Author: MassCommons

If Burnt Shadows were nothing more than a big, bold, sprawling novel crossing generations and continents from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945 to the wrenching Partition of India and Pakistan on Aug. 14 – 15, 1947 to the airplane bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001 and the global carnage unleashed by the world’s remaining superpower in its aftermath, British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie would be owed a debt of gratitude by fiction lovers simply for the audacity of her imagination.

But Burnt Shadows, Shamsie’s fifth novel, is all that and so much more.

It’s also an intimate story of two families and their intertwined lives over three generations: German-born Konrad Weiss, vaporized into the clear blue sky of Nagasaki, his sister Elizabeth and her English husband, James Burton (whom we first meet in Delhi), their (ultimately American) son, Harry and his daughter, Kim; Weiss’ financée Hiroko Tanaka, with the birds of her kimono permanently scarred onto her back by the Bomb, and her husband Sajjad Ashraf (they eventually settle in Karachi) and their late-in-life son, Raza.

Astonishingly, Hiroko is there in Nagasaki at the novel’s beginning and in New York City at its end; and it’s a tribute to Shamsie’s multifarious talents as a writer that she is not only able to stitch together this vast, encompassing quilt of a tale, but to do so with such skill that it’s all but impossible for the reader to notice her stitchwork.

Shamsie writes beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking, spirit-tingling sentences. Stanley Fish (author of How To Write A Sentence & How To Read One) would love Burnt Shadows for nothing more than the pleasure of reading sentences like these:

“Under a pale-leafed tree she holds her arms up to be patterned with drifting spots of sun and shadow as the branches sway in a breeze that isn’t perceptible at ground-level.” (p. 16)

“She said his name, repeated endearments in English, Urdu, Japanese—but he couldn’t hear her above the fluttering of pigeons and the call of the muezzin of Jama Masjid and the cacophony of his brothers’ arguments and the hubbub of merchants and buyers in Chandni Chowk and the rustling of palm leaves in the monsoons and the laughter of his nephews and nieces and the shouts of kite-fliers and the burble of fountains in courtyards and the husky voice of the never-seen neighbour singing ghazals before sunrise and his heartbeat, his frantic heartbeat….” (p. 127)

“It was guilt that kept his hands from reaching out to Hiroko, though it made no sense to him that he should feel guilt for this when he hadn’t for so many other things which by the standards of ordinary, little-picture morality should have had him sobbing in a bar or some other secular confessional.” (p. 246)

“What a gift, then, what a surprising gift, to be able to say the moment when freedom ended had counted for something. Finally, he counted for something.” (p. 363)

…and hundreds more like them.

In a 2014 interview, Shamsie said, “I don’t think there’s anything like the novel for empathy … If you write non-fiction it’s as though you are from the outside looking at something. But if you write fiction, you are behind someone’s eyes looking out, and that’s the difference.”

In the absence of American novelists tackling their nation’s imperial behavior and its reckless, heedless, careless consequences for their own people and for those around the world, what a blessing to have Shamsie and writers like her placing themselves behind our own eyes, offering books to stretch our moral imagination to meet the challenges of our times.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

Part travelogue, part history, part environmental and cultural cri de coeur, Alice Albinia’s Empires Of The Indus: The Story Of A River is an audacious book, recounting her travels on and near the Indus River, from its mouth near Karachi at the Arabian Sea, 2,000 miles up into the Tibetan Plateau to its headwaters. As she travels upriver, Albinia structures the book so that she travels back in time, through 5,000+ years of human history.

In the English language at least, any 21st (or 20th) century book with a Western protagonist traveling up a foreign river exists in the long imperialist shadow cast by Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, and Empires Of The Indus, despite Albinia’s best efforts, is unable to escape completely from Conrad’s influence.

First and foremost, Albinia is captivated by the majestic scope and trans-civilizational grandeur of the Indus:

“Its merchants traded with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. A Persian emperor mapped it in the sixth century BCE. The Buddha lived beside it during previous incarnations. Greek kings and Afghan sultans waded across it with their armies. The founder of Sikhism was enlightened while bathing in a tributary. and the British invaded it by gunboat, colonized it for one hundred years, and the severed it from India. The Indus was part of Indians’ lives—until 1947.

The very name of India comes from the river. The ancient Sanskrit speakers called the Indus ‘Sindhu’; the Persians changed the name to ‘Hindu’; and the Greeks dropped the ‘h’ altogether. Chinese whispers created the Indus and its cognates—India, Hindu, Indies. From the time that Alexander the Great’s historians wrote about the Indus valley, spinning exotic tales of indomitable Indika, India and its river tantalized the Western imagination.” (pp. xv – xvi)

It’s a history and a scale that dwarfs that of Albinia’s native England.

Albinia begins Empires Of The Indus geographically in Karachi and historically with the creation of Pakistan in 1947. She then travels upriver through Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and China to the river’s source in Tibet, while simultaneously taking the reader back chronologically through 3,500 years of human civilizations along its banks, and ultimately to the Neolithic (Stone Age) Era and beyond, to the river’s origins 50 million years ago.

Albinia is a bold and insightful traveler, guide, storyteller, environmentalist and historian. Here are some of the things I want to remember from Empires Of The Indus and the people and civilizations it spans:

The “Other” Slave Trade: “The people of the lower Indus valley were trading with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago and with Africa since at least the time of Pliny (in the first century CE). The slave trade itself was age-old within Africa; but it was Arabs who…first developed the trade out of the country. —snip— Although the East African slave trade was vicious and brutal, even in the cruel nineteenth century it appears not to have reached the extremes of the Christian-run Atlantic trade from West Africa to the Americas. One reason for this may have been that sellers and buyers were Muslim. —snip— Slaves were not just a silent underclass, as in ancient Greece or the Americas, but often became an elite, with responsibility as soldiers, advisers or generals, and power over free persons.” (p. 55)

Shah Inayat, Sufism & The Death of Land Reform in Sindh: An 18th century Sufi mystic, scholar and preacher, “the hero, then, not only of every anti-feudal protest but also of a thoroughly anti-fundamentalist kind of Sindhi Islam, Shah Inayat has come to embody Sindh’s distinct brand of nationalism—politically socialist and religiously syncretic.” (p. 83)

Guru Nanak, Sikhism & Punjabi Nationalism: At Partition, most Sikhs moved to the Indian side of the border; but Sikh founder, Guru Nanak (1469-1539), had been born near Lahore, and several important Sikh shrines remain in Pakistan, on or near the Indus River. A religious seeker, “traveling cured Nanak of attachment to religious frippery. He had visited all the important pilgrimage places of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and rejected them all…. He did not believe in asceticism—his disciples were supposed to participate fully in the world, while leaving time in the early morning and evening for meditation and prayers. He did not believe in reincarnation, avatars or caste…. He criticized the decadent ruling powers.” (p. 115) —snip—

“Guru Nanak made it his mission to give his people something to live for. He rejected the caste-bound Brahmins as ‘butchers’ and the Muslim kings as Satanic exploiters, and centred his sect around Punjabi peasant identity. He wrote all his poetry in Punjabi, and while this has inhibited the spread of Sikhism outside the Punjab, it also defined the community and fostered its sense of nationalism.” (p. 116)

Sultan Mahmud (971-1030) of Ghazni & the Islamic Conquest of India: Over a 30 year period, Sultan Mahmud and his armies 17 times marched down out of the mountains of modern-day Afghanistan and crossed east of the Indus River on wars of jihad and conquest, establishing a permanent (and frequently dominant) Islamic presence across much of the northern part of the subcontinent. “India made Sultan Mahmud’s career. The country was rich. The people were Hindus, so plunder and murder could be legitimized as jihad against the polytheist infidel. Mahmud made a speciality of looting Indian towns with massive temples, and he always (except when his baggage was washed away in the Indus) returned laden with booty.” (p. 135)

Buddha on the Silk Road & Beyond: “…(W)hile it was in eastern India that the Buddha was born, preached and reached Nirvana in the fifth century BCE, it was in the middle Indus valley, three hundred years after his death, that a second Buddhist holy land was established.” (p. 159) For the next millennium, Buddhism thrived along the Silk Road throughout northwestern India, extending to modern-day Afghanistan. “…(I)n northwestern India, along the banks of the Indus, the two (Islam & Buddhism) came into prolonged contact with each other, and it is undeniable that certain features of the older philosophy influenced the way the younger developed locally….. Even the much-maligned Muslim institution of the madrassah may have its roots in the Buddhist monastery. Both are institutions of intense religious learning, sustained by charity; for centuries now in Swat, small cliques of religious-minded men and women have sequestered themselves from the world to devote themselves to prayer, the learning of sacred texts and the accumulation of merit in the next life.” (p. 158) The empire of Buddhism’s greatest (or at least, most powerful) convert, Ashoka (d. 232 BCE), extended over a greater territory than the British Raj, reaching (at its peak in the 3rd century BCE) across all of South Asia except for its southernmost tip.

Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BCE) Reaches his Limits: One of history’s great propagandists (and one of its great generals), Alexander did not come “within a step” of conquering India. “In fact Plutarch’s story was a willful exaggeration of Alexander’s prowess…. The string of cities called Alexandria which he had founded in eastern Persia and western India were washed away in the region’s many rivers or repossessed by the locals…. So imperceptible was Alexander’s impression upon India that none of the residents thought his visit worth recording in such literature as survives.” (p. 177)

Instead, it was Alexander’s mythic status as a romantic, conquering hero that, oddly, “provided a heroic model for medieval Christian kings and knights…(while) Muslims also began to eulogize Alexander as a hero…. And thus even now in northern Pakistan—in the very place where Alexander forded the Indus, worshipped it as a god, and killed the hill tribes—modern-day Pashtuns still claim him as their forebear.” (p. 215)

Aryans, The Rig Veda & the Kalash (1,200 BCE): The further up the Indus Albinia travels, the more mountainous and rural the geography becomes, and the more speculative the history becomes, if for no other reason than the sheer lack of written evidence. As one example, the people who composed (orally) the Rig Veda, Hinduism’s most ancient and inscrutable religious texts, most likely lived for hundreds or thousands of years in what is now Khyber-Pahktunkhwa Province (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) of Pakistan. Most of them moved (as did the Rig Veda) as early as 3,000 years ago into what is now north-central India; though some of their descendants may remain as the Kalash, a Dardic indigenous people who’ve maintained their own distinct, polytheistic culture ever since. In the historically and culturally fraught debate over Aryans and their origins, there’s a body of evidence that suggest they originate somewhere in this wild, beautiful, mountainous region. Albinia concludes “…what is probable, is that the prehistoric grave-builders, horse-eating horse riders, rock carvers, stone-circle makers, and Rig Veda singers meandered through the same dramatic landscape of northern Pakistan; and for a moment in history all were bound together, by their deep, primeval regard for this river and its landscape.” (p. 242)

Alluvial Cities (2,600 BCE): Over a millennium earlier, what archaeologists call the Indus Valley Civilization—a remarkably egalitarian and centralized society—prospered along the river in “…what were probably the world’s first planned cities. Each of the hundreds of towns and cities along the banks of the river were identical, as if the Indus Valley Civilization was conceptualized, planned and constructed according to one model.

It was a linear empire which exploited the power of the river to produce enough grain to feed cities, organize urban society, and trade with foreign lands. Among the cities’ debris, archaeologists found small seals depicting wooden ships, a miniature sculpture of a dancing girl, and scented coffins made of cedar and rosewood. The Indus cities were semi-industrialized, manufacturing mass-produced clay pots, stone weights and copper beads. They were trading with Mesopotamia, using the river to irrigate vast cotton-growing projects, and importing semi-precious stones from Afghanistan, conch shells from the Arabian Sea, fish from Lake Manchar and cedarwood from the Himalayas.

Unlike Egypt with its pyramids, or Mesopotamia with its temples, their biggest structures were not symbols of monarchical tyranny or priestly power, but civic buildings such as public baths and grain stores.” (p. 243-44)

Huntress Of The Lithic (Stone Age): “The very far north of India, from Kashmir to Ladakh, has been renowned since antiquity for the freedom of its women. The ancient Sanskrit-speakers called this area ‘Strirajya‘: Government by Women.” (p. 261)

Until the mid-20th century fraternal polyandry was legal in Ladakh and Tibet, and it’s still practiced today. “The reason is partly cultural, and partly to do with economic prudence: polyandry keeps the birth rate down, avoids inheritance issues and lessens the pressure on scarce resources. In contrast to the situation among Hindu and Muslim families in India and Pakistan, where properties are subdivided among the new children of each generation, in polyandrous families brothers share a wife, so population does not increase and landholdings remain entire. With multiple fathers contributing to the well-being of their joint children, women also benefit. In marked contrast to other places in the Indus valley, the women of Ladakh are said to be ‘powerful’ and ‘uninhibited’ with a ‘strong position’ in society.” (p. 264) Stone carvings in the region dating back as much as 20,000 years similarly show powerful female figures, tantalizing evidence of the possible persistence of a cohesive culture that has endured through millennia of civilizations and conquests.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

Hisham Matar’s writing is like finely spun silk: so fragile that it’s breathtaking to follow his words as they connect one to the next, laying bare the vulnerabilities of the human heart; so powerful that its tensile strength not only carries the unbearable burdens of human cruelty and history, it threads a way forward over the chasms of despair—like an Andean rope bridge from one cliff to the next.

The Return: Fathers, Sons & The Land In Between is prompted by his first trip to Libya in 33 years, in the wake of Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow during the “Arab Spring”. His father, Jaballa Matar, was a prominent opposition leader, forced into exile with his family in 1979, kidnapped by the Egyptian secret police a decade later, and disappeared into Abu Salim, Libya’s most notorious prison, where, in all probability (his body has not been found), he was among the 1,270 political prisoners slaughtered there by the regime on June 29, 1996.

The Return is an intimate book. Matar writes about his friendships at boarding school in England, his dreams in exile in Cairo, his conversations with his uncle Mahmoud in Libya, his discovery that his father, as a young man, had (like Hisham) written fiction.

In its intimacy, The Return ranges far and wide across Libyan history and politics. Matar describes his negotiations with key Libyan government officials, including Seif-el-Islam Qaddafi, the dictator’s son, over the unknown fate of his father. He writes about his grandfather Hamed, born around 1880 in Ottoman Libya, a resistance fighter under Omar al-Mukhtar against the Italians, and a survivor of the genocidal tactics Italy used against what was then called Cyrenaica.

And, like many men separated too early from their fathers, he meditates deeply on the meaning of that intimate relationship:

“The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here. Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift. They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently perhaps with a reassuring smile and and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder…. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.” (pp. 51-52)

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

They’re burying Swisher today.

After a long and remarkable life, John “Swisher” Mitchell died last week at the age of 91 in his hometown of Waterville, ME.

Before his decades-long stint as the yin to legendary Colby College men’s coach Dick Whitmore’s excitable yang, Mitchell was the smart, tough, cocky, fearless point guard who captained what was arguably the best schoolboy basketball team in Maine’s history.

In 1944—in the midst of a 67 game winning streak—Waterville High went 27-0, winning both a state and a New England championship. Their claim to the title of “best team ever” rests on that New England championship: they were, and remain to this day, the only Maine team to win a six-state New England tournament. As Waterville native Fred Stubbert recalls, “The way they beat teams; they didn’t just eke by, they killed them. They absolutely demolished them. The ball hardly ever touched the floor. They were really a team.”

So there’s been a lot of basketball talk this week in and around Waterville, and all across those parts of the internet inhabited by the tens of thousands of people whose lives were touched by John Mitchell’s wit, and competitive fire, and grace, and good humor, and kindness, and yes, his bottomless font of basketball knowledge and stories.

I have my own Swisher stories, but today I find myself thinking instead about the American Dream.

Because John Mitchell and his teammates did more than set an impossibly high standard for athletic excellence in Waterville. For those of us growing up there in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, they were living proof that the American Dream was true.

Here’s where some of the players on that 1944 team started out in life:

   
• John and his big brother Paul (who died earlier this year) grew up in Head of Falls, the city’s poorest neighborhood, literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks that ran through town. Their mother was an immigrant who never really learned to speak English; their father was the orphaned son of immigrants.

   

• John Jabar, a fiery swingman, was also a product of that small, tightly-knit Maronite Christian community Lebanese immigrants built on the banks of the Kennebec River.

   

• Len Saulter, the team’s big, burly center, lived in the South End, raised by his mother. Growing up in a French-Canadian ghetto in a single-parent household was about as low a rung as existed on the socio-economic ladder of 1940s Yankee, Protestant-dominated Waterville.

   

• Teddy Shiro, the undersized guard who never took a shot he didn’t think was going in, was Jewish. All were born in the late 1920s, just a few short years after the Maine Ku Klux Klan (which stood for undying opposition to “Koons, Kikes & Katholics”) held its state convention just outside Waterville, complete with cross burnings and an attendance estimated at 15,000 (equaling the city’s population at the time).

And here’s where they ended up:

   
• John “Swisher” Mitchell was the long-time assistant principal at Waterville Junior High, and even longer-time assistant men’s basketball coach at Colby College.

   

• Paul Mitchell owned GHM, one of the largest insurance agencies in town, and served on numerous city boards.

   

• John Jabar founded and ran one of the city’s most successful law firms.

   

• Len Saulter ran one of the largest mills in town.

   

• Ted Shiro was a successful restauranteur and hotel operator.

They had families and owned homes. They, and many of their friends and classmates, were the first generation in their families to complete high school and go on to college. They, each in their own way, were pillars of the community—serving on boards of directors (especially the Boys’ Club which had been their second home when growing up), some getting involved in local and state politics, others playing prominent roles in the city’s business community, all taking an interest in and ownership of the city (and state, and nation) in which they’d grown up owning next to nothing.

For those of us growing up in their shadows, they were living proof that the world could change, and change for the better. That the people who’d always been in charge didn’t necessarily remain in charge. That in America, those who had nothing could become something.

We knew this in our bones because in Waterville, ME in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, half the people running our little town were descendants of people who’d been running it for the previous century and a half. But the other half were people like the Mitchells and the Jabars and the Shiros and the Saulters and the Josephs and the Rosenthals and the Careys and the Brodys and the Fortiers and the Levines and the Berniers and the Lunders and the Poiriers, all descendants of people who’d never run anything in this country, who’d been run out of whatever country they came from, and who weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms when they arrived here.

But because of their families and their churches and their temples, because of the Boys Club and the public schools and the GI Bill and FHA loans, because of their hard work and native intelligence and varied talents, because in America they had a chance to walk into an arena or onto a basketball court or into a classroom and be treated more or less like an equal, they got to prove themselves, and in doing so they improved our community in ways beyond measure.

It was a good way to grow up.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

It was easily the strangest and most appealing labor-management dispute of the year. In the summer of 2014, hundreds of Market Basket employees went on strike, thousands walked daily picket lines, and millions of customers boycotted the company’s supermarkets…all in an ultimately successful attempt to force the board of directors to reverse its decision to fire beloved CEO Arthur T. Demoulas. Adding spice to the stew of labor-management-vendor-customer-community relations stirred up by the protests, it was Demoulas’ cousin, Arthur S., who led the charge to fire him, and who ultimately resolved the dispute by selling his side of the family’s controlling shares of the company to Arthur T.

Business school professor Daniel Korschun and veteran journalist Grant Welker combine their skills in We Are Market Basket: The Story Of The Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved A Beloved Business to produce a brisk, engaging, insightful and thought-provoking recounting of how the Demoulas family (beginning with grandparents Athanasios and Efrosine) built a multi-billion dollar company that occupied a unique position in the communities it served and built a “clear, unique, and adaptable” corporate culture that inspired and guided the actions of its managers and workers (“associates”) as they fought for control of the company to which many had devoted much of their lives. (p. 42)

Here are some of the things I want to remember from We Are Market Basket:

Clear, unique, and adaptable: “Business scholars find that the cultures that contribute most to performance share three characteristics: members agree on objectives, the culture is distinctive compared with those of other organizations, and the culture encourages adaptability in the face of challenges. In other words, the best cultures are clear, unique, and adaptable. (p. 42)

The “four fundamental pillars” of Market Basket’s corporate culture: “service to the community, a feeling of family, empowerment, and originality—that is, valuing innovation over imitation. What makes Market Basket’s culture powerful is not only that the pillars are clear, unique, and adaptable but that the pillars work together. The sense of community purpose motivates people to commit to the family, and the culture of empowerment encourages people to be resourceful in helping the Market Basket family. The pillars of the Market Basket culture are at the heart of why the 2014 protest took flight and how it became successful.” (p. 42)

Cutting out the heart: The Market Basket protest was led by nine senior managers, all of whom had been with the company for decades. The fact that Market Basket workers didn’t have a union actually gave them extra flexibility and power in this struggle. Under US labor laws, senior managers can’t be part of a union. In this case, senior managers, store directors, stockers, cashiers and baggers all saw their interests aligned with Arthur T. Demoulas and his management style; and they were able to act together as one.

One of the first and most important strategic decisions they made was that only the warehouse workers would go on strike. Market Basket’s central warehouse supplies roughly half the items its stores sell. Very few warehouse workers crossed the picket line and outsiders hired to break the strike didn’t know the company’s systems and culture. The result was stores started running out of essential items (produce, meat, store brand foods) almost immediately and had near-empty shelves for the duration of the six-week struggle. It also meant that store associates didn’t have to risk their jobs.

Enlisting the public: Market Basket used social media and large rallies to build public support, but their most powerful tool was the relationships they’d built with their customers over the years. They used those relationships to explain the protest and encourage customers to join the boycott of Market Basket for the duration of the struggle. For customers who had no other option (e.g., Market Basket’s three stores in Haverhill, MA are the only supermarkets in the working-class city of 60,000), associates continued to offer the excellent service the company has always prided itself on.

Customer support proved critical as roughly 2 million shoppers joined the boycott, crippling the company’s cash flow. (By one estimate, Market Basket was hemorrhaging $10 million/day.) Senior manager Steve Paulenka summed it up this way: “The customers are the locomotive pulling this whole thing right now. They have shut this company down and they are not coming back until we come back and we are not coming back until our boss comes back.” (p. 147)

Shareholders don’t own the company: The Market Basket campaign is proof that, at least sometimes, the “stakeholder” theory of corporations holds true. The “stakeholder” theory is that corporations exist for the benefit of multiple interests—their customers, their workers, the communities they serve, the products they produce…and their shareholders. The “shareholder” theory (most famously articulated by Milton Friedman) is that companies exist solely for the benefit of their shareholders. In the summer of 2014, Market Basket’s managers, workers, customers, vendors and communities fought the company’s shareholders for control of the company…and won.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

The Englers end by stepping back and putting momentum-driving organizing in a broader and deeper context of creating and sustaining change over the long haul. They summarize the three main elements of a healthy and powerful culture of change in this way:

   
• “mass mobilizations alter the terms of political debate and create new possibilities for progress;”

   

• “structure-based organizing helps take advantage of this potential and protects against efforts to roll back advances;”

   

• “countercultural communities preserve progressive values, nurturing dissidents who go on to initiate the next waves of revolt.” (pp. 253-54, emphasis added)

They hold up Gandhi as an exemplar of a practitioner and theorist who, in the course of his long career, drew upon and (in his word) experimented with all three approaches in his quest to achieve Indian independence.

“In Gandhi’s method, the Salt March and other campaigns of satyagraha in India produced defining whirlwinds for the cause of independence. Meanwhile, the Indian National Congress, in which Gandhi played important leadership roles, became a critical structure-based mechanism for institutionalization; indeed, it would become the country’s ruling party after the end of the British Raj. Finally, with his prefigurative ‘constructive program,’ Gandhi advocated for a distinctive vision of self-reliant village life, through which he believed Indians could experience true independence and communal unity. He modeled this program by residing communally with others in a succession of ashrams, or intentional communities that melded religion and politics.” (p. 277)

The point is not to live as Gandhi lived. The point is to recognize what he did: that a vibrant, liberating, democratic culture requires a multiplicity of modes and roles.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

When it comes to the practices necessary for effective organizing for change—and in particular, transformative change—the Englers save the toughest for last.

Sure, it can be hard to use tactics so polarizing that even most of your supporters disagree with your actions. (“In May 1961, a Gallup poll asked Americans, ‘Do you think that ‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters, ‘freedom buses,’ and other demonstrations by Negroes will hurt or help the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South?’ The respondents were overwhelmingly negative: 57% believed that the nonviolent actions were counterproductive, with just 27% expressing confidence in the tactics’ effectiveness.” p. 209-10)

Launching a campaign that requires activists to risk physical pain and abuse, loss of jobs and friendships, even their (and your) lives is a daunting and stomach-wrenching challenge.

Yet many long-time organizers and activists agree that creating and enforcing a disciplined internal culture of nonviolence powerful enough to sustain itself in the face of saboteurs, provocateurs, governmental repression and opposition violence is perhaps the most difficult challenge facing organizations and movements working for change.

As the Englers note, scholars and practitioners of civil resistance tend to avoid theoretical debates about the definition and morality of violence.

“For activists using strategic nonviolence…the relevant question is: What tactics work best in growing a movement and winning popular support?

Here, the philosophical definition of what constitutes violence is largely irrelevant. What matters is the response of the public at large to a tactic—whether the wider society in which a social movement exists judges an action to be violent, and how it reacts as a result. From a strategic perspective, which tactics are classified as ‘violent’ or ‘nonviolent’ is determined by this public perception, not by the outcome of any abstract debate.

Once a movement accepts that gaining broad popular backing is essential to its success, a strong argument can be made for the effectiveness of maintaining strict nonviolent discipline.” (p. 236)

Here are three pragmatic arguments for drawing a bright line of exclusion against the use of violent (as perceived by the general public) tactics:

   
1. “…(S)ome tactics just do not mix. Or, rather, they are actually poisonous when mixed together.” (p. 246) For example, throwing pipe bombs when others have chained themselves to a building’s doors.

   

2. “…(S)ome methods, rather than lending themselves to public outreach, promote insularity.” (p. 247) Violent tactics tend to require secrecy, breed distrust, and separate activists from the people and places they’re trying to aid.

   

3. Drawing on Gene Sharp, “…(V)iolence is especially likely to restore loyalty and obedience among any of the opponent’s troops or police becoming disaffected. In nonviolent struggles in which success and failure hinge on whether the opponent’s troops can be induced to mutiny, violence against them may spell defeat.” (p. 247)

The Englers offer two key suggestions for movements seeking to build a disciplined culture of strategic nonviolence:

   
• “(F)rontload adherence to nonviolent tactics as one of their movement’s norms.” That means developing and using an explicit vocabulary and set of habits long before you expect to encounter violence from your opponents.

   

• “(C)reate a culture of training to foster a greater unity of strategic vision.” Armies have “basic training”. So should movements seeking to win campaigns of radical change. (p. 250)

And when, despite your frontloading and powerful training culture, people in a strategy session, or a public forum, or at a demonstration, still speak out in favor of resorting to violence, treat them like opponents, not allies. Chances are they’re undercover government agents or opposition saboteurs. And if not, then they’re probably misguided young activists or old fools. Whoever they are, if they can’t agree to maintain a discipline of strategic nonviolence, then they’re of as little use to your movement as a raw army recruit who can’t/won’t learn to shoot a rifle.

In that moment, the more important audience is the silent majority—both within your movement, and in the wider society. They are the ones who want and need to know by your words and actions that this is a disciplined movement for change that can keep its eyes on the prize, and is therefore worth trusting and joining.

“The key common link, among all the activities in a momentum-driven movement is that they must be designed, in the long run, to build mass support. It is with this common goal in mind, and with the importance of nonviolence established, that activists can adopt a diversity of roles and approaches.” (p. 250)

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

Whatever your cause of issue, most people don’t know about it, care about it, or support it. A central challenge for nonviolent practitioners is to change that dynamic—until most of the public says something like, “Well, I certainly don’t agree with what they’re doing, but I agree that this situation just isn’t right and something has to change.“

There’s no better campaign to illustrate the importance of polarization and division in winning change than the example the Englers focus on in This Is An Uprising: the campaign led by ACT UP to change the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

For generations growing up in an age of marriage equality, Pride Month, and GSAs in thousands of middle and high schools, it can be hard to comprehend just how feared, hated, despised and isolated gay men in the United States were as recently as 1981, when the first case of AIDS was diagnosed and the “gay plague” started killing otherwise healthy young men by the thousands.

Formed in 1987, ACT UP spearheaded the successful campaign to change HIV/AIDS from a death sentence to a treatable and preventable disease. Here are just some of the tactics they used disrupt business as usual and gain public attention:

   
• “shut down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange”;

   

• “chained themselves inside pharmaceutical corporations”;

   

• “blockaded offices at the FDA”;

   

• “stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge”;

   

• “interrupted Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral”;

   

• “using fake IDS…they jumped onscreen during Dan Rather’s nightly (CBS) news broadcast”;

   

• “draped a giant yellow condom over the Washington home of Senator Jesse Helms”. (pp. 201-02)

These tactics (and others like them) provoked short-term backlash but, as the Englers describe, they also produced long-term changes:

“ACT UP was only one factor that shifted the spectrum of opinion around AIDS. But over the decade when the group was most active, public attitudes underwent a profound transformation. Where stigma had previously prevailed, increased awareness about the disease led to much greater compassion for its victims. Joining the fight against AIDS became a popular celebrity cause, and ordinary people flocked to AIDS Walk benefits. Patients who were HIV-positive were included in government protections against discrimination. And, as author Randy Shaw writes, ‘Federal spending on AIDS rose from $234 million in 1986 to nearly $2 billion in 1992, a nearly tenfold increase in only six years.’ Eventually, such funding gained broad bipartisan support.” (p. 203)

There’s no manual or set of formulas that can tell you which tactics will create positive (or negative) polarization for your cause or issue. It’s always a judgment call. And, what works in one setting, or era, or culture, may not work for another.

It always requires being attentive to your closest followers, your allies, your opponents and, perhaps most especially, the vast majority of people who wish they didn’t have to think about it at all.

But no matter what you’re working for, at some point you’re going to have to figure out ways to polarize, to create division, to use tactics that (at times) bring out the worst in your opponents so that the majority who’d rather not have to, are forced to choose which side they’re on. And you’ll have to do it in such a way that most of them end up on your side…even though they still think you shouldn’t have been so confrontational.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

“If whirlwinds represent a climax, what comes next can only be a letdown.” (p. 191) (Or, as that great political philosopher, David Clayton-Thomas, said, “What goes up must come down.“)

One of Bill Moyer’s deepest and (for movement leaders and organizers) most useful insights was the realization that, “after a whirlwind’s flurry of activity dies down, movements predictably experience what he calls the ‘Perception of Failure’“. (p. 192, emphasis added)

There is, so far as we know, no escaping this dynamic, any more than athletes can avoid gasping for air after peak moments of physical activity.  The more important point, as Moyer articulated and the Englers reiterate, is that “…past movements which were able to overcome despondency ended up seeing many of their once-distant demands realized. As campaigners move to later phases that involve institutionalizing their gains and capitalizing on the increased public support they have accumulated, they begin reaping what they have sown.” (p. 194)

It is critical for activists/organizers to avoid the downward spiral that follows when they become “ever more insular and isolated from the wider public”. (p. 195) Among the questions—and the organizing habits required to answer them—that can help sustain a movement in the wake of its “moment of the whirlwind” are:

   
• is the movement still building popular support and shifting public opinion?

   

• do active supporters and allies still agree with the cause?

   

• do they agree that the struggle is still worth it?

If the answer to those questions is “yes”, then there’s reason to press on. (If, on the other hand, the answer is “no”, then there’s reason to consult more widely as you rethink your strategy and tactics.)

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)
Hang around for even a little while with people working for change and you’ll come across some version of the following excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ magnificent 1857 “West India Emancipation” speech:

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

Douglass’ words aren’t famous because people like what he’s saying. They aren’t famous because they’re comforting. They’re famous because they’re true.

They’re as true about the nature of change in human society as Einstein’s E = mc² formula is true in describing the relationship between energy and mass in the physical universe.

Human society is as it is because at some time in the past, people decided to make it so. If you want to change the world as it is, then you inevitably will have to disrupt the status quo.

But, the status quo not only works well for some (perhaps many) people, it has the added advantage of being familiar and known to everyone.

Therefore, if you disrupt the status quo, some (perhaps many) people will be angry and will attack you. If and when they attack, you will then have to sacrifice if you are to persist in the struggle. (Note: this is true for those seeking to make change by violent means, as well as for those seeking to make change by nonviolent means.)

The Englers argue—based on their reading of the experience of nonviolent movements around the world over the past century—not only that sacrifice is an inevitable cost of organizing for change, but that in order to succeed, activists, leaders and organizers will have to find ways to escalate (nonviolently) the conflict with their opponents.

This will in all likelihood kick off another round of disruption, sacrifice and escalation until one side (or both) can’t take any more and is ready to negotiate a new settlement or concede defeat.

In chapter 6, “The Act Of Disruption”, of This Is An Uprising, the Englers draw upon cases and theorists from multiple continents, centuries and causes to hammer home the absolute importance, the inescapable necessity of engaging in disruption, sacrifice and escalation if you want to create change.

These tactics don’t guarantee success, but failure to use them does guarantee defeat.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com