Vigil behind Bars July 30, 2024 Dear friends, Greetings from the open prison of Koblenz. Since July 30th, we have exchanged the Rohrbach prison desert, where most women are locked up alone or in pairs for 21 hours or more a day, for the relative freedom of a so-called open prison. Did the devil tempt […]
Monthly Archive for July, 2024
Photo by Michelle Shiloh
JULY 29 UPDATE: Someone anonymously paid Dennis DuVall’s fine and he was released from prison.
On July 22, accompanied by his wife and friends, 82-year-old Dennis DuVall reported to Bautzen prison in Germany. The American citizen, who has lived in Germany for six years, will be serving a 90 day sentence for nonpayment of fines for protest actions at Büchel air base, where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored. The Veterans for Peace member spent 60 days in the same prison in 2023, also for actions at Büchel.
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Swedish nonviolence educator and Plowshares activist Per Herngren
by Per Herngren
When civil disobedience spread across Europe and the United States, the biggest mistake was perhaps the fixation on blockades. In the rich part of the world, the blockade has been made the dominant method of civil disobedience. In this text, various reasons are analyzed as to why Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi did not use blockades.
Gandhi used proactive and performative resistance, and the goal became the means of the struggle, “means and ends are convertible terms”. (Mohandas Gandhi, 1939.) The desired solution to the problem was turned into the method of civil disobedience. When local salt extraction and cotton production were monopolized by the colonial power, Gandhi, together with others, mined salt and spun cotton, breaking the colonial monopoly. This is called performative in queer feminist theory and is similar to Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence, where means and ends are the same. A performative is an action that realizes its vision.
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Photo by David Solnit
From the Nuclear Resister
(This chronicle of resistance is published in issues #202 and #203/204 of the Nuclear Resister newsletter, and online at nukeresister.org. Last updated on July 11.)
Since October of 2023, thousands of protests and actions around the world have called for a ceasefire and end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In this day-by-day record of dissent, the Nuclear Resister has chronicled more than 9,000 arrests (and counting) in the U.S. and Canada on over 350 occasions across more than 125 cities and towns in 36 states and 5 provinces. Over 3,400 of these arrests have taken place on at least 70 university campuses. It marks the largest surge of anti-war arrests since mid-April, 2003, when the Nuclear Resister reported over 7,500 anti-war arrests in the U.S. alone in the lead-up to and first weeks of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq.
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Leonard Peltier June 26th Statement 2024 © Greetings my Friends, Family, Loved Ones, and Supporters, Hope is a hard thing here. But I always hold hope in you, My People. Pay attention. The parole decision on July 11th may show you what justice truly means to this nation and to whom it is meant for. […]
Self portrait by Leonard Peltier
From the Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee
July 3, 2024
STATEMENT OF ATTORNEYS FOR LEONARD PELTIER REGARDING JULY 2, 2024 PAROLE DECISION
This fight is not over until it is over. Lead Attorney Jenipher Jones and Attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen, who are leading both the administrative appeal and litigation efforts on behalf of Mr. Peltier, will appeal the United State Parole Commission’s grotesquely unconstitutional decision.
In a moment of bitter irony, as the nation heads into the 4th of July Independence Day holiday, the United States Parole Commission failed to recommend Leonard Peltier, who is the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner in the United States, for release. The USPC’s July 2, 2024 decision continues to impose upon Mr. Peltier a slow Death by Incarceration. The Parole Commission’s decision only illustrates the truth of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention report stating that Leonard’s incarceration constitutes an arbitrary detention and noting his parole hearings as a key contributing factor to what they have characterized as his unjustly prolonged incarceration.
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