Yours
for a nonviolent future,
Tom H. Hastings Director, PeaceVoice Program,
Oregon Peace Institute / 2009 PeaceVoice Conference: http://www.peacevoice.info/?page_id=50
I just got a hate email from
someone named Richard Warren so I knew my column had indeed
appeared in today's Oregonian online... so if you feel like
participating in the online discussion, please visit it (and
check out the great art they put with my piece! ): Tom
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/09/we_cant_afford_health_care_you.html
Please join us at
Whitefeather Peace Community on any of the following Wednesday
evenings. 3315 N Russet (on the 75 bus line), 6 p.m. vegetarian potluck,
followed by Roundtable.
Yours for a nonviolent future,
Tom H. Hastings
Director, PeaceVoice Program,
Oregon Peace Institute
2009 PeaceVoice Conference Call for Papers:
http://www.peacevoice.info/?page_id=50
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.peacevoice.info/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
member,
Whitefeather Peace Community
3315 N Russet Portland OR 97217
503 327 8250
http://www.whitefeatherpeace.org/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
faculty
PSU Conflict Resolution MA/MS Program
724 SW Harrison Neuberger 221
Portland OR 97201
503 725 9173
fax 503 725 9174
Sarah Palin is right to criticize Barak
Obama for 'palling around with
terrorists,' as she puts it. A smart politician would not hang around
with people who have been connected to bombs that might have hurt
civilians, even though the Weather Underground that Obama's buddy Bill
Ayres helped found never targeted civilians. The only person they ever
killed was one of their own in a fatal bomb-making blunder in a
Greenwich Village townhouse.
Of course, those bombs of the Weather Underground back in the late
1960s and early 1970s were a stupid but understandable response to the
infinitely larger numbers of bombs that were dropped on purpose by
John McCain and others into civilian neighborhoods and workplaces in
Vietnam.
Indeed, McCain was shot down as he was bombing Hanoi, a city, not a
military base nor a military supply line such as the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. This was patently illegal then and it's illegal now. It's a war
crime. It was a war crime when it was done by Japanese to Chinese and
Mongolians, when it was done by Germans to the British, and in turn
when we targeted civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfort,
Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. At least, however, there was a
justification for being at war with Germany and Japan. There was none
for our war on Vietnam just as there is none now in Iraq.
We pretend that the rest of the world cannot tell that our bombs are
just as terroristic as anyone else's. We pretend that they
misinterpret any civilian deaths as somehow America's intent to kill
people who are not armed. We pretend that John McCain wasn't a
terrorist.
He was.
There was absolutely nothing noble about what McCain did to
Vietnamese. He was one of the least likely to pay any price for his
actions, bombing them into fireball oblivion from thousands of feet in
the air. Were they not in possession of antiaircraft rockets they
would have had no chance to defend themselves against the bombings of
hospitals, civilian neighborhoods, and the infrastructure that kept
their people alive.
Were the Vietnamese a threat to the U.S.? No. Were they a threat to a
neighboring country? No. Did the UN decide that a military invasion
was necessary to stop a genocide or other major human rights
violation? No. The U.S. unilaterally decided to step in to seize a
colony the French lost in 1954. The Vietnamese had every right in the
world to defend their nation by any means at their command. The U.S.,
on the other hand, had neither the right to attack anyone in Vietnam,
nor the right to attack civilians anywhere. The Vietnamese didn't
always conduct themselves by the international rules of war, but the
U.S. and John McCain clearly did not.
So let's not be quite so fast, Sarah. Check out the character and
history of your pals. Your running mate murdered Vietnamese civilians.
Neither Barak Obama nor even Bill Ayres, his pathetic 'pal', did.
###
Tom H. Hastings (pcwtom@gmail.com) teaches in the
MA/MS Conflict
Resolution program at Portland State University.
Nonviolent resistance is not only
the morally superior choice. It is
also twice as effective as the
violent variety.
That's the startling and
reassuring discovery by Maria
Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who
analyzed an astonishing 323
resistance campaigns from 1900 to
2006.
"Our findings show that major
nonviolent campaigns have achieved
success 53 percent of the time,
compared with 26 percent for violent
resistance campaigns," the authors
note in the journal International
Security. (The study is available as
a PDF file at
http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org)
The result is not that
surprising, once you listen to the
researchers' reasoning.
"First, a campaign's commitment
to nonviolent methods enhances its
domestic and international
legitimacy and encourages more
broad-based participation in the
resistance, which translates into
increased pressure being brought to
bear on the target," they state.
"Second, whereas governments easily
justify violent counterattacks
against armed insurgents, regime
violence against nonviolent
movements is more likely to backfire
against the regime."
In an interesting aside that has
relevance for our times, the authors
also write that, "Our study does not
explicitly compare terrorism to
nonviolent resistance, but our
argument sheds light on why
terrorism has been so unsuccessful."
To their credit, the authors
don't gloss over nonviolent
campaigns that haven't been
successes. They give a clear-eyed
assessment of the failure so far of
the nonviolent movement in Burma,
one of the three detailed case
studies in the piece, along with
East Timor and the Philippines.
In some sense, the authors have
subjected to statistical analysis
the notions of Gene Sharp, an
influential Boston-based proponent
of nonviolent change, someone they
cite frequently in the footnotes. In
his work, Sharp stresses the
practical utility of nonviolence,
de-emphasizing the moral aspects of
it. He even asserts that for Gandhi,
nonviolence was more of a pragmatic
tool than a matter of principle,
painting a picture that's at
variance with much of Gandhian
scholarship. In an interview with me
in 2006, Sharp declared that he
derives his precepts from Gandhi
himself.
Gandhi's use of nonviolence "was
pure pragmatism,"
Sharp told me. "At
the end of his life, he defends
himself. He was accused of holding
on to nonviolent means because of
his religious belief. He says no. He
says, I presented this as a
political means of action, and
that's what I'm saying today. And
it's a misrepresentation to say that
I presented this as a purely
religious approach. He was very
upset about that."
One of the authors of the study,
Maria Stephan, is at the
International Center on Nonviolent
Conflict. The group's founders wrote
a related book a few years ago, "A
Force More Powerful: A Century of
Nonviolent Conflict." Erica
Chenoweth is at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard.
This study is manna for those of
us who believe in nonviolent
resistance as a method of social
change. We don't have to justify it
on moral grounds any more. The
reason is even simpler now:
Nonviolence is much more successful.
--
Yours for a nonviolent future,
Tom H. Hastings /
Director, PeaceVoice Program, /
Oregon Peace Institute
2009 PeaceVoice Conference Call for
Papers:
http://www.peacevoice.info/?page_id=50
"The spread of evil is the
symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only
by default: by the moral failure of those who evade
the fact that there can be no compromise on basic
principles."
Ayn Rand
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