Recently in nonviolence Category

Back in the late 1980s when I was a Villanova University undergrad, sexual assault didn't happen. True story.

It will surprise no one to learn that I co-edited an alternative, "underground" weekly junior and senior year. We called it The VACUUM, a name whose acronym changed every issue. Reading about an early "date rape" study in my feminist studies class I extrapolated how many rapes should reasonably be expected to occur on a campus of Villanova's size. I added a few anecdotes from my all-male dorm experience and published it in The VACUUM. A short while later some friends of mine who edited the official student paper picked up the story and even cited an anonymous quotation from me in what is probably the only official documentation of the VACUUM's existence in the V.U. archives.

Right around this time a female student brought her allegations of an on-campus sexual assault to the local police. Campus officials feigned surprise and provided the local media with parroted quotes: "In all my xyz years working here I have never ever heard of an allegation of rape." Chief of Security, Dean of Students, etc., all delivered the same line, clearly coached by a public relations team, with only the years changed to reflect their campus tenure. Thousands of students, dozens of years, hundreds of frat parties, tanker-fulls of cheap beer and not a hint of impropriety.

Last night I chanced on my alma mater's website and saw a link right there on the homepage to an article mysterious titled Recent Campus Incident (generic URL, probably designed to disappear soon). It documented an alleged assault on a female student by three members of the football team last month. The announcement reports that the University found them in violation of the campus's Code of Conduct and "rescinded the admission of the three young men."

A Google News search turns up that this has been extensively covered by the media with almost 500 hits. The Delco Times reports that the 1990 Clery Act and its amendments have made university cover-ups illegal and required reports and specific protocols for responding to campus crimes. The current media spotlight and long-standing federal laws certainly account for much of Villanova's 2007 enlightenment. Whatever the source of change, it's nice to see. Even three players from the beloved football team can get the boot (sorry, have their admissions rescinded) for criminal behavior. Better still, the university can fess up to the crime and take some responsibility. The times, they have a' changed.

Just a little note to everyone that I've blogged a couple of posts over on Nonviolence.org. They're both based on "peace mom" Cindy Sheeran's "resignation" from the peace movement yesterday.

It's all a bit strange to see this from a long-time peace activist perspective. The movement that Sheehan's talking about and now critiquing is not movement I've worked with for the last fifteen-plus years. The organizations I've known have all been housed in crumbling buildings, with too-old carpets and furniture lifted as often as not from going out of business sales. Money's tight and careers potentially sacrificed to help build a world of sharing, caring and understanding.

The movement Sheehan talks about is fueled by millions of dollars of Democratic Party-related money, with campaigns designed to mesh well with Party goals via the so-called 527 groups and other indirect mechanisms. Big Media likes to crown these organizations as the antiwar movement, but as Sheehan and Amy Goodman discuss in today's Democracy Now interview, corporate media will end up with much of the tens of millions of dollars candidates are now raising. Sheehan makes an impassioned plea for people to support those grassroots campaigns that aren't supported by the "peace movement" but this reinforces the notion that its the moneyed interests that make up the movement. I'm sure she knows better but it's hard to work for so long and to make so many sacrifices and still be so casually dismissed--not just me but thousands of committed activists I've known over the years.

There are a few peace organizations in that happy medium between toadying and poverty (nice carpets, souls still intact) but it mystifies me why there isn't a broader base of support for grassroots activism. I myself decided to leave professional peace work almost a decade ago after the my Nonviolence.org project raised such pitiful sums. At some point I decided to stop whining about this phenomenon and just look for better-paying employment elsewhere but it still fascinates me from a sociological perspective.

Hi QuakerRanter friends: I've been busy today covering the Quaker response to the Christian Peacemakers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of overlapping content:

• Quaker Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
• Nonviolence.org statement and list of responses

Both of these feature a mix of mainstream news and Quaker views on the situation. I'll keep them updated. I'm not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Captives -- check it out.

It's always interesting to see the moments that I explictly identify as a Friend on Nonviolence.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appropriate. We need to explain to the world why a Quaker and three other Christians would needlessly put themselves in such danger. This is witness time, Friends. The real deal. We're all being tested. This is one of those times for which those endless committee meetings and boilerplate peace statements have prepared us.

It's time to tell the world that we live in the power that takes away the occasion for war and overcomes our fear of death (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would travel to dangerous lands to witness our faith).

An early edition of "Nonviolence Web Upfront," which debuted December 29, 1997.

I started Nonviolence.org in late 1995 as a place to publicize the work of the US peace movement which was not getting out to a wide (or a young) audience. I built and maintained the websites of a few dozen hosted groups (including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA) but I quickly realized that the Nonviolence.org homepage itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to member groups. I realized I could highlight the articles I thought should get more publicity, whether on or off the Nonviolence.org domain. The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on December 29, 1997 when I re-named the homepage "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia's article on weblog that the first use of the term occured on December 29, 1997--yes, the same day!

I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others. Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for "Nonviolence Web Upfront." The reliable Archive.org has index of Upfront's second week, whose feature was a guest piece by John Steitz, Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.

When you’ve acknowledge the Power, what does faith become? It becomes a testimony to the world. The Quaker way breaks through both the religious and activist narrow-mindedness of our day. We’re not talking about faith without action and we’re not talking about action without faith. Either one without the other is sacrilege. Combine the two and you have something real, something powerful.

My regular readers may not be aware that Quaker Ranter is the talk of the political internet for the last few days. Since posting my "account of getting a phone call from a CBS News publicist", I've been linked to by a Who's Who of blogging gliteratti: Wonkette, Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, RatherBiased, etc. For a short time yesterday, the story was a part of the second-ranked article on Technorati's Politics Attention index. See The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Nonviolence.org on the main site.

Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on "Deserters," U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence.org (I have here: CBS News Covers New Conscientious Objectors. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked to reporters from major news networks and papers, and I've talked a booking agent or two to arranging appearances on radio shows, but never a publicist.

The Baby Theo blog got a mention in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, It's almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boccella. They missed out on a huge ratings bonanza by not picking Theo for their pictures. Stranger was that two interviews produced only one off-topic substantive line: "Martin Kelly [sic] experienced the worst of it when someone threatened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page."

I am shocked and horrified by the decapitation of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, but not for the chest-puffing reasons the folks at Fox News are. U.S. military proxies held Berg without charges for an extended period of time and there are too many questions about when he was released and who he might have been released to. I'm not one for conspiracy theories but there are real questions as to how Berg ended up in front of those anonymous, hooded butchers. Whatever the answers, the U.S. military is involved in his detention, as is the FBI (who made him miss a plane that was supposed to take him out of Iraq last month), as is the U.S. government back home who didn't cooperate with his family to get him out of there.

My major piece on this is over on the main Nonviolence.org site: US military proxies held Berg before decaptiation; who were his executioners?

I'm sure to get even more hate mail than usual for this but I'll also be watching the mainstream media coverage. I only know of many of these details because Berg was local and Channel 10 News gave background to Berg's detention. Here's my prediction from past experience: this story will be too hot for the mainstream media to question for a few days and then it will only be to report that there are some nutcases asking questions. Only after a few days of this kind of second-hand question will the national media drop the fascade and start asking the questions themselves. It should be a fun week ahead.

I am so tired of "phone war tax resistance":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php. I have a fondness for the aging hippies of NWTRCC & WRL but I thought they'd given up this dead horse by now. Well, at least they're not "resurrecting the 'Doomsday Clock'":http://www.friendsjournal.org/contents/2002/07july/feature.html. Update, 12/8/03: Robert Randall, an old friend from NWTRCC, is the first to comment on the Dead Horses post. "See his response":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000216.php

I'm starting the process of putting my whole site onto MovableType, even the old static pages.

So there's been a flurry of blogging about Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist, an article condemning the activist group Voices in the Wilderness by one of it's former members. Lots of conservative blogs, including the very influential Instapundit are commenting on it. But so far I've seen no pacifist responses other than my own and Voices' website is silent. What's up with this? Is everyone just figuring it's better to let this all die down or do they not know the publicity value of such a prominent article?