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.

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."

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.

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.

From D to D, Chapter 5: Exercising Power

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. Their strategic method has been to disenfranchise as many people as possible in order to cement the control of the "chosen few." Donald Trump was one of the choice instruments by which these sought to promote and enforce white supremacy and the aims of the Global Far Right.  Even though Trump has lost his bid for another Presidential term, the Republican Party is actively planning measures for further disenfranchisement of the poor and the nonwhite who live in the United States. 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.  It's time to organize or die.

Today we are considering Chapter 5 of From D to D, titled, "Exercising Power" - an appropriate topic for our consideration, given the fact that our opponents do not care at all whether their cause is morally right.  Their only concern is the extent to which they can exercise raw power over the rest of us.  What kind of power can righteously and effectively resist the power of our opponents?  According to Gene Sharp, the answer is the power embodied in strategic nonviolent resistance, which he calls "political defiance" in From D to D.  Chapters 3 and 4 of Sharp's book deal with some of the necessary groundwork that must be laid in order to build effective nonviolent power.  Chapter 5 begins to describe what that power looks like in action.  To quote Sharp, effective strategic nonviolent resistance "has the following characteristics:

1. It does not accept that the outcome will be decided by the means of fighting chosen by the dictatorship.
2. It is difficult for the regime to combat.
3. It can uniquely aggravate weaknesses of the dictatorship and can sever its sources of power.
4. It can in action be widely dispersed but can also be concentrated on a specific objective.
5. It leads to errors of judgment and action by the dictators.
6. It can effectively utilize the population as a whole and the society's groups and institutions in the struggle to end the brutal domination of the few.
7. It helps to spread the distribution of effective power in the society, making the establishment and maintenance of a democratic society more possible."

Note, however, that these characteristics do not automatically arise whenever a group of unarmed people come together to resist oppression.  In order for these characteristics to characterize a particular nonviolent struggle, there must be a set of corresponding characteristics of the nonviolent struggle group, as noted below:

• The struggle group uses a variety of tactics to wage the struggle, instead of fixating on only one or two methods.  This is one key ingredient which makes a successful struggle hard for the ruling oppressive regime to combat.  Note that Gene Sharp identified 198 methods of nonviolent action which can be used and which have been used historically in nonviolent struggle.  And Sharp himself admitted that there were many other effective methods of nonviolent action which he had not included in his list.
• The tactics of nonviolent struggle are chosen according to a wise grand strategy of liberation, a strategy with strategic goals.
• The struggle group maintains high ethical and moral standards in its conduct, standards which enable it to present a stark contrast between itself and its the oppressors who are its opponent.  Among these high moral standards are the commitment to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," because "no lie is of the truth."  This leads to the commitment to live in truth, as Vaclav Havel pointed out in his writings.  This choice to behave according to high moral standards also puts the oppressor into a dilemma whenever he or his agents try to shut down the struggle group.
• As part of maintaining high ethical and moral standards, the struggle group maintains nonviolent discipline even when facing a violent opponent.  In other words, the struggle group refuses to take up arms, to engage in violence against human beings (including retaliatory violence), or to destroy property.
• As part of the display of high ethical and moral standards, the struggle group operates very much in the open.  Secrecy and conspiracies are rejected.  Instead, the group openly declares its aims and methods.  This shows both the opponent and the general population that the struggle group has nothing to hide, because it is not engaged in anything that is immoral.

A struggle group which structures itself according to these principles can wield great power.  That power can be aimed at the oppressors themselves as is the case when nonviolent resisters try to convert members of the oppressor group through the witness of their lives and the espousal of their right principles.  However, it must be noted that many oppressors cannot be converted.  Consider people such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, for instance.  These men cannot bring themselves to acknowledge anyone else's will or anyone else's rights, since to do so would be an intolerable affront to the identity which these men have chosen for themselves.  Yet this unrepentance and un-convertibility are not an obstacle to skillful nonviolent resistance, because such resistance is able to change an oppressive society by fundamentally altering the balance of power in the society in such a way the the oppressor's power is disintegrated.  Slobodan Milosevic and Ferdinand Marcos found this out the hard way.

Because the skillful exercise of nonviolent power can accomplish so much, it is only natural that dictators, autocrats, and leaders of other oppressive regimes would have taken a great interest in this means of struggle.  Their interest quite naturally arises from a desire to find ways to make strategic nonviolent resistance ineffective.  Their strategy of neutralization has consisted of things such as these:

• 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.
• To redefine the concept of strategic nonviolent resistance in such a way that the moral and ethical advantages of would-be resisters are erased.
• 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.  Note that Russian lawmakers have been busy passing a number of extremely restrictive laws against mass protest.  Perhaps Putin's regime is feeling a bit insecure, no?  And yet mass protest can be fairly easily neutralized or hijacked, as was demonstrated during some of the many Black Lives Matter protests this past summer.

The strategies by which the powerful seek to neutralize strategic nonviolent resistance deserve some consideration.  We will consider those strategies in the next post in this series, God willing.

From D to D, Chapter 4: Power Analysis

This post is a continuation of our commentary and "study guide" for 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.  The consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which Donald Trump, a would-be autocrat and oppressor who wanted to Make America Great Again by trashing all the nonwhite people and poor people on earth, has lost his attempt to have the United States Supreme Court overturn his election loss.  Trump's late-game strategic goal has been the goal of the Republican Party and the Global Far Right for a very long time: namely, to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else.  Their strategic method has been to disenfranchise as many people as possible in order to cement the control of the "chosen few."  And although Trump's legal challenges have largely failed, the Republican Party is actively planning measures for further disenfranchisement of the poor and the nonwhite who live in the United States.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among these "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.

We have been considering Chapter 4 of From D to D.  The title of Chapter 4 is "Dictatorships Have Weaknesses."  After a brief review of the weaknesses identified by Sharp, we discussed the fact that dictatorships have learned to adjust their tactics over the years, and that this highlights the need for democratic resisters to engage in a careful strategic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the autocratic regimes they are resisting, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic resistance group.  This strategic analysis is known by the terms "power analysis" and "power mapping" by students of community organizing.  

The basis of this analysis is the recognition that a ruling elite depends on the subjects whom it rules, and that the power which this elite exerts over its subjects is based on the extent to which the elite can make its subjects dependent on the elite.  This principle is stated in a number of Gene Sharp's writings, including his three-volume work titled, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  A variant of this insight has also been stated by Marshall Ganz, who said that systems of oppression always depend on the people they exploit.  The relative degree of dependence of each side on the other side determines the relative power each side has over the other.  As Ganz says in his community organizing curriculum materials, if you need my resources more than I need your resources, I have potential power over you.  If I need your resources more than you need my resources, you have potential power over me.  Consider the case in which a few people hold control over a large body of resources needed by the many.  This is exactly the case when a rich but small elite holds power over a large mass of poor people.  Each member of the rich elite holds much more power per capita than each member of the poor masses.  However, if the members of the poor masses organize to withhold from the rich elite the aggregate fruits of their labor on which that rich elite depends, the poor masses can control, curtail, and even shatter the power of that rich elite.

Thus the first questions of a power analysis are these (taken from "Speaking of Power - the Gettysburg Project" by Marshall Ganz):

• What change do we want?
• Who has the resources to create that change?
• What do they want?
• What resources do we have that they want or need?
• What's our theory of change?  In other words, how can we organize our resources to give us enough leverage to get what we want?  Or, how will what we are doing lead to the change we want to see?  "Theory of change" is another term for strategy, which Gene Sharp discusses in Chapters 6 through 8 of From D to D.

Additional questions related to the existing exercises of power in a pre-existing oppressive society are these:

• Who usually wins?
• Who usually gets to set agendas?
• Who usually benefits or loses from the decisions of the powerful?

The answer to these three questions reveal to the democratic resisters the three faces of power as seen in the oppressed society prior to the beginning of a liberation struggle.  The third face of power frequently forms the psychological backdrop of an oppressive society, the understanding by the oppressed of "the way things just are."  All three faces must be challenged by those who resist an oppressive system.

The relations of power and dependence can be captured visually by means of a map of actors.  An example of such a map is shown below:

Map of actors.

Graphic created by me, adapted from the work of Marshall Ganz.

Click on it to make it larger.

Such a map is a great aid in tracing dependencies and beginning to identify the most promising points at which to begin a nonviolent attack against an oppressive regime.  This is key to the creation of a viable strategy which has the greatest chance of success.

Veteran organizer Jane McAlevey elaborates on the concept of power analysis (which she calls power structure analysis) in her book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power In the New Gilded Age.  She makes the very important point that a key reason for power analysis is to map the power your side will need to generate in order to get the members of a rich elite to change goals that are very important to these elites.  To make this point, she quotes Joseph Luders' book The Civil Rights Movement and the Logic of Social Change, in which he asserted that "the most successful organizing drives in the civil rights movement...were those that carried high economic concession costs for the racist regime, that is, those by which movement actors could inflict a high degree of economic pain."  Therefore, a goal of mapping power is to determine first, how much it will cost the members of the elite to grant the demands of the resisters, and second, how much economic disruption and pain the resisters must inflict on the members of the elite in order to make the cost of that disruption greater than the cost to the elites of granting the resisters' demands.  Knowing how these two costs compare to each other before beginning a resistance campaign is key to beginning to formulate an effective strategy of disruption.

Lastly, the mapping of power and dependence serves as a starting point for the democratic resisters to strategize how to reduce their dependence on the ruling elite as much as possible.  This reduction of dependence further weakens the power the elite has over the oppressed society.

The next post in this series will begin to delve into Chapter 5 of From D to D.  Feel free to read ahead.  And feel free to read some of the books I mentioned in this post.  Also, here's a link to another community organizing study guide based on the teaching of Marshall Ganz.  And last, but not least, here's some homework: Study the Cochabamba Water War which took place in Bolivia in 1999 and 2000.  Here and here are sources which describe the conflict.  (Feel free to find other sources as well.)  See if you can identify a map of actors and their interests, resources, and dependencies.  How did the poor Bolivian peasants identify the Achilles' heel of their opponents?  How did they reduce their dependence on their opponents?

From D to D, Chapter 4: Dictatorships Have Weaknesses

This post continues our discussion of how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance as a key component of their struggle to liberate themselves from their oppressors.  As a guide to our discussion, we are continuing our journey through Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Both the book and our discussion of it continue to be relevant in these days for many people who live under exploitative, authoritarian regimes throughout the world.  This relevance also applies to the historically marginalized communities of color in the United States, even though Joe Biden has won the 2020 Presidential election.  For the most powerful members of the Democratic Party will want to define a "centrist" agenda for the United States for the next four years, and some of the most powerful members of both parties will try to legitimize the policies of the recently defeated Donald Trump as the new "center" around which that "centrist" agenda must be built.  However, under that "center", the following injustices will remain:

• A border wall that symbolizes continued U.S. hostility to dark-skinned, non-European immigrants 
• A network of over 200 immigrant detention centers holding over 500,000 people, including children
• A prison-industrial complex that feeds on communities of color starting with children in preschool 
• A cancerous growth in "law enforcement" budgets in cities throughout the United States - even though crime rates have dropped.  The bulk of this "law enforcement" goes toward hiring officers to terrorize minority neighborhoods.  This money comes at the expense of taxpayer-funded programs that could improve the quality of life of the poorest residents of these cities.  For instance, in Long Beach, California, 43 percent of the city budget is spent on police.
• The continued extreme and growing inequality in wealth and access to life resources between the richest U.S. citizens and the rest of us.

I would not count on the goodness of the most powerful people in the United States to reverse these evils.  Rather, that reversal will come only when the people most affected by these evils create a strong, effective resistance that imposes serious costs on the evildoers.

On, then, to today's discussion.  Chapter 4 acknowledges the sense of powerlessness that even activized people feel when they begin to study whether they can actually challenge structures of oppression and the power-holders who control those structures.  As Gene Sharp says, "Dictatorships often appear invulnerable.  [The structures of power] are controlled by a powerful few...In comparison, democratic opposition forces often appear extremely weak, ineffective, and powerless.  That perception of invulnerability against powerlessness makes effective opposition unlikely."

But Sharp goes on to say, "That is not the whole story, however."  And he begins to make his case that even dictatorships have weaknesses that make them vulnerable to skillful application of pressure by resisters.  The key to that skillful application consists of correctly identifying those weaknesses.  As Sharp says, "[Dictatorships], too, can be conquered, but most quickly and with least cost if their weaknesses can be identified and the attack concentrated on them."

WEAKNESSES OF DICTATORSHIPS

In Chapter 4 of From D to D, there is a list of potential weaknesses common to all dictatorships.  Note that I used the word "potential" as an adjective to describe these weaknesses, for not every dictatorship will have these weaknesses to the same degree.  As an example of a regime in which some of these weaknesses had a greater effect, we can look at the failure of the regime of Donald Trump.  In his case, his failures in 2020 were caused in large part by Weakness #1 ("The cooperation of a multitude of people, groups, and institutions needed to operate the system may be restricted or withdrawn") and Weakness #7 ("If a strong ideology is present that influences one's view of reality, firm adherence to it may cause inattention to actual conditions and needs").  Weakness #1 contributed to his inability to turn public outrage over police murders of unarmed African-Americans into a polling boost by portraying himself as a "law and order" president.  The suburbs to which he was appealing had disappeared between the time of Richard Nixon and the present, so that Trump's "Omar Wasow re-election strategy" failed.  This failure was amplified by Weakness #7, which rendered Trump incapable of responding in a coherent and effective manner to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Weakness #7 also rendered Trump incapable of realizing that most Americans cared far more about the threat of the pandemic than they cared about Trump's "law-and-order" talk.

Trump turned out to be a relatively easy autocrat to depose - at least, if the results of the 2020 election are respected and the rule of law is followed in this country.  (Biden's lead over Trump has grown to over 7 million votes, by the way.)  This was due to the fact that Trump was so blatant an oppressor, and that he made his oppressive intentions so clear throughout most of his presidency.  In fact, if I had to organize a resistance movement against an autocrat or would-be autocrat, I don't think I could ask for a much easier opponent than Trump - simply because Trump was such a polarizing figure.  Yet a troubling thing happened during the final few weeks of the 2020 campaign: Trump was able to successfully reach out to certain members of groups of people whom he had initially targeted for oppression.  Thus he gained a surprising number of Latino votes even though the beginning of his term was marked by threats of mass deportations (threats which he repeated in 2019 and 2020) and a push to build a border wall, and even though he forcibly separated Latino migrant children from their parents and threw them into cages.  He was also able to pick up a number of African-American votes even after threatening to arrest "millions" of us and even after Republican policies designed to disenfranchise and disempower the African-American community.  And he was able to pick up votes from Arab-Americans and Muslims even after his attempt in 2017 to impose a Muslim travel ban.  So perhaps I should say that Trump as he was before the final few months of the 2020 campaign would have been an easy figure to depose.  Many have called Trump stupid, but I'd like to suggest that toward the end, he had begun to travel the path of the dictator's learning curve.  So let's talk about something that Gene Sharp perhaps did not consider in Chapter 4 of his book (although he does address it somewhat in Chapter 7).

STRENGTHS OF DICTATORSHIPS

Dictatorships are weakest, ironically enough, when they are at their most hardline, their most oppressive, and their most polarizing.  For it is then that it easiest for democratic resisters to make an ideological case against the dictator to their fellow citizens, because it is then that the dictatorships are likely to be the most brittle, because they have made themselves the most hateful to their subjects.  The problem is that most successful authoritarians are not nearly so obvious anymore.  As Will Dobson says in The Dictator's Learning Curve, "We like to believe that authoritarian regimes are dinosaurs - clumsy, stupid, lumbering behemoths, reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its final days or some insecure South American banana republic."  However, the truth is that "today's dictators understand that in a globalized world the more brutal forms of intimidation...are best replaced with more subtle forms of coercion...Today's dictators pepper their speeches with references to liberty, justice, and the rule of law...[regularly invoking] democracy and claim to be the country's elected leaders.  And modern authoritarians understand the importance of appearances."  (See this, for instance.)  Skillful autocrats have the following strengths:

• They are able to skillfully deploy soft power to keep their people compliant.  Sometimes this comes through making an implicit or explicit bargain with certain sectors of the population.  Sometimes the bargain is made between the dictator and the entire population.  Often the bargain can be stated thus: "You let me bring a certain measure of material prosperity to you, and in exchange, you let me be the boss.  Don't question how I get things done - or else!"
• They are able to skillfully centralize power in ways that don't raise eyebrows.  What Trump tried to do clumsily, autocrats like Putin have done skillfully - and these autocrats have justified their centralization by pointing to the same centralizing tendencies at work in so-called democracies which have allowed radical concentrations of wealth in the hands of a rich few.  (However, that centralization of power eventually becomes a weakness of the autocratic regime.)
• They are able to skillfully divide in order to rule.  Often, they are able to do so by means of a well-developed libertarian ideology of selfishness which disconnects people from each other and causes them to deny their mutual duty to one another in order to try to get rich.
• They are able to skillfully take advantage of the sins and weaknesses of their political opponents in order to divide them.  Thus Trump has managed to take advantage of the conservative social values of many members of the groups of people he has sought to marginalize, in order to dissuade these people from supporting his opponents.  He succeeded because many leaders of the so-called American "Left" no longer speak in any meaningful way for working-class people of color - especially when those people of color hold conservative religious or cultural values (like I do).  Rather, the Democratic Party has begun to take communities of color for granted, assuming that we will always be content to be the foot soldiers of an agenda that does not reflect our concerns or our struggle.  A case in point is the way in which the largely White leaders of the Left have defined the present Civil Rights struggle as a struggle for "diversity"*.  But they have defined "diversity" in a way which elevates so-called sexual "diversity" to the most prominent place in the "diversity" agenda, even while African-American kids continue to be deprived of a quality education and get locked up by punitive and harsh public schools, while African-American families continue to suffer appalling disparities in wealth, and while African-Americans who get sick continue to be killed by a hostile medical system.  To the leaders of the gay rights movement, I have a straight-up request: get off my back.  Get off the backs of my people.  We are not better together.  Stop trying to hijack the struggle of communities of color in order to form a so-called "rainbow coalition" whose actual agenda has nothing to do with the priorities of communities of color.  Your efforts hinder us from liberating ourselves.  You know this.  And for those "corporate Democrats" who assume that communities of color have no viable choice except to vote Democrat, I have the same request: get lost.  Rahm Emmanuel has NO place in any position of government. 

THE NEED FOR POWER ANALYSIS

Many of the strengths of autocrats which I have just described exist because of the often self-inflicted weaknesses of the democratic opposition.  Those weaknesses can be moral as in the selfish embrace of libertarian ideology and the desire to get rich which separates brothers and sisters in struggle from each other.  Other examples of moral weakness include a desire for the "American Dream" middle class lifestyle that is so overpowering that it silences people when they should speak truth to oppressive power.  And there is the weakness that comes from making alliances with people with whom one should not be allied.

Therefore, the people most affected by oppression must form associations with each other in order to build their collective power for the purpose of liberation.  The organizations which claim to be on behalf of the people most affected must be built and led by the people most affected.  And in their initial building of their own internal power as well as in their preparation to take on the power of their oppressors, they will need to engage in an analysis of the relative power of each side, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each side.  This analysis, called power analysis by community organizers, is a key prerequisite for building an effective strategy of struggle.  For even though oppressors have gotten smarter and are therefore not as easy to remove, it is still possible to remove them.  Gene Sharp's closing words of Chapter 4 are still true: "Types of struggle that target the dictatorship's identifiable weaknesses have greater chance of success than those that seek to fight the dictatorship where it is clearly strongest."  Therefore, power analysis will be the subject of my next post in this series, God willing.

*Note: Over the last several years, "diversity" has been subject to ever-greater hijackings, expanding to corporate and government-backed "affinity groups" for the "neurodiverse" and author Susan Cain advocating for a place for "introverts" at the "diversity" table.  And in Oregon, people who would normally be regarded as white have successfully gotten themselves defined as "people of color" by a government agency for the sake of receiving benefits!  I am not saying that such groups should be persecuted, but rather, that including such groups in discussions about "diversity" leaves unanswered the injuries of those most affected by historical oppression in the United States.

Another note: one characteristic of "soft" authoritarian states is the presence of an opposition party that does not actually represent the grievances of the people most affected by the oppression of the authoritarian government.  This has been true not only in the United States, but in countries such as the United Kingdom.  For more on this, click here.  This is why effective nonviolent civil resistance works most often outside of established political channels and processes.