I was just looking around for documentation of the G20 protests in Melbourne, Australia. And of course you find the typical edited footage of the 20 violent punks interspersed with footage of thousands of non-violent protestors. Watch out! The revolution is at your doorstep! They are coming to take away your television and fast food by force! Then I watched some videos from Melbourne Indymedia decrying the violence of the police, while the videos clearly showed static police officers deflecting the large objects that those protestors were throwing at them.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/11/130885_comment.php

I was inspired to post a comment pointing that out since I’ve been reading some history of the sixties and seventies. There were many activist groups that were torn apart by the conflict between the pro-violence and non-violence camps. In particular, I was very disappointed by the collapse of the Midpeninsula Free University, in Palo Alto, California, where I grew up. This was a free university where anyone could teach and anyone could take classes. It lasted almost 10 years, but in the end was destroyed by Maoists who took it over to use as a recruiting and training venue for violent protest. We can all see quite clearly now that in that era, non-violence was far more successful that violence, look at the massive mobilization and significant and lasting change that Martin Luther King, Jr. and company were able to achieve. I shudder to see that advocates of violence could again destroy the foundations of a new movement on the scale of the sixties that we are building.

And for some constructive ideas, there are still some ideas from that forgone era that are useful now. Saul Alinsky provided some very clever and effective non-violence protests that we can learn a lot from. For example, he organized a toilet sit-in at the Chicago O’Hare airport to get the mayor to pay attention to their cause. When faced with the news hitting that none of those business men flying in could go to the bathroom, the mayor paid attention. Check out this synopsis of his Rules for Radicals or read the whole book.

And to end of, I think the EZLN can teach us a lot about how to conduct a protest. Below is a video of the power of non-violence in action. The Mexican military had illegally set up an base in Chiapas in southern Mexico. The locals had been tormented and harassed by the Mexican military, so they did not want them there. They took non-violent action, and stormed the base, facing down soldiers with rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers pointing at them. The military withdrew later the same day in response to this protest:

EZLN takeover of illegal military base