Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called the children of God.

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Reposted from YES! Magazine.

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Armed only with their eyes and their consciences, nonviolent intervenors have had remarkable effects–saving lives in Guatemala, sustaining hope in the West Bank, and freeing India from colonial rule. What might happen if the world had a standing nonviolent army of thousands? Could we transform our response to conflict?

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Building a New Force

Michael N. Nagler

 

When Israeli tanks rolled into Ramallah during ìOperation Defensive Shield” last April, they met with a surprise: international volunteers had somehow gotten into the city and walked blithely past them, ignoring threats backed by gunshots fired over their heads, to enter the building where besieged Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was trapped, thus discouraging further military action against him. This was an unusual event in the history of modern warfare. The press noticed. For a while, ìhuman shields” made daily headlines: ìBoth television and newspapers [gave] a heroine´s welcome to Sophia Deeg, a 50-year-old Munich teacher who acted as a human shield for Arafat at his Ramallah compound,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle on May 2.

For a moment, the media gave a glimpse of a radical possibility: a different kind of force, a nonviolent army that could constitute an entirely new and creative response to conflict. Such a force is not a dream; an actual Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is being born. Nonviolent intervention has been going on–without benefit of media coverage–for some time. This new organization is poised to take it to a new stage by creating a 2,000-member professional corps, along with 4,000 reservists, 5,000 volunteers, and a research division, ready to respond wherever there is conflict around the globe.

NP´s mission is not merely to end violence after it has already begun, but to prevent or dampen outbreaks of violent conflict before they escalate. The Peaceforce would enter a conflict only after being invited, with the aim of creating the space for local groups to resolve their own disputes peacefully. NP would draw its membership from throughout the globe, so that it could circumvent political divisions and visa problems. Its 2,000 professional peacekeepers would be paid, trained, and signed on for two-year contracts.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce began to take shape in 1999 when San Francisco-based civil rights and peace activist David Hartsough and veteran St. Paul community organizer Mel Duncan discovered each other at the Hague Peace Conference.

In three years the project, operating from offices in St. Paul and San Francisco, has garnered endorsements from seven Nobel Peace laureates, established bases in Europe and Asia, and built up a network of participants and potential volunteers from around the world, emphasizing the global South, in part to avoid the problem of ‘peace imperialism.´

If all goes well, an international convening event will take place in Delhi, India, November 28 through December 2, 2002. At this event, delegates will elect an international governing committee to carry the dream further, and select a pilot area for its first field effort, based on an in-depth study completed the year before.

A recurrent vision Knowing that success would depend on careful planning, Hartsough and Duncan decided that before the Peaceforce coalesced, they should conduct a feasibility study to document and glean strategy from the many small peace-team projects already working around the globe. What the study found was a 100-year history of nonviolent intervention that has intensified in the last 20 years, yielding a growing body of evidence that nonviolent intervention does work.

Nonviolent intervention is a recurrent vision among people who refuse to believe that humankind is condemned either to fight or stand by helplessly when violence rages. Though people no doubt have stepped in to break up fights as long as there have been fights (the Buddha is said to have defused a war over water this way, and Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu made a name for himself by doing this in the fifth century BCE) what is now called nonviolent intervention arose 100 years ago, in Mahatma Gandhi´s great campaigns for Indian rights in South Africa. When Gandhi was not calling his Satyagraha volunteers ìpilgrims,” he often referred to them as nonviolent ìsoldiers.

Gandhi, who had served in two wars, realized that, while war itself is an unnecessary evil, there are some qualities of war that are not only positive but indispensable. Soldiers need courage, discipline, training, loyalty, and restraint. But nonviolent activists need these qualities even more. Why not turn the restless energies of men (and women) into different channels, creating a disciplined ìarmy of peace?” They would use the same courage and sacrifice, but for the opposite purpose: instead of violence they would harness it for nonviolence; instead of mobilizing what peace theorist Kenneth Boulding would later call ìthreat power,” they would use it for ìintegrative power.

Since Gandhi´s time and especially in the last two decades, various forms of nonviolent third-party intervention across borders have had dramatic successes in protecting life and reducing human rights abuses and destructive conflict all over the world. These interventions have taken a number of different forms.

One element is witnessing–being present as an observer, sharing information with the outside world and demonstrating to all the parties involved that the world is watching. ìMy heart breaks,” a Quaker volunteer in Hebron writes in Peace Team News, ìas I recall the kindness we received from these gentle people, the smiles and the thanks that greeted us, the words of hope … that we might let the world know of their suffering and despair.” (For another story of witnessing in the occupied territories, see ìThe Boy Who Kissed the Soldier”.)

The protected are not the only ones moved by this courageous kind of intervention. This story is told by volunteers who found their way into Jenin blocked by a large group of soldiers, according to the Catholic Radical: After some discussion back and forth, the commanding officer said to them, ìYou people have a lot of faith.” One of them answered, ìWhen the people of Israel fled to the Red Sea, they didn´t even bring a boat, but God got them through.” The officer paused awhile. Then he said, ìGo back 100 meters and cut through the fields.

The mere presence of internationals changes the atmosphere of conflict, often defusing hatred. When they ‘short-circuit´ entrenched hostility in the way we´ve just seen, third parties can actually reawaken the humanity in people under arms. These people are voluntarily risking their own lives and safety to reflect, through their concern, the humanity of those who have become mere victims.

Elana Wesley, part of a team of internationals in the Balata refugee camp in Palestine in June, describes her team´s efforts: ìAs the Israeli forces made their way from house to house, knocking down joint walls between families, the internationals tried to explain to soldiers that the doors were open to adjoining rooms and apartments and there was no need to make holes in walls to gain access. The internationals offered to walk in front of the soldiers so they could enter through doors rather than destroying walls.

The phrase that I´ve emphasized illustrates one of the key principles of nonviolent intervention: non- partisanship. You are not there to protect one group from another, even when your actions do have that effect. You are trying not to be part of the political mix at all. You are there to protect peace, for everyone, and that means getting in the way of violence against anyone–as did the African-American woman from Michigan Peace Teams who covered a fallen Klansman with her own body when he was attacked by an anti-racist mob.

Another kind of nonviolent intervention is accompaniment. Peace Brigades International volunteers have successfully accompanied threatened human rights workers for 20 years now all over Central America, East Timor, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. They monitor, and thus moderate or prevent, human rights abuses–and in the extreme they can even stand between armed groups to stop violence.

War-stoppers The latter kind of action–the real ‘war stopper´– has captured the imagination of visionaries since Anglican minister Maude Roydon tried to raise an ìarmy” of peacemakers to get between Chinese and invading Japanese forces in 1932. Unarmed groups within a society– the civilians who interposed themselves between government forces and the Polisario guerillas in the Western Sahara in the 1970s, for example–have put themselves between hostile forces and stopped potentially disastrous conflicts. But the method has yet to be tested by third parties intervening on a large scale.

The largest peace teams right now are active in one of the places where the violence is worst–in Colombia. ìLarge,” of course, means ridiculously small when compared to the kind of force needed for armed operations. Peace Brigades International´s team in that country is all of 36 people, yet they are succeeding not only in protecting threatened human rights workers but also the fledgling peace communities in the north of the country.

It is the potency of such tiny efforts that inspires activists to dream of what a larger project might accomplish. If 36 people can shift the terms of conflict, ìWhat would it mean if there were 100 of us?” asks Donna Howard, who is furnishing protective accompaniment to a woman whose partner was recently assassinated in Guatemala. Howard is part of the team building the Nonviolent Peaceforce, which asks the far more ambitious question: What would it mean if the world had at its disposal thousands of trained nonviolent soldiers?

The new project, if it succeeds, will result in a worldwide peace service capable of intervening in a conflict or incipient conflict more quickly than the UN peacekeeping division and–more importantly–with a different kind of power from that of national militaries. While the US government insists there is no alternative to endless war, the Nonviolent Peaceforce is quietly attempting to institutionalize a proven alternative. If it succeeds, the world will have two kinds of standing army to choose from.

The NP study concludes that nonviolent intervention is humanity´s greatest chance to mobilize civil society against the war system, and finally to bring it to an end. As long as the international community can think of nothing else to do but bomb someone to stop some conflict it deems intolerable, as long as societies know of no other way to defend themselves but to take up arms, war will be with us. But when they do come to know that there is actually an alternative, more and more people will demand that their governments choose it.

Recently, Kathy Kern, a longterm nonviolent volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron, found herself shouting to an Israeli soldier who warned her (in an unmistakable American accent) not to try to rescue a woman and child trapped in a house that they had encircled with armored vehicles. ìYou are putting yourself in danger,” the soldier warned. Kathy yelled back, ìEveryone here is in danger.” That gave him pause. Then he added, ìKathy, you are making a fool of yourself. You are turning this into a circus.

Hmm. This could be the best thing that ever happened to the war system.

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For more information about local Peaceforce affinity groups forming in a number of cities, visit www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org. The Nonviolent Peaceforce is organizing Work a Day for Peace on September 11, 2002, and invites people to donate that day´s wages to the group. Michael N. Nagler is professor emeritus of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of its Peace and Conflict Studies Program. He is the author of Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future, which won an American Book Award.

Reposted from YES! Magazine.

Reposted from YES! Magazine.

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Getting land for a quarter million of Brazil´s poorest people was the first task of the Landless Workers Movement. Now comes the question of building a new life

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Of Land and Hope

Frances Moore LappÈ & Anna LappÈ

Brazil had always held tremendous power for me as I (Frances) struggled to grasp why some eat and others do not. In the early 1970s, the experts were telling us that hunger–at home and abroad–was caused by food scarcity. And yet countries like Brazil, a leading agricultural exporter, had a GNP ranking in the world´s top ten, while tens of thousands of its citizens starved. If ever there was a place where hunger could not be blamed on scarcity, it was Brazil.

Hunger in Brazil persists not because of a lack of food, but because of a lack of democracy. Inequality in Brazil is so extreme only Sierra Leone ranks worse.

Today, one percent of Brazil´s landowners control almost half of the arable land–leaving thousands of acres idle–while millions of rural people have no land at all.

Land reform has been an obvious focus of efforts for democracy in Brazil, but I knew all attempts at land reform had been snuffed out with peasant blood. Landowners had too much power–political, economic, and military; the landless too little. (In fact, it was partly the president´s threat of land reform that triggered a US-condoned military coup in 1964).

But in 1986, with the end of military rule, the landless got a key to power. The constitution, adopted that year, includes a clause calling for land reform. If land is not serving a ìsocial function,” the government has a constitutional right to redistribute it.

At first there was little political will to make land reform more than an article on paper, but a movement emerged to ensure the government made good on its promise. This movement is the Landless Workers Movement, or the MST, for its name in Portuguese. It has been wresting idle land from landowners, challenging Brazil´s large-scale agribusiness model, and pressing Brazil´s relatively new government for democracy.

Almost 20 years old, the MST´s efforts seem to be working. Today, the MST has settled a quarter of a million families on more than 15 million acres in thousands of settlements across almost every Brazilian state.

On our first day in Brazil, we head to the MST´s national headquarters. Sitting in a small, stone-walled room, we are greeted by a man with the build of a farmer and the language of a philosopher.

Jo„o Pedro StÈdile is one of the founders of the MST. Like millions of Brazilians, Jo„o Pedro comes from a farming family, so his personal story is the perfect place to begin.

ìMy grandparents and parents worked the land for more than a century but ended up with nothing,” he said. ìI was one of the few in my family who had a chance to study. At school, the church taught us that it was wrong to conform to inequity. When I graduated, I went back to work with the poor. Remember,” he underscored, ìthis was during military rule. No gathering of any size was tolerated. But we gathered ten thousand and managed to raise the price of grapes.”

Jo„o Pedro took many of the lessons of these early years to his work as a founding member of the MST. One of the central lessons is that you can´t succeed alone. From the very beginning, the MST worked with a shared leadership model. Today, Jo„o Pedro tells us, if Brazil´s president asks for a meeting with the head of the MST, all 21 of their leadership committee show up.

Another lesson: Actions speak louder than words. The MST analyzes which idle lands offer the most agricultural promise, brings landless together, and–under the cover of night–they occupy the land. MST members build temporary shelters and start working the land while the leadership presses the government to transfer the title. Today, thousands of families continue living in encampments waiting for official titles.

The process hasn´t been easy. The Movement has faced serious obstacles–from bad press to government hostility to violent attacks. We learn that more MST members have been killed struggling for land reform than were ìdisappeared” during the two decades of the Brazilian military dictatorship. During our time with the MST, we met dozens who have experienced firsthand the real-life threats of pushing for land reform in a country still largely controlled by landholders.

Facing fear

A few days after meeting Jo„o Pedro, we get to see the fruits of the MST´s labors. On our way to one of the encampments, we notice a guardhouse that was set up to warn families of attacks by landowners and gunmen.

Minutes later, we sit outside an MST standard-issue, a shack made of black plastic sheets wrapped around poles. We try to imagine these past four years of waiting for official approval, protected from the elements by nothing more than thin plastic.

Baby chicks peep at our feet as we talk with a family that has been here since the early attacks–Luis and Selga Barch, their five children, and a baby grandson. I notice their affection with each other–passing a bubbly baby among family, hands on shoulders.

Luis and Selga learned about the MST on the local radio. We find out later that the MST operates over 30 community radio stations in its attempt to counteract the mega-media monopoly here.

ìYes, that was a hard time,” Selga says, referring to gunmen the landowner hired to remove them.

ìWe were afraid,” Luis adds. ìBut we had no choice; our land was too rocky, too small.” Now, though they are still technically landless, they have the support of a community of dozens of other families, and like hundreds of thousands of other families may soon have official title to land.

Whose choices?

We´ve been reading press coverage that makes the MST sound like neo-Communists. This gets us thinking. The MST says it´s helping free people from the shackles of poverty, but is it just a different drumbeat with which one must align one´s step? We look for real signs of choice.

According to MST official Geraldo Fontes, in encampments, families decide together how to organize their community. Less than a third, we learn, choose cooperatives. Forty percent choose private plots. The rest opt for a common area as well as private plots.

Two days after visiting the Barches, we´re standing in an MST settlement, Perpetual Seguro, near the town of Pitanga in the middle of the Southern state of Paran·. The settlement sits on a high bluff overlooking rolling green hills. We meet Nivaldo Fernando, a four-year resident. Now, hammer in hand, he builds his first home.

Among the 40 families, few were part of the original encampment. We´re curious about the newcomers. ìThey have come because of our cooperative,” Nivaldo says. ìYou can make more money. Each individual can specialize. My specialty is building and also selling quilts.”

ìWho decides on your specialty?” I ask.

ìThe group decided based on what people are good at and what´s needed. [If there is a conflict] we discuss it. But it was my choice to be in the cooperative. It feels good making a contribution. Plus, say I´m building houses and you´re harvesting the corn and the weather is bad, we all share that loss. It´s not fair to blame the farmer if it doesn´t rain, is it?”

The cooperative seems to work well, so we´re curious why other families aren´t choosing it.

ìMost are still afraid,” Nivaldo´s wife, Doraci, says. ìSmall farmers don´t like to rely on others. But we make the rules for ourselves, for practical reasons. A lot of the original people didn´t want to be a part of the cooperative, so they went to other encampments. Now many want to come back because the cooperative is working.”

A lot of shifting and sorting out–that´s what we´re sensing everywhere in the MST. People are trying on new roles and seeing what works for them.

Pizza and the neo-liberal model

We return from the countryside to the capital of Paran·, Curitiba. We´ve just met brothers Dirceu and Vilmar Boufleuer at the MST´s headquarters and headed to an all-you-can-eat pizza parlor. Biting into our first slice of pizza, we ask why they joined the movement.

ìI was a seminarian,” says Dirceu, ìbut my faith called me to do something more practical.”

ìChristianity and MST are similar,” Vilmar adds. ìThey both value people. Capitalism only cares about production; it doesn´t care about the individual.”

At this, some Christians might cringe. In the US , opposing capitalism is tantamount to endorsing communism. But since arriving in Brazil, we´ve been hearing about the MST creating businesses to function within the market. It´s not the market itself that violates the brothers´ faith; it´s the elevation of the market above all other values, including dignity and health.

And it´s here–in the realm of values–that the MST differs from the neo-liberal model. Vilmar and Dirceu tell us it´s the neo-liberal model that has turned Brazil into the world´s third-ranked agricultural exporter and the number-one exporter of coffee, sugar, and orange juice. It explains why two-thirds of Brazil´s grain feeds livestock, not people. What Vilmar and Dirceu dream of in its place is what the MST is creating–communities coming together to decide how to organize themselves, educate their children, and grow their food.

The birth of citizens

Most people are suspicious of movements that claim great moral purpose. Such movements start using power for their own ends. That´s the assumption, that´s the fear.

And yet many of our conversations with the MST revolved around community and values. So when we get a chance, we ask JosÈ Paulo dos Santos Pires, a long-time member, how the MST develops these values.

ìSociety cultivates individualism and competition,” he answered. ìWe in the MST have been brought up under this system. This creates problems in some of the older settlements where we didn´t talk much about values. A lot of people thought that land would be enough. But soon they find out that they are still illiterate and have no resources to make the land productive.

ìThey realize with time, through debates and seminars, that they have to get together to decide what to plant and how to buy seeds. They may have to join a demonstration, even occupy City Hall to get a school for their children. They acquire the consciousness that they wouldn´t be able to do any of this individually.”

Paulo´s words bring to mind what Jo„o Pedro said about getting the landless involved in the Movement.

ìThe first step is losing naÔve consciousness,” he said, ìno longer accepting what you see as something that cannot be changed.” (We were amused by the irony that in the US, a person gets labeled naÔve who believes that things can change.) ìThe second step is realizing you won´t get anywhere unless you work together.”

Once you start believing a better life is possible, you also must come to believe you have the power to make change. So, Jo„o Pedro told us, the Movement also builds this confidence. In the process, he explained, ìyou forget how to say ‘yes sir´ and learn to say ‘I think thatÖ´ This is when the citizen is born.”

We went to Brazil thinking we´d learn about land reform. But we left realizing that the MST´s biggest achievement may not be in land reform, nor in helping people build dignified places to live, nor even in reducing infant mortality. It may be in the creation of citizens, people who believe they can create what does not yet exist.

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Adapted from Hope´s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore LappÈ, author of Diet for a Small Planet and more than a dozen other books and Anna LappÈ, cofounder, with Frances, of the Small Planet Fund  and Friends of the MST .

Reposted from YES! Magazine.

Reposted from The Guardian.

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They came, they saw, they conquered, and now the Americans dominate the world like no nation before. But is the US really the Roman empire of the 21st century? And if so, is it on the rise – or heading for a fall?

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The American Empire?

Jonathan Freedland

The word of the hour is empire. As the United States marches to war, no other label quite seems to capture the scope of American power or the scale of its ambition. “Sole superpower” is accurate enough, but seems oddly modest. “Hyperpower” may appeal to the French; “hegemon” is favoured by academics. But empire is the big one, the gorilla of geopolitical designations – and suddenly America is bearing its name. Of course, enemies of the US have shaken their fist at its “imperialism” for decades: they are doing it again now, as Washington wages a global “war against terror” and braces itself for a campaign aimed at “regime change” in a foreign, sovereign state. What is more surprising, and much newer, is that the notion of an American empire has suddenly become a live debate inside the US. And not just among Europhile liberals either, but across the range – from left to right.

Today a liberal dissenter such as Gore Vidal, who called his most recent collection of essays on the US The Last Empire, finds an ally in the likes of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. Earlier this year Krauthammer told the New York Times, “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire’.” He argued that Americans should admit the truth and face up to their responsibilities as the undisputed masters of the world. And it wasn’t any old empire he had in mind. “The fact is, no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman empire.”

Accelerated by the post-9/11 debate on America’s role in the world, the idea of the United States as a 21st-century Rome is gaining a foothold in the country’s consciousness. The New York Review of Books illustrated a recent piece on US might with a drawing of George Bush togged up as a Roman centurion, complete with shield and spears. Earlier this month Boston’s WBUR radio station titled a special on US imperial power with the Latin tag Pax Americana. Tom Wolfe has written that the America of today is “now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as… Rome under Julius Caesar”.

But is the comparison apt? Are the Americans the new Romans? In making a documentary film on the subject over the past few months, I put that question to a group of people uniquely qualified to know. Not experts on US defence strategy or American foreign policy, but Britain’s leading historians of the ancient world. They know Rome intimately – and, without exception, they are struck by the similarities between the empire of now and the imperium of then.

The most obvious is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest budgets and finest equipment the world had ever seen. No one else came close. The United States is just as dominant – its defence budget will soon be bigger than the military spending of the next nine countries put together, allowing the US to deploy its forces almost anywhere on the planet at lightning speed. Throw in the country’s global technological lead, and the US emerges as a power without rival.

There is a big difference, of course. Apart from the odd Puerto Rico or Guam, the US does not have formal colonies, the way the Romans (or British, for that matter) always did. There are no American consuls or viceroys directly ruling faraway lands.

But that difference between ancient Rome and modern Washington may be less significant than it looks. After all, America has done plenty of conquering and colonising: it’s just that we don’t see it that way. For some historians, the founding of America and its 19th-century push westward were no less an exercise in empire-building than Rome’s drive to take charge of the Mediterranean. While Julius Caesar took on the Gauls – bragging that he had slaughtered a million of them – the American pioneers battled the Cherokee, the Iroquois and the Sioux. “From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation,” according to Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

More to the point, the US has military bases, or base rights, in some 40 countries across the world – giving it the same global muscle it would enjoy if it ruled those countries directly. (When the US took on the Taliban last autumn, it was able to move warships from naval bases in Britain, Japan, Germany, southern Spain and Italy: the fleets were already there.) According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, these US military bases, numbering into the hundreds around the world, are today’s version of the imperial colonies of old. Washington may refer to them as “forward deployment”, says Johnson, but colonies are what they are. On this definition, there is almost no place outside America’s reach. Pentagon figures show that there is a US military presence, large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations.

So America may be more Roman than we realise, with garrisons in every corner of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the United States’ entire approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman. It’s as if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be done – and today’s Americans are following it religiously.

Lesson one in the Roman handbook for imperial success would be a realisation that it is not enough to have great military strength: the rest of the world must know that strength – and fear it too. The Romans used the propaganda technique of their time – gladiatorial games in the Colosseum – to show the world how hard they were. Today 24-hour news coverage of US military operations – including video footage of smart bombs scoring direct hits – or Hollywood shoot-’em-ups at the multiplex serve the same function. Both tell the world: this empire is too tough to beat.

The US has learned a second lesson from Rome, realising the centrality of technology. For the Romans, it was those famously straight roads, enabling the empire to move troops or supplies at awesome speeds – rates that would not be surpassed for well over a thousand years. It was a perfect example of how one imperial strength tends to feed another: an innovation in engineering, originally designed for military use, went on to boost Rome commercially. Today those highways find their counterpart in the information superhighway: the internet also began as a military tool, devised by the US defence department, and now stands at the heart of American commerce. In the process, it is making English the Latin of its day – a language spoken across the globe. The US is proving what the Romans already knew: that once an empire is a world leader in one sphere, it soon dominates in every other.

But it is not just specific tips that the US seems to have picked up from its ancient forebears. Rather, it is the fundamental approach to empire that echoes so loudly. Rome understood that, if it is to last, a world power needs to practise both hard imperialism, the business of winning wars and invading lands, and soft imperialism, the cultural and political tricks that work not to win power but to keep it.

So Rome’s greatest conquests came not at the end of a spear, but through its power to seduce conquered peoples. As Tacitus observed in Britain, the natives seemed to like togas, baths and central heating – never realising that these were the symbols of their “enslavement”. Today the US offers the people of the world a similarly coherent cultural package, a cluster of goodies that remain reassuringly uniform wherever you are. It’s not togas or gladiatorial games today, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Disney, all paid for in the contemporary equivalent of Roman coinage, the global hard currency of the 21st century: the dollar.

When the process works, you don’t even have to resort to direct force; it is possible to rule by remote control, using friendly client states. This is a favourite technique for the contemporary US – no need for colonies when you have the Shah in Iran or Pinochet in Chile to do the job for you – but the Romans got there first. They ruled by proxy whenever they could. We, of all people, should know: one of the most loyal of client kings ruled right here, in the southern England of the first century AD.

His name was Togidubnus and you can still visit the grand palace that was his at Fishbourne in Sussex. The mosaic floors, in remarkable condition, are reminders of the cool palatial quarters where guests would have gathered for preprandial drinks or a perhaps an audience with the king. Historians now believe that Togidubnus was a high-born Briton educated in Rome, brought back to Fishbourne and installed as a pro-Roman puppet. Just as Washington’s elite private schools are full of the “pro-western” Arab kings, South American presidents or African leaders of the future, so Rome took in the heirs of the conquered nations’ top families, preparing them for lives as rulers in Rome’s interest.

And Togidubnus did not let his masters down. When Boudicca led her uprising against the Roman occupation in AD60, she made great advances in Colchester, St Albans and London – but not Sussex. Historians now believe that was because Togidubnus kept the native Britons under him in line. Just as Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf have kept the lid on anti-American feeling in Egypt and Pakistan, Togidubnus did the same job for Rome nearly two millennia ago.

Not that it always worked. Rebellions against the empire were a permanent fixture, with barbarians constantly pressing at the borders. Some accounts suggest that the rebels were not always fundamentally anti-Roman; they merely wanted to share in the privileges and affluence of Roman life. If that has a familiar ring, consider this: several of the enemies who rose up against Rome are thought to have been men previously nurtured by the empire to serve as pliant allies. Need one mention former US protege Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA trainee Osama bin Laden?

Rome even had its own 9/11 moment. In the 80s BC, Hellenistic king Mithridates called on his followers to kill all Roman citizens in their midst, naming a specific day for the slaughter. They heeded the call – and killed 80,000 Romans in local communities across Greece. “The Romans were incredibly shocked by this,” says ancient historian Jeremy Paterson of Newcastle University. “It’s a little bit like the statements in so many of the American newspapers since September 11: ‘Why are we hated so much?’ “

Internally, too, today’s United States would strike many Romans as familiar terrain. America’s mythologising of its past – its casting of founding fathers Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale rendering of the Boston Tea Party and the war of independence – is very Roman. That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of manifest destiny.

And America shares Rome’s conviction that it is on a mission sanctioned from on high. Augustus declared himself the son of a god, raising a statue to his adoptive father Julius Caesar on a podium alongside Mars and Venus. The US dollar bill bears the words “In God we trust” and US politicians always like to end their speeches with “God bless America.”

Even that most modern American trait, its ethnic diversity, would make the Romans feel comfortable. Their society was remarkably diverse, taking in people from all over the world – and even promising new immigrants the chance to rise to the very top (so long as they were from the right families). While America is yet to have a non-white president, Rome boasted an emperor from north Africa, Septimius Severus. According to classicist Emma Dench, Rome had its own version of America’s “hyphenated” identities. Like the Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans of today, Rome’s citizens were allowed a “cognomen” – an extra name to convey their Greek-Roman or British-Roman heritage: Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus.

There are some large differences between the two empires, of course – starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own imperialism. Indeed, most would deny it. But that may come down to the US’s founding myth. For America was established as a rebellion against empire, in the name of freedom and self-government. Raised to see themselves as a rebel nation and plucky underdog, they can’t quite accept their current role as master.

One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens to all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from beginning to middle to end.

“What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years,” says Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, “is what is the optimum size for a nonterritorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders, what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the Roman empire.”

Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof that the US is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch. But it’s just as possible that the US is merely moving into what was the second phase of Rome’s imperial history, when it grew frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it? Is the US at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that.

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Email Jonathan Freedland

Bring Home the Revolution

Reposted from The Guardian where it was published under the title:   Rome, AD … Rome, DC?

This morning we learn how one community has moved towards achieving a sustainable lifestyle. Reposted from YES! Magazine.

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Before any course of action, we should first ask:
What is already here?
What does nature allow us to do here?
What does nature help us to do here?

–Wendell Berry

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SUSTAINABILITY: From the Earth, Up

Anthony Flaccavento

On November 1, 1996, the day-shift crew arrived at the Louisiana Pacific Waferboard factory in Dungannon, Virginia. Greeted by a small group of security guards and a management representative, they were told to go home. The plant was closed. Permanently. No notice had been given. Ten years after opening its doors in this richly forested Scott County community, the plant laid off nearly 100 workers, also idling loggers who had been supplying the plant with logs. The profits from this plant, management said, were not high enough to keep it operating.

The Appalachian regions of Tennessee and Virginia are not in crisis. Rather, the area is suffering from long-term economic stagnation and marginalization, and steady ecological deterioration. It is an all too common story of cultural and economic subordination, of individuals and communities gradually relinquishing the skills, knowledge, and bonds that made this part of the world different from countless others.

But there is another Appalachian tale unfolding. It is the evolving story of community-based initiatives regenerating the region´s economy and culture from within.

At Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD), we focus our efforts on a 10-county area of southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. This part of Appalachia has sustained jobless rates two to three times higher than US rates, approaching 20 percent in some counties; poverty rates exceed 30 percent in some counties.

Our plan was clear yet ambitious: to help the community build a more sustainable economy from networks of small, local endeavors. ASD set itself the task of transforming two central legs of Appalachia´s economy: agriculture and timber.

In the seven years since ASD was formed, the most important lesson we learned was this: Building an alternative regional economy–one that is more just, more ecologically sound and more self reliant–requires networks of relationships that are synergistic, and a means of capturing and accumulating knowledge and assets. We have come to call this an infrastructure for community sustainability.

The foundation of this infrastructure is the ecosystem. Therefore, the strategy focuses on restoring ecological health, creating livelihoods and economic systems that are ecologically sustainable, and building the financial and physical capital needed to add value to the region´s natural resources and bridge the gapbetween producers and the marketplace.

From tobacco to food

In 1995, a small group of nontraditional farmers–market gardeners, ìback-to-the-landers,” some Amish families–launched a fledgling cooperative, a community-supported agriculture (CSA) project, and a restaurant marketing system. Over the next several years, the CSA grew to between 50 and 100 families who received produce during the growing season directly from farmers. The restaurant marketing co-op delivered locally grown produce to 15 area restaurants.

In spite of this growth, however, the size of the market was limited and we were reaching only a small percentage of tobacco and other conventional Appalachian farmers. As long as our primary markets were white tablecloth restaurants and gourmet food shops, only a small portion of the community had access to these products.

In 1999, we began marketing our produce to a small regional chain called White´s Fresh Foods. During 1999 and 2000, the base of farmers began to grow, attracted by the larger market provided by White´s.
Among them was John Mullins. Mullins was born into tobacco in the tiny community of Stickleyville, Virginia. Small hillside farms were the backbone of the economy there in Lee County, and tobacco was the central economic activity. Like most of his neighbors, Mullins began to see a dramatic decline in tobacco about five years ago. The amount that he and his farming partner, Martin Miles, were eligible to sell dropped by more than 75 percent over four years. By 1999, Mullins and Miles were beginning to look for alternatives.

The growing market for local organic produce provided a viable option. In close consultation with consumers and the buyers at the grocery stores, we developed a growers´ network with a trademark label and brand name, Appalachian Harvest, which became the umbrella for an increasingly wide range of certified organic, locally raised crops.

The network began to take off in 2001 with more farmers joining, larger farms involved, and more outlets. Three new, larger supermarket chains joined as partners. Two of them were family-owned, based right in Virginia. From 2000 to 2001, sales nearly tripled, and projections suggest another 200 to 300 percent growth in 2002.

For the farmers, this expansion means greater opportunities to grow and market organic produce–for many, that represents a life line as tobacco allotments continue to decline. For the general public, it means access to local, sustainable food and a connection to the land. For supermarkets, it´s a chance to highlight local farmers through farmer profiles, recipe cards, and informational flyers and to market fresh, local produce. The region´s produce is beginning to develop a product brand identity and a sense of connection between family farmers, the land they till, and ordinary citizens.

Strengthening community through farming

When ASD began its effort to build a more diversified and healthy farm economy in the late 1990s, we attempted to mimic the best features of the tobacco infrastructure, those elements that had helped keep family farmers viable and encouraged community involvement and pride. We worked to encourage diversity at all levels–within each farm enterprise, within the network of farmers, and within the scope and types of markets we pursue. Mullins and Miles now raise 10 different types of produce and a small herd of goats, while maintaining five commercial organic greenhouses.

Mullins and Miles and 25 other farmers gained access to regional markets by guaranteeing high-quality organic produce and by carefully coordinating among participating farmers to ensure a reliable supply.

The Appalachian Harvest network meets monthly from October through March to decide what to grow, how much to grow, when to plant, and who is to plant what. New farmers are matched with crops that are easier to grow, until they gain more experience. Farmers have gradually recognized their responsibility to one another both to produce what they pledge and to maintain high quality standards. During the growing season, a short newsletter and regular farm tours and field days keep network members in close contact.

ì When you´re with people with a like interest, your enthusiasm feeds each other and the learning curve accelerates,” John Mullins says.

University faculty, county extension agents, ASD staff, and farmers collaborate in research and assist farmers transitioning from tobacco to alternative crops and from conventional practices to organic practices.

Ripple effects

With this sustainable agriculture infrastructure now taking shape, we are just beginning to realize some of the potential for economies of synergy and greater regional self-reliance.

A large egg company looking for a means to comply with stringent water quality standards saw this opportunity. The result: a high nutrient compost produced within 75 miles of all our farms, priced at half of what ìimported” organic fertilizers cost.

Locally owned farm stores have begun to carry organic fertilizers and disease- and pest-control products in response to growing demand from farmers. This makes organic farm inputs widely available and helps institutionalize sustainable practices.

In 2001 we transformed a portion of an old tobacco barn into a small packing and grading facility, thanks to a donation by Martin Miles. This system will increase the payments to farmers by adding value to the produce. This year, we have added a much larger building beside the barn, creating a total area of about 5,000 square feet. With this new facility, we can process 3,000 to 4,000 boxes of organic produce each week, our projected market demand.

The sorting and grading process creates ìseconds” and culls–for example, tomatoes that are too ripe or peppers that are too small. The Clinch Community Kitchen, a commercial kitchen incubator, will be
working with ASD to develop salsa, bruschetta sauce, and other tomato-based products using these seconds. If successful, we will create high-value products from what otherwise would be low-value produce, while diversifying our offerings, extending the season for Appalachian Harvest products, and providing new opportunities for local entrepreneurs.

Most recently, we are seeing farmers take on new leadership roles. Several have become advocates for family farms and sustainable agriculture at county, state, and federal levels–no small feat in a region historically wedded to tobacco and often antagonistic to alternatives.

From forests to floors

ASD´s sustainable forestry and wood products program follows a path similar to our agriculture efforts. ASD forester Emily Duncan works with interested landowners to assess the health of their forests and inventory the timber. Together, they create a plan to protect streams and waterways, conserve wildlife habitat, and regenerate biodiversity. If appropriate, Emily then marks some timber for harvesting. The cut includes a high proportion of lower-quality trees in order to help regenerate both species diversity and better quality timber for future generations. Trees harvested under our standards are purchased by ASD, sawed into boards, dried in our dry kiln, and then manufactured into flooring, cabinets, and other products by local companies.

This restorative forestry requires at least three things: patient landowners willing to forego some money in the short term in favor of long-term wealth, both economic and ecological; skilled loggers, whether mechanical or animal-powered in their operations; and markets that pay closer to the true cost for wood products.

The beauty of the process is its affordability. Because of the proximity of trees to their market, and because of the value adding-steps in the process, it is possible to pay a substantial premium to loggers and landowners, while charging only slightly more to the end user. Sawing the logs, drying the boards, and manufacturing cabinets or flooring makes every foot of log far more valuable.

The Louisiana Pacific waferboard factory that laid off nearly 100 people in 1996 relied on extensive clear- cutting for its cheap supply of timber, and it established no roots in the community. ASD and its many partners are working towards a different type of economic development–one that is inextricably local, that builds upon and adds value to the ecological wealth of our communities. Like a good farmer, the more we pursue this path, the more we see what is already here and what nature enables us to do now and into the future.

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To contact Anthony Flaccavento and ASD, call 276/623-1121 or visit our web site.

Reposted from YES! Magazine.

Reposted from YES! Magazine.

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It Shall Be a Jubilee Unto You

Michael Hudson

Agrarian life is full of risks: drought, flooding, infestation, and other natural disasters, capped throughout antiquity by wars. Farmers must often borrow to get themselves through the lean months, while hoping that nothing prevents them from bringing in crops that will allow them to repay their debts. In ancient times, failure to repay loans could cost farmers their land, possessions, enslavement of family members, or their own freedom. For millennia, the problem confronting rulers was how to prevent the destabilization that occurs when large portions of the population are forced off the land or into debtor´s prison for failure to repay loans.

And so there developed throughout the ancient Near East a tradition of clean-slate edicts, which ìproclaimed justice” or decreed ìeconomic order” and ìrighteousness” by canceling debts and restoring forfeited land to farmers. Clean-slate proclamations date from almost as early as the first interest-bearing debt, starting in Sumer around 2400 years BCE. Eventually, the tradition became known as the Jubilee Year, but by that time it was taken out of the hands of kings and placed at the core of Mosaic law.

Radical as the idea of the Jubilee seems to modern eyes, these ìrestorations of order” were a conservative tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for 2,000 years. What was conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of years for the idea of progress to become inverted, to connote irreversible freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry of their lands and personal liberty.

The clean-slate tradition was so central to Israelite moral values that it framed the composition of both the Old and New Testaments. Yet so far has the modern idea of market efficiency and progress gone that today, although the Bible remains our civilization´s defining book, its economic laws are rarely taken seriously. The Ten Commandments and Golden Rule have become so dissociated from the economic legislation of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy that whoever takes these laws in earnest is considered utopian and anachronistic. Yet these laws formed the take-off point for Jesus upon his return to Nazareth´s synagogue and for his denunciation of the money-changers who had taken over Jerusalem´s temple. As recently as medieval Spain, the tradition of the Jubilee Year was kept alive by the Jewish sages Maimonides and Ibn Adret. To dismiss these laws is thus to remove much of the Bible from the context of its times.

Laws that periodically canceled debts, freed Israelite debt-servants, and returned lands to their traditional holders have confused Biblical students for centuries. They have long been virtually ignored by historians on the ground that, to modern eyes, they would seem to wreak economic havoc.

Recent discoveries of Bronze Age Near Eastern royal proclamations dating from 2400 to 1600 BCE leave no doubt that these edicts were implemented. During the Babylonian period they grew more elaborate and detailed, capped by Ammisaduqa´s Edict of 1646 BCE. Now that these edicts are understood, the Biblical laws no longer stand alone as utopian or other-worldly ideals; they take their place in a 2,000-year continuum of periodic and regular economic renewal based on freedom from debt-servitude and from the loss of access to self-support on the land.

The revolutionary Israelite contribution to the tradition was its removal from the hands of rulers to become a sacred popular compact, to be preserved by the Israelites in memory of the fact that they had once been enslaved and must never again permit economic oppression to develop. The Israelites are portrayed as having made a covenant to protect the economically weak by holding the land as the Lord´s gift to support a free rural population: ìLand must not be sold in perpetuity, for the land belongs to me, and you are only strangers and guests. You will allow a right of redemption on all your landed property,” and restore it to its customary cultivators every 50 years (Lev. 25:23-28). Israelite debt-slaves likewise were to go free periodically in the Jubilee Year, for they belonged ultimately to the Lord, not to any person (Lev. 25:54).

The Bible is a unique composite, embedding ritual traditions and laws of social behavior in a dramatic context of stories and legends intended to appeal to the widest possible audience. This popularization was greatly aided by the spread of alphabetic writing, which made documents accessible to the population at large, in contrast to cumbersome syllabic cuneiforms prevalent prior to the first millennium BCE. But the great innovation was to democratize liturgical texts that earlier Near Eastern societies had restricted to temple priesthoods. Deut. 31:10 directs that the laws be read aloud publicly every seven years, in the year of canceling debts (shemitta), so that all the population would know they were to be freed from bondage.

Jesus later sought to restore the archaic ethic by overturning the banking tables in Jerusalem´s temple and preaching anew the promise of Jeremiah to proclaim equity and liberty (deror) throughout the land. Indeed, it was specifically on this principle of restoring freedom to debt-slaves and unburdening the land that Christianity elaborated its ideas of redemption. In addition to redeeming souls, early Christians redeemed their co-religionists from worldly bondage. When Handel staged the first performance of his Messiah in Dublin in 1742, it was no coincidence that the proceeds were used to free debtors from prison. For thousands of years, redeeming people and land from debt was the primary and most concrete form of redemption. Indeed, when Christians pronounce ìHallelujah,” they repeat the ritual term alulu, chanted upon the freeing of Babylonian debt-slaves.

Echoes of the doctrine can also be heard in American tradition. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is inscribed with a quotation from Leviticus 25:10: ìProclaim liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” The Hebrew word translated as ìliberty” is deror, cognate to the older Akkadian andurarum–to move freely as running water, as freely as debt-slaves liberated to rejoin their families. The full verse in Leviticus speaks of freeing debt bondsmen and freeing the land from debt generally:

ìHallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land and to all inhabitants thereof; it shall be a Jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his family.”

Rome was the first society not to cancel its debts. And we all know what happened to it. Classical historians such as Plutarch, Livy, and Diodorus attributed Rome´s decline and fall to the fact that creditors got the entire economy in their debt, expropriated the land and public domain, and strangled the economy.

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Michael Hudson is distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new edition forthcoming November 2002). This article is based on ìReconstructing the Origins of Interest-Bearing Debt and the Logic of Clean Slates,” in Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, by Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop.

Reposted from YES! Magazine.