We Currently Have No Chance At Solving Our Problems

If the Russian Revolution tells us anything, it tells us that to get real change, we must do more than just change the places of the first and last place teams, we must change the game. When the Russian Revolution succeeded in overthrowing the Tsars in the February, 1917 Revolution and then in overthrowing the provisional government in October of the same year, tyrannical rule was kept only it was practice by a new group.
 
Thus, both revolutions failed. Why? It was because the revolutionaries sought their own power. The provisional government replaced the Tsars in the February Revoution. And though they didn't rule with the iron hand, they didn't share power.

More often than not, when revolutionaries seek to replace the current leaders by force, they are not seeking to change the game by which government operates, they only seek to take the place of those who were ruling and they are willing to use the same methods and force to maintain their power as it took to put them in power. Thus, the game never changed except for the identity of the first and last place teams did.

While talking with one high school student at church, I recommended that he watch the PBS special on the Freedom Riders (click here). Like those participating in the Russian Revolution, the Freedom Riders sought to change the great injustices they saw. But they did things differently than Russians did. The Freedom Riders abstained from violence; they abstained from both external and internal violence. And the Freedom Riders enjoyed more and longer lasting success than those participating in the Russian Revolution.

This should teach us something. Those who use physical or verbal violence to get their way are not seeking to change things for our benefit, they are only seeking power. And that is why we have no real chance to change things today. That is because  over 98% of what we see in the public square is a continual sparring between representatives of different ideological and political groups. We are seeing a continual sparring between  groups that are seeking their own interests.

So we have a choice. We can either join in or we can follow the examples those who who nonviolently participated in the Civil Rights Movement. To follow the former group is to guarantee the status quo only with new faces. To follow the latter group gives us our only chance to change from our current journey to self-destruction.



 

What Can NonViolent Activists Learn From The Movie Suffragette

The movie Suffragette (click here for official website) became an instant favorite movie of mine. It deals with the important issue of women's rights, which should not be limited to just voting. It shows oppression, struggle, and activism. The end of the movie basicaly punches you in the gut, but in a good way--for a movie that is. If you haven't seen it, then either try to find where it is playing or look for the release date of the DVD version.

The purpose of this blogpost is not necessarily to review the movie. One of the better attempts at doing that was written Linda Gordon (click here for one of the sites where her review was posted). Rather, the purpose of this review is to examine the activism practiced by the Suffragettes to see what we can learn. And a challenge here for those of us whose activism is marked and limited by nonviolence is that, from what we see in both the movie and history, the Suffragettes were basically a milder form of the Weather Underground movement from the 1960s and 1970s. This is especially true of the latter movement after an accident occurred in their bombmaking factory which cost the lives of 3 of its members. After that, the Weathermen, that is what the members of the group were called, tried, for the most part, to not injure or kill people when they set off their explosives (click here). 

Like the members of the Weather Underground, the Suffragettes believed that the times dictated action, not mere words. For the Weathermen, it was the severity of issue, the war in Vietnam which was killing an unconscionable numbers of Vietnamese, that demanded action. For the Suffragettes, it was the prolonged inaction, and apparent deafness exercised, by their government to their constant demands that made it necessary for them to act. According to their leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, it was 'deeds, not words' that counted.

So the Suffragettes included committing violence against property as a tactic to get their point across. That violence ranged from the simple throwing stones at windows to the use of explosives on some infrastructure. And like those from the Weather Underground, the goal of their violence was not to terrify the average citizen, it was to get the attention of, or perhaps even terrify, those in power. And like what was practiced by the Weather Underground, though the intent was not to kill or injure, their activities ran the risk of doing just that.

And though no peace activist should practice the violent tactics of those practiced by the Weathermen or the Suffragettes, there is still much we can learn from them.

For the Suffragettes, they wanted to accomplish the following: gain the ear, hopefully a sympathetic one, of the media, draw attention to the issue, garner support from the people, gain more members, and motivate the those in government to acquiesce to their demands. And if we can separate their tactics from these goals, then learning about their struggles can help us think about what new and effective tactics we could employ today that would get our messages out. For it is in our failure to distinguish tactics from goals that has caused past activism to doom current activism to failure. Today's activist tactics that have more-less sabotaged our movements. These counterproductive tactics include civil disobedience and provoking the police. And our problem is that we have regarded such tactics as goals rather than tools much like as when a musical composer regards following the rules of music when composing as a goal rather than telling the story. For the rules in music are only helpful when they allow us to tell the story we want to tell and otherwise distracting, that is at best. And as a result, we've lost the forest for the trees and we've become unable to approach the accomplishing of our goals because we've become unable to both distinguish tactics from goals and discern which tactics are effective. After all, shouting "the whole world is watching" to the police as they arrest a protester, as I witnessed during the last May Day march in NYC, made little sense since not even C-SPAN was covering the event.

Our connection with the past can be found more in our causes and our goals than our tactics. That is because times have changed since the 1960s and 1970s. Heck, times have changed since before Occupy Wall Street started. I remember that the police in NYC were friendlier to us protesters before Occupy occurred than afterwards. And our approach to the police during Occupy, though, for the most part, was physically nonviolent, played a role in the premature end of our encampments.

So rather than posing the silly threat of shutting down the system or even trying to, as the Suffragettes tried to do, we need to examine and think about what we can do to create productive media interest in our causes? What can we do to inspire people to become fellow activists? What can we do to gain the ear of the general public and the people in our neighborhood? And finally, what can we do that would inspire or pressure our government into consenting to our demands? There are no tactics utilizing force or violence that can be on the table for us. Why? Because if we are nonviolent activists who believe in democracy, we know that using force or violence only causes us to become like those we oppose. If we resort to violence or force, we''ve become our opponent.

What new legitimate tactics can we create and practice today that will advance our causes? That is the question one needs to ask oneself when watching the movie Suffragette--we should note that even though the Suffragettes did finally realize their prize, not all of their tactics, even back then, were productive. What can we do that will get the interest of the media and the general public? What can we do to  attract new members and participation from the general public? And what can we do that will either cause those in government to agree with us or feel the pressure to give in to our demands? These are the questions to ask when watching the movie Suffragette. But if you are going to do that, watch the movie multiple times. That is because as a movie, it is well worth watching simply as a movie goer. Then afterwards, one can watch the movie as a critic of the Suffragette movement and of today's activism in general.

Our Favorite King

In an effort to change the subject from Indiana's controversial RFRA law and the Christian reaction to it, this week's review will focus on a short article about Martin Luther King Jr. (click here) by Dr. Richard D. Land (click here).

Land's article about King is very flattering. He discusses the two characteristics which we most often want to hear about King: his commitment to nonviolence and his fight against racism. Land particularly liked King's 'moral commitment' to nonviolence. Land is thankful that the 1958 assassination attempt on King failed; otherwise, who knows what bloodshed we would have experienced here during the civil rights movement.

In addition, Land also mentioned two themes from King's last speech in Memphis. The one theme concerned King expecting to be killed soon. The other theme had to do with King's encouragement to the audience that they would get to the "Promised Land." The Promised Land King was referencing was an America that was free from racism. It would fulfill the promises made by our nation's Founding Fathers.

There is nothing earth shattering in the article. The article was meant to offer simple praise to King for his commitment to nonviolence and equality. But if that is all we know about King, then what we don't know is momentous. And one of learning that point is to read or listen to King's speech against the Vietnam War (click here).  With that speech, King sowed the seeds of what would become America's disillusionment with him. And America here includes some of his comrades in arms in the battle against racism. For here, not only was King criticizing somewhat popular policies of the government, he was criticizing the actions of our military and dared to call our government 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.' Such a message does not sit well with many who value patriotism.

But there is something else here that Land would do well to mention. That something else revolved around why King was in Memphis during his last days. He was there to work for economic justice for Memphis' sanitation workers. Two of King's comments about our economy are telling of his views. The comment comes from King's speech against the Vietnam War (click here):

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

Note how King talked about the need to both provide charity and change the system that causes the need for it. King continues to decry the increase in military spending that the war demanded and how those use of funds were hurting efforts to help those in need. We should note that during the last year of his life, King was working on a march on Washington by and for those who lived in poverty.

But perhaps his next statement explicitly shows what King thought our economic problems revolved around:

The trouble is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. ¹

And

But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken in integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. ²

King rarely used the term 'capitalism' when talking about its problems, especially not in public. The public was already having enough problems with his views on subjects other than racism.

And though many of us who, deeply appreciate King's contributions to nonviolence and equality, could easily forget the other battles he was fighting, King linked his nonviolent fight against racism with his opposition to militarism and war along with his battle against materialism and economic exploitation (click here).

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The King whom Land briefly praises in the article linked to at the beginning of this post is an easy King to like. But when we realize that there is another King who lived, we are faced with a choice of being content with knowing the comfortable King or learning and studying the King who lived. 


References

1. Death Of A King Tavis Smiley, pg 213
2. Ibid

Refining Revolution

Everybody knows that there is something seriously wrong with our country and that we need to change things. Even liberals recognize this. Conservatives think that what is wrong is the choice of personnel in our nation's capital and that what is needed is conservative control of the government. For if conservatives controlled the government, then government would either stop corrupting business by giving it an avenue to power or would quit hindering business from reaching its divine and market-dictated destinies.

Meanwhile, Liberals believe that our problems could be solved if Conservatives would just get out of the way of the President and his agenda. Unfortunately, the President's agenda includes more executive power (see the NDAA of 2012), the prosecution of whistleblowers, more for corporations (see the bailouts, corporate welfare, and lack of criminal prosecution of our Financial Services sector), bloated military budgets, and trade agreements, like the TPP, that increase corporate power, all of which has bipartisan support from both major political parties. 

So both Conservatives and Liberals recognize the need for change but the change desired revolves around personnel choices. Conservatives think that we need Conservatives to be in control while Liberals that there are too many Conservatives are there already. 

What remains unsaid is what the Left wants. And certainly the Left wants a change in personnel. But more than that, the Left wants a new system. The Left wants a more participatory system both in terms of economics as well as politics. This is what makes the Left revolutionary. The Left just doesn't want an overthrow of those running the current system, it wants a new system too. 

Before considering how to conduct this revolution, the Left needs to look in on past revolutions to see what it could learn. The first place from the past we should visit is the French Revolution. This revolution ended badly for all concerned. Why? It ended after much violence and with a similar end as beginning. It ended with an elite-centered government that waged war and brought destruction. And when one looks at the means of the revolution, one shouldn't be surprised at the results. Vengeance, not just change, was a major theme and thus violence was the immoral means relied on.

Compare the means and ends of the French Revolution with that of  Civil Rights activists in this country during the middle of the century. For many Civil Rights Activists, nonviolence was the means and the ends was a partial awakening of the country that won over both the apathetic and some opponents.

The nonviolent means used by many Civil Rights activists from the past outshines the nonviolent approach taken by my fellow Occupy activists. For though, generally speaking, we did not resort to physical violence even when bullied by some of the police, too many of us responded to police tactics with what Martin Luther King Jr. called "internal violence." Here, King was referring to the one's spirit and attitude and how it was expressed with words. Verbally attacking the police was not only wrong, it didn't consider the audience. Outside of watching us, despite the abuses of power, the police have a job many of us could not handle. They have to make quick decisions in what was sometimes life threatening situations. They have to deal with some of the worse in society on a regular basis and we failed to recognize the difficulty of their job. And that context amplifies the internal violence we sometimes exercised on the police. 

For a different approach, we should study how Civil Rights activists from the past caused the public to contrast their dignified response, as exercised by their abstaining from both external and internal violence, with the brute force of their opponents. The difference in behaviors between these activists and their oppressors won over much of the country. In contrast to these activists, whatever dignity our physically nonviolent approach merited was obscured by how we answered the police with our screaming accusations.

Another fault of the French Revolution was that it scapegoated the nobility and clergy. Certainly both were at fault and either oppressed or were complicit in persecuting the rest of the population. But unlike what would occur later in South Africa, there was only the desire to get revenge as opposed to seeking reconciliation and winning over their opponents. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had two objectives. First, the crimes that occurred under apartheid had to be made public. Second, reconciliation was sought including the payment of reparations. And though there were problems with how processes were carried out, the existence of the commission itself stands as a model to be imitated and improved on. For rather than removing those who carried out and benefitted from apartheid from society with punitive actions, it sought to include them in a new South Africa.

The inclusion of the 1%, and here we will use the value 1 symbolically, is what the Occupy Movement did not seek to do when it declared its message through words and actions. In other words, any positive change that the Occupy Movement would achieve would not include the 1%. Such made the 1% harder to win over since they were made to be defensive about their control over the status quo. And it isn't that the Occupy Movement was wrong in specifying what the 1% was doing; rather, it was wrong in ostracizing the 1% rather than trying to win them over. What the 1% has created in our country and around the globe are two economic worlds: a world crafted for the benefit of the 1% and a world for the rest of us who, in most cases, must serve the whims of the 1% to survive. The separation between the 1% and the rest as seen in these two distinct worlds can be called an economic apartheid.

We had, and still have, a choice in describing the remedy for this economic apartheid. We could envision a new world where the 1% get what's coming to them or we could see a new world where the 1% would be included in a single economic world designed to benefit all.

However, implementation of the latter world fell short in South Africa. That is because while the political system was changed, the economic system was not. It still remained a world of investor domination over the economy. And because of that, the political freedom experienced by Blacks in South Africa has not been translated in economic uplift for the vast majority of South Africa's Blacks. We should note that any successful revolution cannot tolerate an elite-centered economy any more than it can tolerate an elite-centered political system. Thus, the problem for South Africa is that it may not be able to maintain its new political and social freedoms if they do not translate into economic betterment. Here, political and social freedoms might, in the future, be judged guilty by association with the maintenance of the old economic system. 

A similar problem to South Africa's political freedom not being followed by a new economic system occurred here. Martin Luther King saw this problem coming when he noticed how spending for the Vietnam War was taking away what was necessary to spend on people to change their economic plight. We should note that wealth disparity between the races in America has not grown smaller.

Finally, the greatest threat to any revolution is that of it being hijacked. This is especially true when the goal of a revolution is to establish and maintain a more participatory system. Somehow, parasitic authoritarians latch on pretending to be believers only to eventually seize control of the revolution so that there is only a change in players, not in the game being played. Thus, revolutions to overthrow tyrants have often produced more tyrants. The Russian and Iranian Revolutions provide examples of hijacked insurgencies. So has the recent Egyptian Revolution though that revolution continues.

One reason why people's revolutions are often taken over by opportunists is that the enthusiasm for displacing the current system is often much greater than the energy it takes to establish a participatory system. Participatory systems ask people to sacrifice some of their own pursuits to establish self-rule. These people are use to laissez-faire relationships with their government so that the only interaction they have with their government comes election time, that is if they have meaningful elections in the first place. Outside of that, they wanted a government that fulfilled their wishes and is non to low maintenance. Participatory political systems require that people invest their time, energy, and emotion into deciding how they will live as a group. The Occupy Movement gave a good, though not perfect, illustration of a participatory system. Certainly, the model of self-rule used by the Occupy Movement would not work with larger and more heterogeneous groups. But the idea that groups could practice self-rule was shown.

Of course, to enable people to be involved in a more participatory political system, our current economic system has to change. People cannot both work in today's full-time jobs and be more involved in local and national politics. It's impossible. 

And so we end up with needing to lead a moral revolution where people become more interested in self-rule than excessive prosperity so that they are willing to spend less time pursuing riches. This is the tradeoff people must accept to enjoy self-rule. It isn't that people must give up prosperity altogether. Rather, people must seek less personal prosperity in order to have enough time to exercise self-rule in a participatory system. Yes, that means that the rich will not be as rich, but it can also mean that the poor will not be as poor.

What we have learned about people's revolutions thus far is that they must be nonviolent and inclusive as well as introduce and get enough support for more participatory economic and political systems. Are there other suggestions to be made to make real people's revolutions more probable? Certainly, but based on what we have seen in history, this is what this blog can come up with.

ONIM For August 12, 2013

Christian News

• Spraying Of Indigenous People's Land In Columbia Causing Sickness -- Christian Today (UK)
• Church Explores Early Church's Forgotten Women -- Christian Today (UK)
• Westminster Creating 'Dependency Culture For Wealthy' --Christian Today (UK)
• The Frightening --But Biblical-- Moral Logic Of 'Breaking Bad' -- Christianity Today
• The Myth Of The Perfect Millennial Church -- Christianity Today
• Resa Aslan Tells An Old Story About Jesus -- Christianity Today
• How The Jesus In Reza Aslan's Zealot Gives History A Bad Name -- Heidelblog.net
• Obama Administration Will Not Oppose Birth Control Lawsuit By A Christian Business -- Christian Post
• Why Is The State Department Opening An Office Of "Religious Engagement"? -- Religion Dispatches
• To Pray Or To Protest? The Both/Andness Of Black Theology -- Religion Dispatches
• Us Liberals -- The Christian Century

World News

• Harry Truman And Memory Of Mass Murder -- ZNet
• Regulatory Official Think Fukushima Radioactive Water Could Be Leaking Into The Sea -- Reuters
• Fukushima Leak Is Worse Than Was First Thought -- Yahoo
• Links Between Fracking, Tar Sands, And The State Department -- Popular Resistance
• The Surveillance State Is As Strong As Ever -- Truthdig
• Congress Kept In The Dark About The NSA -- ZNet
• NSA Loophole Allows Warrantless Search Of Americans' Emails And Phone Calls -- Popular Resistance
• Obama Cancels Meeting With Putin Over Snowden -- Huffington Post
• For The Turkish Gov't, Paranoi Strikes Deep -- Wall Street Journal
• U.S. Drones Terrorize Yemen -- Let's Try Democracy
• White Suburb Trying To Prevent Mostly Black Bus From Driving Through -- Think Progress
• Women Stage Nurse-in At Chick-fil-A -- Yahoo
• Reclaiming the Nonviolent Side Of History -- Waging Nonviolence
• Despite Record Profits, Banks Are Still Cutting Jobs -- Forbes
• Arrests, Street Closures After Massive ALEC Protests In Chicago -- Popular Resistance