I came upon this article the Zone today and it was posted by a wise soul know as Fafa. His insights and commitment to positive social change are remarkable and from the heart. I hope you enjoy reading David Swanson's article and the rest that is part of this remarkable piece that Fafa compiled.
I am only passing it along and take no credit for the work. I encourage you all to do the same.
Fafa begins,
"Here's an interesting article we should consider:"
"Preface: The only
people who should read this are folks who want a better world. Everyone else -
please ignore it ... it will be a TOTAL waste of time ..."
Our Actions
Are More Powerful Than We Realize
David Swanson writes today:
Almost every [history of past activism] includes belated discoveries
of the extent to which government officials were influenced by activist groups
even while pretending to ignore popular pressure.
These
revelations can be found in the memoirs of the government officials as well,
such as in George W. Bush’s recollection of how seriously the Republican Senate
Majority Leader was taking public pressure against the war on Iraq in 2006.
Of course, activism that appears ineffectual at the time can
succeed in a great many ways, including by influencing others, even young
children, who go on to become effective activists — or by influencing firm
opponents who begin to change their minds and eventually switch sides.
The beautiful thing about nonviolent activism is that, while
risking no harm, it has the potential to do good in ways small and large that
ripple out from it in directions we cannot track or measure.
Wittner participated in his first political demonstration in
1961. The USSR was withdrawing from a moratorium on nuclear testing. A protest
at the White House urged President Kennedy not to follow suit:
“Picking up what I considered a very clever sign (‘Kennedy, Don’t
Mimic the Russians!’), I joined the others (supplemented by a second busload of
students from a Quaker college in the Midwest) circling around a couple of trees
outside the White House. Mike and I — as new and zealous recruits — circled all
day without taking a lunch or a dinner break.
“For decades I
looked back on this venture as a trifle ridiculous. After all, we and other
small bands of protesters couldn’t have had any impact on U.S. policy, could we?
Then in the mid-1990s, while doing research at the Kennedy Library on the
history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, I stumbled onto an oral
history interview with Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency. He was explaining why Kennedy delayed resuming
atmospheric nuclear tests until April 1962. Kennedy personally wanted to resume
such tests, Fisher recalled, ‘but he also recognized that there were a lot of
people that were going to be deeply offended by the United States resuming
atmospheric testing. We had people picketing the White House, and there was a
lot of excitement about it — just because the Russians do it, why do we have to
do it?’”
Yes, Kennedy delayed a horrible action. He didn’t, at that
time, block it permanently. But if the picketers in 1961 had had the slightest
notion that Kennedy was being influenced by them, their numbers would have
multiplied 10-fold, as would the delay have correspondingly lengthened.
Yes, our government was more responsive to public opinion in the
1960s than now, but part of the reason is that more people were active then. And
another reason is that government officials are doing a better job now of hiding
any responsiveness to public sentiment, which helps convince the public it has
no impact, which reduces activism further. We also focus far too much on the
most difficult individuals to move, such as presidents.
In
1973-1974, Wittner visited GI coffee houses in Japan including in Yokusaka,
where the Midway aircraft carrier was in port. The Japanese were protesting the
ship’s carrying of nuclear weapons, which was illegal in Japan, and which the
U.S. military, of course, lied about. But U.S. soldiers with whom Wittner and
other activists had talked, brought them onto the ship and showed them the
nukes. The following summer, when Wittner read in a newspaper that,
“a substantial number of American GIs had refused to board the
Midway for a mission to South Korea, then swept by popular protest against the
U.S.-backed dictatorship, it occurred to me that I might have played some small
role in inspiring their mutiny.”
Soldiers can still be reached much more
easily than presidents, more easily in many cases in fact than the average
citizen. War lies are harder to sell to the people who have been fighting the
wars.
In the late 1990s, Wittner was researching the anti-nuclear
movement of decades past. He interviewed Robert “Bud” McFarlane, President
Ronald Reagan’s former national security advisor:
“Other
administration officials had claimed that they had barely noticed the nuclear
freeze movement. But when I asked McFarlane about it, he lit up and began
outlining a massive administration campaign to counter and discredit the freeze
— one that he had directed. . . . A month later, I interviewed Edwin Meese, a
top White House staffer and U.S. attorney general during the Reagan
administration. When I asked him about the administration’s response to the
freeze campaign, he followed the usual line by saying that there was little
official notice taken of it. In response, I recounted what McFarlane had
revealed. A sheepish grin now spread across this former government official’s
face, and I knew that I had caught him. ‘If Bud says that,’ he remarked
tactfully, ‘it must be true.’”
When someone tells you to stop imagining
that you’re having an impact, ask them to please redirect their energy into
getting 10 friends to join you in doing what needs to be done. If it has no
impact, you’ll have gone down trying. If it has an impact, nobody will tell you
for many years.
Mr. Swanson is right. I noted in 2009:
As
MSNBC news correspondent Jonathan Capehart tells Dylan Ratigan, the main problem
is that people aren’t making enough noise. Capehart says that the people not
only have to “burn up the phone lines to Congress”, but also to hit the streets
and protest in D.C.
Even though most politicians are totally
corrupt, if many millions of Americans poured into the streets of D.C., a
critical mass would be reached, and the politicians would start changing things
in a hurry.
As [liberal] PhD economist Dean Baker points out:
The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of
ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where
the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson
and Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war
movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that
convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently,
the townhall meetings, dominated by people opposed to health care reform, have
been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform….
A big
turnout … can make a real difference.
Baker is right about Vietnam.
Specifically – according to Daniel Ellsberg and many others –
Richard Nixon actually planned on dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam Nixon also
said he didn’t care what the American people thought. He said that — no matter
what the public did or said — he was going to escalate the war in Vietnam.
However, a well-known biographer says that Nixon backed off when
hundreds of thousands of people turned out in Washington, D.C. to protest an
escalation of the war.
And Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges
pointed out recently:
I was in Leipzig on November 9, 1989 with
leaders of East German opposition and they told me that – perhaps within a year
– there would be free passes back and forth across the Berlin wall.
Within a few hours, the Berlin Wall, at least as far as an
impediment to human traffic, did not exist.
Week after week,
month after month, these clergy in Leipzig held these candlelit vigils. And it
was slow at first … people forget. Just like the Egyptian revolution has been
percolating for many many months, and even years.
And suddenly,
it began to grow.
And Honecker – who had been in ruling East
Germany since the time of the dinosaurs – sent down a paratroop division to
Leipzig .. . and they won’t attack the demonstrators.
Part of the reason
that our actions are more powerful than we thinks is that courage is contagious.
So is the ability to think.
As we’ve previously noted:
[Studies show ] that even one dissenting voice can give people
permission to think for themselves. Specifically:
Solomon Asch, with
experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since,
highlighted a phenomenon now known as “conformity”. In the classic experiment, a
subject sees a puzzle like the one in the nearby diagram: Which of the lines A,
B, and C is the same size as the line X? Take a moment to determine your own
answer…The gotcha is that the subject is seated alongside a number of other
people looking at the diagram – seemingly other subjects, actually confederates
of the experimenter. The other “subjects” in the experiment, one after the
other, say that line C seems to be the same size as X. The real subject is
seated next-to-last. How many people, placed in this situation, would say “C” –
giving an obviously incorrect answer that agrees with the unanimous answer of
the other subjects? What do you think the percentage would be?
Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch’s experiment gave a
“conforming” answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than
half the time.
Get it so far? People tend to defer to what the herd
thinks.
But here’s the good news:
Adding a single dissenter
– just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect
answer that’s different from the group’s incorrect answer – reduces conformity
very sharply, down to 5-10%.
Why is this important? Well, it means that
one person who publicly speaks the truth can sway a group of people away from
group-think.
If a group of people is leaning towards believing
the government’s version of events, a single person who speaks the truth can
help snap the group out of its trance.
There is an important
point here regarding the web, as well. The above-cited article states that:
when subjects can respond in a way that will not be seen by the
group, conformity also drops.What does that mean? Well, on the web, many people
post anonymously. The anonymity gives people permission to “respond in a way
that will not be seen by the group”. But most Americans still don’t get their
news from the web, or only go to mainstream corporate news sites.
Away from the keyboard, we are not very anonymous. So that is
where the conformity dynamic — and the need for courageous dissent — is vital.
It is doubly important that we apply the same hard-hitting truthtelling we do on
the Internet in our face-to-face interactions; because it is there that dissent
is urgently needed.
Bottom line: Each person‘s voice has the
power to snap entire groups out of their coma of irrational group-think. So go
forth and be a light of rationality and truth among the sleeping masses.
And a recent study shows that when only 10% of a population have
strongly-held beliefs, their belief will often be adopted by the majority of the
society.
True, governments worldwide are cracking down on liberty with
the iron fist of repression.
But some argue that this is actually a sign
that we are winning.
As Truthout’s Matt Renner writes:
Recently I sat down with two of the young adults who organized and
led the Egyptian resistance movement that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. The media
narrative said it took 18 days, when in fact, they had been organizing for over
five years.
According to these young men, the moment they knew
they had won was the day Mubarak’s government shut off the Internet and blocked
cellphone communications. When people could no longer get updates about what was
happening in Tahrir Square, they had to come out of their homes and see for
themselves, tripling the size of the protests in one fell swoop.
The global plutocracy is terrified of dissent. In some places,
the war on dissent is being fought with bullets. In others, the war on dissent
targets social media and mobile communications, while repressing and deceiving
communities of struggle. It’s already happening.
Indeed, the use of
heavy-handed tactics – taking the velvet glove off of the iron fist – could
backfire, as it will show the “emperor’s ruthlessness” for all to see.
The powers-that-be are terrified of political awakening and dissent. For
example, Zbigniew Brzezinski – National Security Adviser to President Carter,
creator of America’s strategy to lure Russia into Afghanistan, creator of
America’s plans for Eurasia in general, and Obama’s former foreign affairs
adviser – said:
For the first time in human history almost all of
humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically
interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest
corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the
political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world.
***
America needs to face squarely a centrally important new
global reality: that the world’s population is experiencing a political
awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the
politics of populism are transforming the politics of power.
***
[T]he central challenge of our time is posed not by global
terrorism, but rather by the intensifying turbulence caused by the phenomenon of
global political awakening. That awakening is socially massive and politically
radicalizing.
It is no overstatement to assert that now in the 21st
century the population of much of the developing world is politically stirring
and in many places seething with unrest. It is a population acutely conscious of
social injustice to an unprecedented degree, and often resentful of its
perceived lack of political dignity.
***
These
energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing
states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America
still perches.
***
The misdiagnosis [of foreign
policy] pertains to a relatively vague, excessively abstract, highly emotional,
semi-theological definition of the chief menace that we face today in the world,
and the consequent slighting of what I view as the unprecedented global
challenge arising out of the unique phenomenon of a truly massive global
political awakening of mankind. We live in an age in which mankind writ large is
becoming politically conscious and politically activated to an unprecedented
degree, and it is this condition which is producing a great deal of
international turmoil.
That turmoil is the product of the
political awakening, the fact that today vast masses of the world are not
politically neutered, as they have been throughout history. They have political
consciousness.
***
The other major change in
international affairs is that for the first time, in all of human history,
mankind has been politically awakened. That is a total new reality – total new
reality. It has not been so for most of human history until the last one hundred
years. And in the course of the last one hundred years, the whole world has
become politically awakened. And no matter where you go, politics is a matter of
social engagement, and most people know what is generally going on –generally
going on – in the world, and are consciously aware of global inequities,
inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. Mankind is now politically awakened
and stirring.
And a reader notes:
We do not understand our
own power. Look around you. Almost everything you see was not only made, but
created by people like yourselves. Most of the horrors existing on earth were
engendered by the elites, WITH OUR CO-OPERATION. Without our consent, most of
the terrifying situations existing in our world will cease to exist. Resist. It
certainly may be difficult initially, but it grows easier moment by moment.
Some historical quotes may be helpful in illustrating the importance of
struggling to make things better …
It is from numberless diverse acts of
courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for
an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against
injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a
million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current
that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
-
Robert F . Kennedy
We must never despair; our situation has been
compromising before; and it changed for the better; so I trust it will again. If
difficulties arise; we must put forth new exertion and proportion our efforts to
the exigencies of the times.
- George Washington
We must remember
that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small
group of determined people can change the course of history.
-Sonia Johnson
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret
Mead
At certain points in history, the energy level of people, the
indignation level of people rises. And at that point it becomes possible for
people to organize and to agitate and to educate one another, and to create an
atmosphere in which the government must do something.
- Howard Zinn,
historian
There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of
social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming
together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot
suppress.
- Howard Zinn
Even If We Will Not Ultimately Win … We Must
Do It Anyway
Czech leader Vaclav Havel said:
Hope is not the
conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something
makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
Chris Hedges – the
Pulitizer-prize winning reporter who challenged the indefinite detention law and
amazingly succeeded in having a judge strike down that law – writes:
In January, attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran asked me to be the
lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta that challenged the harsh provisions of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA). We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the
affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to
trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious
assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and
because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of
the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods
smile on the damned.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a
68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was
unconstitutional. It was a stunning and monumental victory.
***
Maybe the ruling won’t last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we
and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is
something in this.
The government lawyers, despite being asked
five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged
under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not
provide assurances because under the law there were none. We could, even they
tacitly admitted, be subject to these coercive measures. We too could be swept
away into a black hole. And this, I think, decided the case.
***
We pushed forward because all effort to impede the corporate
state, however quixotic, is essential. Even if we ultimately fail we will be
able to say we tried.
This law was, after all, not about foreign
terrorism. It was about domestic dissent. If the state could link Occupy and
other legitimate protest movements with terrorist groups (US Day of Rage
suffered such an attempt), then the provisions in the NDAA could, in a period of
instability, be used to “disappear” U.S. citizens into military gulags,
including the government’s offshore
penal colonies.
***
The battles that must be fought may never be won in our
lifetime. And there will always be new battles to define our struggle.
Resistance to tyranny and evil is never ending. It is a way, rather, of defining
our brief sojourn on the planet. Revolt, as Albert Camus reminded us, is the
only acceptable definition of the moral life. Revolt, he wrote, is “a constant
confrontation between man and his obscurity. … It is not aspiration, for it is
devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the
resignation that ought to accompany it.”
“A living man can be
enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But
if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another
kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”
***
Victory or defeat was not part of the
equation. Not to challenge this law would have meant being complicit in its
implementation. And once resistance defines a life it becomes reflexive.
***
Rebellion is an act that assures us of
remaining free and independent human beings. Rebellion is not waged because it
will work; indeed in its noblest form it is waged when we know it will fail. Our
existence, as Camus wrote, must itself be “an act of rebellion.” Not to rebel,
not to protect and nurture life even in the face of death, is spiritual and
moral suicide. The Nazi concentration camp guards sought to break prisoners
first and then kill them. They understood that even the power to choose the
timing and circumstances of one’s death was an affirmation of personal freedom
and dangerous to the status quo. So although the guards killed at random they
went to great lengths to prevent people in the camps from committing suicide.
Totalitarian systems, to perpetuate themselves, always seek to break autonomy
and self-determination. This makes all acts of resistance a threat, even those
acts that will not succeed. And this is why in all states that rule by force any
act of rebellion, even one that is insignificant, must be ruthlessly crushed.
The goal of the corporate state, like that of any totalitarian entity, is to
create a society where no one has the capacity to resist.
***
We have to stop asking what is reasonable or practical, what the
Democratic Party or the government can do for us, what will work or not work. We
must refuse now to make any concessions, large or small. We must remember that
the lesser of two evils is still evil. We must no longer let illusions pacify
us. Hell is truth seen too late. In large and small ways we are called to
resist, resist, resist ….
The great psychologist James Hillman agreed,
writing that we should seek to help others and act with dignity even in
impossible situations.
In other words, it is in the best interests of
our dignity, our moral life, our sanity, and our spiritual well-being to
struggle … even if the odds seem impossible.
But How Do We Know If Our
Actions Will Be Successful … Or Will Only Help Us In a Spiritual Sense?
But
how do we know if what we’re doing will really have an effect or not? How do we
know if we are being called upon to struggle in order to succeed in changing
things for the better … or for the heck of it?
As F. Scott Fitzgerald
wrote:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold
two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to
function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and
yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Hellen Keller pointed out:
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
We are called upon as
part of our core purpose to struggle to try to make the world a better place.
But we are not privy to fruits of our actions. We are not granted a view of the
future … we will never know how many people we will help, and how we will change
the course of history.
We are called upon to struggle, but we can never
know the end result of our efforts … that is not for us mere mortals to know.
But we are only fully human, fully alive, reaching our potential, and
most in tune with the universe if we try.
