Greenpeace’s activists and supporters before the Global Climate March, November 29th 2015, Madrid. Text on the banner: “100% Renewables.”. Licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionShare Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: OsvaldoGago.
By Kathie MM
New Year’s Resolution 1 comes from the long-time successful activist group Greenpeace International. They have resolved: Tomorrow we rise.
Here are their specific resolutions:
“Tomorrow we break the cycle of overconsumption.
Tomorrow we hold corporations accountable.
Tomorrow we try to decrease the terrible impact of the industrial livestock machine.
Tomorrow, we stand together so that people everywhere are treated a little more equally.
Tomorrow we shake power structures that only serve the few at the expense of the many.
Tomorrow we are positive about our future and will rebuild the planet the way it should be.
Because tomorrow, we resist and we rise.
We’ll see you there.”
Will Greenpeace and Engaging Peace see your signatures on petitions? Will we hear your voices at rallies on behalf on the environment and peace? Will you join us at the ballot box next November, supporting candidates who understand the threats to our environments, and our futures?
Willyou rise and resist?
Will you send us your own resolutions to share with other readers?
Now is the hour: Use the holidays to pledge your commitment to peace and social justice.
And please support Engaging Peace. You can click here to donate.
Title page of The Golden Fleece by William Vaughan (1577-1641). 1626. In the public domain. Memorial University of Newfoundland website (and there is fleecing going on in the public domain today too).
My last post shows how lies and manipulations have the country into a state of ever-growing fear and anger. Unfortunately, without active resistance, the current crisis may go….
From Bad to Worse
To be clear, it certainly makes sense that our core concerns — about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness — should be front-and-center when it comes to thoughtful deliberations about matters of public policy and the common good. Meaningful, far-reaching progressive change requires nothing less. But it’s profoundly destructive — and deeply immoral — when these concerns are instead exploited in a manipulative and disingenuous manner to advance narrow interests that bring harm and suffering to so many. That’s the legacy of Trump’s successful presidential campaign. It’s also a disturbing preview of what we should expect from him and his administration going forward.
At the same time, we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s targeting of these concerns as unique. Indeed, back when he was known as just an ethically impaired real estate mogul and entertainer, other plutocracy-enabling leaders in both major parties were relying on similar psychological mind games: to block climate change initiatives (Senator James Inhofe in 2003: “Could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.”); to justify voter suppression tactics (Texas Governor Greg Abbott in 2006: “In Texas, an epidemic of voter fraud is harming the electoral process.”); to defend discriminatory law enforcement practices (former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on stop-and-frisk in 2014: “Every American has a right to walk down the street without getting mugged or killed.”); to oppose wage hikes (New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2012: “Here’s what’s going to happen — they’re going to have to lay people off.”); to preserve healthcare as a profiteer’s paradise (Senator Rand Paul on healthcare as a right in 2011: “I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.”); to protect tax breaks for the super-rich (U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, on the estate tax in 2015: “The death tax is unfair and in conflict with the American Dream”); to turn public education over to greedy privatizers (former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the 2010 premiere of a pro-charter school, anti-teachers’ union film: a “Rosa Parks moment”); and to galvanize support for deadly wars of choice (President George W. Bush in 2002: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”). Those are just a handful of examples.
In some ways, then, Trump’s move to Washington will simply reinvigorate a well-entrenched predatory agenda that already enriches the few at the expense of everyone else. But there’s also something that clearly makes him qualitatively worse than many other prevaricating one-percenters: he brings to the White House a toxic brew of bigotry, belligerence, and brutality. This has obvious and far-reaching significance. It means that those who are now disadvantaged — especially people of color and other marginalized groups — will face even tougher times ahead as scapegoating and misdirected hostility intensify.
But Resistance Isn’t Futile
There are avenues for withstanding and rebuffing the coming onslaught. The mind games used by Trump and others like him are primarily designed to mislead, to confuse, and, most importantly, to suppress broad opposition to extreme inequality and the withering of democracy. That’s why their worst nightmare is the formation of strong coalitions that bridge stubborn cultural, racial, religious, gender, and class divides. Building and nurturing these coalitions must therefore be a top priority. It’s an endeavor that will require unwavering support for those most immediately at risk and, simultaneously, a clear recognition of what we share in common: voices that have grown weaker, opportunities that have grown scarcer, and children whose futures have grown dimmer. In short, organized and unrelenting resistance will be a key element in obstructing the new administration’s calamitous ambitions.
It will be equally important to directly counter and debunk the President-Elect’s continuing barrage of duplicitous psychological appeals. During the election campaign, this effort proved inadequate. In part that’s because there was a widespread failure to fully appreciate the extent to which Trump’s false claims and assurances rang true for millions of disgruntled voters eager for change. Just as problematically, his final opponent was ill-suited to persuasively offer a compelling alternative narrative, one that would energize an electorate yearning for a candidate who’d take their fears, doubts, frustrations, and hopes seriously.
The 2016 election is over. Now it’s time to work together to make sure that Donald Trump’s hollow tales lose their luster and his self-aggrandizing motives are laid bare for all to see. In the weeks and months ahead, Americans of all stripes must come to realize that, through artifice and manipulation, super-sized hucksters have fleeced and betrayed the country and the people that made their staggering wealth and power possible.
Originally published in Counterpunch, December 22, 2016. Reprinted with permission.
Roy Eidelsonis a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.
The violence of those lost to rage helps to justify excesses of state-inflicted oppression and atrocity on the rest of the frightened population (from above).It also helps to justify excesses of subnationally-inflicted oppression and atrocity on that same population (from below) in the form of terrorism, guerilla warfare and/or revolutionary violence. These acts of oppression and atrocity from above and below shock and discombobulate, and often drive the majority even further into hopelessly compliant resignation to whatever violent force eventually reigns victorious.
If, however, the popular majority of a nation or people begins to continually and effectively coordinate acts of nonviolent resistance to violent oppressors (from above and below) then those who profit from violence and oppression are in danger of a decline in their portfolio.
When true revolutionaries achieve this mass mobilization of nonviolent resistance, the desperate atrocities of the violently rebelling minority should become a less credible justification for state oppression and atrocity against the majority.And the ruthless atrocities of the violently dominating state should become a less credible justification for subnational violence also.
Those who can both resist the oppression and violence of others and maintain nonviolent discipline for themselves will come to look more legitimate than subnational guerillas, violent revolutionaries and terrorists.They will also look more legitimate than the terrorists of another kind who often find themselves making decisions on behalf of powerful states and empires.
When this change in perception occurs among a critical mass of people, the nonviolent revolution should be more likely to realize its goals.This may be for better or for worse, but usually (on average) it should achieve better things that what a more exclusively violent revolution might have achieved.And a nonviolent revolution that can maintain its nonviolent discipline to the end should also achieve better things on average than just taking it lying down.
Any place where occupation and tyranny are the norm, living becomes an act of resistance. For many, resistance amounts to the act of throwing a stone. In Kashmir, resistance takes many forms besides pelting stones.
In early March 2013, young Kashmiris took to the streets early in the morning to paint the roads red and to raise their red ribbons and flags in protest to demand the return of the mortal remains of Afzal Guru.
Later in the day Indian forces washed away the red from the streets of Srinagar and other parts of the valley, but the Kashmiris had made their point.
We will not forget, nor will we give up.
Actions like these are not only innovative but also capture the attention of onlookers globally. Young, active Kashmiris recognize the need for the world to be aware of their plight. Bloggers, poets, musicians, and rappers are rising from Kashmir to tell the story of their torn youth and to advocate the cause of their people.
In Kashmir, resistance has become a way of life for generation after generation of people who have learned to rise from beneath the jackboots of foreign troops in new and creative ways. In the words of one young Kashmiri blogger, Abdul Wajid: “Writing; it was not my cup of tea; never.
“But then a blood-splattered summer arrived and my darling vale started bleeding with my people trampled under the anonymous jackboots.
“As a part of reprisal, some brethren picked up guns while other took stones but the blood bullets left no one breathing. So I picked up a pen.”
