FOR RELEASE: May 2005

CONTACT: Christina
541-345-1778
cristina@neriahlothamer.com

War Activists Challenge Their Own Behavior

Several million people worldwide have marched to protest the Iraq war over the course of the past two years. The size of the protests is greater than any similar series of mass demonstrations since the Vietnam War. What are the factors motivating so many people in the United States and other countries to give up their precious free time, pile into buses, and assemble in public spaces to speak out against a war they consider unjust and unnecessary, rather than just grumbling about it in private?

In a new book to be published in May 2005, entitled Dancing In The Shadow Of Tyranny, An Activist’s Guide To Inner Disarmament (Elite Books, 170 pages, $14, quality paperback, ISBN 0-9720028-8-X, veteran activist Neriah Lothamer gives a sense of the outrage activists feel over the Iraq situation. Yet rather than being powerless bystanders to history, he shows how protesters can do many concrete things in their own lives to counteract the forces that produce violence and bloodshed in the world.

He points out that activists like himself often have internally violent thoughts and sometimes behave badly to others, and that confronting external tyranny is incomplete without confronting those same impulses in our daily mental landscape. “As I deal with my childish bully boss inside, and I see the childish leaders of the world addressing the issues of power, I can see many similarities,” he says. His journey has led him to confront his own tendencies toward alcoholism and domestic violence, and through such “internal activism,” he has been able to bring much greater power, focus and clarity to his external activism.