The Ride Of The Gray Cowboys

At the beginning of this year, as part of the work that pays bills, I found myself checking out a book on digital logic design.  The book was intriguing because it made use of a piece of open-source digital circuit simulation software.  (I always like reading about how to use free tools!)  As I read the preface, I ran across a paragraph titled, "How to Acquire Intuition?"  The paragraph explained why instilling mathematical rigor through proofs is a key part of instilling the mathematical intuition needed to understand digital logic circuits.  As a criticism of the modern way in which many technical subjects are taught, the authors wrote the following sentence: 

All we can say is that this strategy [that is, the non-proof strategy] is in complete disregard of the statement: "When you have to shoot, shoot.  Don't talk"  [Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly].

Let me assure you that today's post is not about digital circuits!  But I have to admit that the quote intrigued me for reasons that are completely non-technical.  You see, I have never watched The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - although I have known that this movie and other movies like it helped launch the big-name careers of some hitherto obscure actors, including Clint Eastwood.  So I checked out a few YouTube clips from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and I pondered the career of Mr. Eastwood.

I have seen only a couple of Clint Eastwood movies in my entire life, but I know that he made a big name for himself as an actor by specializing in the portrayal of morally ambiguous leading characters, characters for whom one might root if one was still a kid, but whom one's parents might not allow around their children.  A case in point is his Dirty Harry character - a cop who doesn't quite play by the rules, a cop who makes us wonder whether or not he'll really do the right thing in the end, a cop whose message seems in part to be that the end justifies the means.  Eastwood's "spaghetti Western" roles were similarly morally gray characters, a somewhat jarring contrast to the image of the American cowboy which had been built up in American culture until that time - the absolutely pure and wholesome blond-white-and blue adult male "Boy Scout" in white hat, set in opposition to the utterly evil, black-hatted villain in the western movies and pulp novels of the early to mid-20th century.

Eastwood's characters largely get away with their moral ambiguity in his movies, as things usually seem to work out in their favor by the time of the closing credits.  In other words, the consequences of moral ambiguity are portrayed as positive for the ambiguous character who has the right skills.  Yet there are other storytellers who provide a glimpse into the costs and side effects of such ambiguity.  One such storyteller was the late John le Carre, whose subject matter was the spy as an agent of government and empire.  Like Eastwood's characters, le Carre's characters were intended to poke holes in a romanticized depiction of a certain type of hero - namely, the sort of uber-cool, gadget-laden, macho adventurer-spy typified by James Bond.  Like Eastwood's characters, Bond is morally ambiguous in his means, but in the movies, it's always okay because we are told that the ultimate end is ultimately good.  In le Carre's work, by contrast, the spy is seen as a morally ambiguous agent of a morally questionable empire, and the things which the empire demands of the spy in the course of his job frequently end up destroying his soul.  

Thoughts of le Carre (whose audiobooks I have recently been enjoying) bring me to a central question of tonight's post, namely, what sort of society we create for ourselves when we choose to live by the dictum, "Do not be excessively righteous, and do not be overly wise.  Why should you ruin yourself?  Do not be excessively wicked, and do not be a fool.  Why should you die before your time?" (Ecclesiastes 7:16-17)  In such a society, we may start out with a righteous end, yet find that in our misguided zeal we choose means that are completely incompatible with the end we profess.  Or - and this seems far more likely nowadays - we may find ourselves searching for ends and means which maximize our own personal advantages regardless of the ultimate righteousness of those ends, even though we say otherwise.  This leads to such things as the ambiguity and the sometimes immense suffering that comprises the legacy of Mao Zedong.  Or the fiendish Machiavellian legacy of V.I. Lenin and the horrors which the Bolsheviks unleashed on Russia and Eastern Europe.  Or the regime of the recently ousted former President Trump (although he seems to have heeded the part of Ecclesiastes which said not to be too good and to have disregarded the part that said not to be too evil!).  Or the legacy and ongoing "witness" of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church, which has by now conclusively proven that it has nothing to do with the Lord Jesus Christ because it has no intention of ever doing what He commanded - especially in the Sermon on the Mount.  Rather, this church has shown that it is the spread-legged whore and serving wench of secular earthly economic and political power, a mere means to a materialist end consisting of earthly domination for a certain select group of people.  When we consider American evangelicalism, we see that one consequence of the toleration of moral ambiguity is a society in which people say things merely to try to achieve certain effects in their hearers, rather than saying things in order to communicate truth.  Hence, for instance, the Right's defense of Trump even in the face of Trump's own moral contradictions.

In short, if Clint Eastwood's characters are the sort of people whom good parents don't let near their children, then morally ambiguous societies are the sorts of places in which good parents don't let their children play - because someone is bound to get hurt in such places.  When such societies do arise (for "it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come"), then it becomes necessary for decent people to resist such societies and the masters who run them.  This has been the motivation for the series of posts I have written on strategic nonviolent resistance during the Trump presidency, and especially during the last eighteen months.  And if one goes through some of the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance that was written and published before the middle of the last decade, one sees that a righteous cause is a necessary ingredient of successful resistance.  It is not by itself a sufficient ingredient - for a righteous cause still needs good strategy - but without a righteous cause, what reason do people have to join a struggle?  Especially when joining a particular struggle may result in the loss of life, liberty and property?

Consider some of the things Gene Sharp said in his book How Nonviolent Struggle Works: 

• Cowardice and nonviolent struggle do not mix
• Cowards seek to avoid the conflict and flee from danger, while the nonviolent resister faces the conflict and risks the dangers involved
• Bravery in this technique of struggle is not only moral valor but a practical requirement
• Civil resisters ought to have confidence in the justice and force of their cause, principles, and means of action (Emphasis added)

Note that last point.  In other words, righteous ends must use righteous means.  Another writer, Jack DuVall, made the same point in a series of paragraphs titled, "Power from Ends" contained in an essay titled, "Civil Resistance And The Language of Power."  To quote DuVall, "For civil resistance to work, it has to shred the legitimacy of power-holders to whom it is opposed and model a higher legitimacy based on representing the real aspirations of the people.  But the fastest way to forsake that advantage is to resort to means that are not seen as legitimate."  (Emphasis added.)  This, for instance, is why Gene Sharp in his writings rejected both violence, sabotage, and the destruction of the opponent's property as appropriate means of struggle.

Contrast such moral clarity with more recent attempts during the last five or six years by so-called "civil resistance scholars" to "gray-wash" the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I am thinking particularly of a book I bought within the last few months titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know by Erica Chenoweth.  (I told you all in an earlier post that I was reading a book for which I might write a critique soon.  A delay of two months isn't exactly "soon," but I've been dragging my feet somewhat - partly because I've been busy, and partly because some parts of Chenoweth's new book make me choke.  More on that in another post.)  I had guardedly high hopes for the book when I first heard about it, but I had already begun to prepare myself for the possibility that Chenoweth might have become among the morally compromised "scholars" who now seem to inhabit the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.  It's a good thing I did prepare myself.  For on page 57 of her book, she seeks to legitimize those who want to include property destruction in the arsenal of what she calls "civil resistance", saying, "When it is disciplined and discriminating, and sends a clear message, property destruction can be considered a nonviolent method of sabotage..."  And she goes on to cite the Boston Tea Party as an example of the wise use of sabotage in a nonviolent struggle.  However, I'd like to suggest that perhaps the backfire among loyalists which resulted from this act has been overlooked.  And on page 79, she suggests that sometimes a movement can achieve strength only by partnering with allies who may not be willing to remain nonviolent, saying that "...questions of justice and political effectiveness are often in tension.  Most scholars of civil resistance stay agnostic on this question by leaving aside moral questions altogether and focusing on strategy, not morality..."  Similarly, chapter 3 of her book appears at first reading to be a moral minefield for a reader such as myself, as she paints those voices who advocate for allowing limited movement violence as people who are engaged in an honest debate over the effectiveness of tactics.

But it seems to me that the evaluation of civil resistance tactics and strategy solely on the basis of their supposed "effectiveness" can lead to a trap if we ignore the righteousness or unrighteousness of the strategy and tactics in question.  (It can also lead resisters to adopt means, methods, and ends that are both immoral and violent.)  For by ignoring questions of morality or righteousness, we ultimately ignore the Scriptural maxim that "...whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."  Such a maxim is easy to forget precisely because we humans tend to look at trends from time scales that are too short.  By way of analogy, for those who are handy with math, consider a parabolic function whose vertex is positive and nonzero, yet whose vertex is a maximum and not a minimum.  Over a short enough interval of the independent variable, the function looks like it will rise forever.  But over a long enough interval, we see that the function value eventually crashes back to zero before becoming forever negative.  Such are the ultimate results of moral graywashing - sooner or later, you lose.

The Poverty of Pivenism

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.)  Recent posts in this series have dealt with the important subject of the strategy of nonviolent struggle.  As I said in a recent post, 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.

The success rate of nonviolent liberation struggles from 1900 to 2006 was over 50 percent, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Indeed, during this period, "campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as successful as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals," according to the book's website.  Yet from 2010 onward the success rate of nonviolent struggle movements began to decline, as documented by articles such as "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance" by Erica Chenoweth, and "Nonviolent protest defined the decade. But is civil resistance losing its impact?" by Rupa Shenoy.  I would like to suggest that the decline continues to this day, in which the success rate has dropped to less than 34 percent - a distressing decline of 16 to 18 percent.  (Violent liberation struggles have shown an even worse decline in effectiveness, by the way.  Don't take out a loan to buy an assault rifle!)  The question then becomes, Why? What is causing the decline in the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns?

In her article "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance," Chenoweth posits a number of reasons for the decline in effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, including the following:

• Savvier responses by governments and other wealthy power-holders
• More entrenched oppressive power-holders who have proven to be resilient in the face of grassroots challenges to their power
• Increased use of brutal repression by these entrenched power-holders
• A change in the structure and capabilities of grassroots movements themselves (Emphasis added)

It is this last factor which I want to bring into sharper focus today, as I believe that it is the decisive factor in the decline of the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance movements.  What changes have taken place in grassroots movements over the last ten years?  According to Chenoweth, the first change is that these movements at their peaks tend actually to be smaller than the successful movements of decades past, both in total numbers and in percentage of the population which participates in them.  This is because the organizers of present-day movements tend to neglect the long-term relationship-building and building of organizational capacity required for a movement to achieve real staying power.  Instead, they do what comes easiest to them: putting together large mass demonstrations and protest marches which can easily be organized by digital social media and which throw a large number of total strangers together in the same place on short notice.  Because these total strangers have not had time to develop a shared story, much less a shared strategy, it is easy for governments and other wealthy power-holders to throw a few violent agents provocateurs into the mix.  And when protest organizers tolerate violent actors or at least are not willing to exercise the discipline needed to separate their movements from the violent actors, the likelihood of increased mass participation in the protests decreases.  (As I have said in recent posts, this comes down to the lack of education and training of the would-be leaders of protest movements.  They need to read some books!)

These weaknesses are characteristic of all the recent "leaderless", "structureless", supposedly "cutting-edge" protest movements of the last decade.  This is why I tend to gag and retch every time I read some article or opinion piece put forth by a media outlet which praises these "leaderless", "structureless" movements as some smart wave of the future.  They're not!  Their weaknesses have not only been abundantly documented by Erica Chenoweth, but also by Zeynep Tufekci, both in her book Twitter and Tear Gas and in a TED talk she gave a few years after the rise and fall of the Occupy protests.  Yet these sorts of leaderless, hastily thrown-together movements which focus almost exclusively on mass protest seem to be the darlings of many a wanna-be movement leader today - especially if that "leader" or those "leaders" identify as "Millennials" or younger who supposedly "don't like structure."

One thing to note is that almost all widely-held popular ideas have a history, a lineage of development.  That includes widely-held bad ideas.  So what is the history of this particularly bad idea, and of the ineffective and incompetent "movements" which have resulted from it?  To answer that question, I want to refer to a book that came out in 2016, and whose paperback edition came out in 2017.  (2017 seems to have been a good year to write books on resistance.  I wonder why...)  The book is This Is An Uprising by Mark Engler and Paul Engler.  And in case the Englers are reading this post, let me warn you in advance that I'm going to throw a few (metaphorical) rocks at your book.  To quote Jimmy Wong, "Please do not find offensive!"

Chapter Two of their book is titled, "Structure and Movement," and its opening sentences read thus: "Two schools stand at opposite poles of thinking about how grassroots forces can promote social change.  Each has a champion."  The chapter then sets forth these two champions, namely Saul Alinsky versus Frances Fox Piven.  The chapter begins to describe Alinsky thus: "Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups.  Like organizers in the labor movement, his approach focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time...this approach can be described as one based on 'structure.'"  The chapter begins to describe Piven thus: "Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization.  She emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly...In contrast to the structure-based approach of labor unions and Alinskyite groups, her tradition can be dubbed 'mass protest.'"

While Chapter Two does try to present a balanced comparison of the two approaches, it is guilty of a bit of distortion of the concept of a movement and of the role of a social movement organization as a catalyst for social movement.  (The social movement organization is a topic which I covered in this post.)  For it seems to paint those who follow the Alinskyite tradition as people who value organization over movement, and thus fails to recognize that it is organizations which give birth to movements.  Chapter Two quotes an Alinskyite organizer who accurately saw Martin Luther King as a "one-trick pony" who relied too much on dramatic mass marches and not on slow, patient capacity-building via sustained organization.

Chapter Two seems to treat Frances Fox Piven more favorably than Saul Alinsky, citing, for instance, a book titled Poor People's Movements by Piven and by Richard Cloward which analyzed some of the disruptive social movements of the 1930's, 1950's, and 1960's.  These movements are cited as proof that poor people who are willing to be disruptive can achieve far more in a short time than those who seek to build organizational structures among the poor.  It's time for a full disclosure statement: I must admit that I haven't yet read Piven's book.  However, what the Englers say about her matches what other sources have said about her teachings and writings.  And if she really holds such a position, I would like to gently suggest that she is glossing over the role that social movement organizations such as the CIO or SNCC had in the movements she cited.  

The "Pivenist" approach (at least, as I understand it) certainly has led to some impressive mobilizations, from the Gezi Park protests in Turkey to the Occupy protests and occupations in the United States to the mass protests of the Arab Spring.  Yet the failures of these mobilizations have also been impressive - perhaps even breathtaking.  One particularly poignant and tragic failure is the failure of the Egyptian revolution to bring about a democratic government, and the loss of all which that mobilization initially achieved.  A sign both ironic and hopeful is the fact that in the aftermath, movement organizers have begun to return to the need for sustained organizing as the means of building power for lasting change.  The Englers note that leaders of the original April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt have begun to focus on building alternative institutions, and that "the 2011 uprising has unleashed a spirit of communal self-determination that cannot easily be subdued."  A further irony is that in connection with the ultimate failure of the Egyptian revolution, the Englers first mention the term "alternative institutions" in their book.  Alternative institutions are one of the most disruptive long-term tools of an oppressed people in a nonviolent liberation struggle - yet the Englers mention them only once.  And their book never defines or discusses them further.  Alternative - or "parallel" institutions - are a pillar of the Gandhian strategy of swaraj, which is why they are a prominent part of his constructive program.  The fact that the Englers mention them only once without explaining their significance is a real shame.  

And so we come back to what I consider to be an accurate and viable roadmap of nonviolent revolution, namely the achievement of shifts in the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor.  To quote Gene Sharp, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship.  As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..." - From D to D, Chapter 9.  Sounds a lot better than Pivenism to me - especially when I see the successful track record of the approach outlined by Sharp.  The approach of Sharp was the approach used by Gandhi and his associates in organizing a successful liberation struggle among dirt-poor Indians.  If they could liberate themselves, none of the rest of us have any excuses for our continued oppression.  This includes those of us in the African-American community!

Yet there are those who know the weaknesses and failures of Pivenism, but who still promote her approach as a valid strategy of collective nonviolent resistance.  I will examine who some of these people are and what I believe to be some of their motives in the next post in this series.

Why Are These Weapons Strong?

I've been scanning recent news articles that deal with nonviolent resistance.  As is to be expected, almost all of these recent articles deal with the ongoing protests against police brutality and the murder of unarmed people of color in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.  Some of these articles are misleading - perhaps unintentionally or perhaps not.  So I thought it good to write a post clearing up a few misconceptions regarding nonviolent resistance.

As I have come to understand nonviolent resistance in the light of the literature I've been studying from the end of 2016 until now, I've come to my own definition of the term, stated below:

Nonviolent resistance: a system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction.

This definition comes from my reading of histories of those who have used nonviolent resistance to defeat oppression including conflicts with some of the most repressive regimes the world has seen within the last 120 years.  Because nonviolent resistance is a system of means employed by the oppressed, it is not passivity or inaction.  Below are some other things that nonviolent resistance is not:

• Nonviolent resistance is not just nonviolence.  (However, nonviolent resisters are nonviolent!)  Why make this distinction?  Because oppressors (along with some misguided members of the oppressed) frequently equate nonviolent resistance with the kind of "nonviolence" that consists only of being passive in the face of oppression, or of trying to "rise above" your oppressor by showing him or her that the oppression doesn't bother you, or by finding creative ways to continue to turn the other cheek or to learn to "live gracefully" under ongoing oppression.  The term "nonviolence" has come thus to have almost New Age "spiritual" connotations.  But if you are an African-American mother whose children were exposed to heavy metals in Flint, Michigan, when Republicans destroyed the safety of the city's water supply, or if you are a relative of the unarmed African-Americans who were murdered by police, or if you are a Latino U.S. citizen whose relatives were wrongly deported, don't you have a right - even a duty - to be bothered?

• Nonviolent resistance is not weak.  Moreover, it is not weaker than violence.  Oppressed populations who rely on nonviolent struggle are twice as likely to achieve their aims as those who use violence, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  In that book, Chenoweth and Stephan present the results of a statistical analysis of both nonviolent and violent conflicts which shows that nonviolent struggles achieved an outright success rate of 52 percent.  The rate of partial success was even higher.  Those who used violence succeeded only 26 percent of the time.  As for those violent actors who failed...well, let's just say that many of them did not get a second chance! 

• Nonviolent resistance is not just protest. Scholar Gene Sharp identified 198 methods of nonviolent action, which he grouped into three general categories.  While I am heartened by some of the recent tactical victories I have seen in the recent anti-racism protests, I have to repeat once again that the methods of protest and persuasion are actually the weakest of the categories of methods of nonviolent action, because they have only limited power to apply pressure to an oppressor.  Strategic nonviolent resistance can be used successfully even against oppressors who don't have any better angels to appeal to, because strategic nonviolent resistance relies on more than just protest.

Nonviolent resistance is a set of means by which the oppressed can assert their humanity and dignity in the face of their oppressors in a way that effectively disrupts the power of their oppressors.  And it has an impressive track record, as seen in a brief survey of examples:

• The Philippine "people power" revolution that deposed Ferdinand Marcos was waged nonviolently.  It succeeded after the repeated failure of violent Communist insurgencies.
• The South African struggle which ended apartheid succeeded because its practitioners learned to skillfully apply strategic nonviolent resistance.
• The Polish Solidarity (Solidarność) movement toppled the Communist Jaruzelski regime without violent combat.
• The Serbian OTPOR! (ОТПОР!)movement was part of the Serbian nonviolent resistance that toppled strongman and genocidal maniac Slobodan Milosevic in 2004.

Nonviolent resistance does depend on the participation of large numbers of people.  As more and more people decide to participate, the oppressor's psychological and social pillars of support begin to crumble.  However, there is one weakness of civil resistance: if the resistance turns violent, the number of people willing to participate drops drastically.  And the more violent the resistance becomes, the greater is the ability of the oppressor to justify violent repression against the resisters.  This is why when a nonviolent liberation struggle begins in an oppressed population, the oppressors almost always try to inject violence into it so that they can more easily crush it.

So now we come to the articles I read this week, some of which raised my eyebrows, articles like this:

• "The Limits And Dangers of a Fixation on Nonviolence", Rebecca Pierce
• "In Defense of Destroying Property", R. H. Lossin

Rebecca Pierce claims to be both Black and Jewish, and her essay appears in the New Republic.  Let me just color her misinformed both about nonviolent resistance as a strategic toolkit and as a strategy which works best when not mixed with violence.  R. H. Lossin is white, and does not have to face the sort of demonization which a Black person would face for even suggesting that property destruction is an acceptable way to advance a social movement.  Her article appears in the Nation.  Both the New Republic and the Nation are prominent magazines.  How is it that these people were given the permission to publish such pieces?  Who gave them that permission, and why?  Who benefits from teaching the oppressed to believe that including violence and property destruction in their "variety of tactics" is helpful to those involved in a liberation struggle against a more powerful oppressor?  (What kind of doofus would try to persuade a child to challenge a grizzly bear to a bare-knuckle fight???)

Two last things.  First, in my writings on nonviolent resistance, I have studiously avoided any mention of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King.  I could leave it to you, the reader, to guess all my reasons for leaving him out of my discussion, but I will help you by giving you one reason.  King has been flattened by public school history books and popular culture into a character who fits the description of "nonviolence" I mentioned in my first bullet point above.  So if one goes to communities of the oppressed saying, "We need to practice nonviolent resistance like King did," there will be voices both within and outside the communities of the oppressed who question whether it is realistic to try to convert the oppressor or to build "beloved communities" between oppressor and oppressed, or to ask the oppressed to keep trying to "love their enemies," blah, blah, blah.  In other words, these voices will set up King as a straw man who is easily knocked down, thus hindering the oppressed from seeing the real power and aims of strategic nonviolent resistance. King has therefore become a distraction.

Second, it is instructive to consider the history of Syria over the last ten years or so.  You might be surprised to know that the civil war which started in Syria several years back began as a peaceful nonviolent resistance movement.  In this form, it posed the greatest danger to the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and was beginning to seriously weaken the pillars of support of his regime.  Assad correctly concluded that if the nonviolent struggle were allowed to continue, it would force him out of power (thus bringing Syria into the list of countries which experienced regime change during the Arab Spring).  To prevent that from happening, Assad injected violence into the nonviolent movement by committing outrageous atrocities against the resisters, in order to provoke them to violence.  He also planted caches of weapons in the hopes that the resisters would find them and try to use them against the regime.  (See this also.)  Assad's hope was that by turning the resistance violent, he could shift the resisters onto a battleground in which the State held a decisive advantage.  The only reason why the resulting civil war lasted as long as it did and came close to ousting Assad was that the violent resistance was able to obtain outside sources of funding and supply.  Had that not been the case, the Assad regime would have quickly crushed the resistance movement.  Let that be a warning to those who have a cavalier attitude toward the use of violence in the current struggle against racist oppression in the United States.

The Strong Weapons Come Out

A makeshift poster I made for a rally out of a white board and markers

I've been to two rallies against racism this week.  The first was held downtown yesterday evening and the second was held downtown this afternoon.  I wanted to attend yesterday's rally so that I could provide some guidance in a limited way to the protestors who have been demonstrating against the continued racism directed against Black Americans, so I used a large dry-erase white board and some erasable markers to make the "poster" which you see in the picture above.  I asked a number of people to take a picture of it and post it on social media.  The poster asks people to do some homework, namely to read books like Why Civil Resistance Works, How Nonviolent Struggle Works, and the CANVAS Core Curriculum.  The poster also asks people to watch community organizing videos from Marshall Ganz.

Yesterday afternoon I also received an invitation from a friend of mine to the rally that took place today under a mix of sunshine and rain.  I was given a blessed opportunity to stand at the mic for a few minutes, and here is what I told the people present.

First I gave then my name and I told them my profession.  (For the purposes of this blog I am a "degreed technical professional" although I used a much shorter title in front of the crowd).  Then I said the following:

I am an African-American!  I am also a Christian!  And the Bible says that every human being on earth has the right to the things they need so that they can fulfill their purpose in life!

But there are some people who don't agree with this - they want to take all the good things on earth and keep them for themselves while they deprive the rest of us of everything we need to live a decent life.  How can we overcome them?  How can we liberate ourselves?

It is through nonviolent resistance that we liberate ourselves!  Nonviolent resistance is a way of shifting the power balance between the powerful and the powerless, between the oppressor and the oppressed.  Nonviolent resistance is not just turning the other cheek and turning the other cheek and turning the other cheek until you have no cheeks left!  It is about shifting the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed!

So I'm going to give you all some homework!  I want you to read: Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.  You all want me to repeat that?! (The crowd answered, Yes! So I did.)  And I want you all to read How Nonviolent Struggle Works! (I repeated this title too.)  You all can download it for free from the Internet.  And I want you to watch some videos by a community organizer named Marshall Ganz. 

Who's going to do their homework?! (A bunch of hands went up.)  If we're gonna liberate ourselves, we've got to learn how!  Do your homework!

A number of cameras were recording me while I was talking.  While I normally don't like that sort of thing, today it was fun.  In fact, I had a lot of fun this weekend!

P.S. Trump's pillars of support keep crumbling.  Over 55 retired military leaders have denounced him, and many of them have endorsed Joe Biden for the Presidency.  Let me just say one thing about Biden.  A trick used by Russian trolls and Russia-influenced media outlets during the 2016 election was to try to paint Hillary Clinton as being just as evil as Donald Trump.  The conclusion these mouthpieces wanted us to make was that "hey, since there's no difference, why vote, it will do no good, blah, blah, blah..."  But to me, there is a clear difference between Trump and Biden.  So I'm going to vote.  (How that must kill you, Vladimir!)  And I'm going to vote for Biden!  (Volodya, that must kill you even more!)  If progress is almost always incremental, we start with what we have instead of refusing to start the journey of progress because it doesn't instantly lead to paradise.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.  To refuse to vote or to vote for Trump is a step in the wrong direction.

Effective Resistance is NOT Protest

In response to the police murder of George Floyd, protests have erupted across the United States.  I agree with the anger of the African-Americans who have chosen to express their anger through protest.  I too am an African-American.  However, I do not think that protest is a wise means of expressing that anger at present.  Protest has not been a wise means of resistance ever since Donald Trump seized the presidency.  Therefore, to rely on protest as a means of tactical and strategic change is a tactical and strategic mistake.

As I have written in previous posts, protest is actually the weakest of the methods of nonviolent resistance, because it by itself does not apply effective pressure to an oppressor.  It is also a dangerous method to use when the oppressor has an understanding of how nonviolent struggle works, because the oppressor can then inject violence into what started as an act of nonviolent resistance.  Once the oppressor is able to inject violence into a nonviolent movement, it becomes much easier for the oppressor to justify the use of violent state repression against the nonviolent movement.  For more on this, please read the excellent Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Or just watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.

This is why I am highly suspicious of the violent actors (mostly white; see this also) who have invaded the nonviolent protests by African-Americans against police brutality.  (Note that the second source I just cited has reported that many of the looters and rioters who have attacked businesses in St. Paul owned by people of color and immigrants over the last two days have been white people from out of town.)  Over the last three or so years, we have witnessed time and time again the provocative actions of the Antifa who show up uninvited to protests by people with legitimate grievances in order to turn those protests violent.  Thus the Antifa turns the protest away from a voicing of legitimate grievances by an oppressed group in order to focus attention solely on the Antifa (and to provoke outrageous reactions in their opponents by means of the outrageous actions of the Antifa).  Therefore, the destruction which is now happening in many parts of the country is not about police brutality against African-Americans, or about the brutality of ICE against Latinos, or about any actual grievance of any oppressed dark-skinned minority groups in the United States.

Based on what I have read and heard about strategic nonviolent resistance, I would like to offer a hypothesis.  First, I believe that the Antifa is funded by the same people who put Donald Trump into power.  Second, I believe that the real purpose of the Antifa is to provide a pretext for Donald Trump to impose martial law on the United States (or at least to boost his chances for re-election).  Third, I believe the Antifa has managed to infiltrate even some organizations whose ostensible mission is to teach strategic nonviolent resistance.  (See this, for instance.  By the way, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict needs to take out some trash.  Seriously.)  By engaging in violence, the Antifa is actually strengthening the pillars of support of Donald Trump in a day in which those pillars of support should be weakening due to his incompetence and malignancy.  And I think (because it has been explained to them time and time again) that the leaders of the Antifa know all these things.  This is yet further evidence that the Antifa is not really about opposing fascism.

So for those who want to support communities of color in these times, please listen to the voices of some of the most prominent members of those communities of color (here, here, and here, for instance).  Do not engage in mass protest.  Let it be seen clearly who the agents of violence actually are.  Instead of protest, study how to build effective organizing skills in order to liberate yourselves from oppression without the use of violence.

One thing just occurred to me - maybe I'll make up some bumper stickers and hand them out to friends.  The stickers could say something like

THE ANTIFA IS PAID FOR BY TRUMP

or,

ANTIFA: PAID FOR BY TRUMP

Hmm...