From the West Bank to the Twin Cities: Active Hope in a Time of Occupation
On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we explore Active Hope—the practice of choosing a direction and moving toward it, even when the future feels uncertain.
We begin with Chris Johnstone (co-author of Active Hope with Joanna Macy), who shares a grounded, non-sugarcoated view of hope as something we activate: by naming what we love, honoring our pain for the world, and building the emotional and communal skills that help us keep going. Johnstone’s “thrutopian” lens offers a way through crisis that refuses both denial and despair.
The episode then turns from inner resourcing to urgent reality on the ground. In a powerful Nonviolence Report, Michael speaks with Mel Duncan, co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, who has just returned from the occupied West Bank to what he calls the “occupied Twin Cities.” Mel draws a direct line between what he witnessed under settler and military impunity in Palestine and what he describes as ICE activity and intimidation in Minnesota—naming the shared dynamics of fear, disappearance, and the erosion of accountability. But he also brings a crucial through-line of connection: nonviolent protective presence. From villages and school routes in the West Bank to neighborhoods and high schools in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Mel describes the same essential practice—trained civilians showing up, documenting, accompanying, de-escalating, and organizing community care—to interrupt harm and protect the vulnerable. The conversation makes a compelling case that the “distance” between global conflict zones and our own streets can collapse quickly—and that nonviolence is a practical discipline we can strengthen now, together.
Transcript, with gratitude to Elizabeth High
Stephanie Van Hook: Greetings and good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. We’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
We have a really packed show for you today, so we’re just going to jump into it really and get started. The show today is about hope– what Chris Johnstone, our guest today, calls "Active Hope," the sense that you just actually have to have an idea of the world you want to see. That's also a form of hope.
And with this theme of hope—on the way here, Michael and I always have some really great conversations that vary from all over—and he started quoting Dante. So, Michael, what were you saying? And please feel free to use the Italian if you’d like. I’m going to put you on the spot
Michael Nagler: With apologies to Italian speakers all over the world. Yeah—this is a famous scene where Dante approaches the gates of hell with his guide, Virgil. And over the lintel of the entrance to that awful place, he sees the words… and he turns to Virgil and says, “Teacher, I don’t understand.” And Virgil says: Qui si convien lasciar ogni speranza. Ogni viltà convien che qui sia morte.
Very good. “Here one must renounce all hope and all fear, if he be dead.” So, as the Latins would say, dum spiro spero—as long as I’m breathing, I’m hoping.
It’s not hoping that something will happen, but hoping that you can do something about it.
Stephanie: Yeah—and having a vision for that. So, really this conversation explores Active Hope as it intersects with nonviolence as a way of life and how we stay resourced in the face of collapse and conflict, and how inner work becomes a form of outer action. So Chris helps us remember that our emotional lives and our stories, and our sense of possibility are not side notes to social change—they’re in fact central to it.
You can find his work at activehope.info and chrisjohnstone.info. He calls himself a “thrutopian coach" —a " coach for thrutopianism." And I ask him about this as we get started in our interview and our conversation what does it mean to be a writer, an author, a trainer for thrutopian well-being? And that’s how we start off. So let’s hear from Chris.
Chris Johnstone: Yes—what a great question, a great starting point. So, I learned this word “thrutopia” from Rupert Read, who is a green philosopher, activist, been involved in Extinction Rebellion and the Climate Majority Project. And we've known each other for 20 years. He came to a workshop that I was organising with Joanna Macy two decades ago. I've always been a fan of his work, but he wrote this article about thrutopia saying, we need a different way of thinking about the future than a lot of the models that are currently available. So there are utopian visions that seem so out of reach that people think, "what's the point of even going there?" And then there are dystopian stories, and lots and lots of them, that seem to have kind of landed in people's minds and hearts, and what I mean by that is a sense of like a resigned acceptance that we're on a downhill slope and heading towards these dismal versions of what the future is going to look like. There was a big study of young people, over 10,000 of them or 10,000 young people, and more than half agreed with the statement, "humanity is doomed."
And so Rupert was saying, well, we need a different story of what our future can be, but also not just what our future can be; what the story is that we inhabit here and now, and so he coined this term "thrutopia." And a thrutopia is a story of making it through towards a future worth aiming for in the best possible way, and I love that; I think that's the story I want to be part of, that's the story I want to give my life to, I want to inhabit.
And my work is around well-being and what I see in the well-being movement, the well-being field, is quite often ideas that really clash with that thrutopian story. One very common one is "when you feel upset about what you notice in the world, just turn the other way. Don't look at it. If it's too depressing, then just see that as like, you know, looking at world problems. What's the point? It will just leave you feeling depressed." And also what often goes along with it is the belief, "well, we can't do anything about it anyway."
And so these two blocks to addressing and engaging with addressing the big issues of our time: One, "it's too painful to look at, it will just make you feel depressed," and another is "well we can't do anything about it anyway." And so thrutopian well-being is, "how do we have a form of well-being that helps us make it through?" And one of the starting points is it needs to address the difficult feelings of painfulness and also powerlessness that often come up when people look at what's going on in the world.
Michael Nagler: You know, what I've discovered is helpful, Chris, is to point out to people that are feeling helpless and disempowered is exactly what the authoritarians are aiming at. And our first act of resistance is to say, "no, I can do something. And I'm going to figure out what it is." Whatever it is, you're at least not absorbing the message that they're trying to impose on us.
Chris: And what a helpful step, because it's something about the recovery of a sense of possibility. And what you talked about, Stephanie, right at the start, "how do we move out of crisis into possibility?" This is really part of it. And the work that you both do with this radio is really about how we find a different story that we locate ourselves in. And for me also working in the well-being field; I spent years working in mental health particularly working with people with alcohol dependence, and I saw a very similar process going on were people feeling helpless people feeling powerless. I remember one client saying to me years ago he said, "Chris I've given up getting up. Because every time I try, I fail. And it's such a painful process. I might, you know, stop drinking for a few weeks, but then I relapse again. And I've just had it. I've had it with going through that painful process of defeat and defeat and defeat." And yet he was talking about this in a group meeting where we do a lot of group work. And someone else in the room said, "yes, I felt like that two months ago. And actually, I'm two months dry now." And it's looking at how we build the sense of the mini victories.
This is where I love the term "Active Hope," because for Active Hope, you don't need to be hopeful. You just need to know what you hope for. And if you know what you hope for and then can be active in heading that way or making it more lightly, then a path opens up for you. And it doesn't have to be blocked by your assessment of "will I get there or not? Will I get there in the way I hope or not?" It's a way of keeping going, even through periods of disappointment and falling and failure, but also getting back up again.
Stephanie: You've said a lot here and I want to pull out a little bit more of your worldview. I mean, in a way I see you as a sort of a world healer that you're seeing the whole world body.
Chris: That's so welcome to hear you say that because there's been a parallel process for me that's lasted for decades. And part of it was when I was a medical student, this is like 40 years ago, I was lucky enough to come across the British Holistic Medical Association at their founding conference back in 1983. And they were really about an approach which is saying rather than this kind of hunt the sick bit of medicine curing illness, it's very much about recognising that within every person there's a self-healing capacity, that there's an ability to recover. And we all know that if we've ever had a bad dose of the flu or a cold and we've got better or we've fallen and cut ourselves and then some weeks or months later we look at what was a wound and we see that it's either healing or healed. If you've broken a bone and yet that bone has grown back, you know, self-healing is kind of known about, but it's not given the spotlight that it really needs. Anyway, so this was one process. So I got really involved in this British Holistic Medical Association and particularly through that, discovered the work of Frithjof Capra and systems thinking. And then around the same time, I came across the work of Joanna Macy. This was also for me around the mid 1980s. And I'm very grateful to my partner at the time, Anne Davis. She had been on one of Joanna's very first intensives in the UK. And it was through her that I learned about her work. And I saw that Joanna Macy was applying systems thinking to addressing concerns about the world. And the holistic medicine movement approach that I was coming across was addressing systems thinking to addressing health challenges, health issues.
And there was also similar language going on, but at different levels. So in the holistic medicine, it was about activating self-healing within ourselves. What Joanna was talking about is activating healing in our world. How can the healing of our world happen through us? Just as within our bodies, the healing of ourselves happens through the various parts of ourselves, whether it's the white cells in our blood that plays a role in addressing infections and the parts of our body that are involved in repair. It's like the larger system happens through the smaller parts. Could something similar happen in our world? Could the healing of our world happen through us? Could we play a part in this? And I really love this parallel story of larger systems repairing themselves, healing themselves. And this was a feature of the system's view. It's like seeing our world in layers rather than pieces. So I'd love to hear what you have to say.
Michael: I have one comment, Chris. You know, I taught Classics for many years at Berkeley, and there was a philosopher who really captured our imagination at one point, faculty and some of my graduate students, with the term "[sýstima systimáton]" that is a system of systems, a kind of fractal of smaller units in which balance was achieved, adding up, building up to balance of the whole system. And that was the only way to go, not to come at it through the top. with laws or what have you that tried to mandate adjustment, but to build adjustment up from smaller units where people knew one another, knew their neighbourhoods, knew the problems and could solve them.
Chris: Yes, I love that. And there's something here about recognising what's needed for a system to work well. And that also that you can have this, what did you call it?
Michael: [Sýstima systimáton]. A system of systems.
Chris: Right. Because also that was what I was working with, a system of systems. There's a term, Engel’s hierarchy. It's like, you know, a pile of cells is different from an organ. You can have a pile of cells and like they're just all disorganized but an organ materially is the same as a pile of cells but it can do things that the pile of cells can't. A whole person is more than just a pile of organs, a family is more than just a pile of people, a society is more than just a pile of families. And now we have this idea of Gaia theory or Gaia understanding that our world is more than just a pile of separate species on a dead lump of rock, that actually there's a way in which these systems act together, there's a larger coherence, integrity, but also there's similar things going on at each level and one of them is self-repair, self-healing.
But what I'm also seeing is, Michael, I'm seeing you identify something about "what's the right level of system to give our attention to, to relate to?" And there's a new term that's come out, I love it. It's called "glocal." And glocal brings together local with global. And this is what the systems thinking does, it's like saying even though I'm here, I'm in a little village in the north of Scotland and we have a sense of community here that I really love; and also I know that I'm part of a global community like here we are looking through the magic window of Zoom that we can have this kind of conversation with each other and we also have a shared purpose that's calling us here, a shared recognition that some of the stories that have become mainstream are actually leading us over the edge of a cliff.
And that what we need is to find, inhabit stories that actually bring us into a much more satisfying approach to life, but also help us make it through to a future worth aiming for.
Stephanie: When we have this conversation, we try to give some key features of New Story and Old Story. That, one, we didn't make up this framework, that these terms Old Story/New Story have been used. Michael cites in particular Joanna Macy
Michael: Yeah Joanna. I think Joanna invented the term "The Great Turning."
Chris: Well I think that I've heard other people have also used it before but she certainly popularized it, she took it on and really brought a lot of life and vitality to it.
Stephanie: And I feel like what you described when talking about Gaia and we no longer have the worldview that "it's just this dead rock that we're living on where everything's separate and everything is violent and we're violent and we're here to extract the most that we can before we die. And then that's the end or we'll get some reward thereafter." That would be Old Story. And what you described as New Story in my mind is Gaia, a living system we know where life has purpose and meaning and that's part of who we are and we're part of the healing of this system. All of those statements can be backed now by science. It's actually a realistic story that we're trying to help people see the reality of. So I wonder if you could play with these ideas of Old and New Story a little bit more for us.
Chris: Yes, yes. It's a really interesting one. And I think that there's a number of different angles that I want to bring in here and they don't all say the same thing. And I think one of the starting points is, how do we deal with difference in view? And the one view is the old classical logic view, classical, my understanding of philosophy that I've heard. There's a thing called the law of contradiction, which is like if A is true and B is different from A, then you can't have both of them being right. You know, this idea that there is one right view. And you see that throughout history. You know, "we're the people who are right. They're wrong. They're the enemy." And there's kind of fight it out. And it happens with religion. It happens with politics. And I think part of nonviolence is about understanding that actually truth can be looked at from different angles. And you don't always see the same thing.
And a really great example of this is the fact that we've got these two eyes. And if you look through one eye, you get one view; and if you look through the other eye, it's a slightly different view. And I say often if you put your thumb out in front of you about an arm's length and you look through one eye and then you look through the other. And actually looking at the computer screen, I've got my thumb in front of Michael. And actually, so I can't see his face with one eye. But then I look through the other eye and Michael's face appears. And I think this is such a helpful view because there's when you look through a different eye, you see something revealed that might have been hidden before.
And in particular, new ways can open up. And in terms of the psychology of changing feelings, there's a thing called cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal is when you look at the same thing in a different way. It might have been that somebody said something to you in a sharp way and you thought "they're so grumpy," and you might feel yourself bristling and come up with a negative view of them. And then you might hear maybe they just lost their job. Maybe somebody close to them is ill in hospital at the moment. And that new piece of information leads to a cognitive reappraisal, leads to a difference in understanding about what's going on. And so you feel differently about it.
And I think that this, what we're looking at here, one thing Joanna Macy used to say is, one of our core choices is the meaning we give to events. And so, for example, when you feel upset about what's happening in the world, one view is, "oh, that somehow shows that you're not optimistic enough or you've got some defect." There's a whole pathologisation that goes on in terms of distress about the world being seen as an indicator of a condition that you need to sort out. And certainly there's a view of mental health where if you satisfy so many tick boxes, you then get a diagnosis of. And I remember there's times where I've become aware of disturbing world issues where I have had sleepless nights. I have felt myself kind of collapse in my mood and my enthusiasm. And I've gone through the checklist for a diagnosis of depression and I score enough ticks to get the diagnosis. Now, cognitive reappraisal, looking at the same thing in a different way. I love this idea that there are "me feelings," which are to do with my own personal story. And there are also "us feelings," which are feelings related to my belonging to something bigger. It might be a family, it might be a community, it might be all of life on earth. And it's understood that if somebody's relative is sick or attacked, you might have feelings that come up and it's like the family is feeling through you. I know when my dad died, the grief that came up, it brought us together as a family. His funeral was a very moving event. And it was like the family was feeling through us in our shared grief in a way that brought us closer together.
And the work of Joanna Macy and the Work That Reconnects is telling a similar story about pain for the world. When we feel upset about what's happening in the world, it's as though the world is feeling through us in a way that can activate our response. So I say this because in the framework that Joanna Macy developed, there's these four steps, we call it the spiral, that you begin with Gratitude, you Honour Our Pain for the World, you honour our pain for the world by really about giving it a meaning that sees the value it can bring, and then this third stage has been called Seeing With New Eyes which is really about seeing things in a different way and then Going Forth is finding your part.
And I love this spiral, such a helpful framework for addressing not just world issues but it's kind of anything that you're finding difficult and challenging: first resource yourself with gratitude, then feel the ouch acknowledge the reality of what's difficult, but then find new or different ways that resource, encourage, empower you to find your path and then you find "okay what's mine to do, what are the steps to take." But there's also a process of change within the Work That Reconnects, where quite understandably people from indigenous backgrounds are looking at this Seeing With New Eyes and they're saying "well hang on a sec that's not so new for me, this idea that we're part of the earth." And so there's been a process of change in the Work That Reconnects, where it's more commonly now being called to "Seeing With New and Ancient Eyes," recognising that this New Story might be new to the kind of industrial mainstream worldview, but actually this is a very old story told in land-connected earth traditions all over our world. How's this sounding to you?
Michael: I say that all the time, because whenever I talk about the New Story, I have to remind people it's "new" in quotes. What it really means is it's new to us because we forgot it. You can pick it up in Sumerian texts and, of course, in ancient Greek, which was the field I specialized in. If I may, hearing you now, Chris, reminded me of an episode that happened when I was teaching. Behind our building, there was a little creek, and there was a bridge across the creek. I was crossing the bridge to go to my office, and there was a student of mine that I was really fond of on the other side of the bridge crying her eyes out. And I probed for a while to kind of find out what was making her so unhappy. And I think it's precisely what you were just saying, that the anguish of the world was expressing itself through her. And I said, "you know, there is another world." That's all I said. And it had a remarkable effect on her. It enabled her to step back out of that kind of sphere of misery and regroup, see other possibilities, and then go back in. And in miniature, I think that's what we all have to do, separately and together.
Chris: Yes, yes and sometimes the grieving, the letting go is what makes room for something new. That if somebody's lost someone close to them, there's like a period of grieving is allowing the emotional reality to catch up, because otherwise we can kind of know something that's happened on a head level, but it hasn't really sunk in at a deeper level and we kind of can continue living as if the loss hasn't happened. There's something about, how do we allow ourselves to catch up with the new reality after a period of something broken or something lost? And grieving is part of that. And also, this is why I love this sequence of beginning with gratitude, because it resources us, reminds us of what we love, what we appreciate, what we give thanks for and to. But also then this honouring pain for the world.
And I think that the way I think about it is if somebody, if a stranger came knocking, a visitor came knocking at your door, how would you honour them? You'd open the door and you'd welcome them in. But when we're going to talk about this "business as usual well-being," (there can be a "business as usual well-being") we're saying "these feelings aren't welcome here. These feelings are a threat to your happiness and mental well-being." And so you just shut them out and turn the other way. That you'll seem to be a depressive influence if you bring up these issues in conversation. And so it's best not to talk about them. Whereas honouring our pain for the world is giving an entirely different meaning. It's saying "it shows you've noticed. It shows you care." And if we were to look at this systems-connected worldview, it could also be seen as a sign that you are connected with belonging to something much larger.
Michael: I think it's worth being connected, even if it's painful, rather than being disconnected and living in an artificial bubble, which you know full well down in your heart somewhere that this is not real.
Stephanie: I also want to respond to Chris about the emotions and feelings as this is also learned. That behavior at some point we felt was a survival mechanism in some way. And so it seems that also in terms of feelings and emotions, you're exploring new-old story in a way that we now know that that's not a healthy way of engaging with life, engaging as part of community by holding back our emotions or feelings and ways that isolate us from possibility, I think.
Chris: Yes. What do you do when you're upset? There's like the personal growth, emotional well-being, the kinds of understandings that have happened in psychology show that one of the best predictors of good outcomes after difficult events is social connectedness. That when you have people you can talk about difficult things with, you tend to have better outcomes. Yet what the research also shows is that over the last three decades, the number of people people say that they can confide in and talk through difficult things with has declined, certainly in North America, and in Europe, too. So there's this although we're more aware that when we're upset, it's helpful to connect and helpful to talk, there's been this breakdown process of communities that leaves people feeling more isolated. And that's been one of the functions of the Work That Reconnects is "how do we reconnect with each other? How do we reconnect with ourselves? How do we reconnect with the world that we're part of?" And sometimes it may feel more painful, but I remember a client once saying to me, he said, "the thing about recovery is that when I was drinking, sometimes I used to feel better but I knew I was getting worse. Whereas sometimes in recovery, I feel worse, but I know I'm getting better."
And there's something here about the role of pain as an activator. One of my things I get very excited about and see is an important project for our time is activating hope. Seeing hope not as something that you have as a kind of feeling of "it will be OK," but hope as a kind of living energy of becoming that can happen through you. It can happen through your choices, through your actions. It's the story of creating and developing and building what we hope for. That to activate hope, sometimes hope is activated by these uncomfortable feelings. They're like calls to action, calls to adventure. And when we make room for them, particularly when we make room for them and that's witnessed by others and we also know that we're not alone, it can be something that really builds a really strong sense of solidarity, commitment and facing this together.
Stephanie: Yeah, that makes me think of what you were talking about earlier of getting caught in grief, for example. Can the grief become so overwhelming where you give up?
Chris: Yes, a common fear is "if I open up to this stuff, I'm just going to get lost in it. I'm going to get sunk. And so to protect myself, I tend to keep my distance." But there's also here something about learnable capacities to find our way through distress. And a lovely term here is the "transformative dip." The transformative dip is where we fall into something that might be uncomfortable, but we emerge from it strengthened. There's this term "post-traumatic growth" is also something.
And that's what my work was about in mental health recovery, that it's very easy to get lost in anxiety, lost in depression, particularly, and I've been there too. I went through a horrible time in my 20s where I felt very low, I went for an awful burnout experience as a hospital doctor and I didn't have the tools or the understanding. I mean understanding is a form of tool, a tool is something that helps you do something, something that can be used for a purpose. And I got very interested in, involved in, mental health recovery for my own survival in a way, you know, it's what I needed at the time. And I learned things that really helped me face and find ways out of difficult pits. And then my career has been passing those on to other people and teaching them, being involved in therapeutic group work.
But also I see something very similar with the Work That Reconnects, the Active Hope work, the work developed by Joanna Macy and other people, is that it's very easy to get overwhelmed by feelings that just feel like, "oh, this is too much, it's too difficult." But there are practices and understandings that can help us find a way through where we become strengthened. And that's the transformative dip, the strengthening dip.
And I think this is one of the tasks of our time is really, how do we equip ourselves and each other? How do we have a take on the project of upskilling ourselves to face the pain of recognising that our world is so dangerously off course? Because if we don't have the capacity to face that pain and find ways through, the danger is that we kind of turn away, we deny it, we push it down, and just things get worse and worse. And then what can happen also is that people in their states of distress, that they turn against each other. You have all of that scapegoating, the blaming it on people, and you see so much of that happening in our world right now, and how politicians, the worst kind of politicians, use this as a way of strengthening their own position by building up enemy narratives, "they're the people who are causing all of this" as a way of venting this frustration rather than finding ways of working through it in constructive ways.
Stephanie: Where do you see nonviolence in this process?
Chris: I watched one of your lovely YouTube videos. Actually, I watched a couple of them. And I just want to say they're gorgeous. They're lovely. You know, they really are. I really recommend people check out the Metta Center and the work that you're doing and some of the videos that you've created. And one of the things I heard described was nonviolence as a superpower, as a superpower that we can bring to difficult situations. And also it's one of those things that people have without even noticing it, without even naming it or really feeling much about it. So for example if you see two people having a difficult conversation, you know, squabbling and kind of turning it against each other, and you can find some way of stepping in that finds a better way forward. And I think this is one of the big challenges of our time. How do we find constructive ways of dealing with conflict? You know, conflicts happen, but conflicts don't have to lead to violence. It's like saying, is there another way? That is nonviolence as a superpower.
Stephanie: It seems to me it's so tied to thrutopianism, the thrutopian idea, because it is a way out of no way, right? It's this great challenge. What do we do about violence?
Chris: I love the way you've just said that, "a way out of no way." And I've been working with cartoon characters, and one of them is called Professor No Way. And Professor No Way is this very clever voice. So whatever you want to do, he or she knows why, there's no way that's going to work. You know, you can hear it in your mind. I don't know if you have one, but I have this clever "oh there's no way that's going to work there's no way that's going to work," in a way that blocks and stops you moving forward. And how do you find a way out of no way and this is where we have this incredible creative capacity and it's like saying "well okay I can't see it straight away," I love the word "yet," and I love the growth mindset where if you can't see a way you just put "I can't see a way yet but I'm going to continue looking."
And I think that nonviolence is part of this. It's part of the way. And in the Work That Reconnects and the Active Hope work, and Joanna Macy and I wrote about it in our book, Active Hope, we wrote about these three stories of our time. There's a Business As Usual story. There's the Great Unravelling, things are just going downhill and it's getting worse and it's all falling apart; but then there's also this something about a turning point a turning process of a shift where we pivot from heading towards disaster to heading towards recovery. And that's the pivot that I worked with in mental health recovery and addictions recovery and it's a very similar process of that kind of acknowledging the awfulness and making a deep level choice of "I want this rather than that. I want to be active in support of my hopes rather than just either being caught up in the story that's creating the problem or just falling apart in a sense of resignation and defeat." And where nonviolence comes into this, I love this term, the Great Turning.
And Joanna and I, we rewrote Active Hope. We brought out a revised edition in 2022. And the reason we rewrote it is, some of the language we'd used in the first edition, we felt we couldn't fully stand behind anymore. There was that sense of, you know, "if we act in time, we can prevent the collapse happening." That's the kind of tone that we had. And we thought, "actually, some of this collapse is already happening. It's already underway. And so we need a different way of thinking about the Great Turning, not this sense of, you know, will it happen and by when, focusing on outcome, but more focusing on the process."
Because I heard people say things, you know, "the Great Turning, this idea that we will get it, we will turn towards the sustainable society that we need, the regenerative society we need, that if people say there's no way it's going to happen it's that Professor No Way again there's 'no I can't see it happening.'" But then I'd say to them, I said "well if the story of this were happening through you right now, first of all do you hope that it will happen? And if you hope it will happen, what would it look like if it happened through you?" And this is looking at the process of a turning happening. And in this process, one of the most important turnings is turning up with an intention to play our part. And then there's turning away from that which we know causes harm and turning towards our best sense of what might be a good way forward. And in that, I think this turning from violence to nonviolence is really at the heart of the Great Turning. It's like saying, "well, I recognise there's ways that maybe I was a bit, actually, I was caught up in a response. Maybe it was a response I learned, but actually there's a kind of violence there. I want to turn away from that." So anyway, so where does nonviolence fit into the Great Turning? It's right at the heart of it. It's what we want to turn towards, what we need to turn towards.
Stephanie: For those of you just tuning in, you're here at Nonviolence Radio, and that was a very inspiring conversation with Chris Johnstone. He calls himself an author and coach for thrutopian well-being. All of that is explained in what you just heard. You can find more at his website, activehope.info. And you can also find his book that he co-wrote with the late Joanna Macy called Active Hope.
Michael, it's your turn for your segment on the Nonviolence Report, and you have a special guest joining you today, so I'm going to pass it right over to you.
Michael: Thank you, Stephanie. Yeah, and instead of a report on news, we're going to hear it live. I have the great pleasure now of talking with an old friend, a very dear friend of mine, Mel Duncan, who was the co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, a really major unarmed civilian peacekeeping organization, and has now been coming directly from the West Bank in Palestine to Minnesota, which is a strange collocation, but very, very eloquent one. Mel, how are you?
Mel Duncan: Well, I'm challenged, Michael. Little did I know that I would be leaving one occupied territory in Palestine and be returning to my home in the Twin Cities to another occupied territory.
Michael: Now, Mel, how is what you're seeing there in Minnesota with ICE on the one hand and the local resistance? How would you say it's similar to or different from the nonviolent protective presence work that you've been doing in the West Bank?
Mel: Well, first of all, in terms of the similarities, there's a great deal of similarity in that just as the settlers on the West Bank and the Israeli police backed up by the Israeli army patrolled the area with impunity in the West Bank, I was in the South Jordan Valley where the settlers would attack at will the shepherds and the farmers and would take their land and beat people. That is what's happening on the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis right now, where they are attacking primarily people of color and taking them indiscriminately off the streets with impunity, no accountability, taking them to holding cells, in federal buildings near the airport and taking them to points unknown, sometimes in Texas and some places we don't know.
They're taking children. For example, many people know the case of Liam Ramos, a five-year-old earlier this week who was used as bait. When he was coming home from school, ICE had him knock on the door of his family's home so they could get in. And then they took he and his father, and now they're being held in Texas. He's five years old. And yesterday, the vice president was here and literally lied about the facts. He said that ICE took the little boy in because there was no one there to care for him, and they had to take him out of the cold when his mother and father was there, and just by coincidence, the chair of the school board was driving by and stopped and said she was from the school district and would take care of the little boy. And there was J.D. Vance, just bold-faced lying. It's the same way that Netanyahu works, that they lie to cover up their vicious racist policies. Just like Stephen Miller presents this view of a monoculture that, as Miller says, flows through Athens and Rome and Philadelphia and Monticello, and that might makes right in this world. We're seeing that unfold here in the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis, just as I saw it unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank.
But I want to say, and picking up on your last guest, that the story, we're not waiting for the story of nonviolence to happen here. It is happening. I've lived here for over 50 years, and I have never seen the Twin Cities so well organized on multiple levels. There are thousands of people who are acting, who are being creative and are carrying out nonviolent activities in very creative ways. We see it where people are taking groceries to families that are afraid to leave their homes because they'll be apprehended by ICE. They are driving people to and from school, to and from work every day.
I'm not doing it today because schools are closed, but every day I go to the local high school in the morning and in the afternoon and provide protective presence with my neighbors the same way that two months ago I was providing protective presence at a school in [Ras Ein al-Auja]. There are people in my neighborhood who go to the corner every day with signs about ICE out. People are intentionally going to immigrant-owned businesses. There are mass demonstrations every day at federal buildings and on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We have patrols in neighborhoods throughout the Twin Cities who are following ICE. Some of those people are attacked every day by ICE and apprehended and taken to these federal holding cells. Their cars are broken into by ICE. There are other people who are out recording ICE activities. Those people are also in great danger. There are people who are going through and appearing whenever ICE is identified and showing up with whistles, just as Renee Good's widow said, "they have guns, we have whistles." There are people who are being trained in de-escalation and are showing up to make sure that things remain nonviolent. There are people who are going to the hotels where the ICE agents are spending the night and, let's say, doing loud music to serenade the ICE agents throughout the night. There are those who are making reservations in those hotels and then canceling them. There's today a general strike that is underway, and things are very quiet here. There are mass demonstrations at the airport taking place right now. There will be a mass demonstration in downtown Minneapolis. And so this is happening. The beloved community is unfolding here in the Twin Cities.
Michael: That is so, so inspiring to hear, Mel, in the midst of all of this darkness. Just for our listeners, would you say a little bit about what protective presence is, what its history is, and what's your experience with it?
Mel: Well, protective presence is where people use a number of different well-tested nonviolent strategies to provide protection for people who are under threat so that to either intervene or prevent violence from taking place. While these methods have been around for really centuries, they started to be brought together in a systematic way in the mid-1980s in Central America and have been developed and have been applied by groups like Nonviolent Peaceforce and Peace Brigades International and Community Peacemaker Teams, and now about 60 organizations who are doing this work in at least 24 areas of the world and that number continues to grow because it works. It is successful. That is being documented more and more by academic institutions throughout the world. It is a successful tool that is practical and that lots of people can take part in.
I do very sadly and with a heavy heart say that in the village where our team was working, it was overwhelmed these past couple of weeks by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army. And this morning, the last family has left. And so the Israeli settlers now have taken that land. And this is part of the ethnic cleansing that the government of Israel, backed up by our government and paid for by you and me, those of us who still pay our taxes, is sponsoring. And so we can't forget that the genocide in Palestine continues, even though it is not on the front pages anymore.
Michael: Well, it may not be on the front pages but it's in KWMR today. Mel, you passed over something I want to focus on because it does give us a kind of opening or breakthrough and that is the large amount of lying going on by the autocratic forces in both of these regions. To me, that's a sign of weakness. I mean, history shows that if you have to base a system on falsehood, it has an inherent weakness and is not going to prevail in the long run. Of course, a lot of suffering will go on in the course of its demise. But I want to get some of your expertise on that. How do you think about what I just mentioned, Mel?
Mel: Well, I don't see how people can tell the truth about what's happening here in Minnesota with the death of Renee Good, which the Hennepin County Medical Examiner today officially ruled as a homicide. How they can say that that she brought it on herself, like Vice President Vance said a few hours after she was murdered. They can't tell the truth because they know that the facts don't support what they're doing. They can't tell the truth that ChongLy Thao, who was torn out of his house when the temperature hovered around zero in his underwear and gaiters and thrown into a car and driven around for over an hour and then was released and said, "oh, sorry, we made a mistake." They know if they tell the truth about those things that they'll just further be exposed. But because we now have video cameras on our phones, they can't hide the police. And so they're being exposed and their words make a mockery of themselves. And so we can show that they are just continuing to lie the same way that has been shown over and over and over again in Gaza, where well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. in the last two and a third years and continue to be killed. And now the way that people continue to be forced off their lands and beaten and killed in the West Bank. And so that truth does unfold. And now it unfolds instantaneously because of technology. And so the politicians, whether they be Netanyahu or Kristi Noem, can stand up and say what they want to say. And we can just side by side show what's happening.
Stephanie: Mel, I want to jump in here with a question. I'm thinking about conflict escalation, and I see Israel and Palestine in a highly escalated state that does go beyond what we're seeing in Minnesota, but that there are signs that Minnesota and what's happening with ICE in the United States can escalate to that point, too, like, they're connected. Can you talk about the ways that nonviolent strategies can help de-escalate this conflict sooner, that if they can be, what can we do now in the United States, based on your experience of seeing a very highly escalated conflict in the West Bank and Gaza, what can we do now that can support us to not go that direction?
Mel:That's very important, Stephanie. I think, first of all, that we need to maintain our discipline of being nonviolent, which has almost completely happened here with a few exceptions in the Twin Cities. I think that that just doesn't magically happen. It happens because of disciplined training in nonviolence and then more specifically training in de-escalation. I've been providing training here, specifically in de-escalation and diversion, that has been shown to work in a lot of different conflict situations, and these methods flow out of the Civil Rights movement, and that people can use these methods. Rather presciently and tragically, one of the trainings I did was the night before Renee Good was murdered, and some of the people who took the training were on the scene the next day and were able to de-escalate, specifically when a group of people turned on the Minneapolis police, who at this point in our history are not the enemy. It was a different situation five years ago, when George Floyd was murdered, but it's now different. And they were able to deescalate not only people in the crowd, but specifically to deescalate the Minneapolis police in a couple of instances. And so we need to continue intentionally and seriously to work with people on deescalation. This isn't just a half hour training. This is serious, engaged training with people who then have the courage to to be involved not only with the armed actors but among our own people to help them de-escalate when that's necessary. And so we need to make sure that we have well-experienced trainers in de-escalation throughout the country who are providing this. And it's really not something that you can do very easily online. You need to be doing this kind of training face-to-face.
Michael: Mel, thank you so much for that very, very insightful and, I must say, passionate report. I think this is one of the most useful voices we could be hearing right now.
Stephanie: Thank you so much, Mel. Thanks, Michael, for bringing on, thank you, Mel.
Mel: On this day of a general strike, I can't think of two people I'd rather be with, so thank you.
Stephanie: That was another episode of Nonviolence Radio, everybody, that we were just speaking with Mel Duncan as part of our Nonviolence Report. He's reporting from Minnesota, having just returned from his work in the West Bank. Special thanks to Mel. Special thanks to Chris Johnstone, co-author of Active Hope with Joanna Macy, thrutopian wellness coach and author, for all of his insights on how we move through crisis with centering and care for ourselves as well. So everybody, thank you so much to everybody who helps make this show possible. Shout out to our mother station, to Elizabeth High, who helps transcribe the show. You'll be able to find that at nonviolenceradio.org. Until the next time, dear listeners, please take care of one another. And we'll be back in two weeks.