Monthly Archives ⇒ December 2004

Grief at the Asian Tragedies

December 30, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Our grief goes out to the ever-higher num­ber of known vic­tims of the earth­quake and tsuamis in south­ern Asia. Non­vi­o­lence isn’t just protest­ing politi­cians, it’s also about sup­port­ing our broth­ers and sis­ters in time of need. As of this writ­ing, the death tool from the earth­quake and tsua­mi has climbed over 140,000. That’s many times the “3000 who died in the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_Terrorist_Attacks. That’s more than the “esti­mate of 100,000 iraq civilians”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/iraq.deaths/ that have died in the two years since the U.S. led inva­sion. We humans seem to do a good job of cre­at­ing mass mis­ery for our­selves but nature can strike hard­er, faster. Who can tru­ly imag­ine such instant, unex­pect­ed mass death?
Please con­sid­er a gen­er­ous dona­tion to a relief orga­ni­za­tion like the “Amer­i­can Red Cross”:http://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html or “Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Committee”:http://www.afsc.org/give/asia-relief.htm. Please also write let­ters to your respec­tive gov­ern­ments: “more can be done”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/opinion/30thu2.html.
Update: read­er Ric Moore says “Help­ing in Tsuna­mi is good, but donors should be aware that dona­tions to the Amer­i­can Red Cross go to a gen­er­al response fund, where­as the “Inter­na­tion­al Red Cross has Tsuna­mi relief separated”:http://donate.ifrc.org/ (Thanks for the tip Ric!)
http://​donate​.ifrc​.org/

The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Non​vi​o​lence​.org

December 10, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Non​vi​o​lence​.org read­ers may not be aware that my per­son­al site has been the talk of the polit­i­cal inter­net for the last few days. Since post­ing an “account of get­ting a phone call from a CBS News pub­li­cist”, I’ve been linked to by a Who’s Who of blog­ging glit­er­at­ti: Won­kette, Instapun­dit, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy, Lit­tle Green Foot­balls, Rather­Biased, etc. For a short time yes­ter­day, the sto­ry was a part of the second-ranked arti­cle on Tech­no­rati’s Pol­i­tics Atten­tion index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a pro­gram on an issue that’s cen­tral to Nonviolence.org’s man­date: con­sci­en­tious resis­tance to mil­i­tary ser­vice. After look­ing over the mate­r­i­al, I thought the inter­views of resisters who have fled to Cana­da would be inter­est­ing to my read­ers and so wrote a short entry on it. Think­ing it all a lit­tle fun­ny that a pub­li­cist would care about Non​vi​o​lence​.org, I men­tioned the inci­dent in the “Sto­ries of Non​vi​o​lence​.org” sec­tion of my per­son­al site. One by one the lead­ing polit­i­cal sites of the blo­gos­phere have run the sto­ry as fur­ther proof of the vast left-wing main­stream media con­spir­a­cy. It’s rather fun­ny actually.

I have to won­der is who’s kid­ding who with all this feigned out­rage? For those miss­ing the irony gene: the Non​vi​o​lence​.org Pay­Pal account cur­rent­ly has a bal­ance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last dona­tion – $5.00 back on Novem­ber 20th. My cor­ner of the left wing con­spir­a­cy is fund­ed by the vast per­son­al wealth I accu­mu­late as a book­store clerk.

Won­ket­te’s pages adver­tise “spon­sor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties,” she’s a recent cov­er girl on New York Times Mag­a­zine, her hus­band is an edi­tor at New York mag­a­zine and in Octo­ber she cashed out her blog­ging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first nov­el (“It’s not Brid­get Jones does Wash­ing­ton, it’s Nick Horn­by does pol­i­tics”: good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for San­dra Day O’Con­nor), teach­es law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapun­dit’s Glenn Reynolds teach­es law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee, has served on White House advi­so­ry pan­els, and is a paid cor­re­spon­dent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the oth­ers, calls a two minute phone call “recruit­ing”?

I’m begin­ning to think the real inter­est comes from the fact that this top tier of blog­gers is total­ly in bed (lit­er­al­ly) with the MSM. Their income comes from their con­nec­tions with media and polit­i­cal pow­er. Their carefully-crafted fas­cade of snark­ish inde­pen­dence would crum­ble if their phone logs were made pub­lic. They’re not real­ly blog­ging in their paja­mas, folks.

By men­tion­ing the exis­tance of blog pub­li­cists, I’ve threat­ened to blow their cov­er. Pay no atten­tion to the men behind the cur­tains: my social gaffe was in pub­licly admit­ting that the main­stream media courts polit­i­cal blogs. Kudos to jour­nal­ist Derek Rose on admit­ting the practice:

But why should­n’t a news orga­ni­za­tion’s pub­lic­i­ty depart­ment court blog­gers? As a MSM mem­ber, I get emails from TV flacks all the time pro­mot­ing their scoops. From ABC, for exam­ple, I’ve received emails regard­ing a tape they got of the Belt­way sniper’s call to the Rockville police; Bar­bara Wal­ters’ Hillary Clin­ton inter­view; and their ‘Azzam the Amer­i­can’ video … as well as a Rush Lim­baugh drug laun­der­ing sto­ry that nev­er panned out. I even got atten­tion from pub­li­cists when I was work­ing for a news­pa­per that did­n’t have a 20th of the cir­cu­la­tion of Instapundit…

Rose aside, there’s incred­i­ble dis­tor­tion in the “report­ing,” a term I have to use very loose­ly. Won­kette says “Kel­ley claims that a CBS min­ion put the screws to him to post some­thing about a ’60 Min­utes’ pack­age on con­sci­en­tious objec­tors” yet all read­ers have to do is fol­low the link to see I nev­er said any­thing like that. Why do the cream of blog­gers feel like a posse of self-absorbed sev­enth graders? When I start­ed Non​vi​o​lence​.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new polit­i­cal world of the inter­net might be All the Pres­i­den­t’s Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it’s just Heathers. God help us.

Seattle Five Years Later

December 6, 2004
· Martin Kelley

It’s been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seat­tle invent­ed a new sort of activism. Angry con­fronta­tions with police dom­i­nat­ed the pic­tures com­ing from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out par­ty of the Inde­pen­dent Media move­ment, both both brought togeth­er and report­ed on the protests.
In the _Seattle Weekly_, Geov Par­rish asks “Is This What Fail­ure Looks Like?”:http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0447/041124_news_wtogeov.php:
bq. But it’s one thing to shut down a high-level meet­ing for a day; it’s quite anoth­er to get your pri­or­i­ties enact­ed as pub­lic pol­i­cy. And so, in the half-decade since Seat­tle’s ground­break­ing protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade orga­niz­ers in the Unit­ed States have strug­gled to find ways to not sim­ply cre­ate debate but win.
I’ve always respect Geov, who’s been one of the rare paci­fist orga­niz­ers who’s act­ed as a bridge between the gray-haired old­line peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it’s kind of fun­ny to see his thought­ful arti­cle described by Coun­ter­punch this way. Read Charles Mun­son’s cri­tique, “Seat­tle Week­ly Trash­es Anti-Globalization Movement”:http://www.counterpunch.org/munson11302004.html.
The WTO protests were a land­mark and rad­i­cal­ized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peace­ful, they nev­er shook the image of the black-clad anar­chist spoiled brats throw­ing bricks through win­dows. Although I had friends who donned the black han­ker­chiefs, the black bloc always remind­ed me of the los­er high school kids who turn over dump­sters behind the 7 – 11; the high polit­i­cal rhetoric seemed sec­ondary to the joy of being “bad.” It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occas­sion­al­ly use­ful, but not the stuff to cre­ate fun­da­men­tal social change.
I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Wash­ing­ton DC and the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion protests in my home­town of Philadel­phia, serv­ing as an Indy­media work­er for both. I wit­nessed won­der­ful cre­ativ­i­ty, I mar­veled at the instant com­mu­ni­ty of the Indy­media Cen­ters, I was fas­in­cat­ed by the cell-phone/internet organizing.
But there was also this kind of nag­ging sense that we were try­ing to recre­ate the myth­i­cal “Seat­tle.” It was as if we were all deriv­a­tive rock bands try­ing to jump on the band­wag­on of a break­through suc­cess: the Nivana clones hop­ing to recatch the mag­ic. It was hard to shake the feel­ing we were play act­ing our­selves sometimes.
It’s good to hon­est­ly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what did­n’t. The fer­vor and orga­niz­ing strate­gies changed activism and will con­tin­ue to shape how we see social-change orga­niz­ing. The world is bet­ter for what went down in Seat­tle five years ago, and so is North Amer­i­can polti­cial orga­niz­ing. But let’s stop idol­iz­ing what hap­pened there and let’s see what we can learn. For we’ve bare­ly begun the work.