Waging Nonviolence

We are seeing increasing social protests all over the world, with hundreds of thousands on the streets from Santiago to Montreal, from Moscow to Tokyo and everywhere in between. Sudan, after having recently divorced its southern neighbour is a country not know for its human rights and police leniency, so it is encouraging that even here things are moving, even if carefully.

by Ter Garcia

The 15M movement in Spain has faced repression from the very beginning: 24 young people were arrested and beaten by police in the demonstrations organized by Democracia Real Ya on May 15 last year, which is a large part of why several dozen people decided to camp that night in Sol square, turning the demonstration into an encampment.

Nonviolence is a beautiful theory but it doesn’t work in the real world, critics have long argued. It is—they maintain—passive, weak, utopian, naïve, unpatriotic, marginal, simplistic, and impractical. In spite of these widely-held assumptions, however, people around the planet go on building one nonviolent people-power movement after another.

Article written by Nathan Schneider

It’s a foregone conclusion that revenge ties itself in a logical knot. It’s a cycle that churns until everyone bound up in it is dead. With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in mind, philosopher Simon Critchley rehearses this fact eloquently in his latest at his New York Times forum, The Stone.

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

Bryan Farrell, a New York based writer and contributor to wagingnonviolence.org gives his view on the English riots and what MLK might make of it all, “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.”

One of the first posts for this site was about GandhiCam, an application for Blackberry phones that automatically sends any image, that you take to your email or an email address of your choosing. The idea was developed to allow activists to immediately get content off their phones before the police could confiscate them, as had happened during the G20 protests in London.

Despite attempts by Chinese authorities to suppress any form of social change, young Chinese people both in and out of the country are constantly finding new ways to be heard. In 2010 alone there were 320,000 incidents of civil unrest. A move is underway to unite the diverse protests and rebrand them the “Jasmine Revolution”, following in the footsteps of Tunisia.

Protests continue in Tahrir Square six months after Mubarak resigned on the famous Day of Departure and while much of the world’s media is looking elsewhere for news. More demands are raised by protesters, yet the family atmosphere in Tahrir Square is causing difficulties for the military who fear using tear gas in such an environment.

Demonstrators take to the street tomorrow in Malaysia calling for reforms of the electoral system to make elections clean and fair. The rally, organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) is supported by the three largest opposition parties in the country but deemed illegal by the government.