Category: Daily News

The power of humor in nonviolent protest! In Odisha, a very unusual form of protest has kept politicians on their toes and security-forces on point! In the Eastern Indian province. egg-pelting (throwing eggs as a form of protest) has been reported over 15 times in the last two years. Targeting political figures from the ruling Biju Janata Dal state political party with the egg attacks gave the security apparatus a firm scare. “The police’s intelligence wing worked overtime to sensitise routes taken by politicians, particularly to interior regions, restricting sale of eggs by roadside stalls. Some policemen were even suspended for failing to prevent the attacks,” according to Priya Ranjan Sahu.  Biju Janata Dal’s MP from Bhubaneswar Prasanna Patasani went to the extent of equating the egg attackers with terrorists and demanded that they be charged with attempt to murder! 

Read Priya Ranjan Sahu’s full article on www.scroll.in here.

Photograph: Reuters/News18.com

Back to last week, when thousands of protesters in London took action against the Defence and Security Equipment International, or DSEI. As the arms fair prepared to open its doors at the Excel centre in London’s Docklands, a diverse array of participants led to a wide range of creative and humorous actions.

DESI is billed as the world’s largest arms fair, where buyers and sellers of arms to network and make preliminary deals. Although no actual trade takes place, this year’s four-day event will be attended by around 34,000 people from the world’s arms companies, militaries and government representatives,  including military delegations from countries with appalling human rights records and countries at war.

Wagingnonviolence.org gives us an insight into several of the nonviolent tactics used to mobilize a diverse group of people and the end-goals of the protests organized against DESI. It also answers the question why the preparations for the arms fair were targeted, instead of the event itself. Read the full article here.

Photo: Dancers block a vehicle as part of the “Festival of Resistance to Stop DSEI” on Sept. 9. (CAAT/Paige Ofosu)

At what was supposed to be the first big protest against Donald Trump’s appearance in New York for the UN General Assembly, fewer than 1,000 protesters attended.

“It’s kind of like battle fatigue. People are worn out.’’

Are people tired of protesting against their president? How can the popular campaign against the Trump presidency stay energized?

Read the full article from Barbara Demick for Los Angeles Times here.

(PhotoCredits Barbara Demick)

Read full article here. By the Associated Press. Photo Credits: AP.

Hundreds of government critics held a peaceful protest of the monthly observances Poland’s ruling party holds in memory of President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others killed in a 2010 plane crash.

The critics say the observances are being used for political purposes by Kaczynski’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, who is the ruling Law and Justice party’s leader. They say that Kaczynski uses his mourning to rally supporters for his policies that threaten democracy.

Read full article here. Photo credits: Steffi Loos/AFP/Getty.

A day of violent clashes between police and protesters culminated on Friday evening with the bizarre spectacle of the heads of the world’s 20 leading economies listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy at the top of a shiny high-rise building while police used water cannon, teargas and speed boats to keep at bay an angry crowd of thousands. Germany’s second-largest city had been eager to showcase its recently opened Elbphilharmonie concert hall to the rest of the world, but it may come to rue its ivory-tower symbolism after a week of chaotic scenes on the edges of the conference hall.

Rising tensions between protesters and police had escalated with clashes in Hamburg’s historic harbour area on Thursday night, and escalated further when masked anti-capitalist protesters torched cars and smashed shop windows in the Altona district on Friday morning.

Masked protesters in black clothes used flares to set fire to at least 20 cars and pelted rocks at the windows of banks and smaller shops as they made their way through Altona and along the Elbchaussee road along the river at about 7.30 am on Friday morning.

Many shops and cafes in the area, including a local Ikea, boarded up their windows in anticipation of further rioting.

 

 

“J.R.R. Martin hard- pressed to envision what the end of Venezuela would be”

“Recently discovered Mayan calendar establishes that the end of Venezuela will occur on July the 30^th”

“Elderly woman nervously goes shopping, returns with 2 bottles of vinegar”

These ludicrous titles were not taken from a conspiracy theory or a work of magical realism, but from El Chigüire Bipolar– Venezuela’s  subversive, highly idiosyncratic (and once you get the “joke” – simply hilarious) news website.

Through absurdity, a genuine, uncensored representation of the highly chaotic and volatile political environment in Venezuela emerges. The reference to “Game of Thrones” underscores the unprecedented levels of police violence and oppression the country is experiencing, July the 30^th, 2017, is the date of the next elections, while the shopping story alludes to the shortage of basic goods which has been plaguing Venezuelans.

This spring, the Human Rights Foundation recognized the publication for its “raw and rigorous reporting” and awarded founders Elio Casale, Oswaldo Graziani, and Juan Andrés Ravell the Vaclav Havel Award for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

#HumorAtWork

Read the whole article here. By Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath for Al Jazeera. Photo credits: Reuters.

Indigenous people across Canada are holding ceremonies, events and protests, saying there is nothing to celebrate as the country marks its 150th anniversary.

On Parliament Hill in the capital Ottawa, where thousands are gathering to celebrate Canada Day on Saturday, groups of indigenous people and their supporters are “reoccupying” what they say is their land and drawing attention to the history and oppression of the aboriginal people.

“The goal of the reoccupation is to express our indigenous sovereignty in the face of these toxic national celebrations,” Freddy Stoneypoint, organiser of the demonstrations, told Al Jazeera.

“As an indigenous person, this is an opportune moment to make our community, which has been rendered invisible by the colonial occupation, known,” said Stoneypoint, a member of the Ojibwe nation.

Read the whole article here. By Greg Satell for Digital Tonto.

On September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district in Lower Manhattan. Declaring, “We are the 99%,” they captured the attention of the nation. Within a few months, however, the park was cleared and the protesters went home, achieving little, if anything.
In 1998, a similar movement, Otpor, began in Serbia. Yet where Occupy failed, Otpor succeeded marvelously. In just two years they overthrew the reviled Miloševic government. Soon after came the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East.
While Occupy certainly did not lack passion or appeal—indeed its core message about inequality continues to resonate—it was unable to translate that fervor into effective action. Otpor, on the other hand, created a movement of enormous impact. The contrast is sharp and it is no accident. Successful movements do things that failed ones don’t.
Clarity of Purpose
For Otpor, there was never any question about what they were setting out to achieve—the nonviolent overthrow of Slobodan Miloševi?—and everything they did was focused on that mission.The group also focused on specific pillars upon which the regime’s power rested —such as the media, bureaucracy, police, and military— to target their efforts.
This clarity of purpose led directly to action. For example, rather than focusing on staging large scale demonstrations, in the early stages, Otpor focused on street theatre and pranks to embarrass the regime. When they were arrested, they made a point to be respectful of the police, but also made sure their lawyers and the press knew about their detention.
By starting slow and building scale, Otpor could show, to their own members and the country at large, that they not only had clear goals, but that they were making progress against them. That led others to want to join them, which in turn led to even greater success and more support, resulting in a positive feedback loop.
Compare that to Occupy, which as Joe Nocera noted in a NY times column, “had plenty of grievances, aimed mainly at the “oppressive” power of corporations,” but “never got beyond their own slogans.” While the group captured attention, nobody, even the protesters themselves, was clear on what was to be done. Before long, everyone lost interest.

Read the whole piece here. By Maria J Stephan and Timothy Snyder, for The Guardian. Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images.

After the spread of democracy at the end of the 20th century, authoritarianism is now rolling back democracy around the globe. In the US, supporters of democracy disarmed themselves by imagining an “end of history” in which nothing but their own ideas were possible. Authoritarians, meanwhile, keep practicing their old tactics and devising new ones.

It is time for those who support democracy to remember what activists from around the world have paid a price to learn: how to win.

Modern authoritarians rely on repression, intimidation, corruption and co-optation to consolidate their power. The dictator’s handbook mastered by Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Maduro in Venezuela, Zuma in South Africa, Duterte in the Philippines and Trump here provides the traditional tactics: attack journalists, blame dissent on foreigners and “paid protestors,” scapegoat minorities and vulnerable groups, weaken checks on power, reward loyalists, use paramilitaries, and generally try to reduce politics to a question of friends and enemies, us and them.

Yet tyrants’ tactics require the consent of large numbers of people. The first lesson, then, is not to obey in advance. If individuals make the basic effort to consider their own sense of values and patriotism rather than subconsciously adjusting to the new reality, aspiring authoritarians have a major problem. Good citizens will then ask: but what should we do? History provides an answer: civil resistance.

Unarmed civilians using petitions, boycotts, strikes, and other nonviolent methods have been able to slow, disrupt and even halt authoritarianism. Civil resistance has been twice as effective as armed struggle. Americans will remember the historical examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and perhaps the peaceful east European revolutionaries of Solidarity in Poland and Otpor in Serbia. Many of us have overlooked the more recent examples of successful civil resistance in Guatemala, South Korea and Romania.

Civil resistance works by separating the authoritarian ruler from pillars of support, including economic elites, security forces, and government workers. It attracts diverse groups in society, whose collective defiance and stubbornness eventually elicits power shifts.

Mass, diverse participation empowers reformers and whistle-blowers and weakens the support base of hardliners. The best gauge of the health of a resistance movement, then, is whether the size and representativeness of active participation are growing.