Uncategorized – Peaceworkers

Book Group—Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist

Web Editor — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:55:24 +0000

Book Group—Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist

Monday, May 9, 20223:00 PM
Monday, June 6, 20224:00 PM

Pace e Bene Online Event

Google Calendar ICS

Waging Peace Published as Free Online Audiobook

Web Editor — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 18:21:38 +0000

Jan. 28, 2022 — The Waging Peace book is now on YouTube, each chapter read by Dr. Steward Burns. (see link in story)

Waging Peace: 2014 Interview on Dedham, MA, Public Television

Web Editor — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 04:12:36 +0000

Waging Peace: 2014 Interview on Dedham, MA, Public Television

To see video controls, hover mouse pointer over video area.

David Hartsough interview on TheWorldIsMyCountry.comSeptember 2020

Web Editor — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 09:54:06 +0000

David Hartsough is a Co-Founder of World BEYOND War, a global movement to end war – making it as illegal to kill people outside countries as it is inside! He has been Waging Peace since meeting Martin Luther King at age 15 – from civil-rights sit-ins to blocking nuclear weapons plants at LIvermore Laboratory. He’s blocked trains carrying munitions to fuel Central American wars — enforcing international law as laid out at Nuremberg. He’s Waged Peace in some of the most dangerous and war-torn places on the planet — including the Philippines, Iran, Kosovo and even the Soviet Union. Arthur met him in the early 60’s when David, a fellow Quaker, led the San Francisco to Moscow peace march — to end the cold war before it ended all of us!

At a time when the US and the World are teetering on the bring of tyranny, ecocide and nuclear extinction, we’ll talk to David about how we can inspire the frustrated and angry to gain real power by renouncing violence and waging peace!

David recommended these books: “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, “Waging Nonviolent Struggle”, “Global Security System: An Alternative to War” Also the film “A Force More Powerful” and these websites: ChooseDemocracy.us, WorldBeyondWar.org, Nonviolentpeaceforce.org, ThePoorPeoplesCampaign.org and Divestfromwarmachine.org

David invites you to buy his book “Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist”! You can read free chapters in PDF format here.

David Hartsough: Remembering Past Warsa talk at the San Francisco Public Library — 2017

Web Editor — Sun, 24 May 2020 10:26:00 +0000

Dr. King’s Radical Revolution of Values

Web Editor — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 08:56:48 +0000

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

David Hartsough talk: Waging Peace Around the WorldJanuary 13, 2020

Web Editor — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 11:43:47 +0000

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. In this talk, David explores the power of nonviolence as he has witnessed it unfolding around the world.

There MUST be a Better WayThoughts as the USA Stumbles Blindly Toward War with Iran

Web Editor — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 08:57:28 +0000

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. Even our high-tech military equipment silently accuses us: If we are smart enough to build fiendishly complex nuclear weapons, can we really be so stupid that we can’t talk to people in other countries? Something is deeply out of whack in our current psychology. (You can see my online library of conflict resolution resources at www.NewConversations.net )

Here are some more of my reflections on the current plague of violence and irrationality:

War is full of painful contradictions that burden and diminish all of us, participant and bystander alike: We Americans tend to celebrate our snipers, bomber pilots and stealthy special forces as noble and heroic warriors, while at the same time we denigrate as beastly assassins and terrorists the snipers, bombers and stealthy special forces of particular other countries.

To embrace such a double standard is to retreat into a form of socially approved irrationality edging on madness, a madness that can turn us into monsters, both on the stage of the world and in our everyday lives. We have seen this split-mindedness before in recent history, and it is at work today in ethnic cleansing campaigns around the world. How would people in the United States feel if some natural disaster caused U.S. citizens to flee to Mexico, and the Mexican government responded by separating children and babies from parents and put the children and babies in cages?

Jesus counsels us to treat others as we would like to be treated. The sounds of endless military marching bands can never bang loud enough to drown out this quiet teaching. Somewhere in our hearts we know that it is true.

Violence is often excused with the idea the “I had no other choice.” This is often put forth to blame external circumstances for our violent actions. But the question remains, in the ten years before the moment of violence, how much effort did we put into finding and practicing alternatives. In the short run, a person may be overwhelmed by circumstances. But in the long run, I believe that we will get what we put a lot of energy into preparing for. (Our trillions of dollars invested over decades in creating machines of death shows every other country what we have come to believe in.) What seeds are we sowing? What are we preparing to reap?

Right now it seems like there is no way out of the growing spiral of violence. But I am convinced this is exactly the moment when we most need to keep looking for a better way, to keep believing in a better way, to say, in loving defiance, they may blow me up, but I will never accept that this was the best that we could do.

Forgiveness and the Sorrow of War
(my personal name for a sculpture by Josefina de
Vasconcellos at Coventry Cathedral)

Aug. 6, 2019 Rally Against Designing Armageddon at Livermore Lab

Web Editor — Sat, 03 Aug 2019 22:11:42 +0000

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.

FEATURED RALLY SPEAKERS:

• Nobuaki Hanaoka, the special guest speaker, was an infant when the bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. His mother and sister died from illnesses linked to radiation poisoning and his brother died at age 39 from premature aging associated with fallout from the bomb. Rev. Hanaoka is a retired minister in the United Methodist Church, who came to the U.S. following seminary training in Japan. He has settled in the Bay Area where he speaks, writes and teaches on topics of peace and human rights. Rev. Hanaoka will present the “Hibakusha Appeal” and solicit signatures from participants (see WHY, below).

• Daniel Ellsberg will be the keynote speaker. He is perhaps best known as the whistleblower who released “The Pentagon Papers” to hasten an end to the war in Vietnam. He was an analyst at RAND Corp. and a consultant to the Defense Dept., specializing in problems of command and control of nuclear weapons, war plans and crisis decision-making. In 2017 Ellsberg released his critically acclaimed memoirs, “America’s Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”

• Dr. Sharat G. Lin will speak on current nuclear flashpoints. He is a research fellow and past President of the San José Peace and Justice Center. Lin writes and lectures on global political economy, labor migration, social movements, and public health. Last August he delivered an apology from the American people to the Japanese people for the U.S. atomic bombings at mass rallies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A medical radiation scientist by training, Lin has connections to the nuclear energy programs in Iran and India, providing him with inside knowledge of the decision-making behind those programs. His insights on the nuclear calculations of Iran and North Korea are reinforced by personal visits to these countries, and provide a vision for denuclearization.

• Marylia Kelley will address Livermore Lab’s role in promoting a new, destabilizing global arms race. She is Executive Director at the Livermore-based Tri-Valley CAREs and brings 36 years of research, writing and facilitating public participation in decisions regarding the Lab and the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Kelley has testified before the House Armed Services Committee of the U.S. Congress, the California Legislature and the National Academy of Sciences, among other deliberative bodies. She has lived in Livermore since 1976. Kelley was inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame in 2002.

• Rafael Jesús González will offer poetry and insight into the movement for nuclear disarmament. He is the City of Berkeley’s first Poet Laureate and an organizer of the 1983 International Day of Nuclear Disarmament. González has taught at the Univ. of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State Univ., Univ. of Texas, and Laney College in Oakland, where he founded the Department of Mexican and Latin-American Studies. His poetry and academic articles appear in reviews and anthologies in the U. S., Mexico, and abroad. In 2013 he received the César E. Chávez Lifetime Award. The City of Berkeley honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.

• Roxanne will speak on divestment from nuclear weapons and war. She is a retired Judge who has worked and lived in Indian Country and seen firsthand the impacts of sacrifice zones created by the development of nuclear weapons. Roxanne first came into contact with nuclear issues in the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, which moved her to pursue graduate studies in renewable energy alternatives to the pollution, destruction and terror that nuclear weapons inflict. Roxanne currently organizes with CODEPINK’s Divest From the War Machine campaign.

• Andrew Kodama and Julia Malakiman are co-emcees. They represent the fresh, dynamic leadership of young adults in the peace movement. Kodama is an educator, artist, and organizer born and raised in Walnut Creek, California. After working for the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center for two years doing community outreach he recently transitioned into the role of Executive Director in June. Malakiman returns to the Bay Area after completing graduate studies in France in Human Rights. She leads the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center in Palo Alto. As Director, she amplifies youth and minority voices while honing in on the grassroots success that local activists before her have fought for and achieved.

WHY: Our world is facing numerous nuclear flashpoints within global conflicts and crises that could catastrophically escalate at any moment. Under Trump, the U.S. is on a path to spend nearly $2,000,000,000,000 (trillion) over thirty years to upgrade its nuclear weapons complex, warheads and delivery systems when inflation and the novel concepts in the Nuclear Posture Review are included. Russia, China, France, U.K., India, Israel and Pakistan have begun nuclear modernizations of their own. While halting talks with North Korea have commenced, the Trump Administration has scuttled the Iran nuclear deal and is escalating pressure on the Iranian regime.

The U.S. announcement, followed by Russia’s, of its intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty on August 2, 2019 is another sign of deepening crisis among the nuclear-armed states. Following the 2002 U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, this latest move imperils the entire structure of arms control and disarmament, including prospects for extension of the New START Treaty that expires in 2021. We may be heading into new, unpredictable rounds of arms racing.

Having experienced unbearable devastation and sorrow, the A-bomb survivors – known as “Hibakusha”, continue to passionately appeal for a world without nuclear weapons based on their conviction that “no one shall ever again suffer as we have”. In the face of growing nuclear dangers they have launched the “Hibakusha Appeal”, a major international petition drive “call[ing] on all State Governments to conclude a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons. The average age of the Hibakusha now exceeds 80. It is our strong desire to achieve a nuclear-weapon-free world in our lifetime so that succeeding generations of people will not see hell on earth ever again.”

OPPORTUNITIES: Interviews in advance or at the rally site with speakers, artists and organizers are available on request. Photo opportunities will be available at the rally site at 8 AM, along the march route and at Livermore Lab’s West Gate. There will be signs and banners. Call for details.

Click Here for the PDF version of this Media Advisory….

An American Casualty of US Economic Sanctions on Iran

Web Editor — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 01:50:22 +0000

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.

The hospital was ready to do the medical procedure the next morning. My health insurance in the US is with Kaiser Permanente, and Kaiser tells all their members that they are covered for any medical problems while traveling outside of the US. However, when we checked with Kaiser, I was told that they could not send the money to cover the procedure because of the US economic sanctions against Iran.

We appealed that decision but were told the decision was final. No money could be sent to Iran for medical care, even of an emergency nature for US citizens. The doctors also told me that if I were to fly back to the US without surgery, I could very possibly have a heart attack – which could be fatal.

For each of three days they prepared me for the surgery, but for three days the answer came back “NO. No money could be sent to Iran for this procedure. It was not permitted by US government.”

Fortunately for me, two wonderful women at the US interest section of the embassy of Switzerland in Iran, heard about my situation and were able to convince the US embassy in Switzerland to loan the money to me to be used for my medical procedure. Within hours I was moved to The Pars hospital, which specializes in heart work and the procedure was done by Dr. Tiznobeyk, a very skilled heart surgeon.

I spent another night in the hospital and then went back to the hotel to recuperate. I am, of course, very grateful to be alive but am acutely aware that people in Iran can’t turn to the Swiss embassy for help.

While in hospitals in Iran I talked with doctors and nurses, and heard many stories about people who could not get needed medicines for their illnesses, and died as a result. For example, one person had cancer and the medicines were available in Europe, but they could not do the financial transactions to buy them and she died.

The economic sanctions have also caused extreme inflation and the cost of food, medicine and other necessities grows almost daily. I have come to understand that economic sanctions are indeed acts of war. And the people who are suffering are not the government or religious leaders of Iran, but the ordinary people. I hope my personal story may be helpful to assist Americans to realize the violence of economic sanctions in which millions of people of Iran continue to suffer and die because of our government’s policies. I fully agree with what the Iranian Foreign Minister told us: You cannot get security for one country at the expense of security for other countries. We badly need to learn that real security can only be found when we have security for all nations.

I come back home with a heart which is much stronger but also with a much greater commitment to stop US policies of economic sanctions which I believe are acts of war. I will continue the work of getting the US to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement and get on the track of peace-building rather than threatening acts of war. I hope you will join me.

David Hartsough is a Quaker from San Francisco, author of Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, Director of Peaceworkers and Co-founder of World beyond War and the Nonviolent Peaceforce

For more info on the trip see: http://www.codepink.org/iranblogs

For more info on the effect of US sanctions on Iran see:

https://worldbeyondwar.org/iranian-sanctions-iraq-redux/ and

https://worldbeyondwar.org/fear-hate-and-violence-the-human-cost-of-us-sanctions-on-iran/

Black Arm Bands Classic Statement on Protests of Conscience

Web Editor — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 21:37:30 +0000

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.

Mary Beth Tinker in 2017 holding detention slip see received for campus protest.

In 1965, the whole world seemed upside-down. Our teachers taught us not to fight, but adults were trying to solve their differences through war. In history class, we learned that everyone had equal rights, but working on a school project about lynching, I learned that blacks had been terrorized for years, even after the Emancipation Proclamation. And it was still going on. Walking with my friend Charles, kids would yell, “Hey, nigger lover!” because he was black and I was white. On the news, we saw children in Selma and Birmingham attacked with dogs and firehoses just for wanting good schools. My friends and I wanted to do more, and would join protestors at the capital, picketing for racial justice and singing freedom songs. There was hope, like now.

But by Christmas that year, about a thousand American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam and President Johnson had to decide whether to escalate the war or try to negotiate peace. A lot of people thought it was patriotic to support the war, but others thought we should try peace. One of them, Senator Robert Kennedy, proposed a Christmas truce. Some students in Des Moines decided to wear black armbands to support him, and wrote an article about it in their school newspaper. The principals saw the article and ruled that any students who tried to wear black armbands to school would be suspended.

After that, we weren’t sure what to do. We’d learned about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment in school, and we felt free speech should apply to kids, too. We also had the examples of brave people standing up against dogs and firehoses to fight racism. In the end, we decided to go ahead and wear the armbands, and some of us were suspended.

That might have been the end of the story, if not for the American Civil Liberties Union. They provided a lawyer, Dan Johnston, who helped us win our case at the Supreme Court on February 24, 1969 by a vote of 7-2. It was a victory for all students because it protects student speech at schools to this day.

In 40 years, things have changed. But the desire of students to express themselves never will. Just last year, Heather Gillman won a case in federal court after her principal banned her from wearing a rainbow belt to show support for LGBT students at her school in Florida. Using the ruling from our case, Heather and the ACLU took her school to court and won.

Censorship still happens all the time to students. But I meet so many students who keep speaking up about all kinds of things they care about: their schools, the environment, peace, voting rights, racial discrimination, immigration and LGBT rights, and so many others. In many ways, the law is on the side of students who want to express themselves, but laws are not always clear, and they are always being interpreted and re-interpreted. Also, some administrators may not know the laws, or follow them. It takes students like Heather to keep the Constitution alive by using it.

As a gay teenager, I experienced discrimination myself. I’m grateful that the precedent established by the Supreme Court 40 years ago is still protecting students, including LGBT students and their friends. And I’m glad Heather was strong, and that she and her friends and stood up for themselves and the Bill of Rights.

I was scared the day I wore that armband to school, but I knew I had to speak up. The world seemed upside-down, but my friends and I had courageous role models to show us how to stand up for what we believed. If you look around, there are many others like that, whether in your home, your school, your neighborhood, your town or even across the world. You can join them to change the world, and when you do your life will be meaningful and very interesting. It certainly has been for me!

Mary Beth Tinker is a nurse in Washington, D.C., and was the lead plaintiff in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. In her spare time she travels all over the U.S. talking with students about their First Amendment rights and the importance of speaking out.

Poor People’s Campaign and more — David Hartsough Interview

Web Editor — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 10:43:28 +0000

June 9 2018 — by Metta Center

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing‐oriented” society to a “person‐oriented” society.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

David Hartsough, Executive Director of Peaceworkers, author of Waging Peace, and long-time nonviolent activist joins Nonviolence Radio to talk about the Poor People’s Campaign, some gray areas of nonviolence, and the power of people who are ready to take action to transform our society through the means of justice and love. Plus, our segment of Nonviolence in the News and an analysis of the Direct Action Everywhere action in Petaluma, CA.

click here to listen…

Remembering Gene Sharp (1928 – 2018)

Web Editor — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 22:21:15 +0000

Some thoughts about Gene Sharp from David Hartsough, Director of Peaceworkers January 31, 2018

What a mighty contribution Gene Sharp has made to humankind’s understanding of nonviolent struggle and the power of nonviolent action.

Through Gene’s work and writing people around the world have learned about the power and effectiveness of nonviolent struggle and have put that understanding into action and built powerful campaigns and movements to create positive change in their societies including building people power movements to overthrow many dictators and governments which were not listening to their people. We and all future generations are grateful for Gene’s life and all he has contributed. With deep appreciation for a LIFE WELL LIVED!!! Gene Sharp, PRESENTE!!

A couple memories of our work together.

Gene and I were in Moscow at the invitation of the Living Ring after the August attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev in 1991. Boris Yeltsin and the others opposing the coup were hiding out in the Parliament building, while 10,000 people (the Living Ring) surrounded it for three days and nights nonviolently facing the tanks and soldiers who had order to attack. The Living Ring wanted training in how to nonviolently defeat future attempted coups against the government. Gene gave talks and we led workshops on nonviolent means to defeat further coup d’etats. It was a real privilege to work with Gene who selflessly shared the power of nonviolent struggle with people, groups and movements who wanted to use peaceful methods to challenge oppression and injustice.

In 1997 I took the several zerox copies of the manuscript of Gene’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy to what was then Yugoslavia to give to students in the nonviolent movement in Kosovo. I left a copy with Women in Black in Belgrade. A copy of that manuscript got into the hands of OTPOR, the student movement in Belgrade. It was translated into Serbian and published there and became the handbook for the courageous nonviolent movement which brought down the dictatorship of Milosovich. Gene, needless to say, was very pleased.

In December 1991 Gene and I were in Moscow at the invitation of the Living Ring after the August attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin and the others opposing the coup were hiding out in the Parliament building, while 10,000 people (the Living Ring) nonviolently surrounded it for three days and nights nonviolently facing the tanks and soldiers who had order to attack. The Living Ring wanted training in how to nonviolently defeat future attempted coups against the government. Gene gave talks and we led workshops on nonviolent means to defeat further coup d’etats. It was a real privilege to work with Gene who selflessly shared the power of nonviolent struggle with people, groups and movements who wanted to use peaceful methods to challenge oppression and injustice.

Brief obituary:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/gene-sharp-advocate-nonviolent-resistance-dies-90-52710416

How anti-Vietnam War activists stopped violent protest from hijacking their movement

Web Editor — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 09:57:28 +0000

Robert Levering — March 7, 2017 — https://www.truth-out.org

Only the Vietnam era protests match the size and breadth of the movement unleashed by the election of Donald Trump. One point of comparison: The massive march and rally against the Vietnam War in 1969 was the largest political demonstration in American history until the even more massive Women’s March in January.

All around us we can see signs that the movement has only just begun. Consider, for instance, that a large percentage of those in the Women’s March engaged in their very first street protest. Or that thousands of protesters spontaneously flocked to airports to challenge the anti-Muslim ban. Or that hundreds of citizens have confronted their local congressional representatives at their offices and town hall meetings about the potential repeal of Obamacare and other Trump/Republican policies.

As activists prepare for future demonstrations, many are rightfully concerned about the potential disruptions by those using Black Bloc tactics, which involve engaging in property destruction and physical attacks on police and others. They often appear at demonstrations dressed in black and cover their faces to disguise their identities. Their numbers have been relatively small to date. But they garner an outsized amount of media coverage, such as a violent protest in Berkeley to block an appearance by an alt-right provocateur or the punching of a white nationalist during Trump’s inauguration. The result is that an otherwise peaceful demonstration’s primary message can get lost in a fog of rock throwing and tear gas. Even worse, fewer people are likely to turn up at future protests, and potential allies get turned off.

This is not a new phenomenon. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. confronted this issue. So did those of us active in the struggle against the Vietnam War.

It’s Time to Claim Our Highest Vision:Let’s Embrace the Great Turning

Web Editor — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 09:44:15 +0000

Saturday, February 25, 2017 By Chris Moore-Backman, Truthout | Op-Ed Across the nation, activists, organizers and newly enlivened social change onlookers are hungry for a shared, coherent sense of direction. George Lakey’s recent 10-point strategy for nonviolent resistance to the new Trump administration offers an excellent beginning to an absolutely critical conversation about comprehensive movement strategy. But our many social change movements, which together have begun to comprise the macro “movement of movements” Lakey describes, may have a short window of time to get our strategic ducks in a row. The new administration has demonstrated a determined will to consolidate power, and to do so quickly. Fascistic executive orders; the systematic delegitimization of existing institutions, checks and balances; unfettered propaganda; and the normalization of bombastic and hateful rhetoric are stark early-warning signs of totalitarian takeover. In this setting, as Lakey argues, the new administration is relying on social changemakers to stay in their customary mode of “playing defense.” We’re called to be culture-shifting movement builders, but by setting enough fires in enough places, Trump, Bannon and Co. seek to render us firefighters. read more…

Pope Francis’ 2017 New Years Day Peace Message

Web Editor — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 17:58:30 +0000

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. A broken world 2. While the last century knew the devastation of two deadly World Wars, the threat of nuclear war and a great number of other conflicts, today, sadly, we find ourselves engaged in a horrifying world war fought piecemeal. It is not easy to know if our world is presently more or less violent than in the past, or to know whether modern means of communications and greater mobility have made us more aware of violence, or, on the other hand, increasingly inured to it. In any case, we know that this “piecemeal” violence, of different kinds and levels, causes great suffering: wars in different countries and continents; terrorism, organized crime and unforeseen acts of violence; the abuses suffered by migrants and victims of human trafficking; and the devastation of the environment. Where does this lead? Can violence achieve any goal of lasting value? Or does it merely lead to retaliation and a cycle of deadly conflicts that benefit only a few “warlords”? Violence is not the cure for our broken world. Countering violence with violence leads at best to forced migrations and enormous suffering, because vast amounts of resources are diverted to military ends and away from the everyday needs of young people, families experiencing hardship, the elderly, the infirm and the great majority of people in our world. At worst, it can lead to the death, physical and spiritual, of many people, if not of all. The Good News 3. Jesus himself lived in violent times. Yet he taught that the true battlefield, where violence and peace meet, is the human heart: for “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mk 7:21). But Christ’s message in this regard offers a radically positive approach. He unfailingly preached God’s unconditional love, which welcomes and forgives. He taught his disciples to love their enemies (cf. Mt 5:44) and to turn the other cheek (cf. Mt 5:39). When he stopped her accusers from stoning the woman caught in adultery (cf. Jn 8:1-11), and when, on the night before he died, he told Peter to put away his sword (cf. Mt 26:52), Jesus marked out the path of nonviolence. He walked that path to the very end, to the cross, whereby he became our peace and put an end to hostility (cf. Eph 2:14-16). Whoever accepts the Good News of Jesus is able to acknowledge the violence within and be healed by God’s mercy, becoming in turn an instrument of reconciliation. In the words of Saint Francis of Assisi: “As you announce peace with your mouth, make sure that you have greater peace in your hearts”. To be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence. As my predecessor Benedict XVI observed, that teaching “is realistic because it takes into account that in the world there is too much violence, too much injustice, and therefore that this situation cannot be overcome except by countering it with more love, with more goodness. This ‘more’ comes from God”. He went on to stress that: “For Christians, nonviolence is not merely tactical behaviour but a person’s way of being, the attitude of one who is so convinced of God’s love and power that he or she is not afraid to tackle evil with the weapons of love and truth alone. Love of one’s enemy constitutes the nucleus of the ‘Christian revolution’”. The Gospel command to love your enemies (cf. Lk 6:27) “is rightly considered the magna carta of Christian nonviolence. It does not consist in succumbing to evil…, but in responding to evil with good (cf. Rom 12:17-21), and thereby breaking the chain of injustice”. More powerful than violence 4. Nonviolence is sometimes taken to mean surrender, lack of involvement and passivity, but this is not the case. When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she clearly stated her own message of active nonviolence: “We in our family don’t need bombs and guns, to destroy to bring peace – just get together, love one another… And we will be able to overcome all the evil that is in the world”. For the force of arms is deceptive. “While weapons traffickers do their work, there are poor peacemakers who give their lives to help one person, then another and another and another”; for such peacemakers, Mother Teresa is “a symbol, an icon of our times”. Last September, I had the great joy of proclaiming her a Saint. I praised her readiness to make herself available for everyone “through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded… She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity; she made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes – the crimes! – of poverty they created”. In response, her mission – and she stands for thousands, even millions of persons – was to reach out to the suffering, with generous dedication, touching and binding up every wounded body, healing every broken life. The decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced impressive results. The achievements of Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the liberation of India, and of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in combating racial discrimination will never be forgotten. Women in particular are often leaders of nonviolence, as for example, was Leymah Gbowee and the thousands of Liberian women, who organized pray-ins and nonviolent protest that resulted in high-level peace talks to end the second civil war in Liberia. Nor can we forget the eventful decade that ended with the fall of Communist regimes in Europe. The Christian communities made their own contribution by their insistent prayer and courageous action. Particularly influential were the ministry and teaching of Saint John Paul II. Reflecting on the events of 1989 in his 1991 Encyclical Centesimus Annus, my predecessor highlighted the fact that momentous change in the lives of people, nations and states had come about “by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice”. This peaceful political transition was made possible in part “by the non-violent commitment of people who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth”. Pope John Paul went on to say: “May people learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal disputes and war in international ones”. The Church has been involved in nonviolent peacebuilding strategies in many countries, engaging even the most violent parties in efforts to build a just and lasting peace. Such efforts on behalf of the victims of injustice and violence are not the legacy of the Catholic Church alone, but are typical of many religious traditions, for which “compassion and nonviolence are essential elements pointing to the way of life”. I emphatically reaffirm that “no religion is terrorist”. Violence profanes the name of God. Let us never tire of repeating: “The name of God cannot be used to justify violence. Peace alone is holy. Peace alone is holy, not war!” The domestic roots of a politics of nonviolence 5. If violence has its source in the human heart, then it is fundamental that nonviolence be practised before all else within families. This is part of that joy of love which I described last March in my Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, in the wake of two years of reflection by the Church on marriage and the family. The family is the indispensable crucible in which spouses, parents and children, brothers and sisters, learn to communicate and to show generous concern for one another, and in which frictions and even conflicts have to be resolved not by force but by dialogue, respect, concern for the good of the other, mercy and forgiveness. From within families, the joy of love spills out into the world and radiates to the whole of society. An ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence between individuals and among peoples cannot be based on the logic of fear, violence and closed-mindedness, but on responsibility, respect and sincere dialogue. Hence, I plead for disarmament and for the prohibition and abolition of nuclear weapons: nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutual assured destruction are incapable of grounding such an ethics. I plead with equal urgency for an end to domestic violence and to the abuse of women and children. The Jubilee of Mercy that ended in November encouraged each one of us to look deeply within and to allow God’s mercy to enter there. The Jubilee taught us to realize how many and diverse are the individuals and social groups treated with indifference and subjected to injustice and violence. They too are part of our “family”; they too are our brothers and sisters. The politics of nonviolence have to begin in the home and then spread to the entire human family. “Saint Therese of Lisieux invites us to practise the little way of love, not to miss out on a kind word, a smile or any small gesture which sows peace and friendship. An integral ecology is also made up of simple daily gestures that break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness”. My invitation 6. Peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the Church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms; she does so by her participation in the work of international institutions and through the competent contribution made by so many Christians to the drafting of legislation at all levels. Jesus himself offers a “manual” for this strategy of peacemaking in the Sermon on the Mount. The eight Beatitudes (cf. Mt 5:3-10) provide a portrait of the person we could describe as blessed, good and authentic. Blessed are the meek, Jesus tells us, the merciful and the peacemakers, those who are pure in heart, and those who hunger and thirst for justice. This is also a programme and a challenge for political and religious leaders, the heads of international institutions, and business and media executives: to apply the Beatitudes in the exercise of their respective responsibilities. It is a challenge to build up society, communities and businesses by acting as peacemakers. It is to show mercy by refusing to discard people, harm the environment, or seek to win at any cost. To do so requires “the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it and to make it a link in the chain of a new process”. To act in this way means to choose solidarity as a way of making history and building friendship in society. Active nonviolence is a way of showing that unity is truly more powerful and more fruitful than conflict. Everything in the world is inter-connected. Certainly differences can cause frictions. But let us face them constructively and non-violently, so that “tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity,” preserving “what is valid and useful on both sides”. I pledge the assistance of the Church in every effort to build peace through active and creative nonviolence. On 1 January 2017, the new Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development will begin its work. It will help the Church to promote in an ever more effective way “the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation” and concern for “migrants, those in need, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and the unemployed, as well as victims of armed conflict, natural disasters, and all forms of slavery and torture”. Every such response, however modest, helps to build a world free of violence, the first step towards justice and peace. In conclusion 8. As is traditional, I am signing this Message on 8 December, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary is the Queen of Peace. At the birth of her Son, the angels gave glory to God and wished peace on earth to men and women of good will (cf. Luke 2:14). Let us pray for her guidance. “All of us want peace. Many people build it day by day through small gestures and acts; many of them are suffering, yet patiently persevere in their efforts to be peacemakers”. In 2017, may we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to build nonviolent communities that care for our common home. “Nothing is impossible if we turn to God in prayer. Everyone can be an artisan of peace”. From the Vatican, 8 December 2016 Francis

Why I am Going to Russia — David Hartsough 6/14/2016

Web Editor — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 05:09:59 +0000

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. A former NATO general has said he believes there will be nuclear war in Europe within a year. Russia is also threatening use of its missiles and nuclear weapons on Europe and the US if attacked. Back in 1962 when I met with President John Kennedy in the White House, he told us he had been reading The Guns of August describing how everyone was arming to the teeth to show the “other nations” they were strong and avoid getting embroiled in World War I. But, JFK continued, arming to the teeth was exactly what did provoke the “other side” and got everyone embroiled in that terrible war. JFK said to us in May 1962,”It is scary how similar the situation was in 1914 to what it is now “(1962) . I’m afraid we are back in the same place again in 2016. Both US and NATO and Russia are arming and engaging in military maneuvers on either side of Russia’s borders – in the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and the Baltic sea to show the “other” that they are not weak in the face of possible aggression. But those military activities and threats are provoking the “other side” to show they are not weak and are prepared for war – even nuclear war. Instead of nuclear brinkmanship, lets put ourselves in the Russians’ shoes. What if Russia had military alliances with Canada and Mexico and had military troops, tanks, war planes, missiles and nuclear weapons on our borders? Would we not see that as very aggressive behavior and a very dangerous threat to the security of the United States? Our only real security is a “shared security” for all of us – not for some of us at the expense of the security for “the other”. Instead of sending military troops to the borders of Russia, let’s send lots more citizen diplomacy delegations like ours to Russia to get to know the Russian people and learn that we are all one human family. We can build peace and understanding between our peoples. President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “I’d like to believe that the people of the world want peace so much that governments should get out of the way and let them have it.” The American people, Russian people, European people – all the world’s people – have nothing to gain and everything to lose by war, especially nuclear war. I hope that millions of us will call on our governments to step back from the brink of nuclear war and instead, make peace by peaceful means instead of making threats of war. If the US and other countries were to devote even half of the money we spend on wars and preparations for wars and modernizing our nuclear weapons stockpile, we could create a much better life not only for every American, but for every person on our beautiful planet and make the transition to a renewable energy world. If the US were helping every person in the world have a better education, decent housing and health care, this could be the best investment in security – not just for Americans, but for all people in the world we could ever imagine. ___________________________________________ David Hartsough is the Author of Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist; Director of Peaceworkers; Co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce and World Beyond War; and participant in a Citizens Diplomacy delegation to Russia June 15-30 sponsored by the Center for Citizen Initiatives: see www.ccisf.org for reports from the delegation and more background information.

Catholic Agitator Review of Hartsough’s Waging Peace

Web Editor — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 09:45:31 +0000

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

David Hartsough — Public Talks Fall 2015

Web Editor — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 19:23:35 +0000

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

WAGING PEACE reviewed by Rev. Sharon Delgado

Web Editor — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 13:08:01 +0000

New book relates ‘global adventures of lifelong activist’

by the Rev. Sharon Delgado on January 26, 2015

Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist by veteran activist David Hartsough is part autobiography, part recent history, and part call to action. This new book shows how a commitment to active nonviolence can plant the seeds and provide the impetus for significant social transformation.

In 2012 I was arrested with David and Jan Hartsough, Shirley Osgood and Janie Kesselman at a demonstration at Beale Air Force Base, near my home in Northern California. We were the first of many to be arrested at anti-drone protests at Beale, home of the Global Hawk, a surveillance drone that helps identify targets for armed Predator and Reaper drones. Our arrests resulted in a trial that generated significant publicity. Our case and others like it at bases around the country got people discussing and questioning the morality of killing people by remote control. Throughout the trial, David urged our lawyers to focus on the Nuremburg Principles and International Law, even though the judge refused to consider these factors as a defense. We were found “guilty” of trespassing onto base property. Before being sentenced we each gave a statement to the court. David’s complete sentencing statement is an addendum to Waging Peace.. The judge could have sentenced us to six months in jail. After hearing our statements, she acknowledged that we were motivated by “deeply held ethical and religious beliefs,” and consequently sentenced us to just 10 hours of community service. We continue to demonstrate at Beale, however. As David says, “Sustained resistance brings transformation.”

Many adventures

David is Executive Director of Peaceworkers, based in San Francisco, and co-founder with Mel Duncan of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. In Waging Peace, David shares some of his many adventures in active nonviolence, as well as his strong faith and the spiritual beliefs that motivate his actions as a Quaker and as a Christian. This book engages the reader every step of the way.

A man held a knife to his heart and threatened to kill him

Waging Peace is a compelling autobiography that tells the story of a life-threatening encounter David had at age 20 while sitting with African American students at a “whites only” lunch counter in Arlington, Va. A man held a knife to his heart and threatened to kill him. Fortunately for David, he had already incorporated a deep inner commitment to nonviolence, and was able to respond in a way that diffused the anger of his would-be killer. As he tells the story of his childhood, David explains what brought him to this life-threatening event, how he handled the situation. He describes how the seeds of peace were sown by his remarkable parents, how he came to understand what Jesus meant when he said to love your enemies, how he began early experiments with nonviolence, and how he came to dedicate himself to living a life consistent with his values.

Modern-day history

David’s father was a Congregational minister who worked for the American Friends Service Committee, and his friends and colleagues had a big influence on David, especially the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the age of 15, David was organizing demonstrations against nuclear weapons. In addition to being an autobiography, this book is a modern-day history of nonviolent social movements, written from the perspective of a committed activist. As an agent for nonviolent social change, David seems to have always been at the right place at the right time. During the Cold War, David travelled to Russia and organized peace demonstrations there. As the United States and Soviet Union were threatening nuclear war over the divided city of Berlin, David lived in West Berlin just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie. He traveled back and forth to East Berlin, learning as much as he could and speaking out against both communist and capitalist propaganda. Ten years later the FBI issued a warrant for his arrest and questioned him about his activities there. David and Jan, his beloved wife and partner in nonviolent action, stopped paying “war taxes” early on. David claimed conscientious-objector status and was an outspoken critic during the Vietnam War.

Committed to the good

David was protesting with his friend Brian Willson on the day that Brian was run over and his legs severed by a train carrying munitions to Central America. David writes about the trauma of that event, but also about how many people continued to block the trains. A short time later his elderly mother and father joined him and others on the tracks. David and Jan traveled in Central American war zones during the 1980s, when U.S. financial support to corrupt regimes and death squads made such travel and life for people who lived there extremely dangerous. He worked in the United States with Cesar Chavez in the struggles for the rights of farmworkers. In the 1990s, David was part of a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation for peace in Bosnia-Hertzegovnia. He has travelled extensively in his peacemaking work, including to Iran and Palestine. His peacemaking work continues, including through Peaceworkers and the Nonviolent Peaceforce. The book is written not only by an observer in these historic events, but from the perspective of one who is committed to the good: to compassion, justice and peace.

Call to action

In addition to being an autobiography and a first-hand history of social movements,Waging Peace is an inspiring call to action. Every page expresses David’s hope for lasting social transformation based on his faith and his experience. By reading about David’s adventures as a skilled practitioner of active nonviolence in key historical events of our time, the reader gains hope and confidence that significant change is possible. Waging Peace is a “how to” book for transforming our society and the world. It encourages us to start where we are, by learning and practicing nonviolence in all areas of our lives. It includes a wealth of suggestions and resources for would-be activists. This book not only gives practical direction, but also shows us the strong foundation built by others upon which we can stand in solidarity with other people of faith and conscience around the world. After describing some of the astonishing changes that nonviolent action has brought about in recent years in places around the world, David writes: What other spots on our earth are waiting for such stunning change? What corner is beckoning to your heart and spirit? Where is God leading you to invest your life on behalf of a world where all God’s children share the abundance and live as one family in peace and harmony with the earth? David closes Waging Peace with this statement of faith: “Deep in my heart, I do believe, that — together — We Shall Overcome!” You can order signed copies of Waging Peace from Peaceworkers or order from a local bookstore. It is also available on online outlets, such as Cokesbury.com.

Editor’s note: The Rev. Sharon Delgado is a United Methodist member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference. You can read more about her atsharondelgado.org/.

A Quaker’s Ceaseless Quest for a World Without War

Web Editor — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 11:58:46 +0000

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

Web Editor — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 22:04:03 +0000

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.

Engaging stories on every page provide a peace activist’s eyewitness account of many of the major historical events of the past sixty years, including the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States and the little-known but equally significant nonviolent efforts in the Soviet Union, Kosovo, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines.

Hartsough’s story demonstrates the power and effectiveness of organized nonviolent action. But Waging Peace is more than one man’s memoir. Hartsough shows how this struggle is waged all over the world by ordinary people committed to ending the spiral of violence and war.

Praise:

“Peace will only come when all of us become the change we wish to see in this world. David Hartsough became that change and has spent the best part of sixty years working to bring peace to our troubled world. His book is one that every peace-loving person must read and learn from.” —Arun Gandhi, president, Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi)

“It has been my privilege to work with David Hartsough over the years and to be arrested and jailed with him for nonviolent civil disobedience. I highly recommend Waging Peace to every American who wishes to live in a world with peace and justice and wants to feel empowered to help create that world.” —Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“When great events happen, such as the falling of the Berlin Wall, we must never forget that people like David Hartsough and many others have worked hard to prepare the ground for such ‘miracles.’ David’s belief in the goodness of people, the power of love, truth, and forgiveness and his utter commitment to making peace and ending war will inspire all those who read this book.” —Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Peace People, Northern Ireland

“David Hartsough has lived an exemplary nonviolent life. Waging Peace highlights the numerous ways he has done this in many troubled parts of the world as well as in the United States.” —Martin Sheen, actor

“If you want to know what it means to live a ‘life well lived,’ read David Hartsough’s masterful book. It is not only a page turner, but it will probably transform the way you look at your own life—your priorities, your lifestyle, your future.” —Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink and Global Exchange

"Over thirty years ago with great trepidation I went through nonviolence training in order to join the blockade at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. David Hartsough was my trainer, and his personal stories inspired me to put myself on the line for what I believed in. Later I went on to become a trainer myself, and for some years Hartsough and I were in a training collective together. Now he's compiled his tales of moments of crisis and his life story into this wonderful book. Waging Peace will inspire anyone who is concerned with social and environmental justice, and will help you formulate your own approach to the activism so crucial now for the world!" —Starhawk, Author,The Fifth Sacred Thing, San Francisco

" Waging Peace is a collection of powerful and moving stories about how one remarkable person has acted on his belief that peace is possible. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to help create the world we all hope and pray for. Be prepared to be empowered!" —Parker J. Palmer author of Healing the Heart of Democracy, Let Your Life Speak, andThe Courage to Teach "For courage, perseverance, and commitment to a nonviolent world, David Hartsough is my teacher. So I treasure this long-awaited memoir where, in his unassuming, ordinary way, he takes us along with him on extraordinary encounters that challenge our notions of what one person in one lifetime can do. From Guatemala to Kosovo, from Moscow to Palestine, he lets us see the kind of adventures that are possible for us as well, when we share his faith in the power of truth and nonviolence." —Joanna Macy, author, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess we're in Without Going Crazy. “A remarkable man, and a remarkable story, pointing, always, forward, to what needs to be done, and can be done. It is a book of incitement to action. It will leave readers challenged to find their own path, with a greater confidence that nonviolence is not a way of avoiding conflict, but a way of changing the world." —David McReynolds, former chair, War Resisters International, long time staff member of War Resisters League, and Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980, and 2000

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David Hartsough Interviewed on KPFK — June 2014

Web Editor — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:24:25 +0000

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.

A U D I O P L A Y E R

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From Jeju and Afghanistan, an Asia Peace Pivot

Web Editor — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:13:43 +0000

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

David Hartsough on a World Beyond War

Web Editor — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 11:47:36 +0000

[vimeo 97624525 640 360]

War and Peace in Korea and Vietnam — 2014 Report

Web Editor — Sun, 18 May 2014 18:54:29 +0000

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 interviews Gilda Bettencourt about Nonviolence Peaceforce

Web Editor — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 22:41:02 +0000

Peace Paradigm Radio, October 18, 2013:

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Randy Kehler: Personal Reflections on the State of the World

Web Editor — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:51:54 +0000

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. Then there’s the problem of nuclear weapons, the alleged need for which gave birth to electricity-generating nuclear power plants as part of the so-called “peaceful atom” program. Despite limited disarmament efforts, there are still at least 23,000 nuclear weapons in existence today, and in twice as many countries as before, during the first years of the nuclear arms race. And many of these weapons are on “high alert,” which means they could be launched at a moment’s notice. Then there’s the matter of the mining, milling, enrichment, and fabrication of fuel and components for both nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants–processes which have been poisoning generations of people, many of them living in indigenous communities in the U.S. and around the world, people who have the misfortune to live in or close to where these toxic operations take place. They, along with those who live near nuclear power plants, face ongoing exposure to radioactive contaminants that cause chronic and terminal conditions, such as cancer, thyroid and heart diseases, miscarriage, birth defects and genetic damage. And, of course, there’s the so-far totally unsolved problem of high-level radioactive waste, some of which must be safely stored for hundreds of thousands of years. A great deal more could be said about this deadly problem, but in the interests of time I’ll stop here and try to summarize the other four crises even more briefly. Second, the crisis of American militarism (which includes at least for us Americans, as well as millions of people around the world, the crisis of America’s global empire). Here are just a few pertinent facts:

–Currently, 47 cents of every discretionary federal tax dollar (excluding trust funds such as Social Security, which aren’t paid for out of tax dollars) is used for military expenditures, including expenditures for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (the total for which will soon reach a trillion dollars).

–The current U.S. military budget is approximately equal to the military budgets of ever other country in the world combined.

–To help fight and prepare for its wars, the Pentagon hires more than 200,000 corporate contractors. During the past 10 years, six of those corporations, working in support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have landed contracts, many of them awarded without competitive bidding, totaling from $5 billion to $41 billion apiece.

–According to a Congressional commission, at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion has been lost to contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

–And according to Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, the U.S. has 900 overseas military bases in 130 countries around the globe.

Third, the economic crisis (in no small part caused by our extravagant military spending) –Approximately 50 million Americans are currently living in poverty. –Despite the fact that the U.S. is supposed to be the richest country in the world, roughly 42% of our children live in or near poverty. –Hunger is on the rise, affecting tens of millions of American families–to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of hungry children and adults worldwide. –In the last 25 years, 82% of income growth in the U.S. has gone to the richest 1% of the population, and in the last 10 years, 100% has gone to the richest 1%. –1% of the U.S. population now owns 41% of this country’s wealth, and receives 25% of all income each year. –In 1975, the ratio of average income for corporate CEO’s to average income for workers was 24 to 1. Now it’s 343 to 1. Fourth, the “climate change” crisis In his widely disseminated feature article, entitled “Reckoning,” in the August 2012 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Bill McKibben starts out by saying that for those who still aren’t convinced about the reality of climate change, “…here are some hard numbers….June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record in the Northern Hemisphere—the 327^th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20^th-century average….Meteorologists reported that this spring was the was the warmest ever recorded for our nation, [constituting] ‘the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.’” That same week, McKibben tells us, “Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.” Yet despite this evidence, McKibben writes “…the leaders of the world’s nations, “meeting in Rio [de Janeiro] for the 20^th anniversary of the massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing” [with our own country, despite the fact that we lead the world in consumption of resources and production of pollutants, deserving much, though certainly not all, the blame for this deplorable failure]. And that brings me, finally, to the fifth crisis: the crisis of American democracy In a very recent op-ed entitled “Money in Politics: Where Is the Outrage?”, Bill Moyers speaks of a “…death rattle of American democracy brought on by an overdose of campaign cash.” Moyers goes on to say: “A radical minority of the super-rich has gained ascendency over politics, buying the policies, laws, tax breaks, subsidies, and rules that consolidate a permanent state of vast inequality by which they can further help themselves to America’s wealth and resources.” “We are nearing the culmination,” he concludes, “of a cunning and fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that were slowly and painstakingly built over decades to protect everyday citizens from the excesses of private power. The ‘city on the hill’ has become a fortress of privilege, guarded by a hired political class and safely separated from the economic pressures that are upending the household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, and civic life of everyday Americans.” FEAR So where does all this self-destructive behavior come from—behavior that gives rise to these (and other) crises? Asking this question always takes me back to something a man from India named Sunderlal Bahugana said to me sometime in the early to mid-‘80’s when I arranged for him to speak at UMass as a part of his American speaking tour. Sunderlal, who, I gather, is still going strong at the age of 85, was, back then, already a well-known and much-revered disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who was leading a huge – it was said “the world’s largest”—grassroots, nonviolent, environmental movement, called the “Chipko” movement whose aim was to prevent the deforestation of large areas of the Himalayas and the destruction of the villages and people whose lives depended on the forest. I found myself sitting next to Sunderlal at supper in the UMass campus center after his presentation. Tall, with a long white beard (even then) and dressed, as I recall, in a long white-ish robe (probably hand-spun, hand–woven “khadi), he was an imposing, awe-inspiring person. At one point during the meal, I asked him what he thought was the cause of the rampant deforestation that the Chipko movement was trying to stop. Sunderlal looked at me for a moment without saying a word, and then said, slowly and carefully, “Fear and greed.” That was it. Nothing more. Needless to say, it wasn’t exactly the kind of answer I was expecting. After a pregnant pause during which I tried to think of a follow-up question, I finally said to him, putting on my organizer’s “hat,” “If fear and greed are the cause, what can we do about it?” This is what his answer was: “We must start by learning to live without fear and greed ourselves.” I could think of nothing more to say. Yet I’ve never forgotten what he said. In recent times, I’ve found myself thinking about the “fear” part of Sunderlal’s reply, more than the “greed” part—for two reasons: First, I suspect that greed is largely a function of fear; that is, it seems to me that our desire to accumulate more and more money, possessions, fame, power, or whatever, is because we feel we need it to be more secure, our insecurity being, of course, a form a fear. (Not that greed is a minor problem, of course. I can’t help but recall the famous words of Sitting Bull, the legendary Lakota Sioux Chief, who, reflecting on white people’s greed, our addiction to material things, is said to have remarked: “The love of possessions is a disease with them.” And indeed it is.) The second reason I’ve spent considerable time of late musing about fear is due to an inspiring “wisdom teaching” passed on to us (and to the world) a few years ago by Penny Gill, a wonderful friend and neighbor to many here today. (Thank you, Penny.) In thinking about the five crises I’ve just mentioned, it isn’t hard to see that fear is a major driver of countries’ quest for the illusory safety and security – and, for some, the feeling of power and prestige – that possession of nuclear weapons can provide. And our fear, or insecurity, also stokes our thirst, or greed, for more and more of the “things” that the allegedly abundant, “cheap” electricity from nuclear power plants can provide. Similarly, isn’t it fear and it’s malignant offshoot, greed, …

that drives this country’s militarism, our addiction to war-making, weapons-building, and military spending?…
that drives Wall Street moguls to manipulate the market for their own self gain, thus causing the recent economic collapse? and that drives some of us to knowingly participate in that fraud because we think we can gain from it?…
that drives our rapacious exhaustion of the earth’s finite resources, and the pollution of the air, water, earth, forests and other creatures whose health we depend on?…
and that corrupts our would-be democracy with the insidious notions that spending money on elections equals “free speech” and that corporations should have the same basis rights and protections as individual human beings?

We know that much of this fear is generated, or at least greatly exaggerated, by governments, institutions (often religious ones), corporate advertisers, and individual demagogues that deliberately try to frighten us (and often with considerable success!) in order to get us to do something they want us to do (like buy a product, support a war, or just keep silent about things we know are wrong). Taking a step back, I ask myself, “Why are we such fearful creatures, or at least so susceptible to fear propagated by others?” Could it be due to a basic misunderstanding of who we are? Here’s what Albert Einstein once said about who, in fact, we are: “A human being,” he said, “is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—an optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us….” Is the “prison” Einstein refers to…is it in some way a prison of fear? Is it our sense of separateness as individual human beings, unconnected to the whole, that causes us to fear that when push comes to shove, we’re really on our own, to fear that, despite all the pious platitudes, life is an inherently competitive, zero-sum game, and that others’ gain may be our loss, and that if we don’t look out for ourselves no one else will? I can’t help but feel that that is the case. If so, no wonder our world is in crisis. So, what’s the nature of the fear we’re talking about, and what are its effects? As the “wisdom teaching” I referred to points out, there are two kinds of fear. The first is the kind that’s helpful, that’s necessary for our well-being, our self-preservation. This is the fear that instinctively and automatically kicks in when we we’re tempted to touch a hot stove, or when the river keeps rising and threatens to wash away our homes. I.e., a very realistic fear. The second kind of fear is the fear we feel in response to a largely illusory, imagined situation or scenario that we’ve conjured up, one that has little or no basis in immediate reality. It seems to me that most of our fears are of this second kind, and they are definitely not helpful. On the contrary, they tend to be self-destructive, forourselves, our culture, our society, our world. In speaking about “fear,” it’s this second kind of fear that I’m referring to. So, what about the effects of fear – on our bodies, our minds, and our hearts? This layperson’s understanding is that fear automatically tightens us, constricts us, armors us, and to some extent shuts us down – all of which can be useful with regard to the first kind of fear—that is, reality-based fear, when the danger we face is immediate and real. But in the case of the second kind of fears, our non-immediate, not-reality-based fears – which count, I believe, for most of our fears – this tightening, constricting process makes it hard, if not impossible, for us think clearly and feel deeply. It tends to shut down our hearts as well as our minds, thus blocking or diminishing our innate capacity for empathy and compassion, our ability to be fully human, our ability to, as the monks of the Weston Priory put it, “to see with the eyes of compassion, to hear with the ear of our hearts.” Loss or diminution of our innate capacity for compassion, for empathy, is probably the greatest toll fear takes. In a truly compassionate world, none of these crises I’ve mentioned would exist, because all of us would be immediately conscious of, and actually feel, the pain and suffering, or the threat of pain and suffering, that our fellow creatures, human and non-human are feeling. And we would immediately respond in order to prevent or alleviate that pain and suffering—in the same way a mother immediately responds to pain and suffering on the part of her child. I love what Eudora Welty, the famous Southern novelist, once said in this regard. She said “My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.” And there’s Mother Teresa’s succinct way of putting it: “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.” This same fear-induced process of constriction also takes a toll on our ability to see. It causes a kind of blindness, a loss of vision (both literally and metaphorically). And to quote the Book of Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (By implication, might it also be true to say, “Where is too much fear, the people perish”? or, to put it in the affirmative, “Where there is no fear, the people flourish”?) When fear causes us to focus obsessively and myopically on that which scares us, we don’t see, or we quickly lose sight of much else, including really important things that have the capacity to enrich and sustain us, especially during hard times. Two of the things I myself tend to lose sight of are beauty and goodness. How often I fail to really take notice of the wondrous beauty all around me (for example, the flock of sparrows that suddenly appeared on the grass outside my window as I was composing this talk, or the milky, gauzy, ¾-moon that appeared over the tree-tops as I was heading off on a walk before bed). And often I don’t see, or soon forget, the goodness of others, whether it’s all the positive, decent, caring, loving, constructive things that people all around me are doing for each other every day (comforting a sick friend, helping take care of a child, volunteering to clean up a local river), or the amazing, inspiring, and genuinely hopeful actions and initiatives that people and communities are taking, both locally and all around the world, in response to the crises we face. Author, philosopher and Buddhist activist Joanna Macy has referred to this rapidly increasing activity as “The Great Turning.” Here’s what she has said about it: “In the face of all the bad news, the challenge of creating a sustainable civilization can seem absurdly unrealistic. Yet it is germinating now, that sustainable society on which the future depends. Its seeds are sprouting in countless actions in defense of life, and in fresh perceptions of our mutual belonging in the living body of Earth—bold, new perceptions deriving from both science and spirituality. Although it doesn’t feature in the day’s headlines or evening news, a silent revolution is occurring, bringing unparalleled changes in the ways we see and think and relate.” Author, “green” entrepreneur, and environmental activist Paul Hawken describes this phenomenon as a rapidly growing “movement,” that he says may be a kind of human “immune system.” …“Picture,” he says, “the collective presence of all human beings as an organism” [which, I would add, in relation to Planet Earth as a whole, many scientists believe it is]. “Pervading that organism are intelligent activities, humanity’s immune response to resist and heal the effects of political corruption, economic disease and ecological degradation….” Hawken goes on to say that “The incongruity of anarchists, wealthy philanthropists, street clowns, scientists, youthful activists, indigenous and native people, diplomats, computer geeks, writers, strategists, peasants and students all working toward common goals is a testament to human impulses that are unstoppable and eternal.” The importance of keeping all this in our minds and hearts while we, at same time, try our best to address the seemingly overwhelming odds against successfully rescuing ourselves and our planet from the crises we face reminds me of something poet Jack Gilbert once wrote: “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.” WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT OUR FEARS? So, what can we do to eliminate or at least reduce our fears, starting, as Sunderlal Bahuguna counseled me almost 30 years ago, with ourselves? Actually, I’m not sure it’s possible for most of us – or at least for me — to totally eliminate all our fears (though that’s probably a worthy goal). For me, it’s more a question of how I can overcome them – that is, lessen their potency, their hold on me — so that I can act in spite of my fears. All of us, I think – no matter how courageous we may seem at times — carry inside us fears of some sort. Our wonderful departed friend and local legend, Wally Nelson — who, with his partner Juanita, modeled for us, in so many ways, how to live principled lives –was one of the most courageous people I’ve ever known. Yet I can hear him saying, as he often did, “I have LOTS of fear, all KINDS of fear.” And I, too, have lots of fears – and have had, ever since I was a small boy and woke up night after night with terrifying nightmares. And I’ve continued to have fears…for example, when I faced the prospect of prison because of my refusal to cooperate with the Vietnam war…and, later, the prospect of losing our family’s home to the federal government due to Betsy’s and my war tax resistance. Both instances put a great deal of fear in me…though, fortunately, not enough to prevent me from doing what my conscience was telling me I had to do. I also have all sorts of more mundane fears, just like most people – fear of failure, fear of losing the affection and respect of others, fear of inciting, by my actions, others’ dislike, enmity, or even violence, and, increasingly as I get older, fear of destitution, of not being able to take care of my family, of serious illness, incapacitation, and, at times, I suppose, of death. Sound familiar? So how can we constructively deal with our fears so that they don’t prevent us from exercising our capacities for empathy, and compassion, and courageous action? I think the first step, certainly for me, is simply to recognize that I have fears, to get in touch with them, to allow myself to experience the feeling of them – rather than cover them over or repress them as soon as they crop up and thus pretend to myself that I’m fear-less. As Alice Walker put it in a recent interview, “You have to go to the places that scare you so you can see: what do really believe? Who are you really?” Sitting quietly, as in meditation, is one way that helps me do that. Constant busyness and distraction make it impossible for me to do it. In addition, I often remember something Gandhi once said that helps me put my fears in perspective. He said (and this is only a rough paraphrase) that we should never give up something until we reach a point where we want something else more. Which I translate to mean that I will only be able to overcome my fear of, let’s say, losing something (my reputation, my health, my physical safety, my possessions) when I can open up to, get in touch with, something else that I want, or value, much more than what I risk losing. In Wally’s case, what he frequently talked about and seemed to value most of all was “freedom,” being able to feel like a free man, unconstrained by any kind of threat, risk, or danger—a person who’s able to follow his conscience and maintain his integrity under the most trying circumstances, without being held back by his fear of the consequences. I have no doubt that that’s what was most important to him. And that’s how he lived. NONVIOLENT ACTION The purpose of reducing or overcoming our fears is, of course, to be able to act, to avoid being frozen into passivity because of what we’re afraid of. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has emphatically pointed out, compassion serves little or no purpose if not followed by action, nonviolent action, on behalf of others. For me, nonviolent action (or “active nonviolence,” as I prefer to call it) means at least two things: to put it in the words of the biblical injunction, it means that we must “Do good and resist evil.” Gandhi, in describing his program of “Satyagraha,” elaborated on this formulation by speaking of “doing good” in terms of creating, or offering, positive, living alternatives to all that we oppose, including social, political, and, especially, economic alternatives. And he spoke of “resisting evil” as not just protesting what we know is wrong, but actively refusing to cooperate with it, regardless of the risk to ourselves. COMMUNITY As we all know, this is no easy prescription to follow (or, in the words of that great Civil Rights song, there’s “no easy road to freedom”)—if only because it’s so easy for our fears to get in the way: our fears of losing all sorts of things that we’ve come to feel are important to us, that we’ve become attached to (our jobs, our social status, our possessions, our financial nest-eggs, etc.) For this reason, there’s no better source of mutual inspiration and support than community—not to mention no better way to accomplish something significant than by working cooperatively with others, in community. Last March, in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, our Japanese friend Chiho Kaneko, a resident of Vermont who’d just returned from visiting the Fukushima area, spoke passionately and very movingly to a packed Brattleboro audience about what she’d just witnessed and heard of the agonizing fear, anxiety, and suffering on the part of the people living in the Fukushima area – the mothers, the fathers, the children…the workers, the farmers, the school teachers, and many others. In closing her talk, Chiho looked out at all of us and said: “I would like to believe that the soundness of our community is our collective priority, because being part of a healthy and intact community is crucial for our survival in this ever-changing world…. It is our only hope.” CLOSING QUESTION I’d like to end this talk by inviting you to join me in pondering the following question: Could there be such a thing as a “Fear Liberation Campaign” – that is, a campaign whose principal purpose would be to enable us to begin liberating ourselves and each other from our fears – those fears that hold us back from taking bold steps to do whatever it is our hearts call us to do in the service of “the Great Turning” ? And if so, what would such a campaign look like? What would it do? And, might such a campaign begin here, in our community, here in this rich and beautiful Valley we call home?…. Thank you.

January 2013 — Peaceworkers Report from the Front Lines

Web Editor — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:23:28 +0000

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 interviewed on Talk Nation Radio 12-25-2012

Web Editor — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 03:28:13 +0000

A U D I O P L A Y E R

[ca_audio url=”https://peaceworkersus.org.hudevbooks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/talknationradio_20121226.mp3″ width=”500″ height=”27″ css_class=”codeart-google-mp3-player”]

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.

Israeli forces fire on Gaza Farmers and Internationals in Khuza’a

Web Editor — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 11:00:31 +0000

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

Following the UN vote, the Dalu family calls for the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel

Web Editor — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:35:28 +0000

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

David Hartsough’s Statement Protesting Drone Attacks

Web Editor — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 03:38:36 +0000

from the Positive Peace Warrior Network (PPWN) web site , November 2012

David Hartsough

David Hartsough is a lifelong nonviolent activist, having participated in the lunch-counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement, and is STILL a committed activist, participating in demonstrations and risking arrest in the name of peace and justice. He has also been a major supporter of our work at PPWN. PPWN honors all of our elders, but gives special appreciation to elders like David, who not only celebrates the work he did decades ago, but is still engaged in the struggle today. We have much to learn from the commitment of people like him. On October 30th of this year, David was arrested again (he has over 125 arrests on his rap sheet!), this time protesting the use of Drones by the US Military at Beale Air Force Base. He is now facing federal charges. Please see below the statement from David about why he decided to take this particular action. Find out more about his work by visiting www.peaceworkersus.org, and look out for his book of stories on nonviolent struggles in the coming months! David Hartsough’s Statement:

We are one human family. All people in the world are our brothers and sisters. If someone attacks our blood brother or sister, we would do everything in our power to stop them. This is the way we feel about innocent civilians being killed by drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Drones are totally immoral and illegal under international law and are against everything we have been taught in our religious Faiths: Love one another, Love your enemy and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. How would we feel if Russians or Chinese or Afghanis or Pakstanis were flying drones over the US and killing innocent people? It is illegal under international law to go into another country and drop bombs on people our government doesn’t like. The United States is making decisions to kill people without them ever coming before a court or found guilty. The US government is playing Judge, Jury and Executioner. Using drones and killing many innocent people is creating more and more enemies of the US. Every person we kill has at least 50 family members and friends who will mourn the loss of their loved ones and seek revenge on the people and nation that has killed their loved one or friend. Instead of drones and dropping bombs on people we need to send peace corps people to build schools and medical clinics and help people in these countries recover from the wounds of war. We could be the most loved country on earth rather than the most hated. By our silence we condone this senseless killing. We must speak out and act to stop this madness. We call on our fellow Americans, people in churches and synagogues and mosques, students, all people of conscience to join us in stopping Drones before they kill more innocent people and recruit more people into Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for perpetual wars and endless suffering and death for people around the world. David Hartsough

David was arrested along with eight others blocking two entrances at Beale Air Force Base where they closed the main entrance for over three hours.

The Batman Massacre: A Response — by Michael Nagler, Metta Center

Web Editor — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:38:12 +0000

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.

An emerging force for peace — Article by Ken Butigan

Web Editor — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:14:55 +0000

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.

The poster reminds us that this is not an easy task. We are building a rainbow, not simply hoping for one. It requires the kind of gumption and creativity only barely hinted at in the poster’s fanciful construction site. It means a profusion of projects, organizations, and movements offering plausible and effective options for the well-being of all. And it means slowly discovering that these innumerable initiatives do not exist in isolation but are part of a mysterious and self-organizing design: a rainbow in the making.

We only have to look around us to see this growing profusion. Countless campaigns and movements (for equality, democracy, peace, social justice and sustainability). New techniques (in nonviolent communication, restorative justice, trauma healing and anti-racism training). Research and education (on empathy, forgiveness, cooperation and conflict transformation). And all reinforced by an emerging worldview stressing the interconnectedness of the planet and its inhabitants.

Nonviolent Peaceforce is part of this creative profusion.

Ten years ago this week Nonviolent Peaceforce came into being. David Hartsough, a peacemaker who first got active with the Civil Rights movement as a teenager in the 1950s and has been at it ever since, had been thinking of something like this for many years: an unarmed civilian peacekeeping force able to respond in a timely and effective manner to crises that might lead to devastating armed conflicts and brutal violence.

Gandhi envisioned a Shanti Sena or “peace army,” which has inspired a number of “third party nonviolent intervention” projects and organizations, including Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, and Christian Peacemaker Teams. Moved by the work of these groups, Hartsough envisioned the emergence of an even larger and more comprehensive initiative.

While David Hartsough began ruminating on this idea in the early 1990s (we have know each other for years, and we would often talk about it together) it was only when he met long-time organizer Mel Duncan at The Hague Appeal for Peace conference in the Netherlands in 1999 that this idea got the traction it deserved. Almost immediately, the two began to build their piece of the rainbow. They crisscrossed the planet spreading this vision, finding collaborators and laying the groundwork.

In December 2001, they opened shop with the early task being to organize a strategic planning conference in Surajkund, India the following November, where Nonviolent Peaceforce would officially be launched. One hundred and fifty peacemakers from 49 countries showed up. I attended this powerful gathering with my Pace e Bene colleague Veronica Pelicaric, and led the opening ritual with Ouyporn Khuankaew, a long-time Buddhist feminist peace trainer and activist from Thailand. It was a dazzling experience spending this time with nonviolent practitioners from five continents hammering out this new project. One year later, in fall 2003, Nonviolent Peaceforce had its first team in Sri Lanka.

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s mission is:

To transform the world’s response to conflict by promoting, developing and implementing unarmed civilian peacekeeping as a tool for reducing violence and protecting civilians in situations of armed conflict.

We envision a world in which large-scale unarmed civilian peacekeeping using proven nonviolent strategies is recognized as a viable alternative in preventing, addressing, and mitigating violent conflicts worldwide. Our primary strategy for achieving this vision is the creation of space to foster dialogue.

Non-faith-based and nonpolitical, Nonviolent Peaceforce adheres to the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence as it has worked in Sri Lanka, Guatamala, South Sudan, and the Philippines. Concretely, Nonviolent Peaceforce:

protects vulnerable civilians from harm and reduces violence in conflict-affected areas through the innovative methodology of unarmed civilian peacekeeping. We work with local groups committed to peace and partner with them to strengthen community security. We provide safe spaces for parties in conflict to meet each other and address their grievances. We hold the conflict parties accountable to the laws and agreements they have signed and help them live up to these.

Simply by being present and being visible, unarmed civilians can reduce the likelihood of violence or other serious human rights abuses. They do this by ensuring such actions do not happen in secret and with impunity. A more proactive presence involves analyzing the sources and causes of the violence and using international pressure to influence the behavior of armed actors. This can prevent violence even more effectively. By living and working alongside conflict-affected communities, building relationships of trust with all the key stakeholders, and engaging with those stakeholders directly and in confidence, experienced and well-trained unarmed civilian peacekeepers are able to help them see that it is often in their own best interests to take the moral high ground, to avoid abuses of and attacks on civilians, and to abide by the agreements they have signed and the accepted norms of international humanitarian law. This provides the maximum protection to civilians in conflict-affected areas and helps to prevent and reduce escalation of violent conflict.

Our activities have ranged from entering active conflict zones to remove civilians in the crossfire to providing opposing factions a safe space to negotiate. Other activities include serving as a communication link between warring factions, securing safe temporary housing for civilians displaced by war, providing violence prevention measures during elections and negotiating the return of kidnapped family members.

Two concrete examples illuminate Nonviolent Peaceforce’s work. In 2010, NP’s longest-serving peacekeeper Oloo Otieno, from Kenya, reported concretely on the power of unarmed peacekeeping in Sri Lanka, which had experienced decades of war. Twenty-six children had been abducted to serve as child soldiers by rebel forces. Otieno accompanied their unarmed mothers, who were intent on getting their children released, to the rebel encampment. As he wrote later:

With no threat of violence leveled against his forces, the senior-most rebel commander arrived to meet with the mothers and their nonviolent entourage. Our lack of arms earned the commander’s trust, respect and cooperation. He yielded with grace, apologized to the families, and ordered the immediate release of all 26 children.

This outcome was echoed some time later in his next posting in Mindanao in the Philippines, where he and his NP partners accompanied a woman to a military detachment where her husband had been detained after being arrested from a paddy field while at work. She had been afraid to take action, but emboldened by the presence of the NP peacekeepers, she made her case to the local battalion commander:

Within three hours, an impromptu community dialogue was convened by the barangay (village) captain and the battalion commander, who were on opposing sides of the hostilities. The commander explained the husband was suspected of belonging to a criminal gang recently spotted in the area. He apologized for the arrest and implored the community to report any suspicious people to the nearest military detachment. The terrified husband, just 22 years old, was released after six hours in custody.

In its first ten years, Nonviolent Peaceforce has been slowly developing a professional “peace service” in various parts of the world. We look forward to the next ten as it increases its infrastructure, reach and impact—and contributes yet one more important piece to the ongoing rainbow construction project.

New forms of Nonviolence and Leadership emerging??

Web Editor — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 06:13:22 +0000

Mirrored from Tom Atlee’s transformational thinkpad

By Tom Atlee — November 24, 2011

Something remarkable has been going on out there – especially at UC Davis. I have a hard time figuring out how to articulate it. I haven’t yet seen anyone talk about quite what I’m seeing, so I’ll give it a try.

Here’s what it looks like to me: Nonviolent activism is evolving rapidly right before our eyes. The level of spot-on – and often spontaneous – nonviolent creativity that’s showing up exceeds what I’ve seen before, to an extent that I wonder if a fundamentally new and more powerful form of nonviolent action is emerging.

The “Occupy” approach itself was remarkable – the word “occupy” having gone viral in virtually every aspect of society and Occupy encampments becoming uncharacteristically persistent centers of news focus. But most Occupy activism still seemed to me to be within the bounds of traditional nonviolent action – albeit without the kind of specific strategic goals or demands that characterized the work of Gandhi, King, and others. That lack of explicit goals and demands has created a dynamic hothouse of change activities in and through which MANY goals and demands – and visions and questions and conversations – have been stimulated and heard and developed and pursued. This ubiquitous diversity of public engagements, it seems to me, itself constitutes a significant contribution to the evolution of nonviolent activism. I was just beginning to get a handle on that when I heard about the silent protest that the UC Davis students did after the now-infamous pepper spray incident which I wrote about in my blog a few days ago https://post.ly/3xrXc. That silent engagement occurred the day after the pepper spray incident.

The Telegraph (UK) wrote: “According to reports Ms Katehi [the UC Davis Chancellor] initially refused to leave a campus building where she had just delivered a press conference regarding the incident after protesters gathered outside demanding her resignation. Following a three-hour stand-off, the university chancellor finally departed after students, who had been chanting ‘we are peaceful’ and ‘just walk home’, sat down in silence and linked arms.” She had to walk three blocks between lines of silently seated protesters.

While my initial response was to appreciate the students’ powerful use of silence, I realized today another significant aspect was the speed with which this innovative response was born and implemented: It happened just one day after the incident that triggered it.

Then I saw an 8 minute video that showed what happened IMMEDIATELY after the pepper spray incident.

After a period of confused anger and upset, protesters chant “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” (since many police departments have “serve” and “protect” in their mottos). Then they chant “Shame, shame!” then “Shame on you!!” The tension between the police and crowd grows palpable. The police become nervous, raising their pepperball guns protectively and threateningly. Things are about to get very ugly. And then suddenly – at 6 minutes 13 seconds into the video – someone in the crowd yells “MIC CHECK!” and the crowd yells back “Mic Check!” They say it again. The scene goes into a surreal suspended animation as the unknown initiator calls out a wisdom that the crowd had not possessed moments before, but now recognizes and follows:

WE ARE WILLING (we are willing)

… The police look around at each other. They aren’t sure what’s going on….

TO GIVE YOU A BRIEF MOMENT (to give you a brief moment)

… The police start to lower their guns…

OF PEACE (of peace)

YOU MAY TAKE YOUR WEAPONS (you may take your weapons)

AND OUR FRIENDS (and our friends)

AND GO (and go)

PLEASE DO NOT RETURN (please do not return)

WE’RE GIVING YOU A MOMENT OF PEACE (we’re giving you a moment of peace)

YOU CAN GO (you can go)

WE WILL NOT FOLLOW YOU (we will not follow you)

YOU CAN GO (you can go)

The “You can go!” becomes a chant. The police back off in a tight protective cluster, facing the crowd, but slowly moving away…. The chant continues, intensely. Finally the apparent officer in charge indicates to the group of police they should leave and they all turn around and slowly walk away. The crowd cheers, surges, and cries out “Bye! Bye!” and “Yeah! Yeah!” Their enthusiastic cheering and applause continue, basking in their sense of moral and physical victory, while giving the cops lively encouragement to continue their departure. As the police near the edge of the quad, the crowd’s chant changes to “Who’s quad? Our quad?!” And then organizers announce a strike and assembly for Monday afternoon. (See another report on all this at https://dynamicsymmetry.livejournal.com/1363034.html.)

Just the fact that all this happened is remarkable. But I want to highlight the sophistication and SPEED of the nonviolent response initiated by that unknown participant in that angry student crowd facing the armed police force – using the “Mic Check” carrier wave developed by Occupy Wall Street. The intervention was perfectly timed and urgently needed: just as the police began raising their pepperball shotguns (). It looked like things were going to get much nastier, very fast. This startling “We’ll give you a moment of peace to leave” intervention was something totally new and unexpected by virtually everyone involved. But while it confounded the police, it was instantly recognized as powerful and right by the crowd, who unified around it, chanting to the police “You can go. You can go.” And those police went.

I was speechless when I first saw all this play out on the video. I could barely believe what I was seeing. Armed police backing up and leaving a crowd that had been spontaneously and brilliantly united into a powerful nonviolent Presence.

(For more recent news from Davis, see the Scott Galindez article below and .)

Then someone sent me a video of the gigantic “Batman” projection of OWS slogans on the side of a major skyscraper in NYC during the Brooklyn Bridge demonstration. See and the great Rachel Maddow interview with a key person in the stunt at .

There are standard methods and guidelines for nonviolence, as described by such experienced experts as the Alliance of Community Trainers https://trainersalliance.org/?p=221 and Harvard’s Gene Sharp (his “198 Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion” https://www.aeinstein.org/organizations103a.html has been used around the world) and other sources (see https://co-intelligence.org/P-nonviolence.html).

But these recent incidents make me wonder if distributed innovation, leadership, and creativity – which has always been part of nonviolent activism – is becoming more widespread, spontaneous, and powerful than ever – perhaps thanks to the web and social media. If this explosive nonviolence creativity continues to expand and deepen, It could generate a (r)evolutionary dynamic that will become almost impossible for status-quo systems to adapt to and neutralize.

On a more fundamental level, I see leadership, itself, evolving. Despite widespread developments in horizontal, participatory, bottom-up forms of leadership, top-down authoritative leadership has retained considerable legitimacy in dangerous and urgent situations where everyone needs to align together quickly in right action in order to survive. The “You can go” intervention described above suggests that may be changing: even urgent dangerous situations may not require top-down leadership. It remains to be seen if emergent situational leadership amplified by the kind of crowd-sourced consensus that comes through twitter and the culture of General Assemblies (“Mic Check!”) can dependably generate the kind of spur-of-the-moment wisdom and co-operation needed in such situations.

If this capacity is going to develop anywhere, it will likely develop within the participatory culture and intense challenges being experienced by the Occupy movement.

Coheartedly,
Tom

============

https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/8535-focus-uc-davis-students-are-role-models
UC Davis Students Are Role Models
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
22 November 11
(Includes two powerful videos, on of the UC Davis Chancellor, one of a speech by one of the pepper-sprayed students, who is admirably AND militantly nonviolent)

Excerpt:

It would have been easy for students at UC Davis to riot after watching their classmates being assaulted with pepper spray. Instead, they remained nonviolent. That simple act gave them the moral high ground. And that’s how social change movements grow.

Rewind a couple of weeks.

Occupy Oakland was in a similar situation. Police had violently cracked down on their encampment. Iraq War veteran Scott Olson almost died. They had the momentum, which led to a successful general strike that closed the Port of Oakland. As night fell on the day of that general strike, some of the protesters became violent. That violence turned public opinion, and slowed their momentum….

The authorities will continue to use violence in the hope that they can inspire a violent reaction from us. They know that scenes like the violence in Oakland after the general strike will kill the momentum of the movement.

Let us learn from Oakland, and follow the example set by Occupy Davis. Right now Oakland is struggling to maintain a camp, while Occupy Davis is back, bigger and stronger than ever.

Occupy Wall Street’s commitment to nonviolence

Web Editor — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:12:30 +0000

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

(from https://wagingnonviolence.org)

I’ve noted before that Occupy Wall Street has had trouble coming to consensus on a statement of nonviolence (as opposed to, say, the October 2011 movement in DC, which publicized one at the outset). This was an issue both in the planning process and in the early days of the occupation. In my essay on the notion of “diversity of tactics” for Occupy Wall Street, I wrote:

Since the early stages of the movement, it is true, those taking part have been in a deadlock on the question of making a commitment to nonviolence. At a planning meeting in Tompkins Square Park prior to September 17, I recall one young man in dark sunglasses saying, knowingly, “There is a danger of fetishizing nonviolence to the point that it becomes a dogma.” In response, a woman added a “point of information,” despite being in contradiction to what Gandhi or King might say: “Nonviolence just means not initiating violence.” The question of nonviolence was ultimately tabled that night and thereafter. “This discussion is a complete waste of time,” someone concluded.

However, this is long overdue for an update. Every major statement so far issued by the General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street’s Liberty Plaza has included a definitive nod toward a commitment to nonviolence.

Here’s a quick rundown of each document now available in the Resources sectionof the New York City General Assembly’s website:

Principles of Solidarity (September 23). The initial statement of the values that the occupation stands for includes, in its preamble: “Today, we proudly remain in Liberty Square constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love.”
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City (September 29). This call for “the people of the world” “to assert your power” twice borrows the language of the First Amendment to describe the act of occupation; of Occupy Wall Street itself the Declaration says, “We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right,” and to “the people of the world” it enjoins, “Exercise your right to peaceably assemble.”
Good Neighbor Policy (October 13). In response to complaints from the community surrounding occupied Liberty Plaza, the General Assembly promulgated some basic values and guidelines for how occupiers should behave among those who live and work around them. This includes “zero tolerance for violence or verbal abuse towards anyone“ and “zero tolerance for abuse of personal or public property.”
Statement of Autonomy (November 1). In order to preempt co-option of the movement, the General Assembly passed this statement making clear that Occupy Wall Street “is not a business, a political party, an advertising campaign or a brand.” Once again, though, in affirming what the movement is, nonviolence (and First Amendment language) is at the heart of it: “We welcome all, who, in good faith, petition for a redress of grievancesthrough non-violence,” says the Statement. “We provide a forum forpeaceful assembly of individuals to engage in participatory as opposed to partisan debate and democracy.”

As I see it, the upshot is clear: Occupy Wall Street has made a firm and consistent commitment to nonviolence. The question remains, of course, what those participating understand nonviolence to actually mean. As new challenges arise, that will be an ongoing discussion.

Stop the Machine! Create a New World: the Occupation in Freedom Plaza in Washington DC.

Web Editor — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:00:32 +0000

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.

People in this movement are willing to put their bodies on the line and commit themselves for the long haul to make sure their voices are heard. People have found that there are many others out there with the same concerns and hopes and believe strongly that together there is HOPE we can make systemic and real change in our society and world. We are not alone. We are the 99% and with courage and a commitment to nonviolence, WE SHALL OVERCOME. There is no stopping us short of victory.

I believe the large majority of the American people support the agenda this movement is promoting:

*Tax the rich and corporations

*End the war, bring the troops home, cut military spending

*Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all

*End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests

*Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation

*Protect workers rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages

*Get money out of politics

What made this gathering in D.C. different from many demonstrations in the past was that this was not just a one afternoon demonstration and then we all go home. People came prepared to stay until our voices were heard and we stop the madness of the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and bring those hundreds of billions of dollars home to meet needs here in the U.S.

Indeed, according to a recent poll by Time magazine, if Occupy Wall Street were a national candidate for president, it would defeat every other candidate on the stage, including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Fifty-four percent of Americans agree with the protesters whereas 44 percent think President Obama is doing a good job. Seventy-three percent of Americans want prosecutions of Wall Street executives for the crisis. Seventy-nine percent think the gap between rich and poor is too large. Eighty-six percent say Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much power in Washington. Sixty-eight percent think the rich should pay more in taxes. Twenty-five percent of the public considers itself upset, 45% is concerned about the country and 25% is downright angry.

The courageous people of Egypt who occupied Freedom Square in Cairo and forced their dictator to resign because he was not listening to and meeting the needs of the Egyptian people were our inspiration. So we came to Freedom Plaza to say with our bodies, Our government is not listening to us. We want to return to a Democracy of, by and for the people, NOT of, by and for the corporations and the wealthy.

My wife Jan and I went to Washington for the first ten days of the occupation of Freedom Plaza and were inspired that thousands of people from all over the country had come to help make history, save our Democracy and stop the horrendous wars which are not only killing thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the words of Martin Luther King, are “destroying the Soul of America.”

This campaign was organized by Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, young people of many races, homeless people and peace and justice activists from around the country.

There were a lot of creative signs and banners. Here’s a sampling: “We are the 99%.” Another said, “Tax the Greedy, Help the Needy.”, “There is enough for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed”. There is enough for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed”, “Support the Troops, End the wars”, “Affordable Housing is a human right”. “The military budget is killing us. Bring our Billions Home.” “W.A.R. = Wasted American Resources”, “I will believe corporations are people when Georgia executes one!” “Guided missiles, misguided men”, “US is not broke, just broken priorities”, “Windmills not oil spills”, “Separation of Corporations and State”

Here is a taste of some of the people I met at Freedom Plaza. One African American man in his late 20’s told me “This is the most exciting moment of my life. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this. I would have never dreamed it would be possible. Our government represents the rich and the corporations. We need a nonviolent revolution to take back this country for the people. We need a government of, by and for the people, not just the rich and the corporations. . I have found a community of people here who care and are ready to commit our lives to changing our society to one where there is justice and we are at peace with the world. I am ready to stay here the rest of my life if necessary. We shall overcome!”

A veteran said, “What we are producing in Iraq and Afghanistan in addition to thousands of civilian deaths are walking time bombs in our country, as PTSD damages loved ones and communities.” A young man on active duty stated, “The wars are based on lies, and our occupations are exposing the military and Wall Street.” A woman from Washington state said, “I’m fed up with the direction this country is taking. I’m here to rally for future generations.

We walked each day to a different manifestation of the military industrial Wall Street complex in Washington to Speak Truth to Power, voice our concerns and share our determination to change things. We marched to the offices of General Atomics which produces drones and we demanded an end to these long-distance death machines; we were chased out of the building. We marched to the Air and Space Museum exhibiting drones and were tear gassed; the museum was closed for the rest of the day. In front of the Chamber of Commerce we shouted “We want JOBS!”. We demonstrated in front of Washington’s Convention Center which was having a weaponry fair where corporations were showing off and selling their tanks and armored personnel carriers and every conceivable type of military equipment to the US Army. We called for an end to war profiteering and an end to the senseless wars. We filled the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building with banners from the balconies of all seven floors and chanting: “Stop the Wars! Tax the Rich!” Senate aids later told us they had heard our message. We occupied the National Security Agency and 12 of us were arrested. We marched to the White House where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and Military Families asked for a “beer summit” with the President to share their personal experiences in the wars and the urgent need to end these wars and military occupations NOW.

Most days some of us would be arrested at these demonstrations. On Sunday evening, Oct 9th hundreds prepared to be arrested rather than be evicted from Freedom Plaza. The next morning the Park Service offered to extend our permit for four months so we could continue our occupation of Freedom Plaza – and keep the tents set up to offer food, legal support, medical, and media.

Each night we had a General Assembly where all major decisions were made by consensus of the hundreds of people present. We also had visits and heard inspirational talks by people like Ralph Nader, Dick Gregory and Patch Adams. Dick Gregory said “We need to be like a turtle – hard on the outside, soft on the inside and willing to stick our neck out…We have already won. We have given people hope.”

Dennis Trainer, Jr said “American Democracy is broken. We are here to fix it. We are here and we are in revolt. We are the 99% and we can and must do this without violence.”

Ralph Nader called for Liberty and Justice for all, not just the few. He suggested that all around this country we surround the Congressional offices (or occupy them) until they agree to represent the people, not corporate interests.” Patch Adams reminded us that our revolution needs to be a “revolution of love” – for one another and for everything on the planet. “The revolution can be fun.”

The Occupy movement is VERY IMPORTANT and is a beacon of hope for not only the 99% of American people who want a return to Democracy and a government of, by and for all the people, but for all the people of the world who have suffered so much from American government acting like the world is our empire. If we can keep the tone and spirit of our movement nonviolent, even in the face of provocation and violence by the police or infiltrators, there is no stopping this movement short of victory. WE SHALL OVERCOME!

David Hartsough is a co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce and Director of PEACEWORKERS, and a member of San Francisco Friends Meeting

For more information on the Ocupation at Freedom Plaza and the other occupations around the country and the world see www.october2011.org and www.occupytogether.org

How to Destroy the OCCUPY Movement and How to Prevent It From Failing

Web Editor — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:54:29 +0000

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.

Good intentions are simply not enough. If they were enough, then war, injustice, and oppression would have ended many years ago. To solve our national and global problems, we need more than just good intentions. We must also be disciplined, strategic, and well trained. Civil Rights leader James Lawson, whom Martin Luther King Jr. called “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,” said, “The difficulty with nonviolent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity of fierce discipline and training, and strategizing, and planning, and recruiting.”

If we truly want to promote peace and justice, we must be as well trained in the art of waging peace as soldiers are in the art of war. In the next several pages I will discuss the Occupy Movement from a strategic perspective, and I will also explain some easy ways for the opponents of change to destroy it. Only then can we protect the Occupy Movement, which is a living monument to Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and vision.

If King had not been assassinated, he would have begun the Occupy Movement many decades ago. King had a vision called the Poor People’s Campaign, which was a plan to occupy Washington D.C. and pressure the U.S. government to create an Economic Bill of Rights. Samuel Kyles, a minister who worked closely with King and was with him during the last hour before his assassination, said: “With the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin is talking about taking these poor people to Washington, build tents, and live on the [Washington] mall until this country did something about poverty… Can you imagine what would happen if all these black and white and brown people go to Washington and build tents and live in tents in Washington?”

King’s vision to increase fairness and justice in our economic system was not fulfilled, but his vision to end segregation gave me opportunities my father never had. When I was growing up, my father always told me: “The only place in America where black men are treated fairly is in the military. People will be nice to you, but when they find out you’re part black they’ll turn on you. The military is the only place that gives black men a chance. You’ll never be able to get a decent job unless you’re in the army.”

Half white and half black, my father was born in 1925 and grew up in Virginia during segregation and the Great Depression. The U.S. Army was desegregated in the early 1950s, many years before segregation ended in the South. This made a strong impression on my father. During the 1940s and 1950s, his belief that he only had opportunity in the military was largely true. A hard worker who began picking fruit when he was six years old to earn extra income for his family, he fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars and retired as the highest enlisted rank, a command sergeant major.

My mother is Korean, and growing up in Alabama I also experienced some racism. This reinforced the fears that my father instilled in me. When I told my mother two years ago that I was leaving active duty, she said: “Are you out of your mind? Nobody is going to hire you. It’s bad enough you look Asian, but you’re also part black. Nobody is going to give a job to a black man who looks Asian.” My parents did not tell me lies. On the contrary, they told me their truth. They were describing life as they had experienced it and trying to protect me from the suffering they endured. But as an adult I had begun to realize that my racial background was no longer the hindrance my parents believed it to be, and I owe my very existence to the power of social movements.

America’s Founding Fathers rebelled against Great Britain because they felt unfairly treated. They believed it was unjust to be taxed or controlled without the opportunity to participate in the political process. The motto “No taxation without representation” echoed their outrage and became a call to arms, leading to the American Revolution. But until the 1820s, fifty years later, less than 10 percent of the American population could vote. Women could not vote. African Americans could not vote. And most white people could not vote unless they owned land. During the early nineteenth century, “No taxation without representation” only seemed to apply to the rich.

How did so many Americans increase their liberties during the past two hundred years? Did non-landowners fight a war to obtain the right to vote? Did women fight a war to get the right to vote? Did African Americans fight a war to attain their civil rights? Did American workers fight a war to gain their rights? Was a war fought for child labor laws? These victories for liberty and justice were achieved because people waged peace, but this is a part of our history that many people do not remember.

One of the most undemocratic things I have ever heard – which I hear often – is that the American president is the leader of the free world. If we understand what the ideal of democracy truly means, we realize that the people are supposed to lead, and the president is supposed to be the administrator of the people’s will. Although we live in a representative democracy instead of a direct democracy, we still have methods to pressure our politicians to do what we want. The evidence from American history shows that nothing will change for the better unless Americans tell the president what to do. American history also shows that ordinary citizens, not presidents, are the brightest visionaries and the true engine of progress.

For example, Lyndon Johnson was not a strong advocate for civil rights when he became president, but he later supported racial equality because Martin Luther King Jr. and other members of the civil rights movement pressured him to do so. Franklin Roosevelt was not a strong advocate for worker’s rights, which included child labor laws and a five-day workweek, when he became president, but the worker’s rights movement changed his viewpoint. Woodrow Wilson opposed women’s equality when he became president, but he later supported the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote because Alice Paul and other members of the women’s rights movement pressured him to do so. Abraham Lincoln was not a visionary who believed slavery was wrong when he began his political career, but his views changed due to the influence of Frederick Douglass and other members of the abolitionist movement.

As a child I was taught that voting was the be-all and end-all of citizenship, and if I showed up to the polls to vote I was fulfilling my civic duty. But the women’s and civil rights movements created dramatic change, even though many of its participants had little to no voting rights. Voting is just one tool in the democratic toolbox, and we can’t build a house with just a hammer. Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. used many democratic methods such as protests, petitions, boycotts, pressuring the legal system, and changing people’s attitudes for the better. Historian Howard Zinn said: “Democracy doesn’t come from the top. It comes from the bottom. Democracy is not what governments do. It’s what people do.”

My ancestors were slaves, my grandfather in Virginia was a racially mixed African American barber, and his wife was a racially mixed African American maid. Neither of my parents graduated from college, but now I am living in a position of extreme privilege. I am not referring to money, because I have a modest income and live in a one-bedroom apartment. To me, extreme privilege refers primarily to four things.

First, I am literate. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and for most of human history the majority of people simply could not read. Second, I am living in a remarkable era where I have greater access to information than anyone living before me. Philosopher Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power,” and Socrates showed that in order to improve our society we must transform people’s beliefs and ways of thinking. In my apartment I have Internet access and many books and documentaries, and in the battle to change minds this is a vast source of power. Third, I can express my viewpoints without being suppressed. Freedom of expression did not exist for much of human history, and it still does not exist in some parts of the world today. Fourth, as an American citizen I have the ability to make a difference, and I intend to make the most of my citizenship.

Although my income is modest and I live in a one-bedroom apartment, from a historical and global perspective I am extremely privileged, and taking action allows me to ensure that I do not take my freedom for granted. We certainly have a long way to go before peace and justice are truly a reality around the world, but we have also come a long way. My existence is proof that progress is possible, and if we have come so far, why can’t we keep moving in a positive direction?

If politicians today said, “We should bring back slavery and segregation, and women should not be allowed to vote or own property,” people would look at them like they were insane. But two hundred years ago the majority of Americans supported those viewpoints. How did we get here, and how can we change attitudes toward the other problems that threaten humanity?

Waging peace was the weapon used by Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr., and we must arm ourselves with this weapon today. King said: “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a unique weapon in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.” If people in the past had not used the power of waging peace, I and countless others would have little to no rights today. The American Civil War kept the country together, but it took a peaceful movement during the 1950s and 1960s before African Americans truly got their human rights. And not a single European country had a war to free the slaves. The first strategic nonviolent movements in history were the abolitionist movements in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By understanding how my bloodline went from slavery to extreme privilege, we will better understand how to strengthen the social movements occurring today and how the opponents of change will seek to destroy them.

In The Art of War, written during the sixth-century BC, Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Knowing our enemy and knowing ourselves is a timeless strategic principle. It means being able to see the world from our enemy’s point of view, and knowing not only our strengths, but also our weaknesses. When waging peace is concerned, our enemies are ignorance, hatred, misunderstanding, and greed. King never demonized the white racists who wanted to kill him. Instead, he called them his “sick white brothers.” King believed that their minds had been imprisoned by ignorance and hatred, and he sought to use the power of truth and love to break their chains.

Not everyone who perpetuates injustice will be won over to the cause of justice, but nonviolent tactician Gene Sharp teaches that in any oppressive system there are always people in that system who will empathize with the oppressed. Nelson Mandela was able to win hearts and minds among some of his prison guards, and Wikileaks exists because people in the American government and military are leaking documents they believe the American public needs to know about. Waging peace requires us to not demonize the other side, and to do more than just preach to the choir. If we use effective techniques for persuading those who disagree with us, then we can recruit more people in oppressive systems to directly or indirectly support the change our world needs.

Governments control people by dividing them, and if I wanted to destroy the Occupy Movement the first thing I would do is encourage people in the movement to have an “us versus them” mentality. The government is notorious for planting undercover agents in social movements who intend to destroy the movement from within, and anyone who wants to destroy the Occupy Movement should use agents to increase the “us versus them” rhetoric.

This can be done with signs and slogans that portray all wealthy people, corporate employees, and police officers as evil. Occupy Movement protests in many cities have had signs with the words, “Eat the rich” (which is a message that endorses violence), and during the Occupy Oakland protest a picture was taken of an activist holding a sign, “All my heroes kill cops.” If a government agent wasn’t behind that sign, then a protestor was doing the government’s work for free.

The truth is that police officers are part of the 99 percent, and in many areas they are losing their jobs due to government cutbacks. Aqeela Sherrills, who grew up in gangs and later negotiated a peace treaty between the rival gangs the Bloods and the Crips, dealt with many bad police officers. But he said, “When the police would come and jump out of the car and everybody would run, we would just stand there. We knew our rights. We questioned and would argue the police down about violating our civil rights and run down the codes to them and everything. People thought we were crazy in the neighborhood. But there are always good cops. There were the good cops who recognized what we were doing was a benefit to the neighborhood, and who would basically tell us how to deal with those racist and renegade cops in the neighborhood by filing complaints and filing reports.”

Activist Blase Bonpane says, “If anyone in your movement advocates violence, always assume they are an undercover government agent.” If you are part of a social movement, the government wants you to use violence. Why? A basic principle of military strategy is to never confront your opponent where they are strongest, and always confront them where they are weakest. Where is the U.S. government strongest? Its greatest strength is the use of violence. The U.S. government has the most powerful military in human history and controls the army, navy, air force, marines, special forces, national guard, FBI, CIA, and police. If you fight the U.S. government with violence on its own soil – where it has home field advantage – it will crush you.

All governments work hard to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence, and the U.S. government has spent the past ten years building a massive anti-terrorism industry. The easiest way to destroy the Occupy Movement would be for people within the movement to commit violence. The U.S. government could then label the movement as a terrorist organization and crush it with force it in the name of self-defense and national security.

For years I have studied jiu-jitsu, which taught me that a skilled boxer is like a lion. Just as a lion is called the “king of the jungle,” a skilled boxer usually reigns supreme in a fistfight. But when a jiu-jitsu practitioner takes a boxer to the ground and applies a submission hold, it is like pulling a lion into a shark tank. A boxer on the ground, like a lion in the water, is out of his element.

When we wage peace, we are taking an oppressive system out of its element and dragging it into deep water, because when we are violent it is best prepared to smash us. King taught us to confront an oppressive system not violently where it is strongest, but in the realm of moral authority where it is weakest. When we wage peace and those in power use violence against us, it can actually make us stronger. When peaceful civil rights protestors were blasted with fire hoses and attacked with police dogs, public support for the civil rights movement increased. When the U.S. government attacked the Bonus Marchers – World War I veterans protesting for the wages they had been promised while serving overseas – it increased the moral authority of their movement and public opinion shifted in their favor.

Star Wars expresses this metaphorically. Right before Darth Vader kills him, Obi-Wan Kenobi says, “You can’t win Darth. If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” This metaphor applies to real life, because when the Athenians killed Socrates he became more powerful. After his execution the Athenians later regretted this injustice; they created a statue to honor him and he became a symbol that has inspired countless people around the world. When the Romans killed Jesus he also became more powerful, and when Gandhi and King were assassinated they became symbols that will never go away.

This is one reason why the apartheid government in South Africa kept Nelson Mandela in prison instead of killing him, and the dictatorship in Burma has held democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi on house arrest rather than executing her. However, unjust imprisonment can still create public outrage and shift national and global consensus. This is why when dealing with nonviolent activists, it is better to imprison than to kill, but it is far better to slander someone’s reputation than be perceived as holding an innocent person in jail.

Although there are many ways to discredit and damage a social movement, in the modern world the greatest danger to any movement is from within. The more frustrated people in the Occupy Movement become, the more likely they will be to use violence. This is cause for concern, because some protestors in the movement may not realize what they are getting into. This is not going to be like Egypt, where a ruthless dictator was toppled in a few weeks. In many ways the struggle in Egypt is just beginning, because much of its oppressive infrastructure is still in place.

To better understand the challenges ahead, we should study and draw inspiration from the struggles for civil and women’s rights, and every other social movement in history. It may take some years before significant progress is made on the issues we are confronting today. Rosa Parks was a committed activist for twelve years prior to her famous arrest incident, and King believed that the dangerous forces we are up against now are going to make the supporters of segregation look like amateurs in comparison.

If protestors aren’t mentally prepared for the challenges ahead and are expecting immediate results, their frustration will swell and the cries for violence will become more potent. Someone in the movement will say, “We’ve been doing this nonviolence thing for eight months and no significant change has happened. I am starting to get impatient. If we want change, we must resort to violence.” There are certainly people in the Occupy Movement who have this mindset now, but as frustration and impatience increase within the movement their violent rhetoric will gain more traction.

Social movements are long-distance marathons, not sprints, and they all involve a series of victories and setbacks. The better we understand this, the less frustrated we will become, the less likely we will be to lose hope due to disappointment, and the less prone we will be to becoming violent and destroying the movement from within. To be effective in any struggle for peace and justice we must balance urgency with patience, and we must be disciplined, strategic, and well trained.

What I have discussed here is just the beginning of a much longer conversation. But before we can move forward, I first had to explain why the easiest way to destroy the Occupy Movement is by getting its members to advocate and commit violence, and the best way to prevent the movement from failing is by instilling a deep loyalty to nonviolence and providing effective training in the art of waging peace. If the majority of protestors do not encourage each other to learn skills and ideals that allow us to be effective, the opponents of change may not have to do much in order to destroy the movement. It will simply collapse from within.

But I have hope, because although protestors are being told they are part of the 99 percent, I realize they are really part of the 1 percent. I am not referring to the “wealthiest 1 percent,” but the “active 1 percent” who truly practice democracy and defend its principles. Henry David Thoreau said: “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and war who yet do nothing to put an end to them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to every virtuous man.”

According to Thoreau, for every thousand people who think something is a good idea, only one person actually does something about it. This is not just Thoreau’s viewpoint. It is also a fact of history. Less than 1 percent of Americans were actively involved in the women’s rights movement, or in the civil rights movement. When opinion polls tell us a large percentage of Americans oppose a war, we must keep in mind that only a small fraction are actively involved in solving the problem.

Today, everyone who wages peace is part of the “active 1 percent.” Their greatest wealth is conscience, compassion, courage, and commitment. Throughout history the “active 1 percent” has worked to give me and so many others the freedoms we enjoy today. Now we must use those freedoms to create the change our world so desperately needs.

***********

Paul K. Chappell graduated from West Point in 2002. He served in the army for seven years, was deployed to Baghdad in 2006, and left active duty in November 2009 as a Captain. He is the author ofWill War Ever End?: A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century, The End of War: How Waging Peace Can Save Humanity, Our Planet, and Our Future, and Peaceful Revolution: How We Can Create the Future Needed for Humanity’s Survival (publication date: March 2012). He lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he is serving as the Peace Leadership Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is working on his fourth book, The Art of Waging Peace: A Strategic Approach to Improving Our Lives and the World, and he speaks throughout the country to colleges, high schools, veterans groups, churches, and activist organizations. His website is www.willwareverend.com.

10 Ways to Support the Occupy Movement — From YES Magazine

Web Editor — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:29:18 +0000

by Sarah van Gelder — YES! Magazine — Oct 14, 2011

There are many things you can do to be part of this growing movement—and only some of them involve sleeping outside.

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:

1. Show up at the occupied space near you.

Use this link to find the Facebook page of an occupation near you. If you can, bring a tent or tarp and sleeping bag, and stay. Or just come for a few hours. Talk to people, participate in a General Assembly, hold a sign, help serve food. Learn about the new world being created in the occupied spaces.

2. Start your own occupation.

Use this Meetup site. Or call together friends, members of your faith group, school, or community group. Reach out to people from parts of your community you don’t normally work with. Unexpected alliances keep the movement from getting labeled as partisan or representing only some people.

3. Support those who are occupying.

Most sites need food, warm clothes, blankets, tarps, sleeping bags, communications gear, and money. Many need people to do loads of laundry, to help with medical care, to provide legal support, to serve food, and to spread the word. Some people call in pizza orders from nearby vendors. Support the folks at Liberty Square in New York here, or check in with your local occupiers to see what they need.

As we discover a community of people who are experiencing similar hardship, humiliation turns into compassion for others and for ourselves.

4. Speak out. Get into the debates and the teach-ins.

Many occupation sites have workshops and discussions on critical issues of our time. Get into the discussion. Bring your expertise and reading materials to share. YES! Magazine is offering free copies of the current New Livelihood issue to occupied sites (request them by emailing JobsIssue@yesmagazine.org). Bring the discussions to other groups you are part of. Listen to perspectives you haven’t heard before. This process represents a critical, but under-reported side of the movement: People are shifting from being passive, frustrated observers of politics to active, powerful players. Instead of waiting for our leaders to do the right thing, people from all walks of life are becoming leaders. It makes us unstoppable.

5. Share your story.

Post how you’re part of the 99 percent on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or in print. Through this movement, people are discovering others who are also losing jobs and homes, who are overwhelmed by debt or working a dead-end job. Through this sharing, humiliation turns into compassion and self-respect. And it builds understanding of the sources and the impacts of our crisis: A Wall Street system that funnels wealth to the top 1 percent is leaving the rest of us behind. Community plus insight makes us powerful.

Photo by Sarah van Gelder.

6. Be the media.

Show up with your video recorder, camera phone, or laptop and share the stories of the occupation. You can download a selection of posters donated by graphic designers and spread them around. Highlight the human dimension of the protests. It is harder for critics to disparage a movement when people see the faces of those involved.

7. Name the meaning of this moment.

What will make the world better for the 99 percent? How has the power of the 1 percent gotten in the way of your hopes and dreams? Make a sign, write a blog, update your Facebook page, or speak out on the issue that means the most to you. Include the phrase, “I am the 99 percent.”

8. Insist that public officials treat the occupations with respect.

The eviction of the Liberty Square occupation on Wall Street was averted by massive public resistance from those in the square and from others. Other occupations also need support. The 99 percent don’t have the money, political access, and media empires of the 1 percent; the occupations are one of the few ways we are building power. Ask your local officials to respect people's right to assembly.

What Can Stop the One Percent?
Naomi Klein: There’s only one thing that can block
the wish list of the one percent, and it’s a very big thing:
the rest of us.

9. Study and teach nonviolent techniques.

There are many examples of outside provocateurs who spark violent incidents that can discredit nonviolent movements such as this. The corporate media is hungry for violent images. (There’s already been an example of an admitted provocateur from the right-wing "American Spectator" who provoked pepper spraying at the National Air & Space Museum). Learn how to lovingly and firmly interrupt and contain violence, and teach what you know. Here are some resources.

10. Be resilient.

This movement is here for the long term. Some efforts may fade because of cold weather or harsh police responses. Others may self-destruct through faulty process or violent outbreaks. The movement may be idealistic, but it won’t be ideal. Don’t get disillusioned; the demand for a society that serves the 99 percent won’t go away. The movement may morph, but it has become unstoppable. Help it evolve.

The genie is out of the bottle. People will no longer accept the systematic transfer of wealth and power from we the people to the 1 percent. In this remarkable, leaderless movement, each one of the 99 percent who gets involved helps shape history.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Faith in the 99 percent: What drives Occupy Wall Street?

Web Editor — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:18:13 +0000

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.

While I have not had the chance to go to Wall Street, I’ve been to four different Occupy sites in the last two weeks, two in Washington DC, one in San Francisco where I live, and one across the Bay in Oakland. There are at least five others within a two-hour drive from my home, and more springing up each day. Oakland was inspiring-like a small village with a food tent, a medical tent, a library, a free school, and a built-in ampitheater in front of City Hall. Some others have looked more like homeless encampments. But all share a common heart, a revulsion against an economy and a politics that increasingly say, “You don’t count, except as something to exploit. Your voice is drowned out by money, your labor is expendable, your needs must be sacrificed to the gods of profit.”

At its essence, the message of the Occupations is simply this:

“Here in the face of power we will sit and create a new society, in which you do count. Your voice carries weight, your contributions have value, whoever you may be. We care for one another, and we say that love and care are the true foundations for the society we want to live in. We’ll stand with the poor and sleep with the homeless if that’s what it takes to get justice. We’ll build a new world.”

The Occupy movement is not overtly religious, like the Tea Party. The 99 percent includes people of all religious faiths, and people who have none. But I believe its core message and ethic is profoundly spiritual, even prophetic.

Religion at its core calls us to charity, community, and witness. In part, our disgust with the system as it is stems from its violation of some of our most basic values. We are taught that a good person does good to others and offers service to the community. Yet we see the system rewarding the rapacious while dismissing the claims of those who devote their lives to nursing the sick, teaching the young, growing our food, building our homes, fighting our fires, or producing those things we truly need.

People come to the Occupations because they cannot rest silent in the face of so much that is just plain wrong. The Occupations give a framework for the protests that call the greedy and powerful to account. And they challeng us to create an alternative.

Disgusted with the corruption and ineffectiveness of government, we go back to the most basic roots of democracy-people sitting together in the public square, talking and making decisions. Of course, democracy is messy and frustrating. When people express their opinions, they don’t all agree. The movement confronts the basic questions of how people can act together. How does direct democracy scale up? We want to hear everyone’s voice, but when we gather in large numbers, how long will that take, and how do we do it without a sound system? Maybe we use the “people’s mike”-where the nearby crowd repeats the words of each speaker, and waves of echoers carry the message back. That creates a great sense of unity, but it takes even longer!

What do we do when needs clash-do we favor the smokers or the non-smokers, the drummers or the sleepers? How do we make alliance with people so broken by life that they are not very capable of listening to others or taking into account other peoples’ needs? Within the broad range of the 99 percent, there are people with whom I agree and others whose beliefs and opinions I find frankly appalling. How do we come together on common ground?

None of these are easy problems to solve. I’ve sat through interminable and frustrating meetings. But I’ve also had moments of profound inspiration and grace. I hug the smiling man at Occupy Oakland who tells me, “There’s a whole lot of healing going on here.” I tear up as a young woman with a beautiful voice sings, “We shall not be moved” to honor an earlier struggle for Civil Rights. I beam at the calm, shy drifter who steps up to facilitate a big meeting and lets his innate intelligence shine.

What a magnificent experiment! How amazing, how exciting that in this world of increasing cynicism and alienation, thousand of people are moved to call to account the greedy and powerful and reinvent democracy in the public square!

The Occupy movement renews my faith in the human spirit, in our creativity, our craving for justice, our determination to root our world in love. So come on down! You are important. Your voice counts. You have a unique contribution to make. We are all the 99 percent.

Find your nearest occupation at:

https://www.occupytogether.org/

Follow Starhawk’s continuing adventures at:

https://starhawksblog.org/

STARHAWK | OCT 20, 2011 3:18 PM

Global Nonviolent Action Database Now Online

Web Editor — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:38:46 +0000

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?

ANNOUNCING THE GLOBAL NONVIOLENT ACTION DATABASE (GNAD)

Check the Internet September 11, 2011: https://NVDatabase.swarthmore.edu

Campaigns are drawn from nearly every country in the world, in which people overthrew dictators, changed environmental policies, halted racist discrimination, fought for economic justice, established their religious freedom, changed sexist and other oppressive laws, established national independence, and defended their neighborhoods – all by using nonviolent resistance.

Included are cases where people power failed, as well, so mistakes can be learned from.

Each case is presented in two ways: a database file to assist researchers and activists, and a 2-3 page narrative to assist strategists and organizers. Through the database, users can do searches on countries, kinds of tactics, kinds of movements, degrees of success. The database features “waves” of civilian resistance in which campaigns inspire each other:

Arab Awakening of 2011
The “color revolutions” which began in Serbia in 2000
Soviet Bloc independence campaigns (1989-)
African democracy campaigns of early 1990s
Asian democracy campaigns launched by Filipino People Power in 1986
U.S. civil rights movement against racial discrimination (1950s – 60s)

More cases are being added to the database — ranging historically all the way back to 12^th century BCE Egypt — by students at Swarthmore College, who have gained assistance from Tufts and Georgetown Universities. The project is sponsored by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore as well as the College Peace and Conflict Studies Department and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. For more information: glakey1@swarthmore.edu.

The Next Crossroads

Web Editor — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 06:31:17 +0000

A guest article by Ken Butigan | September 8, 2011, 1:53 pm

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it is well to remember that the road we took over the past decade was not inevitable. I recall an email that John Paul Lederach circulated just days after the Twin Towers fell. Based on his decades of the study and practice of international conflict transformation, Lederach (currently a professor of international peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame who also teachers at Eastern Mennonite University) counseled us not to seek accountability through war but by thinking and acting differently than expected. As he wrote at the time:

To face the reality of a well organized, decentralized, self-perpetuating sources of terror, we need to think differently about the challenges. The key does not lie in finding and destroying territories, camps, and certainly not the civilian populations that supposedly house them. Paradoxically that will only feed the phenomenon and assure that it lives into a new generation.

Instead, he advised a peacebuilding approach that emphasized regional development, resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and getting at the root causes. “The single greatest pressure that could ever be put on Bin Laden,” he wrote, “is to remove the source of his justifications and alliances.” Change up the script of retaliation and military dominance, Lederach advised five days after the attack, and we’ll have a better chance of creating both justice and peace. The 9/11 anniversary provides an opportunity to assess the road we actually took: a decade of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and beyond; the unimaginable suffering experienced by many in the region and in the US, including the soldiers sent to fight this protracted conflict; and the monumental financial cost of ten years of modern warfare, which has likely played a central role in the severe economic crisis facing the US and the world today. But even more damaging has been the new infrastructure of US “war-building.” We not only possess the legacy of human and financial ruin in the US and throughout the Middle East, we now live in a world where the institutions, strategies, networks and structures of permanent war have multiplied over the past decade. The US geo-politico-military posture has been a powerful global presence since World War II. However, its ability to make sustained war has increased dramatically in the post-9/11 world. Some of this has been relentlessly visible, but there is an enormous dimension of this new militarism that has been largely shadowy, secret, and invisible. Three recent newspaper articles highlight this growing and often behind-the-scenes infrastructure. On September 1, the Washington Post published “CIA shifts focus to killing targets.” This report documents the dramatic growth in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and its drones program that has killed 2,000 people since 2001, with about 20% of CIA analysts working as “‘targeters’ scanning data for individuals to recruit, arrest or place in the crosshairs of a drone.” The story quotes an anonymous former official who characterized the new CIA this way:

“You’ve taken an agency that was chugging along and turned it into one hell of a killing machine”… Blanching at his choice of words, he quickly offered a revision: “Instead, say ‘one hell of an operational tool.’”

Even more revealing is a Washington Post story published on September 4 titled “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at The Military’s Joint Special Operations Command.” This story is an excerpt from a chapter in a book resulting from a nearly two year project detailing the national security buildup in the US since 9/11, including the fact that 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, intelligence, and homeland security across the United States. This piece highlights the explosive growth of the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which has become America’s secret army. Using sophisticated technology and weaponry, JSOC has conducted thousands of shadowy raids in Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in over 1,400 deaths. It is busy creating new “targeting packages” for other places. Mexico, according to the story, is at the top of its wish list. JSOC has incorporated US Special Forces, including the Navy SEALS. Here’s how one anonymous Navy SEAL is quoted as describing his outfit: “‘We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.’” (Click here to see a detailed, interactive graphic offering a detailed overview of “Top Secret America”) A third recent story offers a glimpse into how this national security script is seeping into the weave of life here at home. On August 31, the Los Angeles Timespublished “9/11 spawned big changes on campus,” which details the impact homeland security funding is having on universities across the US. The article is upbeat about the “growth industry” of national security studies on campus and how this trend is yielding innovation and employment opportunities. Aided by federal funding, courses, institutes, certificate programs, even whole departments are being contemplated. One university is looking to the future by offering a “homeland security summer camp for middle school and high school students.” These three reports only offer a glimpse of the emerging infrastructure of the post-9/11 world. There is much more to learn about the growing proliferation of surveillance, targeting, counter-terrorism at home and abroad, space war, and many other tools of military, economic and political threat and counter-threat. The mechanics of domination will continue to grow and widen unless we take steps to challenge and transform it. While this process of change will include learning about this “dominance growth industry,” more importantly it means building an infrastructure fostering peacebuilding and a fundamentally different orientation to life on the planet. Just as the largely unarmed Arab Spring has demonstrated the ability of nonviolent power to trump expensive and technologized military forces and strategies, so people everywhere are being invited at this key turning point to take another road. September 11, 2001 presented us with a crossroads. As we pause this week to mark 9/11, we realize that we are at a new crossroads. We can continue down the well-grooved path of the past decade, or we make a turn and accept John Paul Lederach’s unfulfilled challenges from a decade ago: to do the unexpected and to build an infrastructure of peace that, unlike the path of the past ten years, is transparent and sustaining. The choice for a new path, while not easy or simple, is ours. Again.

Marching in Gandhi’s Footsteps — 2002 Article

Web Editor — Tue, 31 May 2011 20:54:29 +0000

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.

David Hartsough in 2002

Sitting in the Thammasat office of Chaiwat Satha-anand, Thailand's most prominent peace academic, Hartsough comes across first as a friendly, traveller type. His greying hair, well-worn trousers and forest-green rucksack look like the accoutrements you'd expect a peace-loving wanderer to sport. But when he sits down to tell his story and how and why his approach will work, it is with the resolve and no-nonsense confidence of a battle-seasoned general. Hartsough knows nonviolence can work because he has spent his life in the field.

When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, he was building a shanti sena, a “peace troop.” From that idea, Hartsough and of ‘Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.’–Mahatama Gandhi

others have created the Global Nonviolent Peace Force – a corps of civilians trained in active nonviolent techniques that will be sent to areas of conflict around the world to protect human rights and create the space for peaceful resolution of differences.

At the invitation of NGOs or other parties, the corps will enter combat areas to provide unarmed escorts for peaceworkers and training in active nonviolence, as well as summon the attention of the world. Hartsough hopes to have the force “non-combat-ready” by 2003, with an initial contingent of 200 active members, 400 reservists and 500 supporters around the globe who will send email, make phone calls, alert the press and turn the international spotlight on particular conflicts. He already has 10 informal invitations from places including Sri Lanka, Burma, Korea, Mindanao in the Philippines, Columbia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.

At a conference due to be held in New Delhi in November, an international steering committee, which includes Acharn Chaiwat, will choose the location for a pilot project. If it is successful, Hartsough hopes it will set a precedent for solving conflicts peacefully.

Hartsough's early teachers were Gandhi, whom he read as a child, Martin Luther King, whom he met as a teenager, and his father, who risked his life in the early years of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

A Congregationalist minister who later became a Quaker, Hartsough's father went to the Middle East when David was eight years old to bring tents and medicine to refugees displaced by the first Israel-Palestine war. “My father gave sermons in church on the Good Samaritan story, and it really impressed me that he was not just preaching it but was willing to risk his life on the belief that ‘everyone is my neighbor’,” he recalls.

Hartsough's father also took his teenage son to see the work Martin Luther King was doing in Montgomery, Alabama, to secure equal rights for black citizens of the United States. King was the leader not only of the struggle for civil rights in the US, but also of the first nonviolent movement in that country.

“I was very deeply moved that these people, who were facing such oppression, were determined to get justice, but they were determined to do that nonviolently, even against people who were bombing their churches and their homes. That put me on the road to a much deeper understanding of nonviolence,” says Hartsough.

After a year spent at an elite, almost entirely white college on the East Coast of the United States, where he was helping the admissions office recruit black students, Hartsough heard that Howard University, a black college in Washington, DC, needed white students. Deciding to practise what he was preaching, he transferred to Howard in 1959, and there he received a lesson more valuable than anything else he could have learned: the power of peaceful resistance.

In 1960, all across the southern states of the US, people began protesting the segregation of lunch counters. So, every Saturday, Hartsough and his black friends would leave DC, which had already been desegregated, and cross into Maryland. They would sit at a lunch counter there until they were arrested. After spending the weekend in jail singing freedom songs, they'd be released in time for classes on Monday, only to be back in action the following Saturday.

Hartsough stayed clear of nearby Virginia, which was home not only to the American Nazi Party but also to a law that handed down a year's prison sentence and a thousand-dollar fine to anyone who protested at a lunch counter.

“We didn't have a thousand dollars and we didn't want to spend a year in prison,” says Hartsough laughing. But when months passed and no one challenged the racist law there, he and his friends mustered their courage, did some extra training in nonviolence, and crossed the state line.

“Twelve of us went in and sat down at this lunch counter at the People's Drugstore in Arlington, Virginia, and within minutes there were six cars and sirens coming from all directions. They didn't arrest us, but neither were they going to serve us any food. We stayed there for two days, and it was the most difficult two days of my life.”

Hartsough and his friends endured vicious name-calling, lit cigarettes being dropped down their shirts, punches so hard they were knocked off their stools to the floor, where they were kicked, and members of the American Nazi Party sporting swastikas and brandishing photos of apes, asking them malevolently, “Is we or is we ain't equal?”

At the end of the second day, as Hartsough sat in meditation trying to think about loving his enemies, a man approached him from behind. “He said to me, ‘you nigger-lover’, and he had this horrible look of hatred on his face; ‘if you don't get out of this store in two seconds, I'm going to stab this through your heart’.” In the man's hand was a switchblade. “I had two seconds to decide if I really believed in nonviolence, and I looked this man right in the eye, and I said, ‘Friend, do what you believe is right, and I'll still try and love you’, and it was quite amazing, because his jaw began to fall and his hand began to drop and he left the store.”

The most difficult part was to come. The protest had been on newspaper front pages and an angry crowd of 500 had gathered outside the drugstore, armed with rocks and firecrackers and threatening to kill the 12.

For their part, Hartsough and his friends decided to write to Arlington's religious and political leaders asking them to use their moral and political leadership to open the eating establishments to everyone. “We said that if nothing changed in a week, we'd come back. Some friendly newspaper reporters had their cars outside and got us out of there alive, and we went back to Washington and for six days we were shaking and wondering, ‘Do we have the courage to go back and do it again’.”

But they didn't have to make that choice. On the sixth day, the call came that the lunch counters in Arlington were now open to all.

“That taught me a very powerful lesson,” says Hartsough, “That by acting on our conscience we got those people to act on their conscience, and those people got the society to act on its conscience. That you don't need millions of people … even a few can make change.”

Since that time, Hartsough has been working beside the few and sometimes the many, to make change all over the world. He has been jailed well over 100 times, but his most high-profile arrest was at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic.

Before violence erupted in Kosovo in the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Albanians marched to secure basic freedoms – the right to attend school, secure jobs, speak their own language, get access to medical care – that had been taken from them by the Serb regime. They enlisted the help of Hartsough and others to awaken the international community to what was happening and bring moral, political and economic pressure to bear on the Serbs, like that which had succeeded against apartheid.

So Hartsough travelled the US and Europe to rally support, but met with none. He finally returned to Kosovo with a small crew of four Americans to conduct nonviolence training sessions. Though there was no international media attention, coverage on Albanian TV got Milosevic's attention and Hartsough and the five were locked up. “It became front-page news around the world,” says Hartsough, “which was stupid, because 100,000 people marching for justice had not been news, but five Americans in jail was.”

Unwilling to take the international heat, Milosevic soon released the activists and turned them out of the country.

Not long after, the world woke up to the situation in Kosovo and Nato began dropping bombs, a response Hartsough believes could have been avoided and is at the heart of why he is now devoting all of his time to building the peace force.

“I travelled all around the US saying, ‘Kosovo is an explosion waiting to happen, we need people to come’. Nobody responded, and then it exploded and after it exploded, NATO said our only choices were to do nothing or to start bombing. But many of us there felt that with 200 trained and courageous peace troops we might have made an important contribution to a peaceful resolution.”

Hartsough wants his peace force to march right down the middle path between doing nothing and bombing, so that places like Sri Lanka, now possibly on the precipice of peace, can be delivered there rather than disintegrate into further acts of death and destruction.

To charges that this is naive and unrealistic in the world's present landscape of violence, Hartsough marshals evidence that forces like the one he is building have been successful around the globe.

Peace Brigades International, a smaller corps than the one Hartsough plans, was instrumental in giving courage to the civil society in Guatemala which challenged a repressive government that was killing hundreds of thousands of citizens, says Hartsough.

At the invitation of a group called “The Families of the Detained and Disapeared”, the Brigades came in to escort protesters, providing a buffer between military death squads that carried out the government's orders and the civilians who were challenging the government's power.

During a four-year period, only two peace-workers were stabbed in Guatemala and no one was killed. In the increasingly safe environment, more members of the civil society emerged to oppose government oppression. Hartsough, who was there at the time, attributes Guatemala's transition to democracy in large part to the work of the Brigades.

To prepare a training module for his force, the Nonviolent Peaceforce has studied the work of Peace Brigades International and others and has compiled a 300-page document on what has worked, what hasn't, and what has never been tried.

“We're not going to take on the whole world in the first year,” says Hartsough. “Ideally we'd like something that in two years' time we could see some real success. We're convinced that if we do this well, the world will discover that here is a method that costs one millionth of what a military response to a conflict costs, is much more effective, and you don't have the terrible death and destruction and hatred that can continue for generations.”

Despite being a less expensive alternative to armed conflict, peace doesn't come cheap and Hartsough and his colleagues need to raise a pretty penny by peace-movement standards – $8 million (352 million baht) a year – a sum that may be even harder to gather in the wake of September 11. Hartsough is quick to point out, however, that this amount is equal to what the world spends on the military every four minutes. If they can secure the funding, they hope to have the force fully operational – with 2,000 active members, 4,000 reservists and 5,000 supporters – by 2010.

Though September 11 has engendered more violence, Hartsough sees this moment in history as an opportunity to advance his cause. He points to an article in the International Herald Tribune exposing the deaths inflicted on one Afghan village by the American bombing campaign.

“As more and more facts like this come out, I think people are going to be revolted by this militaristic response to something terrible. The United States has spent trillions of dollars on military security, bombers, planes, nuclear weapons, the CIA, FBI … and that got us zero security. It didn't protect one person on September 11. Isn't it time to look at an alternative way to get security?

“After [Martin Luther] King was killed, I was devastated, because he gave so much hope for a new kind of America with him as a leader. But I finally came out of that depression feeling that the only thing we've got is for many of us to become like King,” argues Hartsough. “Today we have a whole lot of local leaders like him that most of the world doesn't even know about. They're in Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, Latin America, Africa and Thailand.”

And, like King, they are all saying unpopular things to a few people in the hopes of changing the minds of the many. This is a legacy which Hartsough is happy to carry on.

“I have felt ever since that time [in Arlington, Virginia] that we don't have to be just subjects of history. We can help make it.”

– For more information on the Global Non-violent Peace Force, visit www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org or email info@nonviolentpeaceforce.org

No Other Way Out — by Chris Hedges

Web Editor — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:57:10 +0000

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

Nonviolent Revolution in Egypt!

Web Editor — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 04:55:18 +0000

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.

Hence the tactics they chose: Massive demonstrations, brazen and ubiquitous use of social media, befriending the army, work stoppages, and eventually the call for a general strike.

Nonviolent people power operates on the assumption that systems of violence and injustice are not absolute and implacable. Rather, they are kept in place by pillars of support. These props include the police and army; the media; economic forces; cultural and ideological structures; and the general population. The job of a nonviolent resistance movement is to remove this support. Key to this process is alerting, educating, and mobilizing a growing number of people throughout the nation or society to withdraw their consent – and to overcome their fear of the consequences for doing so.

By staying this challenging course over the past three weeks – in the face of jailings, torture, organized thugs, demonization by state media, as well as a series of government half-measures designed to prevent real change – the Egyptian pro-democracy movement pulled down these pillars of citizen consent, economic viability, a number of elites, and even state media. (According to an Egyptian blogger who writes as Zeinobia, one of the state television news readers today said, “We apologize, we read lies against our own will.”)

As each of these supports gave way, the Mubarak presidency, despite its hubris and long-time projection of invincibility, was rendered powerless.

The gift that the Egyptian people have placed in each of our hands is the crystal clear example of the power of ordinary people to unleash seismic social change. It is the latest in an increasingly long line of such examples—from the labor movement and the struggle for women’s suffrage, to the Indian Independence movement and the US Civil Rights movement, to the string of breath-taking nonviolent people-power movements that have toppled dictatorial regimes, including in the Philippines, Chile, the Soviet Union, Indonesia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Tunisia.

Each of these prior cases has been incalculably important. What makes the accomplishment in Egypt especially valuable to the rest of the world at this time, however, is that (given the determination of the demonstrators, the stubbornness of the regime, and the ubiquity of social media and other technological innovations) many of us were able to follow this struggle step by step in real time and to therefore see in minute detail how this kind of monumental change happens.

We were able to see this campaign in slow motion: the initial call, the gathering momentum, the series of repressive attacks, the galvanizing power of Days of Prayer, the lulls, the unexpected developments (the release of Wael Ghonim, for example, and his electrifying television interview), the government’s ineffective sticks and even more ineffective carrots, the wave of strikes that began to spread across the country, the much anticipated resignation speech that turned out to be a defiant declaration of authority, and then the undoing of that authority the next day.

This eighteen day saga riveted the world. It offered us a new, three-dimensional awareness of our power to make change through determined, nonviolent action. And it offers us a glimmer of hope as we stand at a monumental crossroads in human history.

In a time of virtually permanent war, growing poverty, threats to civil liberties, ecological devastation, and many other problems, humanity faces the challenge and opportunity to choose powerful and creative nonviolent alternatives. We can continue to opt for the devastating spiral of violence and injustice, or we can build civil societies where the dignity of all is respected and the needs of all are met. True peace and long-term human survival depend on this.

Egypt gives us a clear and radiant example of the nonviolent option.

As President Obama said in a press conference after Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, “It was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing but nonviolence, a moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.”

For eighteen days, Egypt “mainstreamed nonviolence.” Mainstreaming nonviolence does not mean creating a utopia where conflict, violence, and injustice do not exist. Instead, it is the process of nurturing a culture that advances nonviolent options for addressing complicated challenges in ways that are neither violent nor passive. We have much to learn from this powerful experiment in this peaceful and determined struggle for justice.

All of us owe debt of gratitude to the pro-democracy movement in Egypt for this monumental gift that reveals for people everywhere the power and possibilities of nonviolent change in a world wracked by violence and injustice.

Special Event Honoring David Hartsough and Peaceworkers

Web Editor — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:54:08 +0000

Come celebrate the Power of Nonviolence!

January 8, 2011

A special tribute to David Hartsough and Peaceworkers

Special Guest: Daniel Ellsberg

Event Chair: Michael Nagler
Honorary Co-chairs: Medea Benjamin and Martin Sheen*

Event Details

Date and time: January 8th at 6pm
Where: First Universalist Unitarian Church
Starr King and Martin Luther King Rooms
1187 Franklin Street at Geary
San Francisco, CA 94109

Limited seating: Please purchase tickets as soon as possible to gurantee your place! Cost of entry $35.

To RSVP

Please contact Gilda Bettencourt at gbettencourt@nonviolentpeaceforce.org or mail a check or money order to 331 Judah Street, #9, San Francisco CA 94122. Make checks payable to Peaceworkers.

Additional Information

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.

NEWS: Unusual Conversations at Persepolis Nov 10, 2010

Web Editor — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:51:31 +0000

By David Hartsough — in Iran — November 10, 2010

At Persepolis we had several unusual and very significant conversations.

We met the Ambassador from the Netherlands. He said he was very happy to see our American delegation here in Iran trying to help build some peace and understanding between our countries. He said he felt that what is crucial in helping find a solution to the “Iran conflict” is pretty simple. What the Iranian people and the Iranian government are asking for is respect and to be treated fairly and justly. They have an amazing history and culture and we need to treat them as we – any country – would want to be treated.

We encountered about 35 Iranian soldiers in uniform. Accompanying them was an Imam with a white turban. We told him about our belief that all religions have as their basic beliefs and teachings to Love One Another and we are all children of one God. He agreed that love for one another is the essence of all religions, but that we cannot rely on God to bring about a just and peaceful society. We must be God’s instruments to help bring about a more peaceful and just society and referred us to the text in the Koran which says just that.

A while later we talked with the Colonel in charge of the group of Revolutionary Guard soldiers. We were able to say to him and all the soldiers gathered around that our FOR delegation had come to Iran to express our deep desire for peace with the Iranian people. Even if our governments see each other as enemies, we the American and Iranian people could become friends and create peace from the bottom up. We stated that to kill the beautiful Iranian people would be a crime against God and a crime against humanity. We are dedicated to doing everything in our power to help transform the relationship between our countries from enmity and hostility to peace and mutual respect. The Imam and many of the soldiers stood there silently giving their appreciation and respect for our sentiments.

The colonel then responded that he appreciated all we had said and also fervently hoped that our nations could move away from confrontation and hostility to a peaceful and cooperative relationship with mutual respect. He stated that they never think of attacking other countries, and added that he hoped we would understand that they as soldiers are committed to defend their country. If Iran were attacked by the US, Israel, or any other country, they would do everything in their power to protect their country and the Iranian people from aggression. He hoped that day never comes, but said that they must be prepared.

The Colonel and the Imam and many of the soldiers then gave me and others in our delegation very warm and heartfelt handshakes and expressed deep appreciation for our visit.

We left hoping that with encounters like this and our work back in the US for peace and diplomacy rather than confrontation and war with Iran, we can avoid ever having to confront one another on the battlefield and the horrible consequences of war between our countries.

NEWS: Message From Citizen Peacemakers in Iran

Web Editor — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:31:41 +0000

Another FOR Civilian Diplomacy Delegation left the United States for Iran, on November 5th. Today, Monday, November 8th, the delegation of 11 U.S. peacemakers visited the Peace Museum of Tehran. The following reflection from John Schuchardt shares highlights of their experience at the museum.

We have been able to have a few conversations with Iranians in the streets, usually including observations such as “I like Americans but I don’t like that your government is taking severe measures.”

Today a man spoke, probably for most of humanity, when he said, “I would love to live in a world where people don’t kill each other.”

The Tehran Peace Museum is set in the environs of a large, beautiful park, with a large statue of peace in honor of the victims of chemical weapons used by Iraq in it’s desperate 8 year war with Iran, a war which is estimated to have killed 500,000 on each side.

The Museum itself is a new, beautiful round, one story building, with a large white image of the symbol for peace in Farsi in the park grounds in the front. We were most warmly welcomed by Dr. Shahriar Khateri, a leading member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Iranian Physicians for Social Responsibility. He directs the Museum where he works with a large number of veteran survivors of chemical weapons. One of these former soldiers presented each of us with a bouquet of roses. The generosity of their welcome and embrace of us continued throughout our gathering, with serving us bottles of water, cups of tea, a plate of banana, orange and apple fruit, and gifts all the books mentioned following.

Peace delegation to Iran gathering at the beginning of their journey.

To help inform the world and to work most effectively with civilian and soldier survivors, Dr. Khateri founded the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support. He was also the co-author of a major compilation of United Nations documents 1984-1988 covering, Iraq’s Use of Chemical Weapons Against Iran and a booklet of text and photographs of the effects on humans of these chemicals.

We viewed the large panel exhibits describing dates and places of chemical attacks, together with photographs and then met around a large table, joined by 8 veteran survivors. Each of these survivors spoke sparingly of their 24 and more years of health effects, pain, and suffering, including blindness. As they spoke we realized how their voices have been silenced, as one of the results of U.S. embargo and isolation of Iran. They have been making tireless efforts to build international solidarity and to speak to the world. Two years ago, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki visited and have engaged in mutual and cooperative joint efforts towards the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction.

Habib Ahmadzadeh, one of Iran’s most popular writers joined us and presented us with his novel, Chess With the Doomsday Machine. He also showed on a large screen an inspiring and joy-filled film of the extraordinary celebration he organized on the river border of Iraq and Iran, the Arvand Rood. Bringing children from both sides together on Friendship Boat, an exchange of gifts and a children’s party was celebrated, the film then being shown widely on Iranian T.V., and many copies of it sent to Iraq. All of us were presented with a 5 disc recording of the entire event, of which we saw only 15 minutes of clips.

Another major Iranian figure, himself a sufferer from chemical weapons, participated: Ahmad Nateghi. After the war he studied journalism and photography and is leading writer, filmmaker, and photojournalist in Iran today. He presented us with his book Voice of Silence and a second major work containing many of his photographs The Open Wound. We could not take in the enormity of all that was being shared, but all were given these books with which to heal our own ignorance and help to carry these urgent cries back to the U.S. and internationally.

Several women volunteers and artists also participated in our meeting, who contribute vital work to the Society and the Museum. Jess Richardson was able to make a successful connection with the art instructor to find his Iranian connection to build the Bridge of Hearts between the U.S. and Iran.

I told the veterans of the letter from the Veterans for Peace (VFP) National Office, signed by Dennis Lane, explaining that I was representing our entire VFP national membership to express our “esteem, friendship and commitment to peace” toward all the people of Iran. On our return to Tehran, November 17th, this letter will be presented, together with VFP hat and button.

I did present to Dr. Khateri and the Museum a silver dollar from 1923 explaining the history of the U.S. popular revulsion against World War I, which had claimed so many millions of victims, and many victims of chemical weapons: the Congress passed and the President signed the Kellogg-Briand Treaty making war a crime. And the silver dollar was redesigned, so that the styilized imperial eagle with spread wings, holding arrows and olive branch, was changed to a stately naturalistic eagle standing on a rock, holding only an olive branch, with the sun’s rays shining behind and the word PEACE inscribed below. Dr. Khateri requested a written history of this which will go with the silver dollar into their display case.

This report is entirely inadequate to convey our heart to heart meeting, what each of us spoke of longing for peace and our growing friendship with Iran, and even more inadequate to convey the testimonies the suffering and pain carried by our hosts. We were told, “Our understanding of peace is totally different than yours, because we have always been confronting war. The understanding of peace is entirely different when the bombs are dropping on you.” This was an important, truth-filled reminder to us Americans.

We enjoyed the taking of many photographs before our departure. In closing, Dr. Khateri and Ahmed Nateghi proposed our collaboration on a special book to be printed in the U.S. containing chapters on all the weapons of mass destruction recently used against humans: 1) chemical weapons; 2) depleted uranium; 3) Agent Orange; 4) nuclear weapons. It is my hope that VFP, FOR, AFSC and others might quickly unite around this project, bringing together in one book the best and most concise of the work that has been done on all these weapons.

With gratitude and trust, John Schuchardt

NEWS: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 50th Reunion

Web Editor — Tue, 11 May 2010 03:05:42 +0000

By David Hartsough — May 10, 2010

I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the 50^th reunion of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), April 15-18, 2010, in Raleigh, NC. Over 800 SNCC workers, their families and friends came together for four days to remember, reflect, share stories, inspire a younger generation, and strategize about how to continue the important work that SNCC students started 50 years ago.

The SNCC reunion attracted many “giants” of the civil rights movement like Jim Lawson, John Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Vincent Harding, Bernard Lafayette, Dick Gregory, Bernice Reagan, Clayborne Carson, Charlie Cobb and Courtland Cox. They joined hundreds of SNCC workers whom most Americans have never heard of, or have long forgotten.

As many Fellowship readers will remember, the SNCC movement started with four Black students from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, NC who sat in at a Woolworth drug store on Feb 1, 1960.

This action, by David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil (pictured below) ignited a wave of student sit-ins and protests that flashed like fire across the South – a fire for justice that no amount of beatings, jails, or firehoses, could extinguish. Within days, sit-ins occurred in dozens of Southern towns, and in the North supporting picket-lines sprang up at Woolworth and Kress stores from New York to San Francisco.

SNCC Sit In — Feb. 1, 1960

These students faced the Ku Klux Klan, police dogs, fire hoses, death threats and many spent months in southern prisons. Others were beaten by the police and saw their fellow SNCC workers get shot down and killed . Yet they continued their deep commitment to nonviolence and the struggle for justice and sang “We Shall Overcome”

I was reminded how horrendous the oppression was for blacks in the deep South at that time. If a black person in Mississippi or Alabama tried to register to vote, they could be fired from their job, have a cross burned in front of their home, or even have their home or church burned to the ground. Courageous SNCC workers were accompanying these folks as they registered to vote and stood up for their right to live as full citizens in this country.

To give a flavor of some of what was said at the reunion, here are a few of my notes from a talk by Congressman John Lewis, a former former Chairman of SNCC. “Through peaceful action, we helped transform this country… SNCC was an unbelievable movement to make this a better nation… Hundreds of SNCC workers were willing to take a stand for all humankind… By sitting down, we enabled black people to stand up. We started a nonviolent revolution in this country. ..We had a highly disciplined freedom movement to liberate the soul of America. ..We would not give up. ..We kept our eyes on the prize. ..We were bloodied and beat up, but never gave up. ..SNCC workers gave their lives to make this a more perfect union. ..We cried and kept marching.

“If it were not for SNCC, Barack Obama would not be the President of the US. But the election of Obama was not the fulfillment of our dream, only a down payment. We need to get out and push and organize and make some noise to make the crucial changes still needed for justice in our beloved country.

“We all live in the same house. We are one people, one family, and all live in our house. We live in a world house and must care for our brothers and sisters around the world…

Harry Belafonte, who was a strong moral and financial supporter of SNCC throughout their formative years, encouraged the group to not just rest on their laurels about what they did fifty years ago, but reminded them that most of them have another 10-15 years to live. He challenged people by asking, “What can we do with our lives using that same kind of commitment and determination to continue the important work of transforming the United States into a ‘more perfect’ union?”

We were reminded that our work is far from complete. Ninety percent of Blacks in Mississippi still live in poverty. Many black and brown people across the country still study in schools that are of inferior quality, and, are increasingly being re-segregated (including in Raleigh, NC where we were meeting). In addition, a disproportionately high percentage of black and brown young men are in prison. It is clear that we need to radically transform our criminal justice system, as well as our schools. We also need to challenge the powerful military industrial complex in the US which is stealing precious resources from local communities, cities, states, and human and environmental needs of the American people to fight its wars in foreign lands.

As Vincent Harding has said so often, we need to share the excitement, energy, commitment and spirit of the SNCC folks fifty years ago with the younger generation. We should ask them to reflect on what their elders have done, and then decide how they can best continue the struggle to challenge the racism, injustice and militarism of our society and build the society we all want for our children and grandchildren.

It was especially inspiring to hear the children of many SNCC workers share some of their current work, as they continue the important work their parents started 50 years ago.

Experiencing the amazing commitment of the early SNCC folk, I felt a deep challenge to those of us in the nonviolent and religious community: “Do we have the commitment and determination to challenge the continued violence, injustice and militarism in this country, and help transform our country from an American empire fighting wars around the world to a more democratic and just country living peaceably with the rest of the world?

Suggested Reading: John Lewis, Walking with the Wind,Vincent Harding, The Inconvenient Hero and Hope and History, King’s World House website www.theworldhouse.org/whessay.html and the Martin Luther King page of the website www.peaceworkersus.org. That website also has my article about the active nonviolent movement in Palestine and Israel and my talk about the FOR peace delegation I led to Iran..

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David Hartsough, a graduate of Howard University, was very involved in the Sit Ins at lunch counters in MD and VA in 1960. David is a Member of San Francisco Friends Meeting and is the Director of PEACEWORKERS (www.PeaceWorkersUS.org) and was a Co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. David is a father and grandfather, and lives in San Francisco.