This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.) Those who have read previous posts on this subject know that the most recent posts discussed Chapters 6 and 7 of the book. Those chapters deal with the important subject of the strategy of a nonviolent liberation struggle. Strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful. This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important. If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power. If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.
So we come to the events of the late spring and summer of 2020, those events connected with the police murder of George Floyd. As an African-American, I stand with my brothers and sisters who are involved in the Black Lives Matter organizations, yet I feel the duty to point out some of the serious ways in which they dropped the ball last summer, as well as pointing out some of the political consequences of their failure. (One consequence of that failure: their mistakes helped re-elect a certain two-faced gentrifying mayor of a supposedly progressive city on the West Coast.) So here goes. And I'm going to tell the story from the point of view of an observer who was only rarely near the center of any action. If any readers have more expert knowledge or analysis, feel free to chime in with corrections as appropriate.
First, let's begin with the immediate consequences of the murder. The first response seen by myself and most observers was the almost immediate arising of a wave of spontaneous mass protest, both in Minnesota (where George Floyd used to live) and elsewhere. I would like to suggest that much of that protest originated outside of the Black community and outside any other communities of color in the United States. I would also like to suggest, based on what I saw in the Pacific Northwest, that much of that protest originated outside of any Black Lives Matter (abbreviated in this post to BLM) organization. However, the emergence of this protest thrust BLM movement organizations into the limelight, as many protestors who were not officially part of BLM chose to identify their actions as taken in support of BLM. Thus BLM was offered a unique moment in which to take a leadership role, and BLM organizers initiated their own protests as a result.
But at almost the same time as the emergence of spontaneous mass protest came the almost immediate emergence of "spontaneous" violence. I know of one white blogger who characterized it as "the emergence of the worst race riots this country has seen in decades." However, he is exaggerating greatly what actually happened, and his reasons are dishonest. For he does not want to face the fact that the incidents of violence were perpetrated almost entirely by white people. (See this and this also.) An early case in point is the "Umbrella Man." There is also Matthew Lee Rupert, as well as members of the Boogaloo Boys and other white groups who vandalized and looted minority businesses and attacked CNN journalism crews. Moreover, this violence spread in ways that seemed designed to provoke outrage and strengthen the societal "pillars of support" of the police and of the regime of Donald Trump. For the vandals and the violent targeted iconic statues and other monuments to the cultural heritage of the United States. (See this, this, and this for instance.) And in attacking minority businesses, the vandals sought to send a clear message that this is what happens whenever there is mass protest against established authority.
Other ways in which violent infiltrators sought to convey images of dis-order included the setting up of so-called "temporary autonomous zones" in city capitals by people who did not own property or have jobs in these so-called zones. In essence, the people who set up these zones became squatters of the same sort that emerged in city parks throughout the United States during the "Occupy" protests. And those who occupied these zones in 2020 were mostly white, just as those who "occupied" various public spaces in 2011. The 2020 occupations ended just as badly as those in 2011 had, for the occupiers were rightfully seen as squatters. But these squatters, along with the looters and the vandals of businesses and statues, served a useful purpose for the right-wing fascists running the Federal Government during Trump's last year - namely, that they gave him a convenient platform to portray himself as the sole upholder and defender of "law and order" against a crazed opposition movement who simply wanted to plunge American society into "chaos" and "anarchy." In other words, they were the convenient foil in the continued re-telling of the myth of redemptive violence - the favorite myth of fascists and oppressors, by the way, and a myth that became part of Donald Trump's re-election campaign strategy.
I would like to suggest that in the violence, vandalism and squatting that took place, people who had no sympathy for the Black struggle in America managed to hijack the protests over the murder of George Floyd and to twist the message of these protests in a direction which has nothing at all to do with the Black struggle. (As Marshall Ganz has repeatedly said, if you don't intentionally tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you - in ways that you won't like.) That this could happen is due to the following failures of many in the Black community:
- A failure by the Black community to appropriately define our collective identity and the strategy of our struggle. For at least four decades, we have been unconsciously following a rather limited "strategy" of the sort first articulated by Martin Luther King, namely, the strategy of trying to build a supposedly colorblind society in which our individual or historical identities are all dissolved in a "melting pot" to produce a so-called all-American alloy. Thus we have tried to build "beloved communities" with people who ought not to be trusted because they have no good intentions, people who refuse to give up their dreams of total domination. It is way past time for us to come together as Black people (NOT as part of some "rainbow coalition" alloy!) to decide who we are as a people and how we will struggle as a people. In other words, it is way past time for us to self-consciously organize ourselves. When white people who supposedly stand for "diversity" try to bring us as individuals into their "coalition", we need to say, "Not so fast. We will decide as a group what we choose to support. We will NOT allow ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda! Maybe we're not better together!" Of course, to say such things might provoke the sort of reaction from certain white supposed "allies" that would show their true colors.
- A failure by the Black community to understand the methods by which unarmed people shift the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless. In short, this is a failure to understand the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, which has also become known as people power. We have for too long allowed ourselves stupidly to believe that strategic nonviolent resistance consists of trying to love your enemy or to "rise above" the oppression dealt to you by your enemy (that is, to smile when your enemy serves you a sandwich made of excrement!), or to show how "spiritual" you are in the face of oppression. Therefore, too many of us have understandably written off strategic nonviolent resistance. It's time for some of us to start reading some books.
- This ignorance played out in 2020 in a failure to understand the impact of violence on a protest movement. When violence began to erupt during the protests, I saw it as a clear indication of a lack of organization on our part, as well as a lack of training. I saw it moreover as a clear sign of tactical and strategic misunderstanding and failure. But in conversations I had with BLM organizers, both during the 2020 CANVAS Summer Academy and in 2021 with BLM organizers who were part of the Leading Change Network, whenever I pointed out these failures, the BLM organizers got really defensive. Their response to my criticism was, "We were not the violent ones! And you can't believe everything the media tells you! Most of the protests were peaceful!" In making such criticisms, they missed the point altogether. That point being this: that if you engage in mass protests, and violent things happen during your protests, your protest movement will suffer, no matter who started the violence. Erica Chenoweth explains this beautifully as follows: When a mass protest is peaceful, everyone who is an ally or potential ally is likely to show up. This includes young families with small children and elderly grandmas with nothing better to do. In such circumstances, it is very hard for the government to justify using violence to shut down your protest. But as soon as the government is able to provoke or inject violence into the protests, the vulnerable - young families with small children and elderly grandmas - start to disappear until you are left only with athletic young men facing heavily armed cops. In those circumstances it becomes very easy for the government to justify the use of violent oppression to shut down the protest!
- Having said that, I wonder why the BLM organizers did not shift from tactics of concentration to tactics of dispersion as soon as the violence began to appear! (Pardon me - I shouldn't wonder. It's because these fools did not read any books!) For instance, why didn't one or more leaders immediately issue a statement saying, "We see that evil actors have shown up to inject violence and vandalism into our protests. Therefore, we are switching to protest tactics that don't involve large groups of people coming together in the streets. These new tactics will be legal, and will not be able to be hijacked by those who want to cause violence or to paint us as criminals." It shows a fatal lack of brains that not one of these leaders took such a step. I remember reading the news reports of protest after protest in which a small group of agents provocateurs broke away from a protest march to go off and vandalize while the police "declared a riot", and I was shouting in my living room, "Please, wake up and shift tactics!" (It felt to me very much like my experience as a kid watching Saturday Night wrestling and screaming at the TV whenever the "hero" made an obvious mistake. Lot of good that did.) I agree with BLM that there should have been protests. Yet there are both smart and stupid tactics of protest, and BLM failed to understand the difference. (Oh, look! It's happening again.)
- A failure to see the limitations of mass protest. Protest is not a viable single strategy of liberation. At best, it's a single tactic. A tactic is not a strategy. And as we have considered strategy in the context of strategic nonviolent resistance, we have learned that the best strategy is a strategy which your opponent is not ready to meet, and for which he has no defenses. Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D have drawn heavily from the writings of a British man named Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, who in the aftermath of World War 1 advocated heavily that armies should adopt a strategy of indirect approach as the best means of meeting one's enemy in a place where he is not prepared to meet you. I suggest that among the tactics of nonviolent action, mass street protest is now the tactic which most governments are most prepared to meet, and that these governments can short-circuit mass protest most effectively simply by injecting violence into the protests. Once they do that, they can justify raising the cost which ordinary people must pay to participate in protest by using tactics of violent police repression of protest. Mass protest is therefore not an example of the strategy of indirect approach. And mass protest carries certain unavoidable costs even when the protestors do not have to face police repression. I think of some of the BLM websites I saw last year in which organizers vowed to protest every day until their demands were met. I guess they never heard of "protest fatigue"! Moreover, as pointed out by Jamila Raqib, protest by itself does not alter the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.
In their insistence on the same tactic of mass protest day after day, the BLM protest organizers reminded me very much of a Briton who never considered the strategy of indirect approach, namely Sir Douglas Haig. I hope the man has no partisans, fans, or groupies who are still alive - otherwise, they might come to the USA to hunt me down and slash my tires - er, I mean, "tyres" - or threaten to give me "a bunch of fives." But Haig is a man worthy of much criticism. I think of his insistence on costly daily frontal assaults for three months during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and how the Germans played rope-a-dope with him there. I fear that here in the USA, should another outrage against African-Americans be perpetrated, and should that outrage spark mass protest, our enemies may play rope-a-dope again with us as they did in 2020.
