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.

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: Where Are The Carpenters?

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 recent posts, 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 key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been 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 parallel 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.  This was, for instance, a key element of the strategy of swaraj employed by Mohandas Gandhi in the struggle to liberate India from the British empire.

As I mentioned in the most recent post in this series, this building of a righteous parallel society with parallel institutions that meet the needs of the oppressed was conspicuously absent from the so-called "resistance" against the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020.  And it seems to have been painfully absent from the resistance by the African-American community to renewed racist oppression over the last decade.  This absence has not escaped the notice of honest and trustworthy scholars of nonviolent civil resistance.  For instance, Erica Chenoweth commented repeatedly in YouTube interviews from 2018 onward that the "resistance" against Trump seemed to be too one-dimensional, too much of a one-trick pony whose participants spent too much time shouting loudly in the streets against the world they saw coming into being and too little time articulating - in word and action - the vision of the world they actually wanted to see.  The articulation of this vision - a "vision of tomorrow" as described by Srdja Popovic - is much easier for bystanders to see and to embrace when it is embodied in deep, strong organizing of righteous parallel institutions for meeting social needs.  (See "Protests in Perspective: Civil Disobedience & Activism Today, with Erica Chenoweth & Deva Woodly", and "Social Movements in the Age of Fake News with Erica Chenoweth."  Note especially that second citation.  In it, Chenoweth discusses the pivotal role played those who built parallel institutions in the Polish struggle against the Russian-backed Jaruselski regime.)  As I have also mentioned repeatedly in this series, the combination of over-reliance on hasty mass mobilization and hastily thrown-together mass protest, combined with the lack of deep, long-term organizing, has allowed the holders of concentrated wealth and economic and political power to frequently inject violent agents provocateurs into many of the mass protests and mobilizations that have taken place in the U.S. over the last five years.

It may well therefore be asked why this parallel institution-building, this parallel society-building, has been so frequently neglected over the last decade or so by those who call themselves activists and who consider themselves to be leaders of struggles for liberation.  The answer lies in part in the endemic laziness of us humans who tend to "demand" change rather than creating that change ourselves - both as individuals and as self-conscious, self-organized collectives.  (Organizing is hard work, lemme tell ya!  I speak from experience.)  But I would argue that part of the answer lies in the bad advice many of us have received in answer to our questions about how to create liberating change.  

Some of that bad advice was discussed in my post titled, "The Poverty of Pivenism."  In particular, I took aim at the teachings and intellectual legacy of Frances Fox Piven and highlighted the spectacular failures of many of the mobilizations of recent years which embodied a Pivenist strategy.  I also took aim at a book by Mark Engler and Paul Engler titled, This Is An Uprising, a book which claims to teach the principles of successful strategic nonviolent resistance.  The Englers' praise of Pivenism combined with their disdain for long-term deep organizing leads me to believe that they are, at best, rank amateurs.  And yet not all bad advice is given by the ignorant rank amateur.  Some bad advice is given by those who deliberately seek to mislead.

I am thinking just now of June of 2020, in which there were massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd, and in which agents provocateurs had already begun to make sizable inroads into these protests for the purpose of looting and vandalism.  During that month an article was published in a weekly magazine called the Nation, and the title of the article was "In Defense of Destroying Property."  The article was written by R. H. Lossin, a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes.    (At the beginning of this year, she also taught a course with an even more provocative title, namely, "Sabotage: Violence, Theory, and Protest.")  Her White privilege insulates her almost completely from the consequences of saying such things, as well as the consequences that people of color would surely have suffered for following her advice last year.  Yet from her position of privileged safety she was advocating that we who belong to communities of the oppressed should engage in violence.  And yes, my definition of violence includes sabotage and property destruction, for these activities have the same effect of weakening movements for liberation that would occur if movement activists physically attacked their opponents.

But I am also thinking of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), and the difference between my first discovery of this group and my attitude at the final parting of our ways.  I go back now to the horrible and frightening days of the close of 2016, when many Americans discovered that our democracy had been broken and that we were getting a genocidal tyrant as the 45th President.  The discovery of the fact that Trump would be our next President combined with my anger and my commitment to Christian ethics moved me to seriously research what strategic nonviolent resistance had to offer.  So I discovered Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, and I eagerly read How Nonviolent Struggle Works.  I watched a ton of YouTube videos which featured Gene Sharp.  I downloaded the audio of From Dictatorship to Democracy and listened to it over and over again while washing dishes, mowing the lawn, and doing whatever other mindless work was conducive to listening to audiobooks.  I discovered Jamila Raqib and her special emphasis on parallel institution-building and the constructive program as part of a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

And I discovered the ICNC and the many YouTube videos produced by them.  These videos, produced between 2010 and 2016, were a source of fascinating information, deep insight, and hope.  I am thinking especially of the videos from the yearly Fletcher Summer Institutes which were hosted by the ICNC, particularly the videos from the 2013 Fletcher Summer Institute.  That summer seminar featured seasoned veteran activists and leaders of liberation struggles from South Africa to Bolivia and beyond.  In watching those videos I got to (virtually) know such people as Oscar Olivera of Bolivia, who led the successful struggle of the citizens of Cochabamba against the Bechtel corporation in the Cochabamba water war.  And Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, who played an integral role in the initial victorious anti-apartheid struggle there.  And the Reverend James Lawson, who played an integral role in some of the more coercive nonviolent boycotts which ended de facto segregation in the American South.  And Shaazka Beyerle, who has done extensive research into the use of civil resistance against state corruption.

Unfortunately, the ICNC stopped hosting its Fletcher Summer Institutes from 2017 onward.  (A rather interesting coincidence, given the start of the Trump presidency in 2017, no?)  But I was pleasantly surprised (or so I thought) when in 2018, I read on their website that they were hosting a free online course on civil resistance during the fall of that year.  I eagerly signed up, and was glad to be accepted.  What I thought I was getting into (even though at this time I had never heard of Zoom and did not know the role that videoconferencing would play in online instruction especially in the present moment) was an engaging, instructive, live series of videoconferences with renowned experts and practitioners.  In other words, I thought I had signed up for a chance to converse with and ask questions of people such as James Lawson, Mary Elizabeth King, Hardy Merriman, Jack DuVall, Peter Ackerman, Erica Chenoweth, Maciej Bartkowski, Shaazka Beyerle, and others who had become something of a constellation of guiding lights to me from 2017 onward.

Instead, I merely got to participate in a series of online forums which were moderated by people I had never heard of, so-called "activists" and academics who, it seems, had never led a successful movement in their lives.  One of the main moderators was a guy named Steve Chase, and another was a guy named Daniel Dixon.  Mr. Dixon is the gentleman I mentioned in an earlier post who suggested that sometimes violent and nonviolent movements can combine in ways which increase the synergistic effects of both.  As I mentioned in that post, all the available research strongly suggests otherwise!  When I mentioned that I disagreed, and that I wanted to learn how parallel institution-building works to strengthen a nonviolent movement, both Dixon and others kept mentioning the Zapatistas as an example of a struggle group which combined violence with parallel institution-building, and they suggested that I had much to learn from the Zapatistas.  They were right.  I learned that the Zapatistas lost to the Mexican army and had chosen to renounce violence.  End of discussion.

But the ICNC staffers kept throwing up the suggestion that there was some sort of room for violent actors in a successful strategic nonviolent liberation struggle.  An academic named Veronique Dudouet kept citing an article by some guy named Ben Case which suggested that "'...ignoring civilian violence or assuming that it is always and necessarily harmful to movements limits the analytical reach of civil resistance research'. He then uses the case of the Egyptian revolution to prove that sometimes the use of limited 'protestor violence' might prove beneficial to civil resistance..."  Not only this, but the focus of much of the discussion on these online forums was solely on protest as a resistance tactic.  (This was not surprising, since many of the forum participants who were Americans identified themselves with "Antifa.")  I expressed frustration at this, noting that relying solely on protests was leading to incidents of violence occurring every time people came together, and asking why this online "course" wasn't exploring some of the other 197 of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Steve Chase responded by suggesting that other tactics were not as "disruptive" as mass protest.  (I guess he never heard of the Montgomery bus boycott!)  And he held up himself as a good example of movement organizing in that he organized an anti-fascist rally which included some organizations that use violent protest tactics, but which were persuaded by him to not engage in violence during his rally.  As I wrote to him later, that move of his was like playing with matches in a paper house, since if the government had instituted a crackdown on protest groups, they could have arrested him because of his association with the violent group he worked with.

To make a long story short, I dropped out of this online "course" after about six weeks or so.  They had nothing to offer.  And later, in 2020, when I saw that ICNC staffers were teaching that there were situations in which property destruction could actually help a civil resistance movement, I was completely turned off to them (though not surprised).  (See also, "Civil Resistance Tactics In The 21st Century", pages 66-67.)  In short, if the ICNC staffers are genuine and sincere, they have to me become like a minor league baseball team run by toddlers.  Where are the heavy hitters of successful movement building whose faces I saw in those Fletcher Summer Institute videos?  Why is the advice of the ICNC so lame now?  Why does much of their most recent advice contradict the research, scholarship and guidance of successful practitioners of nonviolent liberation struggles over the years - including the advice which the ICNC used to give back when I regarded them with respect?

But perhaps the ICNC contains people who are not sincere.  Erica Chenoweth hugely popularized the application of scholarship to the study of civil resistance.  I still have great respect for her because her advice is most definitely not lame.  But in her wake, I am afraid that there are "scholars" who have arisen to study civil resistance not for the sake of helping the oppressed to liberate themselves, but rather to derail the liberation of the oppressed by misleading them.  In this, they are like many people nowadays who go to school in order to obtain advanced degrees in psychology and behavioral sciences - not to help those who are hurting, but to land lucrative jobs with tobacco companies, the Republican Party and other outfits whose success depends on misleading people and turning them into addicts.  Meanwhile, where are the builders who will construct a righteous parallel society in today's oppressive world?

The History of the Suffragettes - Further Proof Of What the ICNC Has Lost

The International Center On Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has recently tried to advise those protesting the brutal racism against people of color in the United States, and specifically those protesting the murders of unarmed African-Americans.  As I have written previously, I used to be a supporter of the ICNC and greatly enjoyed reading its offerings, as I thought that the ICNC presented an excellent education in strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of neutralizing an oppressor's power.

But during the last several months I became concerned by the appearance of writers and "teachers" attached to the ICNC who suggested that low-level violence (including property destruction!) could help a nonviolent movement succeed faster with better outcomes than strictly nonviolent resistance.  Because of my previous readings on the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance and my understanding that autocrats and oppressors frequently try to inject violence into a nonviolent movement in order to undermine it, I could only conclude that the ICNC had been infiltrated by a person or persons working for Trump, Putin, or the regimes they represent.  One example of my concern lies in the article written by Professor Tom Hastings in which he lays out his opinion of "when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign," as well as his own story of how he was arrested three times for destroying military property.  From his article it is obvious that Mr. Hastings believes that there are times when property destruction is both justified and helpful to a movement.

The only thing is, Mr. Hastings is dead wrong.  And the experience of the suffragette movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Britain and the United States proves it.  According to a 2015 analysis by George Lakey, the British suffragette movement achieved much less than the American movement, and it did so even though it started earlier and many more women were involved.  Why?  Because the American women who agitated for the right of women to vote did so using entirely nonviolent acts, whereas in Britain (oh, such a staid and proper society!), women resorted to arson, blowing up post offices, and smashing windows.  That's why, by 1920, while waging a nonviolent campaign that ran all the way through World War 1, the American suffragettes won equal access to the ballot box, while in Britain (where the women were forced to suspend their campaign during the war), by 1918 only women who were over 30 and owned property were granted the right to vote, even though they had begun their campaign five years before the American suffragettes.  It wasn't until 1928 that British women gained fully equal access to the ballot box - eight years after this victory was won in the United States.  Lakey asks what slowed the British women down, and the answer is that they undermined themselves and their movement by engaging in property destruction.

Mr. Hastings should maybe read the article by George Lakey.  Or he might read the essay by Jack DuVall (formerly of the ICNC) which criticized the property destruction instigated by some supposed "anti-fascists" in the early days of the Trump administration.  That violence played directly into the hands of Trump.

Thankfully, the protesters now facing down Federal troops in Portland do not seem to be listening to Tom Hastings.

(God bless the Wall of Moms!  Now that shows innovation in tactics of protest!  Compare what they are doing with what the Mothers of the Disappeared did to the Argentine military regime before it fell.  They also did it to the Pinochet regime in Chile. And note: the Wall of Moms is spreading to other cities.  How can Chump - er, I mean, Trump - call these women thugs?!)

As long as these protesters continue to remain nonviolent in the face of Federal violence perpetrated against them, they will continue to show the world that the real thug and violent actor is the one and only Donald J. Trump.

Shifting Pillars Of Support, Or, Why We Must Stop Listening to the ICNC

In my post, "Why Are These Weapons Strong?", I described the overall goals, strategy and methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Once again, I'll state the overall definition of nonviolent resistance as I see it:

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.

The method of choice of the Black Lives Matter movement is the use of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to end the brutal racism of the dominant American culture against people of color.  And the proper application of strategic nonviolent resistance against oppressors works by removing the pillars of support which uphold those oppressors.  I described these pillars of support in last week's post.

Now those who have studied strategic nonviolent resistance know that it is such an effective method when properly applied that oppressors frequently try to inject violence into an initially nonviolent resistance struggle so that they can more easily crush it.  We saw this in the United States under Trump from 2017 to 2019 with the staged clashes between the Antifa and various right-wing groups.  I believe we are seeing it again with the rise of people who engage in acts of destruction against monuments commemorating heroes of White American history.  Regardless of how you may feel about these heroes (and believe me, I don't regard these people as my heroes), here's the go to jail truth about property destruction: it is perceived by many people as an act of violence.  Violence polarizes people and causes the agents of the oppressor to tighten their loyalty to the oppressor.  It also plays right into the hands of oppressors who claim that they must oppress in order to maintain "law and order" and to protect society from "chaos."  Even property destruction therefore decreases the ability of the liberation struggle to weaken the oppressor's pillars of support.  Violence - including property destruction - also diminishes mass participation in a movement.

So why are some of those who claim to stand on behalf of Black lives engaging in attacking monuments?  And why, after several weeks of protests, have those who seek to resist oppression not broadened their tactics of nonviolent action beyond protest?  If you're reading this blog and you are Black or Brown, please read Gene Sharp's books on nonviolent resistance!  Or please start studying the CANVAS core curriculum!  If you're White and you claim to want to support Black and Brown people in their struggle against White racists, please read these books also!  And please stop trying to hijack our struggle or to turn our struggle into an expression of your own private grievances!  Most of the vandals who have acted during the protests of the last several weeks have been White.

One other thing.  While I have in the past enjoyed reading the literature of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, I think it's time to reject them for the present, as I wrote in a post in May of this year.  In that post, I said that those who want to incite violence have managed to infiltrate even some organizations whose ostensible mission is to teach strategic nonviolent resistance.  I also challenged the ICNC to take out some of its own trash.  But the ICNC has recently posted on the front page of its website a link to an article written by professor Tom Hastings at Portland State University which argues that there are times when property destruction (that is, protesters destroying property that doesn't belong to them) is helpful to a nonviolent campaign.  Wrong, Professor Hastings!  Can Hastings name a single instance in which destruction of someone else's property enabled nonviolent resisters to weaken an oppressor's pillars of support?  I don't think so!  If protesters destroy other people's property (even statues!), it shows their lack of competence in weakening the oppressor's pillars of support.  Think of the many cases in which BLM activists were successful in getting oppressive state governments to remove their own monuments commemorating racist heroes.  Now that's skill.  As Isaac Asimov once said, violence is truly the last refuge of the incompetent - unless the violent actors happen to be agents provocateurs.

Donald Trump badly needs a "rally round the flag moment" just now.  We need to make sure that we don't give him one.