There is no "after the revolution"

"Eventually I came to see that there was no quick and easy way to creating a more just and sustainable world.  Human nature and the process of change are complex.  There is no single, predictable solution to injustice, only sustained effort.  There was no 'after the revolution.'" (Cathy Wilkerson, "Flying Close to the Sun" Seven Stories Press, NY, 2007.  Page 385)

After posting my review of Cathy Wilkerson's memoir of her life as a 60s revolutionary, I began to consider more deeply this quote from her.  It occurred to me that this is precisely why the revolution CANNOT be violent.  There is no "after the revolution."

The theory of violent revolution rests on the premise that there is an "after the revolution."  That the violent struggle of trained revolutionaries is only a temporary state.  The myth is that  the violent struggle is only a tool by which change will be swept into place.

The reality is quite different.  If the revolution will never end then a revolution ushered in through violence has the greatest chance of becoming a repressive military run government.  Because at whatever stage the revolution is at, at the moment, it will always be struggling against those who do not agree with the revolutionary goals.  Every revolution will have to deal with internal dissent and disagreements.  No population will remain 100% unified as time goes on, thereby ensuring that the armed freedom fighters will eventually turn their weapons against the general population for whom they had initially promised peace and justice.  Look at the historical examples: Russia, China, Cuba - where has a violent revolution for peoples liberation succeeded without internal repression and the use of force to silence dissent?

If there is no "after the revolution" then nonviolent revolution is the only way!

Book Review: "Flying Close To The Sun" by Cathy Wilkerson

"Our grieving
will become a cancer within ourselves
if we do not turn it into
vengeance."

Cathy Wilkerson quotes from her own poem "Women's Lament" toward the end of her memoir "Flying Close To The Sun" (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2007 418 pp.)  This wonderful memoir describes her years as a 60s radical including the time she spent working for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and later her years as a revolutionary in the Weathermen and the Weather Underground.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading her account of her year by year political transformation, her hesitation and uncertainty, her need for validation and to be taken seriously - especially by others within the movement - and her anger and outrage at the violence and devastation that white power and privilege were inflicting on minorities at home and on third world peoples abroad.  Over and over Wilkerson returns to the theme that, when facing a cruel system which thrives on injustice and inequality, inaction was/is unacceptable.

Anyone questioning whether traditional protest activities are effective or anyone considering joining the revolutionary wing of any current social or environmental justice movement would benefit from reading Wilkerson's memoir because she, too, questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience.  She begins her questioning on page 113 when she writes "it [Carl Oglesby's analysis of imperialism] gave me my first doubts that massive social justice movements would be enough."  She continues on page 118 writing, "I agreed with the pacifists that our anger should not be personal, but I was angry..."  And on page 133, "I was questioning pacifism as a political strategy..."  Then on page 147,

"I was also beginning to think that the government was showing that they could tolerate this kind of dissent [nonviolent protests] without changing policy, that they had contempt for us because they believed we didn't have the power to oppose them.  Besides, I couldn't see how civil disobedience could allow me to express my anger, and if I didn't find a way to let it out, I felt like I would explode."

Finally disdaining anything beside direct confrontation she writes on page 181, "I had little time or patience, however, to approach this task [an analysis of war and racism] with rigor.  I was an activist, not an armchair radical, I said to myself."

This, then, becomes the recipe for her revolutionary transformation - anger, uncertainty, impatience.  Anything that delayed a direct confrontation with state or corporate power was seen as a sign of weakness.  Questioning was abandoned because of the criticisms it would draw from her radical peers.  Wilkerson was engaged in a headlong rush to confront state power and to prove that the movement had the ability to oppose anything, or anyone, who stood in its way.  There was no time for internal reflection, or reading, or listening to those with whom one disagreed.  The revolution was here, the Weathermen were in a leadership role in that revolution and, for Wilkerson, "it felt good to be part of the elite..." (page 275).  As she writes, "We had found a place of moral purity that was not dependent on pacifism."  (page  318)

As one can imagine, it was about this time that everything blew up.  The date was March 16, 1970 in a townhouse owned by Wilkerson's father at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village.   Wilkerson, along with the members of the Weathermen cadre to which she belonged, were building a pipe bomb.  The bomb exploded prematurely as the final electrical connections were being made.  Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins were killed in the explosion and subsequent building collapse.  Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin escaped the explosion with only minor injuries and went into hiding.

On May 21, 1970, just a few weeks after the townhouse explosion and with the members of the Weathermen now in hiding, the newly formed Weather Underground issued its "Declaration of a State of War" against the American government.  Rather then taking a step back, Wilkerson was anxious to remain a part of the leadership of the Weathermen and in late 1970 participated in the bombing of the Marin County Courthouse "assuring me and others" she writes on page 363, "that indeed I was as competent [a bomber] as the next person..."  The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for 15 bombings.

While Wilkerson was clearly an ardent revolutionary, her memoir does not glorify her actions or the actions of the Weather Underground.  What I cherished most in this book were those times when she does question her own actions and the actions of those around her.  If I could ask Wilkerson anything, it would be, why, with her mounting questions and misgivings about where the movement was going did she not, in the same way she was challenging the policies of the United States, challenge the policies and direction of the movement?  I have seen this same behavoir among many activists.  They challenge those outside of the movement and question external dogmas and external propaganda, but within the movement they remain silent, in the face of movement dogma and movement propaganda.  If Wilkerson had only fought as hard as she was willing to fight against the Unites States government to smash secrecy within the Weathermen, or to make the leadership of the Weathermen accountable for their own statements, or even to make the structure of the Weathermen more gender equitable, then perhaps the revolution would have truly taken hold.

In her earlier days, Wilkerson was angered by the hypocrisy of the rich and their use of the language of democracy (page 112), and this became one of the sparks in her revolutionary transformation.  Yet, years later, she was unable to muster the same outrage when the movement was showing similar hypocrisy in its use of the language of revolution.  After the the declaration of war issued by the Weather Underground in 1970, Wilkenson writes (pages 357-358)

"What did they mean by that, I wondered.  Wasn't that exactly what we had rejected in the aftermath of the townhouse?  I had agreed that in the townhouse we had recklessly endangered people's safety and lives, not only our own, but even more importantly, those who might have been victims.  In my own mind, that criticism applied to the Days of Rage and Flint as well.  I thought we were now committed explicitly to not hurting people.  But then why use the same language?  Why say '[w]e've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution' or '[g]uns and grass are our weapon?'  If people weren't going to be hurt, then how was it war?  Why guns?  Were we using the word 'war' like Johnson used it in his 'War on Poverty?'"

What a great question to ask.  Yet there is no indication in the memoir that she ever asked this question out loud.

Another interesting component explored in Wilkerson's memoir was her desire to win (page 262), at almost any cost.  This is something that I have questioned in my own activism.  Yet, true to form, as a member of the Weathermen, Wilkerson lacks the time or motivation to openly question this desire.  The obvious questions are, win what?  Win how? What will the world look like after victory?  And how will our opponents relate to our victory?  She grapples with some of these questions in her own mind, for example on page 236 where she writes about sexism "even if the movement defeated capitalism and established socialism, it wouldn't solve the problem of women's domination."  Or, when she writes on page 321, "Now it seems fantastic that I responded to the clear signs of political idiocy [within the movement leadership] by making a series of assumptions that rational, responsible planning lay behind the wild proclamations."  This desire to win, and win NOW, is part and parcel of her and the Weathermen's rejection of nonviolent civil disobedience.  It wasn't that nonviolent civil disobedience was not producing change, it was not producing change fast enough for Wilkerson and the Weathermen.  I also found it interesting that nothing, not even the bombings that the Weather Underground engaged in, seemed to satisfy their quest for a quick victory or damage their sense of moral purity.

Ultimately, Wilkerson's memoir is not advocating violent revolution nor is it arguing that she made terrible mistakes and that only nonviolent revolution can work.  Her memoir is more complex than that.  She acknowledges mistakes and she acknowledges that the Weathermen and Weather Underground lacked a clear program to realize their revolutionary goals.  One early statement in the memoir caught my attention.  Wilkerson writes, "Being confrontational and inclusive at the same time is a difficult balance to attain." (page 117)  Ultimately, her hindsight on her years as a revolutionary came down most harshly on her need, as a youth, for quick victory.  She writes,

"Eventually I came to see that there was no quick and easy way to creating a more just and sustainable world.  Human nature and the process of change are complex.  There is no single, predictable solution to injustice, only sustained effort.  There was no 'after the revolution.'" (page 385)

Gandhian Nonviolence

In any, modern, exploration of the principles of nonviolence Gandhi often takes center stage.  There are many reasons why modern activists become frustrated when the talk of nonviolence finally devolves into quotes from Gandhi.  Primarily, frustration exists, I believe, because Gandhi is not a 21st century figure.  Given his age at the time of his assassination in 1948, one could easily argue that Gandhi was not even a 20th century figure, but instead a relic of the 19th century.  His struggle for civil rights in South Africa from 1893 until 1914 certainly places much of his early work in nonviolent civil disobedience in that archaic 19th century context.

Another reason why modern Western activists have a difficult time with Gandhi is because his campaign for civil rights in South Africa and his campaign for independence for India were fought against the British.  All too often we, in the West, idealize the 19th century British empire as being some benign club.  When we think of the British in India or South Africa we imagine some pasty white guy, too pale for the climate he is living in, wearing a pith helmet, and sporting an enormous handlebar mustache, dressed in an impeccable uniform with white gloves, saying "anyone for a spot of tea."  Too often I hear Gandhian principles of nonviolence rejected by modern activists because Gandhi was not trying to defeat Hitler or some other tyrant.  Implicit in this rejection is the notion that being colonized by the British was a cake walk - cricket, polo, tea parties, and quite walks in the park - rather than some brutal foreign colonial power exploiting another foreign land for the benefit of King and Queen, or as Hitler would have said, the fatherland.

To properly understand Gandhi and to fully appreciate his nonviolent campaign for civil rights in South Africa and independence for India one first needs to replace romantic Western images of the British empire with the often brutal colonial power it was.  To assist in this, listen to what John Oliver, of the Daily Show, had to say about the British oppression in America.

The point is that the British government knew how to subjugate an indigenous population.  What Gandhi faced in South Africa and when he returned home to India was not John Cleese prancing about with a funny walk, it was serious oppression.

Yet critics of nonviolence, like Ward Churchill in his book "Pacifism as Pathology" insist that Gandhi's success happened only after one hundred years of violent struggle and the general weakening of the British empire due to two world wars.  "Prior to the decimation of British troop strength and the virtual bankruptcy of the Imperial treasury during World War II, Gandhi's movement showed little likelihood of forcing England's abandonment of India. [...] their [Gandhi's] victory was contingent upon others physically gutting their opponents for them." (p. 55)

While it is certain that the weakening of the British empire played a role in the ultimate independence of India.  One should never forget that the British soldiers who were in charge in India before, during, and after World War II were under strict orders to maintain British rule.  Even as British power was weakened by two world wars there was a desperate attempt by the British government to cling to, and maintain, the empire.  In fact it would be a historical obfuscation to suggest that World War I and World War II did not increase British repression in their colonial territories.  All around the world dissidents were rounded up and imprisoned, or worse, during both world wars.

The fact that India became independent shortly after the end of World War II is much more a testament to the fact that Gandhi was able to maintain his fight for independence against all odds, during war and peace, while he was free or behind bars.  This, in fact, is a characteristic of nonviolent struggles.  While soldiers may be disarmed, the nonviolent activist cannot.

The praise given to Gandhi's nonviolent struggle for independence in India does not, in any way, detract from the historical struggle, often violent, that the people of India had waged against the British empire.  Each and every one of us alive today are standing on the shoulders of the radicals and revolutionaries who came before us, and our progress towards a more just and peaceful world can only succeed to the degree that it does because of the foundation laid by others.  The reason why Gandhi is often held up as a standard against which we can evaluate our current nonviolent struggles is because Gandhi wanted more than Indian independence he wanted to transform the culture of his country and to make it a more just and equitable society.  He rejected the partition of India, he rejected untouchability.  It was this that cost him his life.  And he was murdered by the establishment elements within his own country.

When modern activists reject nonviolence they reject, as far as I can tell, those who use nonviolence merely for political correctness or because it is seen as the expedient, less challenging path to follow.  Gandhi would have rejected this as well.  Gandhian nonviolence was about challenging, at a basic level, those structures that maintained power and privilege within Indian culture.  When that was the British empire he rebelled against those structures.  But Gandhi was clear that he did not want to replace British tyranny with Indian tyranny.  To ignore these lessons from Gandhi and to reject his nonviolent revolution is to ignore, at a fundamental level, the true meaning of revolution and the goal, that should lay behind all social justice movements.

The Big Takeover

The link above will take you to Matt Taibbi's article of the same name in the April 2, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.  This is one of the best articles on the global economic crisis I have read.

Google & the Future of Books

The title above is a link to this article, of the same name, by Robert Darnton, published in The New York Review Of Books, February 12, 2009, Volume 56, Number 2.  It is a wonderful article which explores the future of digital publishing and asks the question, will the free exchange of information (with limited copyright) prevail or will the commercial need for profit dominate, as library collections are digitized.

AIG Capitalism=Greed

These new stickers are now available at my CafePress store.  Commemorate the 2008-2009 economic collapse and remind people that there is a better way.  Click the title "AIG Capitalism=Greed" to order.

"Truman Defeats Dewey" Will The Death Of Print Mean The Death Of History?

In an earlier post on this blog, I began discussing the very real problem that digital publishing has, which is, no true archival digital file format, as well as no way to prevent original source material from being altered once it has been published.  Some have mistaken this discussion to be a luddite inspired statement, on my part, that print is better than digital.  I am not even remotely suggesting that.  However, it seems important to note, on the eve of the death of print, that print, through the chemical process whereby ink adheres onto paper, had the accidental benefit of being very difficult to alter once the ink had dried.  By its very nature, therefore, print was archival.  Conversely, on the eve of the ascent of digital publishing, it is important to recognize that digital documents, by the physical way in which zeros and ones are recorded and stored in modern data processing equipment, are always mutable.  The result is that on November 3, 1948, had the Chicago Daily Tribune been published in digital format, the historic headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman," could have immediately been corrected on the company's web page to read "Truman Defeats Dewey." Had the Chicago Daily Tribune only published a web edition, in 1948, this historic headline, this historic blunder, might have been corrected before the public became the wiser.  Even sixty one years later the headline is easily corrected using photo editing software.

In our modern digital culture we often loose sight of the fact that digital media means the end of certainty.  There has always been fakery, but these incidents have mostly involved on one, or a few, altering a copy of the original.  What happens to certainty in a digital world where the original is just as easy to alter as any copy?  In a digital publishing world does the word "original" loose its meaning entirely?

After my previous blog post on the topic of the death of print, I received many comments via email, and I thought I would include a summary of those as well as my responses.

• There must already exist a digital file format that is archival and unalterable.  NO.  Portable Document Format (PDF), Rich Text Format (RTF), Extensible Markup Language (XML), or any of the others that friends have suggested, all suffer from the fact that the original data is not secured and that the final, published, file is also not unalterable.  It is also a mistake to think that we need to secure these documents only from outside tampering.  The temptation, on the part of content producers, to alter their documents to make them agree with financial, political, social, or historical realities is great.  The reality for newspaper publishing online is that incorrect headlines may be repaired.  Even years later the headline may be edited or the wording of a story may be tweaked.  How is one to know?  Because the edit does not involve a copy of the story but the "original" data files held by the publisher. 
• Can't these insecure data files merely be encrypted upon publication?  YES, but encryption only protects against unauthorized tampering.  The biggest problem with digital publishing is that the content publishers themselves always have the ability to alter the published, encrypted, content.  The accident securing print was that the content provider had as difficult a time altering the published content as did an unauthorized group or individual.  It was this accident of print that drove much of the ethics of the newspaper industry because publishers knew that once something was put into print the company could be held accountable.
• Couldn't changes to a published document be tracked and recorded the way Wiki producers do?  YES, and they should.  But such a system only means that rather than protecting the original document one now needs to secure the track changes data.  It makes changing a document more difficult because now a content owner would not only need to modify the published content but they would also need to erase any record of those changes in the track changes database.
• Certainly an independent web archive, like that maintained by archive.org, would solve this problem because any changes to content would be recorded in their archive as well.  Since content producers don't have file permissions to the servers operated by archive.org the record of these changes are secure.  The biggest problem with an organization like archive.org is that copyright laws prevent them from archiving copyrighted materials without the copyright holders permission.  To succeed, therefore, archive.org must collaborate and cooperate with content providers. To not put too fine a point on it, while some third party archival organization may provide an extra layer of protection for the historical record, right now the laws prevent this. Securing permissions from all content providers to allow their copyrighted material to be archived would also be nearly impossible.  While we, as a society, debate copyright law and the legality of tools to circumvent DRM, the movement towards electronic only publication is picking up speed.  It could be years or decades before the copyright laws reflect the need to archive and protect the sum of our published digital works.
• Granted there are obstacles, but once the copyright laws and the technology is there to protect the digital record everything will work and the historical record is safe.  NO.  One of the biggest problems with digital publishing is the ability to reference a digital resource.  One could, with a print newspaper, reference the November 3, 1948 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, front page, or page A4, and another person could look up that reference and read the original wording.  Web documents don't have a well defined presentation.  The way a web document is rendered on your computer may be totally different than how it appears on mine.  A publisher of web only content may define the rules by which their content will be rendered but these rules may be interpreted differently depending on what computer, operating system, and browser the end user, or content user, is using to view the content.  The archiving problem is how does one ensure that a content viewer, one hundred years from now, will be able to read the front page of the New York Times from September 12, 2001.  And, perhaps most importantly, how does one ensure that the front page of the New York Times, viewed one hundred years from now, will look the way it did when it was published.
• Isn't the solution to that problem that we just archive the browser software?  NO.  First off because future generations may not be able to just create a virtual PC or a virtual MAC to run this software.  There are copyright, trademark, and patent issues with such a plan.  Even if these can be circumvented, the technical challenge still exists.  Even with contemporary computers running contemporary OSs and browsers the rendering of the front page of the New York Times may not be 100% accurate to how the designers at the Times intended it.  Below are two images from the New York Times web page, the left in Firefox, the right in Safari.  Similar, but not exact.

• Web documents are meant to be dynamic and not static, aren't you basically complaining about something that print was not able to do.  Dynamic documents are so much better, content and ads may be targeted to the individual content user and content may be reformatted to fit best on the device on which the content is being viewed - this is much better than one size fits all news.  Sure, for producers and advertisers dynamic content is much better than static content.  One may be able to even make a convincing argument that for the content user as well, dynamic content is best.  However, from an archivist perspective there is no way to track and archive dynamic content.  From an educational or research perspective there is no way to reference dynamic content.  Even if one could say "this quote came form page A3 of the New York Times" and even if another person could pull up page A3 in his/her browser, the content generation algorithm at the Times web page may say that this person's online profile indicates a greater interest in this type of information therefore they will see this content while the original person's online profile generated a completely different page A3.  Rather then to disprove my point the dynamic nature of web content makes my point.  One hundred years from now a person trying to pull up the front page of the New York Times from September 12, 2001 may not see the correct front page.
• Surely knowledgeable web programmers will solve this problem, you are not talking about a problem inherent to digital documents.  Yes, yes I am.  I began this discussion by saying that an accidental benefit of print was the fact that it was archival.  I don't think that people began recording their ideas on the printed page because they were necessarily thinking these ideas will be around for the next millennium.  They may have been thinking about short term archiving or they may have merely been thinking about their own use at some point in the future.  But, accidentally, print proved to be a very good archiving tool.  It allowed human culture to maintain a certain level of knowledge without each generation needing to reinvent the wheel or without each generation having to remember everything.  Best of all, the stability of print made referencing somebody else's ideas very easy.  An accidental defect in digital publishing is the loss of all this.
• They will be much smarter five hundred years from now then we are, certainly they will be able to figure all this out.  Intelligence does not always equate to understanding.  We are much smarter then people were one thousand years ago yet we still argue over the meaning of biblical passages.  We know much more about language and meaning then we did even 20 years ago yet we still can't agree on translations of some documents between German and English.  My point is a simple one, digital formats are slippery and dynamic.  Even with printed versions of the bible we can't reach agreement yet scholars can go back to very early Christian texts from which modern bibles were translated.  These original biblical documents have not been altered in hundreds of years but our modern translations continue to change.  Now imagine a world where the early Christian texts were digital and they could be modified in untraceable ways by any church authority with the correct access rights to the contents of the important folders.  Do you imagine that these original files would have remained unchanged?

Print is not better then digital.  It is just an accident of print that it was as archival as it was.  But human culture has benefitted from this accident.  Similarly, it is an accident of digital documents that they do not posses the same archival quality as print.  The fact that they don't is apparent to anyone who understands digital documents and dynamic web programming.  The death of print presents human culture with a critical dilemma,  and a critical question we must answer before running headlong into a world where only digital documents persist.  That question is, can human culture survive the death of history?  I think the answer is that we cannot which is why I advocate that greater attention must be paid to creating a truly archival digital file format and a digital publishing medium where documents, once published, cannot be altered.

AIG, could it happen before?

The insurance giant AIG is certainly making news but the news is old news.  I am not talking about the fact that CNN reported on these AIG bonuses weeks before this story became all the rage, I am talking about the fact that this is what capitalism is all about.  GREED!

During the most recent 8-years of Republican control in Washington, we've been told how good greed is.  You remember, don't you, low corporate taxes, low capital gains taxes, and low taxes on the most wealthy - allow people to keep more of their money (aaahhh greed).  Why should corporations and the rich pay taxes, that is just a disincentive to success.  Success at what, you may ask, success at acquiring wealth.  This is the Republican mantra - don't interfere with their [corporations and the rich] acquisition of wealth, because to do so will ultimately hurt the economy and bring us all down.

Of course, now that we are all down, this greed is starting to stink a little.

Now what happens, is what traditionally happens.  Congress holds hearing, politicians point fingers, the media opines "what went wrong," and a few "bad apples" are singled out for rebuke.  Now it is AIGs turn to be singled out.  Before them there was Bernie Madoff, ENRON, Martha Stewart, the Iraq War, skipping decades we can see a line of corruption going back to J.P. Morgan and many before that.

The research is not hard to do.  In 1898, Henry Demarest Lloyd published his expose of the abuses of standard oil entitled "Wealth Against Commonwealth."  Gustavus Myers published his "History of the Great American Fortunes" in 1907.  Charles Beard published "An Economic Interpretation Of The Constitution Of The United States" arguing that some people made a profit based on the wording of that document and achieving greater profit influenced the editing process of the draft versions of the Constitution.

We are now expected to blame AIG and express outrage without questioning the fundamentals of capitalism.  The big problem is that greed is not a sustainable economic policy!  The early Christian church prohibited usury because we were supposed to understand that we are our brothers keeper.  If an individual had money and another needed money, the person with money to give was expected to give it without asking, what's in it for me.

Under Capitalism's tutelage we have learned to only ask, what's in it for me.  Because individual greed drives this economic system.  We expect that every time our community needs something from us there will be some kind of quid-pro-quo.  Rarely do we expect people to do something simply because it needs to be done.  And when it comes to corporations we never expect this.  We make financial incentives so that corporations will hire more minorities, or remove discriminatory advancement policies.  Corporations get incentives to create more jobs, to reduce their waste, to clean up their past pollution, and to invest in R&D and long term projects.  It is laughable to suggest that a corporation would do something just because it needs to be done and will benefit society.  That's not bottom line thinking.  That kind of thinking won't build shareholder profits.

AIG is following Capitalism's dictates.  This is reprehensible behavior to be sure but the problem is not that AIG is using taxpayer bailout money to pay huge executive bonuses it is that, under Capitalism, all executives expect excessive payments.  We are discouraged from looking at this foundational problem by industry apologists who write things like the following

"The reality is that the free market is alive and well, and is the true dictator of CEO pay. While what one's peers are making is still a legitimate barometer, critics should look at the macro economics of "stars" in all fields (after all, CEOs are the "stars" of the business world), and not just the micro economics of CEO pay, if they are serious about understanding the calculus in determining compensation." (from businessknowhow.com)

Political leaders love pointing fingers at the individual "bad apples" as these abuses draw public attention.  But holding Congressional hearings on AIG misses the point entirely and distracts the public from looking at the source of it all - Capitalism.

Print is Dead!

The fact that print is dead is not news.  Why is the media in our country so reactive rather than proactive?  Print has been facing its own mortality for decades and lying stricken, on life support, for at least the last five to ten years.  There are many stories that could be written about the death of print, but the important story, as always, is being ignored.

One of my favorite books is George Ross Kirkpatrick's socialist, anti-war classic, "War-What For?"  This book was first published August 1910.  That's right, it is almost 100 years old.

It looks pretty good, right.  The binding is tight.  The pages have that smell that only a 100 year old book can have.  And I can still read it, unaltered, in its original form!  This is the story behind the death of print.

We do not have a digital format that can deliver that longevity.

Imagine that back in 1983 you created a digital document on your trusty IBM XT computer using a popular program in that day MultiMate.  You stored that document on your trusty 360kb 5 1/4 inch floppy disk.  Within less then a decade that document would have been unusable by most computer systems without someone with advanced technical knowledge.  Within two decades it would have been unreadable by all computer systems even if a person had advanced technical knowledge.  I even gave up my last 5 1/4 inch floppy drive in 2003.

The story is not about how important news is to a functioning democracy, even though that is certainly an important topic for discussion.  Neither is the story the turmoil that this digital transition will create in the publishing business.  The REAL story is that we can't even develop a digital format which will last for longer than a decade, yet we can go back thousands of years and still read early human texts from their original printed form.  Our ability to look deep into our past has given human culture and society a very long perspective on what our culture represents and how our culture has changed.  All that is at risk with this digital conversion.

What is  needed?  World governments have to take out of the hands of private, for-profit entities, the ability to dictate low level data formats.  These world governments need to fund the necessary primary scientific research to develop a truly archival digital format.  Part of this digital format MUST be its mandated use by all computer systems, all storage devices, and all software capable of reading and writing data.  If print is going to die, then then it becomes all the more important that my MAC be able to read the exact same data files as my PC, and I need to be able to open my documents using any web browser or any wordprocessor.

XML is pointing the way forward.  With well defined DTDs and rich schemas one could design operating system and application independent documents.  However current efforts in this regard are still hampered by the fact that much of this development is being conducted by private entities whose main motivation is not the archiving of human culture but their shareholder profit.

Next, the government has to figure out how to create a system where by digital media may be created, but once created, cannot be modified.  When the New York Times printed a headline 100 years ago it became part of the historical record.  The times could not, 10 days after printing the headline, simply click edit on the document and change the wording.  Because of the characteristics of print, once created, it was as good as carved in stone.  This has two benefits.  First, it makes it very important to get it right the first time.  The entire news editing process evolved because if one made a mistake it could only be corrected by printing a later retraction or apology.  But secondly, it made one accountable, because a falsehood printed today may be uncovered a decade later and come back to haunt the institution.

Digital media allows the editing and correcting of material at any point.  This clearly has some advantages on the document creation end.  But, because nothing is permanent in the digital world it makes one less careful.  I plan on proof reading this article before I hit the Publish Post button, but I know that if I miss something and discover it next week, I can simply open this post up, re-edit it, and re-post it.  The original is gone, my mistake is gone, and now anyone looking for what I wrote will find the new version and not the old.  This makes any reliance on a digital document inherently fraught with danger.

It is not in the interest of any private entity to fix this inherent flaw in the digital domain.  Why?  Because as long as this flaw exists history can be re-written.  Today your company's web page says A B C but tomorrow after a news story runs about how irresponsible A is, your company's web page can be edited to say B C D.  Anyone searching to see if your company ever said A would have a difficult time because even if the search engine they were using returned hits on your company's web page related to A, when the individual clicked on any of the links the documents either would no longer be available or they would only be provide the new information.

Protecting the integrity of the historical record, while once not needed because of the archival nature of print, must now become a government research program and technology which protects the historical record must evolve and must be mandated to become a part of any digital media format.

So this is the story that is not being reported in the mainstream media.  Print may be dead but if we are not careful in this transition what will really be at risk is our ability to communicate and preserve human knowledge in a way that will last for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years.

Do "movements to bring about social and environmental justice always fail?"

The assertion that these movements always fail is how Derrick Jensen begins his introduction to Ward Churchill's book "Pacifism as Pathology."  This assertion cannot be taken seriously.  Clearly, movements to bring about social and environmental justice do not ALWAYS fail.  But when they do, the reason is never that activists have engaged in "blind, unthinking nonviolence." (p. 5)  The basic argument of this book, as far as I can tell from Derrick Jensen's Preface, is that movements for social and environmental justice would ALWAYS succeed if all tactics were on the table, and if the pacifists within these movements would just mix things up a little by adding a touch of violence.  I am not putting words in his mouth about pacifists trying violence, he actually says it

"It has always seemed clear to me that violent and nonviolent approaches to social change are complementary.  No one I know who advocates the possibility of armed resistance to the dominant culture's degradation and exploitation rejects nonviolent resistance.  Many of us routinely participate in nonviolent resistance and support those for whom this is their only mode of opposition.  Not long ago I and two other non-pacifists wasted two hours sitting at a country fair tabling for a local environmental organization and watching the - how do I say this politely? - supersized passersby wearing too-small Bush/Cheney 2004 T-shirts and carrying chocolate-covered bananas.  We received many scowls.  We did this nonviolent work, although we accomplished precisely nothing.  But many dogmatic pacifists refuse to grant the same respect the other way." (p. 18)

Haven't I heard that same argument from so many meat eaters.  They say, I tried your soy cheese pizza, now, how about you show me the same respect and have a piece of this pepperoni pizza, a little bit of meat won't hurt you!  God, who doesn't hate those dogmatic vegetarians? (sarcasm here)  Oh... don't get me started on those dogmatic environmentalists, they recycle everything and compost their food scraps.  Wouldn't it be great if they would just stop carrying around their empty plastic and glass bottles looking for a recycling bin and just throw them in the trash for Christ's sake.  (more sarcasm).

Enough sarcasm.  Hopefully you get my point.  But if not, the point of social and environmental justice movements is to hold up an ideal and then to work at moving society, as a whole, towards that ideal.  Society's response will be to try to find some compromise between where society is today and that ideal the social movement is advancing.  Obviously, at some point, both sides will compromise.  We each, individually, decide which compromises we can accept and which we must reject.  For many environmentalists and animal rights activists we've decided to not compromise our vegetarian or vegan lifestyles.  I know many who would argue that staunch vegetarianism or staunch veganism limits the movement, drives good people who agree with us on 80% of what needs to change away from the movement, and makes our success more difficult.  I get that.  I really do.  But my not eating meat is so central to my ideal of what I think we need to achieve that not compromising on that ideal is essential.  For me, as for many who call themselves pacifists, nonviolence is the same.

Why won't we mix in a little violence?  Because to do so would compromise the vision of the world we seek to create and it is a compromise we can't accept.

I think it is also worth noting that Jensen picks a particularly weak example of a nonviolent action.  He spent two hours sitting at a table at a county fair and in his words "accomplished precisely nothing."  I certainly could argue that he did accomplish something, but I am willing to take his word about the failure of this choice.  But more importantly, is he really serious, is that the choice he is laying out?  Nonviolence being represented by the act of sitting at a table verses some unspecified, but assuredly, daring act of violence.  If that is how Jensen and Churchill frame the debate over the choice between nonviolence and violence then clearly the table sitters look like twits.

While sitting at a table may be nonviolence it is not nonviolent resistance.  Yet too often those who advocate for violence frame this debate by selectively omitting the tools of nonviolent resistance.  They denounce writing letters, petition drives, tabling, picketing, and marching.  But that is not the entirety of nonviolence.  Here is another example from the blog Greentangle

"I’m not trying to urge anyone to violence, but are signs and fiery speeches an appropriate opposition to bombs? If someone truly believes that over a million babies are being killed every year in this country by abortion, is writing a letter of protest enough?"  [italics are mine]

Of course, if these are the only tactics that nonviolent activists engaged in then one would have to agree with the point.  But they are not the only tactics.  Sailing a ship to ground zero of a nuclear weapons test is nonviolence!  Plugging a chemical discharge pipe to save a river is nonviolence.  Refusing to participate - not joining the military, not eating meat, not paying taxes - is nonviolence.  Gandhi, King, Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Mary "Mother" Jones, Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison - these folks made fiery speeches and wrote letters and carried picket signs, but that is not where they stopped, that is where they began and how they drew others into the movement.  Jensen quotes Churchill that pacifism "promises that the harsh realities of state power can be transcended via good feelings and purity of purpose..." (p. 5)  NO... pacifism does not promise that!  Gandhi did not promise that, King certainly did not promise that, Debs, are you kidding, that he was only about "good feelings" and "purity of purpose?"  This is such an obfuscation of pacifism that it borders on a lie.

The problem with the arguments that Jensen, and one expects Churchill, make in this book is that they are arguing against some truncated form of pacifism, a neutered half baked idea of nonviolence.  And they denounce this half-born pacifism, that they themselves have created, as being some kind of monster.  Well of course it is, you created it for that very purpose.  Worse, they suggest that with just a little sprinkling of violence - here and there, nothing much - this truncated, neutered, half-born activism can come alive.  It is as if they are saying, just take those pointless protest letters and turn them into letter bombs, and, zap-ping-boing, success.

One final quote from the Jensen's preface.

"The question becomes: what do you want?  I know what I want.  I want to live in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, a world with more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, a world with more ancient forests every year..."

"And I will do whatever it takes to get there." (p. 14)

I know how tempting it is to wax poetic when writing.  When I have allowed more flourishing and dreamful prose like this to flow about pacifism people have derided my lapse by suggesting that I need to get up on a cross.  No ecosystem can support more and more salmon, song birds or forests year after year.  There is a natural carrying capacity for every species in every ecosystem.  So, aside from the fact, that the vision itself is not environmentally sustainable the biggest issue comes with the statement "And I will do whatever it takes to get there."  Because if we take him seriously on any one of these statements then to increase the number of salmon year after year would mean not only removing damns and cleaning rivers but also stopping commercial and indigenous fishing of salmon as well as killing a huge number of higher level natural predators to the salmon.  If you want every year for more and more salmon to exist and if that, and that alone, is what you care about and you are willing to do whatever it takes, then this is what you have to do.  You have to kill or move osprey, kingfishers, otters, herons, sharks, seals, ferns, gulls, and bears.  And you have to stop people from eating or fishing for salmon.  Would any sane person do whatever it takes to get there?  Perhaps I am taking Jensen too literally.  Maybe he does not really mean whatever it takes.

The problem with the phrase "whatever it takes" is that there are many horrible choices out there whose consequences are beyond consideration.  In Sam Harris' book "The End Of Faith," he suggests that a nuclear first strike might be what it takes to eliminate muslim extremists.  When people say or write things like they are willing to do whatever it takes, we all better hope that they don't actually mean it.  Every day, I hope that the United States military will not do "whatever it takes" to protect America, there has to be something that is too much just to save America, and I hope the people in charge of our military have a clear vision of what going to far might be.  As for activists, when they say that they will do "whatever it takes" I also hope that they are not serious.

The big difference between pacifists and the kind of activists that Jensen and Churchill are trying to spawn is that the pacifist says that he/she will do "whatever it takes" up to a point.  To suggest that there is never a point where going farther is going too far, is the argument of a mad man.