How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → nonviolent action; “People Power” → in current anti-war movement

The Declaration of Peace campaign, which I wrote about , is coordinating large-scale nonviolent civil disobedience actions .

Washington D.C. seems to be where most of the action will be. The Declaration campaign hopes to target the offices of Senators and Representatives immediately after its deadline. In addition, Cindy Sheehan plans to bring Camp Casey to the Ellipse in .

They hope to put pressure on those legislators facing the voters in in the hopes that they will feel the need to throw a peaceful bone to their war-weary constituents. I fear that rather than being able to be of much influence in this way, they will become backdrops or props as Washington becomes even more theatrical and absurd than usual during its biennial election show. Politicians seem better at manipulating organized citizen pressure groups than the other way around, and election-year politicians in particular are prone to infect everyone around them with their idiocy.

But I’m being over-cynical again. Certainly Washington is a fine place for a large civil disobedience campaign, and there are many attractive targets that aren’t politicians’ offices. Furthermore the Declaration campaign looks as though it plans to encourage the actions of people all across the country in a loose coalition that will have a variety of targets — symbolic and otherwise.

If you’re interested in taking part, either in Washington or elsewhere, there will be nonviolent action training courses coming up all around the country. In large-scale, coordinated nonviolent action it really does help if everyone is on the same page and has a good understanding of the goals and the methods being used.

And, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but tax resistance is a nonviolent direct action you can do every day, and you certainly don’t have to go all the way to Washington, D.C. to do it.

, the Bay Area Declaration of Peace group held a press conference at the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco to kick off their campaign.

There weren’t a whole lot of press there — other than me, who was wearing my blogger cap and so could be considered a reporter, there was a writer for the Socialist Worker, a camera crew from KTVU, and a reporter for KPFA. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi sent her deputy district director downstairs to make noncommittal words in favor of peace and promise to tell Nancy what she’d heard and seen.

Other than that, it was peace movement folks speaking to each other — people from many local organizations or local chapters of larger organizations who had come together to share their groups’ endorsements of the Declaration of Peace. Among these were Code Pink, the Berkeley Grey Panthers, the San Francisco Labor Council and U.S. Labor Against the War, Pax Christi, War Resisters League West, the Ecumenical Peace Institute, the California/Nevada conference of the United Methodist Church, United for Peace and Justice, the Unitarian Universalist Association, Pace e Bene, and Military Families Speak Out.

I’ve mentioned the Declaration campaign here before (see , , and ). I attended the press conference today because I hoped this might be the real deal — the anti-war movement buckling down and making a real shift from ineffective complaining to sustained and practical direct action.

I’d like to be able to report that I saw evidence of this at the press conference, but in truth it seemed to me to be more of the same. I think it is a good thing that many different groups are coming together and planning to do actions but from the looks of things, the tactics will be the same familiar mix of marches, rallies, complaints, and so forth, with an occasional sit-in or die-in to give the news teams something to bring back to the office for broadcast. None of this will stop this war or threaten to get in the way of the next one.

Most of the press conference speakers were content to speak mostly about why they believe the invasion was wrong and the occupation remains wrong and why the U.S. should withdraw. Few speakers even discussed tactics or gave any indication that they felt the Declaration represented anything new in its attempt to put some muscle behind this impotent pleading.

One exception to this was Friar Louis Vitale of Pace e Bene. He started off by talking about what “we” should do about Iraq, where “we” seemed to mean the United States as a whole, or its government, which was unfortunate, since neither group seems to be asking the peace movement for advice. But this morphed into a call for U.S. troops to be replaced with some sort of peacemaker teams, which strikes me as something that elements of the peace movement could decide to take on as a project, though it’s a long shot.

Vitale was a strange mix — on the one hand he was the only speaker to urge a sustained campaign of civil disobedience and to make the point that the Declaration’s deadline is to be the beginning of a serious civil disobedience campaign and that if it doesn’t work right away, “we’ll up it, and up it, and up it and fill the jails if necessary.”

(The other speakers hardly mentioned civil disobedience or direct action at all, and seemed to think the Declaration was just another mass-signed complaint, or that what was planned for was just another big march — one speaker’s idea of appropriate nonviolent action was to bring the “drumbeat of mother earth” to Washington in order to “raise vibrations” so that the “energy itself would bring consciousness.”)

On the other hand, Vitale was oddly comfortable with establishment liberals. He said he had been talking to Harry Reid the other day and he asked the Senate Minority Leader why the peace movement wasn’t getting much traction. Reid told him that the peace movement needed to get people out in the streets, and Vitale passed this piece of advice on to us. (Of course, the huge street protests of didn’t manage to convince Reid to vote against authorizing the Iraq War in the first place, so he should have a pretty good idea of just how effective such tactics are.)

Vitale said he would be going to Washington to join a fast along with such celebrity protesters as Cindy Sheehan, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, and Dick Gregory (who seems to fast almost as often as most people eat). Our local Code Pink group will also be doing a fast — fasting outside of Dianne Feinstein’s office during the day and outside her home during the night. I’m pretty sure I don’t understand the use of fasting as a protest tactic, but I’m all for hounding Senator Feinstein. There was talk of these fasts going on for two months.

Today was the protest at Bechtel headquarters in downtown San Francisco. I reported about the planning meeting for those people who were organizing civil disobedience at the event, and I’ll give a report of how things went.

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day in downtown San Francisco. The main body of the protest had a few hundred people, demographically white tending to grey (the Grey Panthers and Raging Grannies were perhaps the largest organized contingents). They gathered in “S.D. Bechtel Plaza,” a semi-public courtyard nestled between skyscraper office buildings.

Speakers recited a litany of complaints about Bechtel, which from the sounds of it seems to have been there collecting and handing out checks at just about all of the great government misdeeds of the last century or so. There were musicians. Keiji Tsuchiya spoke about his experience as a Hiroshima survivor. People sang and chanted. Someone wrote slogans on the ground in chalk, and a Mercedes logo in place of a peace sign. People waved United Nations flags and signs with slogans like “Support Indigenous Rights” and “Mad Cowboy Disease.” There was a big papier-mâché Gandhi holding a sign that read “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

Frank Chu was there, of course.

The front and back entrances to 50 Beale Street, where Bechtel’s headquarters is located, were blocked off by short metal fences which were guarded by security guards and San Francisco police, who were letting people in if they had appropriate pass cards. There are additional entrances to the building, or so I was told, from a parking garage beneath the building and from 45 Fremont Street, which shares the same block.

Late into the morning, a group of about 25–30 of the protesters met off to the side to plan their civil disobedience action, with a few police officers milling about and sometimes eavesdropping. Some of what the participants did in this meeting was the countdown-to-launch checklist: does everyone have a buddy and an affinity group? has everyone checked in with one of the legal observers? is everyone okay with the nonviolent action guidelines?

But some topics seemed to me to be things that should have been settled well ahead of time. The group paused to consider whether or not they should have demands. Most thought they should, and the one dissenter was willing to go along with it. They settled on a demand to speak to the C.E.O. of Bechtel. But as far as I could tell, they never reached consensus on what they would speak to him about if their demand were met, and they made no attempt to, say, call up and make an appointment with him or send him a letter (or even determine if he was in the building). The demand seemed to have been chosen as an afterthought, and with the expectation that it would not be met.

It would have been hard for the participants to give this aspect of their action the attention it deserved. Traffic noise made discussion difficult, and it really was a last-minute sort of meeting. But this impresses on me the importance of planning and deliberation in such civil disobedience actions. If you’re going to make a demand, it should be one that could conceivably be met, you should have a plan for what happens if it is met, and you should ask politely for the demand to be met before just launching into civil disobedience. If instead you’re just using civil disobedience as a weapon of disruption, go ahead, but then don’t feel like you have to confuse matters by coming up with a token demand.

Last-minute demands aside (and I don’t know if the protesters ever actually presented their demand to anyone), the real purpose of the civil disobedience action was “to shut down Bechtel” — which is to say, more honestly, to temporarily inconvenience the people working at its corporate headquarters.

Of course there are always a number of unstated goals of civil disobedience actions like this one as well — to radicalize participants and onlookers, to impress people with the depth of the protesters’ commitment, to feel like you’re doing something important and risky that is a threat to The System, to give the media something to use as a hook for their coverage as a way of encouraging them to cover the protest, etc.

To these various ends, the participants split up into a handful of groups — the largest blockading the barriers around the front doors of the building, a smaller group trying to secure half of the back-door barriers, and another small group blockading the entrance to the parking garage.

The main body of the protest began to circle the block, following a contingent of drummers and shouting chants like “Bechtel! Bechtel! Hey Hey! How many kids did you kill today?” and “Bechtel: War Profiteer — shut it down!”

One man handed me a flier from the 9-11 Truth Alliance advertising a lecture about The Report from Iron Mountain. I’m a connoisseur of hoaxes, and I’ve seen this clever old modest proposal trotted out by conspiracy theorists in the right-wing patriot movement and by Islamic revolutionaries. This is the first time I’ve seen it at a leftie rally, although the hoax originated on the peacenik left. What goes around comes around, I suppose.

The blockading began around , but the police seemed to be in no hurry to make arrests, and in fact the blockade was fairly porous. At times, employees simply pushed through the passively-resisting blockaders at the front of the building, or just jumped over the barricades. And the number of protesters blocking the back entrance was never really sufficient to actually prevent people from coming and going, so they were reduced to lying down on the paths and making employees step over them.

Many employees adopted strangely sheep-like behavior, though. They’d see one entrance blocked and then just give up and start standing around and complaining, or getting on their cell phones to explain to someone or other. I walked back and forth between the various entrances and at all times (except for about 15–20 minutes which I’ll get to later) there were employees coming and going — and for the most part, you could see this from either side of the building through its mostly transparent ground floor. I suspect many of the employees were just using the excuse to extend their lunch hours.

Some people were angry about being blocked. One man in particular, a short, overweight, balding fellow in a tight, harshly-colored striped polo shirt, was a heart attack waiting for a good time to happen. He shoved through the barriers and the protesters trying to blockade them, yelling all the while, then tore at protest signs as he stomped down the street, only to stop and yell at the security guards and police for allowing this insult to his day to take place.

Another woman complained that she didn’t even work for Bechtel, but for some UCSF project trying to find a way to alleviate osteoporosis. And in fact 50 Beale Street is home to not just Bechtel’s headquarters, but also other tenants, some quite benign, like the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. The protesting crowd wasn’t very sympathetic to her complaints, and while she was pleading the case of the osteoporosis sufferers, she was shouted down angrily by someone who accused her, without any evidence, of being complicit in Bechtel’s worst crimes.

Most of the police were just milling about, calmly, occasionally speaking into the radios clipped to their chests, but one cop at the back door is playing off the big, loud, no-nonsense, black woman stereotype for effect. “This is not your day!” she shouts, and tells the blockaders to move this way or that. “I’m in a bad mood today; you do not want to be on my bad side.” The police at the back door are for the most part very successful at keeping a path open for people to enter and leave the building. However, their focus necessarily shifts back and forth between two goals: Keeping the paths open so employees can come-and-go, and keeping the paths restricted so that only employees can get in.

Eventually they slip up. They manage to corral the blockaders enough to open up a path, but it’s too much path for the people who are checking identification, and someone else slips through.

It’s Lacy MacAuley. She’s the one whom I mentioned as having said that two people shut down Bechtel for 45 minutes one day just by showing up and asking to speak to the boss (I may have misheard her; she’s reported elsewhere that it was more like eight people). Now she’s in the lobby, and the cops notice their screw-up, and 50 Beale Street really shuts down.

Standard procedure, apparently. Until the protester can be hog-tied and hauled off, nobody goes in or out. What the blockaders were initially unable to successfully accomplish, the building’s own security does.

As far as I can tell, she is an espontánea — she saw an opening and took the initiative, without this being an agreed-upon part of the civil disobedience action, although she was one of the original participants. It is bold and successful in a way that the regular blockade is not. For 15–20 minutes the doors are locked, while the police call in reinforcements to haul off MacAuley, who has gone limp by the elevators.

As she is loaded into the police van, a bullhorn from the crowd leads a call-and-response chant of “Tell me what a police state looks like” — “This is what a police state looks like!” We should be so lucky as to get a police state that looks this way. By or so, as the protest is winding down, Lacy has been the only arrest.

Correction: there were six other arrests earlier in the day of blockaders of the front doors of the 45 Fremont building that I didn’t witness or know about.

In the aftermath, my impression is that the civil disobedience part of the action was not very successful in its major and more important goals. It was largely unsuccessful in making more than a token inconvenience to the working day at Bechtel, certainly in proportion to the number of protesters and prepared disobedients involved. And it did so at the cost of collateral damage to non-Bechtel employees in the area, some of whom were not just inconvenienced but were treated with inappropriate disrespect.

As Lacy MacAuley showed, the 50 Beale Street standard procedure for dealing with lone protesters inside is far more effective in blockading the building than is the efforts of dozens of blockaders outside. People who want to blockade the building would be better off just showing up in the lobby some day and pulling a banner out of their briefcase than they would be by coordinating their actions with a big protest and linking arms outside.

A handful of people, entering the building on the pretense of having business at the UCSF or Blue Shield offices, and then entering the lobby one after the other as each one in turn gets arrested or thrown out, would shut down the building far more effectively than was done .

I posted my review of the civil disobedience action at Bechtel to San Francisco’s Indymedia site. The response to my admittedly gruff but sincere criticism has been to accuse me of being a “racist” who sounds “like some kind of pig, infiltraitor, disrupter”, who is “part of the problem” and whose criticism “hurts our movement.”

In addition, I have been informed that the people who took part in the action consider it to have been a grand success (where success is presumably being defined as something other than meeting the stated objectives).

Apparently, my contribution to Indymedia was at the top of the results of Google News searches for things like “Bechtel Protest”. It’s not too surprising that there weren’t any other news accounts of the protest to compete with it, but my article wasn’t really meant as a news report on the protest as a whole so much as an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness and technique of the civil disobedience action in particular, so that we can learn from our experiences.

In any case, the fact that my report became by default the report about the protest, at least at first, combined with the fact that it was sharply critical of aspects of the civil disobedience action (and assessed it a failure), brought down a bit of a firestorm. That, and the fact that I completely missed the arrests of six other blockaders in front of the 45 Fremont building, which called the accuracy of my account into question.

And, I shouldn’t kid myself: I was being curmudgeonly and impatient with the many flaws I’ve seen in protests like this one, and I expressed this in the way I wrote about it. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: you try to stop a war with the peace movement you have, not the peace movement you wish you had. My criticism was meant constructively.

The anti-militarist movement is getting its ass kicked over and over again by swaggering hawks and war profiteers, and part of the reason is that it keeps making the same mistakes and doing the same ineffective actions over and over again. We desperately need to honestly and critically evaluate our actions to improve their effectiveness — giving up on actions that have become habitual but that do no good, and putting more energy into improving actions that actually disrupt the war machine.

There’s a place for congratulatory press-releases and rah-rah encouragement, but there’s also a real need to go beyond that and be honest with ourselves about our actual impact. This is not the special olympics. We’ve got no time to hand out medals for participating or to announce that today everyone’s a winner.

If we turn against people who won’t just applaud and congratulate every action, calling them infiltrators or accusing them of working for the opposition, we will fail to learn from our mistakes, we will continue to hit our heads against the wall while the militarists continue to make their wars with impunity, and we will drive away from the movement the very people who could help make it more effective. The real infiltrators will be the ones cheering the loudest when the movement does ineffective or self-destructive things.

This sounds interesting: Beyond Ballots or Bullets: Creating a Free America (A workshop to develop freedom strategies).

It looks to be an attempt to get a nonviolent resistance movement of the Gene Sharp variety going in libertarian / anarchist circles. “In this workshop we will explore non-electoral, nonviolent strategies to decrease the state’s ability to coerce us and increase our own powers of resistance. We will also receive training in nonviolent struggle and make plans for action.”

The workshop will be held in Utah .

Over at Slate, editor Jacob Weisberg tries to explain “why you’re not demonstrating against the Iraq war.”

Support for the Iraq war and the president’s handling of it are significantly lower than comparable polling numbers for Vietnam and LBJ at an analogous point in . Yet since the war began, antiwar protesters haven’t been numerous, visible, or influential.

Weisberg comes up with some plausible reasons: there’s no draft yet, the U.S. death toll is low compared to Vietnam, the media is sanitizing the war for public consumption, the insurgents in Iraq are less sympathetic than those in Vietnam were, and Iraq is seen as an issue in isolation while opposition to the Vietnam War became part of a platform with civil rights, civil liberties, and social justice. Oh yeah, and today’s protest organizers “are inevitably moth-eaten left-wing sectarians.”

To this, I would add that the media and the public have become more jaded and hard-to-impress. In part because the Vietnam protests were part of a major cultural upheaval, they were hard not to watch. Will hippies run naked through the streets? Will dope fiends dose the cops with acid? Will a crowd of wild negroes run rampant through the shopping district? Will the National Guard shoot people? Are they really trying to levitate the Pentagon with a big “Om”?

That “levitate the pentagon” protest, so notorious in the lore of the anti-war and yippie movements, was about a 50,000-person affair. If United for Peace gets twice that many people at their march in Washington , how much coverage do you expect? They say they had 350,000 marching in New York City . Remember that? If that had happened in , it would have been the biggest anti-war demonstration yet. In it earned a 521-word article on page 35 of the New York Times the next day.

So even if today’s anti-war movement were every bit as big and active as its counterpart from , it wouldn’t seem like it from reading the papers.

Time has been kind to the anti-Vietnam War movement. It has the advantages of having been right and — eventually — having met its goal of getting the U.S. out of Vietnam. But I think its role in forcing the U.S. out is often exaggerated — both by participants who want to trumpet their accomplishments and by opponents who want to explain their failures. The U.S. did not withdraw because the peace movement convinced it to, but because it was defeated by the Vietnamese, and by the rebellion of draftees overseas. This isn’t to say that those protests and other anti-war activities by Americans at home weren’t helpful or important.

Similarly, the recent shift in the political winds over the Iraq war — which has made withdrawal of U.S. forces an almost respectable viewpoint — has come from a shift in popular opinion — in which withdrawal has become the majority view. But this shift has more to do with the reality on the ground in Iraq and the overselling of the glorious victory on the U.S.S. Mission Accomplished to an easily-illusioned and -disillusioned public than it does with efforts at education and agitation by the anti-war movement.

Which is one more reason, I think, why the anti-war movement seems smaller and less-active this time around. It’s stuck in a rut, doing the same old ineffective things again and again (marches, rallies, quixotic lobbying). Smart people with anti-war views know that this isn’t helping much, and they either participate half-heartedly for lack of an alternative or they sit on the sidelines, frustrated.

I have said before that people who feel strongly that they want the U.S. out of Iraq — or that they want to end any of the government’s other ongoing atrocities — should not be protesting but should be resisting in some fashion.

And so I’ve spent some time studying the nonviolent conflict scholarship of the Gene Sharp school that has been so helpful to “People Power” movements elsewhere. If the people of the United States want to actually change government behavior by asserting their own power, this is how it is done. Don’t throw up your hands and say “impossible!” — RTFM.

Now Kevin Van Horn has called my bluff. He’s organizing a “Beyond Ballots or Bullets” conference that will be held in a few months. This conference will, among other things, prepare a Strategic Estimate for nonviolent struggle, based on Gene Sharp’s theories.

This is not a gathering for reporting on the current state of freedom; nor for denouncing the State’s crimes; nor for rhapsodizing wistfully about how wonderful a free society would be. It is a working conference for those who have a burning desire to see a free America and are committed to making it a reality.

I like the sound of that!

I’ve mentioned before the upcoming Beyond Ballots or Bullets conference, which will be trying to lay the groundwork for a “People Power”-style freedom movement in the United States, using the recent advances in nonviolent resistance theory that have proven so useful to liberation movements elsewhere.

If you’d like to help out, whether or not you’ll be able to come to Utah in March, the conference organizer has created a project wiki where folks can help add data for the first stage: the strategic estimate.

I spent some time over tracking down some of the many on-line resources about modern nonviolent resistance theory & practice, which I compiled at one of the wiki’s pages. That should be more than enough to get you started in becoming familiar with the current state-of-the-art.