time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning angelina good boy enjoying a good boy is the helen jackson chair in human rights and director of the university of washington center for human rights she's also a professor at the him re m jackson school of international studies and long as societies and justice angelina thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning  here so start out if you would and tell us about the university washington center for human rights ok so the center for human rights was founded actually by an initiative of the washington state legislature which is unusual for a center for human rights at a university campus and the idea this was in the two thousand and eight two thousand and nine legislative session the idea was to pull together human rights energies that existed on campus already in departments all the way from the school of medicine to the school of law to  the college of arts and sciences and many other parts of campus and to create one kind of clearing house for human rights activity and specifically to task that center with actually contributing to real world social change for human rights so that's also a distinguishing characteristic of our center in other words you know we're all academics we write books we hold conferences and all those kinds of things that academics do but in addition the center's main task actually is finding ways to harness the energies of the university the know how that exists there that and an excitement of our students the innovative capacity that they have and the skills of our faculty to contribute through partnerships with real world off campus human rights organizations to contribute to real world social change alright and do you pretty much get to make the calls make decisions hands off from any oversight yes i would say  have faculty in all of different university departments we have a faculty steering committee that makes decisions for the center and we receive requests from human rights organizations some of them right here in seattle somehow fly around the  world for research partnerships the bulk of the way that we contribute to human rights organizations capacity is by enhancing their research capacity so many many human rights organizations have research needs that they don't have the in house capacity to address and so this is a great partnership for us as well because it gives us a chance to have our own students working on real world social problems have our own faculty applying their skills to those questions that are posed by human rights organizations and and how did you get involved in the organization well i'm the founding director of the center so when we were founded it was just one year actually after i had the great honor of becoming the inaugural occupant of the helen is jackson chair in human rights so part of the momentum that the donation of the funds to create the helen jackson chair those funds were created or were given to the university by that henrietta jackson foundation that gave us a lot of momentum to say not only it was wonderful that we have the support for human rights activity on campus but we want to take it even further we want to build a center that will enable us to do this work and do it at a higher level and so that was effort that i and others including peter jackson center jackson's son conducted over the course of two thousand and eight two thousand nine legislative session and in june two thousand and nine the bill was signed into law creating this end so one of the some of the campaigns that you're focusing on well we have a number of different research priorities so  the work as i said that we are tasked with doing is working on you know you name it kind of human rights so that runs the gamut from concerns about torture to you know access to water being human right or access to health so we're  with working on all of those human rights concerns and working on them anywhere in the world that they may arise so we're living into that mission now by working we have a project on rethinking punishment which is trying to  develop new ideas to combat the trend towards mass incarceration that we've seen in recent years in the united states we have a project in el salvador called unfinished sentences that i also direct and then we have a new and growing area of human rights a home where we are since january of this year working to try to figure out how we can here in washington state harness some of the energies around human rights to protect and promote human rights in our state even at the time that there have been many rollbacks and human rights at the national level in the u s all right so want to talk a bit about some of your work directly with unfinished sentences or yes and focus on ourselves or in central america which is an issue that's near and dear to my heart as well as mitt many of our listeners and stuff so can you talk about that and how did  did your interest initially in that field get perked your well actually i've been working on human rights in central america for all of my professional career and so when i had the task of being the first director of the center for human rights which had this novel mission of working in partnership with real world organizations for social change it made sense that i look to organizations and an area of the world where i already had preexisting relationships and commitments and that's kind of what gave rise to our initiative in el salvador in particular where around the time that the center was being created and i would you know was commenting to friends and colleagues of mine there about what we were doing and several folks in the human rights movement there said to us you know we could really use your help and so that's what gave rise to this project which is now over five years long where we're working in partnership with not just one but a variety of human rights organizations and all salvador all of them working on justice understood in the broadest possible sense of the word  so talk about more about that sure so well i just said justice in the broadest sense of the word and what i meant by that is some people are interested in pursuing justice in a court of law that's oftentimes what we understand justice to be and that's a very important thing which  even in these months and recent months and weeks has seen important progress in el salvador but other people are also interested in other forms of justice justice as historical memory knowing the truth of what happened in many cases sadly although it's been decades since the conclusion of the armed conflict in el salvador there are many many victims who still haven't had access to information about what happened either to themselves or to a family member some people are interested in simply knowing the truth others are interested in the possibility of recovering the remains of a loved one who may have been disappeared or killed others are interested in promoting community projects like small museums or things like that to document what happened and to share that with the next generation and the future  so there's many different ways that folks on the ground in el salvador are struggling to realize justice for these crimes that occurred decades ago not only in a court of law so one of the areas of focus i believe  is around the salvadoran military is atrocities which there were numerous ones my understanding and you just put out a notice this that occurred not only in and also out there but in surrounding communities over the course of several days so i'm also there was one community but there were other communities that were also affected by this series of brutal massacre massacres with just  exorbitant violence cruelty systematic rapes of women torture the disappearance of children so some children were taken into custody by the armed forces alive and we still don't know what happened to them so these were this was a pattern of atrocities these occurred over the course of several days and the best accounting that we have is that over a thousand people were killed during those days in early december nine hundred eighty one  there have been forensic examinations of some of the mass graves left by this festival of violence that have yielded now hundreds of human remains the bulk of them of women and children  babies very very young children elderly people people that by no stretch of the imagination could have been considered combatants and their remains have been recovered from the earth so there's really no denying that this massacre happened now that we do have this kind of forensic evidence however that forensic evidence wasn't available in the immediate aftermath of the massacre and in fact what many of your listeners may remember is that the united states government engaged in a systematic denial that the massacre at a mosque what they had ever happened systematic and deliberate cover up of that massacre so it's also a particularly ignominious chapter in u s history and in the history of u s and salvadoran relations in this is this this military unit was trained by the u s is that correct yes that's correct and in fact they were held in high esteem weren't they at least publicly in multiple hearings yes so the this one of the several elite battalions that the united states forces trained and of those elite battalions probably the one that had the the most elite reputation or was was most lauded but lauded as an efficient killing force which in fact they prove themselves to be in counterinsurgency correct so fighting not fighting an invading army fighting their own people fighting their own people however i mean the case of a muscle at the is particularly great just because it later turned out that the community of and most what the these were not first of all they were not guerrilla combatants and they weren't even guerrilla supporters so this is an example of what so often happens in counter insurgency wars where fighting forces assume make assumptions about civilian population sometimes confuse them kerk for combatants or punish them for the actions of combatants for whom they have with whom they have no relationship or should have there's no s supported el salvador to the tune of i think at least five billion dollars yeah at least is the correct number because there's much of that assistance that was covert that we don't even above five million and supply them there's evidence that they supply them with a very weapons that were used against the people in that village yes and in many other places yeah so that's correct and on top days after that truth commission's report was released the salvadoran legislature approved an amnesty law so that was in one thousand nine hundred three and that amnesty law was basically a blanket amnesty saying that any crimes that occurred during this period of time will not be investigated or prosecuted crimes of either side right because there were there were crimes including atrocities committed by the left on a much less smaller scale but they did they occurred there as well as well as by the right and all of those crimes were then taken off the table as possible objects of inquiry or prosecution and that basically stood as the principle impediment to justice for many many decades in till just last year so last july there was a historic decision of the constitutional chamber of the salvadoran supreme court which was finally to bring into alliance or into compliance rather with international law on this point which has long said that it is contrary to international human rights commitments to preclude prosecution for crimes against humanity not we're not talking about sundry robberies or other small crimes which may have occurred in the context of the conflict we're talking about crimes against humanity atrocities of the sort that happened at a mall so they the notion that an amnesty law could block prosecution is a and to the contrary the very notion of human rights so finally el salvador's highest court recognized that last july and since then there's been a renewed burst of enthusiasm now in el salvador from many who are concerned about crimes of the past because although decades have passed there really has been no healing process and so many are now looking to the courts to try these cases and to investigate them and then most what is the first and the largest of the cases that are now slowly making their way to the courts so what we're seeing now is essentially pretrial proceedings for the case of and most of them which we have eighteen former military men this is the former the most powerful men in the country at the former high command of the military they're all colonels and generals are facing accusations for their  participation in both as material authors and intellectual authors in other words those who gave the orders and those who carried out the crimes in so this is a really historic moment and that's why our center has been spreading the word about  it it's a very important test of whether justice will be possible in el salvador and it's a really important time for folks around the world to have our eyes on that courtroom out there in rural salvador to make sure that these victims who are coming forward at great personal risk in acts of great courage to share these very painful stories that they're treated with dignity and respect and that they're afforded the protection that they need to participate in this process and those victims began coming forward we're doing testimony here in just the last few days that's right just the last the last week and a half essentially yes in a sense for how that is going  well i haven't been there myself i was there about two weeks ago before the victims began giving their testimony but what i've heard from our contacts on the ground is that those have been extraordinarily tense moments in that courtroom moments that kind of veer between  the great conviction and commitment of the victims to see justice finally done after so many decades that's an admirable conviction and commitment that they have but then well giving their statements on the stand they have been i guess the word would be humiliated subjected to degrading treatment and the attorneys for the military have filed a whole series of sort of a flurry of motions to try to delay the process so to try to essentially bog down the process in legal formalities and so yesterday the process of victim declarations was suspended to allow the court to respond to these other procedural matters that the military defendants have filed in this case so again this suggests that you have you know some of the most vulnerable people in the country up against some of the most powerful people in the country it's a test for the salvadoran legal system but i would say it's also a test for all of us because what happened there was not only involving salvadorans or was not uniquely a salvadoran issue it was a something in which the united states was very heavily involved i think now although there's plenty of other issues to care about in the world and in the united states as well this is a time for those of us who care about justice to pay attention to what's happening in that small salvadoran courtroom  listen to the words of those victims who in many cases are over ninety years old and coming forward to talk about things that happened decades ago but which cry out for justice even today one of the ways people can fall that is through web site unfinished sentences dot org yes that is right and in fact we oftentimes have the capacity to update folks even faster if they follow some facebook so that's the best way to to stay in touch with what we're doing or in just under ten minutes left cia for failing to follow federal law in the freedom of information act so one piece of the way in which we've been supporting our colleagues in el salvador as they're pushing both for truth in the sense of trying to uncover the truth about what happened in the past and also justice in a courtroom and in other places has been trying to obtain information from the u s government because the united states government was so heavily involved in el salvador we do have detailed records of what happened on a day to day sometimes even hour to hour basis in the possession of the u s government and while some of those records were declassified at the conclusion of the war there are thousands and thousands of pages of documentation that still have never seen the light of day and so what we have been doing for the last four or five years is both analyzing the records of the government that are already declassified and seeking the declassification of further documents it's a very laborious highly technical process but we have filed to date i think ar five hundred different requests for information under foyer from six different u s federal agencies and one of those was a request for information from the cia that led to the lawsuit the reason we sued was because we had requested information about a particularly well known perpetrator and the cia responded initially that they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of records and there were any records that would be able to give them to us for reasons of us national security and then our own researchers were able to uncover twenty documents that they had already given to other people pursuant to other foyer requests in fact some of those documents were even on the cia's own website and so what that made very clear was that they weren't complying with the law at the very least they could have given us the documents that were already in the public domain because there's no argument to be made that it would threaten national security to give us documents that were already publicly known and of course we suspected and knew they had other documents  in addition to the twenty that we already had so that's what gave rise to the lawsuit the lawsuit is still ongoing but i'm very pleased to say that in conversations with the cia they've now released to us over four hundred pages of documents specifically relating both to that initial request and some other issues that we're interested in understanding better from this period so the lawsuit has been a very productive  avenue of inquiry for us you could say we've been able to get information that's never before been seen publicly and give it to in the hands of human rights defenders in el salvador many of whom have told us that this information is really valuable invaluable in helping victims heal and helping people know the truth of what what transpired so many decades ago you know salvador what would appear to be related to your your lawsuit against the cia about a year after you had filed that your office got broken into and i'm wondering if you can talk about them you're actually with just weeks after the filing of the lawsuit i don't really have too much to say investigation but no resolution to that crime but so your office as far as we know your office was the only one broken into that's right yes and they own and broken into harddrive removed nothing else was taken over my driving and my desktop computer ok and but nothing else was taken that's right and it was your office was locked again after the perpetrator  few minutes left you you've just mentioned that you do an incredible amount of freedom information act requests and and some of those documents you managed to only get to other organizations but actually managed to get to some of the victims yes can you can you in the last few minutes just touch on the yeah i would say that's been the perhaps the most rewarding part of the compound and of our research which has really grown it's an area where salvador have said this is super helpful we really want for you to continue doing this so it's become a big part of what we do and in fact some of the documents that we have recovered through the lawsuit have now been introduced into salvadorean court proceedings as a form of evidence so that's also very important to us in the sense that salvadoran courts are now reckoning with those documents as part of their grappling with these crimes of the past but i would say even more important than any formal justice proceeding in a court of law has been the immense privilege that it's been for me and i think for my students that have had a chance to participate in this with me which is the immense privilege of being able to give to victims who are seeking sometimes the most basic information about the disappearance or death of a loved one to be able to give them some pieces of information and it's not the kind of information that i would hope at the beginning right with that you know we're going to find the smoking gun in the documents these are shreds of information small clues references perhaps to a missing loved one that are less than a sentence long at times but nonetheless again words come up short in doing justice to the depth of the reaction of so many victims and survivors who have been denied access to the most basic information about disappeared or killed loved ones who have told me time and again in different settings different individuals you have no idea how important it is to me that you know you and your team of students at this university very far from here were able to obtain this information you have no idea how important that is to me in my healing process of course that's just one tiny grain of sand you know in what is required truly for justice or for people to heal but it's a tremendous honor to be able to contribute to those positive process  small way through our research and work at the university of washington we're just about out of time we're talking with angelina good boy she is director of the university of washington's center for human human rights her can people find out more about your sentences to follow us on facebook we also have a mailing list for the center for human rights the center for human rights also has a facebook presence the center as a whole right because we don't only work and also i would only work in many other places including in the united states so that it would be a great way to stay in touch with us both to follow us on facebook but also contact our office and get put on our mailing list so you receive our regular communications throughout the year all right well with that we are time once again for community forum and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning george lakey george lakey is a quaker activist and expert in nonviolent activism he's a co founder of earth quaker action group which just won its five year campaign to force a major u s bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining he has led over fifteen hundred workshops on five continents he has worked with cesar chavez in leading strategy workshops for activists worked in the burma is jungle teaching the theory of nonviolent struggle to pro democracy students in a guerrilla encampment and preceding the one thousand nine hundred four elections in south africa he co led peacekeeping workshops with african national congress members and others in the skills of nonviolent intervention he's a columnist at waging nonviolence and the author of numerous books including afflicting the comfortable afflicting the comfortable strategy for a living revolution and his latest book viking economics how the scandinavians got it right and how we can to george thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for inviting me so start out tell us so when how and when did you first become an activist it really started when i was twelve years old and the elders in my church thought that i might have the makings of a child preacher that was the experience of james baldwin and some other folks and they thought maybe i was that kind of person so they gave me the pulpit they said ok in a month's time sunday morning you get to preach sermon it was a kind of audition and so i prayed and prayed prayed you know what shall i speak on and so that morning came and my sermon was that it was god's will that there should be racial equality well this was nine hundred forty nine this was small  policy transition ever do quakers i found quakers when i was an undergrad and there was not a church of my denomination in that town so i did the rounds to check out you know what the catholics do what about the students and i ran into quakers and i thought up this is it and when did you start focusing on nonviolence and pacifism well but first that was really an amazing encounter with quakers because i love the form of worship and then on my way out i saw on their bulletin board that we were supposed to write our congresspeople and urge against military draft and so i saw that and my heart sank i thought oh that's right i have heard that about quakers the this oh that's terrible because there was no it was very pro military family i've been brought up in and there was no way i could you know i could imagine and then on the way home i kept thinking about it i thought well even good people can have weird eccentricities so i in my magnanimity as in one thousand year old would forgive quakers for being so crazy as to be peaceniks and so i forgave them of course by going back over and over and over if i really woke me up to maybe i should take a serious look at where that was coming from and i took a serious look at tookie year actually doing research and so on into you know encounters  with evil doers you know people wanting to you in that kind of thing what your response what makes sense and ended up the year thinking oh my gosh i guess i'm that's just too ok and then when did you start translating that into yourself taking action that was that translation was done in the context of civil rights movement so it wasn't too long before i got arrested in a civil rights demonstration and that kind of thing so yeah that was hugely formative for me dr king and that whole business was going on i was very very inspired by the stories from it so that linked up to my twelve year old you know perception that racial equality is a huge priority and then but that there was a whole agreement really among the you know white democrats and republicans that there would not be racial equality and so especially in the deep south where the persecution was so great from the ku klux klan and the state governments and the local governments  the civil rights what was totally up against it and was nevertheless winning victories and that deeply impressed me and i thought you know if you can make victories against odds like that then we're talking about some kind of technology that's enormously powerful and how do we tap that for a variety of other causes as well and that set me off really lifelong search for how do we get very practical when it looks hopeless when it looks as though the government's jammed up in some ways totally stuck and you can't make progress well but wait a minute did this all rights movement you know turn over and play dead no they took advantage of every opportunity they could get in order to forge change all right so and then how did you make the transition to wanting to pass this knowledge on to others well one of the things that they did was training they did actually they relied especially on role play that kind of thing and fortunately in the philosophy area where it where i was based there one of the people there had a lot of expertise in training so i apprenticed myself to a guy named charlie walker and i would go wherever he went and learned training from him and then and then you know made more practice of my own and became the one of the trainers for the mississippi summer  four when almost a thousand northern folks went to mississippi to do voter registration and face the ku klux klan and so on so i was part of that training team out and ohio that trained people to go south even even though it was very inspiring to me that so many young people were willing to go ahead to mississippi even though they knew they might not be coming back because it's just so such a deadly place to try to  choosing or some of them reach out to you for help or how did that happen all kinds of different ways like in one case the trees on our street started to be cut down you know out of the blue and  i was coming home from work i was working at that time it a school called the martin luther king school social change which brought students from all over the country and other countries who wanted to develop more expertise and we gave  at the door and said quick quick do something you're supposed to know what to do make them stop this and i said but but with what leverage because i didn't see anything any resistance going on and she said oh me and pat next door the woman are you're crazy she said well we're going to do it so you better do something so i sprang into action and found myself the leader of you know of a neighborhood movement the stopped the coming of trees and force them to you know to do the right thing so sometimes you know if felt like the struggle chose me and other times i could see that there was something coming up in the environmental field or economic justice issues when ronald reagan was elected president that it was a very important time to push harder on economic justice because his job was to lead a counter offensive against the american people victories you know that we've had in the sixty's and sevent s so sometimes it felt like you know i was chosen or i could just see hey it's time to put my whatever talent i have to work you know in this particular way well it would seem like right now at this point in history in terms of the u s and human civilization that your talents are sorely needed could you talk about give a comparison what we you believe we should be focusing on now and maybe you know compare it to some other time periods like i mean you just mentioned ronald reagan so it seems there might be some parallels with that right i think there are i'm very much for doing campaigns for that most appeals to people in different spots so the dreamers you know need campaign to be able to stay in this country and black lives matters folks need to campaign around police abuse and so on and the cool thing about campaigns we found this out actually in the nuclear power movement in the movement against nuclear power was that if you do campaign that's heartfelt it has to do with your interests you know that they're going to build this thing or they're doing this thing that's wrong with a very specific target and a very specific demand and then you win or you make considerable progress on that that's inspires other people to do like campaigns and next thing you know you have something called a movement like we call black lives better movement right because there are multiple campaigns in many cities all over the country so once you've got a movement then it's interesting to look around and see what are the other movements that are going well there's also a climate crisis well about that and that again like that can be a lot of pipeline fights so there's a whole thing so multiple campaigns create multiple movements and then the the the the real art is sowing those movements together so you get a movement of movements that's when you're talking about mass and its mass that we need in order to really tackle the fundamental power problems in this country fact that we don't have a democracy the fact that our country is really run by the economic elite and we in order to counter that we need approach to to reach the level of mass and so we can do that through a movement of movements but each of those new movements needs to have solid legs under it and the legs under are the specific campaigns local that are going after local targets ok once you get that movement of movements of course that's when the economically starts to sweat because they don't see masses of people that's what we approached in the sixty's and seventy's organized against them with more and more people making connections oh you're for racial equality funny thing you're your opponent turns out to be the same as my opponent working on climate and their opponent over there working on immigration and opponent all turns out to be the same opponent how interesting don't we have something in common here and that's where the economic elite starts to sweat because then democracy might break out in the united states of america and how scary would that be so  i think we're coming to a period where that's going to happen that we're going to be able to create a movement of us and i was talking with david because i met mcclanahan new friend i've been making here in seattle and he was reminding me that political scientists have now figured out by looking at many countries where there have been successful movements nonviolent direct action movements that it only usually takes three and a half or four percent of the population to be active in the movement in order to win so mass doesn't mean fifty percent of population or mass doesn't mean twenty percent of the population mass means a relatively small amount but what appears to be a huge amount because most wealthy economically depends on is most people being passive and despairing you know hopeless oh well can't fight city hall you know you can't change the country but when that many people which in our case might be what you know nine million people something like that when you get nine or twelve million people in at in motion in this country you have a very good chance to make fundamental change and that's what i'm interested so give any insights into  for instance getting different movements working together it seems from my observations the never did lee people get very territorial and won't cross that boundary towards working with someone else's movement and or someone else's campaign any insights on how to deal with that yeah one thing is affirming very strongly you are doing the right thing in pursuing your your issues instead of hey my issues more important than your issue which is very tempting to do right i mean you know over here there are people giving their lives to their issue it's very tempting for them to think it must be the most important or i wouldn't be willing to you know risk my life for that and so a lot of it is a question of after a lot of the sewing together of multiple movements has to do with affirming the validity of each of those movements and the importance of keeping them alive at the grassroots rather than creating a kind of national leadership cadre that is so get so involved in fighting that they lose touch with their own base which is happening largely on the local level so that's one thing a big affirmation hey your movement is really important and we're in solidarity with you and we want you to be in solidarity with us and the other thing is to invite people to be in active solidarity not only to make statements of that kind but actually to come to each other's defen so you know so you look at look at each of his eyeballs right and say ok when you're in maximum trouble you know when the national guard is called out to put down your folks we're going to be there the next day just as  can because those acts of solidarity really build support so for example a standing rock when vietnam vets against the war show up in large numbers who right that is a huge signal to everybody else in the country oh what a difference that makes i mean what a vietnam vets against the war have to do with a pipeline in north dakota who cares about north dakota people coming from the west coast well because they see the connection and so it's not i don't put a lot of stock in national leaders sewing all this together by themselves is much more that we are that solidarity we come through for each other and build trust in each other that we understand that we actually have an opponent in common the economic elite and that that's what we have to move and we can only do that together because in fact none of us is strong enough by ourselves to actually take care of it you i believe in some of your writings have critiqued the effectiveness of demonstrations and or marches just for doing a demonstration or march is that in my reading of that's right that's right one off demonstrations i believe almost never do any good occasionally they're used quite sure t j glee but mostly they're expressions of opinion and calling you know the women's march is an example i  tremendous that i happen to be on my book tour in san francisco when the women's march happened the day after the inauguration of course i went i was curious to see who was there it was fun to see all the newbies who were there people had never been before that's great that could be a threshold for them so that has strategic value right but it doesn't the reason why it doesn't have a lot of power with regard to our opponent is because our opponent knows perfectly well we're coming together that day and there were couldn't back home and so all they have to do is wait it out well they're used to waiting out all kinds of things they get there well in the sixty's they gave us some trouble and they went back home and so what we need to do is show our own sustainability and we do that through campaigns and that was the brilliance of the civil rights movement now there were times i was very influenced by byard reston who is the most important strategist of the rights movement and i sat at his feet every chance i got he was actually a fellow quaker african american  strategist with dr king and others and he would occasionally use a national one off march like in washington as a way of getting young people for in that context which is the late fifty's he was very concerned to get the historically black college student leadership to understand that there was a bigger thing going on so there would be in the typical dorm a historically black college i graduated from historically black college even though i'm a white guy was the only white guy on campus but i got the feel you know what it what it what it was like and so you'd have typically and byard knew this very well because he was moving around all the time in those circles you'd have a lot of people's sitting up till two o'clock complaining about racial inequality complaining about white supremacy but complain complain of quaint does nothing right but people often felt too alone you know ok there youth march for integration and we'll say we're marching in washington and we'll make sure in the organizing of it that you're getting these hot heads from these college dorms up to washington and they will look around and they'll see tens ten thousand people like them marching and they'll say oh my god we are not alone and then they go back and you can see the payoff for that very first one hundred sixty four guys from one of those dorms goes down town sits in they said in and say we want to cup of coffee that's the beginning of the sit in movement that swept the country and and you know and that became the local campaigns ok those four guys on february first in greensboro in one hundred sixty they knew perfectly well they could not do a one off and expect chant you don't show up at a lunch counter say i want coffee they say no go away you go away and that's doing it no that isn't doing you have to go back the next day the next day the next day the next day get more people more people escalate escalate escalate and then you can get that cup of coffee that nature of a campaign as compared to the one off is th sustainability and the escuela tory dynamic that can happen and that's what they did in greensboro which inspired the historically black college you know down the road in north carolina those students saying wait a minute if those two can do it we can do it right so then they risk their lives to do it and then the next you know three counties over there's another historically and so and that was the pattern that was going on across the south that  that woke up so many black people with white allies to the realization we even though the democratic party and republicans are against us even though the f b i is constantly figuring out trying to figure out how to destroy us even though we have the ku klux klan trying to string us up we can nevertheless forge victories in that context so yeah so i would say yes there can be advantages to the one off  demonstration if you need to show something that the activists themselves need to learn and the women's march to that like just just knowing that there were so many people four million people or something that would come together in that moment that was important to learn but then that's it no more when offs are necessary that's when then those people newly energized can go after campaigns sustain those campaigns to actually make a difference one of the things you point out in your writings is recommending people to not be on the defensive but to go on the off chance can you touch on that oh because because i'm this old guy remember i remember reagan right so there we had been sixty's and seventy's pushing pushing pushing making victory after victory after victory so obviously the economically gets very rattled the quote the natives are refs so we have to stop that so reagan's job was to stop that so first thing actually that he does as president is when the air to air traffic controllers go on strike he fires them and puts in jeopardy people who use airplanes because but he takes that risk in order to bust that union in order to make the point it was a much larger point than about that particular strike it was to send the signal to americans now we're going on the offensive we the economic elite are going to take our country back and make sure and reassert control and not let you folks think that you can keep winning victories so the stakes are very high for them and they were willing to play that high stakes game ok what happened the u s popular movements with one exception went on the defensive labor went on the defensive the women's movement they had been making enormous strides went on the defensive the school reform movement went on the defensive the elders who had been fighting for a better elder core care went on the defensive move in after the civil rights movement went on defensive so a number of movements went on the defensive in the by the by that i mean fought then to hold on to previously achieved gains that's that my definition of defensive when you say oh we reached a high water mark now our job is to defend that against this  scurrilous right and that's the classic defensive posture one movement was an exception that the other movements went on the defensive and lost lost lost and they've been losing ever since labor movement has lost enormously women's wood has lost enormously school reform movement i mean you know public education in most states being flushed down the toilet and so on so so what but why would we lose when we're on the defensive well guess what generals will tell you you can't win it when you're on the defensive gandhi will tell you not gandhi didn't always agree with military generals on strategy he did he said you can't win anything on the defensive you've got to go  the offensive to win how well is there any folk wisdom on the subject hey an audience so after audience i say complete the sentence please the best defense is and everybody in the room offense it's folk wisdom so why is the democratic party right now as i look into your eyes why is the democratic party going on the defense violating based strategy law and number one never go on the defensive and that's what the democrats not only are doing with didn't ever paper there they want the rest of us to do that as well even though that's exactly what they did in the eighty's under ronald reagan and lost ground ever since so yeah i feel very very strongly about that now the one movement that didn't do that the one move in this state on the offensive was the l g b tea movement  act up amazing in your face nonviolent direct action movement that made gains after gains after gains after gains next thing you know demanding a further not just defending the previously held gains but saying we want marriage equality oh my god you know the trembling in the boots of the homophobes you know the exclamations there's a homosexual agenda oh my god well of course there was a homosexual because it is visionary people i was part of that i was arrested in that cause i'm i'm a gay man i was arrested in that cause at the supreme court the largest civil disobedience we ever did in the supreme court over over this issue on the on the offensive there was no stopping l c p well what is the one movement in american life since one nine hundred eighty that has made the big main strides and that's been the other g b t because they've been on the offensive so please tell me any of your listeners please write to me and tell me why we should go on the defensive right now speaker at tonight's p n h p physicians for a national health program western washington's annual meeting taking place at seven pm doors open at six thirty pm at kane hall at university of washington room two twenty and everybody wants to know how to push the economic elite out of dominance of a society can learn a lot from the nordics and that's what i focus on in the book and you're also doing a training tomorrow sunday at