Spirit in Action
Nonviolence At Work in Senegal to Sudan to Ukraine to the USA: Michael Beer & Nonviolence International
Our 2nd visit with Michael Beer, director of Nonviolence International since 1998. Last time Michael talked mainly about his book,
- Duration:
- 55m
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[Music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat and each week we bring you visits and conversations with people doing healing work for this world, hearing what they're doing and what inspires them and supports them in doing it. Welcome to Spirit in Action. Today for Spirit in Action, we'll have our second visit with Michael Beer, director of non-violence international since 1998. Last time we had Michael with us, he talked mainly about his book Civil Resistance Tactics in the 21st century, but this time we'll be talking more widely about the nuts and bolts of the work of non-violence international, which among other tasks advocates for active non-violence and supports creative constructive non-violent campaigns worldwide. We'll look at recent non-violent efforts and actions both successful and not successful and the upcoming struggles and possibilities. We're going to try to include links to a generous handful of the kinds of organizations that non-violence international and Michael Beer work alongside, like training for change, the International Center for Non-violent Conflict, and Swarthmore's global non-violent action database. We have the advantage for this interview in that we're talking to Michael face-to-face at the 2024 Friends General Conference Gathering, held on the campus of Haverford College just outside of Philadelphia, which means that we're on campus with many great social activists like George Lakey, Jonathan Kutab, Peterson Tuscano, and Bianca Van Hadorn, all of whom I'll be talking to later in this week. It's an inspirational place to be at this moment, so let's get talking to Michael Beer. Michael, it's great to have you back again for spirit in action. It's an honor to be back, Mark. And since I talked to you back in 21, has anything been happening in the world? We've had a lot of strong wonderful things happen in the world despite the terrible things you see in the news. So let me focus on some significant non-violent struggles that may inspire people, whether here in the United States or in other countries, because non-violent power is real and is proving to be effective in various places. It doesn't mean it always wins, but we need to continue to support non-violent struggles around the world, and ourselves to try to organize our communities to bring about the change and to meet the needs that we see. So I'll start off with one success story, which is that of Senegal, they had an election recently, and the president of that country didn't want to have election at one point, because he had finished two terms and wanted to go move on, and he actually wanted to try to have a third term, and the people said no way, and then he said, "Okay, well, we're going to postpone the election," and they said, "No, you're not going to postpone the election. We're going to have the election." And the Senegalese people really put their foot down, overwhelming support in the streets, and they managed to push to a place to enforce the president to hold elections, and they held elections in an opposition. Young man, one who had recently only gotten out of jail three weeks before, and so they have new leadership in Senegal, and they've preserved their democracy, which they're very proud of. This is a Muslim country, predominantly, and it's great to see Muslims taking leadership in non-violent struggle around the world. In fact, one of the other recent successes in the world has to do with Muslim peoples, too, predominantly, and that is in Sudan. Now, Sudan also does have Christians and others, but it's predominantly Muslim country. It was ruled by an Islamic dictator. His name was Bashir, President Bashir, and he was basically removed through people protest led by professional unions, medical unions, engineer union leaders, and then lots of students and youth and neighborhood committees that organized all over the country, and women. Women provided very strong leadership in Sudan to take down president Bashir, and it was just the first time in modern times when an Islamist dictatorship has been brought down by non-violent people power, and they're very non-violent, most remarkable. I want to make sure, the phrase "Islamist," I certainly have seen it, right, as opposed to Islamic, and Islamist has this negative connotation. What specifically does it mean? Yes, what I'm referring to here is, yes, it called itself an Islamic state, but this was also a leader who was close to what we call the Salafi or Saudi type of Islam that had also relations with Al-Qaeda and ISIL. These are all part of the same family of Sunni supremacist Islamic jurisprudence and law in which they won an Islamic state with a particularly harsh orientation towards non-Sunnis. So there are a lot of Islamic countries which are not Islamist? I would say so, yes. So we're talking about Sudan, and we've gotten Islamist removed. That's what we did, and led by, again, women who took leadership roles in the streets and elsewhere, and we were quite hopeful that Sudan was really headed in a good direction. Unfortunately, their transition to democracy has not been fulfilled. Democrats did come to share leadership with the two armed elements in the country, which were the rapid support forces of militia, formerly known as the Jan-Jaweed, who did a genocide at Darfur in the aughts, and then the Sudanese army is the other armed actor that civilians shared power with, and unfortunately, the two armed factions have gone to war, and the vast majority of the people don't support either the army or the rapid support forces. It's really remarkable. You don't see this much in history. You usually see people taking one side or the other in these kinds of civil wars, but the people are pretty clear that they wanted democracy, and they didn't want either of these armed actors, but they're at war now, and it's going very badly, and these armed actors are being supplied with weaponry and funds from outside countries, which are making the situation very, very bad. There are, depending on who's giving the reports, but the United Nations, I think it's OCR, I'm not sure which UN agency is said that up to 25 million people may be at risk for starvation in Sudan. Enormous numbers, absolutely enormous, and this is because people can't plant their seeds amidst the civil war, and there are millions of people who are displaced in refugees. So we have a very bad situation, and it's getting worse, and the UN and other countries have been unable to bring about some sort of halt to this terrible war, and unfortunately, some of the outside actors like Egypt, which is supporting the Sudanese Army, and UAE, which is supporting, sorry, UAE is the United Arab Emirates, is supporting the rapid support forces. We unfortunately have a worse and worse situation in one of the largest countries in Africa. It sounds like your days are filled with looking at all of these sometimes problems spots, sometimes glimmer of hope spots around the world, and tell me again what you do as one of the co-coordinators now, the co-directors of non-violence international. One of the things we do is we promote knowledge about these important struggles around the world. We do this through webinars and through social media as well as articles on our website. We also provide coaching for non-violent leadership. For example, during the 2019 revolution in Sudan, I was asked to come on a Facebook Live show to talk about planning for a general strike and what you needed to think about if you were going to do a general strike. What were the kind of considerations, the strengths, the weaknesses, pluses and negatives, and this session had something like 200,000 views within the week, and they went on to do that next week, a general strike that was quite successful, and then a month later, another general strike, and this is the kind of education that we try to share from protest to protest, from campaign to campaign, from movement to movement. We try to share information. I'm often not the person doing the direct sharing. I'm often putting people in touch with each other so that, for example, we had Sudanese and Burmese talk to each other because they're both facing civil war in each other's country, and they have a lot in common, unfortunately, with armed actors who are trying to rule their country as kind of mafias, and so they're both facing conscription, they're both facing terrible civil war, and getting these actors together to talk about how do we fight conscription in these countries? How do we also deal with deserters, soldiers' deserters, and get soldiers to defect? So there's a role of those non-violence international getting experts, because we're often not the experts, but getting experts together to share with each other about what they can learn. And folks, the website nonviolenceinternational.net is linked on northernspiritradio.org. You can also listen to my previous interview with Michael Beer, a chapter three years ago, and you can learn about his book, Civil Resistance Tactics in the 21st Century. I talked to you about this three years ago, but just to refresh people's memory, this is a continuing resource that people have out there. I was wondering if you were dropping it on Sudan or in Senegal or something like that. I'm not sure if those people are drawing on this book and the resources that you have pulled together as part of nonviolence international. This book has gained quite an interest because it's now been translated into five major languages and has been downloaded for free in many parts of the world. It's basically trying to help people understand the big picture of non-violent campaigns and tactics around the world and survey the enormous dynamic of non-violent action. We have non-violent action going on in almost every country of the world, almost every single day. It often doesn't win, it often loses, and sometimes nonviolence action here can be actually a sign of weakness, because if you don't have access to the regular economic or political or legal power structures, you engage in whatever else you can, which is basically the grab bag of everything else, which is non-violent action. But it just shows you that people around the world really do have a sense that they don't want to be treated unfairly by others or ruled by others, and they will resist and try to meet each other's needs without harming others. So we provide in the book and the database online a kind of survey of what's going on around the world, and we don't give a lot of advice on what to do. People around the world often know what to do. The biggest challenge that people have besides not always being creative in their thinking, and we try to provide a lot of creative ideas for people, is that people are either afraid or in despair, and these are the two big blocks to resistance, whether armed resistance or non-violent resistance or anything else. We need people to stop being passive and to try to organize their communities to meet their personal needs. So that's a long way to say that this book is out there, it's not prescriptive, but it does try to open up a window for people to be thinking about creative ideas and things that they can do in their particular situation. And who would you say are your forbearance in producing this? Who the source is that? Sure. I built strongly on the work of Dr. Jean Sharp, who in 1972-73 came out with the politics of nonviolent action and came out with the first typology and survey of the field of nonviolent tactics. He called them nonviolent methods. And I've updated his work and expanded the category slightly to encompass the larger field of nonviolent action as we understand it today. And I think one of the things I focused on in looking at nonviolent action are the examples of prefigurative nonviolent action that we have around the world today that have been very inspiring and continued to be used. And what I mean by this is I mean I'm talking about nonviolent action which is for something, not just against something. And so for example, some of the most successful nonviolent movements of the modern era of our lifetime have been the gay lesbian, transgender, queer movements, which is used all kinds of creative tactics, very creative, positive tactics to create the new world that they want to live in. I'll give you some examples. One example is marriage. Marriage, at least in modern times, is historically not really an option for same gender people. But beginning in the late 60s, early 70s, we saw, particularly in Western countries, a movement for gay lesbian, bisexual, transgender people to be treated equally and wanting the right to marriage. And so you started having same gender people marrying each other, started off in some of the more radical church communities, Quakers, Yintarian Universalists. You also saw some specifically Christian, gay, lesbian, bisexual churches that formed their own communities and started doing marriage. So this marriage practice started happening outside of the support of the state, but with the support of various religious communities. And then this was taken up in the United States and many other places in the world. So the point where I think last week, the Thai government overwhelmingly supported gay marriage and lesbian marriage, same gender, same gender marriage. And it was, I don't know, 80%, 90% for including a lot of conservative figures in Thailand. And so non-violent action is not always about being against. It's often about what we call acting out the future today. What kind of future do you want? And you act that future out today. Another example is during the AIDS crisis when there weren't AIDS drugs available for many people with AIDS because it was very limited and they were still trial testing and they weren't making these available to the general public. And so what the gay community did is they, in the United States in certain places, they formed underground pharmacies where they took the drugs from those who had died, the leftover drugs, and repurposed them and gave them to people who were still living. And these underground pharmacies then grew in to be substantially above ground, well-known health clinics that are still here today. So I'm very interested in trying to highlight in my survey of non-violent struggle the kinds of positive things that people can do to live out their future today. There's so many threads I want to follow Michael as we go through this. One thing I want to touch back on since we're talking about Sudan and other places in Africa. Back in 2011, Arab Spring was such an exciting thing going on. Egypt, the dictator there, was taken out and for a while you had an elected government and eventually they disappeared and we've got a worse dictator than ever there. And I'm afraid that happened in a number of countries in that northern part of Africa. I think tactics of non-violence were used non-violent struggle were used in a number of those countries and they were successful except they didn't go far enough or they didn't have the ending results that one would have wanted. Talk to me about what was there, what was missing. Syria is the big case because one of the primary teachers of non-violence there was a wonderful culture of non-violence that had been birthed and grew in Syria. It worked for a while but then it fell apart. I mean it degenerated into civil war. Yes indeed the Arab Spring was very encouraging. We had a whole bunch of countries that really challenged their dictators. In some cases kicked their dictators out. In other countries there were some reforms that the governments were forced to take on to stay in power. But indeed pretty much all of those democratic revolutions have gone backwards and we've seen democracy go backwards in many countries not just in North Africa and West Asia but also in other parts of the world and there's a danger in the United States that the democracy may suffer grievous injury in the near future. So one of the challenges of course is it's one thing to bring down a dictator and you can use tactics to sometimes dissolve the power under a dictator. But with society fragmented it's often very difficult to then get a unity around a new government and dictators purposely work this way when they're in powers to keep society divided and this division is often very difficult to get rid of quickly and often the unity is just being against the dictator but that's not a whole lot of unity. Unfortunately Tunisia which had the best shot at really moving into a democratic sphere did not. I wish the United States government would pay more attention to these democratic transitions and pour much more political economic resources into these countries if they're wanting it to support democracy and their development than we've done. We're very happy to send in weapons and guns everywhere and even our military anywhere to protect our allies and doing our whatever foreign policy things we the United States wants to do. But I wish the United States had put more energy into supporting Sudan, put more energy into supporting Tunisia a few years ago in the Nepal revolution. They have been able to make it by themselves but they pulled down their absolutist monarch through nonviolent struggle predominantly and yet they haven't really had the kind of support that I think emerging democracies deserve. So we don't quite have our priorities correct here in the United States. We're still relying too heavily on the gun and militarism unfortunately. So that's the quick version of the what we sometimes people call the Middle East and North Africa. I like to use the term West Asia rather than Middle East but there's no question that things are again becoming rather unstable in North Africa. This is related to the conflict in Israel and its neighbors, Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and others, Iranians and many of the Arab states are friendly with Israel and yet their people are generally very hostile to what Israel is doing. So there's a significant amount of instability and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some serious outbreaks of protest and resistance soon against some of these Arab states not just because of the Palestinian issue and Israel's behavior but that would be the trigger. Many of these countries are ruled by very very corrupt elites, extremely corrupt elites. In addition to resources like your book civil resistance tactics in the 21st century there's the online database that's worth more. Could you talk a little bit about it? I'm wondering where people who want to practice nonviolence, where they should be grabbing their resources from. There are a number of great places for people to get good resources. Swarthmore College has this wonderful database that was started by George Lakey who you've interviewed a number of times and Lee Smithy now and the professors there and the students have come forward with something like 1400 case studies of nonviolent campaigns around the world. There's a specific format they use that you can really look through and compare many many of these campaigns and they have campaigns literally all over the world many different kinds of sectors whether it's union labor rights, whether it's taking on dictators, whether it's gender rights or ethnic minority rights or religious rights or environmental activism. There's just wonderful examples of campaigns and it's a very searchable database and it's really quite splendid and growing. That's a great place to go to for inspiration and understanding. My book is just about tactics which is just the ground floor of nonviolence and the great thing about the Swarthmore database is that it focuses on campaigns. Campaigns are what we really call the collection of tactics together make up a campaign that is what we often attribute to success or failure or some sort of movement and I would say that we have too many people sometimes just focusing on the tactics of which is what my book and database do and don't focus enough on campaigns because when you have campaigns you have to sequence things you have to plan you have to have goals and often realistic goals if you're going to succeed. And so the art of campaigning is something that you can learn in a variety of places. Training for change is a good place to learn from that. Beautiful trouble is a really spectacular place for resources on nonviolent organizing and campaigning. For a real research nerd and people that really want to dig down into the weeds into the research I would go to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict they are the folks that actually published my book the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and they have an enormous set of studies and research papers on nonviolent struggles around the world and I highly recommend them they have spent a lot of money millions and millions of dollars in getting resources into many languages there's something like 60 or 70 languages on their website. That's a great place for people who have to research to go for resources on nonviolence. I'm a big fan of nonviolent news which comes out every Friday Rivera Sun is the author of this just before this radio interview I skimmed through the weekly nonviolent news report if you want to know about bottom up protests and struggles all over the world on a weekly basis I highly recommend this I sometimes it's really easy to be focused on top down news oh we're interested in the presidents and the you know the Supreme Courts and the parliaments and they and that's important and we need to focus on that but we also need to balance that with spending time looking at people power movements around the world many of them that could use help or raising up so that's another great resource nonviolent news. That's a very good start I think we're exhausted already the only one that you mentioned giving specific training is training for change but I suspect there are other folks out there for many of us Gandhi's work in India was one and then MLK Jr they were doing this kind of movement they're doing a campaign as opposed to specific tactics and I also want to make sure we toss in something here Michael about some people say well yeah but it doesn't win all the time so why should we bother and when people ask that do they realize that they're saying they're not realizing perhaps that in every war there's this side fighting it's this side one side loses 50 percent of wars are guaranteed to be lost at the very least and maybe worse than that because both sides can lose and decimate each other so the training in any case is really important so besides training for change where would we love well a beautiful trouble is also another strong online really good online resource for training and trainers there's a global grassroots network led by Katherine who's frayed tech the group that sponsors that is called Solidarity 2020 and beyond which is a mouthful Steve Chase who you used to I think I've interviewed in the past I used to be co-director of this effort to support non-violent trainers around the world so people can go to the non-baunts international website because we are this fiscal sponsor of this a set of groups Solidarity 2020 and beyond and the global grassroots trainers network and that's a great place to get trainers as well let's talk a bit more about non-violence is not always successful but the studies actually indicate that non-violent struggles are more often successful than I say struggles I'm really talking about campaigns are more successful more often than violent efforts yes that's what the data from about ten years ago showed Maria Stefan and Erica Chenoweth wrote an important book on this topic and papers in which they studied more than a hundred non-violent struggles going back a hundred years and came to the conclusion that 53% of the time non-violent struggles were successful and about 25% arm struggles were successful those numbers have attenuated a little bit in recent years we've had quite a few failures on the non-violent front in the recent years and then we had the Taliban succeed in an arm struggle recently but we still see a significant advantage to non-violent struggle over arm struggle arm struggle requires enormous resources usually in a backer almost always who can provide the weaponry and the ammunition to fight with modern armies and it's very rare to see successful arm struggles because the you have to have a huge outside backer in order for that to happen non-violent struggles don't require an outside power often an outside power is detrimental to non-violent struggle we also know not only that non-violent struggle is more often successful than arm struggle but that the transition towards democracy is more assured or more likely put it that way then through arm struggle if you have an arm struggle chances are there's going to be another armed coup or another civil war in another set of years to resolve that country so there lots of good utilitarian reasons to take non-mount struggle if you want to win there are many of us also that don't like harming people and wish that we could figure out ways to change things without killing and harming others so there's also a moral and ethical thing to it but it's very tricky for us as an international group and me as an American of European heritage to be telling people around the world what is right and wrong like I spent years in the Burma Myanmar situation which is now in full blown civil war and terrible suffering going on right now in which we train more than a thousand grille is in non-violent struggle we didn't tell the grille struggles you're bad people you shouldn't be killing people we didn't tell as foreigners and as users and as we didn't say that we said look non-violent struggle can be powerful it can really be powerful and you should really take a look at it if you're going to do that's how you might want to go about doing it and so often we have to be careful in our advocacy for non-violence to be careful about moralizing or telling people what to do now we're founded by a Palestinian and he's he's in a situation where Palestinians are at the bottom of the marginalized hierarchy barrel barrel and so but therefore at the top of the hierarchy of in the politically correct universe of people who have moral assuasion and so he unabashedly will go around the world saying that non-violence is the way to go on an ethical basis but he's in a much different situation than me as a privileged American I do want to ask you a little bit about the leadership for non-violence international and again folks the website is non-violenceinternational.net we're speaking with Michael Beer who is co-director at this point and that's a recent appellation because before he was the director we do have the interview with Michael Beer on the northern spirit radio org website also on that website you'll find interviews with Steve Chase and other folks who've been mentioned here we've got a lot of resources and we're trying to spread the word because what we want to do is lift up world healing and that's of course what they're all about so come to northernspiritradio.org check out our website listen to these interviews and make the connections because none of these campaigns is successful because of one person they're successful because one person meets another meets another reaches out so please do support these campaigns these efforts share this information and please support Northern Spirit Radio we've been going for 19 years now there's some 35 stations nationwide in the US that carry our programs and I want you to support those stations as well because getting out this kind of news making this kind of change in the world is something that's done well together it's not one billionaire who's controlling and pulling the strings here as a matter of fact for financing for Northern spirit radio we depend on donations of listeners not on corporations not on government because those won't necessarily represent the interests that all of you have and listen to this program so please make a donation to support us support your local community radio station support organizations like nonviolence international and let's make this world a better place now again we're speaking with Michael Beer here I wanted to talk about the leadership Samia Wadd is now co-director why did that happen were you getting tired yes well I am getting older and Samia Wadd is a little bit younger than I am and he's based in Bethlehem and he's a remarkable Palestinian leader in his own right and he's been one of the few Palestinians that's really been reaching out to Israelis and saying to Israelis that I understand your trauma in the Holocaust but don't let your trauma then cause trauma for the Palestinians and so what he started to do is he started to do trauma healing workshops with Palestinians and with Israelis realizing that until the Israelis really confront their traumas and their fears it's going to be very difficult for the Palestinians to get some sort of freedom and equality and so one of the great things about bringing him on board is that nonviolence international is one of the few places where Palestinians and Israelis and Jews will work together particularly to try to build a shared future together and that is whether you believe in two state or one state that is really what U.S. foreign policy and the world policy should be which is to support Palestinians and Israelis to live together they have to figure out exactly what those medallities are but in fact it's hard to get Israelis and Palestinians to work together there's a lot of fear there's a lot of damage a lot of hatred and Sammy faces threats from his own community for working with Israelis to try to address these traumas of the Jewish community that are now being enacted unfortunately on the Palestinians so I'm looking forward to his leadership he's also going to be pioneering a leadership training program called a nonlinear leadership program which I'm very keen to learn about that he's found successful in Palestinian wants to take it around the world and one of the interesting things about these Palestinians is that yes they're nationalist but there's something about them that also makes them very universalist they're interested in the whole world they're not just interested in their own situation even though they're suffering genocidal situation in Gaza and whatnot they're very concerned about the planet there's this fellow named maz and kumsia who is a great professor and leader in Palestine who focus on biodiversity he says yeah I mean I'm focused he says he says all the time on trying to free Palestinians from our apartheid situation but this is just one struggle among many in the world and climate change and ecological collapse is going to take us all out so it's remarkable that you have people who are just trying to survive and yet have the capacity to be concerned about the world's problems if people go to the nonviolence international website nonviolenceinternational.net website amongst other things I think they'd find a link to talk a speech by Mubarak Awad there was an interfaith if tar that he organized for prayers for peace alliance in Philadelphia if I had gone and listened to that which I should have what would I've learned what I what would I have heard from embark and how is that a wad related to Samia wad? Mubarak is Samia wad's uncle and Mubarak is really quite an inspiring figure he was arguably the primary leader of the first intifada in Palestine and he got exiled by the Israelis in 1988 because he was so dangerous and he is a big fan of nonviolence struggle and believes that it's because he doesn't want to kill anybody he says this because his own father was killed in front of him on his doorstep in 1948 during the knockba but his mother always told him do not revenge do not kill your father would not want that and so he's devoted his life to teaching people about the importance of forgiveness in fact he was on a call last week where there is significant discussion about forming a new effort called forgiveness international some sort of new global network to be still determined in which we support peoples around the world to forgive both a for individual transgressions but also for group transgression so he's out there saying that if we're going to survive in this world today the way Dr. King said we have a choice between nonviolence and nonexistence Mubarak is very much for nonviolence and we really do believe that this is the path forward for the world and I encourage everybody to listen to his storytelling which is remarkable in modern day USA two struggles are very much on our radar people didn't hear about what happened in Senegal or at least I believe almost nobody in the US heard about that most people are unaware of what you've talked about in Sudan and on and on I mean we're completely ignorant of that but we do know what's happening in Ukraine at least to some degree and we're also aware of what's happening Israel and particularly in Gaza so our news plays a big part in what we care about what we don't care about what relationship is there between nonviolence international and what's happening Ukraine and in Gaza in Ukraine we've had a long standing program they're trying to support nonviolent resistance first during the initial invasion which was reasonably successful in summer sex and then in the last year with not a lot of success unfortunately we've been trying to support the anti-war movement in Russia unfortunately Russia's become quite totalitarian and people are too afraid to speak up there's a lot of passive resistance the government is hesitant to go to a full draft for example because they know that there's a lot of resistance in society unfortunately the war is continuing and incredibly damaging to Ukraine and Russia I mean the number of people dying every day there is extraordinary we probably have 400 people dying a day at least in Ukraine Russia and this war is is really badly damaging both societies it's very very important for the world to try to stop this war and come collectively try to put pressure on the parties to stop there there is a connection between Russia invading Ukraine and what Israel has done because Russia has occupied an annexed Ukraine and this is what Israel has also done against the international law in Palestine it is invaded Syria and Lebanon occupying the Golan Heights and the Sheba farms it's annexed East Jerusalem and unfortunately the Trump administration in this last days recognized these illegal annexations of Golan height and East Jerusalem in exchange for doing that the United States got Israel to agree to Morocco's annexation of the Western Sahara people aren't aware that the Morocco has invaded occupied Western Sahara since 1975 this is against the what the international court of justice said was the right of the self-determination for the Sahrawi people who were suffering under Spanish rule to have and so for the last what is that 54 years there's been this occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco with full U.S. support and Kissinger was fully supportive of Morocco invading there are 200,000 people that live in the desert to this day 54 years in exile and refugee camp in the middle of nowhere and it's tremendous suffering and so not all it's international we believe that to end war we need two things we need nonviolent resistance and we need international law we have to have norms and if countries are going to be able to invade their neighbors and take over territory we will never end war and so the world needs to put say no to Russia invading Ukraine no to Israel invading and annexing the Golan Heights and the East Jerusalem and no to Morocco invading the West Sahara these are the four primary cases of this kind in the world today and unfortunately the United States is very hypocritical we're enormously supportive of the annexations and recognize the annexations of Morocco and Israel but when our adversaries do it like Russia all were offended and say that the rules based order is deteriorating so if the United States could be a little bit more consistent in supporting international law rather than our exceptionalist statecraft we would be in a lot better place certainly that makes great sense to me you talked about training by other people that they're out there doing that do you Michael Beer get out and train people I'm not training many people anymore for a couple of reasons one is that as a North American guy of European heritage in my 60s people aren't really wanting even though I have a fair amount of experience and whatnot people are really not needing or wanting my skill set in that way and I also haven't lived under a lot of dictators around the world and there are plenty of people now in the world who for generations we've been training people around the world to be trainers themselves and so there are superb trainers from Sudan from Serbia from Russia from Thailand from Indonesia I mean I can go on and on there's so many wonderful trainers out there doing the good work I'm not really the I don't speak the language and I don't have the necessary experience and credibility to train people and prepare people in many situations that other people are so I spend most of my time referring people to better trainers and to better training networks so I'm actually doing a fairly small amount of training now there's a little detour I want to take I did interview your sister Jenny Beer about a book that she put together I've interviewed you previously but I've also met here at the French General Conference gathering where we're meeting right at Haverford College I've met your sister Sandy as well you've got some amazing siblings there and I guess my question is do you have heavy competition in your family to be the best non-violent competitor in the family no I wouldn't say that we're terribly competitive in that regard but we have an unusual family our family is we have a mother who's Quaker and a father who's Jewish and I think we got really wonderful things from both traditions we have very internationalist arm in our mindset strong women figures in both of these cultures and communities our father was a professor our mother was historian of sorts so we're very into the importance of the power of knowledge and learning and the importance of social change and one of the interesting things that's occurred recently is that on October 7th when Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other Palestinians invaded Israel we had Jewish third cousins who were killed and then others taken hostage on that day and so we're in an unusual position of even though we didn't really know them because they're so distant in relation we have an unusual connection to the conflict over there and at the same time I had a close colleague of mine whose Gazan lose his father and five siblings and sixteen other members of his family in a bombing of Gaza in later in October and so that hit me very very hard and the gift of my Jewish heritage is that I get connected to people obviously in Israel that didn't expect to be connected to and the conflict in that way but there's a tremendous Jewish heritage of social change and support and I'm in full support of Jewish voice or peace and if not now activists who've been stepping up here in the United States Jews who are really stepping up for Palestinians saying that we can't supporting apartheid anymore there is an interesting side note to that which is that here in Philadelphia is an interesting experiment that I've been helping with and it's called Prayers for Peace Alliance it's the first alliance between Palestinians and Jews in the United States and it's focused on going to Christian nationalist churches and Christian Zionist churches in the Philadelphia area and vigilant at them picketing them and trying to pray with them to see and ask them to reevaluate the kind of Christianity they they have and it's a support of Israel and its opposition to Palestinians and their rights and so as a person of dual heritage along with my siblings I think we're opened up to not being trapped in one world but we're opened up too many and I would encourage all of you out there who have multiple heritages and most of us do really to try to take advantage of your multiple heritages and share those gifts across from one community to the other we all benefit from this. I do think that the bigger our picture of who we is the bigger that picture is the more likely we're going to be able to find peaceful ways forward and that exactly having dual heritage or recognizing I've got Irish I've got German I've got well we don't all have to be enemies and I've got that embodied in my very person as well. There's something you alluded to Michael that I wonder if the preparation has been put in place we take for granted for some 240 some years we've had this experiment in democracy going in the United States and for a lot of people in the world this is the preeminent example of what democracy is that we've never had monarchy mixed with it like England has and and so on so for a lot of people this is democracy and it feels threatened right now and my question is are we prepared for the nonviolent struggle on the US ground itself to keep democracy as that campaign been mapped out. Yes we have some groups that are mapping out this campaign now to try to prepare us for the possible election of Trump to power and Republican colleagues in Congress who seem bent on perhaps ripping up our Constitution and there's of course lots of people who are involved in in electioneering and what not and this is a non-profit radio and non-violence international doesn't take sides in in electoral contests but there are lots of people are very concerned about what will happen if the populist right-wing government comes to power because of what they've said they said they they probably ignore our democracy and democratic boundaries talk about weaponizing for example the Department of Justice for example would be horrifying our Supreme Court this week in the United States has become so corrupt and has issued horrific decisions particularly the Chevron decision which is going to cause enormous problems for our government to function and to keep corporations in line we're going to have corporations running amok here it's really the most damaging and heartbreaking decision of this cycle and there are groups around the country what we're doing we're training we're getting prepared we're getting our communities together at all levels to try to prepare to resist a takeover of this government there are those out there doing the electoral work that's important I will share a third longer term effort that I'm part of as a volunteer which is that I'm a big fan of ranked choice voting and the movement that is substantially led by has been led by Fair Vote and Rob Ritchie a well-known Quaker and this electoral reform is really desperately needed in our country because most of our country operates in polities that are 51-49 either red blue or blue red and so if you're in them 49 percent you don't get anything you're just shut out and so these people don't vote and they whine in some cases they pick up guns and we desperately need a voting system that is proportional so that people can get their people elected so you don't just have two candidates so that we can have multiple parties and this is what ranked choice voting can bring to our country we've been experimenting it with a few places recently I'm in Arlington Virginia and we've been using this to create success it reduces ranker it increases voter turnout almost everybody gets somebody elected that they vote for and I'm a huge fan long term of bringing ranked choice voting to this country as a voting reform to strengthen our democracy because we desperately need to strengthen it that's for sure there's been an extremist tendency it happens in all political parties but particularly in the Republican Party recently and I'm saying over the last eight years because what happened is in primaries within the Republican Party things have been tipped in favor of a more extremist Republican view and so the moderate group has disappeared and there have been a lot of really wonderful Republicans who stepped back or felt like they had to would rank choice and it all helped in those situations. Oh yeah, rank choice voting would help a great deal particularly the proportional rank choice voting where you're voting for seats in the legislature or their county board or the city council because the whole idea here is that you would vote for not just one seat at a time but you maybe vote for three or five seats at a time and in that case when you use rank choice voting you can get various candidates that will fill the spectrum and the Republican and Democratic Party will not be able to control these elections anymore because if you only need 20% or 18% of the vote to win you don't need the Democratic Republican Party and so their role as gatekeepers on who the primary candidates will be in the final election will not be will be overlooked and wither away and so if we can get proportional rank choice voting out there will have multiple parties we won't face this very damaging duopoly that we have right now where extremist candidates in both parties tend to beat a more centrist candidates. So you've already mentioned Michael that that's one of the things you've been volunteering your time towards and I'm just amazed at the thought that you can have any free time to do anything keeping your eye on so many countries so many situations in the world. You seem a pleasant personality upbeat and yet you're looking at a lot of the most stressful situations in the world. How do you do it? Yeah it's a great question. Well for one I live with great privilege. I say I'm thankful every day and I know there are a lot of religious and spiritual traditions in which that's a very important way to keep grounded and I do that. I really revel in and I'm gratefully thankful for the privileges that I have and I know that my privileges are sometimes at the expense of other people. I live this very wealthy lifestyle here in the United States on cheap fossil fuel oil and resources that are gained by a very militaristic country which maintains an economic empire that benefits me enormously. But I do revel in my privilege and the things that I do have that are wonderful so that helps me to be thankful every day and every moment. I also work with other people. I work with an organization non-violence international and network of people around the world who really care about others often people they don't know and that helps. I'm also a Quaker and I'm quite active as a Quaker and this is an important spiritual community for me. It's a seeking community for me that helps me deal with the trauma that I witness and experience. I work with a lot of people who are broken a lot of people who are hurting who suffered grievously and it's very hard to take in suffering day after day after day without going to a place for respite and my Quaker meeting and community is one of those places of respite where I can be heard and I can share deeply and listen deeply with others. I'm thankful you've got that support that you do the work you do. I am amazed at the breadth of the knowledge and the number of people across the world that you carry in your heart day to day. It's a beautiful thing to see and I actually feel some tears building me right now as I think of that care reaching out across the world. I want people again to go check out nonviolenceinternational.net in the many places that they support in the world, the resources they have like Michael's book Silver Resistance Tactics in the 21st century. That's only one of many resources. I do want to get to know Sammy Awad one of these days and we'll connect up and we'll do that and I just am so thankful for your work and your time here today for spirit in action. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Again, the links are all on northernspiritradio.org and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World performed by Sarah Thompson. Check out All Things Spirit in Action on northernspiritradio.org. Guests, links, stations and a place for your feedback, suggestions and support. Thanks for listening. I'm Mark Helps-Meet and I hope you find deep roots to support you to grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our deeply ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]
Our 2nd visit with Michael Beer, director of Nonviolence International since 1998. Last time Michael talked mainly about his book,