InterOccupy Conference Call on Nonviolence vs Diversity of Tactics

I've tended to stay away from the Occupy Conference Calls since last November. I'm not keen on the highly structured format among other things, but since I've been pretty well embroiled in the intensifying online discussions regarding the merits of Occupy Oakland's more militant and confrontational "Way" compared to the constant litany of "Nonviolent Peaceful Protest" we hear out of New York and elsewhere, I thought the discussion (however tightly it was controlled) might be interesting this morning.

It was.

When I joined, about 20 minutes into the discussion, I thought I heard the tail end of OO's Boots Riley's observations, but I can't be sure, because there's nothing in the minutes about his participation, and as far as I know, he never participated again.

There seemed to be about twenty or twenty-five participants, the plurality in New York, but there were others in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, so it was something of a geographical cross section, but did not seem to be inclusive of a variety of positions regarding Nonviolence or Diversity of Tactics. There was instead a heavy concentration of pretty rigid adherents to the narrowest definition of Nonviolent Resistance (you must follow Gandhi and King exclusively or you are a violence advocate, it seems), and there was pretty much no one else at all, at least none (well, few) who spoke up.

I made a couple of points about the fact that overall and in the context of specific occupations like Occupy Oakland, the Movement (pdf) is by definition a Nonviolent Resistance Campaign that includes no Violent Resistance at all. Black Bloc tactics and "the anarchists," are Nonviolent by definition, and they are part of a Nonviolent Resistance Campaign. No one in the Movement advocates or practices Violent Resistance. No one. And no one is engaged in a Violent Resistance Campaign -- which is defined as armed insurrection and the use or threat of deadly force.

Well, the room exploded in furious denunciation and disagreement with my own sweet self. I never heard so many Nonviolence advocates on such a rampage!

I wasn't surprised at their disagreement with me, but their vehemence about it took me aback. These are believers in Nonviolence? Ok then...

As should be clear by now, I'm not a Nonviolence "purist;" while I certainly have respect for Gandhi and King, my view of Nonviolence is colored by a somewhat different experience set than that of many people who are highly socialized and accustomed to a very rigid and narrow definition of Nonviolence. I tend to take a broader, Big Picture view of the topic, and I am a good deal more inclusive by nature than many of the purists. Pretty much anyone who advocates and fights for civil, social and economic justice while eschewing resort to arms and physical coercion and harm toward others -- fits the Nonviolent Resister definition in my book. A purist will go full Gandhi and assert that even protecting oneself in a violent situation with authority is impermissible. I don't agree with that. Nor do I agree that one must follow Gandhi's and King's models in order to be "effective."

In fact, I would argue that rigid adherence to those models in the contemporary context is actually counter effective, because as I say in another post, our Overclass has learned the lessons of King and Gandhi very well, and their chief interest lies in ensuring that their form of Nonviolent Resistance never succeeds again.

I would further argue that Nonviolent Resistance Campaigns that are principally focused on marches, rallies and charismatic leaders and their speeches, homilies, and demands essentially can't succeed in this country any more for the simple reason that the Overclass has learned how to confront them and neutralize them nonviolently. Without the official violence and brutality aspects of the confrontation, the power of the Nonviolent march and the rally and the charismatic leader is significantly reduced or (as in the case of the anti-Iraq War protests) eliminated altogether.

There is much, much more involved in a serious Nonviolent Resistance Campaign than those few aspects, of course, but they are the ones that receive the most attention. And I argue that they don't work the way they used to, nor are they likely to be more than marginally effective for real change in this country again. Their effectiveness is declining in foreign lands, too, as the authorities learn ways and means to counter them.

Something else is needed, specifically something more militant, though not more violent. The days of passive resistance will soon be past.

(I've written before about how disturbing it has been for me to watch the passive behavior of the hundreds and hundreds of people on the Brooklyn Bridge submitting to their arrest after being trapped by police; much the same feeling of extreme unease came over me as I watched the first part of the arrest of the hundreds and hundreds of surprisingly passive people in front of the YMCA in Oakland last weekend. I couldn't watch the rest of it. The scene was too disturbing.)

When the People "stand up and fight back" -- militantly but nonviolently -- the tables are turned and Authority is de-legitimized. This happened at UC Davis in rather spectacular fashion in response to the egregious pepper spray incident. And it has worked extraordinarily well in Oakland as well.

During the call (back on topic!), Starhawk was invited to provide her insight as a long time progressive activist whose experience with Black Bloc and Diversity of Tactics could be instructive. What I got from her talk was that her ideas of Nonviolent Resistance are more inclusive and expansive than those of most Nonviolence advocates, but she can't recommend giving Black Bloc advocates free rein. The backlash against some Black Bloc tactics damaged the movements she's been involved with.

I don't doubt it, but she didn't have time to go into detail, and I would very much like to know more about her experiences, which movements she feels were effective and why. But that's for another day.

Someone talked about how the "violence meme" was constantly being applied to Occupy -- which I thought was odd, but people's perceptions are shaped so much by what they see and hear and read, and I don't have cable, rarely watch television news, have a relatively short list of online bookmarks I visit regularly, and I've decoupled from Facebook and Twitter. So my perceptions are based largely on what I have seen via the online streams, what I have read in the postings on Occupy websites, and how some in the blogosphere and online news community have reported or reacted to Occupy events. So my perceptions are clearly not the same as those who are immersed in the mainstream propaganda.

Nathan Schneider was one of the participants, but I really don't remember what he had to say, and that's too bad. He wrote a really good article for Waging Nonviolence on the topic of OWS, and their employment of Nonviolent version of Diversity of Tactics. It was so long ago in Occupy Time, it seems like centuries, but still the points he makes are valid.

There were some people who pointed out, correctly, that Diversity of Tactics and Black Bloc does not necessarily mean vandalism or other forms of destructive mischief at all. One of the things that happened during The Battle of Oak St on J28 was a classic Diversity of Tactics/Black Bloc action -- whether intentional or spontaneous, I don't know. A demonstrator appeared to be injured and was on the ground well in front of the crowd. One member of the crowd -- unprotected -- went to the injured person to see what had happened and one of them motioned to the police to stop firing. Then the shield bearers in the crowd moved forward to surround and protect the injured person with their bodies and their shields. They weren't dressed in black, but protecting the injured in a demonstration is a Black Bloc tactic. Completely nonviolent, too. Of course they were fired on by police -- which should have shocked the conscience of any onlooker, but you never know about that.

My final comment during this morning's call was that if practicing Nonviolent Resistance was so important to Occupy, there needed to be far more comprehensive and accessible training in what it is and how to do it. Most people have no idea.

The notes from the call are very incomplete, but they may be informative.

There's supposed to be a follow up call in a week to explore the Nonviolence issue further, but I think I'll be on the road that day and will probably miss it.

Darn.

The Problem of Success -- What if the Short Term Goal of Delegitimizing Authority is Achieved?

In an earlier essay I argue that the whole of the Occupy (Wall Street) Movement is a Nonviolent Resistance Campaign -- including its more militant and confrontational outposts like those in the West Coast port cities of Seattle and Oakland -- and that there is no divergence within the Movement from Nonviolent Resistance. Black Bloc is not a Violent Resistance Campaign, (no matter its reputation) nor are "the anarchists" (or anyone else) within the Movement advocating that Occupy engage in Violent Resistance.

I further argue that the militant and confrontational Nonviolent Resistance that has characterized Occupy Oakland has been a stunning success in achieving the short term goal of delegitimizing civic authority.

To highlight just what's happened since the advent of Occupy Oakland, it may be well to look at the following facts:

• Mayor Quan is under threat of recall, two recall petitions having actually been certified, and a recall election is very likely this year -- her authority in the interim has been delegitimized (the pathetic picture of her viewing the overturned model of City Hall in the lobby of said building after the events of J28 was the key metaphor for her complete loss of authority)
  
• Oakland's City Council members have been shown to be bullies and liars in their own right, beholden to their sponsors and owners and not the People; their behavior has been at times appalling, and has delegitimized their authority
  
• The Interim Police Chief has been repeatedly revealed as a liar whose contempt for the city of Oakland and its people is palpable -- his authority is effectively delegitimized
  
• The administration of the City of Oakland has been shown to be both corrupt and incompetent in response to Occupy Oakland -- thus delegitimizing it
  
• Judge Thelton Henderson has threatened to place the Oakland Police Department into Federal receivership because they have not fulfilled their reform obligations under the consent decree issued nine years ago, a threat based in part on events surrounding OPD's violent efforts to suppress Occupy Oakland. This threat, along with the global disrepute brought on the OPD by their violence and brutality toward Occupy Oakland has served to delegitimize their authority.

Delegitimizing authority as thoroughly as it has been delegitimized in Oakland since the advent of Occupy Oakland is almost unprecedented in recent American political history and is a stunning victory in Occupy Oakland's Nonviolent Struggle against the oppression and exploitation of Oakland's people by its elected and appointed leadership.

Certainly nothing so effective has come from the so-called "progressive movement" in the last 40 years.

Victory of this sort is a problem, however.

The question naturally arises: "What do we do now?"

Nonviolent Resistance by Occupy Oakland has gained a spectacular short term victory, but delegitimizing authority opens the door to the unknown and potentially to chaos, as many Revolutionaries throughout time have come to realize, sometimes too late. My sense -- from the outside looking in -- is that Occupy Oakland activists are aware of the problems of victory, but I'm not sure more than a few recognize what they have achieved.

The ongoing internal debate over "nonviolence" vs "violence" in Oakland seems odd to me because there is no Violent Resistance Campaign in Oakland or anywhere else in the Occupy Movement. Violent Resistance has not even been considered, at least not anywhere in the Movement I'm aware of. Just like most Occupy activists, I would immediately suspect anyone who did advocate or try to instigate a Violent Resistance Campaign through Occupy to be a provocateur or worse.

To recapitulate: Black Bloc -- and/or "the anarchists" -- in Oakland (or anywhere in the Occupy Movement) do not constitute a Violent Resistance Campaign, as they do not engage in nor do they advocate armed insurrection or the use of deadly force.

Militant Nonviolent Resistance by Occupy Oakland has achieved first-level victory by delegitimizing civic authority. What is the alternative to the present corrupt and disintegrating authority structure? Do OO activists have an alternative ready to go once the discredited present system is swept away? Or will Oakland's Powers That Be "re-legitimize" their authority before the collapse?

These questions are being worked in Oakland and elsewhere in the Movement right now.

The answers will come, but finding them is a more difficult task. What kind of future and future world do we really want?

On Letting Go

There have been a number of Occupy evictions lately as part of what looks like another coordinated crack down series to "welcome" Occupy on its putative awakening after winter hibernation. It's not clear yet whether there has been a metamorphosis. Maybe it was just a molt.

I say that because of today's eviction -- well, sort of -- of Occupy DC from McPherson Square. I say "sort of" because what I saw on the UStream wasn't quite what it appeared to be. There was both deception in motive and purpose and acts of extraordinary arbitrariness.

Some tents were "cleared," for example, to the outcry of the Occupy DC crowd, and in response, apparently, the National Park Police (McPherson is a federal site) left the rest of them alone. There was nevertheless a skiploader hard at work "clearing" who knows what? "Beep-beep-beep" all the time, "beep-beep-beep". The crowd was told this was an "inspection," not an "eviction," yet they were kept back from the tents by ever-shifting lines of (rather decorative, I must say) barricades and horse police who were pooping and peeing everywhere. Nobody was on hand to clean it up, as all those who might have done were dolled up in bright yellow-orange HazMat suits poking gingerly here and there in the rubble of the encampment while the skip loaders beeped around them and the Park Police looked on impassively and unprotected, OMG!, from the ick of the Occupy.

It was simply a bizarre scene.

As it was, eventually, the park was "cleared" -- of people. There were a number of arrests, some pretty violent. Someone was apparently tasered, but I didn't see it, and someone else was apparently pulled over a (decorative) barricade to be arrested, but I didn't see that either. I did not stay glued to my monitor all day, after all. Things to do, dontuknow.

Some people were apparently allowed to stay in the park to protect the library. From what I witnessed, the whole "library episode" was quite as bizarre as everything else that went on at McPherson Park if not more so.

The whole point of the "inspection" was to ensure that there was no contraband on site, such as pillows and sleeping bags and mattresses and such due to the fact that Darrell Issa (Idiot-CA) was on the warpath in Congress over his claim that Obama had ordered the Park Police to stand down and not "enforce the anti-camping laws of This Great Nation" -- or something. I really don't know what Issa is on about at any given time. I never do. He's a jerk, everyone knows he's a jerk, and he likes being a jerk. It's an identity thing.

At any rate, the "inspection" was proceeding throughout the park, closing in on the library tent where about a dozen or so Occupy DC activists decided to Make A Stand (and bless their hearts, too.) It had started raining a slushy rain -- looked awful, I wouldn't want to be out in it -- and the multitude was in their rain ponchos sitting on the ground, refusing to move unless the library was left alone. In DC, the police do speak to the demonstrators as opposed to New York where they don't, at least not when they are engaged in an aktion, and the demonstrators were assured that there would be no attempt to harm or dismantle the Library Tent (if it passed "inspection" of course.)

Naturally, the crowd did not believe the assurances because the police had repeatedly lied to them all day, so no one was about to take their word now about the safety of what is the symbolic heart of most Occupations, The People's Library.

In New York, as we know, the People's Library appeared to have been deliberately targeted for very ostentatious destruction during the eviction from Liberty Square last November. It was really outrageous -- and very shocking -- when it happened. Symbolically, it was horrendous, and IIRC, the City of New York ultimately promised to replace the volumes that had been destroyed in the aktion. Whether they ever did so, I don't know, but the memory of the Destruction of the People's Library at Zucotti Park will live in the growing Hall of Infamy of the events surrounding the attempts to suppress the Occupy Movement.

In DC, I watched this afternoon (on the UStream) as a very kindly and very polite park policeman asked the librarian if he could "inspect" the tent. The librarian (I believe his name was Eric) was very courteous and polite himself, and he cooperated by taking down plastic tarps that had been hung to protect the books -- looked like there were perhaps a thousand or more, very neatly arranged in crates and on shelves and tables -- and as he went from one section to another exposing the books and explaining what else there was in the tent, the policeman "inspected" and eventually declared himself satisfied, the People's Library had passed "inspection."

This was supposed to be the signal for the sitting demonstrators to leave now, but they were disinclined to do so until they were informed that two of the Occupy DC number, including Eric, could stay behind to protect the Library. Only then, would the demonstrators agree to leave. They were apparently given assurances that once the "inspection" was complete, the park would be re-opened to the public, but as soon as they were out, the barricades went up and no one was allowed into the park.

All the Occupy DC people had been pushed out into the slushy rain and the street. I believe it was K Street, too. Heh.

At any rate, they milled around for a while then held a General Assembly that was mostly Open Forum where people discussed the events of the day, what went well, what didn't, and how the situation could be improved. There were many offers of housing for the night, though some were going over to Freedom Plaza encampment -- which was still operating.

During the "inspection" food was served by volunteers, and apparently the City made some accommodations available for the homeless. The whole thing was kind of surreal and bizarre. It seems very late in the game to be conducting evictions, the point of which has never been clear in any case. The stated premise -- to "clean" -- is patent;y and obviously false.The use of HazMat suits is clearly about theater, not "safety." As the crowd was being held behind barricades they did a series of mic check testimonies about Why They Occupy, some of which included concern for public worker livelihoods and pensions -- which are under perpetual threat by the likes of Darrell Issa -- and plenty of Democrats, too, let it be said.

Despite the arrests and the occasional police brutality -- seemingly quite casual and even unintentional (I said it seemed bizarre) -- there was none of the incredible level of outrage and violent attacks on demonstrators that characterized evictions in New York, LA, Oakland, Seattle, etc. It's a different atmosphere in DC. As I've said many times DC's culture is that of the Palace, and the denizens there are socialized to a very ritualized courtly behavior that can certainly get nasty and injurious to person or reputation, but which is nevertheless bound by rules and conventions as strict as any at Versailles.

In the end, the crowd disappeared from the scene, much of their stuff still behind the barricades in the Park. The UStreamer I was watching most, Nate of OccupiedAir, gave a wrapup description of the day's events and before he signed off with a view of the park from across K Street, someone offered him a place to stay for the night (he'd already received three packs of cigarettes, which he of course distributed to those in need of nicotine). And that was that.

I watched all this unfold (at least as much of it as I did watch, maybe an aggregate of three hours -- the aktion went on for at least twelve, but as is the case with Revolution in real life, there was a lot of just standing around... ) with a kind of tired despair.

There has been no actual public need to evict any of the Occupations, nor has there been any public need to prevent them from Occupying in the first place (prevention being the objective of authorities where I am). As many observers have recognized, the public interest would have been better served by simply leaving the Occupations alone (as happened in Davis recently when a building was temporarily occupied by activists) rather than conducting these repeated raids and assaults and violent -- or not so violent as the case may be -- evictions.

Every Occupation has been organized as an intentional community specifically designed to serve unmet public needs, whether feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or sheltering the homeless, among other things like providing educational opportunities, entertainment, and space for the development of a democratic alternative to our clearly broken political system. The alternatives to the way-things-are that were being developed in New York were astonishing in scope, from bicycle powered generators to alternative systems of finance and banking. The creativity and the social innovation shown by the Occupy System -- if you want to call it that -- has an extraordinary public value, and every time an Occupation is destroyed, literally vandalized and bulldozed into oblivion in yet another example of Eviction Theater, all that public interest energy of development is (at least temporarily) lost.

In those cities where Occupations have been left alone or even been supported by civic authorities, they have proved invaluable assets to the public good.

But instead, Authority believes it MUST harass and eventually crack down and destroy. The symbolism is heavy with the negative memories of dictatorships and totalitarian systems that we all thought had been vanquished a generation ago -- but apparently not. Maybe they weren't vanquished at all.

Today's eviction was surreal to my eye in part because of its seeming arbitrary conduct, but also because it was pure ritual; there was no ultimate point to it, except to assert the Authority of the Park Police at the behest of one of the jerkiest elected representatives in the country. Just as none of these evictions (or preventions for that matter) has never really been necessary or been in the public interest, today's wasn't either.

Ultimately, civic and national authorities who conduct these aktions will be as discredited as Oakland's police and officials are after their repeated violent assaults on and failed attempts at suppression of Occupy Oakland.

What we see is a rotting system is the process of collapse. There is a Revolution going on, everywhere around the world simultaneously, and I think the operators of this system know it, and they know they can't win through suppression and violence, nor can they win through ever-more bizarre exercises like the one I witnessed today in Washington DC. (All well-deserved kudos, by the way, to the livestreamers.)

The game may not be quite over, yet, but we can see the finish line. The oppressors are to the point now that they aren't even trying. They're just going through the motions; at least that's what I saw in DC. This was not only Theater, it was Theater of the Increasingly Absurd.

The answer, of course, is "Letting Go." Surrender in the Buddhist sense.

Many of the Occupiers already know how to do that and they know what a positive spirit results. At some point, we can't say exactly when, but I wouldn't be surprised if it as soon as this summer, our civic and national leaders will need to get right with themselves and the public and do likewise.

Nonviolence in Today's Struggle

This is not violence. Wearing bandanas is not violence. Carrying signs is not violence. Using them as shields against police armed assault is not violence. Defiance of authority is not violence. Marching in the streets is not violence. Confrontation is not violence. Breaking free of police cordons is not violence. Throwing back munitions fired by police at demonstrators is not violence. Protecting oneself and assisting the injured is not violence. Attempted possession and reuse of vacant buildings is not violence.... Image from Indybay.org

Proposition: Taken as an organic whole, the entire Occupy Wall Street Movement in the United States, together with its many affiliates abroad, constitutes a Nonviolent Resistance Campaign by definition. Even its hotbed outposts of assertive activism, such as Occupy Seattle and Occupy Oakland, are by definition nonviolent resistance campaigns.

This simple fact often gets lost amid all the fretting and handwringing over a few broken windows back in November, or a flag burned in front of an AP camera in Oakland a week ago.

Let's define our terms, shall we?

A Nonviolent Resistance Campaign is characterized by a strategy of disobedience and unarmed confrontation with illegitimate authority.

A Violent Resistance Campaign on the other hand is characterized by a strategy of armed insurrection and use of deadly force against illegitimate authority.

See the difference? Armed/unarmed? Insurrection/disobedience? Deadly force/confrontation? They're not the same thing. What is the same is the object of the resistance campaign: illegitimate authority.

How then did it come about that resistance itself is called "violence," and confrontation and disobedience are seen as "tactics of violence?" To whom?

A Bit of History

[Note: I'm concentrating on these incidents because I'm closer to them; there have also been clearly nonviolent resistance incidents in Seattle that have been grossly characterized by authorities and media as protester "violence."]

We all saw incidents during the fall of last year at both UC Berkeley and UC Davis in which UC and allied police forces beat, pepper sprayed and violently arrested Occupy demonstrators who disobeyed police demands and linked arms in solidarity and defiance. And we heard and read, many of us to our shock and disbelief, administrators and police supervisors on these campuses declare those classic tactics of nonviolent resistance to be "not-nonviolence."

These events in Berkeley and Davis followed on one another, and they in turn followed on the spectacular events of Occupy Oakland's General Strike on November 2, 2011.

During the course of the day's activities in Oakland, a Black Bloc contingent (we assume that's who they were) committed acts of vandalism on selected targets such as Whole Foods, several banks and some other businesses in Oakland, by spraying graffiti and breaking a few windows. Later, as part of an attempt to liberate the vacant Traveler's Aid Building, several makeshift barricades were erected in the streets and were set alight.

There were, as I recall, about 100 arrests that night and the Traveler's Aid Building was restored to its official higher use as a vacant building. This is America; one does not "liberate" vacant buildings. It's just not done!

The Black Bloc actions during Oakland General Strike Day were defined by media and officials as "violence." No doubt, vandalism occurred and graffiti was sprayed. As many have noted, there was nothing special about this; it happens practically every day in Oakland, and it is not called "violent." It is called "vandalism." Or most often, "mischief."

It is rare in Oakland or anywhere else in America for vacant buildings to be liberated for the People's use through taking possession and squatting but even in those rare instances when it happens, possession-taking and squatting -- which generally means gaining access to the building without the use of arms or injury to people and moving in -- is not an act of "violence" by any remote definition of the word. Likewise the building of makeshift barricades from urban debris and setting them alight. It's not a "violent" act.

Clue: unarmed defiance is not the same thing as armed insurrection; vandalism is not the same as the use of deadly force.

But imaginations have been stretched to the point that simple disobedience and acts of solidarity are declared to be "not-nonviolence" and acts of vandalism or building liberation are declared to be the equivalent of "violent insurrection."

This is absurd. I use the term of art: "Absurdity on stilts."

And yet it is happening, absurdities upon absurdities adopted not just by officials and the media, but adopted by some of those involved in the Occupy Movement itself, leading to considerable internal dissension, tension and strenuous divisions among Occupy participants, factors that can lead to fragmentation and dissolution -- which is also a clue to what might really be going on. But I'll get to that.

There have been endless calls by well-meaning handwringers for Occupy Oakland, especially, to "renounce violence" and "officially declare themselves nonviolent" as if somehow their campaign of nonviolent resistance is not in and of itself sufficient. No, they must do more. They must RENOUNCE. Then they must OFFICIALLY DECLARE. Finally, as proof of their commitment to nonviolence, they must EXPEL "The Anarchists."

This has become, for many of those within Occupy Oakland (as it did in Seattle) The Most Important Thing In The Whole Wide World.

All Right, What's Really Going On Here?

Taken as an organic whole, the Occupy Movement is by definition a nonviolent resistance campaign. There is no hint of armed insurrection or use of deadly force to achieve political objectives anywhere within the Movement at all. (Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but these things have to be made crystal clear so that people in general and the handwringers especially begin to get it.)

No one within the Movement -- at least no one I'm aware of -- has advocated or attempted to precipitate or participated in armed insurrection or use of deadly force as part of the Occupy Movement.

Despite intense official violence and brutality used against Occupy Oakland and Occupy Seattle participants (as examples), there has never been a hint of adopting or using violent resistance tactics in response, even though participants in both cities, and especially in Oakland, are frequently accused of being "violent" and using "violent tactics."

Despite extraordinary levels of official violence and brutality against the Occupy demonstrators in many places in this country and abroad, the Movement remains dedicated to nonviolent resistance.

We've seen how classic nonviolent resistance tactics have been redefined by officials as "not-nonviolence." In a previous essay, I argued that the Overclass in effect has become the teacher of nonviolence, and therefore gets to determine the definition and allowable scope of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance. This has led to the notion that nonviolence must "look like" King's or Gandhi's campaigns: focused on marches, rallies and charismatic leaders. Appearance above substance, in other words.

When that is what is taught about "proper" nonviolent resistance, that is what participants are going to expect the Movement to look like. But as we saw with the Anti-Iraq War marches and rallies, "looking like" nonviolent resistance movements of the past doesn't work. It has become completely ineffective.

The Occupy Movement doesn't "look like" King's or Gandhi's resistance campaigns, and it is constantly sniped at from within and without partly because of that. It's also far more effective and on a far more elemental level than any of the activism against the Iraq War.

The Occupy Movement is actually forcing political and social change in real time, almost unprecedented since I was a young sport. And because it is effective it is dangerous to our Overclass -- and to those who seek to join the Overclass.

The effectiveness of Occupy Oakland is truly astonishing: they have succeeded in almost completely delegitimizing the rule of the city's elected and appointed leadership as well as their elite controllers, and they have succeeded in delegitimizing the authority of the police. And they've done this through a brilliant nonviolent resistance campaign that has almost no precedent in America.

Thus, Occupy Oakland especially, but Occupy in general as well, is a potent threat to the continued rule of an implacable, indifferent global elite, an elite Overclass whose rapine extractions and misrule have given rise to misery and global opposition.

This, I believe, is the key to understanding why there is so much internal dissension and external sniping over the "question" of using violent or nonviolent tactics by Occupy Oakland. I argue that there is no real question at all; the decision is plain to see: Occupy Oakland is, like all the rest of the Occupy Movement, intrinsically and by definition a nonviolent resistance campaign. A very effective one, perhaps the most effective one in the country at the moment.

OO's effectiveness in delegitimizing the authority of of officials, their police forces and the Overclass that runs them is a profound lesson that the Overclass does not want the masses to learn. My goodness no!

So rather than pay attention to what OO is doing right and well, and the actual nonviolent resistance tactics they are employing in doing so, nearly all the mass media focus and the attention they are getting from the outside, and nearly all the internal dissension that has accompanied their success in delegitimizing authority in Oakland has focused on phony charges of "violence," a largely irrelevant "debate" over whether to "renounce violence," and constant catcalling from within and without to expel "the anarchists."

As David Graeber (an anarchist, btw) has pointed out in a different context, the success of the Movement is a real problem for many people inside and outside the Movement.

What Do You Do Now?

I'm not sure there is an answer yet. But Occupy Oakland shows the way to effectively delegitimizing the authority of a civic leadership and their hired guns that has abandoned and is overtly oppressing the People. They have done it through a purposeful, directed, and completely nonviolent resistance campaign that doesn't look like the campaigns of Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi because it is not obsessed with the appearance of things, it's focused on the substance of political, social and economic justice.

Conclusion: The entire Occupy Movement is by definition a Nonviolent Resistance Campaign. Occupy Oakland has conducted an extraordinarily effective Nonviolent Resistance Campaign that has successfully delegitimized the ruling authorities in Oakland. At no time has Occupy Oakland -- or any other Occupation -- become or even hinted at becoming a violent resistance, not in the United States nor anywhere in the world. Calls for Occupy activists to renounce violence are superfluous, and demands that "the anarchists" be expelled are absurd.

One. More. Time: the Occupy Movement is by definition a Nonviolent Resistance Campaign. None of its activists have engaged in Violent Resistance, nor has any affiliate, nor has any Violent Resistance Campaign been proposed or adopted by any Occupation. At all. Anywhere.

Any questions?

Occupy Oakland Press Conference, February 3, 2012

Testimony of people who were brutalized and arrested on January 28, 2012; many were held for days without charge.

Parts of the video are difficult because of sound problems, sirens, and so forth, but the testimony is important.

Oppressed people tend to testify truthfully; their oppressors tend not to.

Just keep that in mind.

The Armchair Revolutionary (aka Armchair Radical)

From Boston Review, via Susie-C:



Photo of Ian Saxon holding the line at The Battle of Oak St, January 28, 2012, Oakland, CA -- via Daniel Spaulding

I mention this guy in my play by play of The Battle of Oak Street posted earlier. He was all over the place at the J28 events; does anyone know what happened to him? Was he arrested and jailed, or did he manage to escape with his comfy chair?

On De-Coupling From the Twitterverse; DeFacebooking, Also. Too.

I signed up for Twitter several years ago thinking it would be a handy and modern way for me to keep up with some of the writers I enjoyed like Jeremy Scahill, Matt Taibbi, etc. Well, that didn't work so well. First of all, they rarely Tweeted -- well, Greenwald Tweeted ALL the time, but who has the need or the patience to wade through all his many Twitter Wars? Not me -- and most of what was being Tweeted was the equivalent of bird-doo-doo. Typically of neither import nor interest. It's a home for gossip, marketing, snark and sniping. Feh. I can get plenty of that elsewhere. Then for some reason, my computer stopped loading Tweets anyway. Oh, well. Maybe it were a "sign?" So, I didn't even look at my Twitter account/Twit-feed for years. No point to it, you see.

I resumed checking Twitter with the advent of Occupy Wall Street, because it was sometimes the only alternative for action play-by-plays when the Livestreams were on the fritz -- which was frequently in the early days. But then the Twit-feeds for the Occupations I was following pretty much devolved into the same sorts of things that had happened to all the others.

I stopped bothering with Twitter altogether; I'm still signed up, and the only thing I use it for is for login at Digby's. I think I have only ever Tweeted twice myself, just not into it all that much, I guess.


For all that time I resisted even accessing Facebook, Global Evil Soul Sucker that it is. It was simply not something I was going to do, no, no, no!

But then the Occupy came along and Facebook was almost the only way to stay in contact with the various Occupations I was involved with or following. I signed up. Blergh. I hated it, and I said so -- many others felt the same way, but what choice did we have? It was either Facebook, Twitter or nothing in the early days. Social media, babaay1! The Revolution will be Facebooked and Twittified!!@###

After a while, it was clear that Facebook hell was, if anything, a worse timesink than the Twitterverse; some of the things that were being posted were just atrocious and totally useless to Occupy with. It was often one Facebook argument, dispute, or war after another, with endless denunciations and calumnies, insults and raging online anger, at one another, not the Powers That Be. I stayed away from Facebook for a week in December, and when I opened my account again, there were more than 900 messages waiting for me, almost all of them had to do with a furious dispute between one Occupier and a selection of others.

The only things I was getting from Facebook -- apart from often inaccurate scheduling information and incessant RAGE -- were sometimes interesting (though superfluous) insights into group dynamics, and sometimes good links to interesting and informative articles and videos, which, typically, I could also find elsewhere.


A few days ago, I De-Facebooked. That's it, no more, bye-bye. I understand there is a complicated protocol to actually and forever get off Facebook, and what I did, by de-activating, doesn't really get me off their lists, but I'm not going to expend any more energy on it right now.

Since this blog is posted on Blogger and I have a YouTube account, I'm still linked in (and of course tracked) on Google everywhere I go on the Internets, but I figure somebody would be doing it if it wasn't Google, so, enh.

Most of the Occupations I'm interested in now have dynamite websites of their own so Facebooking and Tweeting @Teh Revolution is not as necessary as it once was. Information sharing has many operative parts these days, most of which can avoid the behemoth social media sites. Anti-corporatism actually insists on de-coupling in any case, something that is proving more difficulty than many expected.

We do rely on the internet and the giant corporate interests that are the providers and hosts. There's not a lot we can do about it, at least not yet.

But the relief I feel from letting go of the Twitterverse and Facebook is darned nice!

Frreeeeedom! Lib-erty!
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Yayyyy!
------------------------------

As a kind of coda on this post, "On the Media" ran an episode titled "The Facebook Show" on Thursday, but I didn't hear it -- didn't even know of it -- until the show ran on the car radio while I was driving yesterday. Talk about "Global Evil Soul Sucker," Facebook turns out to be even worse than I thought. It's a monster, I tells ya! Yet as many of those who speak out on the show recognize, Facebook is so integrated into so many people's lives now -- not to mention Twitter -- it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, for any more than the cranky fringies (oh, like me?) to decouple. "If not impossible..." Social Media is controlling us much more than we know... Listen to the show if you haven't already. It's fascinating.

An Insignificant Handful of Oakland Demonstrators Escape Police Entrapment at HJ Kaiser Park, Oakland, CA, January 28, 2012

Of course some hundreds of them would eventually be kettled and arrested at the YMCA several blocks away later that night.

"Submit to your arrest!" "Submit!" "Submit now!"

----------------------------------------
Editorial comment: My title is meant to be ironic for those who might miss it.

There are erroneous reports that "only" a few hundred participated in the J28 actions in Oakland, which is simply not true. The numbers varied throughout the day and into the evening, from a few hundred at the City Hall where the march originated, to perhaps a thousand or so at The Battle of Oak Street which followed the attempt to occupy the Oakland Auditorium a couple of blocks away, to several thousand at the Henry J Kaiser Park where police made a failed attempt at a mass arrest.

The police had ordered dispersal from the park after closing all exits from the scene. Thousands of people were trapped unable to "disperse" if they wanted to. The police fired teargas into the crowd -- an angry but not violent crowd -- and began to tighten their cordon. Members of the crowd then tore down a chain link fence that separated the park from a vacant lot that had been "liberated" for use as a playground but which was then reclaimed and fenced off by the city for the higher use as a vacant lot. The crowd is seen in the video above breaking through the fence at Telegraph Avenue and continuing their march.

Part of the crowd was kettled by police in front of the YMCA between 23rd and 24th on Broadway, where about 100 escaped arrest through the building, thanks to the kindness of Y staff, and maybe another 50 were able to escape over fences. The rest -- about 400 -- were arrested.

All through the day, citizens of Oakland who were not part of the action were assisting the demonstrators -- residents near the Museum where The Battle of Oak Street took place were aiding people who were suffering the effects of tear gas and assisting the injured, people were cheering the marchers from their apartments as the marches passed by, drivers were honking their horns in support all along the routes. The very idea that OO has no support in Oakland is false on its face.

Below is another video of the police cordoning the crowd at the Henry J Kaiser Park and their escape, recorded from the window of an apartment across the street from the park.

The Lessons of Nonviolent Resistance and Who They Benefit

"Not Nonviolence?" Our rulers have learned and internalized the lessons of successful nonviolent resistance campaigns; many of us have yet to learn them at all... (image: Anarchosyndicalist flag, Wikimedia Commons)

Given the fact that campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi to liberate India from Britain and Martin Luther King to expand the liberty of basic civil rights to all Americans were successful enough to be taken as models, and both relied on the weapon of nonviolent resistance, what were the lessons of these campaigns, and perhaps as important, who learned them? Who benefits from those lessons?

Pious frauds and useful fictions abound when exploring those questions, primarily the frauds and fictions intended to control, discourage, disable, or dispute the merit of resistance campaigns that don't "look like" King's or Gandhi's.

Much of the Overclass learned plenty of lessons from the experience of being bested by a rag-clad Indian and a well-spoken preacher of the African American church. Their primary lesson learned is how to effectively thwart such campaigns by using the tools, tactics and language of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance against those who would engage in those tactics to gain advantage in the economic and political realms. In the social realm, enh, the Overclass doesn't really care so much, or at least hasn't interfered quite as much as it has in campaigns for economic justice and real political change.

And the first lesson learned by the Overclass is it is sometimes possible to thwart the objectives of nonviolent resistance campaigns by teaching nonviolence. It's a wonderful thing.

Nonviolent resistance is a complex and interwoven set of tactics that when used to advance a strategic objective (under the right circumstances) can be very effective. As pointed out in the previous installment of this series, nonviolent resistance tactics are weapons that work very well against brittle, and inherently weak authoritarian regimes that rely on violence or the constant threat of violence to maintain their power and authority.

One way to mitigate the effectiveness of a nonviolent resistance campaign against such authority is to be the teacher who determines the definitions of "violence" and "nonviolence," and who instructs in the proper forms of nonviolent resistance.

What happens, for example, when teaching the topic of nonviolent resistance campaigns is limited to "what King did" or "what Gandhi did," and is focused primarily on what those campaigns looked like? Ie: Tightly controlled marches and rallies fronted by charismatic leaders who spoke in homilies. Those who opposed those campaigns are characterized as well by what they looked like: Big Bellied Sheriffs with their dogs and their fire hoses, British Imperial functionaries with their languid disinterest in anything beyond a game of polo and holding court over the seething masses.

When it's all about appearances and hardly anything at all about the substance of nonviolent resistance tactics and campaigns the lessons learned by those are being taught about King and Gandhi are incomplete, to say the least.

It's been my experience that most people are eager to learn what nonviolent resistance really is -- for they would often love to be able to use it themselves or be part of a campaign that uses nonviolent tactics -- but they don't know squat about it and all they've been taught are pious frauds and useful fictions about marches and rallies and charismatic leaders.

Appearances, in other words.

Thus when hundreds of thousands took to the streets in the fall of 2002 to march and carry signs and attend rallies against the looming tragedy of the Iraq War, and then millions took to the streets in February of 2003 for the same cause and in the same manner, they "looked right" (well, except for the tie-dye and the giant puppets, according to the wags and purists) but they got nowhere at all. They were quite ostentatiously ignored. These hundreds of thousands and then millions of people in the streets marching and rallying against looming catastrophe simply did not matter at all to the Powers That Be.

Media ignored or mocked them, and the Regime -- which was then actually quite weak -- dismissed them with an airy wave.

Note: there was no violence against these huge marches and rallies, the state did not come down on them with full force or even minor force; the marches and rallies were huge, completely peaceful, earnest, and utterly ineffective. The total indifference of Power to the outcry of the People was stunning.

How could this be when so many people were doing exactly what they had been taught was what King and Gandhi did? How could doing the same things in essentially the same manner but now involving millions and millions of people around the country and the world be so completely ineffective?

And what were the lessons the People learned from this experience?

There would be many more similar experiences when people by the hundreds of thousands would gather in protest of something -- broadly speaking "The Regime" -- but would find themselves corralled or dismissed or ignored, or in a few cases (such as the rallies and marches that weren't allowed to march in New York during the Republican Convention in 2004) faced arbitrary arrest and a certain level of random brutality from the police.

These experiences showed that the Overclass had learned their lessons well on how to deal with nonviolent protest; meet fire with fire in a manner of speaking. Be even more "nonviolent" than the protesters. Ignore them utterly, or if attention must be paid, have the media mock them and the police corral them. It worked like a charm.

Not only was the Iraq invasion pursued with great relish, it took place without any opposition The Regime believed it had to pay attention to at all; all authoritative voices raised against it were silenced or ignored, and the People's voice mattered not at all because there was literally nothing they could do about it.

The triumph was complete when the anti-war movement essentially dissolved in despair. People gave up for they were getting nowhere at all with their protests and marches and rallies. That was the point.

Teach them the lesson that "nobody (who matters) cares what you think."

How do you nonviolently resist THAT?

In the short term, you don't. You've been checkmated.

You clear the board and you try something else.

Some of the people who were better informed about the complex nature of nonviolent resistance and who understood that rallies and marches by themselves are insufficient to force a serious change in the direction of a Regime, understood well enough how it was that these enormous events failed so utterly to move the Powers That Be.

"Looking right" isn't enough -- it isn't even necessary. But that's really all these marches and rallies had: the appearance of resistance without the substance.

Nor was there the appearance of any serious -- let alone violent -- opposition to these events. The initial anti-Iraq War marches and rallies seemed to take place in a complete vacuum.

Oh but there are more lessons learned.

One of the chief lessons the Overclass has learned is how to use nonviolent communications as a weapon -- often a very effective one -- against would-be popular opposition. They've learned to talk in airy terms of concern and consideration for the plaints of the People, and they've learned how to couch their own needs and demands in nonviolent language, to the point where outrageous actions are presented and often enough accepted as "reasonable." They've learned this lesson so well that when an official slips up and uses harsh language in dealing with opposition, they look crude and socially maladroit and are even sometimes brought up short by their own peers for being so outré.

This has become particularly true during this Endless Recession in conjunction with the imposition of more an more destructive and apparently mindless Austerity measures. Every official action which harms and impoverishes the People is couched in the language of concern and consideration, and even Scott Walker -- as stumble bum as he is -- has been able to use the language of nonviolent communication to effectively thwart the outcries of the People against his Regime. It is a wonder to behold.

Rightists became so dominant in American life in part because they were able to adopt the principles of nonviolence and the language of nonviolence to advance their own reactionary ends. The use of nonviolence tactics and language by those in power can be very disorienting and disabling to those who seek to change the exercise of power through nonviolent resistance tactics of their own.

It's difficult to know how to respond effectively. Working on it!

Meanwhile, the official response to the Occupy Movement has become more and more overtly violent in rather stark contrast to the overall nonviolence of the movement itself. More and more officials are re-defining violence and nonviolence in such a way that almost any action by Occupy is "violence" by definition. The police actions in Oakland in response to J28 may be a template for what is to come. Some of this redefinition of terms has been adopted by factions within the Movement itself in an effort to purify the Occupy Movement of any hint of "violence." Thus, for example, the constant demands from some factions within the Movement to denounce and expel "the anarchists," who are defined as "violent" due to existence of the Black Bloc.

As I've said many times, there wouldn't be an Occupy Movement at all without "the anarchists." But then, maybe that's the point of all these calls to denounce and expel them...

Next: Nonviolence in Today's Struggle

"When Oakland Is Under Attack, What Do We Do? Stand Up, Fight Back!"

There's now a plethora of videos from the J28 events in Oakland. I've posted some of OakFoSho's and linked to OaktownPirate's. Of course there are many more now. I like the unedited views of what was going on because it is possible for one to see and understand more of the context of the what happened, and they also give you a better perspective on the whole panoply of events. There's a lot of standing around, for example.

The Battle of Oak St. depicted in the video above shot from street level is taking on semi-legendary status. It was quite different that the October 25, 2011 police assaults on the encampment at City Hall and later on the demonstrators in the street during which Scott Olsen and hundreds of others were injured.

Though I don't have a link handy, I've seen reports that hundreds were injured on J28 too. The absolute numbers of injuries connected with the police suppression of the Occupy Oakland activities is moving upwards rapidly, and we may not recognize how many people are getting hurt in these incidents. I watch the young people on the front lines of The Battle of Oak St. and I think, "Sweet Jesus's baby booties, I couldn't do that." Even if I was younger, I'm not sure I would. These people are incredibly brave -- not stupid -- to stay engaged in confrontation like that. This is tough stuff; these people could get killed, and I'm sure they know it.

There have been the usual denunciations of the black clad and masked "anarchists" seen in this incident and others throughout the day, some of whom are seen throwing stuff at the police. But nobody has been cited as throwing anything at the police before the police fired, unprovoked, on the crowd with "less lethal" munitions. And most of what was thrown was tear gas canisters, smoke bomb canisters and rubber bullet casings that had been fired at the crowd.

Apparently, the police in Oakland have to be ordered not to fire on demonstrators. Otherwise, :kablooie:

The confrontation of course is intentional. The point is to delegitimize -- further delegitimize -- the authority of the Oakland police. Did it work? I can't say. It's an ongoing project. But I would say, based on what I've seen, that the police had no cause to fire. By doing so, and by continuing to fire, and later to assault many demonstrators, after it was clear that they were not actually under threat from the crowd, they delegitimized themselves. And then they lied about what happened.

Occupy Oakland comes off fine in these incidents. Brave, stalwart and true. Even when they are throwing things at the police. The cops on the other hand...

Richard Wolff Explains It All to the Sweet People of Occupy Marin

January 7, 2012:



For those of you who don't know much about California's political, economic, and social geography, you might miss some of the frequently delightful ironies of Wolff's talk on this fine, sunny January afternoon in San Rafael, CA.

Marin County (big, slow-loading pdf; be warned) is just north of San Francisco on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's hilly country, and remarkably rural still. At one time it was mostly ranches and resort communities like Tiburon and Sausalito, and much of the spirit of ranching and resorts continues among the couple of hundred thousand who live in Marin County today.

For many years, Marin County was home to some of the wealthiest people in California -- as it still is -- and people who lived in San Francisco aspired to one day be able to afford to live in Marin. The per capita income in Marin County in 2007 was the highest in the Bay Area and in fact it was the highest in California. Marin County is the country seat of California's "1%". Keep that in mind while listening to Wolff's talk and you will see what I mean about the ironies of his observations. Does he know where he is? OMG. "11 shares of GM that your grandmother left you?" "Working people?" "Wages?" Hello?!!

It's a lovely area, relatively unspoiled, "like California used to be," and its people are fiercely protective of its natural beauty and the legacy of its rural past.

The thing about Marin is that despite the overall wealth of its inhabitants, it's politically and socially far more (academically) leftist than practically any place else in California. Make no mistake, this is the leftism of the elites and the bourgeoisie, not the gritty and radical working class leftism of the East Bay, centered in Oakland. The people of Marin do not, how you say, engage in The Class Struggle.

They are, however, great supporters of those who do! Bless their hearts.

NonviolentTactics Are Weapons

In Oakland, a significant minority of activists do not consider these men to be sacred relics of Nonviolent Resistance to be worshiped as if Divine. How rude! Indeed, when one man stood up at an Occupy Oakland General Assembly and denounced Gandhi in no uncertain terms (which I will not repeat because the terms were so rude... eek) it caused a minor firestorm among the multitude. How dare he!? Well, he did, and it had the effect of breaking a kind of spell that is cast on Americans with the mention of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.

A spell that has proved very useful tamping down and keeping at bay any effective resistance to the triumph of America's real class warriors for decades on end.

"Gandhi wouldn't do that!" "Martin Luther King would be embarrassed to hear you say that!"

Be like Gandhi and King! That's the only way to win!

Gandhi led campaigns for simple justice in South Africa and Independence from the British Raj for India from the 1890's until his unfortunate assassination in 1948. King led campaigns for basic civil rights, justice and dignity for African Americans in the United States from the 1950's to his unfortunate assassination in 1968.

Gandhi failed to win his campaign for simple justice in South Africa; that would not come for generations under other leadership, and some would say it hasn't arrived yet. He ultimately saw victory in his campaign to free India from British rule, but not his dream of a free India. When he was shot and killed, India was still in the throes of assembling itself into a nation, a very bloody and dispiriting process as it happened.

King lived to see the "mountaintop" as he called it, but he did not get to the "Promised Land" before a rifleman's bullet caught up to him in Memphis. For the "Promised Land" wasn't just the right to vote and to sit at a lunch counter in the South, far from it. He was in Memphis to press for economic justice for garbage men, and since the success of the Civil Rights Movement, he'd been pressing more and more insistently to end the War in Vietnam, and to raise up Americans of all colors from poverty and economic despair. He would not live to see either goal accomplished, nor can Americans today see any end to global warfare against... something... and every year since the Endless Recession began the poverty rate goes up; it's higher now than it was in 1968. (12.8% in 1968 vs 15.1% in 2011.)

Both Gandhi and King are rightly praised and celebrated for their triumphs and for their similar approach to their struggles. Both got partway to their goals before they were killed. Though their legacies live on -- and have had astonishing results a generation or two after their deaths -- it's not at all clear that conditions now, in India or the United States, would please them. There has been much backsliding or sidestepping. Progress in the United States seemed to halt sometime around 1982; in India, the material record may be somewhat better, but what of the spirit that was so essential to Gandhi -- and King for that matter?

We have come so far, yet we have so far to go.

And it is widely claimed that the only way forward is on the nonviolent paths laid for us by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Anything else leads to madness, suffering, and failure.

What is nonviolence?

I argue that nonviolent tactics are weapons. When well employed, they can be extraordinarily effective. But Americans seem to have lost sight of what nonviolent tactics are, often confusing them with passivity, and too few have any idea how to use them effectively let alone who they should be used against and why.

Gandhi and King had very profound insights into the nature of their struggles and the nature of nonviolence in the context of their struggles, and I feel confident in saying that insight was a direct result of their essentially "holy" status.

Gandhi may have been a lawyer -- there's nothing particularly "holy" about that! -- but he was informed by his extraordinary spiritual life that kept him personally centered and free no matter what was going on around him -- which included some of the most dreadful and poignant events in the history of India. We forget that the British were almost inconceivably cruel in their rule of India using famine, genocide, murder, dispossession, bribery and immense levels of brutality to control the restive Natives. What the British did to the Indians makes their impositions on the American Colonists that led to the Revolution seem like a walk in the park.

And all of Britain's heavy handed atrocities were utilized in suppressing the Indian self-determination and self-rule during Gandhi's decades long campaign for Independence.

The struggle wasn't solely a against British cruelty and violence toward their dusky charges. No, half the sub-continent was ill-ruled through native Maharajahs who functioned as British lackeys almost to the very end. They were paid handsomely for their service in suppressing the native revolts, and if they didn't suppress revolts smartly enough, they were deposed... so what did they have to complain about?

In contrast to this routine violence on the part of the British and their client rulers, Gandhi's struggle was conducted through a process of nonviolent resistance, the sharpest weapon available to his largely impoverished followers under the circumstances. Of course using it meant much sacrifice on the part of the Indian masses, sacrifice which Gandhi himself was ever cognizant of and frequently recognized through word and deed. Many thousands of Indians paid for independence from Britain with their lives; and if you add in the famine casualties, the death toll was in the millions.

Throughout Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns there were parallel campaigns against the British that utilized violent tactics like kidnapping, sabotage, murder and other forms of violence as well as frequent civil disturbances. Never let it be forgotten that Gandhian nonviolent campaigns were taking place in a context that was sometimes extraordinarily violent.

It was partly because of that contrast the nonviolent campaigns of Gandhi and his followers and the violence of some other Indian rebel factions that the British essentially adopted Gandhi as the one spokesperson for India that they would deal with. So many of the other Natives were just too eager to slit British throats. Which they cheerfully did any chance they got.

But Gandhi was wise enough to use nonviolence as a weapon, too. One that in the end proved more effective than all the murders, kidnappings, sabotage and worse that were taking place while his nonviolent campaigns were going on.

For through nonviolence, Gandhi was able to shame on British, as they had never felt shame before, for their intolerable Imperial conduct.

Of course there was more to the victory of the Independence campaign than merely shaming the British or conducting nonviolent demonstrations. After the horrors and destruction of World War II, no European power could afford an overseas Empire any more. Better to cut one's losses while one could than to try to continue to assert power that wasn't viable -- or affordable -- any more. So the Brits finally packed up and left, India and Pakistan descended into chaos for a while, and India re-emerged -- without Gandhi -- as if it were a phoenix rising. From that day till this, it has been a hard road, but a nonstop march forward, resulting today in an India that I doubt Gandhi could have imagined.

Nonviolence was the weapon that eventually won Indian freedom from British rapine and rule, but it took decades of relentless driving home the point. I believe Gandhi started his campaign in India in 1915. It would be over thirty years -- and two world wars -- before British rule ended.

The British Raj in India and its client states (the Princely States) were effectively ruled by approximately 1000 British civil servants under the authority of the Viceroy on behalf of the Crown 8000 miles away in London. There were of course thousands more British civilians and military officers in India during the period of the British Raj, but their number was always vastly fewer than that of the Indian People. The intrinsic injustice of the situation could not be avoided, and Gandhi took full advantage of it. Because there were so few British ruling over so many Indians, finding the weak spots and using the weapon of nonviolence to expose the shame of its injustice to Indians and the world helped destabilize the whole system -- until by 1947, it collapsed and the British Raj came to an ignominious end.

That's quite a different situation than Martin Luther King faced in shepherding the Civil Rights Movement primarily in the American South. The goal was something else entirely: the inclusion of Negroes in the American social, political and economic system as opposed to their continued segregation and exclusion. Whereas Gandhi was focused on getting the British to quit India, King had the task of focusing America -- particularly in the South -- on including all of its people instead of segregating and excluding a significant minority of them.

In most of the South, Blacks were not the majority of the population. Segregation and Black disempowerment was the custom after the end of Reconstruction. White rule was considered natural. Thanks to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, there was a very limited educated and well-off Black population. The customs of the South tended to keep it that way.

The struggle against Black oppression was not new when Martin Luther King founded the SCLC. It was not new when the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High School in Little Rock, AR with the assistance of the 101st Airborne. It was not new when Rosa Parks disobeyed a Montgomery, AL, bus driver. It was not new when Emmett Till was lynched outside of Money, MS. It was not new when the Supreme Court decided Brown vs Board of Education. It was not new when the black Navy munitions loaders mutinied at Port Chicago, CA after an explosion that killed over 300 of their number. The struggle against Black oppression was not new when the Scottsboro Boys were falsely accused, nor was it new when the white citizens of Tulsa went on a riotous rampage through the colored section of town killing over 300, leaving over 10,000 homeless, and burning the entire district.

It was not new when Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote his Poems. It was not new when W.E.B. DuBois and others formulated the Niagara Declaration.

The struggle against Black oppression had been going on in one way or another in the United States since Colonial times, and it continues to this day.

The goals of the Civil Rights Movement were to empower Blacks politically and socially and to end segregation laws. There was no thought of removing the government and substituting another. It was not, in other words, a Revolution, nor was it an Independence movement. It was about realizing the equality promise of the Declaration and Constitution and beginning the process of redemption from the original sin of chattel slavery.

Nonviolence patterned after Gandhi's model was the chosen path of Dr. King and the SCLC.

The nonviolent program of the Dr. King nevertheless still led to dozens of deaths of civil rights workers through the 1950's and into the 1960's. As Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." And in the early days of the civil rights struggle, it was apparent that Power wasn't about to concede anything, demand or no.

But the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the shame brought on the South from the Emmett Till murder and the violent resistance to school integration showed that Power in the South was very brittle, and thus in many ways weak.

There were ways, nonviolent ways, to alter the power relationships that were thought to be permanently designed by God Himself. And so, from 1955 to 1965 an increasingly disciplined and visible Civil Rights Movement took to the streets of many cities in the South as well as the North to advocate for Civil Rights and Constitutional protections for everyone. There were hundreds of marches, sit ins, teach ins, and acts of civil disobedience, some of them met with extreme violence and brutality by the authorities, other not so much; there were rallies and assemblies and voter registration drives. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds or thousands were injured or arrested and jailed, but bit by bit the restrictions and impediments of segregation were rolled back, to the point where, by 1965, Blacks had restored to them almost the level of rights and protections they had enjoyed after the Civil War in 1865. That's a bit of hyperbole, but the success of the Civil Rights Movement was almost a restoration of Reconstruction rights.

King and his followers used nonviolence tactics as weapons to undermine the authority of the iconic "big bellied Southern Sheriffs," and this in turn helped more and more Americans in general to understand just what a monstrous evil the Southern Jim Crow segregation laws and restrictions on basic civil rights were. That realization and the overt and constant brutality of the oppression of the Civil Rights Movement eventually helped change the laws.

But none of this happened in a vacuum. The nonviolent Civil Rights Movement that Dr. King led was paralleled by many other individuals and groups fighting for civil rights in America, some of them a good deal more militant. There was the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, Black Panthers, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and many others, each with a different interpretation of nonviolent resistance and its utility in the struggle against oppression.

But let it be said that nearly all the violence that was perpetrated during the Civil Rights struggle up to 1965 was perpetrated by whites under color of authority -- or otherwise -- against Blacks and other civil rights workers.

Nonviolent tactics were successfully used as weapons in the struggle against oppression in both India and the United States. They were used to weaken and expose the very brittle structures of Power in the British Raj and in the American South, and they were used to bring shame on the perpetrators of violence against nonviolent demonstrations, protests and rallies.

Laws were changed in the United States and changed attitudes eventually followed. The British Empire eventually dissolved as if it had never been.

India achieved independence in 1947; Gandhi was assassinated in 1948; the crucial Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, by which time almost all segregation and racial discrimination laws had been overturned, though Americans are still not at the point of full equality.

Nonviolence tactics worked and worked very well to accomplish specific goals that were set -- though they took a long time to become effective -- under the circumstances.

There were many lessons learned from the experience, and among the questions we ought to be asking now are "What were those lessons, and what exactly was learned? By whom?"


Next: The Lessons of Nonviolent Resistance and Who They Benefit

On the Use and Misuse of the Nonviolence Meme

March on the Pentagon, October 1967. How much more nonviolent could a protest be?

From the opening bell of Occupy Wall Street on September 17, 2011, to the shockingly brutal repression and mass arrests of Occupy Oakland activists on January 28, 2012, the Occupy Movement has wrestled with the question of "Nonviolence."

For all intents and purposes, the Movement has been overtly nonviolent from the beginning, but it has been met with increasingly intense official violence in many locations around the country, starting with the infamous pepper spraying of non-resisting activists in New York on September 24, 2011, by DI Anthony Bologna, the supervising NYPD officer for Lower Manhattan. His unprovoked act shocked the conscience of the nation. It was to be the first of many WTF moments in the history of the Occupy Movement.

Officer Bologna's act appeared to be one of official but mindless cruelty. There would be many more such incidents associated with Occupy. Mindless cruelty and brutality toward certain police targets are institutionalized in the United States, as just about anyone from minority communities can testify.

The litany of the incidents to date is long and disheartening.

And these incidents of mindless official cruelty and brutality continued over the weekend in Oakland, California.

Yet the Movement has remained nonviolent. Nonviolent, yes, but not to the point of passivity.

Many of the critics of the Occupy Movement and Occupy Oakland specifically have made much of the fact that Occupy Oakland has not "officially" denounced diversity of tactics and "officially" expelled anyone who has advocated diversity of tactics or who has committed acts of vandalism -- acts which have been declared to be "violence" by the authorities. Just as linking arms and refusing to budge when ordered to do so has been declared "not nonviolence" at UC Berkeley and UC Davis (and I'm sure at other places as well.)

See this post for further discussion of "diversity of tactics" and how those who employ diversity of tactics define "violence."

I read an op-ed in my local newswipe this morning written by a retired journalist I have long respected who referred to Occupy Oakland activists as "thugs" and to their actions over the weekend as "rioting." It was deeply disappointing to me, because I can only assume that he, like so many others, has no real knowledge of what happened in Oakland over the weekend at all. The only things he knows about it is what was on the teevee and the lies -- yes, they were lies -- put out by the City of Oakland Emergency Operations Center (pdf). The facts may take a little digging, but they are easily available. The lies, however, are everywhere.

The way Peter Schrag characterized the participants in the weekend activities of Occupy Oakland was very evocative to me, as I assume it would be to anyone who has studied nonviolence, been an activist who believes in its value, and who lived through the Civil Rights Era, the anti-Vietnam War Era, or who may have any knowledge of the Independence Movement in India or the anti-Apartheid efforts in South Africa, or as may be, has any familiarity with the Palestinian cause.

In every case mentioned, the activists/rebels, no matter what they did or didn't do, were characterized by authority as "violent" and "thugs" and their actions were called "rioting." ALWAYS.

Whether or not the activists are practicing nonviolence is irrelevant when authority wishes to crush a rebellion, as anyone who has been involved in nonviolent resistance for any length of time knows full well.

When authorities feel threatened by activist rebellions, as they clearly feel threatened by the Occupy Movement, they will go to any length to suppress and destroy the rebellion and to discredit those associated with it. They will insist that participants are committing acts of "violence" no matter what the activists do -- as UC administrators did in Berkeley and Davis and as some civic authorities have done all over the country, but most especially in Oakland, where at least one of the city council members has asserted that Occupy Oakland activists are engaged in acts of "domestic terrorism."

It should be noted that many of those arrested at the political conventions in 2008 were charged with "domestic terrorism" though they had committed no terroristic acts whatsoever. It doesn't matter. The act of public protest -- or even planning such a thing -- is, in certain cases in this country, considered chargeable as "domestic terrorism" though eventually (at least in most cases) the charges don't stand up in court.

Professing or practicing nonviolence does not protect you; in fact, it can have just the opposite effect. So many people have chanted "Peaceful Protest!" during Occupy events while they're being beaten senseless, gassed and dragged away to some detention site.

Anyone who has been in a nonviolent resistance situation in which Authority demanded obedience knows full well that nonviolent tactics will not protect you from police brutality, detention, injury or death.

"Peaceful Protest!" is not a protective mantra.

And anyone who's been in that situation knows that nonviolent tactics will not prevent Authority from lying about what happened -- as has long been the case in Oakland. They lie all the time; it is their official culture.

That said, is it wise to adopt diversity of tactics or overtly violent tactics? Under the conditions Americans live in -- a virtual police state -- the answer is almost always no. Not only is it not wise, it's not necessary.

A police state is a brittle state, very weak in many respects. Violence on the part of police state victims almost always has the ironic effect of strengthening the oppressor and weakening the victim. Nonviolent tactics, on the other hand, can have an increasingly weakening effect on the police state while strengthening the victims.

Nonviolence, however, should not be confused with passivity. And passivity is not the same as Passive Resistance. One of the problems Americans have in talking about -- let alone sorting through -- these issues is that most Americans have no idea what the terms really mean and how to practice nonviolent tactics effectively.

They have had no experience, there is very little training available, and they don't know what to do. All they know are the names of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "Do thou likewise!"

But what did Gandhi and King do? And just as important, where, when and why?

Next: Nonviolent tactics are weapons.

The Implacables

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan checking her Facebook while citizens testify about their experiences with OPD during the J28 confrontations. From OakFoSho's video of the proceedings, Jan 31,2012.

I watched a portion of the Oakland City Council's meeting last night on OakFoSho's incomparable Ustream livestream. Many eloquent statements were made about the J28 events in Oakland and the multiple failures of the Oakland High PoohBahs and their lackeys that brought them about.

From time to time, someone in the audience would shout at the Council members: "Pay attention!" It has become standard practice for City Councils and their administrators (not just Oakland's) to ostentatiously ignore the comments of the public at their meetings, to leave the room, to text-message their friends, to chat among themselves or what have you. The public is of no interest to them, and what the people "think" or "say" about this or that matter is of no concern. The People's Voice is heard as noise if that; the People are not listened to.

Our civic rulers are very determined that their message to the masses be heard loud and clear:

"You don't matter; you've had your two minutes now go away."

The testimony at the council meeting about the J28 events included a litany of abuse and cruelty by the police that would, in ordinary times, leave anyone with a conscience deeply outraged, and anyone in a responsible position mortified.

These are not ordinary times, thus the seemingly endless stream of the People testifying to the cruelty and brutality of the Oakland police and their helpers from around the Bay Area was met with blank stares or nothing at all. The council has no conscience, and the People's outcry is as nothing to them.

Many of those who testified at last night's Oakland City Council meeting were middle aged or even elderly white women who said they were terrorized and brutalized by the Oakland Police on January 28. One said she was thrown to the ground and beaten with batons on the steps of the YMCA. Another said that what she witnessed and experienced was unconscionable. The council cared not at all. They were otherwise engaged.

There are reports that hundreds of people who were kettled at the YMCA and arrested there were taken to Santa Rita Jail where they are being held on enormous bail and where they are being brutalized, beaten, gassed, and humiliated by guards who, according to reports, are "enjoying" their work immensely. Santa Rita is run by Alameda County Sheriffs -- whose own reputation for cruelty and brutality was solidified last November when they participated in beating student and faculty protesters at UC Berkeley during the initial Occupy Cal actions. Of course they were also heavily involved in the October 2009 beatings of students and faculty at Berkeley during the Wheeler Hall occupation. Plus ça change and all that. The brutality endemic to America's detention system is notorious throughout the world.

Almost off topic: I was held for several hours at Santa Rita -- on a bus with about 50 others -- some 45 years ago when it was a very different place than it is now. As I recall, it was a decommissioned WWII military camp that Alameda County had acquired to hold overflow county inmates, mostly antiwar protesters at that time. It was not a pleasant experience. Now it is the county's main jail.

The implacable disinterest of our elected representatives in the plight of the masses and the brutal conditions under which authority is implemented against the People has become one of the hallmarks of the Modern Age.

No one in positions of power or authority "listens" to the People.

They listen only to those whose positions require it. This means the mass of the People are ruled by a self-proclaimed pseudo-nobility for whom nothing else matters but their own power and prestige compared to others of their ilk and class.

Oh. And suppressing urban unrest... teach those little old ladies a lesson they'll never forget.

But as Spencer Mills (OakFoSho) states in the conclusion of one of his video documents, he too was just an everyday progressive going about his socially conscious business, voting and doing all the other things good progressive citizens are supposed to do, until he witnessed with his own eyes what the police were doing to the People under the authority granted by elected officials like the Oakland City Council. When he saw for himself what was really going on, he was radicalized like many hundreds or thousands of others in Oakland and throughout the country have been radicalized by the police state actions they have seen for themselves.

And that leads to implacable resistance.

Who'd a thunk.