From D to D, Chapter 6: The Need For Strategic Planning

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. These "chosen few" have been working to turn the entire world into a bit of Hell for the poor and afflicted of the earth.  One of these chosen few, a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, tried to turn the United States into a bit of Hell on earth for many of us who live here, in the role which his government played in installing a certain Donald John Trump into the office of the Presidency of the U.S.  Now Trump has been deposed - and it is looking increasingly like the same thing may be about to happen to Putin.

As long-time readers of this blog know, the book From D to D outlines how an oppressed people can use nonviolent, yet extremely coercive means to rid themselves of dictators, autocrats, and other oppressors.  From D to D is part of a much larger body of literature on the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Among this literature is the excellent book titled, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, and the book Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic (who was one of the masterminds behind the nonviolent overthrow of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic) and Matthew Miller.  Srdja Popovic is the person I credit for teaching us that "there are only two kinds of nonviolent struggle: the spontaneous and the successful."  It should be obvious therefore that careful strategic planning and analysis is required of resisters who want their movement to be successful. 

So we consider the opening words of Chapter 6 of From D to D, where we read that "if one wishes to accomplish something, it is wise to plan how to do it.  The more important the goal, or the graver the consequences of failure, the more important planning becomes."  And yet Gene Sharp acknowledges that often resistance movements break out in a spontaneous or unplanned way, that resistance leaders "do not bring their full capacities to bear on the problem of how to achieve liberation."  He then asks why it is that people who struggle to free their people so rarely prepare a robust strategy to achieve that freedom.  It is that question which I want to address in today's post.  For Sharp mentions that among the reasons, it is just possible that "inside themselves, [the resisters] do not really believe that the dictatorship can be ended by their own efforts."

It is obvious that a person's estimate of the possibility of achieving a goal will influence his or her strategic approach to attempting to achieve it.  Things that influence that estimate of possibility include the difficulty of the goal, the cost (in money, resources, pain, suffering and other elements) of achieving the goal, and the consequences of attempts that end in failure instead of success.  Sometimes also the estimate of possibilities is influenced by the person's own ability to imagine himself or herself succeeding in achieving the goal.  This ability to imagine may be weak and undeveloped if the goal imagined lies far outside the person's everyday experience.  For instance, if I read that in order to prevent heart attacks, I need to get in 10,000 steps a day, that is something that I can easily imagine myself doing, because walking to get to places is part of my life history.  Therefore I know that I can take 10,000 steps a day (although that might take a while, since 10,000 steps is about five miles!).  But if I'm watching the Olympics on a screen and I see someone clean and jerk 230 kilograms (that's 506 pounds), or pole-vault 20 feet in the air, or ski jump over 400 feet, that is quite far outside of my personal experience.  If someone were to challenge me especially to learn long-distance ski jumping, I would know intellectually that such a thing might be possible - that is, that most humans can train their bodies and minds to acquire the needed skills - but my brain would have very little enthusiasm for the project, due to the likely consequences I'd suffer from making a mistake. 

So we see that one thing that de-motivates people in attempting hard things is the realistic assessment of the hardness of the hard thing.  And yet we do see people who both try and succeed in the hard thing - Olympians who do indeed win weightlifting records, or pole-vault almost 20 feet (6.03 meters if we want to keep things metric), or ski-jump 132.5 meters.  Some of these Olympians look very ordinary, even though they do extraordinary things.  We also see people whose performance in certain domains is very much below average, even though there is no mental or physical defect in these people when compared to the rest of humanity.  As I mentioned previously, one of the main things that differentiates people in these groups from each other is the ability to imagine succeeding in doing the hard thing.  What then influences this ability to imagine, to dream big?

Often the factor that influences this ability is nurture.  For instance, parents who show their kids that they don't really believe in them, who refuse to encourage them, who ridicule their failures and ignore their successes, will tend to produce young adults who struggle to dare big things.  Yet nurture extends beyond the family unit to encompass an entire society.  It is not only parents, but the masters of entire societies who shape the perceptions and imaginations of the people who live in these societies.  When a person belongs to a historically oppressed group within a society, or belongs to a historically oppressed society, that person's ability to imagine, to dream big, to visualize possibilities, will tend to be shaped by the dominant oppressive society.  This is the "third face (or, 'third dimension') of power" identified by Steven Lukes, the face that dictates what people can and cannot believe to be possible.  This face of power is worn by the dominant power-holders in an oppressive society, who train the oppressed to believe that their oppression is not really "oppression" but simply part of an inevitable and realistic order, and questioning that order is unrealistic, or inappropriate, or "just not done."

According to the e-book Honouring Resistance: How Women Resist Abuse In Intimate Relationships, "Whenever people are badly treated, they always resist.  In our experience, people always resist violence and abuse in some way."  (Emphasis in original.)  Note that though this book was written for women in a specific context, the statement quoted above is true whenever people - male or female - are oppressed.  Yet the forms and outcomes of the resistance mentioned in this quote - the strategy or lack of strategy of this resistance - will be shaped by how deeply the oppressed or abused have internalized the "third face of power" of their oppressors.  Where this "third face" has been allowed to deeply infect the imaginations of the oppressed, their resistance will take on strange and dysfunctional forms.

I will now describe what I as an African-American man have seen of the dysfunctional responses of my own people to this oppression over the last five or so years.  To provide readers with my credentials, below is a picture of my desk.  The dark-skinned hand you see in that picture is my hand.  If you are an African-American and are reading this, watch yourself, because you're about to get some very tough love from one of your brothers.

First, the one-paragraph version of my "story of self."  I was born during some of the hottest action of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States.  My dad was a military officer, so I lived on military bases during much of my childhood.  Most of the time I was in environments which were very "white," and as a result, I took a lot of physical and verbal abuse from members of the "dominant culture" who questioned my right to share the same benefits they were enjoying.  My childhood was therefore rather hellish.  When I became an adult, that time coincided with a time in American history in which it seemed that the obvious racism had gone away and I could live in peace.  But my experience with white American evangelicalism showed me that the racism had not actually gone away - it had just gone underground.  And from 2013 onward - when first Trayvon Martin was shot, then Michael Brown, then John Crawford, then Tamir Rice - and so on! - I saw that the same narcissistic, damnable filthy pieces of garbage (Lord, help me to keep this clean!) who had made life miserable for me and my people were trying to bring back those days of Hell on earth.

There was no bloody way I was going to let that happen without a fight, so that's when I started reading literature on resistance, and that's when I began to discover the power and effectiveness of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But such resistance becomes truly effective not when performed by isolated individuals, but by a people collectively organized into an effective resistance movement.  So I tried to do my part to organize that kind of resistance among my people.  What I found in response to my efforts was not the beginnings of liberation, but something else, as described below:

• The Kvetchers' Club

These are the people I met who organized "listening sessions" so that we could spill our complaints about the increasingly racist and oppressive treatment our people were experiencing.  The goal of these sessions was merely emotional catharsis - so that the facilitator (or his or her bosses) could tick a box in answer to the question, "Do you feel heard today?"  Sometimes the catharsis was amplified by reading books about our mistreatment, books written by pessimists like Ta-Nehisi Coates.  One thing about some of these kvetchers was the way they tried to prove how "woke" they were by their profanity-laden, Ebonics-flavored complaints against their oppression.  Yet they never asked, "Ok then - this is unacceptable.  So what are we going to do about it?"  For the asking of such a question was deemed to be unacceptable by those who had been conditioned by the third face of power.

• Uncle Tom-ism

In my personal day-to-day life, this manifested itself as the attempt by some of my brothers and sisters to steer any collective activism of ours into directions that posed no threat to established systems of domination.  This steering also included sabotaging the efforts of anyone who was genuinely trying to build a disruptive, yet nonviolent resistance.  For instance, when Stephon Clark was shot in his grandmother's backyard, there were African-Americans who tried to organize creative forms of protest that would put police departments into a dilemma because these protests did not involve mass picketing, even though they would make the cops look very bad.  Yet there were Black employees of municipal bureaus and police departments who, when they learned of these efforts, tried to co-opt them in order to reduce their value as protest, and in order to instead portray these efforts as part of "a larger effort by people both in the police and in the community to solve our problems together!"  (The only reason why these municipal bureaus and police departments found out about these efforts is because some of these Uncle (and Auntie) Toms went and told them.)

But this Uncle Tom-ism had its manifestation in much larger circles, extending in some cases even to full-blown Stockholm Syndrome.   Cases in point among other members of other minority groups include U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.  But Black Americans are not to be outdone in this department, for we have U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (who is married to a doofus), and Herman Cain - a former Republican Presidential candidate, a former businessman and a former living human being whose true belief in Donald Trump cost him his life.  But the most egregious example of both Stockholm Syndrome and Uncle Tom-ism is Ben Carson, the former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary.  A more pathetic and ridiculous whipped yard-dog of a man would be hard to find.  Almost nothing he says makes sense.

• The Free Lunch-Eaters

 Those who read of Gene Sharp's 198 methods know that among the methods classified as "Nonviolent Intervention" are those methods which construct a self-sufficient parallel society among the oppressed so that they can meet their needs without relying on a dominant society that wants to exploit and oppress them.  This building of self-sufficiency is an essential component of a successful liberation struggle.  And organizing this kind of self-sufficiency is very similar to organizing a potluck picnic or lunch.  Yet one thing that ruins such efforts is people who show up looking for a free lunch instead of a potluck.  I think particularly of one lady whom I met at a time when I was trying to organize a math club for African-American youth, due to the institutional failure of our public schools to adequately teach African-American children.  I tried to make it clear that I was organizing this club as a means of building our capacity to liberate ourselves from a dominant system that was destroying us, and that for this club to work, it would require a collective effort from all involved.  She kept on calling what I was doing a "program" (or "pro-graham" as she used to pronounce it), and she kept on referring to me as a "service provider."  She would also always say, "Honey, organizing is not my gift.  But I support you in trying to help my kid!"  Thanks be to God that I haven't seen that woman in over a year.  But if I ever see her again, I'm going to challenge her.  I'm going to say to her, "Since you refuse to contribute to your own liberation - looking instead for 'service providers' to deliver 'programs' to you - why don't you try going to Winco or Food For Less and loading up a shopping cart full of groceries.  Then try walking out without paying for them, while loudly thanking the store for its 'program'!  But before you do, please call or text me so I can show up and watch what happens to you!"

An additional danger of "free lunch-ism" is that an oppressed people can be bought off by a dominant power willing to shell out a few bucks to create an actual "program".  For the kind of "program" thus created will almost certainly not be designed to correct an actual imbalance of power between the oppressed and the oppressor.  Rather, it will be designed to benefit a chosen few from among the oppressed in order to buy them off.  And frequently, the program will be run by members of the Uncle Tom group who fight for positions as managers of the "program."  Gene Sharp quotes Martin Luther King in calling this sort of thing "tokenism" in Part 3 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action. 

• The Fat, Dumb and Happy

These were the people who simply could not be bothered to become activized, even as they saw the atrocities being perpetrated against their people, for they were too submerged in their own lives and their own comforts.  To be fair to these people, being fat, dumb and happy is not exclusively an African-American weakness.  Rather, I believe it is the inevitable response by any people to having one's basic creature needs met without expecting or wanting anything more from life.  Indeed, the phrase "fat, dumb, and happy" was first used by Herman Wouk in The Caine Mutiny to describe the entire United States of America as it was during the 1940's.  I have a personal example of fat, dumb happiness in the person of one of my cats whose name is Vashka.  His is truly the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind - a mind unspotted by any intelligent thought.  There are only three things he lives for: sleeping, eating, and being petted.  He used to live for a fourth thing before I had him neutered...

But the problem with being fat, dumb and happy is that such an attitude precludes the exercise of active citizenship and makes people vulnerable to being oppressed in the first place.  You can bury your head in the sand only for so long.

As I said, these were the kinds of people and the kinds of responses I encountered in my attempts to organize my own people.  And although these responses were indeed very, very aggravating, I must also admit that they were a kind of resistance to oppression - even if the resistance degenerated into the escapism of the fat, dumb and happy.  It was a "resistance" in the sense that it was a reflexive personal response to an intolerable situation.  Yet it is obvious that this kind of "resistance" does not change anything in the long run.  In order to create the kind of resistance that brings permanent, serious change, there must therefore first be a liberation of the minds of the resisters.  They must free themselves from the third face of power of their oppressors.

I have some hard news for you.  There can be no liberation, no freedom without intentional suffering.  This is especially true in strategic nonviolent conflict.  Those who have experienced cognitive liberation are those who have come to a point in life where they choose to live in truth, no matter what it costs them.  As a Christian, I must say that if you are afraid of paying the price to live in truth, maybe it's because you have no knowledge of God or of the hereafter.  My source of strength and of cognitive liberation consists in this: "Since then the children [that is, human beings] share in blood and flesh, He Himself [that is, Jesus Christ] likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives." (Hebrews 2:14-15)  But whether you are a Christian or not, you must answer for yourself whether it is better to pay the price of living in truth as free people or to choose instead to be a pack of whipped yard-dogs so that you can persuade your masters to be a bit less cruel to you.  

I think again of the example of the Russians (including Alexei Navalny) who right now are resisting both a powerful oppressor and an all-consuming system of oppression.  These people are going for broke.  I also think of the African-Americans who bravely resisted oppression during the 1950's and 1960's, people whose stories are contained in books like Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, and I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition And The Mississippi Freedom Struggle.  Those people went for broke.  We should too.  Only then will we be willing to craft an effective strategy of liberation.

The Shaking of Vladimir Putin?

I've been loosely following the events in Russia over the past week.  For those who don't know, Russia has been rocked by anti-Putin protests sparked by the arrest of Alexei Navalny upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had received treatment for a poisoning attempt undertaken by Russian agents.  The resulting protests have been so widespread that Russian jails are now running short of space to contain newly arrested protestors.  

Navalny has turned out to be an interesting character.  He and others like him are the inevitable grassroots response to a regime dominated and ruled by parasites.  As scholar Shaazka Beyerle has documented in her book Curtailing Corruption, it is the corruption practiced by the rulers of a crooked regime which frequently opens the door for the kind of effective nonviolent civil resistance that brings in much larger democratic social change.  Navalny has exploited that open door.  But it is important to note that Navalny does not represent a merely reactive response to social injustice.  Rather, he has been proactive - patiently building up organizational capacity over a period of many years in order to wield the organizational power that is now on display in Russia.  Remember that there are only two kinds of nonviolent resistance struggles: the spontaneous, and the successful.  Or, to quote an ancient Internet proverb, "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.  The second best time is today."  Waging a successful liberation struggle requires a willingness to play a long game.

So what shall we make of Navalny's struggle?  There are some encouraging signs.  A movement that can continue even when its leaders have been jailed is a movement that has built strategic depth.  That depth is on display now in Russia.  It should also be noted that the protest movement has achieved one of the hallmarks of backfire - namely, that increased repression by Putin's agents has led, not to a decrease, but to an increase of public expressions of outrage against the Putin regime.  There are, however, some areas for concern.  Navalny's movement will do well to emphasize the need to maintain nonviolent discipline in its protests.  Otherwise, Putin can use protest violence to bolster his claim to be the bulwark of law and order in the same way that Trump tried to make a similar claim during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.  Second, Navalny's movement will need to guard against infiltration by agents provocateurs.  The BLM protest organizers failed to adequately guard against such agents in 2020.  Third, Navalny's movement must stand for something more than just Navalny himself.  Rather, his movement must articulate a clear vision of the future that can survive and inspire even if Navalny himself does not survive.  Lastly, Navalny's movement can greatly amplify its power if it strategically adds methods of economic and political noncooperation to its primary methods of protest.  For those methods of noncooperation (especially economic noncooperation) are far more powerful than mere mass protest, even though mass protest is a flashy, attention-getting tactic.  My advice to movement participants would be to not rely on the West to apply this sort of economic pressure.  As Gene Sharp says in From Dictatorship to Democracy, "Usually no foreign saviors are coming."  A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance.

This week, I have also done some further reading on Putin, especially as a rather large bit of his dirty laundry is being hung out on the washing line.  For instance, I learned that he (paragon of moral virtue!) has been divorced since 2013, and has had a few mistresses since then.  Makes the stories of Putin's palace more plausible...  (How's that for alliteration?)

From D to D, Chapter 5 (Continued): The 198 Methods

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Blessedly, these exploiters have suffered a setback as a result of the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.  However, it would be a mistake for those who are members of historically oppressed groups in the United States to take the incoming Biden administration as a permanent state of affairs in the United States.  Nor should the incoming administration be regarded as permission for these groups to become lazy or complacent.  As the Good Book says, "Do not trust in princes, in a son of a man in whom there is no salvation."  A world free from the tyranny of the few, a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples - this world will not magically come into being by itself.  We who are among the oppressed must still organize or die.  

Recent posts of this series have focused on Chapter 5 of From D to D, titled, "Exercising Power."  This chapter describes some of the characteristics and features of nonviolent power when it is deployed by a group engaged in a liberation struggle.  One point which is mentioned in the chapter is that a nonviolent struggle works through various methods of struggle.  As Sharp says, "The use of a considerable number of these methods - carefully chosen, applied persistently and on a large scale, wielded in the context of a wise strategy and appropriate tactics, by trained civilians - is likely to cause any illegitimate regime severe problems.  This applies to all dictatorships."  This also applies to all other types of agents of oppression as well, including corporations and other holders of concentrated wealth and entrenched privilege.

A list of 198 identified methods of nonviolent struggle is provided in an appendix to From D to D.  Part 2 of Gene Sharp's three part work The Politics of Nonviolent Action elaborates on each of these methods and describes cases both of success and of failure in the uses of the various methods.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I am still studying these cases, so I cannot provide a definitive analysis of the entire package of methods as described by Sharp.  However, I can draw a few lessons from the cases I have read.

The first observation is that those methods which are reactionary - that is, methods which arise spontaneously as a reaction to a sudden threat - often fail to immediately achieve any lasting change.  This applies especially to the methods which are categorized under "Protest and Persuasion."  Cases of such failures include the failures of spontaneous protest or of spontaneous organization of parallel institutions in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the 1968 invasion by Russian troops.  Although the emergence of these protests and institutions temporarily (and significantly!) slowed the Soviet Russian consolidation of control, they ultimately collapsed.  However, these actions created a residue of "cause-consciousness" among people that could then be amplified by subsequent actions.  Those actions which are undertaken merely to register dissatisfaction or to blow off steam often fail to achieve anything.  A case in point is that of a farmer who lived near the Miramar Naval Air Station in the 1960's.  He was so angered by the constant jet noise from the base that he used a tractor to plow the word QUIET in large letters in his field.  The base did not become quieter, however.

Those methods which are deployed under the guidance of a wise grand strategy of resistance or liberation (or which emerge as part of a larger struggle with a larger strategic goal) tend to be more successful.  Those people who are part of a liberation struggle that wants to accomplish more than just blowing off steam must therefore examine each method they choose to assess its total contribution to the liberation struggle and its total effect - both immediate and long-term - on the oppressor group.  It must be remembered that the existence of an oppressed group and of an oppressor group is due to a fundamental imbalance of power that exists between oppressor and oppressed.  A fundamental goal of a liberation struggle is therefore either to deliver the oppressed out of the power of the oppressor or to correct the imbalance of power so that the oppressor can no longer oppress.  Some questions to ask regarding methods are as follows:

• Does the method under consideration strengthen the oppressed group - either by communicating and spreading cause-consciousness, or by creating more cohesive bonds between members of the struggle group, or by meeting actual material or social needs of the struggle group?

• Does the method under consideration apply effective pressure to the oppressor?  Note that in democratic or semi-democratic societies, large protest marches and rallies may not pose the same degree of threat or challenge to existing authority as such rallies would pose in a more totalitarian society.  However, such rallies (and other acts of protest and persuasion such as sending symbolic objects to authorities) may sometimes indeed be perceived as a credible threat to established power even in "democratic" societies, as was seen in the heavy-handed police response to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests which took place in the U.S. and elsewhere in 2020.  Note also that the protests now occurring in Russia against the arrest of Alexei Navalny are an example of the susceptibility of brittle authoritarian regimes to disruption by mass protest.  See this and this also.  It seems that Putin may be losing his grip!  Note, however, that a key to the success of the Russian protest movement will lie in whether or not the protestors are willing to maintain nonviolent discipline.  Violence by the protestors against police will only strengthen Putin's pillars of support and make it harder for the movement to achieve its goals.

• Does the oppressor possess methods or techniques which can neutralize the chosen methods of the nonviolent struggle group?  
• Remember that a major source of the strength of the nonviolent actionists is the contrast which they are able to present between themselves and their frequently violent oppressors.  If these oppressors can inject an element of violence into a nonviolent method used by the nonviolent struggle group, the oppressors can damage the credibility of the nonviolent group.  This happened with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.  Although 93 percent of the protests were completely nonviolent, white agents provocateurs were able to inject violence into the remaining protests, which drew disproportionate media coverage and enabled police to justify extremely heavy-handed action against protestors.  (See this and this, for instance.)  This violence also led over time to a decrease in support for the BLM protests.  Had the BLM protests shifted to methods and venues that precluded the injection of violence, things might have been different.  On the other hand, the protests for Navalny and against Putin are taking place in a context in which Putin's repertoire of countermeasures is becoming increasingly powerless.  Therefore the protests are having a significant impact.

• In addition to injecting violence into a method of nonviolent action, what else can an oppressor do to render the action ineffective?  Three cases come to mind.  Two of these cases were mentioned by Sharp in Part 2 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  In one case, during the Sino-Soviet conflict of the late 1960's, a platoon of Chines soldiers began to march to the Russian border every day in order to make a rude gesture toward the Russians.  This gesture involved, shall we say, "partial disrobing."  However, the Russians eventually stopped these gestures when one morning they set up large pictures of Chairman Mao facing the Chinese side of the border.  From that day on, the Chinese soldiers kept their clothes on.  In another case, when faced with hunger strikes by political prisoners, the British government would release these prisoners when they became weak from fasting, then re-arrest them once their strength had recovered.  This became an effective means of breaking hunger strikes.  In much more recent times, the government of Indian Hindu ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi has neutralized the power of hunger strikes by untouchables in India.  His solution: simply to let people die; that is, to refuse to care whether they die or not.

• Is the method under consideration the only method which the nonviolent struggle group intends to use, or is it part of a larger suite of diverse methods?  As was written by a science fiction writer I read back when I was a kid, "a one trick fighter is easy to whip if you know two, and I know half a hundred."  Reliance on only one method of action was the great weakness of the BLM protests last year.  

• Does the chosen method contribute to the ultimate strategic goal of the struggle group?  If not, it may be a waste of time from a strategic standpoint.

• Lastly, is the chosen method within the ability of the struggle group at a particular point in time and a particular stage of the struggle?  For instance, if I send a thousand letters to various radio and TV stations, newspapers, and online media outlets announcing that on April 1, 2021, I will instigate a six-week total boycott of Hostess Twinkies as an act of protest against (write whatever grievance you want in this space: _____________________), I'd better have the organizational capacity to deliver on the threat if I don't want to look like a fool come April 2nd.  

As can be seen, the choice of appropriate methods for a nonviolent liberation struggle involves a careful assessment of the potential and drawbacks of each potential method under consideration, as well as a careful understanding of the history of the use of each of these potential methods.  The choice of the appropriate methods of struggle is therefore influenced by the development of an appropriate strategy of struggle.  The next post in this series will, God willing, therefore begin an exploration of Chapter 6 of From D to D, titled, "The Need For Strategic Planning."

A New Day, And A Blue Tie!

 

Public domain image taken from Wikimedia Commons

Public domain image taken from Wikimedia Commons

Welcome, President Biden and Vice-President Harris!  My prayers are with you!

From D to D, Chapter 5: Dealing With Infiltrators

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Among the crimes committed by this select few was the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of this month in an attempt to prevent Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris from being certified by the U.S. Congress as the legitimate winners of the U.S. Presidential election held in November of 2020.  Though that attempt failed, these who lust for their own supremacy are continuing to organize and to plot how they can maintain their own supremacy by disenfranchising, dispossessing and oppressing everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.

A previous post in this series stated that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy. For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group. This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors. For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.  The most recent post in this series explored the use of the agent provocateur as the tool of choice used by oppressors in order to render a nonviolent struggle ineffective.  

The power of a nonviolent movement derives from the high moral and ethical principles of the movement participants and from the resulting contrast between these participants and the members of the oppressive regime.  The greater this contrast is, the stronger the nonviolent movement and its actionists are.  Therefore the role of the agent provocateur is to infiltrate a nonviolent movement in order to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  Some cases of the use of these agents were cited in the most recent post in this series.  There are certainly other cases as well.  (For further reading, you can start with "Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant," or, "Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist," both by Gary T. Marx.  There are also the posts I have written about violent white infiltrators at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.)  As a result of the activities of these agents over the last several months, broad American support for the right to engage in mass protest has been declining (although most of that decline has occurred among people who identify as Republican).

So then the natural question is, how can organizers of a movement or of a movement campaign guard against the threat of infiltrators?  I'd like to suggest that the answer to that question depends on the attitude which movement participants have toward the likely costs of living in truth.  For I believe, based on my reading of the Bible and of various books on the dehumanizing nature of oppression, that it is the duty of people everywhere to resist oppression, and therefore to resist the oppressor.  This is true even when such resistance is undertaken against one's own oppressors.  The Biblical command to love one's enemies does not negate the Biblical requirement for the oppressed to speak truth to power, including the power of their oppressors.  As Paulo Freire states in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the resistance against the oppressor by the oppressed is an act of love, in that this resistance provides the oppressor with an opportunity to recover his own humanity - a humanity which he damaged when he chose to become an oppressor.  This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe's depiction of the so-called "Christianity" of Uncle Tom is in fact not Christian.

But since this resistance is to be nonviolent, it takes on a certain character which requires certain  characteristics in and among the resisters. The nature of this resistance is captured in the Greek word hypomone (ὑπομονή, meaning "an act of remaining behind", "an act of holding out," "enduring to do"), and is illustrated by such New Testament passages as Revelation 3:7-13.  Resisters remain behind and hold out by holding forth the truth in the face of hostile and violent opposition.  Part of the resistance of these resisters consists of remaining nonviolent even as they resist.  (As it says in the Good Book, "Here is the hypomone and the faith of the saints.")  Because the nature of this resistance requires resisters to live in truth even though they will be punished for it, and to refuse to retaliate against the punishment, this kind of resistance requires a special courage - a willingness to abandon fear (even the fear of death), or at least to control fear so that it is not the overriding force controlling a resister.  This is pointed out by Gene Sharp in From D to D (pages 33-34), How Nonviolent Struggle Works (HNVSW) (pages 53-54, 62-64), and Part 3 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action (pages 456-458, 481-492).

Those who have not achieved this fearlessness and willingness to openly bear the cost of living in truth will be tempted to try to use secrecy and internal conspiracy to guard their movement against infiltration.  Such people may attempt to create movements that have a "healthy security culture" as described in an essay which appeared on the website of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict titled "Insider Threats: A Closer Look at Infiltrators and Movement Security Culture."  Such a "security culture" will inevitably limit the ability of potential participants to contribute as much as they are capable of contributing to the movement.  Such a culture will also hinder the democratic nature of what is supposed to be a movement for liberation, and will introduce a potentially authoritarian element into the movement, as in leaders telling subordinates to "Do x and y.  Don't ask why; just do it!  Because I said so!"  And there is the problem of what to do once an infiltrator is outed within a movement organization.  Will the infiltrator have gained access to sensitive information?  Will the information be of such a nature that "If I told ya, I'd have to kill ya"?  (Killing informers is not very non-violent, is it?!)  Note that there is a very, very high likelihood that the oppressor will be able to infiltrate your organization and obtain just such information, no matter how hard you try to prevent it.  It happened frequently during the anti-Tsarist uprisings in Russia in 1905, during some of the labor strikes in Britain and the United States in the 1800's and 1900's, and among the resisters against Nazi rule in World War Two.  Total secrecy is wickedly hard to achieve.  Lastly, how will movement secrecy limit the ability of movement organizers to build a truly strong, durable and intelligent mass movement?  Gene Sharp notes that during the history of the Indian liberation struggle against the British, campaigns that relied on secrets and conspiracies tended to collapse before they ever became powerful.

On the other hand, movement organizers can choose to build a movement that can survive, thrive and prevail even though the oppressor knows everything about it.  Building such a movement involves the following steps:

• Choose an ultimate strategic goal that is utterly good and utterly blameless.  For instance, if an ultimate goal of your movement is the creation of a society in which everyone has an equal share of the rights and resources needed to fulfill his or her own human potential, no one can legitimately object to that.  If on the other hand, your ultimate strategic goal is the creation of a society in which you get to indulge evil and harmful pleasures at the expense of others, try to be as secret in your intentions as possible, since if you are open about them, your intended victims will sooner or later begin to organize against you.  If your organization exists to harm others, beware also of infiltrators, since they will at the least tip off your intended victims!  
• Create a movement strategy that does not depend on secrecy for its success.  This will be easy if your movement goal is utterly blameless.  If on the other hand, you have formed an organization whose goals can be summarized by slogans such as "Child Molesters Of The World, Unite!" or "People for the Torture of Animals," creating a strategy that does not depend on secrecy will be much harder.
• Your movement goals and strategy should not involve physical harm, sabotage, or property destruction.  Then if informers or other agents discover it, they will not be able to accuse you of any intentions of wrongdoing.
• Your movement goals and strategy should include a road map for building up your oppressed brothers and sisters through your own self-reliance.  This will show that you are actively managing your own affairs for good, and will neutralize the oppressor's claims that you need to be oppressed because you are disorderly or shiftless or lazy.
• Once you have created your movement goals and strategy, make them known to as many people as possible.  This will put informers and other agents out of work, as there will be nothing left for them to inform on.  And if a provocateur comes to cause trouble, you can point to him and say, "Remember the strategy we publicized.  This man does not represent our brand!"  You will be believed if you have made your strategy open and have conducted yourself honorably and with high moral and ethical standards.  To quote Jawaharlal Nehru (a contemporary of Gandhi), "Above all, we had a sense of freedom and a pride in that freedom. The old feeling of oppression and frustration was completely gone.  There was no more whispering, no round-about legal phraseology to avoid getting into trouble with the authorities. We said what we felt and shouted it out from the house tops. What did we care for the consequences?  Prison? We looked forward to it; that would help our cause still further. The innumerable spies and secret-service men who used to surround us and follow us about became rather pitiable individuals as there was nothing secret for them to discover. All our cards were always on the table."  (Quote taken from HNVSW, pages 63-64.)  
• Do not seek to grow too quickly.  Quality is much more important than quantity at the beginning, and high quality is the most durable way to obtain high quantities of powerful participants.  This is yet another reason why the sort of hastily thrown-together mass protests that have characterized the second decade of the 21st century do not represent real power.  When one man teaches a small group, and that group learns its lessons well enough that each of its members can in turn skillfully teach others, you have the beginnings of real power.

Such openness will aid the creation of a movement that is extremely durable and powerful.  On the other hand, a climate of secrecy not only promotes fear and dampens the movement, but it also makes the movement vulnerable to the second kind of agent provocateur: the infiltrator who sabotages a movement by spreading false accusations against movement leaders in order to foster distrust between the members of a movement organization.  This is why when Cesar Chavez began organizing what would become the United Farm Workers Union, he rejected secrecy and made his organization open.  

P.S. For an example of the hypomone mentioned above, consider the case of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm during the 1950's and 1960's.  Jordan was a white evangelical preacher - yet when you consider what he did and what he stood for, you can see that he really "got" Christianity, because he was a real Christian.  Too bad that the modern white American evangelical church no longer has such people as Clarence and his wife Florence.

The Value Of A Clean Shirt

Pardon my recent talkative streak, but the events of the last week have me on a roll.  Those who are regular readers of this blog and of my essays on strategic nonviolent resistance know how I have stressed the vital importance of maintaining nonviolent discipline among the members of a social movement.  I have also stated how the introduction of violence into a movement drastically increases the likelihood that the movement will fail.  These insights did not originate from me, but they are the result of years of painstaking research and analysis by such social scientists as Jamila Raqib, Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, Srdja Popovic, and others.

The violent attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol by white supremacists and white evangelicals proves my point.  The violence which was instigated by Donald Trump has spectacularly backfired against him.  As a result of national revulsion and disgust over last week's rampage, Mr. Trump is on the verge of losing everything as the businesses that propped up his commercial empire abandon him and criminal prosecutors begin to surround him.  The Republican Party is now reeling from a number of self-inflicted wounds that have resulted from their support of Trump.  And many members of Trump's white supremacist base have begun to turn on him, showing less that they actually believed in him than that he was, rather, merely the convenient vehicle for their unjustified grievances.  He functioned, as it were, merely as a telephone pole that was cut down to make a convenient battering ram.  Now that the pole is cracking, a growing number of his supporters are ready to kick him to the curb.  

But these supporters - sworn to violence as their chosen means of political change - are beginning to discover firsthand the weaknesses of political movements that rely on violence and lawlessness.  These weaknesses include the need for secrecy and conspiracy, the danger of backfire, and the risk of infiltration.  The dawning awareness of these risks is driving these people into an increasing paranoia which will greatly increase their difficulty in acting.  

None of this means that the next several months will be easy for the people who have been historical targets of oppression in the United States.  However, it does point out how the building of a nonviolent movement for social change - a movement both principled and strategic - can result in something much more powerful than that which thugs are able to build.  Hopefully, this weekend I will be able to continue my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  We'll see how it goes.  Unfortunately, some valuable time was eaten up today when I had to take one of my cats to the vet...

A Parasite Protection Plan

Many reputable media sources have mentioned the prominent role that white American evangelical and Protestant churches played in the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol last week.  These sources have also noted the prominent role which these churches are playing in the threat of violent white nationalist insurgency in the United States from now on.  This is interesting, given the fact that many of these churches have been ongoing recipients of funds authorized by Congress under the Payment Protection Plan instituted by the U.S. Government in response to financial hardships experienced by American businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is also no secret that these churches should never have received these funds (due to the Constitutional separation of church and state as well as the Code of Federal Regulations), and that the only reason why they did is because of the influence of Donald Trump.  And a number of these churches have been guilty of misusing these funds, using them for legal fees incurred in defending the churches from sex abuse scandals, or for buying private jets.  See this, this and this also.

The question that naturally arises is this: why are American taxpayers (many of whom are people of color who are threatened by these far-right white supremacists) giving our tax dollars to organizations that want to violently take over the United States?  And why do churches continue to enjoy tax-exempt status?  At this late stage of the game, what value do these groups actually provide to the American people?  They have shown themselves to be utterly unreliable as a moral compass.  As a moral restraint, they are about as worthless as a set of burned-out brakes on a runaway semi truck.  (For those readers who care about the defense of Biblical doctrine, why are white evangelicals joining forces with Nazi New Age shamans in their pursuit of white supremacy?  See this also.  Doesn't sound very Christian to me.  Remember what I said about the syncretism of these white supremacists?)  Why should they continue to receive free money in order to threaten the rest of us?  Why are U.S. taxpayers being required to give money to religious talking heads such as the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed, or Franklin Graham?

Farewell to YouTube

I find myself once again in a somewhat familiar position this week.  Over the years, I have been exposed to things that tasted or felt so good that partaking of them quickly became a habit.  However, as time passed, I began to notice that the things which had become habits had some unavoidable downsides - downsides which eventually became too great to ignore.  Thus it was that I was forced eventually and reluctantly to give them up.  Examples include television, sugary sweets, coffee (except in small doses) and talk radio.

This week, YouTube joins that list.  This has been a long time coming.  I have tuned in to YouTube primarily to hear and watch a number of insanely awesome fingerstyle guitar players.  But during the last year - a very traumatic year! - it seemed to me that YouTube's algorithms were deliberately seeking to amplify trauma by showing links to politically provocative videos in their "Recommended For You" sidebar.  I have no idea why these videos were "recommended for me" especially when I think of how most of them were either racist, right-wing, or linked to conspiracy theories.  Perhaps the people at Google thought that by showing me things that are offensive, threatening, terrorizing and outrageous, they could get more pageviews, and hence, earn more advertising revenue.

They were wrong.

The final straw for me has come in learning that YouTube is dragging its feet in removing Donald Thug Trump's YouTube channel - even after the attempted violent seizure of the U.S. Congress by Trump's band of church-going thugs.  Note to these thugs: there is no "grace for your hearts."  Rather, what you can expect for yourselves is spelled out in Hebrews 10:26-31.  You body-slammed police officers; you bashed police officers in the head; you came with guns, zip-ties, rope, racist slogans and rhetoric; you planted pipe bombs; you came ready to murder.  Don't ever again try to give me Bible lessons.  You don't know what you're talking about.

And as for YouTube, I will find alternatives.  But I won't be coming back.

Cleaning Up A Week of Broken Glass

I'm in the process of gathering more information for the next post in my series on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, so today's post will not be a continued exposition of Chapter 5.  I do, however, want to make a few more comments on the attempted takeover of the U.S. Congress by pro-Trump thugs this past week.  

First, we now know that the mob that assaulted the Capitol had been preparing its action for weeks.  We also know that the mob had been preparing to abduct members of Congress at gunpoint and bind them with zip ties and rope.  We know that most of the organizing and coordinating between the various thugs who assaulted the Capitol had taken place online, in full view of the FBI and the Capitol police.  We now also know for a fact that white American evangelicals and their pastors comprised a large part of the mob.  We also know that similar mobs stormed a California county house and surrounded a number of state houses last week.  We know that several Republican lawmakers (such as this man) joined in the call to commit violence.  We now know that pro-Trump fascists and other persons associated with the Far Right have infiltrated many police departments across the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  We know that some of these officers traveled to Washington DC last week to join the riot.

And we know that those who orchestrated last week's trouble are making plans - in plain sight - to do it again.  

So how to respond to all of this?  If you're like me, your first reaction is likely to feel a great and terrible anger - an indignation which has an element of righteousness to it, yet which leads to rash errors if not properly guided and handled.  That anger can lead to moralizing, which is both an innocuous response and a rather useless one.  The people who orchestrated last week's events have no morals, no better angels that anyone can appeal to.  They will be deaf to your sermons.  So that leads to the second of several possible reactions: the urge to go to the streets and organize counter-demonstrations against the fascists!  But there is a problem with this approach, namely, that the fascists, like a pack of rabid dogs, are keen to provoke violence.  If they succeed by their violence in provoking you to counter-violence, you become part of the problem.  (Unfortunately, this has already started to happen.  Remember what I wrote a while back about relying on mass protest rallies?)

So let's consider the third response: to construct a strategy for nonviolently shifting the balance of power away from those who want to dominate the rest of us.  Consider the following perspective from Part 1 of Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action: that the source of armed conflict between various groups of people is the belief that political power is like a solid, durable stone that can be possessed only by the strongest and most violent members of society.  This belief is false, however.  And the power of an oppressor can be disintegrated by a people who build their own social power and withdraw their consent from the oppressor.  

This is good news.  I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian, which means that unlike the vast majority of white American evangelicals, I believe I'm supposed to obey the Sermon on the Mount and not physically threaten my fellow human beings.  (This is why I don't own a gun.)  However, I know that there are tens of millions of white American evangelicals who stand ready "in the name of Jesus" to harm, oppress, and even kill their fellow human beings.  Yet they comprise a continually shrinking minority of the population.  This means that their power is declining.  This is especially true when one considers that the power they claim does not consist of knowing how to do useful things that benefit their fellow human beings.  Rather, it consists almost entirely in the assault rifles that many of them openly carry everywhere like pacifiers or security blankets, without which they would feel like ghosts upon the earth.  Those of the oppressed who do choose to build the power that comes from knowing how to do useful, meaningful work will therefore go far.  Consider the constructive example of the  Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado.  Consider Titus 3:14.  And don't let the terror which your oppressor seeks to instill divert you from patiently building your power by the daily practice of beautifully good work.  To put it another way, don't let these evil people get inside your OODA loop.

There is more good news: Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple have surgically removed Donald Trump's metaphorical mouth.  He can't post garbage online, and the Parler site has been denied access to the Google Store.  Lastly, I just want to say God Bless Arnold Schwarzenegger!  Just when I was ready to write off all Republicans as irredeemably evil, former Governor Schwarzenegger has forced me to eat my words.  And get this: he is leading an initiative to restore voting access to as many disenfranchised Americans as possible.  (See this and this also.)

The Confused Villains Of The Piece

As I write this, I am suffering from a bit of sleep deprivation.  I spent too much of last night and early this morning reading the news about the Congressional ratification of Biden's election victory and the riot by pro-Trump thugs in Washington D.C. yesterday.  Sleep deprivation tends to make me cranky.  To the Thug-In-Chief, I have a message: you're done.  Shut up and get out.

I do want to mention that in my morning Bible reading, I started the Book of Revelation a few weeks ago.  (I've also been reading the Book of Exodus in the evenings - but lately I slacked off.  I need to get back to it.  Tonight, however, I may just go to bed early.)  Reading Revelation took me on a bit of a trip down memory lane.  Way back when I was a new Christian, in the early days of the racking up of the miles of my pilgrimage, I was exposed to a number of white evangelical authors whose books offered to expound and explain Revelation to people like me.  The books all tended to have the same formula, with the following elements:

• The preaching of the doctrine of the pre-Tribulation rapture, in which believers will supernaturally be whisked away from the earth to Heaven just prior to the period of human history in which mankind must suffer through the final conflict of this present age.
• The teaching that the reason why the United States is not mentioned in the Biblical account of that final conflict is because most of the people of the United States will be caught up in the pre-Tribulation rapture, thus causing the U.S. to cease to exist as an earthly nation.
• The reason why most of the people of the United States will be raptured is because this is a Christian nation!  Hey, it's obvious - especially when we vote Republican, oppose gun control and socialism (note: whenever you say this word, be sure to pronounce the "s's" with a sinister hiss - something like this: "ssssssocialisssssmmmmm..."), support family values and the free market, and believe that the United States is Biblically mandated to kill anyone who thinks otherwise. 

These tenets are encapsulated in books like The Late Great Planet Earth, Peace, Prosperity, and the Coming Holocaust, and (of course) the Left Behind books.  But there's a funny thing about all of these books (and of the books of the related genre of the baptized version of the myth of redemptive violence, including all the books of Frank Peretti).  The thing is that even though the pre-Tribulationists are convinced that Christians will be whisked away from the earth just prior to the appearance of the Antichrist, they are obsessively fixated on the dangers posed by certain cultural trends which they consider to be the deceptions that will trigger the End Times and initiate a wave of persecution of Christians.  Note my description of their "definition" of a Christian in the third bullet point in my list of points above.  Such a definition is an apt description of many of the Americans who have aligned themselves with white supremacy, so that white supremacy has come to be regarded by many as synonymous with Christianity, and white America has just happened to become regarded as the hero of the drama of the end of this present age.

Don't get me wrong.  I accept the Book of Revelation as part of God's holy Word.  And I support family values - especially when the proponents of these values practice what they preach (which many of them haven't done).  Nor should anything I say in this post be construed as an indication that I think Trump is the Antichrist.  I don't.  It's not that Trump is not evil enough to be, but rather that he is too stupid.  But what if the people who congratulate themselves as the heroes of the End Times are confused about who the real heroes and villains are - like a dog who thinks he's a cat?  Consider the support which white evangelical leaders have given to Trump all throughout the sorry pile of used toilet paper that comprises his political career.  Consider their statements of their support, such statements as "If God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar to advance His Kingdom, then we must accept that God is using Trump.  We must not criticize Trump, but instead we must support him!"  Such statements are usually bundled with admonitions to Trump's critics to submit to their rulers as commanded in Romans 13.  Funny, but these same evangelical leaders seem to suffer from collective amnesia regarding Romans 13 when their political opponents win elections.  Maybe that's why some of their followers were toting pipe bombs and firearms yesterday.

Let me restate what has been obvious for a long time: white American evangelicals and their leaders do not really accept the Bible as a guide for their own lives.  Otherwise, they would obey the Sermon on the Mount, wouldn't they?  And they would speak truth to power like John the Baptist did - even when it was politically inconvenient and they had to tell the truth to their own President - wouldn't they?  No, rather, the god of white American evangelicals is raw, naked, secular political and economic power.  In their pursuit of this power, they have forgotten that the Bible says that no lie is of the truth.  By hitching their wagon to a serial liar like Trump, they have become not only nihilists, but syncretists.  Like a junkie and his needle, they have shown that they will support and ally themselves with anyone who gives them their power fix - even if the people they support live wicked lives that deny the Gospel, even if they are so corrupt that they try to give themselves Presidential pardons in order to avoid jail, even if they go so far as to sympathize with openly New Age or Satanic white supremacist groups like the Order of Nine Angels.  This means that should the Rapture actually occur after the Tribulation, there will be white American evangelicals during the Tribulation who will align themselves with the Antichrist and "take the mark of the Beast" as long as the Antichrist promises them a seat at the table of political power.

Which means that when the Rapture occurs, a lot of evangelicals will be left behind.

A Time for Celebration and a Time for Caution

It is with great satisfaction that I am enjoying some of the news this evening.  The Democratic Party has just retaken control of the United States Senate.  This was due in no small part to the groundswell of community organizing and constructive resistance in the African-American community.  This encourages me to add diligence to my own organizing plans.  I also find it bitingly funny that the African-American players in the WNBA managed to oust a team owner from the U.S. Senate.  

The news is not all good, however.  The supporters of Donald Trump - consisting mainly of white evangelicals who don't seem to read their Bibles - rioted in Washington DC to prevent the Congressional ratification of Joe Biden as the next President.  These are the people who regularly use the term "thugs" to describe unarmed people of color.  Who are the real thugs here?  Even in this, however, there is a silver lining: those who study strategic nonviolent resistance know that violence always backfires against those who choose to be violent.  As a result of the violence of the pro-Trump rioters (who were incited by Trump himself), some of the Republican members of Congress who had intended to object to Biden's ratification have chosen instead to support him.  Even Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have turned against Trump.  Trump has become a lame duck in every sense of the word, as it was Vice President Pence who coordinated with the military to call National Guard troops to stop the rioting.  Clearly Trump is no longer counted among the adults in the room.

For you who are among the marginalized and oppressed, continue to organize constructive resistance!  Continue to remain nonviolent.  Continue to speak truth to power.  Support those even among the Republicans who are finally beginning to speak truth.

One last thing.  I believe it is time for those of us who desire to be decent people to organize a permanent boycott of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and possibly YouTube as well.  The role of these social media platforms in facilitating the kind of chaos that has characterized the Trump years is undeniable.  The boycott should therefore last until the owners of these platforms are bankrupt.

From D to D, Chapter 5 (Continued): On The Trail of Tommy The Traveler

Kala ku pandang kerlip bintang nun jauh di sana

Sayup kudengar melodi cinta yang menggema

Terasa kembali gelora jiwa mudaku

Karena tersentuh alunan lagu semerdu kopi dangdut

Api asmara yang dahulu pernah membara

Semakin hangat bagai ciuman yang pertama

Detak jantungku seakan ikut irama

Karena terlena oleh pesona alunan kopi dangdut

Irama kopi dangdut yang ceria

Menyengat hati menjadi gairah

Membuat aku lupa akan cintaku yang telah lalu

Api asmara yang dahulu pernah membara

Semakin hangat bagai ciuman yang pertama

Detak jantungku seakan ikut irama

Karena terlena oleh pesona alunan kopi dangdut...

- from Kopi Dangdut.  Lyrics by Fahmi Shahab.

As I said in a previous post, if you are from outside Europe or Russia or the United States, please keep making good music!  For those of you who, like myself, are native English speakers, try Google Translate if you dare.  And now...

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples. 

The previous post in this series introduced us to Chapter 5 of From D to D, which is titled, "Exercising Power."  In that post we discussed the fact that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy.  For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group.  This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors.  For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.    To repeat a bit of the previous post, the strategy used by the oppressor consists of things such as these:

1. To try to make the practitioners of nonviolent struggle resemble the oppressor as much as possible by adopting the oppressor's means of fighting to the greatest extent possible. This shifts the struggle onto a ground in which the means of fighting are chosen by the dictator, and thus the struggle is easy for the oppressor's regime to combat.
2. To redefine the concept of strategic nonviolent resistance in such a way that the moral and ethical advantages of would-be resisters are erased.
3. To reduce the popular conception of nonviolent resistance into a small set of activities that can be easily controlled, outlawed or hijacked - for instance, by defining resistance solely as mass protest rallies and marches.

Today we will consider the first two strategies in this list, and we will consider a method of choice used by oppressors throughout history to accomplish the goals of these strategies.  Note that all three of these strategies fit within a larger political strategy which has been used by worthless and evil power-holders throughout history: namely, to prevail in a political contest by tarnishing one's opponent rather than by conducting oneself in a way that is clearly morally superior to the way of one's opponent.  In other contexts, this larger strategy goes by the very familiar term of mudslinging.  

But what if the organized opponents of an evil power-holder can't be tarnished by garden-variety mudslinging because they insist on conducting themselves wisely and righteously in the sight of all?  Then the evil power-holder is forced to attempt to seduce the struggle group to abandon right moral and ethical principles, or to adopt unwise strategies, or both.  In this attempt, the oppressor's tool of choice is the agent provocateur.  

An agent provocateur (literally, an "inciting agent") is a person sent by a power-holder (whether a government or other holder of concentrated wealth and power) who infiltrates a social organization in order to perform a certain job.  The infiltrator's job is to try to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  The discussion of agents provocateurs tends at times to produce disbelief, especially in the United States, where a significant number of people believe that the government is always an agent for good (that is, when it is controlled by the Republican Party), that the rich are good people, and that "our men in uniform" are engaged in a righteous mission at all times - especially when they are police, and especially when they are killing people of color.  When one suggests to such believers that perhaps the heroes whom they worship are actually up to dirty tricks, they respond by accusing the suggester of believing baseless conspiracy theories.

However, the history of the use of agents provocateurs is long and deep and extremely well-documented.  In pages 592 and 593 of his three-volume work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp documents the ways in which agents provocateurs have been used by both governments and big business, such as the use of such agents in an attempt to sabotage the Indian struggle for independence from Britain, the use of British Army agents during the 1926 British general strike, and the Russian Tsar's use of such agents during the latter half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century.  (Ever heard of the Okhrana?  See this also.  And note that Vladimir Putin seems to be styling himself as a tsar rising from the ashes...)  As for the use of these agents in American labor struggles, John Steuben's excellent book Strike Strategy provides excellent documentation.  

And the use of such agents is not confined to the somewhat distant past.  In a previous post I described how members of various white supremacist groups infiltrated the Black Lives Matter protests which took place in 2020 because of the police murders (yes, I said murders) of George Floyd, Ahmed Aubury, and Breonna Taylor.  However, the 1960's provide some of the richest, most fascinating, most narratively and cinematically pregnant history of the use of agents provocateurs in the history of the United States.  For that decade was the decade in which a number of movements for social justice - patiently nurtured during the previous decades - burst into highly visible fruition.  It was therefore the decade in which the established holders of concentrated wealth and power reacted most colorfully, being terrified by the flowering of movements whose strength they had underestimated.

This was the decade of COINTELPRO, the program created by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on American citizens who were deemed to be a "threat to the established social order" including many members and leaders of the African -American Civil Rights struggles.  Note that in 1976, U.S. Senator Frank Church led a Congressional investigation of domestic spying performed by agencies of the Executive Branch, and discovered that the rights of U.S. citizens had been systematically violated by these agencies.  (You can read about it here.  Just scroll down to the text that reads, "Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976)".)  And this was the decade in which a particularly weird agent provocateur first made his appearance at a number of college campuses in the United States.  His birth name was Momluang Singkata Thomas Tongyai N’Ayudhya, but he soon became known as "Tommy the Traveler."  His fanatical focus was on finding students whom he deemed to be likely to be involved in subversive organizations in order to incite them to commit crimes.  And he stuck out like a sore thumb, not only because he was too old to be a college student (hey, this was way back in the day, ya know!), but because he dressed like a cop and acted like someone who was mildly deranged.  After much effort, he did eventually get some students to firebomb an ROTC office (with the firebomb materials provided graciously by himself), and that led to a raid on the college campus.  During the raid, his identity as a police agent was revealed.  Needless to say, those attending that college in those days were taught a lesson they had perhaps not signed up for.  You can read more about him here.

How then should a nonviolent struggle group structure and position itself to deal with the threat of agents provocateurs, and with the problem of infiltration in general?  I will provide my answer to that question in the next post in this series, God willing.  Hint: the answer is not what you might think.