The Shape of Our Struggle

Things in the United States are turning out about as I expected in the aftermath of Joe Biden's election victory over Donald Trump.  Trump's response has been what he told us all along that it would be.  Indeed, even when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he had told us that he would not accept a legitimate election loss.  The deep existential foundations of Trump's malignant narcissism are the motive behind his refusal in 2020 to accept a loss that is becoming more painfully obvious with each passing day.

Over the last four years, Trump has managed to pack many offices of the Federal government with sycophants who have no principles other than self-seeking loyalty to Trump.  Anyone with competence and principles who was part of his administration at any time has by now left.  He has packed the Federal judiciary with unrighteous judges.  And he is now packing the Pentagon with loyalists.  

All of this leads naturally to the question of what decent people in the United States should do if Trump refuses to leave office, or if he succeeds in getting corrupt courts to void a legitimate election, or if he stages a military coup.  My answer to such a question is contained in the many posts I have written which explain strategic nonviolent resistance on this blog.  Strategic nonviolent resistance is a key component of the struggle of an oppressed people to liberate themselves from a tyrant, dictator, or oppressor.  If you're looking for what you can do to contribute to that struggle, please read these posts.

A few points must be made.  First, you must get ready to organize with your neighbors.  Second, you must organize to massively and collectively withdraw your economic and political cooperation from the system.  This will massively raise the costs borne by a Trump dictatorship and make such a dictatorship unsustainable.  (Think of such things as strikes and boycotts of large businesses (such as Fox News) that support Trump.  DO NOT base your struggle solely on mass protest marches!)  Third, you must remain nonviolent in your struggle.  This is not just for moral reasons!  It is also because the moment you allow violence, you decrease your chances that your liberation struggle will succeed.  (If you don't believe me, please read Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Or watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.)  

Fourth, you must begin NOW to study strategic nonviolent resistance if you haven't yet started.  Fighters who lack skill never win.  If you want to win, you must study.  But learn only from reputable sources.  Here is a short list of sources I consider trustworthy:

• The Albert Einstein Institution
• The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS)
• Teachers and practitioners of community organizing.

One source which I would urge you to stay away from is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC).  From their founding up to the end of 2016, their courses and publications presented valuable information and good advice.  But from 2017 onward, something began to change.  Thus in one of their online courses which took place after 2016, Daniel Dixon of the ICNC suggested that violent and nonviolent forms of resistance could be combined in a movement to make the movement stronger.  (By the way, all available evidence on social movements proves the exact opposite.)  His exact words were, "An organizing friend of mine likes to talk about 'synergy of tactics' as opposed to 'diversity of tactics'.  By this he means that violent forms of protest can work alongside nonviolent forms of protest to create something that is more powerful than either could accomplish individually."  This is complete garbage.  He is not the only one to make suggestions that are harmful to liberation struggles.  Tom Hastings of the ICNC suggested this year that there were times and cases in which a nonviolent resistance movement could help its cause by destroying property.  That too is garbage.  If you engage in violence (including property destruction) you will make it harder to shift the pillars of support of the dictator's regime.  And we want to make it as easy as possible for people who now support Trump to walk away from him.

This weekend, God willing, I will be continuing my series on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.  Stay tuned.  

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."

The Power of Decentralized Resistance

I've been enjoying listening to some talks by Jamila Raqib, who is Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution and a Research Affiliate of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In one of those talks she made a point about the nonviolent struggle waged in the American colonies for over ten years which granted de facto independence to many of these colonies months before the start of the Revolutionary War.  Her words got me thinking (and Googling) for more information.

In my search, I ran across a book (which, I must admit, I haven't read yet) called The First American Revolution - Before Lexington and Concord, by Ray Raphael.  In reading various summaries and reviews of the book, I came across some surprising information about the decentralized, grassroots nature of the vast majority of the resistance in Massachusetts to British rule.  No matter what one thinks of the aims of the revolution itself, one can't help but appreciate the wealth of information captured by recent historians about the ordinary acts of social and political disconnection by ordinary citizens which weakened and eventually destroyed de facto British rule throughout many of the colonies.

According to one source, the points made by Raphael concerning the revolution in Massachusetts are these:

• The revolution was strongly democratic, and therefore highly decentralized.
• Because the revolution was decentralized, it was ubiquitous (in other words, it sprang up everywhere, "taking place everywhere and at once without any central organization, specific times or geographical locations.").
• Many of the revolutionaries were people who had had their voting rights taken away by the British.  Hence, the strong commitment on the part of these revolutionaries to participatory direct democracy among themselves at the local level. 
• The revolution occurred without bloodshed.
• Because the revolution was decentralized and ubiquitous, it was extremely hard for centralized British authorities to counter, or even to understand.  

To the British governor and his superiors, it must have seemed as if they were being eaten by a school of piranhas - a diffuse resistance which was highly effective in drawing economic and political (but not physical) blood, yet which presented no easy target against which the British could concentrate their forces.

This presents an important lesson in the power of everyday resistance.  A grand strategy of resistance is very important, and a wise and well-executed strategy by a wise leadership insures the success of a resistance movement.  Yet ordinary everyday resistance is also very important, even though acts of everyday resistance are not likely to make it into the news or the history books.  Such everyday resistance was used by the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles East Germans, Hungarians and Czechs in their struggle against Russian Soviet occupiers in the latter half of the 20th Century.  (See this for instance.)  Such everyday resistance is also part of a manual for civilian-based defense published by the Lithuanian government in 2015 and designed to help Lithuanians foil any future Russian attempts to invade their country, whether that threat comes directly or through "hybrid warfare."

There is just one cautionary point I want to make about everyday resistance, as it is defined and has been studied by political scientist James Scott.  His catalogue of acts of everyday resistance includes acts that most societies would consider criminal, such as arson, sabotage and theft.  I don't think these acts should be part of the toolbox of tactics of nonviolent resistance.  The reason why I would exclude such acts is that criminal acts - even if they are nonviolent - weaken the mechanisms by which nonviolent resistance removes the pillars of support of a dictatorship, in much the same way that violence weakens nonviolent resistance.  Those who engage in such criminal acts give the oppressor an excuse for his oppression.  Instead, nonviolent resisters should be guided by the following principle: "...let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or an evil doer..." - 1 Peter 4:15.

That still leaves many very legitimate acts of everyday resistance that can be employed.  (See this and this, for example.)  Using your imagination and creativity can be a lot of fun here.  In a future post I will describe an an idea that recently came to me for just such an act of everyday resistance.  Let's explore how to take bites out of the Trump regime, shall we?