BALTIMORE HOLDS 36th ANNUAL HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI
COMMEMORATIONS. IT IS THE 75th ANNIVERSARY OF THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF JAPAN.
On August 9 from 1 to 2:30 PM, participants will commemorate the
atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Some of the vigilers will start at Homewood
Friends Meetinghouse, 3107 North Charles Street and spread out on corners up
Charles Street as far as possible towards the Stony Run Meetinghouse, 5116 N.
Charles St. People will wear masks and stay six feet from
others. Other participants will gather at 12:30 PM on 29th Street on the
south end of Wyman Park. At 1 PM, the caravan would head north on Howard
Street and turn right on Art Museum Drive and left by Homewood Meetinghouse.
The caravan would then head north on Charles Street all the way to Stony Run
Meetinghouse. There the cars would turn around and head south on Charles
Street back to 29th Street on the south end of Wyman Park. The vehicles
in the car caravan will be decorated with anti-nuclear messages and will have
their blinkers on. The drivers will honk their horns when appropriate.
Please let Max know if you intend to be in the car caravan – 410-323-1607 or
mobuszewski2001 at Comcast dot net. Then there will be an anti-nuclear weapons
strategy session outside Homewood.
We will also recognize the bravery of the Kings Bay Plowshares, seven Roman Catholic activists, including Baltimore’s Elizabeth McAlister, who were arrested at a Trident Submarine Base in Georgia on April 4, 2018. All were convicted in October 2019 of conspiracy, depredation of government and naval property, and trespassing. McAlister has been sentenced to time served. The others await sentencing, and remain concerned about going to prison during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rev. Steve Kelly, SJ has remained in a county jail in Georgia since his arrest.
On August 9 from 7 to 9 PM, we will host a Zoom conference
with Dr. Vince Intondi entitled "A Discussion on the Connections Between
Black Lives Matter and the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki." He is the author of “African Americans against the Bomb:
Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement,” which is
available through Stanford University Press. Intondi is a Professor of
History and Director of the Institute for Race, Justice, and Civic Engagement
at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland. From 2009-2017, Intondi was
Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute in
Washington, DC. Prior to teaching at Montgomery College, Intondi was an
Associate Professor of History at Seminole State College in Sanford, Florida,
and regularly works with organizations exploring ways to include more diverse
voices in the nuclear disarmament movement.
Besides discussing the book and examining the Black Lives Matter protests, we will look back to June 12, 1982 to remember the largest peace demonstration in US history when possibly one million of us were in New York City at the No Nukes march and rally. This day is well-covered in the documentary IN OUR HANDS by Robert Richter, and those in attendance included Coretta Scott King, Helen Caldicott, Peter Seeger, Meryl Streep, Rita Marley, and Randy Forsberg. During the Zoom conference, we will ponder if we can organize a massive anti-nuclear movement once again.
Sign up for the Zoom conference at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvcOusrTwuH9NuHTVm9PUr_odmD_Lb4w_O. Please submit any questions to jlathey@comcast.net.
Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Understanding
Trump’s Game Plan in Portland Could Be the Key to Preventing a Coup in November
George
Lakey
July
25, 2020
Waging
Nonviolcence
While outrage was
still growing in Oregon over federal agents’ intervention in Portland,
President Trump on July 20 named Chicago, New York, Detroit, Baltimore and
Oakland, California as possible next targets. Since then Albuquerque was added
to the list.
Although the
agents’ mission was supposedly to protect federal buildings, they were ranging
around the city, dressed in camouflage outfits in unmarked vans, joining police
in responding to demonstrators. The New York Times reported them
seizing people and locking them into a van with no explanation and wearing no
insignia.
The feds began to
arrive June 27 and have ramped up in numbers since. The Washington Post reported that
a curious 53-year-old Navy vet, Christopher David, approached a demonstration
where he saw agents acting aggressively. He asked the officers to remember
their oaths to protect the Constitution. They attacked him and broke his hand.
Agents were
assembled from Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security
Administration, Coast Guard, and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. According to The New York Times, “The
tactical agents deployed by Homeland Security include officials from a group
known as BORTAC, the Border Patrol’s equivalent of a SWAT team — a highly
trained group that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling
organizations, as opposed to protesters in cities.”
Portland Mayor Ted
Wheeler called it “an attack on our democracy.” That was before he was
tear-gassed on the street in a demonstration. Oregon Attorney Gen. Ellen
Rosenblum filed a lawsuit, seeking a restraining order.
Gov. Kate Brown,
who called Trump’s intervention “a blatant abuse of power,” said that the
protests were starting to ease before federal officers arrived. What might have
prompted Trump to act? Why Portland? How might this choice be strategic for
Trump, both to bolster his chance to win the election — and perhaps to remain
in office even if he doesn’t win? And what can activists do about it?
Trump’s “law and
order” strategy really can help him win
Trump’s earlier
hopes to win based on a strong economy and conquest of the coronavirus have
faded. He needs another emotional issue that responds to people’s need for
security: public order. The narrative couldn’t be clearer. In new advertising
and tweets Trump has argued that Biden “is a harbinger of chaos and
destruction.” During a two-week period in July the Trump campaign spent nearly
$14 million to air a television spot suggesting that police
departments won’t respond to 911 calls if Biden is elected.
Trump’s team
figures that a percentage of voters who might otherwise be ambivalent about him
can be tipped toward supporting him by appealing to their anxiety. In the
1960s, when the nonviolent civil rights movement moved national public opinion
sufficiently to pass two landmark U.S. civil rights acts, I watched a series of
riots in Philadelphia and elsewhere, from 1965-66, break the movement’s
momentum.
To measure the
impact of riots carefully scholars have examined other examples. Princeton
political scientist Omar Wasow studied the April 1968 riots following
the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was one of the many outraged in
the streets — although, our Philadelphia Black-led mass protest was nonviolent.
Wasow found that
the violent protests measurably helped Republican Richard Nixon become
President in 1968. (His study kicked off a recent dialogue, including Nathan J.
Robinson’s critique in Current Affairs. However, Robinson
admits he doesn’t challenge the fact that right-winger Nixon did benefit from
the riot.)
Another Princeton
researcher, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, investigated the outcome of the 1992
Los Angeles rebellion — also sparked by a just cause — and found it
resulted in the Democrats moving to a “law and order” posture, mass
incarceration and increased poverty.
Clearly, the Trump
team’s strategic calculation on voter behavior is a reasonable one. But why
target Oregon for this intervention?
Portland is known nationally
for having some activists who try to defend themselves against police violence
in a violent way. By sending in federal agents who will escalate violent
tactics, there seemed a good chance of getting video footage for Trump’s
election campaign, proclaiming him as “the law and order candidate.” With luck
they would get vivid pictures at the site of federal buildings that give the
feds their protective justification for being there.
A long-time white
anti-racist activist and conflict studies professor at Portland State
University, Tom Hastings, told me another reason why Portland is an obvious
choice for Trump’s team: Oregon’s electoral votes were already certain to go to
Biden. It doesn’t matter for November’s election that Oregon’s major elected officials
are protesting the federal intervention. Hastings also pointed out that the
cities on Trump’s list for more interventions have Democratic mayors.
Will activists
play Trump’s game?
One key to a
winning strategy is to figure out what the opponent’s strategy is and refuse to
be manipulated — in Portland and in the other cities on Trump’s target list.
Federal
intervention in Portland has turned the previous hundreds of late-night
protesters into thousands. Nonviolent tactics include dancing, a
“Wall of Moms,” and orange-clad dads with leaf-blowers, who blow away tear gas.
Mothers form the front line of a protest march toward U.S. Courthouse, July 20,
2020 - marking 54 days of protests in Portland following the death of George
Floyd in police custody.
Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images // Waging Nonviolence
Other
activists have escalated violent tactics in response to the escalation by the
feds. According to The New York Times, some of the protesters
used lasers while federal officers fired projectiles into the crowd. Court
papers claim that a Molotov cocktail was thrown and one protester was charged
with hitting an officer with a hammer, while the Times reported multiple
efforts by some protesters to set alight the wood on the façade of the federal
courthouse. The fire attempt of course reinforces Trump’s dubious claim that
the feds need to be there to protect federal property.
Activists
everywhere can learn from the major shift in tactics made this year by looking
at the national response to the May 25 police killing in Minneapolis of George
Floyd. Our spontaneous reactions expressed grief and anger in multiple ways.
The mass media (as
usual) gave most headlines to the rioting. That meant, as historical research
has shown, the impact of the movement could have set back the struggle for
racial justice. However, from the start, the vast majority of people were
protesting nonviolently. The more fact-based mass media caught up with that
quickly. The rioting quickly ebbed, and the image of the movement shifted to
one that is fairly consistent in its use nonviolent action.
When police in
some locations continued to act out violently against the peaceable
demonstrators, they only proved the point demonstrators were making. Their
brutality displayed on nightly TV boomeranged against them, and more people
joined the protests.
Almost all
activists found far more effective ways to escalate than using fire and
projectiles: They escalated the contrast between their behavior and that of the
police.
By channeling rage
and grief into nonviolent tactics, the Black Lives Matter surge sustained
itself, grew exponentially, introduced new people to the streets and a national
conversation about racial injustice. It continues to chalk up a series of
limited victories. Bigger victories await even more focused nonviolent
campaigning.
Any effective
strategizing — Trump’s or ours — includes a back-up plan, and my guess is that
the Trump team has one. If Portland activists refuse to play into Trump’s hand
by adopting a nonviolent discipline, Trump has a list of other places to try.
Trump can hope that in Chicago or Oakland activists might not see how much he
wants them to fall for his ploy.
A more
sinister goal Trump may have in mind
When announcing to
the media his list of targeted cities, Trump revealed how important this
narrative is to him. His next statement was that if Joe Biden is
elected, “the whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go
to hell.”
Although Trump
would undoubtedly claim voting fraud because of mailed-in ballots, the
emotionally more impactful narrative would be “hell” in the form of violent
chaos in the streets happening in real time following the vote. He has plenty
of armed Trump loyalists ready to do their part. While the courts wrangle about
voting fraud, the chaos can serve as Trump’s immediate rationale for staying in
the White House in January.
The “violent
chaos” narrative is Trump’s growing emphasis, and I think it’s linked to
his hope that police will give a break to Trump-followers in the streets. On
July 19 on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Trump said again that he would
not agree ahead of time to obey the results of the election. But then he added,
“Biden wants to defund the police.” As I mentioned, his campaign is
already investing millions in TV ads attacking Biden’s capacity to support the
public’s basic need for safety and security.
Even a man as
reckless as Trump likely knows that initiating a Constitutional crisis is an
unusually chancy operation. He needs preparation even to have a chance of
success. By “success” I mean at least making a deal in which he and his family
would avoid the parade of lawsuits that await him when he is no longer in
office.
I see him and his
team taking a number of steps to prepare. Right now in Portland he’s trying out
the narrative that justifies a refusal to exit.
The Utah Citizens’ Alarm is only a month old, and yet it already boasts
15,000-plus members.
Chaos is good for
him. For years he’s been preparing his base to produce an armed force of
“irregulars” that can generate chaos. Armed men are showing up in places of
political tension and conspicuously being allowed to remain there by local
police. Examples include April 30 in Lansing, Michigan, June 2 in
Philadelphia and July 20 at the Utah State Capitol.
Trump also needs
the legitimacy of a governmental force at his command. On his home ground in
Washington, D.C. he experimented with soldiers in combat gear and military
helicopters attacking peaceful demonstrators to clear the way for a photo-op.
That test didn’t
work out well. The demonstrators didn’t turn to violence to give him
justification, so the media revealed a military behaving disgracefully. Trump
received enormous push-back from military leaders. They clearly vetoed further
use of the their forces for his own political purposes.
Still wanting the
availability of loyal government guns, in Portland he’s testing civilian
federal armed agencies that represent governmental legitimacy. Chad Wolf, the
acting head of Homeland Security underlined his loyalty when he visited
Portland on July 16. How that works out is yet to be seen.
Since Trump does
believe in the art of the deal, if a take-over doesn’t work he needs also
political enablers with some credibility who will step in to arrange a
compromise that protects Trump and his family when they leave. He’s in good
shape there. Republican leaders have plenty of practice enabling Trump’s
corruption and presumably will be available for this service in the midst of a
crisis that’s not turning his way.
What
strategy can defend against a coup?
Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty speaks to protestors during a candlelight
vigil to support Portlanders' rights to free speech and assembly
Photo by Mason Trinca/Getty Images // Waging Nonviolcence
Jo Ann Hardesty is
a long-time activist and Black community leader in Portland who became a city
commissioner last year. In the midst of this crisis she voiced the most
important strategic insight that activists need, although not an easy one to
grasp.
On July 20, she
called a mass protest outside the county Justice Center downtown, saying the
city would “not allow armed military forces to attack our people.”
At the
rally she gave us the key: “Today we show the country and the world that
the city of Portland, even as much as we fight among ourselves, will come
together to stand up for our Constitutional rights.”
The key is unity —
a challenging concept in a polarized time, especially for those of us who think
of ourselves as social change activists.
A successful
direct action campaign for change, after all, doesn’t start out assuming unity
with our point of view. Change activists generally start out as a minority voice,
often a tiny minority, like the first women who asserted the right to vote or
the first LGBT people demanding freedom to be who we are.
Our initial
minority typically finds allies, persuades more doubters, and reaches the point
of launching direct action, becoming what Bayard Rustin called “angelic
troublemakers” who dramatize our point of view. Then, when we grow and achieve
critical mass, we polarize the issue in such a way that the center of gravity
comes down on our side — leading us to victory.
Right
now in Portland he’s trying out the narrative that justifies a refusal to exit.
In Hardesty’s
words, change activists in Portland (and everywhere) assume we’ll “fight among
ourselves” hoping our point of view will someday win out. However, she calls us
to learn to do more than only one thing. She wants us to be able at one moment
to fight for change and at another moment to be able to fight for defense, to
protect something worth defending.
She believes that
the city of Portland, for all its problems, is worth defending against Trump’s
attack. You likely agree that your city, or state or country, is worth
defending against a would-be dictator.
But here’s the
challenge to us: Strategizing for defense is different from strategizing for
change.
When we’re on
defense, we not only minimize actions that polarize, as Hardesty says, but we
also design actions that play more to the center. The “center” is the people in
your system (be it your community or nation) who are not committed strongly one
way or the other.
The leaders in a
stable system pay a lot of attention to the people in center and also, as
leaders, they see themselves as balancers who need to hold things together in
whatever system they’re leading. (The military leadership in the United States
is an example of this.) They usually think “leadership” means at least some
care for the system’s cohesion, integrity and security.
What this means
for activists gets clearer in a story about a puzzle I watched environmental
organizers solve.
Finding the
difference between offense and defense
When I was
consulting with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, I saw their local
organizers make sense of a confusing and surprising phenomenon. Their issue was
commercial waste companies trying to dump toxic waste in local communities.
The organizers had
been schooled in social change projects and were therefore accustomed to
entering a community, finding some sympathetic people more on the periphery of
the community (perhaps a Black minister, a white union member, a Jewish
teacher, a Unitarian librarian) who agreed that toxics shouldn’t be dumped
there. By supporting the activism of these initial contacts and using house
meetings to follow their links in toward the power center of the community, the
organizers expected at last to rouse the leaders of the community to join in
defense against the waste haulers.
To their surprise,
the organizers discovered that the leaders of the community frequently “jumped
the gun,” adopting the defense against toxics as their own issue and even
taking leadership in organizing sit-downs in front of the trucks.
By comparing
experiences, the organizers realized that community leaders believed they
needed to be seen as defending their system against violations of its integrity
and security.
Trump
enjoys being outrageous so he can watch us react — and then waste our time
moralizing.
On a national
level, this is why Republican leaders are so uneasy about Trump’s relationship
with Putin and his denial of Russian electoral attacks. Their conflict is
between their loyalty to Trump and their own responsibility to defend the
system’s integrity against attack from outside. That responsibility goes with
being part of the system’s center.
When Jo Ann
Hardesty spoke at the rally, she was coaching activists to see the difference
between offense and defense. She said, “This is not about ‘^^^^ the police.’
This is not about who did what, when. As you know, Portlanders will continue to
fight once we get rid of these federal occupying forces. But when Portland is
under attack, whether you’re Black or white, whether you’re right or left,
Portlanders come together.”
Defeating an
attempted coup – nonviolently
When Germans
overthrew would-be dictator Wolfgang Kapp in 1920, they used a defensive
strategy. It wasn’t easy. World War I left Germany intensely polarized, much
more than the United States is now. The right wing saw an opportunity to try a
coup d’etat, backed by some of the armed forces.
Germany’s center
read the attempt as an attack on the integrity and security of the system, and
responded to the left when it called for a general strike. Along with ordinary
people staying home, governmental civil servants failed to show up for work.
Kapp found empty
offices, with no one to type out a manifesto saying he was the new ruler of
Germany. He needed to bring his daughter to the capitol the next day to do the
typing!
Even an
economically battered, partly destroyed, and politically divided Germany found
so many leaders and ordinary people linked to that sense of integrity and
security of the whole system that within a week the coup was defeated by
nonviolent defense.
How can
individuals prepare for defense?
As Bill McKibben
is fond of saying, “Stop being an individual.” Recruit your activist group.
Talk with others about our possible need to use Jo Ann Hardesty’s call for an
“all-in” shift from change to defense.
On Zoom calls
discuss with others cases of community and national defense, hundreds of which
are available on the Global Nonviolent Action Database.
As you read cases,
note what the strengths were that winning activists used, and ask what you and
your comrades’ strengths are. If you’ve done only change activism up until now,
build your flexibility so you can start or join defense actions as well. With
people in the center in mind, think “unity” rather than “further polarization.”
Don’t under-rate
our opponent. Just because it’s easy to deride Trump’s limited information
about things we think are important, like the virus, is no reason to under-estimate
how wily he is, how he “reads” his opponents and goes after their (and our)
weak points.
One of our weak
points is that many of us would rather moralize than strategize. Trump enjoys
being outrageous so he can watch us react — and then waste our time moralizing.
If you’re out late
at night and get attacked on the street, it’s a waste of time and brain-space
to analyze the ethics of the attacker. Similarly, we’ll do better in an
attempted coup if we give up moralizing and identify our strengths, Trump’s
weaknesses and create a strategy to win.
Acknowledge your
fears, to yourself and friends. If in contemporary America you have no fear,
you simply don’t understand what’s up. I find my teeth chattering more often
these days, which is a way of acknowledging and letting go of my fear.
Build on the
strengths of previous movements that found ways to handle threats and attacks.
One way to
practice your strategy chops is to keep looking at tactical possibilities for
nonviolent noncooperation. This formula might help you:
Ask: “What do they
want me to do?” Then don’t do it.
Ask: What don’t they want me to do?” Then consider it.
The United States
is a polarized country. The path of least resistance is for each pole to become
obsessed by the other: The right wing wastes time learning about and despising
us, and vice versa. That’s the trap.
The way out is to
pay attention to the center, which especially in defense scenarios, is the
prize. Learn about centrists, make friends with them, discuss your points of agreement
and disagreement. Your growth as an activist is guaranteed.
Our own fear may
urge us to “look good” to our comrades, perhaps by doubling down on whatever
campaign we’re now involved with. Our campaigns (for racial justice, immigrant
justice, stopping a pipeline, etc.) are in one sense addressing sub-systems.
That’s good, because in ordinary times the sub-system offers concrete gains
when we win.
However, if my
analysis is correct, in this situation what’s in play is the national system as
a whole, which will make it more critical for a moment — and also will make the
center available in a new way.
Remind your
friends that because the center is easily alarmed by disorder and especially
violence, its willingness to defend the whole depends partly on the degree to
which it sees “our side” as nonviolent and “the threat” as violent. Because the
overwhelming majority of Portlanders have been demonstrating for Black Lives
Matter in nonviolent ways, elected officials are mobilizing against Trump’s
intervention. If the majority had been violent, Trump’s intervention would be
welcomed by the center.
Reduced to bare
bones, our three-point plan in this political moment may be: stand with the
community as a whole, communicate the power of strategic nonviolent action, and
then — as Hardesty reminds us — as soon as Trump is really out, we can return
to our disagreements and our struggle for revolutionary change!
George Lakey has
been active in direct action campaigns for over six decades. Recently retired
from Swarthmore College, he was first arrested in the civil rights movement and
most recently in the climate justice movement. He has facilitated 1,500
workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national and
international levels. His 10 books and many articles reflect his social
research into change on community and societal levels. His newest books are
“Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians got it right and how we can, too”
(2016) and “How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning”
(2018.)
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