Repost - Touching The Oppressor's Wound

I'd like to point my readers to a post which I wrote back in 2017.  The title of that post is "Touching the Oppressor's Wound."  That post lays out the theoretical basis for weakening the power of the oppressor by showing his agents how their oppression is hurting not just the oppressed, but the oppressor's agents as well.  That may sound like a crazy and impractical approach to dealing with an oppressor, but allow me to give a simplified summary of the points I wanted to make in my original post.  That summary is as follows:

• First, we know that when a tyrant or dictator recruits men to serve as his armed henchmen, he tends to select such recruits from the most violent, deviant, and psychopathic members of society.  This must be so, because the tyrant will want to use these men as agents of terror both against his own citizens and against the peoples of foreign nations whom the tyrant wants to conquer.  
• Second, in order to make these recruits even more effective as instruments of terror and violence, the tyrant will subject these recruits to the kind of training that greatly amplifies their viciousness and violent tendencies.  In other words, their training will amplify their tendency to act like monsters.
• Third, this violent viciousness will become such a pervasive part of the character and personality of these people that it will essentially be "on" at all times, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  This means that they will be very hard people to live with!  Indeed, there are multiple studies which show highly elevated levels of domestic violence among U.S. military and law enforcement personnel.
• Fourth, this tendency to violence and cruelty will actually turn out to be a weakness of their families and intimate partner relationships, as it can become a motivator for their spouses and children to seek some way of escape from relationships with these people.  
• Fifth, and most important: Therefore, a viable tool of resistance against a tyrant and his agents of oppression can be for trained volunteers and mental health professionals to offer counseling, help, and especially outreach to the spouses and children of these men.  For in offering such counseling and help, the volunteers and mental health professionals will be communicating to the spouses and children that their situation is not normal or acceptable, and that the men perpetrating this domestic violence are not normal or acceptable.  This will weaken the ability of the tyrant to continue to use these men as a pillar of support of his oppressive regime.
• The weakening starts with the volunteer, friend, or mental health professional getting the victim of domestic violence to admit that she is in a destructive relationship and that she (and any children she has) are in danger of serious harm.
• The volunteer, friend, or mental health professional must then bring the victim to see that her spouse's monstrous behavior is a direct consequence of his choice to do the violent dirty work of the oppressor.  The victim must be brought to see that her spouse has been turned into a monster precisely because being a monster is part of the requirements of his job.
• The victim must then be shown that there are righteous, legitimate ways of escaping from her monstrous situation, and she must be gently led to choose between staying in a harmful (and potentially fatal) situation versus walking away into a more healthy life.

I suggest that in the United States at this time, there's no shortage of potential victims who could be helped by this kind of intervention.  For we have a military that has come unhinged from any moral restraints, a military which allowed itself to be deployed against its own citizens in 2025, and which is now busily killing people in other countries in order to take over those countries for Trump.  (First, Venezuela, then Cuba, then Denmark and Greenland, then...?) And we have domestic bullies like the ICE agents who have been shooting unarmed U.S. citizens lately.  (I'm a man and not a woman - yet I cringe at the thought of what it must be like to be the spouse of Jonathan Ross! Or one of his kids.  It truly must be a living hell...)  The kind of domestic violence interventions I am suggesting might be a pivotal tool in showing the men of ICE and of the U.S. military what monsters they have become by showing their spouses and children how impossible it is to live with these men any longer.

P.S. Those who read the original post will encounter comments from a few rather wacky and unhinged commenters.  These commenters spouted a bunch of right-wing talking points in their comments.  I believe two of the comments are from the same person even though one of them was posted anonymously.  Feel free to take the comments with a grain (or more) of salt.

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

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

Nonviolent resistance: a system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction.

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

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

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

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

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

The Defeat of the Violent Flanks

In two of my most recent posts I wrote that protest is not a good method of nonviolent resistance in the age of Trump, because oppressors know how to inject violence into nonviolent protests in order to discredit the protests and legitimize violent crackdowns on protest. But it looks like I’m going to have to eat my words based on the reports I’ve been reading over the last 24 hours concerning the protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

Believe me, I’m quite happy to eat my words just now. Some of the things that are now being reported are wonderful. It now appears that the leaders of the protests have figured out how to separate their protests as far as possible from the violent infiltrators who are coming from the Antifa, the Boogaloo Boys, and other violent white extremist groups. Because the protest leaders and the relatives of those African-Americans recently killed by police violence are insisting that the protests remain peaceful, the protests have gained increased legitimacy among the general public. Because the protest leaders have sought to promote strict nonviolent discipline among the protesters, the protest leaders have been able to get police and National Guard personnel to join with the protesters in showing solidarity with the victims of racist violence, as seen in the many recent media pictures of National Guard troops laying down their shields in support of the protests and police kneeling with the protesters to show their solidarity with the cause of the protests. (See this, this, and this.)  In some cases, police can be seen not only kneeling with the protesters, but holding hands with them and marching with them in solidarity. (See this also.)  And in one case, police who knelt with protesters joined with them in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

This has made it much harder for Donald Trump to justify sending the U.S. military in to stop the protests. In fact, former President George W. Bush released a statement affirming the right of Americans to protest injustice and calling on Americans to build a society which is just and fair for all. Even televangelist Pat Robertson has spoken against Trump’s call to send in U.S. troops against U.S. citizens. And the U.S. defense secretary has stated that he will refuse any orders by Trump to attack American citizens.  It appears that Trump’s pillars of support are dissolving!

Lastly, it appears that the protest leaders have discovered some of the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance. One of the protest leaders spoke of the triumph of “people power.” The phrase “people power” was used by Filipinos to describe their nonviolent overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos back in the 1980’s. Trump is now starting to look like Marcos, or like Slobodan Milosevic just before OTPOR overthrew him in Serbia's own nonviolent revolution.  The protesters against racism in America have powerfully succeeded in making oppression backfire on the oppressor.

I wonder what Putin’s Russia thinks of all of this, since it is clear that the Russian government has been behind the rise of many far-Right national leaders (including Trump) over the last several years.  It must be hard for him to see that all the work he did to mess up the United States seems now to be going up in smoke. Maybe a people power revolution will come soon to a town near him!

One warning: though there is much good news coming out of the re-emerging movement for racial justice, we can't yet claim victory.  Trump is still President.  Therefore, we must remain vigilant, stay on the offensive, and make ourselves as smart and resourceful as possible.