Nonviolence Radio

Burri in Khartoum – Burri Barricades

Stephanie and Michael welcome three guests this week on Nonviolence Radio. First, they talk to Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh and Steve Chase about their work together in Solidarity 2020 and Beyond. Responding to the isolation and suffering caused by COVID, Solidarity 2020 and Beyond offers hope and support to grassroots activists and organizations, providing them opportunities to network, to learn from each other and to collaborate through webinars and trainings. Solidarity 2020 and Beyond draws on the power inherent in sharing experiences and using them to educate and increase solidarity amongst all those who are striving — nonviolently —  to bring about change for good, wherever in the world they may be.

…what we’re trying to do is to be driven by the grassroots activists, extremely flexible to respond to their needs, and not create an organization but realize there are amazing groups out there – Beautiful Trouble, ICNC, the Einstein Institute, Nonviolent Peaceforce, Metta Center, Waging Nonviolence, all the groups that are working on these issues. And African Youth Movement, Africans Rising – we’re very closely connected with them. And just trying to help bring groups together and find ways to do critical learning, research, and really spread the knowledge both to people that are doing the work on the ground as people learn from each other.

…for the vast majority of people in the world that are not directly involved, but may be very hopeless right now, letting them know these amazing things are happening, and these amazing courageous people are out there changing the world for the better. It’s not time to give up hope, but really to have a vision for a better future. And that is possible. Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh

The inspiring conversation with Katherine and Steve is followed by an equally powerful discussion with Mubarak Elamin, a Sudanese activist supporting the movement in Sudan. Mubarak talks about the astounding strength and courage of the Sudanes people, their determination to stand up for what they need, often risking their lives, working for peace and change:

We’re actually learning from the streets of Sudan. It’s amazing, the creativity and how people are committed to – first, they’re committed to nonviolence and peaceful protest – peaceful actions. And the second thing they are doing also, organizing.

Robert Levering comes to Nonviolence Radio this week to talk to Stephanie Van Hook and Michael Nagler about the film “The Boys Who Said No!” and the powerful draft resistance movement that helped to end the Vietnam War. Robert is an executive producer of the film, a position he is well suited to as he himself was a draft resister in the 1960s. In the interview, we hear how Robert worked collectively to refuse the draft, and more, to stand up actively and nonviolently to an unjust and oppressive system

…the draft sort of makes it us vs. the government. It’s very frightening just individually to face the government and all the power it has. But the communities that we developed helped to give us the kind of strength that we really needed in order to do that confrontation.I know that I never would have – I don’t know what I would have done. I mean, you never can tell. But it made it really much, much easier to do something as part of a community rather than just simply doing it individually.

Robert’s discussion of his work in the 60s reveals how groups like those opposing the war in Vietnam came together with the Civil Rights Movement to create a power that finally ‘overwhelmed’ the US government, pushing it to end the war and change some of its racist policies. We are seeing strong echoes of this kind of collaboration today, as shown in Michael’s nonviolence report at the end of the show: diverse groups dedicated to nonviolence in many different forms, directed at many causes are coming together, joining hands and actively building a better world.

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence.

This week, Michael and Stephanie talk to Kathy Kelly, life-long nonviolence activist, co-founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones Campaign. This week she discusses her extensive experience in and thoughts about Afghanistan. American intervention, she believes, was — and indeed, continues to be — entirely misoriented, escalating rather than resolving the violent conflicts there. She offers some practical and clear advice on what good and productive involvement might entail, and provides concrete ways we might engage. She also pushes us to reconsider our preconceived ideas, both about the Taliban and ourselves; in doing so we can start to empathize, re-humanize and be less afraid:

First of all, I think we need to do what you and Michael have advocated in the Metta Center for a long time. We have to find the courage to control our fears. We have to become a public that isn’t so whipped-up into being afraid of this group, afraid of that group, that we will continue to bankroll efforts to kind of eliminate that group so that we don’t have to be afraid of them anymore. That’s one thing.I think it’s really important to keep on building up our sense of controlling our fears. A second thing, very practically, is to get to know the people who are bearing the consequences of our wars and our displacement…My young friends in Afghanistan were emblematic of people who wanted to reach out to people on the other side of the divide. They talked about a border-free world. They wanted to have interethnic projects.

Only when we truly look at Afghanistan, when we see it and its people in all their rich complexity can we come to a better understanding of what they want and need. Only by actively listening to individuals and groups on the ground will we learn how we might be able to join them in finding ways to resolve conflicts and rebuild. And all this depends on a firm commitment to nonviolence, genuine humility and honest self-reflection:

…nononviolence is truth force. We have to tell the truth and look at ourselves in the mirror. And what I’ve just said is really, really hard to look at. But I think that it’s required to better understand who we are and how we can actually say, “We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry,” and make reparations that say we are not going to continue this.

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence

https://apomm.net/2018/09/27/ela-gandhi/

This week, Nonviolence Radio hosts Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, herself a peace activist and committed supporter of nonviolence. Ela was raised in The Phoenix Settlement, an ashram established by Gandhi in 1904 dedicated to the value of self-sufficiency, grounded in a profound concern for the natural world and dedicated to promoting human dignity for all. In this episode, Stephanie and Michael talk to Ela about her life, about the corrosive power of consumerism in our world today, about the importance of actively modeling compassion, decency and kindness, and the crucial Gandhian idea of constructive program:

…at Phoenix Settlement, we encouraged people to do their own growing of vegetables and so on. That was one way in which people became self-sufficient. Also, in little skills to make them less dependent on the mainline economy. This is building up your own economic activity so that you become self-sufficient, so that you’re not dependent on the people who are actually exploiting you. That’s the one thing.

The second thing is that you are not supporting the exploitative mechanism. By becoming independent or dependent on yourself rather than on these economic giants, you’re making a statement and you’re also showing that, at the end of the day, they depend on us as consumers. And if we stop consuming what they produce, then it makes them think, it makes them reassess what they are doing. That’s one of the ways in which one indicates to people that we are unhappy about the way you are doing things.

“Constructive program” emerges as one of the most empowering and effective tools nonviolent activists can use to push back against oppressive forces and set up a more just and peaceful world. 

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence

On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, Stephanie and Michael are joined by Kelly Denton-Borhaug. Kelly teaches in the Global Religious Department at Moravian University and has written extensively on issues of war culture, moral injury and the ways that sacrifice can be used as a means to dehumanize and oppress marginalized people. Kelly traces the celebration of sacrifice — so pervasive in America today — back to the Bible, back to Ancient Greece and Rome, revealing the deep roots of this powerful and destructive rhetoric. Her work encourages us to think seriously about the damaging consequences of this kind of thinking and to be aware of how religious language can be misused to support, sustain and normalize a culture of war. 

We need, Kelly insists, to listen to the voices of those who have been unjustly pushed into lives of violence and battle. More broadly, we need to push back against this worldview and reckon with the impact it has, not only on soldiers but on all of us, collectively, as human beings.

What I would like to call for is for members of the nonviolence community to really become much more sophisticated in terms of seeing these kinds of dynamics and calling them out, calling out the exploitation of the use of sacrificial verses in the Bible and the way that they are used in war culture; calling out the language and the logic of sacrifice, and actually lifting up the destructive consequences of actual sacrificial dynamics that are endemic to war culture.

I think that as people who care about nonviolence and who are, frankly, so often characterized as naïve about the world and about the dangers of the world — nonviolent actors — I would love to see them become much more sophisticated about calling out the naivety of those who claim that violence works, and those who unashamedly resort to these kinds of references to religion, to sacralize, undergird, and frankly, conceal the real process and the real consequences of the use of violence.

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence

As we move into the days commemorating the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we join with activists and scholars around the world who say “no” to nuclear proliferation. What kind of wealth system, what kind of thinking about human life and our shared ecology would pose a fundamental challenge to the nuclear mindset? 

We invited Dr. Michael Allen to Nonviolence Radio to offer a short but meaningful “teach-in” about the foundations of Western economic thought in Thomas Hobbes and its revolutionary contrast in the economics of Mahatma Gandhi. 

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence.

This week, Michael and Stephanie welcome Dr. Wim Laven, professor, author, board member of the International Peace Research Association and the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and Editor in Chief of Peace Chronicle magazine. Wim’s work looks at the immense power of forgiveness as well as the very real difficulties involved in the act of forgiving. How does forgiving release us and allow us to move forward? What are the conditions needed for meaningful forgiveness? How can we forgive the unforgivable? 

People are figuring out, you know, and being coached by their friends and their family and their spiritual advisors and so forth, that in order to live their best lives, they’re going to have to release some of these injustices, despite the fact that it’s completely unfair, right? Like police departments pulling over people just because of the color of their skin or just because they’ve profiled them to match descriptions of whatever prejudicial bias they would like to monitor. But being angry about it, staying angry about it, is having harmful consequences.

In that capacity, the police officer is just following orders and we know that just following orders has been used as a defence about some of the most heinous crimes in history. But it really is. It’s the system or the structure that’s creating those outcomes. I don’t know how much the student is aware that what they’re doing is forgiving the racism in America, but I do know that they are aware that if they stay angry, then they’ll be unemployed. And they’re finding ways to get over that – at least to the degree that they’re able to function, you know?

It’s challenging stuff. I think that there are some people that would say that that’s not really forgiveness. I would. I do. I think that I’ve learned a lot from my students sharing their experiences and their practices for how they get through the critical injustices in the world.

Wim’s work with students in prison and all over the world illuminates the way in which forgiving plays an essential role in helping individuals to release anger so that they can live more freely and fully. At the level of society, Wim shows how forgiving can work to dismantle power structures that allow for, even encourage cruel, unjust and violent actions. Forgiving is not easy, but it is a powerful force which, when harnessed, allows for deep and lasting transformation.

Transcript archived at Waging No

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Nonviolence and utopian thinking go hand in hand, or so argues Safoora Arbab on this week’s episode of Nonviolence Radio. Utopian thinking is about what is possible, not what is impossible, she posits, and when coupled with nonviolence, we have both a roadmap and a means for achieving a more balanced and inclusive political identity. The goal may be “ever receding” as Gandhi said, and yet, without the clarity that utopian thinking can provide, nonviolence cannot fulfill its higher capacity to engage with long-term systems’ transformation. 

Michael Nagler begins the show with his Nonviolence Report for the week. 

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence.

How does the way that we live contribute to a nonviolent society? As the pace of society speeds up, fewer and fewer people are finding fulfillment in the promise of a world that is based on advancing technology, consumerism, and depersonalization. Yet there are pockets of nonviolence-oriented people around the world who are experimenting with community life as a solution to our society’s ills. While this does not mean that there will not be any conflicts (remember, conflict is natural–violence is not), or that the experiment is perfect (for Gandhi, all was an experiment, a learning opportunity), it is precisely in community living infused with high ideals like those of the nonviolent path, that we can see ourselves and our human potential more clearly. 

In this episode of Nonviolence Radio we speak with Tim Anderson, a full-time resident of a nonviolence-oriented community in the South of France, founded by Lanza del Vasto, an Italian follower of the Gandhian path. 

In the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler makes the radical case for restorative justice because of the impact of retribution on the human psyche and our societal development; and Stephanie shares an article from Waging Nonviolence by Robert Levering about Daniel Ellsberg’s conversion to nonviolence, and a press release from the Shanti Sena Network on their upcoming gathering, to which all are invited!

Transcript archived at Waging Nonviolence.

This week, Nonviolence Radio hosts Mubarak Awad, founder of the National Youth Advocate Program, which provides alternative foster care and counseling to “at risk” youth and their families. He is also the founder of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem and of Nonviolence International, which works with groups and organizations all over the world. Michael asks Mubarak about his path from Palestine to the US, about his early work with kids in prison, about his long commitment to nonviolence (sparked by his mom), and about the recent violence in the MIddle East. Mubarak goes to the deep and entrenched roots of the problems between Palestinians and Israelis and finds clarity and hope:

There is always an alternative. It doesn’t matter what is the conflict, what is the problem, you have to create an alternative. Many times, people will come to [Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence] and they would say, “The Israeli soldiers, the Israeli settlers came and uproot all our olive trees that are hundreds of years old.” And I said, “Okay, so what do you want me to do? Is it to find those trees and bring them back?” They said, “No, we don’t know where they’re at.” I said, “Okay, let’s get groups together. Let’s get even Israelis with us and let’s go.” And they took 100 trees, 1000 trees. We’ll plant 4000 trees so that in years to come, we’ll have more trees than the original. And that’s how we start.

He highlights the need for both sides to listen and respect each other, however different their individual beliefs might be, “Our idea of understanding is first to respect other peoples’ beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not, they believe in it. That’s an important thing.” He stresses the need for equality amongst all people, “The Israelis have to see that they are not better or worse than the Palestinians, we are equal to them. That equality is important.” 

Creative solutions, respect and equality are all, according to Mubarak, essential aspects of living, active, effective  nonviolence.

Transcript is archived at Waging Nonviolence