Brain Failure in L.A.

Those of you who read this post will be able to tell at a glance that I don't follow the news closely.  It took a next door neighbor's relatives for me to find out today that there have been ongoing protests in Los Angeles over the immigration policies of Donald Trump.  I knew about the No Kings rally.  However, I did not know that the protests in Los Angeles had continued after that rally.  It turns out that even though I did not know about the continuation of the protests, I could easily guess the turn which these protests have taken, as noted below:

• Some of the protests have turned violent.  This violence has included vandalism and property destruction.  (NOTE TO ANY BONEHEADS WHO SAY THAT VANDALISM AND PROPERTY DESTRUCTION ARE NOT THE SAME AS VIOLENCE: VANDALISM IS VIOLENCE!) 
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and various law enforcement agencies ample justification for an overwhelmingly heavy police/military presence in Los Angeles.
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and the major right-wing media outlets in this country a gold-plated opportunity to portray those who oppose Trump as lovers of chaos who want to bring chaos into America.
• I strongly suspect that at least some of the violent actors in the protests were and are agents provocateurs either paid by the Trump administration or inserted by various police and Homeland Security units in order to strengthen support for the Trump regime by discrediting the critics of Trump.
• The protests were ongoing throughout the entire month of June and into July of this year - EVEN THOUGH THE PROTESTORS COULD SEE THAT THE PROTESTS HAD BECOME VIOLENT AND EVEN THOUGH THE VIOLENCE INJECTED INTO THE PROTESTS WAS BEING USED BY RIGHT-WING MEDIA TO DISCREDIT THE PROTESTORS AND THEIR CAUSE.

I just want to say that normally I don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS as it comes off sounding like I'm shouting.  But in this case, I am!  I hate Trump as much as any decent person ought to.  I hate the demographic from which he has emerged, as well as the members of his pillars of support.  But what makes me extremely angry is when I see people who claim to hate Trump and who claim to be part of the resistance against Trump choose tactics and strategy (or a slap-dash, boneheaded failure of strategy) which can so easily be hijacked by the very regime they claim to oppose.  A truly effective resistance uses a multitude of tactics, and is not fixated solely on the tactic of mass protest marches.  A truly effective resistance is able to switch to tactics of dispersion if its leaders see that tactics of concentration have begun to lose their effectiveness or to be derailed by violent agents provocateurs.  Hint to the boneheads: mass protest marches are a tactic of concentration!  A truly effective resistance is guided by a wise strategy and is implemented by actors who display tactical ingenuity and creativity.  And among the most important of all, a truly effective resistance is composed of people who maintain strict nonviolent discipline, as they know that allowing any violence - including property destruction - hurts their cause because it hardens the oppressor's pillars of support!

To those who want to be identified with righteous resistance, I say, Please, please, PLEASE study the theory and practice of successful strategic nonviolent resistance!  Please understand that if you call for a mass protest march or rally, an autocratic thug like Trump will find a way to inject violence into the protest march so that he can justify deploying a violent military or police response in order to crush it.  As I have said before, relying on mass protest as your sole go-to tactic of resistance is as stupid as relying on daily frontal assaults was in World War 1.  Please, please, PLEASE read some books!  Learn how to organize and deploy such highly disruptive tactics as the stay-at-home, the strike, and the boycott.  It is almost impossible for an oppressor to justify arresting citizens simply for refusing to shop or refusing to go out to an amusement park or restaurant.  Find out what Trump's economic pillars of support are and go after them with tactics that are street-legal, nonviolent, and guided by wise strategy.  Use such strategy and tactics to go after the wealth of the entire Trump family.  Read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read the book No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey.  Above all, read the writings of the Albert Einstein Institution - especially Gene Sharp's list of 198 methods of nonviolent action.  (That's right folks - 198, count 'em, 198 methods! Not just one!) I leave you once again with a quote from Theodore Sturgeon: "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."

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...