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Remembering MLK Jr: Pence on Trump, Gene Sharp

Monday, January 21st, 2019

[ by Charles Cameronin memoriam, ad vitam ]
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… and Mike Pence on the eve of MLK Day compares President Trump to the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr!

Doofus.

**

Since so many media outlets have excellent MLK photos and fine tributes today — or are talking on and on about “not building bridges, building walls” or the reverse — let me just say that the best way to honor Dr King is to possess, purchase or borrow Gene Sharp‘s definitive trilogy

… to take the hint in Sharp‘s title, and put the ideal of nonviolence into practical, active living.

Tea with your sugar, sugar with your tea

Thursday, March 29th, 2018

[ by Charles Cameron — who has moved on to caffe latte ]
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Two things I read in quick succession.

Sugar:

The first deals with a moment in the history of slavery and abolition, and by extension, sugar:

When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity?:

Shortly after Christmas 1831, an audacious rebellion broke out in Jamaica. Some 60,000 enslaved people went on strike. They burned the sugar cane in the fields and used their tools to smash up sugar mills. The rebels also showed remarkable discipline, imprisoning slave owners on their estates without physically harming them.

Tea:

The second just begs to be read alongside the first, especially if like so many Brits you like two cubes of sugar in your tea..

**

The second leaves you hanging, yeah, needing to comb your memory for the back-story of tea.. which is why, in addition to the fact that I read it after I’d read the entry on sugar and the sugar riots, I have put it second here.

It requires mental work!

But then the first one — with the rebellious slaves treating their imprisoned previous slave-owners civilly..

May I find there an early precedent for the nonviolence of MLK and the civil rights movemnt — in Jamaica, 1831?

**

This is the sort of intellectual stimulation I live for!

Lattes for two, if you please. Do you take yours with Splenda?

This would be sad either way, but

Monday, August 28th, 2017

[ by Charles Cameron — it seems particularly sad to “left-leaning” me ]
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I don’t really fit left or right, but as a near-“non” where it comes to violence, I’m particularly saddened by this:

**

Given my quasi-Mennonite sympathies, and even thought it may be irrational in the final analysis, I’d be less saddened if the “sides” were reversed…

Source:

  • WaPo, Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley
  • Downward Spiral as a pattern in conflict — do we study it?

    Friday, October 21st, 2016

    [ by Charles Cameron — a thoroughly impertinent riff on that saying of von Moltke ]
    .

    Hw many places could this sentence be applied to?

    But the latest attacks, which appear to have been several months in the preparation, threaten to draw the entire population into a downward spiral of deadly confrontations, violent crackdowns by the security forces and toxic relations between local communities and the authorities.

    It happens to come from an article about the Rohingya, Richard Horsey‘s Reality bites for Aung San Suu Kyi amid surging violence from the Nikkei Asian Review.

    But how many other places might such a sentence apply to?

    I ask this because we tend to focus on certain words in a sentence like this: attacks, preparation, threat, population, deadly confrontations, violent crackdowns, security forces, local communities, the authorities. Those are the forces in play, if you will. But their play follows the rules of a certain game, and that game is also named in the sentence.

    Its name is downward spiral.

    **

    vatican-spiralSpiral staircase, the Vatican, Rome

    **

    What I want to suggests that we might learn a great deal if we shifted our attention from attacks, preparation, threat, population and the rest, and thought about spiral.

    Spiral is the form that the attacks, preparation, threat, population and the rest — here and in those other places — takes, and as such it’s an archetype that underlies them, not just among the Rohingya, their Buddhist compatriots and Aung San Suu Kyi, but across the globe and through time itself.

    Spiral as a pattern in conflict — do we study it?

    **

    If, as I suppose, von Moltke can be translated as saying, “no operating concept survives contact,” it would seem we may need to conceptualize contact, ie the complexity of relations, rather than operations, which are far more focused on us — how we “will prevent conflict, shape security environments, and win wars” — than on conflict and wars, both of which are minimally two-party affairs.

    And I’m not trying to say anything so terribly new here, just to give fresh phrasing to Paul Van Riper‘s comment:

    What we tend to do is look toward the enemy. We’re only looking one way: from us to them. But the good commanders take two other views. They mentally move forward and look back to themselves. They look from the enemy back to the friendly, and they try to imagine how the enemy might attack them. The third is to get a bird’s-eye view, a top-down view, where you take the whole scene in. The amateur looks one way; the professional looks at least three different ways.

    **

    sintra-castle-spiral-credit-joe-daniel-price-740x492Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, Portugal, credit Joe Daniel Price

    **

    The sentence immediately preceding the one from the Nikkei Asia article I quoted above will hopefully illuminate hope in a pretty desperate situation:

    The majority of this community and its religious leaders continue to eschew violence.

    **

    Image sources:

  • Both spiral images from the Top 10 Spiral Architecture page
  • Will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?

    Sunday, July 10th, 2016

    [ by Charles Cameron — protest and arrest in Baton Rouge ]
    .

    will you won
    Reuters – Jonathan Bachman

    It is the stunning balletic quality of this image that catches my attention here, and gives this post a title drawn from Lewis Carroll‘s Lobster Quadrille in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.


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