Well worth checking out is today’s post at Narco News from Al Giordano about a new “bomb” being armed by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Hundreds of delegates are meeting down there, the Zaps are listening, and planning their promised emergence from the jungle. It’s a remarkable and eloquent description of a social revolution in formation.
We tend to see revolution in the bold terms of armed rebellion, states falling, factories seized, and all that old-style iconography. But here’s the real McCoy gestating invisibly in plain view. I’m finally finishing reading Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, and it fits together nicely. His book examines the history of war and the war system, its co-evolution with industrialization and democracy to the semi-paralytic state it reached at the end of the Cold War. But his real contribution is to highlight the relatively invisible (and nonviolent) history of the changes in hearts and minds that made possible the American, French and Russian revolutions, and how the rise of cooperative power from below has grown strong enough to really confront us–historically–with the possibility of writing a whole new chapter in human civilization… if we don’t get blown to bits or killed by avian flu or drowned by rising oceans first! I’ll have more to say about The Unconquerable World in a later post.
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