Peter Ackerman's Accuracy

Here's another short post that is a follow-on to the post I wrote yesterday.  My encounter with the protest march in Portland yesterday got me so agitated that I actually went back to watch a YouTube video that was made by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2013.  As long-time readers of my blog know, I believe the ICNC went seriously off the rails from 2017 to 2020, and that as a result they gave some advice that was seriously flawed, both morally, tactically, and strategically.  So in my posts from 2020 onward, I have scrupulously avoided referring to any materials or videos published by the ICNC.  However, I must admit that the materials they published and released up to 2016 are actually quite good.  Their Fletcher Summer Institute video series is a particular example of this.  Also, I've grown to strongly dislike YouTube for reasons which I have mentioned on this blog, yet to this day YouTube remains the best place to find videos of talks and lectures by people such as Srdja Popovic, Jamila Raqib, Marshall Ganz, Zeynep Tufekci, and other scholars of people power, community organizing, and strategic nonviolent resistance.  So to use an analogy, even though I hate the taste of cheese, because I'm hungry and there's nothing else to eat, I guess I'll have to eat this cheese sandwich...

Anyway, the video I am referring to is "FSI 2013: Why Skills Can Make Civil Resistance 'A Force More Powerful'" and it is a recording of a talk which was given by Peter Ackerman, who was one of the founders of the ICNC.  (By the way, Peter Ackerman passed away around three years ago.  I'm sorry to hear of his passing.)  In his talk he makes the point that the development of skills and wise strategy among the participants in a nonviolent liberation struggle is the key to winning the struggle.  He has some interesting things to say about the lack of effectiveness of mass protest marches when those protest marches are nothing more than an expression of collective outrage:

"Well..you know, again, we're always talking about probabilities. But a strategy to go to the street because you're angry - to let off steam - recognizing you probably have a finite amount of steam - that's probably a not good use of your steam.  [Sic] And I don't believe you should...even consider a tactic without understanding its strategic context.  Why would you just go out and do something without thinking it through?...Tactics are not a strategy. [Emphasis added.]  "What makes a tactic have a strategic context is the forethought that comes to it. [Emphasis added.] 

"And the military gets this...as some of you know, I have a son who was in the military and...as a combat officer before he went out on any activity he had to write a 40-page paper about what was the purpose, what were the risks, and on and on and on! We should submit ourselves to that same kind of discipline.  If you don't do it, you're gonna lose!"

To those who want to craft an effective resistance to the autocrats who have taken over their countries (as Trump and the Republican Party have done in the United States), I say the same thing.  Educate yourselves in the theory and practice of effective strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read some books - especially the books published by the Albert Einstein Institution.  Learn to craft an effective strategy of resistance, an effective theory of change.  If you don't do it, you're going to lose! 

Cassandra's Sore Throat

I was planning to meet some friends for coffee (or in my case, green tea) today in downtown Portland, Oregon.  Because I don't have a TV and don't watch the news on my computer, I was completely surprised by the presence of a huge anti-Trump protest rally (one of over two hundred taking place across the nation) which blocked several downtown streets, including the street I needed to take to reach the coffee shop where my friends and I were supposed to meet.  

As readers of my blog know, I am utterly opposed to the Presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also utterly opposed to the Republican Party.  Even though I am a Christian, I find that regrettably, I must now stand in complete and utter opposition to the white American evangelical/Protestant church in all of its manifestations.  So I could certainly sympathize and agree with many of the grievances of the protestors - especially because I am a black African-American.  Yet I must say that the sight of the protestors filled me with a strange mix of feelings.  This mixture of feelings was even more agitated when I gave up on trying to reach my coffee shop friends and parked my car instead in order to talk to some of the protestors.  I learned that many people had come to the protests simply because they had heard about them during this past week, and that they had not received any prior training in the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Moreover, the protest march seemed at times to be very little more than a nearly inchoate venting of grievances.  

So I asked a few of the protestors if they had ever heard of the study of the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I stressed that this three-word phrase meant far more than simple "nonviolence."  I asked them if they had ever read any of the books of Gene Sharp or if they had ever heard of Jamila Raqib or Marshall Ganz.  I asked them if they had ever heard of the difference between tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  I asked them if they were willing to start reading the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, and particularly on the methods of organizing a strike, a boycott, or a stay-at-home.  (One note about that last link: it leads to a webpage written partly by Erica Chenoweth.  While I greatly enjoyed Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, written by Chenoweth and by Maria Stephan, I must say that I did NOT enjoy a subsequent book by Chenoweth titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  If you want my reasons for disliking that book, please click here.)  I told them that the use of mass protest rallies is actually one of the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, and that if they wanted to mount an effective resistance to Trump and the demographic he represents, they needed to learn the far more powerful methods of organizing economic noncooperation.  I told them that people who relied solely on mass protests as a tactic did not know what they were doing.  I warned them that people who only know how to organize mass protests can be undermined by the government if the government chooses to infiltrate the protests with violent agents provocateurs.  I ended by urging them to read some books.

They politely listened to my near-diatribe and graciously answered my words, yet I must wonder how it must have felt for them to be button-holed by a total stranger and lectured for several minutes.  If any of them are reading these words now, my deepest apologies for any heartburn I caused in you.  Nonetheless, I have over the last several years felt like the Cassandra of Greek mythology who was condemned to scream out warnings which were not heeded by her hearers.  Then again, maybe things are not as bad as I sometimes fear.  After all, tactics of economic noncooperation effectively drove Elon Musk out of his role as one of Trump's henchmen.  These tactics have almost bankrupted the Tesla corporation and are starting to hurt Starlink, which is another of Musk's businesses.  And things like these boycotts should be proof enough to my fevered brain that I'm not the only one who can come up with a good idea.  Still, like Cassandra, it's hard sometimes to resist the urge to scream my head off...