Nonviolence

The Political Objective And Strategic Goal Of Nonviolent Actions

July 24, 2014 Robert J Burrowes, www.dkeenan.com Strategize! Activism, Direct Action, Nonviolence

All nonviolent struggles are conducted simultaneously in the political and strategic spheres, and these spheres, which are distinct, interact throughout. I have discussed this at length elsewhere.1 Despite this, only rarely have nonviolent struggles been conducted with a conscious awareness of this vitally important relationship. Gandhi's campaigns were very effective partly because he understood the distinction and relationship between politics and strategy in nonviolent struggle. And the failure of many campaigns can be attributed, in part, to the fact that most activists do not. To illustrate the distinction and the relationship between these two spheres, and to highlight their vital importance, this article discusses them within the simpler context of nonviolent actions.

The Silent Power Of Boycotts And Blockades

July 10, 2014 Kanya D'Almeida, www.ipsnews.net Resist! Nonviolence, Peace, Wars and Militarism

Peruse a few reports on global military expenditure and you will not be able to shake the image of the planet as one massive army camp, patrolled by heavily weaponised guards in a plethora of uniforms. Last year, the world spent about 1.76 trillion dollars on military activity according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The year before, arms sales among SIPRI’s ‘Top 100’ companies touched 410 billion dollars. It is estimated that 1,000 people die from gun violence every single day. The newly founded Pan African Network on Nonviolence and Peacebuilding is the first regional initiative of its kind dedicated to connecting African grassroots organisers around nonviolent resistance. But scattered amongst the barracks of this planetary war zone are scores of white flags, wielded daily by the many millions of people engaged in nonviolent resistance to the forces that threaten their existence. Nearly 120 of these peace activists are currently assembled in Cape Town’s City Hall, for the quadrennial meeting of the 93-year-old War Resister’s International (WRI), a global network of activists from far-flung regions fighting on every imaginable front, from anti-trafficking in Australia to peace and reconciliation in Rwanda.

Armed Resistance In The Civil Rights Movement

June 17, 2014 Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, www.prospect.org Strategize! Black Power, Civil Rights, History, Nonviolence, Racism

On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said. In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive. Danielle L. McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, argues that armed self-defense was also far more common for black women in the South than has generally been acknowledged.

Calling ALL Knitters: Join The Rewoolution!

June 9, 2014 Creative Resistance, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! Arts, Creative Resistance, Nonviolence, Peace, Protest

This article is from our associated project, CreativeResistance.org. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action’s NO To NEW TRIDENT campaign is joining knitting needles across the sea for some major guerilla woolfare. Here are the basics: You knit a pink scarf. It gets assembled, along with other people’s scarfs, into one long section. We ship the whole thing to the United Kingdom where it joins a 7-mile long scarf stretched between the UK’s nuclear weapons factories on August 9, 2014. Then, your scarf is sent to a conflict zone to become a humanitarian blanket. Read on to learn more and get involved.

Don’t Ignore Syria’s Nonviolent Movement

June 8, 2014 Tamara Al-Om, www.theguardian.com Resist! Nonviolence, Syria

Being Syrian these days only ever elicits one response: "Oh, I'm sorry … it must be terrible for you … Have you got family there?" This reaction is understandable, given the nature of the information that emerges from the country, with coverage of death, destruction and displacement of people. While it is vital that the world is made aware of the suffering of the Syrian people, however, the complexity of the conflict can sometimes be forgotten. What we tend to hear less about is the nonviolent movement (NVM), which has been playing a significant role since the start of the uprising, and which started in early 2011 with peaceful protests. At this stage the NVM had a much wider support base both domestically and internationally, with audiences sympathetic to its struggle. The number of army defections was also relatively high. However, as the government began to take violent action against the protestors, armed resistance inevitably emerged. This was followed by the development of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The FSA's lack of real organisation and an established central command made it easier for foreign extremist groups to enter Syria and hijack the uprising. They began to subvert it from a movement about freedom and justice into something very different.

Summer Activities In Northwest To Abolish Nukes

June 7, 2014 Leonard Eiger, www.gzcenter.org Resist! Nonviolence, Nuclear Weapons, Peace, Wars and Militarism

Well, that's all for now. As you can see Ground Zero people are at it, both in front of and behind the scenes. Even though I have nothing new to share on it today, the legal effort against the Bangor Second Explosives Handling Wharf continues. And so does the rest of the work. You can keep in touch with all of it at both our website at gzcenter.org and our Facebook page (Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action). Send your questions to either me at gznonviolencenews@gmail.com or to info@gzcenter.org. Above all, please get involved in whatever way you are able. Scrapping Trident and abolishing all nuclear weapons is not something politicians will do without a huge groundswell of citizen involvement. So please share our message and work far and wide. We're all in this together, and together we CAN make a difference!!!

Roadmap To Personal Empowerment From Metta Center

June 5, 2014 Staff, www.mettacenter.org Strategize! Activism, Nonviolence, Revolution

While creating a nonviolent future is a serious undertaking, one thing remains encouraging: we are not alone. There are countless organizations, groups and individuals already doing the great work, all striving for a shared goal. If you are reading this issue of Emergence, it is very likely that you are one of them. And it is precisely because it is not an easy task, we must join our hands together. The “Roadmap” is Metta Center’s attempt to offer three things to help create an unstoppable movement of movements: unity, strategy, and nonviolent power. One very appealing aspect of the Roadmap is that we all can identify ourselves with it - we all belong here. Roadmap illustrates the interconnectedness of our work, and many issues that are often seen as separate. It also shows the trajectory of “peace from within,” starting from our “Person Power” at the center.

Should We Fight The System Or Be The Change?

June 5, 2014 Mark Engler and Paul Engler, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Nonviolence, Organizing, Strategy

It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society? Over the past 50 years — and arguably going back much further — social movements in the United States have incorporated elements of each approach, sometimes in harmonious ways and other times with significant tension between different groups of activists. In the recent past, a clash between “strategic” and “prefigurative” politics could be seen in the Occupy movement. While some participants pushed for concrete political reforms — greater regulation of Wall Street, bans on corporate money in politics, a tax on millionaires, or elimination of debt for students and underwater homeowners — other occupiers focused on the encampments themselves. They saw the liberated spaces in Zuccotti Park and beyond — with their open general assemblies and communities of mutual support — as the movement’s most important contribution to social change. These spaces, they believed, had the power foreshadow, or “prefigure,” a more radical and participatory democracy.

Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker Arrested

June 2, 2014 Voices for Creative Nonviolence, www.us1.campaign-archive1.com Resist! Drones, Nonviolence, Peace, Protesters Arrested

Busloads of activists gathered today at the gate of this base in central Missouri to protest drone warfare waged from inside its boundary. The action was the third in a triple-protest called the Trifecta Resista, which also addressed nuclear weapons and the imprisonment of the whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Voices co-coordinator Kathy Kelly crossed the property line with Georgia Walker, community activist from Midtown, a neighborhood in Kansas City. A few hours ago Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker were arrested at Whiteman Airforce Base where US killer drones are operated from. As the 2 approached soldiers at the base Kathy was carrying a loaf of bread with the intention to break bread and talk with the soldiers while Georgia carried caution tape to symbolise the danger to life which drones impose

An Open Letter To Cecily McMillan

May 26, 2014 Robert J. Burrowes, www.nationofchange.org Strategize! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Nonviolence, Occupy

I found your brief statement at sentencing and your statement to your supporters, both insightful and evocative and it brought to mind the compassionate and powerful statements of the great nonviolent activist—such as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.—who have gone before you. I write this open letter to you in the hope that it will inspire you and our fellow nonviolent activists to consider one other course of nonviolent action that we can take in our efforts to create the world of peace, justice, sustainability and love for which so many of us strive. . . In asking you to consider this course of action, I also admit that it has taken me the experience of some 30 arrests for nonviolent acts of conscience (with a variety of outcomes including jail terms, imprisonment as a psychiatric patient and forcible injection with 'anti-psychotic' drugs, seizure of my bank account, garnishee of my wages, bankruptcy and seizure of my passport) and I confess that I have been slow to learn and come to the suggestion that I make to you now. But every time I have appeared in court my conscience, principles and love for all that lives have been trashed in favour of laws that, for example, made my swimming in front of a nuclear warship to impede its entry to an Australian port, sitting in front of a bulldozer in defense of old-growth forests or 'trespassing' at a US military base located on land stolen from indigenous people 'illegal'.

Remembering Vincent Harding, An Enduring Veteran Of Hope

May 23, 2014 Ken Butigan, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Civil Rights, History, Nonviolence

Historian by profession and relentless nonviolent advocate by calling, Vincent Gordon Harding died on Monday, May 19, at the age of 83. The author of a series of books on the civil rights movement — which he called the Southern Freedom movement — he not only wrote history, but also played an active part in the struggle to make and remake it. Harding worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Mennonite House in Atlanta, an interracial voluntary service. As part of the Albany, Ga., movement, he was arrested for leading a demonstration at the city hall in 1962. He became a strategist for the movement, and drafted Martin Luther King’s historic 1967 anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” which King delivered at Riverside Church in New York City one year to the day before his assassination. Harding completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 1965 and accepted a teaching position at Spelman College in Atlanta. In 1990 he published Hope and History, a text that stressed the importance of telling and teaching the story of the freedom struggle. Later he became professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where he founded Veterans of Hope, a project focused on documenting and learning from struggles for nonviolent change, healing and reconciliation.

An Introduction To Nonviolence

May 20, 2014 Michael N. Nagler, www.opednews.com Strategize! Nonviolence, Organizing

The twentieth century left us a double legacy. On the one hand, it was a time of great cruelty and violence; on the other hand, and perhaps from that very crucible of violence, we saw manifestations of a new kind of power--or rather, new uses of an age--old power--that can lead humanity to a far better future. In the years since Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated the power of nonviolence to free India from colonial rule and Martin Luther King Jr. employed it to liberate people of color from some of their oppression in the United States, countless peoples around the world--from Manila to Moscow, Cape Town to Cairo, and in the Occupy movements worldwide--have had varying degrees of success using one or another aspect of nonviolence to loosen the bonds of exploitation and oppression. The practice of nonviolence touches on something fundamental about human nature, about who we wish to be as individuals or as a people. Gandhi stated simply, "Nonviolence is the law of our species."1 Dr. Vandana Shiva, a renowned leader of rural resistance in India, said in a recent lecture that if we do not adopt nonviolence we risk compromising our humanity. Likewise, Iraqi Kurdish activist Aram Jamal Sabir said that although nonviolence may be harder and may require greater sacrifice than violence, "at least you don't lose your humanity in the process."2

Story Government Doesn’t Want You To Hear

April 27, 2014 Rivera Sun, www.truthout.org Strategize! Activism, Media, Nonviolence

A sea of candles, a street of soft-lit faces, the swell of a thousand voices singing, the unstoppable surge of tears, an ache of yearning in the heart, the possibility of change, and the sense that as all falls into darkness, the people will rise. This is the story of nonviolent struggle . . . a story that has changed the world time and again . . . the story the government doesn't want you to hear. The government and mass media do their best to suppress this story. The cameras swing to the angry kid dressed in black and the provocations he launches at the police. The images flash scenes of chaos during the crackdown. The news does not report the countless hours of quiet boycotts, uneventful sit-ins, or midnight sign-painting sessions in preparation for tomorrow's picket lines. The sudden grace of students taking wing from tyranny, walking out on classes and injustice is rarely mediatized.

Global Nonviolent Action Database

April 14, 2014 George Lakey, www.nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu Strategize! Nonviolence

“Nonviolent action” is one of the names people sometimes give to the conflict behavior reported in this database. Other names are “people power,” “civil resistance,” “satyagraha,” “nonviolent resistance,” “direct action,” “pacifica militancia,” “positive action,” and more. We mean a technique of struggle that goes beyond institutionalized conflict procedures like law courts and voting, procedures common in many countries. We study the methods of protest, noncooperation, and intervention that typically heighten a conflict – and the use of these methods without the threat or use of injurious force to others. Our definition is not located in the discourse of morality and ethics, although some people may choose to use nonviolent action for ethical reasons. Instead, we focus descriptively on what people do when they use this specific “technique of struggle.”

Would Saul Alinsky Break His Own Rules?

April 5, 2014 Mark Engler & Paul Engler, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Nonviolence, Organizing

Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark book, Rules for Radicals, is now nearly 45 years old, the principles that emerged from Alinsky’s work have influenced every generation of community organizers that has come since. The most lasting of Alinsky’s prescriptions are not his well-known tactical guidelines — “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” or “power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Rather, they are embedded in a set of organizational practices and predispositions, a defined approach to building power at the level of local communities. Hang around social movements for a while and you will no doubt be exposed to the laws of Chicago-style community organizing: “Don’t talk ideology, just issues. No electoral politics. Build organizations, not movements… Focus on neighborhoods and on concrete, winnable goals.”

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