Nonviolence News: Pirate Care, Salting, Knit-Ins Against Debt & Old Book Protests
Image Credit: Remix from demonstration in Indonesia by Sigit Setiawan on Pixabay.
Pirate Care, Salting, Knit-Ins Against Debt & Old Book Protests
By Editor Rivera Sun
The horror of the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles is vivid this week as 10,000 structures burned in the second-largest city in the United States. Climate activists have been campaigning hard to make the connection to the climate crisis clear as news media and officials fail to mention it. (In case you're also wondering, drought caused low water tables and tinderbox conditions, and climate instability intensified the seasonal Santa Ana winds which whipped up the fire into an uncontrollable inferno.)
In the face of this catastrophe, each step away from fossil fuels, toward renewable energy, or for climate adaptation takes on added significance. Chicago's municipal government now runs on 100% renewable energy. The Episcopal Church divested completely from fossil fuels. Nearly all of Barcelona's 5.3 million people live within a 10-min walk of a free, safe, and accessible climate shelter providing relief from rising summer temperatures. Congolese activists halted (for now) a 'carbon bomb' of an oil and gas lease auction. The US banned new offshore oil and gas drilling in most federal waters.
This week also saw several other success stories for what I like to call 'nonviolent solutions'. These are programs or responses to the causes of harm and destruction in our world. For example, Indonesia launched its first nationwide school lunch program, a new wildlife bridge in Massachusetts aims to save lives by preventing deer-human collisions, the US is poised to remove medical debt from credit scores, and the ballpark where Jackie Robinson desegregated baseball has been designated a commemorative site, honoring the long struggle for racial equality.
To follow-up on one of the biggest successes of last year, South Koreans are still in the streets. After stopping an attempted coup and impeaching their president, citizens haven't quit. They braved snowstorms to continue demonstrating for accountability while former president Yoon Suk Yeol barricaded himself in official buildings to evade arrest and prosecution. The persistence of the South Koreans is something nonviolent movements around the world should sit up and take notice of. One of the common shortcomings for movements is how the power vacuums opened by mass protests are filled by military coups, new dictatorships, or equally corrupt regimes. Sustaining a movement through the full arc of political transition is necessary for long-term success.
South Koreans aren't alone in campaigning for democracy: protests broke out in Guinea after the ruling junta ignored a deadline for initiating a democratic transition. In Mozambique, violent repression of protesters in the wake of the October elections has left 300 dead and led to international aid groups warning that funding may soon by cut off if the government does not halt the violence. In Serbia, students angered over political corruption left piles of old books outside the education ministry as part of the daily protests, marches, and monthly road blockades that have taken place for over two months since a concrete canopy collapsed and killed 15 people.
In more Nonviolence News, people of the Yoruba tradition are campaigning to end religious stigma and discrimination, hundreds marched in the funeral procession for a slain Syrian activist who was imprisoned by the Assad regime in 2020, and Indigenous runners in Colombia completed a 10,000-mile run for Mother Earth. In Ecuador, mass indignation and protests have broken out after the government detained and disappeared four children. Greek police showed that they're exactly as bad as protesters claim, cracking down on a memorial demonstration for a 15-year-old boy who was shot and killed by police in 2008.
We're also seeing sustained organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza. In Istanbul, Turkey, over 450,000 people demonstrated to end the genocide in Gaza. Across the Middle East, Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) campaigns are surging and spreading through regional solidarity in Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Jordan. The global movement also mobilized some unusual sectors of society. Lawyers and researchers, for example, are resisting by documenting the genocidal comments and speeches of Israeli leaders, making the claim of genocide undeniable by proving intent. Doctors held a global sick-out against conditions in Gaza, refusing to go to work over how the bombing of hospitals, blocking of humanitarian relief, and lack of medical access is making them sick to their stomachs. The American Historical Association took a rare stand to denounce scholasticide - the intentional destruction of educational infrastructure - in Gaza and opposed US funding for Israel. In California, 500 US taxpayers have launched an unprecedented lawsuit against their legislators for voting to fund more weapons to Israel's genocide.
Here are a few other unusual or creative tactics worth noting. Around 3,700 educators in the US have joined study groups on racial justice and history to counter the right-wing's attempt to erase racial justice struggles from US history curriculums. Outside the US Dept. of Education, people over the age of 50 with student debt held a knit-in against medical debt, sitting in rocking chairs and calling on Biden to cancel debt for people their age. Indians are using their free library system to counter caste discrimination and authoritarianism. And salting is on the rise - no, not in food ... in labor organizing. This is a tactic where workers apply for jobs with the secret intention of organizing the workplace from within. Among young labor activists, especially, this approach is energizing the movement.
A favorite story this week? Pirate care: acts of civil disobedience to provide care and services to groups and individuals denied care by the state or society. These creative and often life-saving actions include doctors treating people without health insurance, for example, or providing abortions against the law or gender-affirming care for trans individuals. Pirate care also includes support for migrants, providing jobs for ex-convicts against company policies, or creating free access to knowledge that has been banned by the state or law. It's a vast swath of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience that is actively resisting some of the worst injustices of our times.
Visit our Nonviolence News Research Archive to find more stories from this week's news, including a how-to guide to turn up the heat when you're out on strike, an inside-look at how we might be able to stop mass shootings, and a fascinating history article on 19-year-old Angelo Herndon, a Black labor organizer in Atlanta, Georgia in 1932.
In solidarity,
Rivera Sun