Category Archives ⇒ Nonviolence

From 1995 – 2008 I was the pub­lish­er of Non​vi​o​lence​.org, a ground-breaking por­tal and blog about peace. Many of these arti­cles are archived from that period. 

Impor­tant Posts:
* The Rev­o­lu­tion will be Online (1995)
* NYTimes Pro­file of Non​vi​o​lence​.org (1998)
* The Ear­ly Blog­ging Days (2005)
* The His­to­ry of Non​vi​o​lence​.org, 1995 – 2008 (2008)

Reposting: Horror

September 11, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Repost­ing from 9/11/2001: Today’s ter­ror­ist attacks are sim­ply hor­ren­dous, thou­sands of inno­cents might well lose their lives. Most impor­tant now is to sit patient­ly, to pray and to not call for mas­sive indis­crim­i­nant attacks that might only kill thou­sands more. Our char­ac­ter as a nation is being test­ed now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, glob­al injustice.

Post­ed to Non​vi​o​lence​.org from the library in Bar Har­bor Maine, where we were hon­ey­moon­ing. Archive​.org.

The real world’s competition this week is on the streets of Georgia

August 11, 2008
· Martin Kelley

To Amer­i­can eyes the news of the esca­lat­ing war in the Cau­ca­sus nation of Geor­gia almost reads as farce: a break­away region of a break­away region, tanks rolling to main­tain con­trol of… well, not that much real­ly. We won­der how it could be in either Rus­sia or Geor­gia’s inter­ests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Rus­si­a’s de fac­to leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fight­ing the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Geor­gia’s Pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunt­ing the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weari­ness as we real­ize just how famil­iar this all is. Tiny eth­nic enclaves with cen­turies of ani­mosi­ties and well rehearsed sto­ries of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the oth­er set fight­ing by the break­down of an empire that had uneasi­ly unit­ed them in repres­sion. Change a few details and we could be talk­ing recent con­flicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwan­da, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood mon­ey from the drug trade, from oil bil­lions and human traf­fick­ing add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fight­ing these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seri­ous­ly: oth­er­wise strong economies col­lapse under the chaos that these ter­ri­to­r­i­al wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in mar­gin­al areas and all sides would be bet­ter off if the politi­cians stopped wor­ry­ing about these con­test­ed ter­ri­to­ries and just focused on build­ing a econ­o­my attrac­tive to inter­na­tion­al trade.
Why has­n’t the world learned the mech­a­nisms to end these con­flicts before they erupt into open war­fare? Where is the polit­i­cal will to end this class of war once and for all? Dis­ease and ter­ror­ism are the invari­able fruits of these con­flicts and strike us all across nation­al bound­aries. The “inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty” needs to be mean more than impres­sive chore­og­ra­phy and a few thou­sand ath­letes in Bei­jing. This week’s real gold met­al will go to the lead­ers that can tran­scend macho pos­tur­ing and weak-willed apol­o­giz­ing and get those Russ­ian tanks out of Georgia.

The long life of 1950s sci-fi

July 2, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Part of the play­book for Amer­i­can tor­ture in Iraq and Guan­tá­namo comes from Chi­nese inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods used against cap­tured Amer­i­cans dur­ing the Cold War.

What the train­ers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied ver­ba­tim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chi­nese Com­mu­nist tech­niques used dur­ing the Kore­an War to obtain con­fes­sions, many of them false, from Amer­i­can prisoners.
The recy­cled chart is the lat­est and most vivid evi­dence of the way Com­mu­nist inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods that the Unit­ed States long described as tor­ture became the basis for inter­ro­ga­tions both by the mil­i­tary at the base at Guan­tá­namo Bay, Cuba, and by the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. 

It sounds like some­thing out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchuri­an Can­di­date. And in a way it is: the idea that Chi­nese Com­mu­nists had used inhu­man ruth­less­ness to unlock the secrets of the brain to cre­ate the per­fect truth tech­nique would be a charm­ing arti­fact of 1950s Amer­i­can cul­ture, some­thing to show along­side the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hov­er cars we’re all sup­posed to be dri­ving in the year 2000. Instead it’s yet anoth­er exhib­it in Pen­ta­gon amnesia.

Does­n’t any­one do any fact check­ing at the Pen­ta­gon? “Offi­cials who drew on the SERE pro­gram [in 2002 to design Amer­i­can intel­li­gence adap­ta­tion] appear to have been unaware that it had been cre­at­ed as a result of con­cern about false con­fes­sions by Amer­i­can pris­on­ers.” And yet… it’s clear that Pres­i­dents Bush and Cheney want­ed false infor­ma­tion in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. What­ev­er “con­fes­sions” can be wrung from the Bagh­dad taxi dri­vers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can cer­tain­ly be used to bul­ly the grow­ing num­ber who oppose the war.

But what do we want, jus­ti­fi­ca­tions or the truth? Peace in the region or pro­tec­tion from sins of the past? For­get that tor­ture is inhu­man: it’s also just an unre­li­able way of get­ting accu­rate infor­ma­tion. It’s hard to imag­ine a real­is­tic sce­nario where the hor­ri­ble events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of tor­ture by U.S. intel­li­gence or mil­i­tary per­son­nel but it’s could have been stopped if thought­ful ana­lysts had been allowed to share infor­ma­tion across agency lines and been focused on true knowl­edge and understanding.

Shuttering up Non​vi​o​lence​.org

January 26, 2008
· Martin Kelley

In a move sure to be a sur­prise no one, I’m shut­ter­ing up my Non​vi​o​lence​.org site. Sure it’s a great domain, sure it still gets more traf­fic than all of my oth­er sites com­bined, but I just don’t have the time to keep it going in any kind of coher­ent way. It’s always sur­prised me that I could nev­er get sub­stan­tive finan­cial sup­port for a project that has reached mil­lions. It seems par­tic­u­lar­ly iron­ic to shut it down in the midst of one of the longest wars in U.S. history.

For those want­i­ng good activist news, the Dave the Quak­er Agi­ta­tor is always on top of cur­rent events and the Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion’s new’ish group blog at FOR​Peace​.net is a great addi­tion to the peace blog­ging scene. Archive posts from Non​vi​o​lence​.org have been migrat­ed here to the Ranter.

On shoestrings and keepin’ on

May 30, 2007
· Martin Kelley

There’s some inter­est­ing follow-up on the Cindy Shee­han “res­ig­na­tion” (see yes­ter­day’s post). One fel­low I cor­re­spond­ed with years ago gave a dona­tion then sent an email urg­ing us not to fall into despair. It’s hard.
Go beyond Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty fronts like MoveOne and you’ll find the most of the peace move­ment is a ridicu­lous­ly shoe­string oper­a­tion. Nonviolence.org’s four month “ChipIn” fundrais­ing cam­paign raised $50 per month but the sac­ri­fice isn’t just short-term – just try apply­ing for a main­stream job with a resume chock full of social change work!
Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Lev­ellers blog talks about “keep­ing going through the despair”:http://levellers.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/needed-for-long-haul-peacemaking-a-spirituality-of-nonviolence/:
bq. This is a cau­tion­ary tale for the rest of us, includ­ing myself. Out­rage, right­eous indig­na­tion, anger, pub­lic grief, are all valid reac­tions to war and human rights abus­es, but they will get us only so far. They may strain mar­riages and fam­i­ly life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spir­it of non­vi­o­lence and active peace­mak­ing. And, since impe­ri­al­ist mil­i­tarism is a sys­tem (bib­li­cal­ly speak­ing, a Pow­er), it will resist change for the good. Work for jus­tice and peace over the long haul requires spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline, requires deep roots in a spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of non­vi­o­lence, includ­ing cul­ti­vat­ing the virtue of patience.
Michael’s answer is specif­i­cal­ly Chris­t­ian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one’s motivations.
Shee­han’s retire­ment did­n’t stop her from “talk­ing with Amy Good­man on Democ­ra­cy Now this morning”:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/1343232. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and con­trasts them with the tens of mil­lions pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates are rais­ing, most of which will go to big media TV net­works for ads. Shee­han says we need more than just an anti­war movement:
bq. Like, end­ing the Viet­nam War was major, but peo­ple left the move­ment. It was an anti­war move­ment. They didn’t stay com­mit­ted to true and last­ing peace. And that’s what we real­ly have to do.
More Cindy Shee­han read­ing across the blo­gos­phere avail­able via “Google”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=cindy+sheehan&btnG=Search+Blogs and “Technorati”:http://technorati.com/tag/cindy+sheehan.
And for those look­ing for a lit­tle good news check out the brand new site for the “Glob­al Net­work for Nonviolence”:http://gn-nonviolence.org/. I designed it for them as part of my “free­lance design work”:http://www.martinkelley.com but it’s been a joy and a lot of fun to be work­ing more close­ly with a good group of inter­na­tion­al activists again. Their “non­vi­o­lence links”:http://gn-nonviolence.org/links.php page includes sites for some real­ly com­mit­ted grass­roots peace­mak­ers. This long-term peace work may not give us head­lines in the New York Times but it’s touched mil­lions over the years. If human­i­ty is ever going to grow into the kind of cul­ture of peace Shee­han dreams of then we’ll need a lot more won­der­ful projects like these.

Cindy Sheehan “resigns”: It’s up to us now

May 29, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Poor Cindy Shee­han, the famous anti-war mom who camped out­side Bush’s Craw­ford Texas home fol­low­ing the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she’s all but “resigned from the protest movement”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070529/ap_on_re_us/cindy_sheehan. She post­ed the fol­low­ing “on her Dai­ly Kos blog”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525
bq. The first con­clu­sion is that I was the dar­ling of the so-called left as long as I lim­it­ed my protests to George Bush and the Repub­li­can Par­ty. Of course, I was slan­dered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty… How­ev­er, when I start­ed to hold the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty to the same stan­dards that I held the Repub­li­can Par­ty, sup­port for my cause start­ed to erode and the “left” start­ed label­ing me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid atten­tion to me when I said that the issue of peace and peo­ple dying for no rea­son is not a mat­ter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the pow­er and mon­ey in the anti-war move­ment comes from Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­nec­tions. Her trag­ic sto­ry, soc­cer mom looks and artic­u­late ide­al­ism made her a nat­ur­al poster girl for an anti-Bush move­ment that has nev­er real­ly been as anti-war as it’s claimed.
Con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats had all the infor­ma­tion they need­ed in 2002 to expose Pres­i­dent Bush’s out­landish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruc­tion. But they “autho­rized his war of aggres­sion anyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution. More recent­ly, Amer­i­cans gave them a land­slide vote of con­fi­dence in last Novem­ber’s elec­tions but still they step back from insist­ing on an Iraq pull-out. The Non​vi​o​lence​.org archives are full of denun­ci­a­tions of Pres­i­dent Clin­ton’s repeat­ed mis­sile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before rein­vent­ing him­self as a earth-toned eco can­di­date, Al Gore posi­tioned him­self as the pro-war hawk of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.
Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insid­ers of both major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties. But as long as the move­ment is fueled with polit­i­cal mon­ey it will be behold­en to those inter­ests and will ulti­mate­ly defer to back-room Cap­i­tal Hill deal-making.
I feel for Cindy. She’s been on a pub­lic­i­ty roller coast­er these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground her­self. Defeat­ing war is the work of a life­time and it’s the work of a move­ment. Shee­han’s wit­ness has touched peo­ple she’ll nev­er meet. It’s made a dif­fer­ence. She’s a woman of remark­able courage who’s point­ing out the pup­pet strings she’s cut­ting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

Nonviolence.org’s fundrais­ing cam­paign ends in a few hours. In four months we’ve raised $150 which does­n’t even cov­er that peri­od’s serv­er costs. This project cel­e­brates its twelfth year this fall and accu­rate­ly “exposed the weapons of mass destruc­tion hoaxes”:http://www.nonviolence.org/weapons_of_mass_destruction/ in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Con­gress. Cindy signed off:
bq. Good-bye Amer­i­ca …you are not the coun­try that I love and I final­ly real­ized no mat­ter how much I sac­ri­fice, I can’t make you be that coun­try unless you want it. It’s up to you now.
Some­times I real­ly have to unite with that sentiment.

Webb on SOTU: We owe them loyalty, we owe them sound judgment

January 24, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I must be hon­est and admit that I’ve always found Pres­i­dent Bush’s State of the Union speech­es unbear­able. The dis­tor­tions and half-truths are infu­ri­at­ing and the unearned con­fi­dence of a draft-dodging rich kid turned failed mil­i­tary adven­tur­er just sends my blood pres­sure through the roof. I wish I could be detached enough to lis­ten at least to the art of fine speech-writing but the mes­sage gets in the way.

Bet­ter then to lis­ten to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic response, giv­en by Sen­a­tor James Web. The tran­script is over on the NYTimes and the video is over on YouTube. Here’s a taste.

Like so many oth­er Amer­i­cans, today and through­out our his­to­ry, we serve and have served, not for polit­i­cal rea­sons, but because we love our coun­try. On the polit­i­cal issues ­ those mat­ters of war and peace, and in some cas­es of life and death ­ we trust­ed the judg­ment of our nation­al lead­ers. We hoped that they would be right, that they would mea­sure with accu­ra­cy the val­ue of our lives against the enor­mi­ty of the nation­al inter­est that might call upon us to go into har­m’s way. We owed them our loy­al­ty, as Amer­i­cans, and we gave it. But they owed us ­ sound judg­ment, clear think­ing, con­cern for our wel­fare, a guar­an­tee that the threat to our coun­try was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defend­ing it.

Worth a look: Josh Mar­shall over at Talk​ing​PointsMemo​.com had the neat idea to set up a YouTube group for peo­ple to give their own video respons­es to the State of the Union. 

Warriors against the War

January 16, 2007
· Martin Kelley

In the news:  more than 1,000 ser­vice mem­bers sign peti­tion to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), orga­nized by the Appeal for Redress cam­paign spon­sored by a hand­ful of mil­i­tary anti­war groups includ­ing Non​vi​o​lence​.org alums Vet­er­ans for Peace. The sim­ple peti­tion reads:

As a patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can proud to serve the nation in uni­form, I respect­ful­ly urge my polit­i­cal lead­ers in Con­gress to sup­port the prompt with­draw­al of all Amer­i­can mil­i­tary forces and bases from Iraq. Stay­ing in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Sup­port­ing the troops means mak­ing sure Amer­i­can lives aren’t being wast­ed in dead-end wars. Their ser­vice and their sac­ri­fice has been too great to con­tin­ue the lies that have fueled this con­flict since the very begin­ning, start­ing with the myth­i­cal Saddam/Al Qae­da con­nec­tion and the phan­tas­mic weapons of mass destruc­tion. The cur­rent esca­la­tion (euphemised as a “surge”) of troop lev­els is sim­ply an esca­la­tion of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?
*Update*: Pres­i­dent Bush has admit­ted that the Iraq gov­ern­ment “fum­bled the executions.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/washington/17prexy.html. Mean­while, the UN puts the “2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html. When will Bush admit he’s fum­bled this whole war?