all. Solutions therefore depend on widening the circle of problem solvers (Lappé, 2006, p. 9).

I've been writing Bradley Manning lately, the young man imprisoned in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico in Virginia, charged with leaking files to Wikileaks.There are now stories that he is being mistreated, even possibly tortured. Yesterday I got a letter with the return address of the "COMMANDING OFFICER [all caps in the original]. The three-page document, the first two pages of which are a copy of what was given to "Detainee Manning, Bradley," explains in detail that my postcard was being rejected because I'm not on his "mail and visitation list." It finishes with his decision not to appeal this rejection, and Manning's signature below a checked statement:

Furthermore, I choose not to add this person to my mail and visitation list, thereby refusing all incoming correspondence from this individual.

If the stories and allegations about Manning are true, and they appear to be in the instance of his release to Wikileaks of many files, including the ones of filmed war crimes, he has blown the whistle on the military and should be afforded all protection, not imprisonment. There are laws about protecting whistleblowers, right?

Ironically, those laws seem to only cover those whistleblowers who use inside channels, official forms, and this protects the offending federal agency from the public oversight it hates so much. Woe to whistleblowers who shine the light of the "free press" on the wrongdoing. Now the military is seen by the world for what it is: a violent occupying force that guns down civilians in cold blood, literally laughing at its bloody deeds and blaming the victims.

The way that decisionmaking works in a democracy is that we choose who can make the top-down decisions, we elect our representatives. If we don't like a policy we have options:

• elect a different official
• lobby the elected official
• sue
• work to change the policy by bringing civil society pressure to bear
• expose the policy to the public, inviting discourse
• ask for negotiations to amend the policy

So, there are layers of authority involved in the question of Bradley Manning's treatment. There is the GySgt William Fuller, who seems to handle his mail. There is the unnamed "COMMANDING OFFICER" and there are ascending officers in the chain of command, all the way through the military to the Joint Chiefs and then to the civilian Commander-in-Chief, President Obama. With regard to torture, all these layers are also superceded, by law, by the international laws to which the US has signed and ratified, including basic Geneva, Hague, and Nuremberg Conventions, Accords, and Treaties. All apply, all are the Supreme Law of the land, and all are enshrined in the actual rules of the various branches of the armed forces. Viewing just a tiny fraction of what Manning is alleged to have done reveals a prima facie case that he is uncovering serious violations of these rules and laws.

The threats and actions against Bradley Manning are also against our democracy. Civil society is beginning to respond. I can report that, as a former inmate, getting lots of mail that was rejected for one arbitrary reason or another was a very positive thing. My experience was also for directly confronting the military but I was never a member of any military organization and never held in a military prison, so perhaps Manning is having a different experience in all ways, but until I learn better, I am going to regard the Amnesty International principles as valid, which they certainly were in my case. The nature and amount of my abuse and arbitrary mistreatment by the prison system lessened as the volume of supportive mail grew. I was certainly out of my cell much more often, and even when I was in solitary confinement the respect with which I was treated slowly grew as the mail volume increased. When guards and wardens know that the outside world cares about an inmate they seem to adhere to a bit better standard of treatment and they understand that they might be themselves held a bit accountable.

Turns out that the unnamed brig commander is:
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)

So, now I have someone to whom I can write to press for better treatment for Manning and I hope Averhart is deluged with mail.

I also have my next postcard addressed to Manning:

Bradley Manning

USMC Base

Quantico Brig

3247 Elrod Av

Quantico VA 22134

and I hope you will consider writing him too. He just turned 23, he's been in Quantico since July, and needs to know that more of us believe he did the right thing. More mail, even when it's rejected, is a real back-straightener for those who are apparently powerless, shackled and ordered around. We are the threads to freedom for Manning and if all of us are involved in some way, his time of freedom is that much closer. As Lappé notes, we are all stakeholders and problem-solvers in a strong democracy. The guns and steel doors and concrete walls of military brigs are not the strength, we are, if we act.

References

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