Posts from — February 2008

Quote for thought: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birth-day of a new world is at hand.” - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

And today’s headlines and stories:

1. Latest Research Reveals Huge Disparities Among Young Voters - From WireTap Magazine: “College students are voting in record numbers and making their issues heard in the 2008 primary season. Young people without college experience — who constitute close to half of the 18- to 29-year-old electorate and are more likely to be youth of color — are notably absent.”

“If social science research can be sure about anything, it’s the fact that education is positively correlated with many civic engagement outcomes — including voter turnout rates. In the 2004 presidential election, 27 percentage points separated the turnout rates of the college-educated (61 percent) and youth who have no college experience (32 percent). This gap has persisted since 1972 and it continues today. New CIRCLE research found that one in four young people with at least some college experience voted in the 2008 Super Tuesday states, compared to just one in 14 non-college youth.”

2. Why Voters Aren’t Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues - and article by Joe Brewer and George Lakoff, The Rockridge Institute; posted on AlterNet. “How politicians communicate has more influence than policy details. Why else would the public accept destructive practices like domestic spying?”

“There is a faulty view of voting behavior — widely held by political strategists on the left — that people already know what they want. All you have to do is conduct a poll to find out where they stand on the issues, then build a platform of positions that accords with the polls, and they will vote for you. Missing from this view is the importance of cognitive policy — the ideas necessary to understand what the issues are and how they should be addressed. It is the ability to understand where a candidate is coming from that makes public support possible. Endorsement quickly follows when this understanding combines with a sense of shared values.”

3. The Roosevelt Institution’s 2008 Essay Contest: Finding Progressive Voices for the 21st Century - Firstly, the deadline on this is March 8, 2008, so if this interests you, get your butt into gear! The Roosevelt Institution and The Nation Magazine are co-sponsoring an essay contest about what a new major New Deal-like reform program would look like in 2008. Here’s the description:

“The Nation magazine and the Roosevelt Institution are teaming up to explore what relevance FDR and the New Deal have for the 21st Century, and how today’s college students understand the social contract. We are looking for essays of 600 words or less that answer the following question:

In the 1930s, FDR’s New Deal established a new social compact between government and its citizens. That compact has frayed greatly in the face of economic globalization and the seeming triumph of free-market thinking. What relevance, if any, do you think New Deal politics have today in meeting the challenges of the 21st century, especially globalization and climate change? Let us know in 600 words or less.

The top essay or excerpts will be published in The Nation, and the author will receive a $500 cash prize. The top five essays will be published on Student Nation and the Roosevelt Institution homepage.

The deadline for submissions is March 2, 2008. Please send your essay to essays@rooseveltinstitution.org, subject line “New Deal Essay;” when sending, please include as an attachment and in the body of the email.”

More articles may come later tonight…

Why does the left lose in America? While there are a bunch of reasons, language is one of the biggest ones. In Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate George Lakoff explores cognitive science, language, linguistics, and how all of them relate to progressive politics and progressive framing/messaging/organizing. Every radical interested in winning should read Lakoff and those at Rockridge Nation and The Rockridge Institute. Apply a radical analysis to their tactics and BAM - we’ll be infinitely more successful. Don’t Think of an Elephant is a great introduction to framing and messaging. Take a look:

“Don’t Think of an Elephant! is the definitive handbook for understanding what happened in the 2004 election and communicating effectively about key issues facing America today. Author George Lakoff has become a key advisor to the Democratic party, helping them develop their message and frame the political debate.

In this book Lakoff explains how conservatives think, and how to counter their arguments. He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives hold, but are often unable to articulate. Lakoff also breaks down the ways in which conservatives have framed the issues, and provides examples of how progressives can reframe the debate.

Lakoff’s years of research and work with environmental and political leaders have been distilled into this essential guide, which shows progressives how to think in terms of values instead of programs, and why people vote their values and identities, often against their best interests.

Don’t Think of An Elephant! is the antidote to the last forty years of conservative strategizing and the right wing’s stranglehold on political dialogue in the United States.

Read it, take action-and help take America back.”

By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS

[in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review
From the issue dated January 18, 2008
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i19/19b00701.htm]

We forget so much. We forget that he was hanging by a thread in 1968 at the time of his death, whose 40th anniversary we will mark in April. We forget that his moral authority had frayed, leaving his fund raising in free fall. We forget that in his final years, he faced not only a rising “white backlash” — the media term for white obduracy in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, North as well as South — but resentment from establishment liberals who thought he had executed too radical a turn by opposing a Democratic president and the Vietnam War. We forget that although blacks still looked to him more than any other leader, he was increasingly viewed with cynicism by young militants who derided him as “De Lawd” and thought his nonviolence too tepid for the times. We forget that police agencies from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to military intelligence viewed him as a dangerous subversive, listened in on his conversations, and spread both true and false rumors about him in a concerted campaign to discredit him. We forget that between major addresses he was prone to depression, afflicted by insomnia so severe that he slept only a few hours each night, even when popping sleeping pills. We forget that his close associates were concerned by his anxiety and fatigue, and taken aback by his fixation on his own mortality. We forget the critics who accused him of harboring a “Messiah complex.”

By all rights, though, we ought to remember. We are surrounded by constant reminders of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Statues, monuments, and postage stamps bear his likeness, highways and boulevards his name. He has become a national icon. Television ads sample his voice. Presidential candidates invoke the “fierce urgency of now.” Ubiquity has come, however, at a price. The nonviolent revolutionary who upended conventional society and sought to induce tension has become an anodyne symbol of progress. The disappointed prophet who spoke toward the end of his life of America as a nightmare is remembered only for his 1963 dream. Once widely reviled, King has become an almost obligatory object of reverence. Even conservatives genuflect before his memory. While dismantling affirmative action, a policy King advocated, they cite King’s aspiration that Americans be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. King is a totem: safe, universal, unobjectionable. He is as remote and mythical to schoolchildren as any other figure in the national pantheon stretching back to the founding fathers. His inner turmoil, his public failures, his vocal critics, left and right, have all faded from view, replaced by a fable in which a nation awakens gently to his self-evident dream.

This pattern is not wholly lamentable. It may even be necessary. Had the long campaign waged by Coretta Scott King after his murder not succeeded, had she and her husband’s closest associates not surmounted strong resistance and achieved a national day named for him, there might be no annual federal commemoration of the life of any African-American. There might be no occasion for the nation to reflect upon the merit of the dismantling of overt racism in law, public accommodations, and education, as well as the securing of voting rights for all citizens, regardless of race. These accomplishments — understood by King himself as gigantic steps forward — merit our commemoration.

But the ceremonial gloss now overlaid upon Martin Luther King Jr. causes problems. By rendering him immaculate and incontrovertible, sanctification has, paradoxically, left him vulnerable. Cynicism is too easily the reaction when revelations occur about, say, King’s sexual escapades or collegiate plagiarism. But King’s heroism and place in history never depended on a halo of saintly purity. Brilliant, flawed, controversial, talented, King — as he was first to observe — was always a sinner.

To view Martin Luther King Jr. as the Man Who Brought About Civil Rights is to conflate movement with man, and biography is no substitute for history. King’s stature ought not obscure the vast and variegated activity from below, in countless cities and rural districts, that made up the civil-rights revolution. Too often King’s story is framed within a self-contented story of national progress that idealizes the extent to which the country has transcended race and minimizes the disruptive tactics necessary to bring about an end to Jim Crow. Commemoration further confines King’s life to the box of “civil-rights leader,” making it seem that his sole aim was to eliminate de jure discrimination — the explicit racist barriers to opportunity. In actuality, King, like the black freedom movement as a whole, pursued an expansive moral mission dedicated to ending inequality, racism, war, and poverty.

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day,” King told the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination, “I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize — that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards — that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.”

Our scholarship on the civil-rights movement — truly stunning in its quality — is not to blame for our oversimplified iconography of Martin Luther King Jr. King is the subject of many fine biographies, among them David Levering Lewis’s King (Penguin, 1970), Stephen B. Oates’s Let the Trumpet Sound (Harper & Row, 1982), David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross (William Morrow, 1986), and Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy, beginning with Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon and Schuster, 1988). Excellent biographies now exist of Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Rosa Parks, King’s colleagues. Testimonies of the black freedom struggle are collected in oral histories and memoirs. Narratives have appeared of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, and Freedom Summer, as well as struggles in local communities, from Birmingham to Greensboro. Writers have shed new light on Brown v. Board of Education (1954), organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the press’s “race beat,” and segregationists’ “massive resistance.” The freedom movement has even occasioned the best historical documentary ever produced on any subject, Eyes on the Prize.

These investigations have transformed historical understanding in ways the nation’s culture has yet to fully register, let alone absorb. Scholars now emphasize the global context of cold war (as a lever) and decolonization (as inspiration) for the American civil-rights movement. Many of them speak of a “long civil-rights movement” stretching back at least to the 1940s, when A. Philip Randolph led fights to desegregate industry and the military — if not even further back, to Ida B. Wells’s antilynching crusade of the 1890s or the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by W.E.B. Du Bois and others in 1909. Recent scholarship heralds women’s networks, rooted primarily in the black church, as critical to movement success in the 1950s and 1960s, giving Septima Clark, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others their due. Historians have shown conclusively that armed self-defense was a significant factor in a cause once taken to have been purely nonviolent. They have depicted numerous mobilizations against Jim Crow in the North, as well as the South. They have begun to explore with sophistication the complex relationship between black radicalism and militant liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s.

Those insights, which mark off civil-rights scholarship as one of the most imaginative fields of modern American historiography, pose profound challenges to those who would consecrate King as the personification of the movement. In I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (University of California Press, 1995), a brilliant local study, Charles M. Payne blasts “top down” civil-rights histories for obscuring the “collective, multi-faceted nature” of the movement’s leadership. “King-centric” studies, he writes, promote a “normative history” by assuming that “national institutions work more or less as advertised.” They tend to overestimate the national consensus about the movement’s goals and frame radicalism as irrational. In “popular discourse about the movement,” Payne finds, King fits the normative bill as “the apostle of nonviolence, advocate of interracial brotherhood and Christian patience.”

As if in conscious response, a new scholarly synthesis seems emergent four decades after the death of King, one that draws upon decidedly bottom-up conceptions of the civil-rights movement to reconsider King’s life and thought. Far from a comforting, “normative” figure, King emerges in these studies, as Thomas F. Jackson puts it in his very fine intellectual portrait From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, as “much more radical, earlier and more consistently, than he is credited for being.” One hallmark of these recent works — which concentrate above all on King’s economic and social philosophy — is their attentiveness, again in Jackson’s words, to the way in which King’s voice echoed “the values and languages of specific audiences” while “challenging them with antithetical truths, stretching their terms of understanding and prodding them to think and act in new directions.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., the ongoing work of the King Papers Project headed by Clayborne Carson at Stanford University. A labor of love, the King Papers Project is a money-losing venture both for its host institution, which quarters it in a temporary modular building, and its publisher, the University of California Press. Subject to the ebb and flow of whatever financial support it manages to cobble together, the King Papers Project has somehow succeeded in assembling an extraordinary, state-of-the-art digital database and issuing six handsomely bound volumes of King’s papers to date.

An hour spent with a volume in this series is virtually equivalent to a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. Each volume is a trove of letters, memoranda, transcriptions, photographs, speeches, minutes, and fragmentary notes, some in facsimile of the handwritten original. All are reproduced verbatim, complete with King’s wretched spelling (”diciple,” “fudal”). The staff editors — as historians trained in social history and, in several cases, veterans of social movements — are ambivalent about Great Man theories of King. Aided by squadrons of Stanford students they oversee, they acquire King documents from the world over, make selections from mountains of potential items, and write the contextualizing footnotes and introductions.

The most recent volume comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (”There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

The volume’s assiduous editorial annotation permits us to locate King in lived dialogue. We discover, for example, that his 1952 sermon on “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, prompted a letter of retort from Melvin H. Watson, a Morehouse College professor and Ebenezer congregant, who attempted to set King straight on the virtues of Stalin. Watson, a holdover from the Communist-led Popular Front, helps us place King’s democratic radicalism in bold relief while providing a concrete illustration of how black communities retained a strong left-wing presence even after the 1940s.

Reviews of the first volume of King Papers in 1992 were mixed, but read today those initial objections look stingy. Regrettably, no volume issued since has received much attention, even though the third, on the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, is nonpareil as a sourcebook on that critical struggle. With six volumes now in print, it is time we hail the King Papers Project as a triumph of national scholarship, one that would have been impossible without grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and other federal agencies.

It may be too much to hope that the steady accumulation of scholarship drawing attention to King’s radicalism and situating him within a complex movement will alter popular conceptions of King, but if a breakthrough does come, it would seem most likely to take place in a year, like this 40th anniversary, that draws our attention to his activity in 1968.

Never was King’s full agenda more visible than after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his last years, King struggled to devise tactics suitable to challenging economic injustice, a target more amorphous than Jim Crow. In 1966 he launched an ill-fated challenge to Chicago’s slums and residential segregation. In 1967, in a speech against “racism, materialism, and militarism,” he described the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” placed America “on the wrong side of a world revolution,” and blamed the “need to maintain social stability for our investments.”

In 1968, King visited a bare-bones elementary school in rural Mississippi. As he watched, the teacher provided each child with a few crackers and a quarter of an apple for lunch. “That’s all they get,” his friend Ralph Abernathy whispered. King nodded, his eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. That night, King conceived the notion of a Poor People’s Campaign. To open the eyes of the nation to poverty, he would lead a Washington encampment of poor people whose civil disobedience would compel a shift of funds from war to social priorities such as full employment and a guaranteed annual income.

Opposition instantly greeted the Poor People’s Campaign. King’s advisers privately doubted its wisdom. Former allies criticized it publicly. As King soldiered on undaunted, he was called to Memphis, where garbage workers requested his presence. Their strike, sparked by the deaths of two workers crushed in a faulty trash compactor, had unified the black community in opposition to Memphis’s intransigent segregationist mayor, Henry Loeb.

Never before has there been so complete a rendering of that episode as in Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign. Situating the Memphis strike within the sweep of history, Michael K. Honey shows that the poverty wages of sanitation workers were emblematic of the black working poor. One might take issue with some aspects of Honey’s retelling, such as his rendering of King as opposed to obsessive anticommunism but never to communism. Honey also misses that King, by invoking the Jericho parable, did not merely mean to call us to service like the Good Samaritan; he actually proposed, through social transformation, to alter the road itself to eliminate the need for charity. (”We’re going to change the whole Jericho road!” he shouted in Chicago.) Honey’s intricately researched reconstruction, however, leaves far more to commend than fault. His portraits of key players, from union leaders to Black Power youth, are highly informative. He effectively recreates King’s powerful oratory — including his startling call for a Memphis general strike. Going Down Jericho Road is a majestic work of black history as labor history, and social history as American history.

When King died after being shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at age 39, he was beleaguered. Some people say he was a dreamer, but — to quote another martyr — he was not the only one. Malcolm and Medgar, Allende and Lumumba: The casualties dotted that age. King’s mellifluent baritone voice and charismatic leadership in 1968 were directed beyond attitudinal racism and legal segregation, toward overturning the tables of the money-changers. He meant to bring an end to war, slums, underfunded schools, destitution, and unemployment. Down riot-torn streets, he continued his quest for audacious social transformation by means of creative tension, compassion, love, inclusion, and humility. His death reminds us of American violence. The aspirations he left unfulfilled — especially for social equality and economic justice — may yet supply the legacy for a renewed American hope.
Christopher Phelps teaches 20th-century American history at Ohio State University at Mansfield.

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:

From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, by Thomas F. Jackson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, by Michael K. Honey (Norton, 2007)

The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume VI: Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948-March 1963, edited by Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Susan Englander, Troy Jackson, and Gerald L. Smith (University of California Press, 2007)

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 19, Page B7

Today’s headlines and stories:

1. Evangelicals are Splintering; Republican Base Falling Apart: Jim Wallis on CNN - Evangelicals Splintering: How It Could Change Politics. Jim Wallis is on CNN. Also see Jim Wallis’s blog post on the Pew report, A Religious Landscape Ripe for Revival:

“I haven’t yet read the whole study released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life titled, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” just some of today’s news reports. But what I have read confirms what I see on the road every week. U.S. citizens are on the move religiously. Many people are not staying in the churches of their upbringings. “This is not your parents’ church,” many now could say as they show up on Sunday mornings. But where are they going? What we have known for a long time now is backed by the data—namely that many evangelical churches are growing, and especially congregations that are “non-denominational” or “unaffiliated.” And a decline in Catholic Church attendance is being somewhat offset by an influx into the country of Catholic immigrants.”

You can find a PDF version here. We’re gonna OWN the Republicans this year!

2. Pew Report Finds More than One in 100 Adults are Behind Bars - The Pew Center on the States:

“Washington, DC - 02/28/2008 - For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety. According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study. During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates. In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments, why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety.”

3. Times They Are a Changing: An Interview with George Lakoff on Language, Politics, and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections - Dave Winer, 52, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; check out his interview with George Lakoff, a fellow at the Rockridge Institute, and a pioneer in linking lessons from linguistics and cognitive science to politics and progressive organizing & messaging. And here is the mp3 file. I’ll definitely be posting some follow up posts about this article soon. Stay tuned!

4. New College of California, a progressive college in San Francisco, loses its accreditation - New College has lost its accreditation as the result of undemocratic and anti-progressive attacks from moderates and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). Statement from the New College Board of Trustees:

“As members of the New College Board of Trustees, we are very disappointed by the decision by the WASC Commission to move to terminate the College’s accreditation, as communicated to us in a message received yesterday. At this point, we are exploring a number of options, as described further below. In our deliberations we are clear that our first and foremost priority is to protect the interests of individuals invested in the College - this starts with our students and extends to our graduates, along with members of our faculty and staff.”

This is truly a loss for our movement…

5. Youthquake - January 9, 2008 in BusinessWeek:

“They’re called the Millennials—and they’re fed up. Why? Try angst about jobs, health care, and debt. Now they’re getting pols to listen. Earlier than most of his rivals, Barack Obama sensed that a youthquake was rumbling deep inside the American electorate. For months, his campaign has put a premium on reaching out to YouTube (GOOG) disaffecteds. So far the strategy is paying off, helped along, no doubt, by the candidate’s hip, un-boomer persona. The 46-year-old Illinois senator’s surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses and close second-place finish to New York Senator Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire Democratic primary were fueled largely by hordes of twentysomethings in hoodies—the oft-pierced-and-tattooed generation that has come to be known as the Millennials, or Gen Y.”

Got other interesting articles from the last few days? E-mail me at brian (at) walkingbutterfly.com!

By Stephen Zunes
Source: Portside

The United States has done for the cause of democracy what the Soviet Union did for the cause of socialism. Not only has the Bush administration given democracy a bad name in much of the world, but its high-profile and highly suspect “democracy promotion” agenda has provided repressive regimes and their apologists an excuse to label any popular pro-democracy movement that challenges them as foreign agents, even when led by independent grassroots nonviolent activists.

In recent months, the governments of Zimbabwe, Iran, Belarus, and Burma, among others, have disingenuously claimed that popular nonviolent civil insurrections of the kind that toppled the corrupt and autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in recent years - and that could eventually threaten them as well - are somehow part of an effort by the Bush administration and its allies to instigate “soft coups” against governments deemed hostile to American interests and replace them by more compliant regimes.

This confuses two very different phenomena.

The U.S. government has undeniably provided small amounts of money to various opposition groups and political parties through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and other organs. Such funding has at times helped a number of opposition groups cover some of the costs of their operations, better enabling them to afford computers, Internet access, fax machines, printing costs, office space and other materials. Assistance from foreign governments has also helped provide for poll watchers and other logistical support to help insure free and fair elections. In addition, the United States, through the NED, the IRI and other U.S.-funded projects, has also provided seminars and other training for opposition leaders in campaign strategies.

What is controversial about these endeavors is that they have been directed primarily at helping conservative, pro-Western parties with a free-market orientation and generally not parties of the democratic left. Nor are they aimed solely at pro-democracy struggles challenging autocratic regimes. Indeed, U.S. agencies have also backed opposition parties in countries such as Venezuela, despite it already being a democracy.

Some opposition groups in some countries have welcomed U.S. assistance while others have rejected such aid on principle. There is no evidence, however, to suggest - even in cases where this kind of limited U.S. support for opposition organizations has taken place - that the U.S. government or any U.S.-funded entity has ever provided training, advice, or strategic assistance for the kind of mass popular nonviolent action campaigns that have toppled governments or threatened the survival of incumbent regimes.

How Democratic Change Occurs

The United States remains the world’s number one supplier of armaments and security assistance to the world’s dictatorships. There is little reason to take seriously the idea that U.S. foreign policy, under either Republican or Democratic administrations, has been based upon a sincere belief in advancing freedom and democracy as a matter of principle. History has shown repeatedly that the U.S. government, like most Western powers, supports democratic rule only if it is seen to promote perceived economic and strategic interests. Conversely, the U.S. government has frequently opposed democratic rule if it is seen to be contrary to perceived economic and strategic interests. Since the vast majority of Americans, according to public opinion polls, do support democracy as a matter of principle, however, support for “democracy” has long been used as a rationalization for various U.S. foreign policy initiatives, even when these policies end up supporting authoritarianism and repression. As a result, though support for democratic change in countries ruled by autocratic regimes is certainly a worthwhile goal, skepticism over the Bush administration’s pro-democracy rhetoric is indeed warranted.

In any case, true democratic change comes from within. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a series of broadly based nonviolent social movements that have succeeded in toppling dictatorships and forcing democratic reforms in such diverse countries as the Philippines, Chile, Bolivia, Madagascar, Nepal, Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Serbia, Mali, and Ukraine. Even the relatively conservative Washington-based Freedom House, after examining the 67 countries that have moved from authoritarianism to varying degrees of democratic governance over the past few decades (www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/29.pdf) published a study concluding that these transitions did not come as a result of foreign intervention and only rarely through armed revolt or voluntary elite-driven reforms. In the overwhelming majority of cases, according to this report, change came through democratic civil society organizations engaging in massive nonviolent demonstrations and other forms of civil resistance, such as strikes, boycotts, tax refusal, occupations of public space, and other forms of non- cooperation.

Whenever governments are challenged by their own people, they tend to claim that those struggling for freedom and justice are traitors to the nation and agents of foreign enemies. In previous decades, opposition activists challenging U.S.-backed dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere were routinely labeled as “communist agents” and “Soviet sympathizers.” Today, pro-democracy movements within U.S. client states in the Middle East are depicted as “Islamic fundamentalists” and “Iranian agents.” Similarly, opposition activists in Iran, Belarus, Burma, and Zimbabwe have been labeled as “supporters of Western imperialism” and “American agents.”

In reality, the limited amount of financial support provided to opposition groups by the United States and other Western governments in recent years cannot cause a nonviolent liberal democratic revolution to take place any more than the limited Soviet financial and material support for leftist movements in previous decades could cause an armed socialist revolution to take place. As Marxists and others familiar with popular movements have long recognized, revolutions are the result of certain objective conditions. Indeed, no amount of money could force hundreds of thousands of people to leave their jobs, homes, schools, and families to face down heavily armed police and tanks and put their bodies on the line unless they had a sincere motivation to do so.

Conspiracy Theories

A number of regimes facing popular opposition have gone so far as to claim that certain small independent non- profit organizations and supporters of nonviolent action from Europe and the United States who have provided seminars and workshops for opposition activists on the history and dynamics of nonviolent resistance are somehow working as agents of the Bush administration. Some Western bloggers and other writers critical of the Bush administration and understandably concerned about U.S. intervention in the name of “democracy,” have actually bought into some of the claims by these governments. These conspiracy theories have in turn been picked up by some progressive websites and periodicals and even by some in the mainstream press, which then repeat them as fact.

Virtually all of these seminars and workshops, however, come at the direct request of opposition organizers themselves. And at least as many of them have been on behalf of pro-democracy activists struggling against right-wing dictatorships as there have been on behalf of pro-democracy activists struggling against left-wing dictatorships. Over just this past year, for example, my colleagues and I have worked with Egyptians, Maldivians, Palestinians, West Papuans, Sahrawis, Azerbaijanis, and Guatemalan Indians struggling against repressive U.S.- backed governments. In addition, virtually all of these groups have a strict policy of refusing support from the NED or any other government-funded entities. As a result of my own involvement in a number of these groups and personally knowing most of their principal workshop leaders, I recognize that charges that Gene Sharp, Jack DuVall, Bob Helvey, Ivan Marovic, the Albert Einstein Institution, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), and the Center on Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) are somehow in cahoots with the CIA or are serving as agents of U.S. imperialism are totally unfounded.

Unfortunately, even Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - echoed by some of his North American supporters - has apparently fallen for these false charges and has accused some of these individuals and groups of plotting with his opponents to overthrow him. Chavez has every right to be a bit paranoid, given the very real U.S. government efforts to subvert his regime, including support for a short-lived coup in 2002. In reality, however, the only visit to Venezuela that has taken place on behalf of any of these non-profit groups engaged in educational efforts on strategic nonviolence was in early 2006 when I - along with David Hartsough, the radical pacifist director of Peaceworkers - led a series of workshops at the World Social Forum in Caracas. There we lectured and led discussions on the power of nonviolent resistance as well as offered a series of screenings of a film ICNC helped develop on the pro-democracy movement in Chile against the former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. The only reference to Venezuela during those workshops was how massive nonviolent action could be used to resist a possible coup against Chavez, not foment one. In fact, Hartsough and I met with some Venezuelan officials regarding proposals that the government train the population in various methods of nonviolent civil defense to resist any possible future attempts to overthrow Chavez.

Workshops on Strategic Nonviolence

The American and European groups that share generic information on the history and dynamics of strategic nonviolence with civil society organizations in foreign countries are not unlike the Western private voluntary organizations that share environmentally sustainable technologies and agricultural techniques to farmers in developing nations. Both offer useful tools that, if applied consistently and effectively, could improve the quality of life for millions of people. There is nothing “imperialistic” about it.

Just as sustainable agricultural technologies and methods are more effective in meeting human needs and preserving the planet than the conventional development strategies promoted by Western governments, nonviolent action has been shown to be more effective in advancing democratic change than threats of foreign military intervention, backing coup plotters, imposing punitive sanctions, supporting armed rebel groups, and other methods traditionally instigated by the United States and its allies. And just as the application of appropriate technologies can also be a means of countering the damage caused by unsustainable neo- liberal economic models pushed by Western governments and international financial institutions, the use of massive nonviolent action can counter some of the damage resulting from the arms trade, military intervention, and other harmful manifestations of Western militarism.

Development based on Western models usually means that multinational corporations and the governments of wealthy capitalist countries end up exerting a large degree of control over these societies, whereas appropriate technologies allow for genuine independence and self-sufficiency. Similarly, unlike fomenting a military coup or establishing a military occupation - which relies on asserting control over the population and potential political opponents - successful nonviolent civil insurrections are necessarily based on a broad coalition of popular movements and are therefore impossible for an outside power to control.

It is ironic, then, that some elements of the left are attacking those very individuals and groups who are trying to disseminate these tools of popular empowerment against the forces of oppression and imperialism.

People Power

Another difference between these people-to-people educational efforts and U.S. intervention is that, unlike the NED and other government-backed “pro- democracy” efforts, which often focus on developing conventional political initiatives led by pro-Western elites, these workshops on strategic nonviolence are primarily designed for grassroots activists unaffiliated with established political parties who seek to make change from below.

Historically, individuals and groups with experience in effective nonviolent action campaigns tend to come from leftist and pacifist traditions which carry a skeptical view of government power, particularly governments with a history of militarism and conquest. For example, my own background in strategic nonviolent action is rooted in my involvement in the late 1970s as a nonviolence trainer for the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance and the nonviolent revolutionary group Movement for a New Society, both of which were radically decentralist in structure and decidedly anti-capitalist and anti- imperialist in orientation. More recently, my fellow workshop leaders have included a South African veteran of the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front, a leading Palestinian activist from the first intifada, and former student leaders from the left-wing Serbian opposition to Milosevic.

Conversely, large bureaucratic governments accustomed to projecting political power through military force or elite diplomatic channels have little understanding or appreciation of nonviolent action or any other kind of mass popular struggle. Indeed, what would CIA operatives know about nonviolence, much less grassroots organizing?

In short, not only is it naive to assume than an external power could provoke a revolution of any kind, it should be apparent that the U.S. government does not know the first thing about fomenting a nonviolent civil insurrection. As a result, the dilemma for U.S. policy- makers - and the hope for all of us who support democracy as a matter of principle and not political expediency - is that the most realistic way to overthrow the world’s remaining autocratic regimes is through a process the U.S. government cannot control.

The U.S. government has historically promoted regime change through military invasions, coup d’etats, and other kinds of violent seizures of power that install an undemocratic minority. Nonviolent “people power” movements, by contrast, make regime change possible through empowering pro-democratic majorities. As a result, the best hope for advancing freedom and democracy in the world’s remaining autocratic states comes from civil society, not the U.S. government, which deserves neither the credit nor the blame for the growing phenomenon of nonviolent democratic revolutions.

Strengthening the Bush Agenda

The emergence of civil society organizations and the growing awareness of the power of nonviolent action in recent years have been among the most positive political developments in what has otherwise been largely depressing political times. It is most unfortunate, then, that supposedly “progressive” voices have chosen to attack this populist grass roots phenomenon as some kind of Bush administration conspiracy.

It is also ironic that so many on the American left - after years of romanticizing armed struggle as the only way to defeat dictatorships, disparaging the potential of nonviolent action to overthrow repressive governments, and dismissing the notion of a nonviolent revolution — are now expressing their alarm at how successful popular nonviolent insurrections can be, even to the point of naively thinking that it is so easy to pull off that it could somehow be organized from foreign capitals. In reality, every successful popular nonviolent insurrection has been a home grown movement rooted in the realization by the masses that their rulers were illegitimate and the current political system was incapable of redressing injustice. By contrast, no nonviolent insurrection has succeeded when the movement’s leadership and agenda did not have the backing of the majority of the population. This is why the 2002-2003 “strike” in Venezuela’s oil industry failed to bring down Chavez while comparable disruptions to economies elsewhere have often forced out less popular leaders.

“Leftist” critics of nonviolent pro-democracy movements parallel right-wing supporters of U.S. intervention in that both denigrate the power of individuals to take their destiny into their own hands and overthrow oppressive leaders and institutions. Instead, both appear to believe that people are passive victims and that social and political change can only come through the manipulation of foreign powers.

Reagan Redux

For example, despite President Ronald Reagan’s insistence during the 1980s that the popular armed insurgencies that challenged repressive U.S.-backed regimes in Central America were the result of a Soviet “hit list,” the reality was that the revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala were homegrown popular movements. The Soviets provided a limited amount of assistance and obviously wanted to take political advantage of the possible overthrow of pro-American oligarchs by having them replaced with leftist revolutionaries who would be friendlier to their interests. But the oppressed peasants and workers of those Central American countries were not following the dictates of Moscow. They were struggling for basic rights and an end to repression.

Similar claims heard today that the United States is somehow a major force behind contemporary popular movements against dictatorships in Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Belarus or that the United States was somehow responsible for the successes of previous movements in Serbia, Georgia or Ukraine are equally ludicrous. This attitude parallels claims by those on the right who disingenuously credited Reagan’s dangerous and militaristic Cold War policies for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and tried to depict the union activists, peasants, students, priests, and others martyred in the course of popular struggles in Central America as Soviet agents.

In addition, it is important to remember that the vast majority of successful nonviolent civil insurrections have not been against dictatorships opposed by the U.S. government, but dictatorships supported by the U.S. government. Right-wing autocrats toppled by such “people power” movements have included Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah of Iran, Duvalier in Haiti, Pinochet in Chile, Chun in South Korea, and Numeiry in Sudan, to name only a few.

Another problem with this kind of simplistic reductionism is that when nonviolent civil insurrections do succeed in bringing democrats to power in countries previously under anti-American dictatorships, the new often-inexperienced leaders are faced with plaudits from the American right and suspicion from the European and North American left. This could lead them to wonder who their friends really are and reinforce the myth that those of the right, rather than the left, are the real champions of freedom.

The conspiratorial thinking and denigration of genuine popular movements appearing increasingly in some leftist circles serves to strengthen the hand of repressive regimes, weaken democratic forces, and bolster the argument of American neo-conservatives that only U.S. militarism and intervention - and not nonviolent struggle by oppressed peoples themselves - is capable of freeing those suffering under repressive rule.

How Change Occurs

Successful nonviolent revolutions, like successful armed revolutions, often take years or decades to develop as part of an organic process within the body politic of a given country. There is no standardized formula for success that a foreign government or a foreign non- governmental organization could put together, since the history, culture and political alignments of each country are unique. No foreign government or NGO can recruit or mobilize the large numbers of ordinary civilians necessary to build a movement capable of effectively challenging the established political leadership, much less of toppling a government.

Trainers and workshop leaders like me and my colleagues emphasize certain strategies and tactics that have been successful elsewhere in applying pressure on governments to change their policies and undermining the support and loyalty required for governments to successfully suppress the opposition. In some cases, local activists may try to emulate some of them. However, a regime will lose power only if it tries to forcibly maintain a system that the people oppose, not because a foreign workshop leader described to a small group of opposition activists certain tactics that had been used successfully in another country at another time.

In maintaining our steadfast opposition to U.S. interventionism and exposing the hypocrisy and double- standards of the Bush administration’s rhetoric in support of democracy, we must also challenge those who denigrate popular indigenous movements as creations of Washington or slander reputable non-profit groups that share their generic knowledge of nonviolent strategies and tactics with like-minded organizations overseas.

Finally, both to maintain our credibility and because it is the right thing to do, progressives should recognize the moral imperative of opposing repressive regimes regardless of their ideology or their relationship with the United States. Progressives should also embrace strategic nonviolent action in the cause of freedom as an ethical and realistic alternative to U.S. interventionism.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus and a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. He is the principal co-editor of Nonviolent Social Movements (Blackwell, 1999) and chairs the board of academic advisors for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco

A profound video by Annie Leonard: The Story of Stuff. Its a great, accessible way to start a conversation with people about production, consumption, allocation, and environmental sustainability and justice. Check it out! http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Iraq Veterans Against the War: “In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”In 1971, a courageous group of veterans exposed the criminal nature of the Vietnam War in an event called Winter Soldier. Once again, we will demand that the voices of veterans are heard.

Once again, we are fighting for the soul of our country. We will demonstrate our patriotism by speaking out with honor and integrity instead of blindly following failed policy. Winter Soldier is a difficult but essential service to our country.

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan will feature testimony from U.S. veterans who served in those occupations, giving an accurate account of what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground.

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans’ health benefits and support.

When: Thursday March 13 to Sunday March 16

For those interested in watching or organizing around the proceedings at Winter Soldier, there will be a number of ways to watch and listen to the event. Find out how to watch.

Want to help make Winter Soldier a success? Find how how you can help.

Help us spread the word: forward this page to a friend.”

A great talk Van Jones gave at the National Conference for Media Reform in 2007. He talks about the politics of togetherness, avoiding defeatism, realizing when the Left is actually winning on issues. He uses superb language and themes that all leftists should take up. He’s a great orator and motivational speaker. Feeling down? Need some inspiration? Check it out!

“Non-violence is not inaction… It is not for the timid or weak… Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.” -  César Chávez

Can a computer game teach how to fight real-world adversaries—dictators, military occupiers and corrupt rulers, using methods that

have succeeded in actual conflicts—not with laser rays or AK47s, but with non-military strategies and nonviolent weapons? Such a game, A Force More Powerful (AFMP), is now available. A unique collaboration of experts on nonviolent conflict working with veteran game designers has developed a simulation game that teaches the strategy of nonviolent conflict. A dozen scenarios, inspired by re

cent history, include conflicts against dictators, occupiers, colonizers and corrupt regimes, as well as struggles to secure the political and human rights of ethnic and racial minorities and women.”

Aaron showed me this really interesting video from Digital Ethnography, a project at Kansas State University. Here’s Professor Wesch’s post describing the video:

“This video was created by me (Professor Wesch) and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:

“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”

Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.

I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period.

The introduction was filmed by myself a month later. It is inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s ideas as they apply to education, especially as they have been used by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

How we gathered the numbers:

133 out of 200 students responded to the survey which yielded the results. Further explanation of the data is posted below:

“My average class size is 115.”
Survey: What is your average class size?
Average: 115.0602

“18% of my teachers know my name.”
Survey: What percentage of teachers you have had in college would be able to recognize you and call you by name?
Average: 18.2

“I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me.”
Survey: Not including this class, what percentage of assigned readings do you complete?
Average: 48.73

“Only 26% … relative to my life.”
Survey: Not including this class, what percentage of assigned readings do you find relevant to your life?
Average: 25.95

“I will read 8 books this year.”
Survey: How many books have you read this year?
Average: 8.03 (ranging from 0-200)
We discovered later that there was some disagreement about whether this question referred to a semester, the past year, or the year starting as of January 1^st (this survey took place in April - roughly equal to one semester). To make the ratio to web page and Facebook reading more accurate we assumed this statistic to relate to one semester rather than one calendar year.

“2300 web pages”
Survey: On average, how many web pages do you read each day?
Average: 21.51
(We then multiplied this by 105 - roughly the number of days in a semester and rounded to 2300.)

“and 1281 facebook profiles.”
Survey: On average, how many Facebook profiles do you view each day?
Average: 12.2 (multiplied by 105 = 1281)

“I will write 42 pages for class this semester.”
Survey: On average, how many pages do you write for your classes each semester?
Average: 41.96

“And over 500 pages of email.”
Survey: On average, how many pages of e-mails will you write in a single day?
Average: 4.96 (*105 days/semester = over 500) “

The peace movement, which has largely convinced the entire population that the Iraq War is about oil, and the environmental movement, which has framed the debate that global warming is a clear and present danger, both don’t seem to be bridging the gaps between the two issues. I’d love to be proven wrong on this, but from what I’ve seen, most of the two sections of the progressive movement aren’t making the obvious connections.

Burning fossil fuels is driving global warming. The United States just spent almost $1 trillion (yes, trillion with a “T”) to ensure permanent access to Iraqi oil. In other words, money that could have gone to dozens of serious social programs - including funding a complete greening of the American economy - was instead funneled into an illegal, costly, and lethal global warming drilling expedition and nobody is talking about it.

The war, as the election season in the United States speeds up, is largely off the table. It’s gone off the media radar for election coverage, which isn’t surprising, though obviously quite frustrating. The environmental movement, which has been doing a phenomenal job linking solutions to global warming with solutions to poverty in America (i.e. “green pathways out of poverty”, “green collar jobs”, and “solar cells, not jail cells”), but doesn’t seem to be focusing in a large way on why our national spending priorities are what they are. How can we prompt a green economic revolution in our country if half of our budget is going to waging a bloody war for control of fossil fuel reserves!

The only folks I’ve seen actually trying to link the two issues are the “no war, no warming” folks. But the slogan just doesn’t cut it. All it says, all it invokes, is a group of people who happen to be against two things (key word: against). The direct linkage and correlation between the two issue’s aren’t highlighted when they are dichotomized in that way. We need to be more creative and thoughtful when linking the two - and we need to frame our message in positive language. People need to understand them as one concept. Much like messaging around “green collar jobs” invokes two issues with one conceptual frame.

The connections are clear. The public, soldiers, and veterans are all against the Iraq War in record numbers. Large portions of the population think we need to take action against climate destabilization too. Both global warming and the war are only getting worse. The U.S. Government and Corporate America just handed us these narratives. Let’s take them and roll with it!

An ongoing compilation of Organizations Promoting: Leadership Development, Political Education, Vision, Strategy, and Capacity Building. I will soon add links to their websites and descriptions of what they do. In the mean time, you can find them by googling their name. Want to help build the movement? Donate these groups and support their work - they are the people who build the capacity of the movement’s best organizers and leaders! Enjoy!

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Beyond the Choir

The Brecht Forum

Campus Camp Wellstone - a project of Wellstone Action

The Center for Political Education

The Change Agency

Electoral Action Training (EAT) - a project of the United States Student Association and Campus Camp Wellstone

Grassroots Organizing Weekend (GROW) - a project of the United States Student Association and the Midwest Academy

Highlander Research and Education Center

Paul Kivel

Labor/Community Strategy Center

The Midwest Academy

Movement Strategy Center

New Tactics in Human Rights

The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond

Project South

RANT Collective (Root Activist Network of Trainers)

Rainforest Action Network

RESIST Grants

The Rockridge Institute

Rosenberg Fund for Children

The Ruckus Society

School of Unity and Liberation

smartMeme

Tools for Change

Training for Change

War Resisters League

Z Media Institute