Google is blocking our site. Please use the social media sharing buttons (upper left) to share this on your social media and help us break through.
On December 10, 2017, Popular Resistance is beginning a new phase.
As we count down to that date, we are featuring some of the people behind Popular Resistance.
Chris Hedges is an author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, formerly with the New York Times where he covered wars around the world in the field. He quit over the Times coverage of the Iraq war. He has been a close ally and adviser of Popular Resistance since before the beginning.
Chris experienced his first arrest in the United States during the anti-war protest at the White House on December 16, 2010. Hundreds protested the war on Afghanistan on a Thursday afternoon in the snow as President Obama told the press about the “progress” being made there. Over 130 people were arrested, mostly veterans.
After that action, the organizers continued to meet to discuss next steps. We asked ourselves if it would be possible to get groups working on different issues to come together and take action targeting the root causes of the crises we face. We decided to start with an April action in New York Times Square called “Sounds of Resistance.” Almost 20 different groups organized that action. It targeted Bank of America for avoiding taxes and actually receiving a large tax refund. We spoke about the good that money could do in our communities to meet basic needs for housing, health care, jobs and more. The energy of the people showed that the public was ready to fight back.
And so, the planning for an October occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC began in earnest. Chris advised us throughout the process based on his extensive experience covering wars and resistance around the world and understanding of how systems of power work. One lesson that Chris taught us is that activists never know how close they are to victory. He recalled speaking to activists in East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down. They thought that perhaps they would be able to travel between East and West Germany within a year, and by the next week the entire wall was gone.
A critical element in the initial phases of Popular Resistance was to build a culture of resistance. It is important for people to understand how resistance works, how it fits into our work for social transformation and that it is a legitimate force.
Of Popular Resistance, Chris Hedges writes:
“Popular Resistance is one of the most important resistance organizations in the country. It has a clear and lucid critique of corporate power and how it has destroyed all of our democratic institutions. It knows that all energy poured into the Democratic Party is a waste of time. It places its faith, as it should, in mass mobilization and sustained acts of civil disobedience. It repeatedly calls on us to act in the face of the greatest existential crisis of our time, the ecocide being carried out on the planet that sustains life. It is firmly committed to nonviolence, the only tool that gives us any hope of overthrowing corporate power. We will carry out, through groups like Popular Resistance, one of the greatest transformations in human history or doom ourselves to extinction. The crisis is that grave. Popular Resistance, along with a handful of other groups that understand where we are and where we should go, are our only hope.”
