From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The "Sin" Of Not Needing You

This is another short post.  I wrote in my last post that I need to read a book in order to write a critique of it, and that that critique might become a post on this blog, as part of my continuing series of posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, this week I have been busy fixing things at my house.  And I must say that fixing things feels really good - especially when those things have been either broken or messy for years.  The fixing is by no means done yet...

But I haven't stopped thinking about the depiction of the process of liberation-in-action described in Chapters 8 and 9 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Those who have read my last few posts on his book know that I have been particularly focused on how the building of parallel institutions and a parallel society by and for communities of the oppressed is a necessary part of a successful liberation struggle by the oppressed.  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  And in Chapter 9, he writes, "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..."  (Emphasis added.)

Groups and communities of historically oppressed people who choose to build their own internal power and self-sufficiency will therefore go a long way toward achieving their liberation from a dominant oppressive society.  However, it is also true that groups and communities of historically oppressed people have often been "trained" to look to one or more of the dominant societies of the Global North for their salvation instead of learning to rely on themselves.  This has become the basis of the "soft power" sought by some of those dominant societies in their bid to establish global rule for themselves, for the leaders of some of these dominant societies have gladly dressed themselves up as "saviors" and "benefactors" ready to supply guns and other arms, military training, investment money, trucks and heavy machinery, sketchy Russian vaccines, etc, to the poor dark-skinned unwashed masses who seemingly "can't save ourselves."  I am thinking of one Global North nation in particular whose leadership looks at the entire earth as if it were already the special possession of this nation, a world which this nation's leaders have already carved up in their minds into zones with such names as "the near abroad" and "the far abroad" and on which they have drawn the "red lines" of their national narcissism.

But what if the oppressed societies (or even those societies which are categorized as "developing countries") choose to begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if, moreover, oppressed groups within the societies dominated by the Global North begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if these structures begin to provide for the needs of the people of these societies in a way that is better and stronger than anything the dominant cultures can offer?  I am thinking right now of the investment of Nigeria in the mathematics education of its population, as seen in such enterprises as the Cowbellpedia math competition.  One result of this investment: this year, 2021, saw a Nigerian teen named Faith Odunsi win first place in an international mathematics competition which featured students from many nations of the Global North. 

When communities of the oppressed build their own structures of self-reliance, they achieve the following results:

• They strengthen their own self-confidence and motivation as they begin to see the successes they are able to achieve with their own hands.
• They destroy the basis for the "soft power" sought by the dominant societies of the Global North.
• They manage to cross a few "red lines" as they prove that they do not need their wanna-be-Great-Power "saviors" from the dominant culture.  This causes those supposed "saviors" to choke a little.  Now that's fun!

P.S. I mentioned vaccines in this post.  The original version of the post read "worthless vaccines," but I have altered that phrase in order to make my meaning crystal-clear.  I most definitely believe in vaccination as long as the vaccines offered have undergone a rigorous three-stage series of clinical trials to prove both their safety and efficacy.  The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have all undergone this process, which is why I chose to receive the Pfizer vaccine in March of this year.  I have received both doses of the two-dose regimen.  I also appreciate the ongoing efforts to monitor the efficacy of these vaccines over time, among various populations, and in their response to the COVID-19 variants which have arisen during the last year.  The efforts to be honest and transparent - even when the news is not always good - have gone a long way in establishing the credibility of these vaccines.  The same cannot be said of the Russian Sputnik "vaccine", whose developers have been neither honest nor transparent.  Even the article published by Russian spokespersons in the British medical journal Lancet has relied on sketchy and unverifiable data.  Moreover, the publishing of that article has revealed the emergence of problems in the Lancet's peer-review process.  Yet the government of Vladimir Putin has embarked on a massive campaign of trying to make its Sputnik "vaccine" look really, really good by tearing down the vaccines developed in the West.  Which is to me yet another proof that Putin really is a thieving little man in a bunker, a Potemkin Village head-fake of a man.  Not even a majority of his own people believe in his "vaccine."  And now, rant off - secure from red alert.  Have a good night.

Parallel Institution-Building As The Answer To The Anti-Vaxx/Anti-Mask Crowd

I've been thinking over the last few days about the ongoing menace posed to American public health by the anti-vaxx/anti-mask arm of the American right wing.  This has been provoked by my encounter with staff at a couple of chain stores who informed me that their corporate offices have instructed store staff not to enforce state-imposed mask mandates.  Other things of notice have been the stories - both in the news and from other bloggers - of anti-vaxx/anti-mask agitators infiltrating churches and disrupting the opening of public schools.  This is noteworthy because the Delta variant of COVID-19 is especially damaging to young people.

So what if you actually believe in science and would like to be guided by evidence-based scientific recommendations for keeping safe from the pandemic?  What if, moreover, you are bloody sick and tired of the tantrums of the American right wing?  I have the following suggestions.

First, understand the motivation by that right-wing tantrum-throwing.  The tantrum is motivated by the frustrated desire for white supremacy and total domination.  This desire was frustrated on account of the 2020 Presidential election, which the chosen emblem and embodiment of supremacy lost by over six million votes.  Therefore, the deluded followers of this orange-haired emblem are busy throwing the most destructive tantrum they can legally (or semi-legally) get away with.  The Capitol insurrection went over the line, so they are playing it safe by merely trying to hold the health of the rest of us hostage.

Second, understand that these people are able to pose a medical threat only because we and they share many of the same physical spaces as part of our daily routine.  If you choose, you can join with like-minded citizens to change that fact.

Third, start changing that fact!  Are you concerned that the anti-vaxx/anti-mask crowd will threaten the health of your kids at school?  Then find like-minded parents and pull your kids out of school - at least for a while, and maybe permanently.  You can start homeschooling clubs.  In fact, in all 50 states, parents have a legal right to homeschool their kids.  Are you worried about going to the store?  Then organize a buyers' co-op and only invite people whom you can trust, who are willing to show proof of vaccination and are willing to wear a mask at all times when they are around you.  In other words, reduce the points of contact between you and the right-wing nutcases as much as possible.  

I must warn you, though, that if you do this, it will involve some elbow grease and some sweat equity on your part.  I must also warn you that if you do this, you can expect the agents of the American right to try to stop you - especially if you live in a red state.  For as Marshall Ganz has said, systems of oppression always depend on those whom they exploit.  But if you're not afraid of a fight (a fight which you fight by means of strategic nonviolent resistance!), then you can cause a major disruption and have a blast in the process.  For if enough people do this, we can stop this anti-vaxx/anti-mask foolishness dead in its tracks.  Because those who allow or promote anti-vaxx/anti-mask nonsense will start losing some serious folding money.

Cleaning Up A Week of Broken Glass

I'm in the process of gathering more information for the next post in my series on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, so today's post will not be a continued exposition of Chapter 5.  I do, however, want to make a few more comments on the attempted takeover of the U.S. Congress by pro-Trump thugs this past week.  

First, we now know that the mob that assaulted the Capitol had been preparing its action for weeks.  We also know that the mob had been preparing to abduct members of Congress at gunpoint and bind them with zip ties and rope.  We know that most of the organizing and coordinating between the various thugs who assaulted the Capitol had taken place online, in full view of the FBI and the Capitol police.  We now also know for a fact that white American evangelicals and their pastors comprised a large part of the mob.  We also know that similar mobs stormed a California county house and surrounded a number of state houses last week.  We know that several Republican lawmakers (such as this man) joined in the call to commit violence.  We now know that pro-Trump fascists and other persons associated with the Far Right have infiltrated many police departments across the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  We know that some of these officers traveled to Washington DC last week to join the riot.

And we know that those who orchestrated last week's trouble are making plans - in plain sight - to do it again.  

So how to respond to all of this?  If you're like me, your first reaction is likely to feel a great and terrible anger - an indignation which has an element of righteousness to it, yet which leads to rash errors if not properly guided and handled.  That anger can lead to moralizing, which is both an innocuous response and a rather useless one.  The people who orchestrated last week's events have no morals, no better angels that anyone can appeal to.  They will be deaf to your sermons.  So that leads to the second of several possible reactions: the urge to go to the streets and organize counter-demonstrations against the fascists!  But there is a problem with this approach, namely, that the fascists, like a pack of rabid dogs, are keen to provoke violence.  If they succeed by their violence in provoking you to counter-violence, you become part of the problem.  (Unfortunately, this has already started to happen.  Remember what I wrote a while back about relying on mass protest rallies?)

So let's consider the third response: to construct a strategy for nonviolently shifting the balance of power away from those who want to dominate the rest of us.  Consider the following perspective from Part 1 of Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action: that the source of armed conflict between various groups of people is the belief that political power is like a solid, durable stone that can be possessed only by the strongest and most violent members of society.  This belief is false, however.  And the power of an oppressor can be disintegrated by a people who build their own social power and withdraw their consent from the oppressor.  

This is good news.  I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian, which means that unlike the vast majority of white American evangelicals, I believe I'm supposed to obey the Sermon on the Mount and not physically threaten my fellow human beings.  (This is why I don't own a gun.)  However, I know that there are tens of millions of white American evangelicals who stand ready "in the name of Jesus" to harm, oppress, and even kill their fellow human beings.  Yet they comprise a continually shrinking minority of the population.  This means that their power is declining.  This is especially true when one considers that the power they claim does not consist of knowing how to do useful things that benefit their fellow human beings.  Rather, it consists almost entirely in the assault rifles that many of them openly carry everywhere like pacifiers or security blankets, without which they would feel like ghosts upon the earth.  Those of the oppressed who do choose to build the power that comes from knowing how to do useful, meaningful work will therefore go far.  Consider the constructive example of the  Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado.  Consider Titus 3:14.  And don't let the terror which your oppressor seeks to instill divert you from patiently building your power by the daily practice of beautifully good work.  To put it another way, don't let these evil people get inside your OODA loop.

There is more good news: Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple have surgically removed Donald Trump's metaphorical mouth.  He can't post garbage online, and the Parler site has been denied access to the Google Store.  Lastly, I just want to say God Bless Arnold Schwarzenegger!  Just when I was ready to write off all Republicans as irredeemably evil, former Governor Schwarzenegger has forced me to eat my words.  And get this: he is leading an initiative to restore voting access to as many disenfranchised Americans as possible.  (See this and this also.)

Maintenance Day November 2020

I have a ton of things I need to do away from a computer today.  So I won't have time to write another research-heavy post.  But I will provide readers with a plan of what I intend to cover in future posts.

First, it appears increasingly undeniable that Joe Biden will become the President of the United States on January 20 of next year.  Trump's courtroom challenges to the legal election results continue to be stricken down.  Yet Trump continues with his courtroom challenges, even though these challenges have no merit.  It can be clearly seen that Trump is trying to invalidate votes cast by people of color.  It can also be seen that there are yet many Americans who continue to align themselves with White supremacy and with Trump as their leader.  Therefore, I will continue my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  Those of us who have been historical targets of oppression will need to continue to study the ways in which we can use strategic nonviolent resistance to neutralize the power of our oppressors.

Second, I want to continue to discuss the ways in which the outworkings of damnation move through an evil society.  I have focused almost exclusively on the United States in my previous posts, but I want to shift the focus to include Russia, which is another evil society that is now reaping what it has sown.

Lastly, I want to write posts which explore how decent people can navigate these difficult days.  Meanwhile, please read what the Reverend William Barber has to say about the United States of America.  I like this man's perspective!  "Well, I was trained in theology that whatever you call your spiritual experience, if it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect..."  Maybe this lack of genuine spiritual experience of conversion explains why so many American evangelicals who claim nowadays that they have been "saved" and "born again" look more like Freddy Krueger than the Lord Jesus Christ.

From D to D, Chapter 3: The Organizer's Toolkit

If you don't respect yourself, ain't nobody 

gonna give a good cahoot, na na na na

Respect yourself...

- Respect Yourself

lyrics by Luther Thomas Ingram and Mack Rice

This post continues our discussion of strategic nonviolent resistance, and is based in the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp.  This discussion is especially relevant for those of us who live in the United States and who have been struggling to create a nation and a world in which each of the world's people has equal access to the things they need to fulfill their human potential.  The emergence of such a world is currently being blocked by people such as Donald Trump and his supporters, who want to make themselves great by trashing everyone else on earth.  As an example, key members of the Trump administration have already clearly signaled their intention to refuse to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election which Donald Trump clearly lost.  Therefore the study of strategic nonviolent resistance and of nonviolent liberation struggles is very timely.  

The most recent posts in this series have focused on Chapter 3 of From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  You can find those posts here, here, and here.  A key point of Chapter 3 was that the kind of economic and political noncooperation that destroys a dictator's regime works best when it is applied on a mass basis as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society.  Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration.  Sharp made the point that if the independent institutions of the oppressed society have largely been destroyed or taken over by the dictatorship, the democratic resisters against the dictatorship will need to rebuild these independent groups so that these groups can contribute to the liberation struggle by their mass withdrawal of cooperation from the dictator's regime.  The building, rebuilding, and redirecting of organized groups of people requires people who are willing to take on the role of community organizers, as we showed in the last post in this series.  Therefore, today we will consider some supplemental material that describes what tools organizers use in order to successfully create organizations that can wield power.  And we will be looking at some further material from a veteran community organizer and social movement scholar named Marshall Ganz.  

Dr. Ganz has created an entire curriculum designed to teach the craft of organizing.  I had the opportunity a while back to take one of his online classes in organizing, titled, Leadership, Organizing and Action.  I will not attempt to reproduce the entire class here, but rather to summarize some of its key points.  To quote Ganz, "Organizing is a form of leadership.  Organizers identify, recruit, and develop the leadership of others; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community.  Organizers do not provide services to clients or market products to customers.  They organize a community to become a constituency - people able to stand together on behalf of common concerns.  Organizers ask three questions: Who are my people?  What is their urgent problem?  How can they turn their resources into the power to solve their problem?"  (Emphasis mine.)  

From this description we see that the organizer's job is not an easy one!  This is especially true in the United States, where many oppressed peoples and communities have become so passive that they look for "saviors" or "programs" from the dominant culture instead of building their own power in order to become independent of that culture.  Because the "saviors" never quite seem to adequately "save", and the "programs" never seem to effectively eliminate the problems they are supposed to solve, these communities continue to passively suffer the effects of institutionalized oppression.  The organizer's job is to bring the members of these communities to say, "Hey - no one is coming to save us.  What therefore are WE going to do to turn our resources into the power we need to save ourselves?"  How can organizers effectively call their people out of passivity?  The organizing framework of Dr. Ganz is a way of answering that question, and it has five elements:

SHARED STORY

As I have said above, the organizer must ask "Who are my people?"  But the people whom the organizer seeks to organize will want to know, "Why are you trying to organize us?  Why do you care about our problem?"  So the organizer needs to have a clear story of why he is trying to organize.  And this story must not just be a story of factoids and statistics, but of the moments which called the organizer to be an organizer.  These are the moments when the organizer faced not the mere statistics of the challenges facing his people, but the physical incarnation - the embodiment - of those challenges.  For one particular organizer whose story I heard on a podcast, a particular series of such moments consisted of her childhood experiences of crossing a bridge from Jordan to Palestine to visit her relatives.  As part of that bridge crossing, she had to endure being forced with her mother and sisters to strip naked in front of the Israeli army soldiers at the bridge checkpoint in order to be searched.  For me, one such moment came during an afternoon in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade, when three racist bullies from my school came to my house to steal water from our water hose and I had to fight them.  

Moments like these are activizing moments - and they form the basis of the organizer's story of self.  The organizer must also have a story of us - a story of his response as a member of his people to the collective challenge faced by his people, and a story of now - the response he is asking for from his people.  But the story of us and the story of now are not just the creation of the organizer.  They are developed and enlarged as the organizer forms relationships with the members of his people and as he hears their stories of self.  This is a key to the development of shared strategy later in the organizing process.  This is why Mohandas Gandhi spent many months traveling through India listening to the stories of his people before he began his campaign of Indian liberation.  This is also why the Reverend James Lawson spent several months listening to the stories of hardships suffered by African-American mothers who had to shop in segregated stores in the Jim Crow South before he began organizing his campaigns of civil disobedience.  This listening and collaboration is key.  Without it, you may have an organizer who is activized well enough, yet who in his rage tries to shove solutions down the throats of his people.  (I've been guilty of this, I'm afraid!)

SHARED COMMITMENT

From the sharing of stories of self between the organizer and other members of his people there arises a set of shared relationships.  These relationships become relationships of commitment to a common cause.  These relationships, moreover, are based on shared values.  As Marshall Ganz says, "In organizing the 'moment of truth' is when two people have learned enough about each other's interests, resources and values not only to make an 'exchange' but also to commit to working together on behalf of a common purpose...Relationship building is thus the key to organizing because it is the association of people with each other, not simply the aggregation of individual resources, that can create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts."  That is why my previous post in this series began with a quote from a romantic song - because relationship-building requires skill!  And maintaining relationships requires ongoing work.

SHARED STRUCTURE

From a network of relationships of common purpose, the various people involved in those relationships build a shared structure for action.  As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, that structure must be explicit and mutually agreed upon by all its members.  Remember - successful social movements are always planned and never purely spontaneous.  And the organizations that produce successful social movements always have an explicit structure, including an explicit, mutually agreed method of making decisions.  The kind of structure that is adopted by a group has a great impact on the effectiveness of the group.  A group where one person does all the thinking for everyone can be easily defeated (or worse yet, decapitated).  On the other hand, a group which doesn't do anything unless all its members come to a consensus on what needs to be done never gets around to doing anything.  The "snowflake" model of leadership development proposed by Ganz is a way to strike a happy balance between the two extremes and to create leadership that is maximally effective. 

SHARED STRATEGY

Shared strategy is the outcome of shared story, shared commitment, and shared structure.  Strategy is the answer of your group to the question of how to "turn the resources you all have into the power you all need to make the change you all want."  Just as leadership is not as effective when it is done by only one person in the group, strategy is most effective when it is developed as a team effort.  Effective strategy is important for groups of oppressed people who are struggling to liberate themselves from their oppressors, because this strategy is the way such groups make up for a lack of resources by becoming more resourceful in using what they do have.  Effective strategy also is how such groups overcome the advantage of the much greater resources of their oppressors.  Ganz uses the term "strategic capacity" to describe the characteristics of teams that are most likely to develop effective strategy.  (See this also.)

SHARED ACTION

The final outcome of shared story, shared commitment, shared structure, and shared strategy is shared action - a unified campaign by the oppressed to shift the balance of power between the oppressed and the oppressors.  Organizations work through campaigns that have strategic goals or milestones.  This setting of milestones provides the necessary discipline for organizers to achieve concrete goals.  One campaign I know of organized poor villagers in the Middle East to teach themselves to read.  This campaign achieved certain milestones of success that had been developed during the strategy and planning phase of the campaign.  The phase of shared action is the time when your organizing skill and effort is put to the proof.  

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

The person of the organizer and the work of organizing is so important to successful social movements that it deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give to it in a limited space on a Sunday afternoon.  However, if you want to know more about how the powerless can build their own power for their own liberation, Dr. Ganz will have another online class through the Harvard Kennedy School next winter and spring.  You can find out more about it here.  The class is definitely not free - but maybe if you're part of a group, a number of your friends can chip in and you all can pay for one member of your group to attend.  (If you're an African-American leader in a Black Lives Matter group, you should definitely attend!)  There are also the following free online resources:

• Leadership, Organizing and Action (training guide from a 2016 workshop in Morocco)
• "Learn About Organizing from Marshall Ganz" (a series of videos is included on this page)

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Who Made Thee An Organizer?

 At aalis, magbabalik

At uuliting sabihin 

Na mahalin ka't sambitin

Kahit muli'y masaktan

Sa pag-alis

Ako'y magbabalik

At sana naman...

- from Nobela, lyrics by Christian Blanca Renia

(My title being a nod to the 7th chapter of the Book of Acts...  Note: as I've been listening lately to music from other corners of the world, you may find me including some of the lyrics in future posts if I think they are relevant to the topics being discussed in those posts.  So if you're from outside the U.S., please keep making good music!  For the rest, if you want to know what the lyrics mean, try Google Translate.  However, I must warn you that using Google Translate is sometimes like trying to ride a horse that has a couple of broken legs.)

This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators.  (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.)  I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes.  From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor.  Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals.  Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.

Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like.  Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition.  My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle.  In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States.  One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement.  For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue.  And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful.  Successful movements are organized by smart organizers.  The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement.  Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing).  So what kind of person is an organizer?

To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University.  Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership.  He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty."  And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want."  Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling.  People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?

-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)

So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call?  And where do these called people come from?  To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:

THE LIMINAL

The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold."  The word can also be defined as, "on the edge."  In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group.  In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces.  Moses from the Bible is such an example.  He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River.  His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him.  (Exodus 1 and 2).  In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian.  In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.

Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt.  (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.)  But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother.  Thus there were two potential identities within Moses.  However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate.  The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself.  So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)

That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal.  This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South.  From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement.  Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).

And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer.  Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me.  I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7.  But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed.  An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now.  The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.

THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED

As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression.  But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here."  While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator.  So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!"  The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.  

But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals?  What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves?  Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers?  And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer?  That is the point of Havel's essay.  When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!"  So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!"  Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.

THE ACTIVIZED

A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers.  These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers.  And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors.  In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation.  Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power."  Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.  

The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation".  This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars.  But I define its beginning as a point in which an oppressed person decides that he or she will no longer tolerate the oppression and its accompanying humiliation, and that he or she will begin to live in truth from now on - even if it means suffering. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer.  "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.")  This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed.  This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.

But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous.  Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line."  As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables.  And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship.  So the organizer must be patient and resilient.  (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...)  You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul.  But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier.  I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.

Some Cats You Don't Mess With

The Internet seems to be abuzz lately with news stories and opinion pieces about Donald Trump's efforts and intentions to make himself President for life.  Some of these pieces cite Trump's attacks on Black Lives Matter organizers as his attempt to construct a "Reichstag moment."  (Note to BLM: If Trump succeeds in doing so, it won't be because he is very smart and very powerful.  Rather, it will be because of your repeated failures of strategic thinking, as I have repeatedly pointed out to you.  Read some books on strategic nonviolent resistance and effective community organizing!)

The tone of these stories and essays began to bother me this afternoon - first, because when people get hysterical, their hysteria can become contagious.  Hysteria prevents people from getting necessary work done and turns them into zombies glued to their screens - a good thing for advertisers and media companies, but a bad thing for the zombies.  Second, the tone of these pieces seems to subtly convey the message that Trump is such an overwhelming threat that resistance is useless.  Thus, if you can't turn yourself into a successful refugee to another country, you may as well kiss life goodbye.

I have a problem with that point of view.  I have chosen not to try to become a refugee.  I know moreover that there is an entire suite of things an oppressed people can do to shatter the power of a dictator who rises up over them, and that this suite of things is effective because it does not depend on violence to succeed.  Doing these things involves hard work and sometimes significant suffering and risk, and there is always the possibility of failure.  However, it must be realized that there is always also the possibility of success.

I am thinking just now of several YouTube videos and news stories about cat owners or members of families who own cats in which one of the family members was threatened or attacked by a dog and the cat in the house righteously thrashed the dog.  (See this also.)  If cats could talk, the cats who choose to throw down on dogs might explain themselves thus: "If I just give up and do nothing, horrible things will happen.  If I choose to resist, horrible things might still happen.  But there is also the possibility - however slim - that I might win.  So let's throw some blows!"

If a cat can be that brave, then maybe some of the humans in our midst should take a deep breath and get a grip.  In the face of the threat posed by Trump, the following questions should be asked:

1. Are we who are among his targets willing to resist?
2. Are we who are willing to resist also willing to study the most effective methods of resistance?

If you answered Yes to both of these questions, then watch this blog for my comments on Chapter 2 of "From D to D."

Report on CANVAS Summer Academy

I had the opportunity to attend a recent online Summer Academy in strategic nonviolent resistance hosted by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS.  This online academy featured speakers and leaders from several nonviolent liberation movements around the world, and showcased the large diversity of nonviolent tactics being employed by men and women waging struggles for liberation or democracy under difficult and hostile regimes.

The first lecture presented a troubling statistic - namely, the number of formerly democratic regimes which have slid toward authoritarianism in the last ten years.  (Yes, the United States is in that list!)  That fact motivated the following goals for the Summer Academy:

• Understanding the principles of successful nonviolent movements
• Learning lessons from those movements which fail

The first lecture's host, Srdja Popovic, made a statement that he repeated several times during the workshop:

"There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

This highlighted the need for careful planning and development of wise strategy as a prerequisite for success.  One of the readings that went along with that first lecture was "How Protests Become Successful Social Movements."  Here we could see how, although protest can be an important element of a social movement, it is not enough in itself to guarantee movement success.  (Read the article if you want to find the additional required ingredients!  Also, note that "leaderless movements" like the Occupy protests are not likely to achieve anything without a means of clearly deciding and stating what their goals are.)

During the first lecture, a movement leader from another country discussed how his organization was opposing his country's authoritarian leadership by highlighting the regime's corruption.  Corruption is almost always the soft underbelly of authoritarian regimes, since these regimes are created by strongmen in order that the strongmen may receive all the economic and political benefits of the societies they rule while giving nothing back in return.  The spokesman for this movement organization talked about how in many towns and villages in his country, it is hard to get clean water because of burst water delivery pipes which the government has refused to fix until recently.  This man's movement organization therefore started printing large, highly visible "burst certificates" (sort of like a "birth certificate" notifying the world of the birth of a water leak)  and posting them next to broken water mains in locations which motorists could see.  This motivated the government to start fixing their water mains!

The second lecture discussed how social movement organizers are adapting to organizing during the current COVID-19 pandemic.  One organizer from Latin America described how her movement organization has provided basic health care education and services like free masks to poor people - showing the role of parallel institutions in building a successful social movement.

The third lecture was focused on the anti-racism protests that have taken place since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.  We heard from two Black Lives Matter organizers, and we also heard from Will Dobson, fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy and author of The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy.  Mr. Dobson spoke first, and his assessment of the Black Lives Matter protests was highly positive.  He spoke of the large shifts in public awareness and opinion over the last two months as a result of the protests, and he also spoke of how Donald Trump's response to the protests has actually hurt Trump's reelection prospects.  However, when the BLM organizers spoke, some of us (myself included) questioned them about whether they had created effective structures for weeding out violent infiltrators from their protests, whether they had a training program for participants in strategic nonviolent struggle, and whether they had explored other methods of movement struggle besides mass protest rallies.  Their answer was that they have indeed begun to explore these things, and there is a Black minister in Los Angeles who has started doing nonviolent resistance trainings in the style of the Reverend James Lawson, who conducted similar trainings in the 1960's. (Note that I called them "nonviolent resistance" trainings - not just "nonviolence trainings".  The word resistance is always an essential part of the phrase "nonviolent resistance.")

The last lecture was the most unexpectedly interesting, in my opinion.  It was titled, "Creative Activism, Dilemma Actions, And The Use of Humor - Hilariously Groundbreaking Tactics."  Sophia McLennen of Penn State University was the guest speaker.  To provide a bit of background, the OTPOR! movement (of which Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders and original organizers) depended on the use of humor as a key tactical weapon to de-legitimize Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  It turns out that Sophia and Srdja have done some original research that shows that the use of humor and other dilemma actions greatly boosts the success rate of resistance struggles.  Moreover, dilemma actions and "laughtivism" can be used to de-legitimize the corporate or State-owned media of the oppressor.  Laughtivism can be used successfully against Fox News, One America, and other far-Right or White supremacist media, for instance...

An example of a dilemma action: toys protest corruption in Minsk.

Did the cops arrest the toys?  How did that make them look?

Image from Radio Free Europe article dated 10 February 2012, 

retrieved from Radio Free Europe on 16 August 2020

I am planning to write a series of posts walking us through a key text on strategic nonviolent resistance.  The name of the text is From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp.  Those who want to read ahead can download the print copy of the book here, or they can download an audio recording of the book here.  Remember this quote from Srdja: "There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

Voting As An Act of Civil Resistance, Or, Whose Idiot Is Umair Haque?

Logo of OTPOR! Serbian nonviolent resistance movement

which ousted Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Image By Le serbe - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14240808, 

retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 12 July 2020

Ever since Donald Trump's capture of the White House in 2016, I have been fixated on the question of how oppressed people (or people targeted for oppression) can shatter the power of their oppressors without resorting to violence.  My initial research led me to the writings of Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, and Gene Sharp.  Later, my reading expanded to include the work of Srdja Popovic.  From these thinkers and activists I learned to see strategic nonviolent resistance as 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, as I wrote about in an earlier post.

This shift in the balance of power occurs when skillful nonviolent resisters are able to weaken or destroy the pillars of support of an oppressive government by shifting the loyalty of the people who comprise those pillars of support.  For those readers who may not be familiar with strategic nonviolent resistance, "pillars of support" are those organizations which provide social power and legitimacy to a regime and its leaders.   These include the police, the military, banks and other financial institutions, and the media, as well as others.  Skillful strategic nonviolent resisters are able to weaken the allegiance of the members of these organizations to the regime by two means: first, by pointing out the corruption, evil, destructiveness, and specially, the unsustainability of the current regime, and second, by presenting a righteous alternative to the regime.  By employing both of these means, the nonviolent resisters weaken and eventually destroy the legitimacy of the regime.  Once the regime loses legitimacy, it can no longer command obedience - therefore it can no longer survive.

In reading the history of successful nonviolent resistance campaigns, I have recently been struck by the role which elections played in the resistance struggles.  Elections can be a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, skillful dictators and autocrats use them as a tool to divide the opposition so that the dictators can retain the appearance of a mandate to power.  This was the strategy of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, as documented by Chenoweth and Stephan in the chapter of Why Civil Resistance Works titled, "The Philippine People Power Movement, 1983-1986."  This was also the strategy used by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who retained his power for several years by dividing and co-opting his opposition as documented here and here.

But there are times when elections as a weapon are seized from the hands of autocrats and dictators by an opposition who skillfully uses the elections to remove the legitimacy of the dictatorial regimes.  They do so not only by publicizing the evils of the current regime and the possibility of a righteous alternative, but also by the following additional means:

• Massive "get out the vote" drives, especially among disaffected and marginalized populations,
• The development of a robust network of volunteers into an effective, independent means of monitoring election results,
• And the development of a means of nonviolently causing painful sanctions against the regime in the event that it tries to cheat, rig the election, or refuse to accept the results.

The development of an independent election monitoring network was the means used by both OTPOR! and CeSID in Yugoslavia to verify that Milosevic had in fact lost the 2000 election, as documented here and here.  The bulldozer strike and subsequent mass march on Parliament provided the painful sanctions that forced Milosevic to resign.  In a similar way, the Philippine opposition skillfully used the 1986 election to de-legitimize Ferdinand Marcos, employing a network of half a million volunteer election monitors to expose the cheating of the Marcos regime, and employing a massive general strike and huge mass protests to provide the pressure that forced Marcos out of office.

Now in 2020, those who treasure the continued supremacy of a favored few are hanging their hopes on the slim possibility that Donald J. Trump will pull off some sort of Election Day miracle that will enable him to "win" the election (meaning the Electoral College) even if he loses the American popular vote by several million.  In order to get the American people to passively swallow the results of such an "election," the election must be made as close as possible.  Thanks be to God that right now, it doesn't appear that the election will be close at all, and that it appears that not only Donald Trump, but a lot of Republicans are about to be ejected from office as if by the violent projectile emesis of the American body politic.  Yet those who want another four years of Trump continue to fight on.  And some of their tactics are sneaky.  Those of us who lived through 2016 can spot these tactics.

One particular tactic is to try to say that there's really not much difference between Biden and Trump, or to characterize the choice between the two men as a choice between the "lesser of two evils."  The users of this tactic seek to increase its effectiveness by using supposed voices from the Left to make such assertions.  These supposed members of the Left claim to oppose Trump and winner-take-all capitalism, yet they also claim that voting for Biden is an act of ideological impurity and that we who stand to suffer the most from another four years of Trump should not lower ourselves to vote for someone like Biden.  Among such voices is Omar Haque, who lumps both supporters of Trump and supporters of Biden into the same category, which he calls "The American Idiot."  Omar is not the only idiot trying to pull such a stunt.  There is also the website In These Times (published by the Democratic Socialists of America), who last month wrote an article titled, "Want To Defeat Trump Without Campaigning for Biden? Here's How."  Note that if you read their article, you may conclude that it should have been titled, "Want to Waste Your Time In Symbolic Opposition To Trump While Handing Him A Second Term?  Here's How."  (Note also that In These Times has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to downplay the evidence of Russian interference in the American electoral process - even though the entire American intelligence community is united in their assertion that Russian interference is real and did take place in 2016.)

This reminds me of blogger Olga Doroshenko's excellent description of the Russians who claimed to be opposed to Putin and to his aggression against Ukraine, yet who criticized the attempts of the Ukrainians to liberate themselves from Russian aggression because those attempts did not meet the Russian standard of "perfection".  As she pointed out, when you are doing all you can to liberate yourself, yet someone criticizes your efforts on the grounds that they are not "perfect", it is a sign that the critic really wants you dead.

Let's take a lesson from the Serbians who successfully used elections to oust Milosevic.  They rallied a formerly fractured opposition behind a candidate who stood the best chance of delivering them from both Milosevic and from the ongoing destruction of the nation under Milosevic.  Was that candidate "perfect" No!  But was he aimed in a radically different direction than the continued slide into self-destruction under Milosevic?  Yes!

Biden is not perfect.  (What mortal human being is?!)  Yet he is aimed in a radically different direction from Trump.  As was said of Milosevic, it can be said of Trump that his language smells like death.  I want life to win this year.  Therefore, I am voting for Biden.  And I am wondering if we have the political will to organize ourselves effectively in the next three months in order to put teeth into an electoral loss for Trump.  Are we willing to do what the Serbs and the Filipinos did?

The Strong Weapons Come Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tactics of Polarization

This last week, I listened to a video lecture presentation from the 2016 Fletcher Summer Institute of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.  The title of the lecture was "Nonviolent Discipline and Violent Flanks," and was presented by Dr. Erica Chenoweth and by Philippe Duhamel.  I learned a few rather disturbing things, the first of which is that, although the record of successes in nonviolent mass civil resistance campaigns had been growing steadily from 1900 to 2006, the percentage of nonviolent campaigns that succeed has been dropping steeply from 2010 onward.  (However, there is good news: the number of nonviolent campaigns that succeed is still quite high, and nonviolent mass campaigns, which were over two times as likely to succeed as violent campaigns during the 20th century, are now more than three times as likely to succeed.)

Fortunately, Dr. Chenoweth (who presented these statistics) also presented a number of possible explanations for this decline in effectiveness, such as the fact that oppressive adversaries have learned how to adapt and react to nonviolent campaigns, or that nonviolent movements are not learning the right lessons from each other.  But she also stated a hunch she has that the reason for the decline in nonviolent campaign effectiveness is that "...a growing proportion of nonviolent mass campaigns seem to be willing to tolerate or even endorse violent flanks that are existing alongside them..."  She defined a "violent flank" as "...a group of people attached to the movement and who engage on a routine basis in some form of violence," where violence is defined both as destruction of other people's property and as harming or threatening to do bodily harm to an opponent.  To bolster her hunch, she showed a graph which displayed the percentage of nonviolent campaigns per year that had no violent flank compared with those campaigns in which a violent flank coexisted with the nonviolent movement.

Sure enough, the graph line showing the number of movements which had both a nonviolent campaign and a violent flank began to increase around 2010.

Dr. Chenoweth then presented evidence of the detrimental effect of the presence of violent flanks on the nonviolent campaigns with which they coexist, presenting her own research and the data set which she built in the process of writing her book on nonviolent resistance.  However, she also presented evidence from studies I had not heard of before, studies which backed up her assertion that violent flanks in a mass civil movement drastically hurt the chances of success for the movement.  (Her slide, "Negative Violent Flank Effects," is quite relevant - especially the references she cites.)  Interestingly, in the NAVCO data set which was constructed by Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, most of the violent flanks in movements which occurred between 1900 and 2006 did not arise in the movements to which they attached themselves - rather, like unwelcome house guests or body lice, these violent flanks sprang up independently and then claimed to be part of these movements.

As Dr. Chenoweth described how violent flanks decrease mass societal participation in a civil resistance campaign she said something very striking: "Violence is by definition a tactic of polarization."  That statement is so important that I will repeat it again:

Violence is by definition a tactic of polarization.

In her words, "Polarization means dividing a society into very discrete camps that support or oppose a certain idea..."  Therefore, tactics of polarization effectively discourage diverse groups within a society from coming together to work for the common good, or from uniting against a common predatory threat.  Thus the emergence or presence of a violent flank in a nonviolent resistance movement does not help the movement - but it does help the oppressor against whom the movement has organized.

This perspective helps to interpret the events described by Philippe Duhamel in the second part of the video.  Duhamel is an activist who was instrumental in several anti-"free trade" protests in Canada and the U.S. from 1999 onward, and he described how, in the majority of the protests, the organizers held extensive training sessions for participants before each protest action.  Yet they began to find that as time passed, their protests were being increasingly infiltrated by members of the "Black Bloc," groups of young adults, usually men (and usually white), who attended protests in order to commit vandalism, assault other protesters, and attack police.  (See this, this, this and this also.)  The increasing presence of these Black Bloc vandals at mass protests has begun to reduce the effectiveness of sustained mass protest in presenting the genuine grievances of marginalized and threatened populations.

An interesting question, then, is, where the violent flanks have come from in the nonviolent campaigns that have been waged especially in North America and Europe from 2010 onward.  For the oppressors who are the targets of civil resistance have now known for a long time that the presence of these violent flanks actually helps the oppressive regimes against which these violent flanks fight.  In fact, there are concrete historical examples which demonstrate that if a mass nonviolent movement remains nonviolent, the oppressive regime it opposes will try to manufacture violent incidents in order to polarize the nation's population and bolster support for the regime, as happened in the Philippines when President Ferdinand Marcos ordered his forces to set off a number of bomb explosions around Manila.  The bombs were set to give Marcos a credible reason to declare that the country was under threat and that he was therefore justified in imposing martial law.  (See Why Civil Resistance Works, Chenoweth and Stephan, pages 148-150.)  It might be prudent to ask who is funding, supporting and growing the Black Bloc.  Who guides its recruitment efforts?  What similarities exist between the Black Bloc and the global far right?

(A larger question, one which hopefully will be studied by the academics at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, is the study of false flag operations by oppressive regimes who are under threat from popular uprisings.  How, particularly, does an observer detect whether a violent incident is a false flag attack?  I think especially of the shooting of a police officer in France last week, supposedly by a "member of ISIS".  How, er, convenient - just a few days before the French presidential election, in which an anti-immigrant candidate is one of the front-runners.)

In closing, I am reminded of Vaclav Havel's essay, The Power of the Powerless, in which he says that "...a future secured by violence might actually be worse than what exists now; in other words, the future would be fatally stigmatized by the very means used to secure it."  He also implied that oppressive regimes appeal to their oppressed populations by making them believe that the only alternative to the regime is chaos, as made clear by his statement that "Every aberration from the prescribed course of life is treated as error, license, and anarchy."  One way a nonviolent resistance movement can disarm such an appeal is by being orderly and maintaining strict nonviolent discipline.  Another way is by building orderly "parallel institutions" by which people can get their needs met in an orderly way that is superior to what the existing system currently offers.

A Resistance Way Of Life

I'd like to make a post out of a few very good comments to my discussion of frugality as a means of nonviolent resistance.  Thanks to Aimee and CZBZ for your input.

Aimee's recommended ways to be subversive in modern America:

1) Maximize your food independence. For some of us, that means growing a lot of food or raising animals. For others, it means learning how to cook from scratch. If you are buying raw materials from your local farmers at the farmer's market, you maximize support of your individual neighbors and minimize your support of the giant agribusiness companies. You also save money and eat better.

2) Buy secondhand. Everything you possibly can. In this way you avoid encouraging the extraction of raw materials and extend the useful life of products. The embedded energy cost in, say, a new car or a new set of dining room furniture - even a new winter coat! - can be stretched over a greater time period and made to serve a greater number of people. For me, buying secondhand clothing is an ethical decision to avoid supporting the sweatshop industry. A subclause to this recommendation is: repair things that can be repaired. Get your fridge fixed a few times before you get a new one. Learn to mend clothes. When was the last time you saw a kid wearing jeans with knee-patches on them, unless they were sold that way to begin with? Take good care of your car. Do all the scheduled maintenance. Learn to do it yourself! Or ask your neighbor.

3) Maximize your energy independence. There are so many ways to do this - we brew biodiesel for our cars. But you might do it with solar panels or windmills, depending on where you live. Or do it by not owning a car and biking instead. Or by living in a smaller house and super-insulating. The sky's the limit.

4) Know your neighbors. Make friends. Develop mutually beneficial networks. Support each other. Lend your tools. Pool your resources. Why should every small-farming family along the same stretch of road own its own haying equipment, for example? That's absurd. Or its own tractor, even? Why shouldn't three or four families get together to buy one tractor instead of four? Does every household really need a chainsaw? No, not if you are on good terms with Bob down the way. And not if you are willing to lend his wife your sewing machine.

5) Most important of all: take charge of your education! Be informed! Get your information from diverse sources. Use your brain. Teach your kids. Go to museums and libraries while they still exist! Buy books (secondhand, of course!). Do not default on your obligation to educate your children, or yourself. It's too important. You can't leave it to the public school system alone. Talk about important issues with your spouse, your neighbor, your kids, your in-laws, your city councilman, your state senator!

6) For the love of God, VOTE!

CZBZ's Contributions:

1) Join families under one roof. This challenges communal skills and nourishes spiritual growth. Save landfills by purchasing one washing machine for four adults. My sister and her son moved in with me and now my adult daughter lives with me. That would be four washing machines (dishwashers, refrigerators, etc.) if we lived apart.

2) Find a church and fill your inner void with something meaningful rather than zombie shopping, what my daughter calls "retail therapy". Each of us has shopped-til-we-dropped and that's why we know how 'empty' it is---like an addiction.

3) Buy second-hand furniture or better yet, learn to build it yourself. Self-esteem grows as carpentry skills increase and there's nothing as wonderful as knowing your nephew almost cut his finger off making a bookcase for your second-hand books.

4) I love cooking from scratch (make my own yogurt and have saved thousands of plastic containers from the landfill). However, I don't judge people who lack the time to cook from scratch...it is very time-consuming but gives me a sense of purpose now that I'm old. (grin) And nothing brings community together quite like having a good cook in the family.

5) Save all the bones and table scraps for day-long boiled broth but don't tell your guests that you were gnawing on the chicken a few days ago. 

6) Learn to be thankful.

And here's an additional contribution of my own: a link to an article in Sojourners Magazine on the virtue of buying used (when you have to buy at all).  Also, if anyone wants to add to these lists, feel free to leave me a comment.

Have a good week!

Big Feet In Little Shoes?

A few weeks ago, I listened to a stimulating and informative lecture from the 2013 Fletcher Summer Institute of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  The title of the lecture was "Economic Self-Organization By Movements," by Tufts University Professor Kim Wilson.  Professor Wilson described in detail the risks and dangers that await indigenous peoples in developing countries when they are enticed by pushers of Western models for financing family, group or village economic ventures.  She also described the innovations which have been created by indigenous peoples for creating secure ways to pool their savings.

But she also gave her audience a warning, namely that Western corporations and NGO's have co-opted some of these innovations and have used them as means of continuing to rob indigenous populations of their savings, or as means of continuing to bring these populations into financial indebtedness to the West. 

Her warning was brought again to the forefront of my attention this week, as I heard about an Arizona-based cooperative called Anyshare, which seeks to help people throughout the United States connect with each other to form "sharing communities" - for a small fee, of course.  It's nice that they call themselves a "cooperative."  But I think that many of the social advantages of a cooperative - including an effective say in the direction of the cooperative - are best realized when the so-called cooperative is truly local (as in, an organization whose members don't have to travel more than a few miles to physically touch each other's hands).  This also ensures that the number of members in the cooperative does not drastically exceed Dunbar's Number.  Thus, if I want to form a "sharing community", I am much more likely to walk down the street to talk to my neighbors than I am to rely on an organization that is based in a state over 1,000 miles from where I live.  (I don't live in Arizona.)  The trouble I see with Anyshare or any other organization that seeks to capitalize on a social movement is that once that organization grows beyond a certain size, it stops looking like a homey, affectionate, well-worn collective of friends, and starts looking like...a corporation... (Sorry, REI.) 

I think Professor Wilson's warning is especially relevant in these days, in which many people are beginning to build alternative or parallel institutions as part of a campaign of nonviolent resistance to the regime currently in Washington.    Those who want to watch her lecture can see it here:

Those who are involved in building parallel institutions should beware of middlemen who "wanna get big" at the expense of the people whom they are supposed to be helping - especially when the middlemen are far away from the people they are trying to help.