By Richard Eskow — January 20, 2020 — Nation of Change

Dr. King’s spirit lives on in the new Poor People’s Campaign,
and in every place radicals gather to change the world.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Monday, the nation celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. If he hadn’t been murdered, he would be 91 years old. How would Dr. King view today’s activists?

The words to his “I Have a Dream” speech will be repeated from podiums and in classrooms across the country. But many of the people repeating these words have never heard other King quotes, like this one:

“I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”

King’s answer:

To those who condemn idealism, who preach the quiet cynicism of self-limiting “pragmatism” and insist it’s “how the world works,” Dr. King had an answer: He was, in his own words, “maladjusted.”

read more at Nation of Change

A guest editorial addressed to his fellow U.S. citizens by Dennis Rivers
January 6, 2020

In the name of Jesus, who said “love your enemies,” and from the Inner Light of my own heart, I mourn the death of every person killed in war, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran included. May his children find consolation on the loss of their father.

To all those American politicians and commentators who have just said loudly, “No American will mourn the death of this man,” I ask this question: Is this the best that America can do? Is this all that America can do? How can we ask God to bless America if all America can do is kill people, assassinate leaders of other countries, and then threaten to kill even more people after that?

There MUST be a better way. We cannot possibly be so smart that we can put rovers on Mars, and then be so dumb that we can’t work out our disagreements with other countries. Continue reading →

LIVERMORE, CA – On August 6, 2019 a Rally, March and Nonviolent Direct Action titled, “Designing Armageddon at Livermore Lab,” will commemorate the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the site where the U.S. is designing new nuclear weapons for use today.

WHAT:  Dozens of groups will mark the 74th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan at the gates of Livermore Lab. The rally will expose the humanitarian consequences of the bomb with first-hand testimony from a survivor. Livermore Lab is designing Armageddon. It is imperative to gather at Livermore Lab on the date a nuclear weapon was first used in war to stop the creation of new warheads proposed by President Trump. More than 80% of Livermore Lab’s fiscal 2020 budget is for Nuclear Weapons Activities. Participants on August 6 will say “never again” to the use of nuclear weapons – and demand their global abolition.

WHEN: Tuesday, August 6. Rally at 8:00 AM (see below). At 9:30 AM, participants will march to the Lab’s West Gate, where a Japanese bon dance will call in the ancestors and the outlining of bodies on pavement will commemorate the vaporized shadows found after the atomic bombings. Those who choose will peaceably risk arrest. 

WHERE: The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, corner of Vasco & Patterson Pass Roads in Livermore. The march will go southward down Vasco Road to Westgate Drive.  Continue reading →

By David Hartsough,

March 7, 2019

I went to Iran in February of this year with a peace delegation of 28 Americans organized by CODEPINK, a women-led peace activist group. The first day in Iran we had a very fruitful hour-and-half conversation with Javad Zarif, the Foreign Minister of Iran. He listened to our thoughts and concerns and then shared his perspectives about what is needed to help move our countries to a more peaceful and mutually respectful relationship.

Unfortunately, during that day I got increasingly severe chest pains. Friends encouraged me to go a hospital to have my heart checked. We went to the Shahram Hospital where they quickly did tests and discovered that there was major blockage in the arteries of my heart. The doctor in charge encouraged me to undergo surgery immediately (angioplasty) to avoid having a heart attack.

My heart was heavy in more ways than one. I had been working on and looking forward to this trip to Iran for many months. I hoped that our delegation could contribute to moving our government from extreme economic sanctions and threats of war toward building peace and mutual understanding.

Continue reading →

What a Black Armband Means, Forty Years Later

By Mary Beth Tinker — 2009 — first published on DailyKos.com
 
(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

Just before Christmas in 1965, a group of students in Des Moines, Iowa wore black armbands to school to mourn the dead in Vietnam. I was 13 and in eighth grade. The nightly TV news, with scenes of flaming huts, screaming children, and soldiers in body bags had gotten to me. Along with a small group of high school students, including my brother John and our friend, Chris Eckhardt, and even my little brother and sister Paul and Hope, who were in elementary school, I decided to wear an armband that Christmas. Our message was peace.

We had no idea that our small action would lead us to the Supreme Court, or that the ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District 40 years ago today would become a landmark for students’ rights. But that is how history is made.

Continue reading →

June 9 2018 — by Metta Center

Full text of Pope Francis’s message for the World Day of Peace From Vatican Radio: https://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/01/02/non-violence_at_heart_of_popes_plea_for_world_day_of_peace/1283120 “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace” 1.    At the beginning of this New Year, I offer heartfelt wishes of peace to the world’s peoples and nations, to heads of state and government, and to religious, civic and community leaders.  I wish peace to every man, woman and child, and I pray that the image and likeness of God in each person will enable us to acknowledge one another as sacred gifts endowed with immense dignity.  Especially in situations of conflict, let us respect this, our “deepest dignity”,  and make active nonviolence our way of life. This is the fiftieth Message for the World Day of Peace.  In the first, Blessed Pope Paul VI addressed all peoples, not simply Catholics, with utter clarity.  “Peace is the only true direction of human progress – and not the tensions caused by ambitious nationalisms, nor conquests by violence, nor repressions which serve as mainstay for a false civil order”.  He warned of “the danger of believing that international controversies cannot be resolved by the ways of reason, that is, by negotiations founded on law, justice, and equity, but only by means of deterrent and murderous forces.”  Instead, citing the encyclical Pacem in Terris of his predecessor Saint John XXIII, he extolled “the sense and love of peace founded upon truth, justice, freedom and love”.    In the intervening fifty years, these words have lost none of their significance or urgency. On this occasion, I would like to reflect on nonviolence as a style of politics for peace.  I ask God to help all of us to cultivate nonviolence in our most personal thoughts and values.  May charity and nonviolence govern how we treat each other as individuals, within society and in international life.  When victims of violence are able to resist the temptation to retaliate, they become the most credible promotors of nonviolent peacemaking.  In the most local and ordinary situations and in the international order, may nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions, and indeed of political life in all its forms. Continue reading →

The US and Russian governments are pursuing dangerous policies of nuclear brinkmanship. Many people believe we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. Thirty-one thousand troops from the US and NATO countries are engaged in military maneuvers on the Russian border in Poland – together with tanks, military planes and missiles. The US has just activated an anti-ballistic missile site in Romania which the Russians see as part of an American first strike policy. Now the US can fire missiles with nuclear weapons at Russia, and then the anti-ballistic missiles could shoot down Russian missiles shot toward the west in response, the assumption being only the Russians would suffer from nuclear war. Continue reading →

Reviewed by Sandi Huckaby in the February, 2015, issue of the Catholic Agitator Vol. 45/No. 1 As the title suggests, David Hartsough has been a lifelong peace activist, not just on the East Coast, but all over the world—and what an adventure it has been! His iron-strong commitment to nonviolence has taken him from Castro’s Cuba to the Oval Office in the Kennedy White House. He attended many of Dr. King’s sermons at Howard University, and was at the lunch counter sit-ins in the South. He bore nonviolent witness to erecting the Berlin Wall, held an anti-nuclear demonstration in Red Square—and was threatened with 20 years in a Russian prison … read more

SEPT 26: CULVER CITY, CA Saturday 7pm at the Peace Center 3916 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City, CA 90230 (Located between Venice and washington Blvd. Parking behind building SEPT 27: PASADENA, CA Sunday 10am Orange Grove Friends Meetinghouse, 520 E Orange Grove Blvd, Pasadena, CA SEPT 27: RIVERSIDE, CA Sunday 7pm Universalist Unitarian Church 3657 Lemon St., Riverside, CA SEPT 28: SAN DIEGO Monday, 7pm Peace Resource Center, 3850 Westgate Pl (promoted by San Diego Peace Resource Center, Friends Meetings and Veterans for Peace) OCT 4: BERKELEY, Sunday, 11:30am, St. Johns Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave, Berkeley, CA OCT 18: SALT LAKE CITY, Utah Sunday, 11:30am Salt Lake City Friends Meetinghouse, 171 E 4800 S, Murray, UT 84107- OCT 20: ITHACA, NY, 7pm Ithaca Friends Meeting, 120 3rd St, Ithaca, NY OCT 21: ALBANY, NY, 6pm, Social Justice Center, David Hartsough, author of WAGING PEACE: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, PM press 2014. Available through Peaceworkers for $20 at 721 Shrader St., San Francisco, CA 94117. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: Indeed it’s the only think that ever has.” Margaret Mead

September 7, 2014 ( from Street Spirit)   During a long lifetime spent working for peace and social justice, David Hartsough has shown an uncanny instinct for being in the right place at the right time. One can almost trace the modern history of nonviolent movements in America by following the trail of his acts of resistance over the past 60 years. His life has been an unbroken series of sit-ins for civil rights, seagoing blockades of munitions ships sailing for Vietnam, land blockades of trains carrying bombs to El Salvador, arrests at the Diablo nuclear reactor and the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, Occupy movement marches, and international acts of peacemaking in Russia, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Iran and Palestine. It all began at the very dawn of the Freedom Movement when the teenaged Hartsough met Martin Luther King and Ralph David Abernathy at a church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 as the ministers were organizing the bus boycott at the birth of the civil rights struggle.    Read more…

Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist Available now. 

Authors: David Hartsough with Joyce Hollyday • Foreword by John Dear • Introduction by George Lakey • Afterword by Ken Butigan Publisher: PM Press  —  ISBN: 978-1-62963-034-2 Paperback  —  $20.00

Signed copies available now from Peaceworkers (postage included) for a sliding-scale price of $20 to $25. Peaceworkers, 721 Shrader St., San Francisco, CA 94117

Free Chapters in PDF format:

CHAPTER 2: One Common Humanity: Meeting Dr. King and a Lunch Counter Showdown CHAPTER 7: Blockade: Standing in the Way of Bombs Headed for Nam CHAPTER 10: Assault on the Tracks: Facing Violence with Love and Courage

Fall 2014 Book Tour Public Events

David Hartsough knows how to get in the way! He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet “the enemy” in East Berlin, Castro’s Cuba, and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines. Waging Peace is a testament to the difference one person can make. Hartsough’s stories inspire, educate, and encourage readers to find ways to work for a more just and peaceful world. Inspired by the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hartsough has spent his life experimenting with the power of active nonviolence. It is the story of one man’s effort to live as though we were all brothers and sisters. Continue reading →

Dear Friends,

Thought you might be interested in my recent radio interview on KPFK about my trip to Vietnam, the World Beyond War movement and my book, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist.

By Dr Hakim

“Don’t you touch me!” declared Mi Ryang.

South Korean police were clamping down on a villager who was resisting the construction of a Korean/U.S. naval base at her village. Mi Ryang managed to turn the police away by taking off her blouse and, clad in her bra, walking toward them with her clear warning. Hands off! Mi Ryang is fondly referred to as “Gangjeong’s daughter” by villagers who highly regard her as the feisty descendant of legendary women sea divers. Her mother and grandmother were Haenyo divers who supported their families every day by diving for shellfish.
Since 2007, every day without fail, Mi Ryang has stood up to militarists destroying her land.

Mi Ryang, in white cap on the right, challenging a construction truck driver at the naval base gate

read more…

A Journey of Peace by David Hartsough in 2014 I have recently returned from three weeks in Korea and Vietnam, countries which have in the past and are still suffering from the ravages of war. Korea – North and South are caught in the tragic cold war mentality with a divided country imposed on them by the United States (and not opposed by the  Soviet Union) back in 1945 and solidified in 1948. Ten million families were separated by the division of North and South.  People in South Korea cannot phone, write or visit relatives or friends in North Korea and vice versa. One Catholic Priest from South Korea I met spent three and a half years in prison in South Korea for visiting North Korea on a peace mission. The border between North and South Korea is a battle zone where hot war could break out at any moment. The US and South Korean military regularly do full scale live fire war games invoking up to 300,000 troops simulating both defensive and offensive war including armed war planes right up to the border of North Korea. North Korea regularly makes threats of war as well. The Soviet Union is no more and it is time for the United States to ask forgiveness of the people of South and North Korea for imposing this state of war on the two countries, sign a peace agreement with North Korea to officially end the Korean war,recognize the government of North Korea and agree to negotiate all differences at the conference table, not on the battlefield. read more…

---

Peace Paradigm Radio, October 18, 2013:

…

---

Talk by Randy Kehler at the Nipponzan Myohoji Peace Pagoda,  27^th Anniversary Celebration, Leverett, Massachusetts, September 29, 2012 (PDF version)

INTRODUCTION Greetings, friends.  It’s wonderful, as always, to be here with all of you, and an honor to have been invited to share some thoughts with you. The title of my talk (“Personal Reflections on the State of the World”) was meant to be general enough to give me plenty of leeway to talk about almost anything, because, frankly, when I was asked what the title would be, I hadn’t yet had much time to think about what I wanted to say.  At this point, having given it more thought, I think I would at least amend the title by adding this subtitle: “Randy’s Ongoing Meditation on Fear.”  I think you’ll see what I mean. FIVE CRISES But let me start with the state of the world and a brief recap of what appear to me to be 5 of the most serious, most threatening, most daunting crises we face – crises that many of us here have devoted significant portions of our lives attempting to address – and few, if any, with more faithfulness, perseverance, and equanimity than the monks and nuns of Nipponzan Myohoji.  First, the crisis of nuclear power. This is from The Economist, of March 10, 2012 (one year after Fukushima):  “The triple meltdown at Fukushima was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.  The damage extends far beyond a lost power station, a stricken operator (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO), and an intense debate about the future of the nation’s nuclear power plants.  It goes beyond the trillions of yen that will be needed for a decade-long effort to decommission the reactors and remove their wrecked cores, if indeed that proves possible, and the even greater sums that may be required for decontamination (which one [Tokyo University expert] thinks could cost as much as 50 trillion yen, or $623 billion).  It reaches into the lives of the displaced, and of those further afield who know they have been exposed to the fallout from the disaster….For parallels that do justice to the disaster, the Japanese find themselves reaching back to the second world war, otherwise seldom discussed….And, of course, to Hiroshima.” There are roughly  [400-?] operating operating nuclear power plants in the world today.  104 of them are in the U.S., most of them old and approaching, or already having exceeded, their 40-year design life.  Many of them, including the Vermont Yankee nuke, on the Conn. River 20 miles north of here and the Pilgrim nuke in Plymouth, 40 miles south of Boston, have been given permission by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate for an additional 20 years, and at 120% of the power output they were designed to produce.  23 of the U.S. reactors, including both Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim, are of almost the identical make and flawed design (courtesy of General Electric) as the nukes still melting down in Fukushima. Continue reading →

Palestine West Bank / Bahrain / Burma / MST / Iraq By Nicholas Sismil, Peaceworkers Intern – PeaceWorkersUS.org Palestine, West Bank In recent news, Palestinian actions in the West Bank have moved more towards constructive programme in the last month or two. Palestinians and international activists have built a total of three protest villages thus far. Two have been destroyed but the recent village is still standing. The first camp was constructed on Friday, January 11th. By noon, the Palestinians announced to the world that the village of Bab-al Shams (Gateway to the Sun) had been established. A day later, there were approximately 250 residents, a village council, a health clinic, a media center, a communal kitchen, and the beginnings of a library. The majority of the residents were students, activists, and popular committee leaders. However, residents of various locations in Palestine and even those from 1948 were living there as well. Click here to read the entire report in pdf format.  which will take you to: https://www.peaceworkers.us/peaceworkers-report-january-2013.pdf

David Hartsough has been a peace activist since the 1950s, a conscientious objector, a civil disobedient, arrested over 100 times.  In 2002 he cofounded the Nonviolent Peace Force ( nonviolentpeaceforce.org ).  Hartsough is the executive director of Peace Workers ( peaceworkersus.org ).  He discusses the current status of war and peace in our culture. Total run time: 29:00 Host: David Swanson. Producer: David Swanson. Engineer: Christiane Brown. Music by Duke Ellington. Download or get embed code from  Archive  or   AudioPort  or  LetsTryDemocracy . Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

December 12th, 2012 By International Solidarity Activists Gaza- Israeli forces fired live ammunition and tear gas at unarmed farmers and international solidarity activists working in Khuza’a, a small village outside of Khan Younis located near the Israeli border. At 10:30 AM, the farmers arrived and began to plough approximately 100 meters from the separation fence while internationals lined up in between the border and the farmers. They were quickly met by an Israeli military jeep and transport vehicle. An Israeli soldier issued a warning in Arabic to leave the area and then fired two rounds into the air. The farmers and internationals remained calm and continued their work and the Israeli soldiers left the area.

Israeli soldier aiming

At around 11 AM, approximately 20 Palestinians and farmers gathered around 300 meters back from the fence. Two military jeeps returned to the area. One soldier exited his vehicle and fired four shots in the direction of the farmers and activists. The fourth shot crossed the line of the activists and landed in the field being ploughed. Again, the Palestinians and internationals were not deterred. The Israeli jeeps left and the farmers finished working on this section of land and moved on to an adjacent plot.  Read more

 Dalu home in Gaza obliterated 

On November 18, 2012, the Dalu family, huddled at home, waited for the war that surrounded them to end. Like everyone else in Gaza, they had nowhere to run. At 2:30PM, without warning, an Israeli missile flattened the entire building, killing all ten occupants and two from the building adjacent. Not only was the building destroyed, but the bomb carved out a deep crater where the home had been. It took four days of searching through the rubble for rescuers to find the bodies of the ten family members and two neighbors. Palestinian citizens are all theoretically eligible for a Palestinian passport. However, Israel determines whether the applicant will receive the passport. Because of this, thousands of civilians have been denied the right to exit the prison most of them were born into and will likely die in, the prison of Gaza. The Dalu family did not have the option to flee to Israel or Egypt for safety as the borders were only open intermittently during this most recent conflict, and passage was restricted to medical emergencies and humanitarian supplies. read more

Mirrored from www.mettacenter.org — July, 2012

I want to make an offer to my fellow Americans who are, like myself, reeling from the worst “random” shooting the country has ever seen.  My question: Have you had enough?  Because if you have, I can tell you how to stop this kind of madness.  I know that’s a bold claim, but this is not a time for small measures.

We cannot fix this tomorrow, because we didn’t cause it yesterday.  We have been building up to this domestic holocaust since – to take one milestone – television was made available to the general public at the conclusion of World War Two.

If you are still with me, you are prepared to believe that it was not a coincidence that this massacre took place at the scene of an extremely violent, “long-awaited” movie.  Psychologists have proved over and over again that – guess what – exposure to violent imagery produces disturbances in the mind that must, in course of time, take form in outward behavior.  The imagery can be in anymedium, nor does it matter whether on the surface of our minds we think what we’re seeing is real or made up.  This is a natural, scientific law.  Exactly who will crack next and in what setting is nearly impossible to predict, and in any case it’s ridiculous to try to run around stopping the resulting violence from being acted out after the mental damage has been done.  The only sane approach is not to do it in the first place.

As Lt. Col. Dave Grossman pointed out in his book, Let’s Stop Killing Our Kids, the video games that the Army uses to prepare ordinary men and women for combat, in other words to wipe out the normal empathy and inhibitions against hurting others that we’ve built up over millennia – a process known as civilization – are the very same games our young people buy across the counter throughout the country.

Of course, there are other factors.  At some point we will have to talk about readily available weapons; at some point we’ll have to realize that a nation that engages in heartless drone warfare, torture, and extrajudicial killings cannot expect to live in peace.  But until we liberate our minds from the endless pounding of violent imagery I fear we won’t be able to think clearly about those factors (or for that matter anything else).
With rare exceptions, film and video game producers will not stop turning out these dehumanizing products as long as there is profit to be made from them – and not enough sophistication about culture or the human mind to warn us about their dangers.  But there is a way, one that has worked well on the small scales on which it has so far been tried: don’t watch them.  Captain Boycott had the right approach.

Right now police have been posted at theaters where this same movie is being shown – still.  But ask yourself, what are they protecting?  Is it perhaps the belief that violence is just entertaining?  People, tell me when you’ve had enough.

---

If you are moved by this article, please pass it along. If you are a member of the press and would like to interview the Metta Center for our perspective on this tragedy, you can contact us at 707.774.6299 or by email: info@mettacenter.org. 

---

 

December 15, 2011, 9:41 am  —  Mirrored from wagingnonviolence.org 

“Building a Rainbow” is the title of an old poster I picked up somewhere along the way. The rainbow’s swath of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet layers is dazzling—and only half finished. In the picture, this symbol of peace is not an idealistic dream but something real. It is under construction, with a troupe of cranes carefully maneuvering sections into place, countless trucks and overworked paint wagons, scaffolding everywhere, and a flotilla of helicopters lumbering across the sky, each with its own precarious splotch of color dangling below.

We live in a violent world. But we also live in a world where a growing number of people everywhere are determined to confound the assumption that there is nothing we can do about this. They gamble that violence need not have the final word. They wager that there are options. They assert that we needn’t be victims of a cycle of violent history; rather, we can dare to be active subjects of a more nonviolent history that engages and transforms the violence around us. For them, violent history isn’t a given, it is made. So, too, is a nonviolent one.

Continue reading →

Mirrored from Tom Atlee’s transformational thinkpad

By Tom Atlee  — November 24, 2011

---

by Nathan Schneider | November 13, 2011, 4:19 pm

  
by David Hartsough — November 7, 2011

The Occupation in Freedom Plaza in Washington DC (two blocks from the White House) and the occupations around the country and the world give me more hope than anything which I have experienced since the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960’s.

Hundreds of thousands or millions of people from all walks of life and all ages, races and religious backgrounds– and especially young people- are waking up and saying with their bodies “We aren’t going to take it any more. We will not put up with a society where the government does not represent the people, but too often represents the corporations and the wealthy. We will not put up with a government which gives unlimited hundreds of billions of dollars to fight foreign wars, create more nuclear weapons and build military bases around the world while making drastic cuts across the board to programs for education and health and welfare of the American people.

 

Continue reading →

by Paul K. Chappell
October 31, 2011

Mirrored from Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

 

I graduated from West Point in 2002, served in the army for seven years, and was deployed to Baghdad in 2006. I left active duty in 2009 as a captain, and I am currently serving as the Peace Leadership Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, where I work to empower people with the skills and ideals that allow us to effectively wage peace.

If we compare how much the average twenty-two-year-old army officer knows about waging war and how much the average twenty-two-year-old activist knows about waging peace, there is a big difference. Although I admire their deep commitment to waging peace, many activists have not had enough training in the nonviolent methods that lead to positive change. Many activists have not thoroughly studied the brilliant techniques of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, and other peace warriors.

 

Continue reading →

In Westlake Park, Seattle, shortly before police removed the tent and
arrested occupiers. Sign reads: 250,000 Homeless Vets Is
Unacceptable. (Photo by Sarah van Gelder.)

The OccupyWallStreet movement continues to spread with more than 1,500 sites. More and more people are speaking up for a society that works for the 99 percent, not just the 1 percent.

Here are 10 recommendations from the YES! Magazine staff for ways to build the power and momentum of this movement. Only two of them involve sleeping outside:

Continue reading →

By Starhawk  OCT 20, 2011

“We are the 99 percent!” The chant thunders through the streets, from Wall Street in New York City, where the Occupy movement began, to K Street in Washington, where high-paid lobbyists influence government, to streets in cities and small towns all across the nation. In hundreds of Occupations, ordinary people have been moved to fill parks and streets and squares with signs, tents, impromptu soup kitchens, intense conversations and lengthy meetings.

What’s going on? Pundits splutter about the movement’s lack of ‘demands’ and coherent messaging, but sound bites and 10-point programs arise from central committees and top-down hierarchies. The Occupy movement demonstrates a very different model of organizing: emergent, decentralized, without a command and control structure.

 

Continue reading →

WHAT IF activists around the world who want to be more effective could turn to a database of actual campaigns, to get ideas for creative nonviolent strategies and tactics?
 
WHAT IF scholars and writers who are researching alternatives to violence could turn to a global database with hundreds of cases where people used nonviolent action to struggle for human rights, eco-justice, democracy?

 

Continue reading →

 

---

Rather than being victims of history, David Hartsough believes we should make it – he's raising a ‘peace force’ to do just that
By Kate Rope  —  Bangkok Post  —  2002

---

George W. Bush is dividing the world and waging war. Osama Bin Laden is skillfully eluding capture and giving hope to the thousands he has trained to kill.  Betwixt the two, hot spots in Israel and the occupied territories are descending into ever more gruesome violence, other countries are being forced to choose which side of the “war” they support, and nobody is talking about peace.

Except, perhaps, David Hartsough, who is quietly building an army in the midst of  the fury. A veteran of the civil rights struggle in the US and a peace activist who's been on the front lines of some of the most destructive clashes of the last half century, Hartsough is travelling the globe to rally a force that will march into the danger zones of the world armed with only a commitment to peace. Born from the work left unfinished by Mahatma Gandhi some 70 years ago, it's a hard-sell in times like these, but Hartsough is an experienced and persuasive salesman.

Continue reading →

https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_other_way_out_20110228/
Posted on Feb 28, 2011  —  By Chris Hedges

I have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear. 

A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out.  Full Article
 

Another step toward mainstreaming nonviolence
by Ken Butigan | February 12, 2011, 11:47 am

The movement that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty year autocratic rule not only has created a spectacular breakthrough for Egyptian democracy, it has bequeathed a priceless gift to the rest of us in every part of the planet.

For eighteen days the Egyptian people carried out an unarmed revolution with determination, creativity, and a daring willingness to risk.  They marched, they improvised, they prayed, they connected with one another.  Most of all, they stayed put—and invited the nation to join them.

Faced with a corrupt and dictatorial police state, such a movement might have been tempted to wage armed struggle. Instead, they reached for, experimented with, and remained largely steadfast about another way: nonviolent people power.
Continue reading →

• Includes dinner buffet. Event proceeds will support the future publication of David's life stories – 50 years of promoting nonviolence.
   
• Sponsored by the Hartsough Duncan Founders Circle.
   
• All contributions are tax deductible.

*We are delighted to have Martin Sheen join Medea Benjamin as honorary co-chair. Though Martin  is currently out of the country, and cannot guarantee his presence, he'll certainly be with us in spirt.