In this interview ICNC speaks with Tom Hastings - member of the Governing Council of the International Peace Research Association, former co-chair and current board member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, Director of PeaceVoice (a program of the Oregon Peace Institute), founder of Whitefeather Peace House, a former Plowshares resister and nonviolent felon (twice) for peace and disarmament, and author of several books on nonviolence as well as peer-reviewed journal articles, peer-reviewed book chapters on nonviolence, and an entry in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace.  

Hastings speaks about the ways in which the US Civil Rights movement inspired him to learn more about and participate in various nonviolent movements, including several plowshare actions as part of the anti-nuclear movement.

Interview:

How were you influenced by the Civil Rights Movement in the American South?

Tom Hastings (TH):Watching what they did in the civil rights movement, and I was living in the north, as a kid but we talked about it a lot when I was in Junior high school and in high school because these were innocent venerable victims, these were kids, and then especially, the most gruesome and ghastly occasion was the bombing of the church in Birmingham Killing the little girls. And there’s research now saying that you kill little girls everyone’s going to hate you, everyone’s going to figure out how to rise up against you. So there was a great feeling in the North, and in the far West, pretty much the whole country except the old confederacy where Jim Crow was legal that "that’s not our America, you don’t get to do that in this country.” In fact, we even had a civil war over this, you don’t get to do that anymore. And so I had friends who were older than I was who by 1964, were going down and volunteering at Freedom Summer etc. It was outrageous to the whole country. Because we were still in this afterglow of WWII where we saw ourselves as the beacon of democracy, human rights and equality on planet earth. We really irrigated that self image and this flew flat smack in the face of that so when they were doing sit-ins they were radicalizing people that they didn’t even know that they were radicalizing. And ultimately, it really helped to prepare a lot of us for doing nonviolent resistance to other things.

Its kind of one of the lessons of nonviolence that you hear a lot of talk that says “you cant be wed to the consequences you just have to do the right thing.” But often times we’re very strategic even when we don’t know it, and we’re very strategic to other peoples in other struggles because all of us who are acting, as James Lawson pointed out last night, we are setting up examples for other people to draw from.

What was your involvement with the anti nuclear struggle?

TH: I had done my first plowshare action back in 1985, which a plowshare action is basically you go out and you do what we call direct disarmament, which in other words is if the government wont do it I’m going to do it with my bear hands, or simple tools if I have to.  One of the other elements of that is that you are personally accountable for what you do.

So for the first one I went out and dismantled a part of this antenna of a command facility for thermonuclear submarines and I actually cut it up into pieces and took a piece to the local congressman put it on the desk and said “tell Bob Davis hi from me and I’ve taken down part of that system and you don’t need to call the sheriff because they’re only a block away and that’s where I’m going next with my other little piece of this.” So I did that in 1985 and that really was for me a change in direction.

I had been much more involved in what I considered to be the Martin Luther King model of mass action and the plowshare was much more of the individual model or the Phil Berrigan type to go out there as a witness.

How did you use skill teaching and coalition building in that struggle?

TH: During that same period of time Native American treaty rights were in question in northern Wisconsin, in the northeastern part of Minnesota, and in the upper peninsula of Michigan. And as we allied ourselves with the tribes and began to do trainings on our campuses and in our communities for going out simply to be whitnesses when they practiced their treaty rights we were elevating the skills of nonviolence in a regional sense because we did a lot of these trainings, had been fighting this thermonuclear command facility for decades since it was first announced that it was going to be built in Wisconsin. And we never got it unbuilt until the tribes jumped in with us. And as we organized and inadvertently built coalition we didn’t say there was a quid pro quo.  We didn’t go to the tribes and say if “we support you in this will you support us in that?” We just offered ourselves because it was the right thing to do—it was so clearly the right thing to do, the racism was not subtle, let’s put it that way. So we got involved for many years in doing that.

We were really involved in spreading the skills out because so many people were so interested in this. And very few people in the local area were really interested in stopping this thermonuclear command center so we didn’t know it, but at the time, our various skilling and competency building exercises were preparing the way to really radically change the structure and the conditions.

What methods do you find most successful when educating students to get involved?

TH: One thing that I stressed a lot with them was this action, reflection, action model, because so much activism is just action action action, and someone tries a little reflection and everyone’s still action action action, “we gotta get out there,” “the time for words is over,””talk is cheap, “walk the walk” but you know you have to slow down after every one.

The thing that I asked the students in Northland to do was to get involved in the strategic planning, do the action, don’t go get arrested (and most of them didn’t but occasionally there’d be one that would commit a crime of passion that day…), and within a day, maybe two days at the outset we’d meet and my role was just to be the scribe on the blackboard—what worked, what didn’t work, and then the advance in knowledge happens, and only then. Because then they’re folding their experience into the theory that we’d been talking about in the classroom. And they’re producing a synthesis and an evaluation that’s telling them something that’s going to stick, their experience means something now because oh next time “ahh maybe we’ll do this” and it’s the human problem solving gene, whatever that is… we’re all born with it, but unless you activate it with people and do it on a basis where it’s elicitive so you’re getting something from everybody can contribute and you come out with a collective collaborative learning at the end, you don’t have one sage who’s the strategic master who’s saying you know “thank you young grasshoppers here is what we’ve learned.” That’s not the way it works.

What have you found to be the key elements needed to wage a successful nonviolent struggle with sustainable transformative results?

TH: If all you’re doing is worrying about the competency and the wiping away of the dictator then you’re doing the most superficial thing that you can do, it is for a very good reason and you’re achieving a very good thing, but the difference between reform and revolution is really that the revolution never ends. If you don’t continue to engage in basically a national conversation about what’s next, you know, what’s the next good thing we can do rather than say “well got that all done, now we’re on to living happily ever after!” You’ve got to keep the big machinery necessary for building a civil resistance campaign humming along somehow and that I think is the biggest challenge, because if there’s no ongoing process of reflection and "how do we evolve from here," we kind of just stall out and guess what, the bad actors are raring to go on the margins—they’ve had a plan on the shelf. It’s kind of a good combination of East and West because I think the philosophies of the east are much more centered on the idea that change is permanent—that’s the only permanent. There’s nothing that’s decided once and for all, nothing.