War Is A Crime .org - Nonviolent Resistance

Guide for Conscientious Objectors

davidswanson — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:00:54 +0000

Sit-in at Customs and Border Patrol HQ, Act of Resistance to Trump’s Travel Ban Targeting Muslims

davidswanson — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 13:38:42 +0000

WASHINGTON -- A group of concerned citizens and George Washington University students will be engaging in a sit-in on the ground floor of the Customs and Border Patrol Headquarters this morning, calling on officials to ignore President Trump’s latest controversial and bigoted executive order targeting Muslims and immigrant communities. Several participants are willing to risk arrest.

As a group in solidarity with many other organizations and individuals, “Each Other” is committed to calling out the racist, anti-immigrant policies of this administration. The group plans on visiting these offices again as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement Offices in the DC area. In so doing, the group also hopes to make contact with officials and agents in these offices to personally urge responsible parties to resist and oppose Trump's mandates against immigrants, Muslims and any other group targeted for religion, race or country of origin.

Each Other will be acting in conjunction with DC Justice for Muslims who will be holding a rally simultaneously outside the Reagan building, which houses CBP.

“We want to appeal to the people working at CBP and ICE not to follow these incredibly prejudiced and frankly unlawful executive orders,” said Alison Schwartz of Each Other. “It is the rich ethnic and religious diversity which gives our nation its beauty, strength, and advancement.”

When: 8:00AM, Thursday March 2, 2017

Where: 1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC (14th Street Entrance)

Why: Citizen outrage to the president’s revised Muslim Travel Ban

Resisting Donald Trump's Violence Strategically

Robert J. Burrowes — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 04:01:29 +0000

It is already clearly apparent, as many predicted, that Donald Trump's election as president of the United States would signal the start of what might be the final monumental assault on much of what is good in our world.

Whatever our collective gains to date to create a world in which peace, social justice and environmental sustainability ultimately prevail for all of Earth's inhabitants, we stand to lose it all in the catastrophic sequence of events that Trump is now initiating with those who share his delusional worldview.

Drone Protesters Arrested on Tuesday

davidswanson — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 04:39:05 +0000

Anti-Drone Activists Blocked Gate to Beale AFB with Life-Sized Figures of Drone Victims

Four Arrested While "Putting A Human Face" on Recent Civilian Drone Victims in Afghanistan

Two Others Were Arrested Monday While Sprinkling Ashes on the Base to Represent Innocents Incinerated by Drone Missiles.

Report from Toby Blomé on Tuesday:

This Is Not Your Grandparents' Resistance

davidswanson — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 18:08:34 +0000

I want to disagree, in part, with a recent recommendation that John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down be used as a guide to resisting the outrages of the Trump regime. I think you could present the basic plot to an average middle school student today, and they would point out the fundamental flaw quite quickly.

Here's the plot. Nazis armed with machine guns take over a small Norwegian town that has a 12-member army, instantly killing 6, injuring 3, and sending 3 into hiding. The Nazis want all the townsfolk to cooperate, including by working in a coal mine so that coal can be shipped out to help the Nazis in the war, as well as -- of course -- generally providing food, shoveling snow, and keeping things running in the town. The townsfolk bitterly resent the occupation. Yet they generally cooperate in all ways, except when they find opportunities to kill a German soldier or two. They send to England for dynamite with which to blow up bridges. No other resistance tactics even occur to them.

Does something occur to you? Does it occur to you that a mine won't run if the miners all refuse to enter it? The fact that this occurs to a great many people today is the result of intellectual and practical progress. We know now that nonviolent tools are the most likely to succeed. We have models and plans for potential situations. This response -- unthinkable through most of human history -- has almost become common sense today.

In part, that's because of the real history of Norway. A strong case has been made that Norway avoided developing its own brand of Nazism in the 1930s by means of using strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and nonviolent occupations to democratize its society, rather than the violent approach used in some other countries. Norway also used, not just violence, but largely nonviolent resistance (as well as violence against non-living things, aka sabotage) to resist Nazi occupation.

Leaders of the Norwegian resistance were, appropriately enough, school teachers, who refused to cooperate with a puppet government, and inspired others to do the same. U.S. teachers should be, and in some cases are, leading resistance to Trump's agenda for the United States. So should local and state governments. So should prominent individuals and organizations of all sorts. I think this is what the article linked above has in mind, too, in recommending The Moon Is Down. But that tale needs updating.

Even so, The Moon Is Down, begins to get close to what's needed. It was a controversial book, and is a good book, because it depicts the Nazis occupying Norway as human beings, just as the people obeying orders to yank Muslims off airplanes in the United States today are human beings. Steinbeck depicts foreign occupations as hopeless and dreams of being welcomed with flowers and chocolates as insane -- something the United States has been in desperate need of learning these past 16 years. The Nazis fail to occupy the town in the story not because they are racists or sexists or haven't donated to the Clinton Foundation, but because there is no way to occupy someone else's town successfully, whether or not the people of the town have been "disarmed."

The Moon Is Down makes the powerful point that the victims of war do not excuse the crimes because the crimes are part of a war. After all, most of them have never attended any U.S. university, so they don't know any better. When the Nazi commander orders the mayor to order the killing of one of his citizens for the crime of murdering a German soldier, he asks if they will punish their own troops for the crime of killing six Norwegian soldiers. Murder is murder, after all, even -- I would bet Steinbeck might agree -- when a flying robot is used.

But the idea that today Norwegian villagers occupied by German troops would be wisest to engage in assassination, as opposed to mass non-violent resistance live streamed on the internet, seems hopelessly outdated. If we want to resist strategically, if we want to transform positively, we will have to update our toolkit dramatically. Looking back at how people thought 75 years ago should serve us primarily as an inspiring reminder of how far we've come, and thereby as an indication of how much further we can go in changing the way we think and act. The permanent military state into which Trump now wants to dump 65% of discretionary spending was begun by people who basically didn't know any more about how societies can work than Aristotle knew about evolution. Perhaps we should reconsider our devotion to their manner of resistance -- which is, after all, what the Pentagon believes it is leading.

Talk Nation Radio: L.A. Kauffman on Direct Action

davidswanson — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 18:54:53 +0000

https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-la-kauffman-on-direct-action

L.A. Kauffman is the author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. She has spent more than 30 years immersed in radical movements, as a journalist, historian, organizer, and strategist. Her writings on grassroots activism and social movement history have been published in The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, the Village Voice, and many other outlets. She served as executive editor for the radical theory journal Socialist Review and as an award-winning national political columnist for SF Weekly, focusing on dissent and activism. Kauffman was the mobilizing coordinator for the massive February 15, 2003 antiwar protest in New York City. She continued in this role through the years of major antiwar protests, including those that greeted the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
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Music by Duke Ellington.

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Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works

Robert J. Burrowes — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 01:43:09 +0000

Nonviolent action is extremely powerful.

Unfortunately, however, activists do not always understand why nonviolence is so powerful and they design ‘direct actions’ that are virtually powerless.

I would like to start by posing two questions. Why is nonviolent action so powerful? And why is using it strategically so transformative?

Resistance in the Time of a Madman

davidswanson — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 15:02:25 +0000

By Joy First

I was with the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) in DC on January 20, one of many groups demonstrating against Trump during his inauguration. NCNR has been speaking out and acting in resistance against the crimes of our government since 2003. Though our focus has been on ending war, including drone warfare, we have recognized the intersectionality with other issues such as racial justice, social-economic justice, and the threat of ecocide resulting from the climate crisis, and have brought those issues into our work. Many of us have been arrested over and over in acts of nonviolent civil resistance during the Bush and Obama years.

We had been planning a direct action for the inauguration since last spring, but we fully expected that we would be up against Hillary Clinton With Clinton in office there was no question that the wars started by Bush and Obama would continue and even escalate, and so our work in resistance would have continued. But with Trump’s surprising win in November, everyone was left stunned. His stated views on women, racism, immigration, and on and on left so many fearful of what the future would hold. We would take action on January 20 knowing it would be a totally different atmosphere than we had expected.

White Silence Equals Violence: Awaiting a Verdict

davidswanson — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 14:02:20 +0000

By Kathy Kelly

This morning, here in Minneapolis, I’ll learn whether six jurors believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Dan Wilson and I are criminals. The court case stems from an action protesting the execution of Jamar Clark, age 24, who died in the early morning of November 15, 2015 outside a north Minneapolis apartment complex. Two Minneapolis police officers, Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze, were involved in the shooting. Jamar Clark died after a bullet was fired directly into his head. Several witnesses say that he was handcuffed and motionless when he was shot dead. The police officers have been cleared of all charges and are back on the job.

Dan and I are among 25 defendants charged with obstructing a Minneapolis Metro transit vehicle on April 11, the opening day of the Minnesota Twins baseball season. The Legal Rights Center lawyers working with us arranged a calendar so that small groups would be tried weekly. Earlier this month, two people were acquitted of all charges and one person has been convicted. Two days ago, Andrew Gordon and Priyanka Premo, lawyers from the Minneapolis Legal Rights Center who are representing Dan and me, began the jury selection process. Yesterday, evidence was presented and the six-person jury was asked to determine a verdict. The jury didn't arrive at a verdict last night. We felt grateful they are not rushing to judgement on what many would see as a cut and dry case. The prosecution presented, as evidence, a photo of me standing, arms linked with others, in front of a bus.

“MARY & JOSEPH” ARRESTED ENACTING NATIVITY SCENE AT HANCOCK DRONE BASE

davidswanson — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 03:26:59 +0000

www.upstatedroneaction.org

Friday, December 23, as many throughout the world prepare to celebrate the birth in Palestine of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, four members of the grassroots group Upstate Drone Action were arrested at the main entrance of Hancock Reaper Drone Base on East Molloy Road in the town of DeWitt in upstate New York.

The four set up a nativity manger tableaus in the driveway entrance to the Hancock base. Hancock hosts the 174^th Attack Wing of the NY Air National Guard – the MQ9 Reaper drone hub. Hancock is also the national Reaper maintenance training center.

The MQ9 Reaper is a robotic, satellite-linked, remote assassin flying unmanned missions over Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern, African and West Asian nations. The CIA uses Reapers for its illegal lethal missions over northwest Pakistan.

According to “LIVING UNDER DRONES: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan ,” published by Stanford University and New York University Law Schools [downloadable], such missions are responsible in that region for the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants, including women and children, and for the terrorizing of thousands more.

Bev Rice, playing Mary, noted that “If Herod had had a Reaper drone, Jesus, Mary and Joseph would have been incinerated.” John Amidon, playing Joseph, further declared, “The indiscriminate and illegal killings of so many holy families in the MiddleEast must stop!”

Today’s civil resistance action is one chapter in Upstate Drone Action’s six-year scrupulously nonviolent campaign to expose the Hancock AFB war crime. Since 2010 there have been over 170 anti-Reaper arrests at Hancock. These have resulted in extreme bails, maximum fines, incarcerations, and so-called “Orders of Protection”…as well as some acquittals in the De Witt Town Court.

Those arrested Friday:

                  ~ John Amidon, Albany, NY
                  ~ Ed Kinane, Syracuse, NY
                  ~ Jules Orkin, Bergenfield, NJ
                  ~ Bev Rice, New York, NY.