Authored by: davidslesinger on Monday, April 09 2007 @ 01:49 AM EDT

Fellow Truthers,

I am the person who spoke on nonviolence at national 9/11 conferences in 2005, 2006, and 2007. I have lamented for years the strong commitment that our culture has to being ignorant. This is not confined to the millions too afraid to examine 9/11. I have been active on the 9/11 issue since 2002 and very much lament how many of my friends in the movement have neglected to watch my presentation in Chicago in 6/06. It is the fullest version of my general rap. It is linked in 3 parts on streaming video at 911courage.org down on the left near the links to ML King.

While I do have some criticism of Tom's efforts, which I have already explained to him, any effort to weaken the will of the police is an essential element of any nonviolent campaign. This would be especially true with the NYPD because they lost so many brothers on the towers.

My criticism of Tom is that it is extremely unlikely that police would refuse to arrest truthers committing civil disobedience the first time or probably ever. Assuming police would risk their jobs implies the whole fabric of city government is on the verge of collapse at that moment.

As an example, I am close friends with Keith McHenry, co-founder of Food Not Bombs. FNB has been explicitly committed to nonviolence throughout their 27 year history. They give out free vegan food in hundreds of cities around the US and the world. The US government still considers them terrorists and monitors them as such.

Keith was arrested 92 times in San Francisco for distributing free food without a permit before he left town because he feared the police would kill him. ( He recently told me Mark Twain left SF because he had feared the SFPD was going to kill him.)

FNB as a group experienced approximately 1000 arrests for attempting to give out free food in the streets of SF. They brought down 2 mayors in a row, Art Agnos and former police chief Frank Jordan, both Democrats. The mayors were not surprisingly more dedicated to the tourism industry than to the homeless. Because FNB was so fearless, they were able to cause the 2 mayors to lose their office.

I have 2 stories I'd like to tell about Keith's success at touching the hearts of the police.

Keith recounts a time that he was in SF City Hall distributing press releases when a woman accompanied by a little girl approached him. They asked if he was Keith McHenry. He said he was. The mother said her daughter had been wanting to meet him for so long. THIS WAS THE WIFE AND DAUGHTER OF A POLICEMAN WHO REGULARLY ARRESTED HIM.

The second story is one I witnessed personally. I went to SF in 1995 for the 15th anniversary celebration of the founding of FNB. It coincided with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which had occurred in SF in 1945. Not surprisingly, the local pols had ratcheted up the draconian laws against the homeless for the occasion, a wonderful irony.

One day Keith was lamenting that most of the other FNB'ers only wanted to serve food and neglected tabling with political leaflets. We drove downtown and set up a table. Immediately SFPD grabbed Keith and whisked him away. Keith's car was parked illegally and I knew he had many past parking violations. I called Keith's wife, took a bus all the way across the city, got a spare key and took a bus all the way back. When I got there Keith was already back tabling. He explained that 8 police had taken him into a room where they all apologized for how they had been treating him and asked what they could do to make it up to him.

Another story from SF is relevant. One day during these 1995 actions the police arrested the FNB crew bringing the meal. At the same time, one of the police told the FNB crowd that Mayor Frank Jordan was throwing a party to open his reelection campaign office just blocks away. Over a hundred FNB'ers descended on the party, completely discombobulating hizzoner, who closed the party down.

The lesson here is partly that it is possible to touch the hearts of the supporters of one's adversary, a fundamental assumption of nonviolence. It is also that the adversary might kill you despite or because their minions are having their willingness to obey weakened.

I speak often in my talks of Gene Sharp. Since I last communicated with him, I see he has been called the "Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare". I once attended a seminar he organized at Harvard which discussed the general strike against Noreiga in Panama during the 2 years prior to the US invasion. He had earlier advised the leaders of that strike to attempt to weaken the will of the police. He was beside himself at the seminar I attended because these leaders had failed to prevent significant attacks on the police, seriously weakening their movement.

In his seminal work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp notes that the Russian Revolution of 1905 failed because the revolutionists attacked the army, even though it was close to mutiny. In 1917 Trotsky, hardly know for being a pacifist, had all guns taken from the Bolshevik rank and file to assure the army would not be dissuaded from mutiny. It did mutiny.

In 1980 while I was active against the building of the nuclear plant at Seabrook NH with Boston Clamshell and the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook(CDAS), I was isolated as the only advocate for any classical approach to nonviolence, until the Californians arrived a week before the action. I had organized a committee to prepare a leaflet to police and national guard. At the action I was notified that all the leaflets had disappeared. Soon after I was told by a member of the committee which prepared the leaflet that he and his sweetie had visited the head of the national guard personally. They had been given permission to post the leaflet on the central bulletin board at the national guard headquarters. I laughed so hard that the thieves of our leaflet had been thwarted that I rolled around laughing on the ground. During the action my affinity group dressed as clowns in the blockade. We would do the bunny hop down route 1, and then turn into the middle of the road. The national guard then pushed us out of the road. While experiencing this the largest national guardsman told me,"My heart's not in it, My heart's not in it!"

I have been viciously attacked for advocating nonviolence in my own local group, dc911truth.org, of which I am the only founder still active. I am quite open to the possibility that I have misunderstood the wisdom of Gandhi or King. I suggest that anyone who is not completely frothing-at-the-mouth-insane consider that these 2 greatest activists in the last 100 years of world history have a contribution to make to any movement for truth and justice.

The position that activists who wish to confine themselves to public education and lobbying should have toward those who advocate nonviolent resistance is that it should only be of high quality so as not to unecessarily embarrass the movement. Nonviolence should be an attempt to touch everyone's heart, including and especially one's adversaries.

911 truthers need to consider the possibility that even though just being active as truthers indicates significant courage, there is no guarantee we will not all be killed. If there is another false flag operation where thosands of Americans are killed, then anyone who even wrote a letter to the editor that disturbed the cabal could be rounded up and killed. The only guarantee is that all the members of the cabal, being human, will eventually die.

I include as an attachment my paragraph explaining the power dynamic of nonviolence. It is my interpretation of Gene Sharp's concept of moral jujitsu. The primary value of this paragraph is to serve as a prod to so many Americans, who fall into the common intellectual trap of being profoundly superficial. Americans use the term nonviolence to mean "I didn't physically attack anyone today or at least in the past 10 minutes."

Don't forget the tens of millions of Americans who approve of torture. Don't forget we're part of a culture where violence is as American as apple pie.

If you oppose nonviolence and cannot provide a useful critique of this paragraph, you have no leg to stand on.

Dave Slesinger

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 28 2007 @ 10:58 AM EDT

Police are part of the beastly system. Unknowingly they take part in the dislodging of the free from that thing that makes them free. This is the fulfillment of the beast. The constitution is the acknowledgement of the God given right to voice freedom and persuade all of that acknowledgement.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 17 2008 @ 09:59 PM EDT

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If you have a myspace site I suggest you utilize my page! Send comments,
make friends etc. It's important! Thank you in advance Richard S Holler

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