Of the 99% spring, nonviolence, civil disobedience, Plutarch and the Spartans

I've been reflecting lately on the 99% Spring campaign lately, which aims to train 100,000 people in nonviolent direct action in April. Earlier posts are here and here.

One good decision on the part of the campaign was to try to convey the range of possibilities for nonviolent action without really getting into civil disobedience. That is a topic of its own and requires a great deal of planning and preparation to be successful in the best case scenario.

While it can at times be a very powerful thing, in my opinion, civil disobedience is an option that is greatly and grossly overused. Some people apparently think that you get points for getting arrested. You don't. As I see it, you get points for winning. Some people use civil disobedience not as a last resort but as a first resort when they haven't even come close to exhausting alternative strategies. Sometimes it seems to me that it's the refuge of the politically inept.

This is the martial artist in me talking, but the value of a technique generally diminishes with its repetition. Habituation happens. If you overuse one technique you become predictable and your opponents can easily counter and/or dismiss it. The last reaction a group working for social change wants is for people to say, with a sigh of boredom, "there they go again."

Random classical digression....This train of thought was inspired yesterday as I was re-reading Plutarch's Lives. I'm on the life of Lycurgus, the ancient lawgiver of Sparta. The author states that the Spartans made it a policy that

"they should not make war often, or long, with the same enemy, lest that they should train and instruct them in war, by habituating them to defend themselves."

(Random historical digression...Eventually the Spartans failed to follow this advice, which resulted in them getting their butts kicked by the Thebans.)

THE PLAGUE OF WAR

This week, El Cabrero is on another ancient Greek jag. The theme is the tragic Peloponnesian War which brought about the end of Greece's "golden age" as documented by Thucydides (died around 400 BC), the first "modern" historian.

One would hope that it's not too late to learn from that tragedy. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

As is the case with most wars, both sides predicted a short fight and an easy win. When the Spartans invaded Attica, the Athenians gave up their countryside and retired within the walls of the city, counting on sea power for provisions and victory.

Plague came in the wake of the overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions:

people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach, it upset it; and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. In most cases also an ineffectual retching followed, producing violent spasms, which in some cases ceased soon after, in others much later.

That was just the warm up. It got really nasty after that. The worst was the feeling of despair and isolation:

By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when any one felt himself sickening, for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder; besides which, there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality. On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse: on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence. This was especially the case with such as made any pretensions to goodness: honor made them unsparing of themselves in their attendance in their friends' houses, where even the members of the family were at last worn out by the moans of the dying, and succumbed to the force of the disaster.

Thucydides sums it up this way:

Words indeed fail when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure

.

All this happened in the year 430. There were 26 more years of war to go...

But there was another plague as well: the plague of habitual brutality as the war dragged on and led to other revolutions and civil wars. Thucydides again:

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mare of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect...

Revenge was more important than self-preservation...

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.

There's a lot more to it but you get the idea...

WV AHEAD OF CURVE ON MINE SAFETY. In the wake of the 2006 mine disasters, the state of West Virginia didn't wait for federal action. It moved quickly to enact new safetly legislation which became a model for the MINER Act. This is from USA Today:

West Virginia passed its own mine safety law last year after an explosion at its Sago mine trapped 13 miners, all but one of whom died. State mining officials followed with an ambitious plan to get the best communication devices available now to miners quickly. The state is using combinations of older technologies to provide systems that can work deep underground. One uses miles of cable antennae run through a mine's tunnels along with wireless radios, much like the ones used by police and firefighters, for individual miners. Another system uses an adaptation of Wi-Fi.

The state required operators to submit plans for using the devices by last month. Mines will start getting the devices this year. By the end of 2008, 170 underground coal mines can be equipped for $150 million, according to Randall Harris, engineering adviser to West Virginia's mine safety director.

In other words, West Virginia is doing the best it can for miners right now, while the federal government is spending years looking for a perfect solution. Robert Friend, the deputy assistant secretary for the federal mine safety agency, says West Virginia is "trying to get out in front and be proactive. I wouldn't criticize them for that." Even so, he believes that the federal approach encourages development of a better, fully wireless system by 2009.

Unfortunately, waiting for a perfect system can mean more dead miners.

(I imagine our "Unleashing Capitalism" friends would prefer all this to be left to "the market.")

KATRINA: A "GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY" FOR CONSERVATISM. As we pass the second anniversary of the Katrina debacle, here's a good one by Rick Perlstein about how the hard right hoped to cash in on the disaster.

TAX CUTS: WORKING FOR WHOM? This snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute challenges supply side dogma about growth, employment, and cutting taxes.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IN THIS CORNER...

El Cabrero is on another ancient Greek jag this week, with a special focus on the tragic Peloponnesian War that ended the "Golden Age" of Athens (there's also lots of stuff on current events).

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

The two principle powers that collided in that 27 year long war provided a huge contrast. Sparta was a warlike, aristocratic,conservative, fairly closed society. To their credit, they were not particularly acquisitive after wealth or a large empire. Athens was creative, chaotic, democratic, and imperialist. As mentioned yesterday, Athenian imperialism was the main cause of the war, although the Spartans were the first to invade their rival's territory.

Early on in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, a Corinthian ambassador describes the contrast to the Spartans:

The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine: your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger then is no release. Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they an never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions,you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind.

The Athenians were bold, even reckless:

They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country’s cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss... they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their lives, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.

In a word, they could be dangerous not only to their enemies but to themselves.

(Uhhh, do they sound like anybody we know? I didn't think so.)

AFSC CALLS FOR STRONGER MINE SAFETY LAWS. In the wake of the Utah mine disaster, the American Friends Service Committee calls for stronger mine safety rules:

Congress should move swiftly to pass recently introduced legislation that, among other things, immediately requires mining companies to use systems that can track and communicate with miners," says Rick Wilson, director of the American Friends Service Committee West Virginia Economic Justice Project. "The law would also require companies to upgrade to better communications systems as they become available."

That legislation, HR 2768 and 2769 and S. 1655, introduced in June of this year by Representatives George Miller (D-CA), Nick Rahall (D-WV), and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), and Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Patty Murray (D-WA), would improve health and safety in U.S. mines and immediately require companies to use the best available technology to stay in contact with miners.

THE COAL INDUSTRY'S BEST FRIEND. The NY Times reports that the Bush administration is about to issue a regulation expanding mountaintop removal mining, a practice that literally blows their tops off and fills in valleys with debris. El Cabrero is of the opinion that this is not what Isaiah was talking about when he said that every mountain should be brought down and every valley exalted.

CHILDREN'S HEALTH SMACKDOWN. This post from the AFLCIO blog asks a pertinent question: "If Stomping on Children’s Health Care Is OK, Why Do Bushies Bury News on Weekend?"

INEQUALITY GONE WILD. Does this sound good?

The top 10 percent of income earners in the United States now owns 70 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest one percent owns more than the bottom 95 percent, according to the Federal Reserve. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans enjoyed about the same share of the nation's income -- 21.8 percent -- as the bottom 150 million.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THINGS START SMALL

It's sad to realize that ancient Greek civilization self destructed at the height of its creativity, but that's pretty much what happened.

Fifty years after diverse city states united to fend of the massive Persian invasion, a war began between Athens and Sparta and their allies which would rage off an on for 27 years between 431 and 404 BC.

That was a long time ago but there's something modern about the war. It also had the first "modern" historian, the Athenian general Thucydides, who attempted to write a neutral and objective account of the debacle, although he died before he completed it. He was aiming for posterity, writing in it that

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.

I don't know about the "forever" part but it has done pretty well for the last 2,400 years.

The story of this extended goat rope is long and complicated. Interested people not inclined to wade through Thucydides 600+ pages may want to check out some novels about it, such as Mary Renault's Last of the Wine and Steven Pressfield's Tides of War.

People often imagine it as a conflict between democratic Athens (the good guys) and authoritarian and militaristic Sparta (the bad guys), but that doesn't work very well. Both societies owned slaves. To the extent that Athens was democratic, it was very democratic, but Sparta itself had a mixed government that combined two kings with republican features such as a council of elders and a citizen's assembly. Spartan women were probably the freest in all Greece.

Athens was democratic but imperialist. Its empire began as a league against the Persians, with allied states contributing ships and men. It became an extractor of tribute. And while the Athenians often supported popular governments, they were not averse to massacring and enslaving those who resisted them.

Spartans were authoritarian and warlike but they disliked long wars and had no far flung imperial ambitions. They had long ago conquered neighboring Messinians who became an oppressed class of helots which might revolt at any time. Given the choice, Spartans didn't like to be away for too long.

The Athenian position was basically this: we got an empire by fair or foul means and we'd be stupid to give it up--deal with it. As Thucydides narrates it, an Athenian leader put it this way to Spartan envoys seeking a resolution of a dispute involving cities that attempted to revolt from Athens:

We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so--security, honor, and self-interest. And we are not the first to act this way. It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power.

Attitudes like that are not conducive to conflict resolution. The die was cast when the Athenians rejected arbitration. Sparta made the first military moves, but Athens seems to El Cabrero to be the moral aggressor.

And they would pay a terrible price.

ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SUBJECT, Reuters reports that:

More than half of top U.S. foreign policy experts oppose President George W. Bush’s troop increase as a strategy for stabilizing Baghdad, saying the plan has harmed U.S. national security, according to a new survey.As Congress and the White House await the September release of a key progress report on Iraq, 53 percent of the experts polled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress said they now oppose Bush’s troop build-up.

Ninety-one percent believe the world has grown more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percent from February. More than 80 percent of the experts said they expected another major terrorist attack over the next decade. Fifty eight percent of those polled expected that the Middle East would still be reeling from the negative effects of the war a decade from now. Only 3 percent believed Iraq would be "beacon of democracy" in the next 10 years.

WE'LL CROSS THAT BRIDGE. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute focuses on declining investments in infrastructure, which can be lethal.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEPARTMENT. A Texas couple arrested for protesting at an appearance by President Bush in West Virginia in 2004 won $80,000 from the White House. What makes the whole thing really interesting is the administration's "sensitive" manual that provides instructions on how to stifle free speech.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED