- "Trump delays tariffs as the rest of the world plays hardball," BBC
- "Can the world be governed without the US?", Inside Story
- "This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America", The Guardian
- "To save the global economy, kick the US out of the WTO," Politico.eu
Thursday, July 10, 2025
On Not Needing You, Part 2
Sunday, December 12, 2021
The Urgent Need for Conscientização
- "Freedom In The World 2021: Democracy Under Siege", Freedom House
- "'An Urgent Matter': Biden Warns Democracy Is Under Threat At Summit", The Guardian
- "Democracy Slipping Away At Record Rate, Intergovernmental Body Warns", Reuters
- It should show the oppressed that the world is not just some static thing over which they have no control and to which they have no choice but to submit.
- It should enable the oppressed to see themselves and their relation to the world more accurately - not as mere objects acted upon by forces over which they have no control, but as people who have the power to act to change their reality.
- It should move the oppressed to begin acting on their reality, both as individuals and collectively, as a logical consequence of beginning to see themselves in the world more accurately.
- As part of this movement toward activity, it should lead the oppressed to more clearly see the present intolerable reality of their oppression. To quote Freire (who quotes Marx), "Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella loa conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla." ("It is necessary to make real oppression even more oppressive by adding to it the awareness of the oppression...")
Thursday, September 23, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The "Sin" Of Not Needing You
- 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!
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Parallel Institution-Building As The Answer To The Anti-Vaxx/Anti-Mask Crowd
Sunday, September 5, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The Plight of the Little Red Hen
- A group of poor or oppressed people come together to discuss their common grievances.
- These people manage to move beyond the stage of mere griping or kvetching and start asking, "Okay - so things are bad and we're being mistreated. What do we want to do about it?"
- In pondering the answer to that question, this group begins to discover the ways in which they themselves can collectively meet needs that are being deliberately unmet by the oppressors.
- They begin to act on this knowledge to create their own structures under their own control for meeting their needs.
- This communal self-reliance produces the following effects:
- It starts to create a new shared collective identity among the participants
- It starts to show them that they do indeed have power over their own affairs
- It begins to give them experience and practice in functioning and making decisions as a collective unit
- It begins to produce a collective cause-consciousness which arises out of a new experience of citizenship
- This cause-consciousness becomes the motivator for the group to start thinking about how to strategically use collective action to oppose the power of their oppressors.
Sunday, August 29, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: Where Are The Carpenters?
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.
Sunday, July 18, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 8 and 9: How The Straight Subverts The Crooked
Sunday, November 22, 2020
From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): The Social Movement Organization
Today's post continues our discussion of Chapter 3 of the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. This will be the last post that deals with Chapter 3. The next post in this series will begin to cover Chapter 4. The book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) teaches how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of their oppressors. This knowledge is especially appropriate for these days, in which a number of racist, White supremacist and Global Far Right leaders have in the last decade come to power in many nations, including the United States, where Donald Trump was illegally helped into his seat of power by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. (The Russians helped many of the other authoritarian strongmen come to power as well.) Mr. Trump has clearly and legally lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, yet he is refusing to concede his loss and he is resisting being ejected from the seat of power which he has occupied (a seat which he has been soiling) for the last four years. Therefore, it is quite possible that oppressed people in the United States will have to use the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to achieve regime change right here in the U.S.A.
Chapter 3 of From D to D explains how an oppressed population can shatter the power of a dictator or oppressor by the mass withdrawal of political and economic cooperation from the oppressor's regime. But that noncooperation works best when it is exercised 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 listed a number of normally independent groups and institutions which are also normally apolitical, such as families, gardening clubs, sports clubs, musical groups, and the like. As noted in an earlier post in this series, in order for such normally apolitical groups to become part of a strategic nonviolent resistance movement, they must be politicized or co-opted by movement organizers.
According to Sidney Tarrow, this collective action must be sustained collective action in order to be considered the basis of a social movement. To quote Saru again, "So, according to Tarrow, a social movement occurs when people with limited resources - in our world, we call that the people most affected - are able to sustain - that word is important - contentious actions in conflict with powerful opponents." (Emphasis mine.) Social movement organizations are the basis of social movements; therefore, social movement organizing is much more than just organizing a march or a petition drive or a mouse click campaign. For a social movement organization is a collection of people who are willing to work together collectively in a sustained manner in order to shift the balance of power between themselves and powerful opponents.
Now the work of a social movement organization is not just to engage in sustained collective action as an organization, but to create an environment in which, according to Saru, "something else happens and gives way to a much broader, much wider movement in which many more people...who are not affiliated with any organization...are suddenly across a very wide swath of society engaging in contentions actions over a long period of time." When the social movement organizations trigger this kind of sustained societal shift in behavior, that's when a social movement is born. These movements, are, however, built on the ongoing, patient work of social movement organizations. It is a series of patiently accumulated small steps and small victories which lead to the big breakthrough movement moments.
The necessary initial work of a social movement organization must first be to teach the people most affected to begin to reclaim agency over their lives. This is done by building structures of self-reliance. 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." Therefore, the movement organization must begin to build its own means of taking care of the needs of its members. To illustrate this, let's look at some of the demands of some of the Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States. One of those demands is the demand for equal access to quality education for Black and Brown children. But the people who have set up inequitable systems of education did so for a reason. Therefore, what makes BLM think that these people will respond to the demand of the people most affected to change these systems? Instead of demanding decency and humanity from people who don't have any, why doesn't BLM organize its own education system as a necessary prerequisite to organizing a crippling mass boycott of the system set up by the dominant culture? When racist teachers who are part of punitive schools face empty classrooms, they learn quickly that their jobs are in danger! Similarly, the low-wage workers who are employed by exploitative employers must begin to build the self-reliance they need in order to go without work for a while in the event of a strike. Building self-reliance of this kind is not easy when you're being exploited, yet it has been done time after time by people who successfully liberated themselves. The United Farm Workers did this very thing when they built the structures which enabled them to use strikes and boycotts against large California farms in the 1960's.
The building of structures of self-reliance is also the means by which social movement organizers chip away at the legitimacy of the structures of the dominant culture. For if the structures built by the powerless actually work better than the structures built by the powerful, people will start to notice! Thus Asef Bayat, in his book Life as Politics, says "I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity." (Emphasis added.)
This concludes our study of the necessary groundwork that must be laid by the people most affected by oppression in today's world, the people most threatened by White supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the collection of strongmen who want to Make Their People Great Again by trashing all the other peoples on earth. We will next begin a discussion of strategy. However, I may also decide to write a post describing the Global Far Right in terms of a religious cult, and describe in that post how we might use some of the resources created by cult researchers such as Steve Hassan to reach out to those who are trapped in that cult mindset.
Saturday, October 21, 2017
Being Positively Disruptive
First, the tutoring initiative in which I am involved, which I mentioned in this post and this one, is now expanding from one location to three. Our roster of teachers has both changed and grown. I believe there are now thirteen of us, and more may be joining in the next few months. While two of our groups are continuing to focus on basic mathematics, one group is developing a science curriculum aimed at teaching appropriate technology and self-sufficiency/sustainability in the context of developing alternative institutions. That group is being led by a woman from an African-American/Asian background and a Native American woman, and they are writing a series of science experiments and activity packets aimed at youth from 10 to 20 years of age.
And we have a fourth group composed of writers, who are developing and editing a math curriculum to be used by all of our groups, complete with workbooks and worksheets. (As soon as I am done with this post, I will be working on addition and subtraction worksheets. If idleness is the devil's workshop, I won't have to worry about getting into trouble for a long time!)
On another front, a group of us at work are planning to launch a campaign to collect donations for the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Irma. I am thinking we will present the campaign as an opportunity to spend money for a good cause instead of spending money on holiday shopping. We will also promote news sources that are providing accurate coverage of the situation in Puerto Rico, as opposed to many American news sources and the White House. My goal is to provide a positive disruption in three ways:
- By providing concrete relief to people whom our current regime would like to starve,
- By shunting money away from the usual recipients in our consumer economy during this holiday season,
- And by providing ongoing evidence that our current regime and its President are illegitimate.
Lastly, it looks like I may have a few opportunities over the next couple of months to talk about resistance and related topics in front of a few audiences. It looks like my part in the resistance being mounted by oppressed people is likely to get quite a bit larger.
Friday, September 22, 2017
Catch-Up - September 2017
- Tutoring and teaching math and language arts to families from marginalized populations. Our group of tutors has expanded greatly within the last two months, and we are planning to go to at least two, and possibly three apartment complexes this fall. We may even get to teach in people's homes, which would give a nice retro, counter-cultural feel to what we are doing - rather like this.
- Nonviolent resistance. There are now well over fifty people with whom I have been in frequent contact over the last two or three weeks, and we are discussing the start of a boycott of holiday shopping (both for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever else), along with a general push for frugality among those now targeted by the current regime. We want to serve up a steaming, heaping helping of economic non-cooperation this holiday season. Stay tuned...
Sunday, July 2, 2017
The Duty Of Active Citizenship
Lately I have been thinking rather much about the wide range of responses among the American public to the Trump presidency. One response that has been somewhat troubling has come from certain seemingly well-meaning elements of the American church community - both home-grown and immigrant. That response can be best summarized in the following statement: "We recognize that it is God who removes kings and sets up kings. Therefore, we must recognize that it is God who has given Trump the presidency. This means that we must not speak against the president whom God has given us." Some carry this thinking even further, and say, "Just as God worked through flawed human beings in history to accomplish a greater purpose (as was the case with Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus), even so God has raised up Trump to accomplish a greater purpose." (See this also.) The implication then becomes that the flaws and sins of Trump are no longer a legitimate point of criticism, since he is "the vessel whom God has chosen." Some among this crowd even go as far as blatant appeals to Calvinist doctrine to teach that, since God is Sovereign, and since nothing happens apart from His sovereignty, we who have been the historical targets of oppression should not complain about the oppression which has been dished out to us, nor protest against the ascendancy of people who in the present day want to dish out extra helpings of the same oppression.
I say that such thinking is both flawed and dangerous, as it presents only a partial picture of the story. One of the biggest missing pieces of that story is that God has given free will to both men and societies. Another huge missing piece is the fact that God gives and allows things in response to the freewill choices of His creatures. So when people fall under the grip of an oppressor, it may be that the appropriate response of the oppressed is not to absolve themselves of responsibility, nor to throw up their hands and say, "God is bringing us through trial as He did with Job, and we must not try to figure out the root causes of our suffering. Perfecta es Tu voluntad para mi..." Maybe what we should do instead is to ask ourselves how and where we dropped the ball and allowed this to happen.
So how then should believers look at life under oppressive political regimes? That is a huge question and it requires a huge answer. And I don't have time to even begin to scratch the surface of that answer today, nor do I believe that I have the wisdom to provide a definitive answer all by myself. However, I'll present a few of the thoughts that have come to me from thinking about this question over the last three months.
First, I believe that God has created us to fulfill a particular purpose, and that this purpose involves the full development of the humanity of every human being, as I wrote in a previous post. The fulfillment of that purpose and calling involves the struggle of nonviolent conflict, because of the presence of oppressors and would-be oppressors who seek to make themselves rich by dehumanizing the rest of us. How should we respond when the oppressors become the rulers of the land? One clue to the answer to that question can be found in 1 Peter 2:13: "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution..." The word translated "institution" is the Greek word κτίσις (ktisis), and it literally means, "creation (my emphasis), creature, institution..." This is important. For it means that we are called to submit to every created institution, not only to the institutions created by our oppressors, but to the institutions which the oppressed create in order to fulfill their ontogeny in spite of their oppressors. For our submission to the institutions of our oppressors should extend only as far as we can obey without violating our duty to our higher calling. Where the institutions - the creations - of our oppressors seek to violate that calling, we are responsible for creating new creations - new arrangements and parallel institutions - by which we may facilitate the fulfillment of our calling. This is why anarchy is not a right response to oppression, for according to the Scriptures, "God is not a God of confusion but of peace." When the oppressed create by themselves the creations - the arrangements and institutions - by which they may fulfill their calling in spite of their oppressors, this is an example of "active citizenship" as defined by Asef Bayat in his book, Life as Politics.
So then, why are "bad kings" given? Why is it that peoples fall under the rule of oppressors? For I have stated that the Bible teaches that God gives and allows things in response to the freewill choices of His creatures. And it is true that God removes kings and sets up kings. (See Daniel 2:21). So what choices do oppressed people make that cause them to remain in victimhood to oppressors? I submit that the answer is that the oppressed far too frequently become and stay oppressed through a failure of active citizenship. I am thinking particularly of a quote from a book I recently got, Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles, edited by Dr. Maciej Bartkowski. On page 18 of the first chapter, Dr. Bartkowski quotes Syrian activist Abd al Rahman al-Kawakibi: "...people 'themselves are the cause of what has been inflicted upon them, and that they should blame neither foreigners nor fate (my emphasis) but rather ignorance (al-jahl), lack of endeavor (faqd al-humam), and apathy (al-taw kul), all of which prevail over society.'" He also cites Polish philosopher Josef Szujski in his assertion that "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of foreign powers lay in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility. Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
This shows us where many societies, including the present United States, have gone wrong. First, we fell victim to convenience - that is, in the words of Jack Duvall, we allowed ourselves to be rented by people who promised to relieve us of the duties of active citizenship in exchange for our support of the political aspirations of these people. Their message was, "Let us do the dirty work of creating a healthy society. After all, we are the experts and you are not. (As our covfefe-in-chief once said, "I'm a genius!") All you have to do is lend us your support by sending money to our political campaign and vote for us." The flip side of that convenience is that we allowed ourselves to become addicted to convenience - that is, to a lifestyle which required no hard work, no thinking, no sacrifice for a larger good - but only the immediate gratification of our cravings and appetites. In short, we became a society whose members aspired to be Ferris Bueller or a character from Happy Days when we grew up. How fitting that Ferris Bueller's Day Off became a box office hit during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. How perceptive also is Dr. Maciej Bartkowski's comment that the Ukraine fell back under the sway of corrupt dictatorship after the Orange Revolution because after that revolution, Ukrainians abandoned active citizenship and went back to watching TV.
This also shows us where many "nonviolent resisters" in the United States are still going wrong. They believe that the power of rulers over a society is a fixed, durable monolith, and they direct their efforts to arguing with the current owners of the monolith for control of the monolith, as Gene Sharp explained in his book The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle. This is why their repertoire of strategy and tactics includes very little more than protest and persuasion (which might be termed a series of variations on the common tactic of loud complaining). But movements which focus solely on complaining show a lack of confidence in their ability to take their affairs into their own hands. These would-be resisters would do much better to stop arguing over control of an oppressive and unjust system and to devote themselves the much more effective work of active citizenship (starting with self-rule, self-control, and freeing oneself of degrading addictions), of building the parallel arrangements and institutions of a just society within the shadow of the wreckage of their present corrupt society. Effective nonviolent resistance, whether in the United States or Russia or anywhere else, must be modeled on the spread of active citizenship and must not therefore rely on the presence of a charismatic leader who rents the support of the society by promising them that he will meet all their needs if only they will give him their support.
But I am sure that there are those who, after reading this, still think that Trump is a mysterious gift from an inscrutable Calvinist god, and not the fault and consequence of a nation guilty of wrong thinking. Maybe among these people are those who will freeze to death this winter because even though they had money in the bank, they neglected to pay their heating bill. Maybe their last dying sentence will be, "Perfecta es Tu voluntad para mi..." But when they stand before the Judgment seat, they may hear, "You doofus! Why didn't you pay your bills?"