This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.) Those who have read previous posts on this subject know that the most recent posts discussed Chapters 6 and 7 of the book. Those chapters deal with the important subject of the strategy of a nonviolent liberation struggle. Strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful. This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important. If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power. If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.
- A failure by the Black community to appropriately define our collective identity and the strategy of our struggle. For at least four decades, we have been unconsciously following a rather limited "strategy" of the sort first articulated by Martin Luther King, namely, the strategy of trying to build a supposedly colorblind society in which our individual or historical identities are all dissolved in a "melting pot" to produce a so-called all-American alloy. Thus we have tried to build "beloved communities" with people who ought not to be trusted because they have no good intentions, people who refuse to give up their dreams of total domination. It is way past time for us to come together as Black people (NOT as part of some "rainbow coalition" alloy!) to decide who we are as a people and how we will struggle as a people. In other words, it is way past time for us to self-consciously organize ourselves. When white people who supposedly stand for "diversity" try to bring us as individuals into their "coalition", we need to say, "Not so fast. We will decide as a group what we choose to support. We will NOT allow ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda! Maybe we're not better together!" Of course, to say such things might provoke the sort of reaction from certain white supposed "allies" that would show their true colors.
- A failure by the Black community to understand the methods by which unarmed people shift the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless. In short, this is a failure to understand the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, which has also become known as people power. We have for too long allowed ourselves stupidly to believe that strategic nonviolent resistance consists of trying to love your enemy or to "rise above" the oppression dealt to you by your enemy (that is, to smile when your enemy serves you a sandwich made of excrement!), or to show how "spiritual" you are in the face of oppression. Therefore, too many of us have understandably written off strategic nonviolent resistance. It's time for some of us to start reading some books.
- This ignorance played out in 2020 in a failure to understand the impact of violence on a protest movement. When violence began to erupt during the protests, I saw it as a clear indication of a lack of organization on our part, as well as a lack of training. I saw it moreover as a clear sign of tactical and strategic misunderstanding and failure. But in conversations I had with BLM organizers, both during the 2020 CANVAS Summer Academy and in 2021 with BLM organizers who were part of the Leading Change Network, whenever I pointed out these failures, the BLM organizers got really defensive. Their response to my criticism was, "We were not the violent ones! And you can't believe everything the media tells you! Most of the protests were peaceful!" In making such criticisms, they missed the point altogether. That point being this: that if you engage in mass protests, and violent things happen during your protests, your protest movement will suffer, no matter who started the violence. Erica Chenoweth explains this beautifully as follows: When a mass protest is peaceful, everyone who is an ally or potential ally is likely to show up. This includes young families with small children and elderly grandmas with nothing better to do. In such circumstances, it is very hard for the government to justify using violence to shut down your protest. But as soon as the government is able to provoke or inject violence into the protests, the vulnerable - young families with small children and elderly grandmas - start to disappear until you are left only with athletic young men facing heavily armed cops. In those circumstances it becomes very easy for the government to justify the use of violent oppression to shut down the protest!
- Having said that, I wonder why the BLM organizers did not shift from tactics of concentration to tactics of dispersion as soon as the violence began to appear! (Pardon me - I shouldn't wonder. It's because these fools did not read any books!) For instance, why didn't one or more leaders immediately issue a statement saying, "We see that evil actors have shown up to inject violence and vandalism into our protests. Therefore, we are switching to protest tactics that don't involve large groups of people coming together in the streets. These new tactics will be legal, and will not be able to be hijacked by those who want to cause violence or to paint us as criminals." It shows a fatal lack of brains that not one of these leaders took such a step. I remember reading the news reports of protest after protest in which a small group of agents provocateurs broke away from a protest march to go off and vandalize while the police "declared a riot", and I was shouting in my living room, "Please, wake up and shift tactics!" (It felt to me very much like my experience as a kid watching Saturday Night wrestling and screaming at the TV whenever the "hero" made an obvious mistake. Lot of good that did.) I agree with BLM that there should have been protests. Yet there are both smart and stupid tactics of protest, and BLM failed to understand the difference. (Oh, look! It's happening again.)
- A failure to see the limitations of mass protest. Protest is not a viable single strategy of liberation. At best, it's a single tactic. A tactic is not a strategy. And as we have considered strategy in the context of strategic nonviolent resistance, we have learned that the best strategy is a strategy which your opponent is not ready to meet, and for which he has no defenses. Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D have drawn heavily from the writings of a British man named Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, who in the aftermath of World War 1 advocated heavily that armies should adopt a strategy of indirect approach as the best means of meeting one's enemy in a place where he is not prepared to meet you. I suggest that among the tactics of nonviolent action, mass street protest is now the tactic which most governments are most prepared to meet, and that these governments can short-circuit mass protest most effectively simply by injecting violence into the protests. Once they do that, they can justify raising the cost which ordinary people must pay to participate in protest by using tactics of violent police repression of protest. Mass protest is therefore not an example of the strategy of indirect approach. And mass protest carries certain unavoidable costs even when the protestors do not have to face police repression. I think of some of the BLM websites I saw last year in which organizers vowed to protest every day until their demands were met. I guess they never heard of "protest fatigue"! Moreover, as pointed out by Jamila Raqib, protest by itself does not alter the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.
In their insistence on the same tactic of mass protest day after day, the BLM protest organizers reminded me very much of a Briton who never considered the strategy of indirect approach, namely Sir Douglas Haig. I hope the man has no partisans, fans, or groupies who are still alive - otherwise, they might come to the USA to hunt me down and slash my tires - er, I mean, "tyres" - or threaten to give me "a bunch of fives." But Haig is a man worthy of much criticism. I think of his insistence on costly daily frontal assaults for three months during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and how the Germans played rope-a-dope with him there. I fear that here in the USA, should another outrage against African-Americans be perpetrated, and should that outrage spark mass protest, our enemies may play rope-a-dope again with us as they did in 2020.