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Our Tahrir Square: DC's Freedom Plaza on October 6th
by David Swanson of WarisaCrime.org
When other nations' governments go off track, their people do something about it. In Tunisia and Egypt people have nonviolently claimed power in a way that has inspired Americans in Wisconsin and other states, as well as the people of Spain and the rest of the world.
Washington, D.C., is the weakest point in our democracy, without which state-level reform cannot succeed. Most Americans want our wars ended, our corporations and billionaires taxed, and our rights expanded rather than curtailed. We want our money invested in jobs and green energy, not a global military that can't stop itself. Our government in Washington goes in the opposite direction, opposing popular will on these major issues, regardless of personality or party.
On October 6th, a Thursday, the Afghanistan War will complete its first decade as the United States goes into its 2012 austerity budget. Tahrir Square in Cairo Egypt translates as Liberation Square. We have in Washington, D.C., a square with the similar name: Freedom Plaza. This square is located between the Capitol and the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue, and built into its surface is a map of downtown Washington on which nonviolent resistance actions can be conveniently planned.
Today a coalition of organizations and prominent individuals is announcing at http://october2011.org a plan to begin a people's occupation of Washington, D.C., on October 6th, to build it into something larger on the 7th, 8th, and 9th, and to not leave until we are satisfied. There is absolutely no reason that our government must be permitted to continue functioning on behalf of Wall Street and a war machine. In Afghanistan, the people protest our bombing of their homes. We sit inside our own homes complaining about our economy, our banks, our schools. Instead, we now have a chance to have a say, in solidarity with others around the world, with success just as likely -- if just as shocking to those in power -- as with past U.S. people's movements and the recent advances in Tunisia and Egypt.
This will not be another rally and march on a Saturday, make home movies, pat ourselves on the back, and go home. We are coming to Washington to stay. Today's announcement is an open invitation for all kinds of organizations, national and local, to join in the early planning stages of this campaign. We need not agree on political ideology or party or much else. We need only agree that nonviolent resistance to a government that routinely ignores the will of its people is appropriate in our nation as well -- even above all, given our nation's impact on the environment, global finances, and wars.
Over this past weekend Wikileaks revealed that the U.S. government had been quite upset with Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown for pulling troops out of Iraq, and had accused him of something even worse: of having pulled the troops out in order to please the British public and win an election. What, we might ask, would be wrong with the U.S. government occasionally doing what the U.S. public demands? When I'm in London later this week I will be pleased to let them know we're alive over here with exciting plans for October, and in fact to ask them to join in on October 6th -- they have plenty of good squares over there too.
On the new website http://october2011.org , which lists an impressive number of groups and individuals already committed, you can sign a pledge to be there on October 6th and to stay. But how can you be sure you want to make that commitment? How can you agree to travel great distances and make great sacrifices? Sure, to be part of history, to be able to tell your grandchildren you were there for the most famous event of the new century, you could do it. But how can you be sure that's what this will be? Well, nothing is strictly guaranteed, but you can sign up right here http://october2011.org/besure committing to be there and to do this only if at least 50,000 other people do the same. With that number of dedicated people, we will be able to kick start a process of nonviolent change the likes of which we haven't seen in this country in many years. Sign up there and we'll let you know how many others are with you.
Individuals can sign up and spread the word. You can also post on the website your reasons for being there. So can organizations. By doing so, you join a coalition and will be able to participate in the planning. This is a coalition that is just beginning to be formed. It is not a new organization. Existing organizations that promote the coalition website are in turn promoted by the coalition. Get in touch to learn more: http://october2011.org/contact
Media outlets can also sign on as intending to cover the campaign. Many already have. I'll be discussing this on Lila Garrett's "Connect the Dots" on KPFK today, on the Nicole Sandler Show, on GW on the Hill, and on Scott Harris's "Between the Lines." Others are on lots of other shows. Already independent video producers are devoting themselves to the cause. Check out these videos by Dennis Trainor below. Get inspired. Make your own. Tell your friends. Groups on the West Coast like the Backbone Campaign are already planning training events and travel arrangements. If you need or can offer help getting to D.C. let us know at http://october2011.org/travel In the meantime, take the pledge to be there. That act alone will put a little bit of concern into the minds of those ruining our country, and that will be something new: http://october2011.org
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At last! And all power to this movement. But I have 2 big questions about this most-promising action. First: How will the precise demands for change be articulated, drafted, written out and agreed-upon? If you mean to "stay until change is made," you need very precise goals and criteria. Not least because I fear that thousands are going to be arrested and brutalized.
Second: How far against "profit" as the U.S. economic engine will these demands go? For "Profit" is an irrational equation (Something For Nothing) that MUST produce an "Advantage" for one and "Dis-Advantage" for all others. This is the core formula that MUST GO and be changed---and does this movement/action imagine that mainstream America is ready for it? How can Americans be prepared to understand what October 6 intends?
I think it helpful to consider these excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last book of essays, "The Trumpet of Conscience," 1968---This first one from “Nonviolence and Social Change." For King's plans for a "poor people's occupation of Washington" offer a lot of important insight. Not least, he knows that such a movement and such actions must also be INTERNATIONAL in scope--because the problems killing us certainly are.
"…Of course, by now it is obvious that new laws are not enough. The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35 million poor people in America---not even to mention, just yet, the poor in other nations---there is a kind of strangulation in the air. In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the ‘affluent society’ increases.
"The question that now divides the people who want radically to change that situation is: can a program of nonviolence---even if it envisions massive civil disobedience---realistically expect to deal with such an enormous, entrenched evil?
"…I intend to show that nonviolence will be effective, but not until it has achieved the massive dimensions, the disciplined planning, and the intense commitment of a sustained, direct-action movement of civil disobedience on the national scale….
"…The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.
"Beginning in the New Year, we will be recruiting three thousand of the poorest citizens from ten different urban and rural areas to initiate and lead a sustained, massive, direct-action movement in Washington, D.C. Those who choose to join this initial three thousand, this nonviolent army, this ‘freedom church’ of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills. Then we will move on Washington, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action on jobs and income.
"A delegation of poor people can walk into a high official’s office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. (If you’re poor, if you’re unemployed anyway, you can choose to stay in Washington as long as the struggle needs you.) And if that official says, ‘But Congress would have to approve this,’ or, ‘But the President would have to be consulted on that,’ you can say, ‘All right, we’ll wait.’ And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary.
"If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children, you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.
"The many people who will come and join this three thousand, from all groups in the country’s life, will play a supportive role, deciding to be poor for a time along with the dispossessed who are asking for their right to jobs or income---jobs, income, the demolition of slums, and the rebuilding by the people who live there of new communities in their place; in fact, a new economic deal for the poor.
"…I have said that the problem, the crisis we face, is international in scope. In fact, it is inseparable from an international emergency that involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the whole world.
"Can a nonviolent, direct-action movement find application on the international level, to confront economic and political problems? I believe it can. It is clear to me that the next stage of the movement is to become international.
"National movements within the developed countries---forces that focus on London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa---must help to make it politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.
"But movements in our countries alone will not be enough….So many of Latin America’s problems have roots in the United States of America that we need to form a solid, united movement, nonviolently conceived and carried through, so that pressure can be brought to bear on the capital and government power structures concerned, from both sides of the problem at once. I think that may be the only hope for a nonviolent solution in Latin America today; and one of the most powerful expressions of nonviolence may come out of that international coalition of socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks.
"…In practice, such a decision would represent such a major reordering of priorities that we should not expect that any movement could bring it about in one year or two. Indeed, although it is obvious that nonviolent movements for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed war, we have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice.
"…In this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis: it is an imperative for action."
by Dr. Jack Dempsey
http://AncientLights.org
http://jackdempseywriter.wordpress.com/