Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • The Burden of Peace in Gaza

    My first-ever bit on Huffington Post just went up—”Who Carries the Burden of Peace?” It’s an attempt to talk about the place of nonviolence talk in the Gaza conflict and, ultimately, to challenge those in positions of power to push harder for peaceful solutions. Loyal readers will recognize parts of my recent essay, Can Nonviolence…

  • Cleansing Ideology in Method

    In Marxism, when thought as well as applied, there often appears the hope that in pursuit of true ideology, any method can be cleansed. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao come to mind—as long as they had the proper utopia in mind, any amount of sacrifice could be exacted from the people. Trotsky wrote: Dialectic materialism does…

  • An Invitation: What Is Missing?

    Beginning in this new year, which today has dawned on the present generation and its thoughts, I will be editing a new series of pamphlets with The New Pamphleteer press called “What Is Missing?” As in that cliche: “I was going through my life or looking at my world and couldn’t escape the feeling that…

  • The Sounds of San Cristóbal

    Early tomorrow morning, after almost two weeks here, I leave San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, for a few days in Washington, D.C. It has been a very peaceful trip and such a gift to be with family here. To share a sense of what I’ve been experiencing all this time, here is a list…

  • Can Nonviolence Govern?

    SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico – Mayan woman in the streets of this colonial tourist town sell hand-made dolls of Zapatistas, the media-savvy, black-masked rebels who claim to speak for the local indiginas and, indeed, for all the oppressed peoples of the planet. While they began, on New Year’s Day in 1994, with an…

  • Numbers into Buildings

    Being sick in bed on this Christmas Eve in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico has afforded me the welcome opportunity to spend the day with Peter Tompkins’s Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. Tompkins, a journalist, World War II spy, and occult theorist (AP obituary; profile), was a fixture in the background of my childhood.…

  • Population Bombs

    Population was to the 1970s what climate change is to today. Academia was in a frenzy, governments dragged their feet, and disaster seemed unavoidable anyway. The Al Gore of that period was Paul Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford who wrote the mega-bestseller The Population Bomb. After the mass starvations he had imagined for the…

  • List of Human Sacrifices

    Yesterday I had the great privilege of visiting for the first time the Mayan ruins at Palenque, in Chiapas, Mexico. Astonishing. Part of the conversation among my family as we walked through these stone shells of palaces, temples, and dwellings only recently unveiled from the rainforest was about whether the people who lived there were…

  • Living in Lists

    Do you make lists? Are you one of those people who, according to caricature, have no rest until the things of their lives rest in a list? Who don’t feel even their own being until being properly listed—be it by Google or by Post-It? Or else, perhaps, are you one of those who so valiantly…

  • Christmas Cheer

    In the apartment just below mine, the lady has done a marvelous job of decorating. The door is covered in foil (reminiscent of the Throne of the Third Heaven) and there is a whole wall of Santa Claus-related elements. There’s even a shrine to the troops on the far wall, with the injunction, “Bring them…