A Modest Objection To "The Body Keeps The Score"

The present times are rather terrible, both globally and here in the United States.  We who are not of the rich and powerful are under a full onslaught being waged by those who are rich and powerful, and want to bring back the sort of status quo which existed in the early part of the 20th century.  Rights and protections are being rolled back by those who want to revive colonialism and white supremacy.  The effects of their efforts are widespread and tragic, as we have seen and will continue to see in my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.

One of the more curious responses to this phenomenon come from those members of the dominant culture who claim to be "woke" or who seem to sympathize with the plight of those of us who have once again become targets of oppression.  One of the expressions of this sympathy consists of framing the discussion of the ways in which oppression and the revival of racism hurts the oppressed in such a way as to imply that this oppression leaves the oppressed permanently debilitated.  And along this line, one book that has recently gotten a bit of press is The Body Keeps The Score.  This book describes the long-term traumatic psychological and physical effects of the stress of living in a hostile society, and its premise seems to be that the long-term experience of hostility, persecution and oppression can produce long-term debilitating effects from which the sufferers of such experiences cannot recover.  (By the way, where did the use of the word "woke" as an adjective come from?  Does the dominant culture really believe that we who are not members of it can't use a more grammatically correct term like "awakened"?)

Now I must admit that I have not yet read The Body Keeps The Score.  But lately I get more than a little uncomfortable when I hear so-called sympathizers going on and on about how our experiences of oppression can produce long-term debilitation that is impossible to overcome.  I get irked by people who imply that our experiences of oppression tend to permanently disable us or to permanently reduce our capacity to fulfill our human potential.  To me, such expressions of so-called sympathy tend to reinforce the message that we who are of the oppressed are thus permanently robbed of our agency.  Such expressions of sympathy seem to imply that we who are of the oppressed should therefore give up trying to overcome our oppression and simply accept damaged lives and damaged identities.  (To use a cheesy analogy, imagine a scene in a space-opera sci-fi movie in which a green-skinned, three-eyed, lizard-faced commander of an enemy spaceship is telling the movie's protagonist, "Captain! As you can see, we've destroyed your death ray, we've damaged your engines, and we've blasted a few new holes in your ship.  Only your neutron torpedo launchers are still working.  Perhaps you should surrender ...")

To those who are unwittingly broadcasting this message I say please reconsider what you are saying.  To those who are knowingly using expressions of "sympathy" to broadcast such a message, I say you're full of garbage.  What's more, I have logical, historical counter-examples to show that you are full of garbage.  To name a few, consider:

Nelson Mandela.  While he was a prisoner of the white apartheid South African regime, he maintained a strict schedule of weekly exercise in order to keep himself in top physical and cognitive shape.  As documented by Alex Soojung Kim-Pang, Mandela found that keeping in good shape helped him to think more clearly and to effectively deal with the frustrations and outrages of being a political prisoner.  It also helped him to show his captors that he remained in charge of his own life and destiny, no matter what they tried to do.

The Polish Underground Schools in World War Two. When Germany invaded Poland during World War Two, the Germans sought to destroy all higher education in Poland.  (The Russians also tried to do this in the 1800's during their involvement in the 19th century partition of Poland.)  This was in order to turn the entire nation into a nation of manual laborers who would serve the Germans as slaves.  Yet the Poles resisted.  One of their methods of resistance - a shining example of building parallel institutions as a means of strategic nonviolent resistance - was the creation of a network of underground schools for their children.  By this means, Polish scientific and technical capabilities were preserved so that they could once again flourish when freedom was won.

Admiral James Stockdale.  I am not a fan of American involvement in Vietnam during the 1960's and early 1970's.  I think that American involvement in the Vietnam war was an expression of American stupidity, narcissism, and hubris which blinded this country to the realities of another people's lived experience and history.  However, I must say that James Stockdale's experience of suffering and survival as a prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese provides great inspiration and insight into how people who must face hostile circumstances can survive and eventually prevail.  To quote Stockdale, "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

The Guiding Lights of the Civil Rights Struggle.  Consider people like Robert Moses, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, the organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Rosa Parks.  Consider Rosa Parks especially - note her quiet, dignified demeanor and the way she carried herself.  See in these people - in their language, behavior and dress - how they communicated the message that they would not let their identity be defined by their oppressors.  

We who are once again targets of oppression have a hard slog ahead.  Part of that slog consists, as Stockdale said, of "the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."  But the purpose of that confrontation is that we might begin to build a strategy to overcome those brutal facts.  I am thinking of two particular works of fiction to which I have been exposed in the last seven years.  One was The Warmth of Other Suns, and it was recommended to me by someone in a reading group that was organized by the management of my workplace shortly after Trump stole the White House in 2017.  I never read the book because I was turned off by the person who recommended it to me.  It seemed that the purpose of the book (and of the workplace reading circle) was to induce us to have a good cry over our shared experience of suffering as African-Americans, in the hope that after our cry we'd feel better and become pacified.  I don't have time for that kind of garbage!

The other work of fiction was a short story that I read this year, in 2023, and it is "Tempus Fugit" by a French woman of Black African descent named Ketty Steward.  I liked that story!  In it, the intended targets of oppression reclaim their agency by overcoming their situation.  Ketty Steward rocks!

P.S. If you have read The Body Keeps The Score and you have evidence that I have misinterpreted some of the press surrounding this book and others like it, please feel free to present your evidence.  I'm not above eating my words from time to time...

How Decent People Should Respond To The Murder of Tyre Nichols

I wasn't planning to write another blog post this weekend.  And I have grown to dislike regular exposure to the news.  But the police murder of Tyre Nichols came to my attention within the last few hours.  Tyre Nichols was an unarmed African-American man who was brutally beaten to death by the police in Memphis, Tennessee.  Tennessee is a red state ruled by Republicans and I am sure that many of its citizens are white evangelicals who loudly proclaim the name of Jesus even though they have no intention of doing anything He actually commanded them.

The question that naturally arises after yet another White murder of unarmed Black people is how we who are people of color should respond.  I wrote an extensive series of blog posts on that subject a little more than two years ago.  Those posts can be found on the sidebar of this blog, under the headings, "From Dictatorship to Democracy" and "Resistance In The Age of Trump."  These posts deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of liberation of historically oppressed peoples.  Let me summarize some key points from those posts as follows:

• Strategic nonviolent resistance is an effective means of liberation - especially when it is guided by wise strategy.

• Strategic nonviolent resistance does not consist of trying to convert the oppressor by appealing to the "better angels" of the oppressor.

• Strategic nonviolent resistance works best when an oppressed population withdraws its cooperation from a system of oppression in ways that impose coercive costs on that system and its masters.

• The best kind of coercive costs which an oppressed people can impose are economic costs.  Think of things like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance.

• A key component of effective strategic nonviolent resistance consists of the oppressed population building their own structures for individual and communal self-reliance.  This way they will not need to rely on the structures of the oppressor.

• Effective resistance does not rely solely or even primarily on mass protest marches.

• Mass protest marches are not as effective now as they were in the past, because oppressors have learned how to discredit the protests by sending agents provocateurs into the marches to cause violence and vandalism.

• One of the main strengths of strategic nonviolent resistance is its nonviolent character.  Therefore beware of any people (especially from the white community) who try to persuade you to mix violence (including vandalism or property damage) of any kind into your struggle.  If you listen to them, you will give the oppressor a ready-made excuse to increase his oppression.  That is why the oppressor sends such people to try to infiltrate your struggle.  The oppressor will use any means to try to force your struggle to turn violent.  If the oppressor can successfully tempt you to use violence or to destroy property, then he can justify using force to violently crush you.  Maintain nonviolent discipline!  If you maintain nonviolent discipline, then any violence which your oppressor inflicts on you will backfire on him instead.

• This means that you should probably not listen to anything said by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict from 2016 onward or to anything said by Erica Chenoweth from 2019 onward.  These people used to give good advice up to 2016.  After Trump entered the White House, the advice of the ICNC began to turn to garbage.  (I wonder - was that change deliberate?)  And in my opinion, Erica Chenoweth's recent book titled Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know is a continuation of that garbage.

• Effective strategic nonviolent resistance requires people to develop the art of strategic thinking and of learning to work together in long-term projects of collective self-reliance.  Start developing these skills.

A Story That Illustrates: The Sea Goddess' Bloom

This weekend is once again one of those weekends in which I have very little time for anything except catching up on work.  So today's post will be extra short.  However, I'd like to recommend a story which was published recently in an online magazine/podcast combination known as Escape Pod.  The name of the story is "The Sea Goddess' Bloom" and it was written by Uchechukwu Nwaka, a Ph.D lecturer at the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Nigeria.  To me, the story and character arcs are a beautiful illustration of a point I made in a post on this blog titled, "How The Straight Subverts The Crooked."

Freire's Pedagogy: 1. On Becoming Fully Human

In this post, we begin to explore a theme which logically follows from our consideration of strategic nonviolent resistance, as outlined in the series of posts I wrote on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  Freedom from oppression is the goal of a liberation struggle based on strategic nonviolent resistance.  This liberation struggle cannot be successful if it is waged only by isolated individuals.  It must be waged by people in collective, interdependent relationship - that is, by people who have chosen to organize.  The question then becomes how to persuade people to organize.  

The answer to this question has been explored by various people from various angles.  Marshall Ganz has developed the story of self/story of us/story of now framework as a means of activizing people.  This method relies on crafting an organizing call that resonates with the values of the people one is trying to organize.  On the other hand, Jack DuVall has pointed out the necessity of appealing to the reason of the people one is trying to organize, so that they may know exactly what is the substance of the cause they are being asked to join.  According to DuVall, it is this appeal to reason which leads to passionate commitment among those who are organized for the cause of liberation, as they see a cause which reflects their deeply-held values.

These viewpoints provide valuable instruction, yet they may not adequately explain why it is so often so hard to rouse oppressed people to liberating action.  I believe that this explanation is provided in large part by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Freire's book begins to explore why oppressed peoples so often act for a long time in ways that do not reflect a desire for freedom, but rather for its opposite, and what foundational work must be done to begin to liberate people in their minds so that they can begin to liberate themselves in actuality.  Thus today's post begins the exploration of Freire's Pedagogy, starting appropriately with Chapter 1.

So we begin with a foundational question, namely, what is the purpose of freedom.  Freire answers this by stating that "the people's vocation" is to become more fully human.  I would put it as this: that our calling is to fulfill our ontogeny (that is, the reason why we were created as human beings) to the greatest extent possible.  However, the reality of living in a fallen world is that some people don't believe they can reach their full human potential unless they steal from others the ability to fulfill their human potential.  

(A present-day case of this theft is the move by Russia to send 100,000 troops to the Russia-Ukraine border in order to invade Ukraine.  Why has Putin done this?  Because he's gotten it stuck into his evil head that he can't fulfill his ontogeny (or Russia's) unless he seizes the entire world as his possession.  Ukraine was the intended first morsel of his feast - but the brave Ukranians have not allowed themselves to be swallowed so easily, so it's taken Putin over seven years to try to swallow them.  Putin (and his familiar spirit Aleksandr Dugin) assign pretentious possessive names to the regions of the rest of the world - terms like "the near abroad" and the "far abroad," by which they really mean "our near abroad" and "our far abroad."  Putin and his fellow travelers believe that unless Russian "influence" has unrestrained reach throughout the world, his identity will suffer an intolerable insult.  Russian "influence" in this case amounts to sadism as defined by Freire.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Message to Putin: Yo, dude - the rest of the world doesn't want to be Russian!  I'd like to say a few choice words to that thieving little man in his bunker - but I must restrain myself...)

Freire states that while humanization is the people's vocation, that humanization is stolen from the people by those who oppress.  This theft constitutes dehumanization - dehumanization of those who are victims of this theft, because it is a distortion of their humanity.  This theft also dehumanizes the thieves, turning them into something less than human - for they must be less than human in order to mistreat their fellow human beings the way they do.  The oppressor becomes so dehumanized by his oppression that he cannot free himself from it.  Only the oppressed have the power to free both themselves and their oppressors.  Freire sounds a hopeful note, however, in the following statement: "Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so."  

However, at first, many members of the oppressed population do not see freedom as a new collective possibility, nor do they recognize the healthy new identity of freedom which they are being called to express.  Instead, the experience of the oppressive environment in which they live conditions them to internalize the oppressor, so that they mistakenly come to believe that becoming more fully human means to become like the oppressor.  Thus we have people among oppressed communities of color whose disease is so far beyond mere "Uncle Tom-ism" that they inhabit the land of Stockholm Syndrome - people like Larry Elder, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Clarence Thomas.    We also see those who seek to become "courtiers" to the oppressors by becoming part of the apparatus of the oppressor's "false generosity" - a generosity which actually is designed to cement the oppressor's control over the oppressed society.  As members of the oppressor's organs of false generosity, they seek to become brokers and middlemen between the oppressors and the oppressed.  In these and in other ways, some members of the oppressed look for hierarchal ladders to climb so that they can become big shots.  To quote Freire again, "But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'sub-oppressors'...Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.  This is their model of humanity."  

Freire also says that "The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom."  This fear of freedom deserves further exploration, but that exploration will have to wait until the next post of this series.  However, those who want to see an example of the conditioning of the oppressed by an oppressive environment and their consequent fear of freedom can refer to a post by Cynthia Kunsman on her blog Under Much Grace.  The title of the post is "The First Step Towards Understanding Jill and Jessa Duggar’s Fox Interview: Second Generation Adults in Cultic/High Demand Religion", and it deals with the effects of high-demand, highly authoritarian religious cultic groups on children of adult parents who become involved in such groups.   

The Adlerian Organizer

In recent days, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been sounding a needed alarm about the state of democracy in the United States at present, as well as the continuing efforts by the Republican Party to destroy American democracy by restricting the right to vote in various states.  Therefore I want to return once again to one of the closing themes of my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  This is the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "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...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

In a previous post I said that building an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed" starts when the oppressed start organizing themselves into local, small groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  As they grow, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

I also mentioned that this kind of organizing was key to many of the successful liberation struggles of the past.  Yet we see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  It is good to ask why this is so.  As I mentioned in the post I have cited, a partial answer can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, specifically in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that book, Freire posits that the oppressed are conditioned by their environment and by the education imposed on them by the oppressor.  This education (which takes place in all areas of society and not just the classroom) teaches the oppressed that they are merely passive victims of a fate that is imposed on them and which they must merely accept.  On the other hand, the pedagogy which leads to liberation opens the minds of the oppressed to see their situation as a problem which can be critically examined.  Critical examination of this problem leads to the realization that the problem can be challenged, changed and overcome.  Seeing the problem as something that can be changed leads to the realization that the oppressed have the power to make that change.  The outcome of this realization is that the oppressed begin to live in freedom - that is, they begin to make the changes which they see as necessary to change their situation.

In other words, Freire treats the problem of oppression in a certain sense as a problem of cognition, a problem whose solution starts with the oppressed becoming first free in their minds.  And yet freedom can be somewhat frightening, even though it begins only in the mind first.  For a free mind begins to lead to free actions.  And those who choose to begin to live in freedom will almost always begin to bear the costs of their choice, for their oppressors will begin to make the choice of freedom costly.  Those who are frightened by the cost of freedom will often therefore reject the dawning awareness that freedom is possible in order to continue their submerged existence as oppressed people without being bothered by their consciences.  So we have two kinds of oppressed people: those who are not free because they don't realize that freedom is possible, and those who are not free because they are unwilling to pay the cost of becoming free.  What is to be done for this second group of oppressed people?

I believe I have stumbled on what is at least a partial answer.  It is found in some of the writings and teachings of a European psychiatrist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Dr. Alfred Adler.  

Adler was an interesting character, who made much metaphorical hay from the simple realization that people always have reasons for the things they do - even when the things being done are dysfunctional or cause self-harm.  The experience of being oppressed tends to lead to dysfunctional behavior by the oppressed.  But this dysfunctional behavior has a goal, namely, to compensate psychologically for the damage done by the oppressive situation.  I suggest that this dysfunctional behavior often consists of what looks like passivity, fatalism, and apathy, and that it is an expression of "exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence."  According to the Adler Graduate School, the objective of Adlerian therapy is "to replace exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution."  What the organizer is trying to bring about is the "courageous social contribution" of oppressed people coming together into groups to achieve their common liberation.

Thus one part of an organizer's work is to help his or her people begin to see their own motives and the role of these motives in their continued enslavement or oppression.  For it is these motives which motivate the continued passivity of the oppressed and their continued refusal to live in freedom.  Adler used a graphic word picture to describe the process of getting patients to see both the dysfunction and the consequences of certain motives, namely the idea of "spitting in the patient's soup" in order to make the dysfunctional behaviors less palatable.  This notion of spitting into someone else's soup conjures images of organizers going to their people and telling those people what is wrong with their ongoing passivity.  However, the best and most skillful Adlerians get the patient to spit into his or her own soup - that is, they use respectful Socratic dialogue to get their people to admit to themselves out loud what are the motives, goals and consequences of their choices.  From that admission can spring the discussion of better ways to meet the goals of their people.

So it is that Adlerian dialogue can be seen as a component of Freirian problem-posing education of the sort that turns passive, fatalistic, atomized members of the oppressed into purposeful, united, interdependent people laboring together for their common liberation.  There is more that can be said about this, but I need to do some further reading both of Freire and of Adler!  Stay tuned...

Strategic NVR In Action: The Colorado Trucker Boycott

As I mentioned in my last post, my blogging schedule for the next few months will usually be bi-weekly, so that every two weeks a post will be published.  The posts will usually be on Sundays.  However, should there be an event which merits commentary, I may write a short post in between the major biweekly posts.  Today's post is one of those short posts.

I want to call attention to the case of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a Cuban immigrant to the United States.  Mr. Aguilera-Mederos was employed as a semi truck driver (for those who use British English, "semi truck" means "lorry"), and was recently sentenced to a 110-year prison term for the deaths of four people in an accident in Colorado in which the brakes on the truck driven by Aguilera-Mederos failed, preventing him from safely stopping.  The sentencing was determined in large part by the prosecutor in his trial, a Ms. Kayla Wildeman, who "celebrated the harsh verdict" according to one source.  This same Ms. Wildeman reports to a chief deputy district attorney named Trevor Moritzky.  Moritzky gave Wildeman a trophy for the harsh sentence handed down, yet Moritzky managed to obtain only a misdemeanor conviction for a Colorado police officer who raped a woman in the back seat of his police car.  According to another source, Aguilera-Mederos' case also differs from that of a white motorist in Texas named Ethan Couch, who received only ten years probation at his initial sentencing after he killed four people while speeding and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.  His parents were wealthy.  (See this also.)

I must say now that while many posts on my blog have condemned white supremacy, I do not believe that all white Americans are evil.  There are examples of good men and women who do not believe that they and they alone should rule the earth and that they have the right to treat the rest of us as their slaves or punching bags.  However, the prosecution of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos is yet another example of how much of the American "justice" system is corrupted by right-wing white supremacists who seek to use the power of the state to vent their unresolved rage.  Not only do these supremacists want to dump that rage on people of color, but they even rage against those of their own people who do not share their monstrous sense of entitlement and their malignant narcissism, as is seen by the murder of two white people and the wounding of a third by Kyle Rittenhouse.  It seems that Mr. Rittenhouse took exception to the fact that his victims were standing in solidarity with people of color.  Mr. Rittenhouse is, in my book, a pile of human garbage, as is the jury which miscarried justice by acquitting him of murder. 

To repeat, the "justice" system in the United States at present is merely the tool of those who are rich and white and who wish to dominate.  Therefore, many of the verdicts rendered by that system are actually a miscarriage of justice.  Among the victims of that miscarriage of justice, the standard response to that miscarriage over the last several years has consisted of things like mass protests, listening sessions, bumper stickers proclaiming that our lives matter, petitions, and attempts to have conversations about "race".  In other words, our strategy has looked much like trying to convert our oppressors by trying to have conversations with them.  

But the case of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos has begun to show something different.  Aguilera-Mederos was not drunk or intoxicated, and did not willfully and deliberately kill people, but was involved in an accident.  (Note to Kayla Wildeman and Trevor Moritzky: go find a dictionary and look up the word "accident."  The job of a prosecutor is no place for doofuses.)  His sentencing was harsh and unfair.  And while there have been protests in response, there has also been something else - something with teeth that can bite.  Truckers have begun to boycott Colorado.  This boycott has begun to produce results FAST.  When you can't get things in a certain state because truckers refuse to make deliveries to your state, you tend to sit up and take notice.

And this is the power of strategic nonviolent resistance when it's done strategically.  Effective resistance is NOT protest (at least, not solely or even mainly protest), because protests by themselves do NOT impose coercive costs on an oppressor.  Effective resistance is the coordinated, unified withdrawal of economic and political support from an oppressive system.  If that withdrawal is done according to a wise strategy, the oppressed can cripple the system which is oppressing them.  For effective resistance to have long-term staying power, communities of the oppressed need to build their own self-sufficiency by means of what one writer calls "self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement."  This is how one can engage in long-term strikes and boycotts which inflict pain and which strike fear into the heart of anyone who wishes to be an oppressor!  For those of us in communities of color, it is this kind of power which we need to build.  

Let's see how Mr. Aguilera-Mederos' case goes.  If Colorado does not commute his sentence (and fast!), I may post a list of companies which are headquartered in Colorado, so that boycotts can be organized against them.

The Urgent Need for Conscientização

[Note: For much of the last two years, I have been posting to this blog on a once-per-week basis.  Lately that has changed to posting once every two weeks.  For the next several months, I will remain on my current blogging schedule as much as possible, so I will continue to post once every two weeks.]

The end of a year is often a time in which people project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto the future.  Those who have become accustomed to easy, privileged lives tend to be on the hopeful side of the forward-lookers; those who have had experience of hard times tend to look forward more soberly.  Certainly the last few years have given the world an abundance of reasons to approach the future soberly and cautiously - even in the privileged nations of the Global North.  In the United States, for instance, we have seen the erosion of civility and safety for many groups of people.  We have also experienced widespread environmental catastrophes such as the wildfires of 2020, and the explosive growth of tent cities comprised of the recently disenfranchised.  We have seen the beginning of the breakdown of those supply chains which nourished the consumerism of the nations of the Global North.  We have witnessed the hyper-concentration of the world's wealth into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of so-called "owners".  We have witnessed the emergence of a pandemic whose consequences will be with us for decades into the future.  We have witnessed the undeniable  accelerating consequences of the destruction of the earth's environment, the increasing loss of safe and healthy habitats for the world's biosphere.

And we have witnessed another loss, namely the global loss of safe spaces for democracy.  Consider the following reports:

• "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

The series of posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance and on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy have been my response to this loss of safe spaces for democracy, and especially the damage done to American democracy during the regime of Donald Trump.  Among the themes discussed in those posts, the last theme discussed was the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "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...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

What does it look like to build an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed"?  It starts when local, small groups of the oppressed organize themselves into groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  Moreover, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

History is full of examples of this process in action, from the "constructive program" of Indian self-reliance organized by Gandhi against the British empire to the preparations for strikes and boycotts by the Black majority of South Africa which helped to end the apartheid regime in that country to the parallel institutions organized by the Polish against conquerors and oppressors in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Indeed, I might suggest that one sign that oppressed people have become liberated in their minds is that they begin to organize ways of taking care of themselves without relying on their oppressors, in order that they might then withdraw their labor from the continued support of the oppressor in order to break the oppressor.

We see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  (It would be good to ask why.  More on that later.  Let's just say that this kind of organizing is the hardest kind there is at present.)  What we see instead among the oppressed are either masses of people who are apathetic and fatalistic in the face of their suffering, or we see people who put their hopes entirely in elections, even though they now live in countries in which the electoral process is breaking or has been broken.  Among those who trust in elections, there are "organizers" who seek to stand for the oppressed or for the environment or for something better than unrestrained predatory capitalism.  Their ethics are indeed worthy of praise.  But their strategy and tactics revolve around trying to organize political campaigns to get the right sort of people elected.  And their story of self/story of us/story of now dialogue with the people they try to recruit focuses on the short-term transactional goal of merely getting people to vote a certain way.  Their "dialogue" thus degenerates into a manipulative, slogan-laden monologue.  So the "collective action" of the people is reduced to merely casting a ballot once every few years, and once the ballot is cast, the "collective action" goes away - and has to be rebuilt almost from scratch during the next election cycle.  And the battle between the oppressors and those who seek change by means of political action becomes merely a battle between dueling emotive slogans.

Now I do believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to participate in the electoral process.  It is partly because of decent people who did not vote in 2016 that we had to suffer four years of Trump.  But voting is not the only characteristic of good citizenship.  And to rely on voting alone as a means of positive change is a grave mistake.  In democracies whose democratic processes are being sabotaged or have become broken, election seasons have become downright nasty.  (To me as a citizen of the United States, the last several election cycles have not been a time of hope or of joy but rather like a paroxysm of coughing during a long bout with pertussis or like one of the paroxysms of fever and chills which characterize a long bout of malaria!  Except that in this case, it's the Global Far Right that is the infectious agent.  And next year, here we go again...)

The kind of organizing which liberates the oppressed in their minds so that they begin to collectively take charge of their own destiny - this is the kind of organizing which truly transforms.  To quote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the true organizer must labor with the oppressed to forge a pedagogy of liberation - "a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.  This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48).  In other words, the organizer engages with the people he or she is trying to organize, in order to collectively create a "story of us" and a "story of now" by which the people thus organized begin to change their world.  

The organizer's task is to engage his or her people in an act of what Freire calls "problem-posing education", where "...people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.  Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world.  Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 83)  To break this down into simpler pieces, the education of the oppressed should do the following:

• 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...")

And this change in consciousness is not something which the organizer shoves ready-made down the throats of his or her people, but something that arises as a result of dialogue as organizer and people engage in common reflection upon the world.

It is this patient work of consciousness-raising which is lacking from the work of many organizers who seek to reverse the rise of oppressive autocracy in the world today.  And while I have enjoyed my contact with the Leading Change Network over the last year or so, it seems to me that the members and teachers in this network have a surprisingly weak knowledge of this kind of organizing.  (For that matter, so do I.  But I do want to get stronger!)  This weakness of knowledge has led the LCN increasingly to organizational efforts which focus solely on electoral politics and whose tactics seem at times to be shifting away from bona fide organizing to mere mobilizing. 

It is because I want to strengthen my ability to do this consciousness-raising work that I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts exploring Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This may be my next series.  Those who want to read along with me will, I am sure, be able to find online versions of the book if they want.  Otherwise, the book itself is not that expensive.  The aim of my exploration of this book will be to answer the question of how to lead oppressed people from passivity to the kind of activized consciousness that causes the oppressed to collectively take charge of their own destiny.  This movement is the beginning of any true liberation struggle.

The Ride Of The Gray Cowboys

At the beginning of this year, as part of the work that pays bills, I found myself checking out a book on digital logic design.  The book was intriguing because it made use of a piece of open-source digital circuit simulation software.  (I always like reading about how to use free tools!)  As I read the preface, I ran across a paragraph titled, "How to Acquire Intuition?"  The paragraph explained why instilling mathematical rigor through proofs is a key part of instilling the mathematical intuition needed to understand digital logic circuits.  As a criticism of the modern way in which many technical subjects are taught, the authors wrote the following sentence: 

All we can say is that this strategy [that is, the non-proof strategy] is in complete disregard of the statement: "When you have to shoot, shoot.  Don't talk"  [Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly].

Let me assure you that today's post is not about digital circuits!  But I have to admit that the quote intrigued me for reasons that are completely non-technical.  You see, I have never watched The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - although I have known that this movie and other movies like it helped launch the big-name careers of some hitherto obscure actors, including Clint Eastwood.  So I checked out a few YouTube clips from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and I pondered the career of Mr. Eastwood.

I have seen only a couple of Clint Eastwood movies in my entire life, but I know that he made a big name for himself as an actor by specializing in the portrayal of morally ambiguous leading characters, characters for whom one might root if one was still a kid, but whom one's parents might not allow around their children.  A case in point is his Dirty Harry character - a cop who doesn't quite play by the rules, a cop who makes us wonder whether or not he'll really do the right thing in the end, a cop whose message seems in part to be that the end justifies the means.  Eastwood's "spaghetti Western" roles were similarly morally gray characters, a somewhat jarring contrast to the image of the American cowboy which had been built up in American culture until that time - the absolutely pure and wholesome blond-white-and blue adult male "Boy Scout" in white hat, set in opposition to the utterly evil, black-hatted villain in the western movies and pulp novels of the early to mid-20th century.

Eastwood's characters largely get away with their moral ambiguity in his movies, as things usually seem to work out in their favor by the time of the closing credits.  In other words, the consequences of moral ambiguity are portrayed as positive for the ambiguous character who has the right skills.  Yet there are other storytellers who provide a glimpse into the costs and side effects of such ambiguity.  One such storyteller was the late John le Carre, whose subject matter was the spy as an agent of government and empire.  Like Eastwood's characters, le Carre's characters were intended to poke holes in a romanticized depiction of a certain type of hero - namely, the sort of uber-cool, gadget-laden, macho adventurer-spy typified by James Bond.  Like Eastwood's characters, Bond is morally ambiguous in his means, but in the movies, it's always okay because we are told that the ultimate end is ultimately good.  In le Carre's work, by contrast, the spy is seen as a morally ambiguous agent of a morally questionable empire, and the things which the empire demands of the spy in the course of his job frequently end up destroying his soul.  

Thoughts of le Carre (whose audiobooks I have recently been enjoying) bring me to a central question of tonight's post, namely, what sort of society we create for ourselves when we choose to live by the dictum, "Do not be excessively righteous, and do not be overly wise.  Why should you ruin yourself?  Do not be excessively wicked, and do not be a fool.  Why should you die before your time?" (Ecclesiastes 7:16-17)  In such a society, we may start out with a righteous end, yet find that in our misguided zeal we choose means that are completely incompatible with the end we profess.  Or - and this seems far more likely nowadays - we may find ourselves searching for ends and means which maximize our own personal advantages regardless of the ultimate righteousness of those ends, even though we say otherwise.  This leads to such things as the ambiguity and the sometimes immense suffering that comprises the legacy of Mao Zedong.  Or the fiendish Machiavellian legacy of V.I. Lenin and the horrors which the Bolsheviks unleashed on Russia and Eastern Europe.  Or the regime of the recently ousted former President Trump (although he seems to have heeded the part of Ecclesiastes which said not to be too good and to have disregarded the part that said not to be too evil!).  Or the legacy and ongoing "witness" of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church, which has by now conclusively proven that it has nothing to do with the Lord Jesus Christ because it has no intention of ever doing what He commanded - especially in the Sermon on the Mount.  Rather, this church has shown that it is the spread-legged whore and serving wench of secular earthly economic and political power, a mere means to a materialist end consisting of earthly domination for a certain select group of people.  When we consider American evangelicalism, we see that one consequence of the toleration of moral ambiguity is a society in which people say things merely to try to achieve certain effects in their hearers, rather than saying things in order to communicate truth.  Hence, for instance, the Right's defense of Trump even in the face of Trump's own moral contradictions.

In short, if Clint Eastwood's characters are the sort of people whom good parents don't let near their children, then morally ambiguous societies are the sorts of places in which good parents don't let their children play - because someone is bound to get hurt in such places.  When such societies do arise (for "it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come"), then it becomes necessary for decent people to resist such societies and the masters who run them.  This has been the motivation for the series of posts I have written on strategic nonviolent resistance during the Trump presidency, and especially during the last eighteen months.  And if one goes through some of the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance that was written and published before the middle of the last decade, one sees that a righteous cause is a necessary ingredient of successful resistance.  It is not by itself a sufficient ingredient - for a righteous cause still needs good strategy - but without a righteous cause, what reason do people have to join a struggle?  Especially when joining a particular struggle may result in the loss of life, liberty and property?

Consider some of the things Gene Sharp said in his book How Nonviolent Struggle Works: 

• Cowardice and nonviolent struggle do not mix
• Cowards seek to avoid the conflict and flee from danger, while the nonviolent resister faces the conflict and risks the dangers involved
• Bravery in this technique of struggle is not only moral valor but a practical requirement
• Civil resisters ought to have confidence in the justice and force of their cause, principles, and means of action (Emphasis added)

Note that last point.  In other words, righteous ends must use righteous means.  Another writer, Jack DuVall, made the same point in a series of paragraphs titled, "Power from Ends" contained in an essay titled, "Civil Resistance And The Language of Power."  To quote DuVall, "For civil resistance to work, it has to shred the legitimacy of power-holders to whom it is opposed and model a higher legitimacy based on representing the real aspirations of the people.  But the fastest way to forsake that advantage is to resort to means that are not seen as legitimate."  (Emphasis added.)  This, for instance, is why Gene Sharp in his writings rejected both violence, sabotage, and the destruction of the opponent's property as appropriate means of struggle.

Contrast such moral clarity with more recent attempts during the last five or six years by so-called "civil resistance scholars" to "gray-wash" the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I am thinking particularly of a book I bought within the last few months titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know by Erica Chenoweth.  (I told you all in an earlier post that I was reading a book for which I might write a critique soon.  A delay of two months isn't exactly "soon," but I've been dragging my feet somewhat - partly because I've been busy, and partly because some parts of Chenoweth's new book make me choke.  More on that in another post.)  I had guardedly high hopes for the book when I first heard about it, but I had already begun to prepare myself for the possibility that Chenoweth might have become among the morally compromised "scholars" who now seem to inhabit the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.  It's a good thing I did prepare myself.  For on page 57 of her book, she seeks to legitimize those who want to include property destruction in the arsenal of what she calls "civil resistance", saying, "When it is disciplined and discriminating, and sends a clear message, property destruction can be considered a nonviolent method of sabotage..."  And she goes on to cite the Boston Tea Party as an example of the wise use of sabotage in a nonviolent struggle.  However, I'd like to suggest that perhaps the backfire among loyalists which resulted from this act has been overlooked.  And on page 79, she suggests that sometimes a movement can achieve strength only by partnering with allies who may not be willing to remain nonviolent, saying that "...questions of justice and political effectiveness are often in tension.  Most scholars of civil resistance stay agnostic on this question by leaving aside moral questions altogether and focusing on strategy, not morality..."  Similarly, chapter 3 of her book appears at first reading to be a moral minefield for a reader such as myself, as she paints those voices who advocate for allowing limited movement violence as people who are engaged in an honest debate over the effectiveness of tactics.

But it seems to me that the evaluation of civil resistance tactics and strategy solely on the basis of their supposed "effectiveness" can lead to a trap if we ignore the righteousness or unrighteousness of the strategy and tactics in question.  (It can also lead resisters to adopt means, methods, and ends that are both immoral and violent.)  For by ignoring questions of morality or righteousness, we ultimately ignore the Scriptural maxim that "...whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."  Such a maxim is easy to forget precisely because we humans tend to look at trends from time scales that are too short.  By way of analogy, for those who are handy with math, consider a parabolic function whose vertex is positive and nonzero, yet whose vertex is a maximum and not a minimum.  Over a short enough interval of the independent variable, the function looks like it will rise forever.  But over a long enough interval, we see that the function value eventually crashes back to zero before becoming forever negative.  Such are the ultimate results of moral graywashing - sooner or later, you lose.

Strategic Nonviolent Resistance - What's It To Me?

Those who have read this blog over the last five years have been exposed to a large number of posts which deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance by oppressed people against an oppressive power.  Those who have followed this blog for the last twelve months have been exposed to a rather detailed, in-depth analysis of a particular book on strategic nonviolent resistance, namely, From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by the late Dr. Gene Sharp.  Each one of the posts in that analysis has involved a fair bit of weekly research - in some cases several hours for a single post.  That research was all performed on my own personal time, during a period in which I had many other responsibilities.  (In my last post I mentioned how good it feels to finally take time to clean and fix certain things around the house.  Those things got some serious neglect during the last year!)

Readers might well then ask, "Why did you take all this time to do this research?  Why did you embark on such an exhaustive analysis?"  Some of these readers (including a certain Aunt Tammy I know) may think they already have the answer from the general subject matter of my blog, and may tell themselves, "Oh, he's just a geek - he likes reading lots of books, and this particular subject just happened to catch his interest."  But that would leave unanswered the question of why I spent over $2,000 and 15 weeks of my life in 2019 to take a distance course in community organizing from Harvard University.  Upon finding out that I had taken such a step, some might say, "Oh, he's just an idealist - he's naturally drawn to activism.  Let's see if we can figure out his Myers-Briggs personality type..."  

But if you learned that I am an African-American, you might gain a few clues to the actual motivation for my study of strategic nonviolent resistance, and my attempts to organize it over the last few years among my people.  You might also gain a few clues as to why I have chosen to try to be an organizer in the first place.  In learning community organizing from the Harvard course, I learned that one of the first things an organizer needs to do is to tell his "story of self" to his audience, so that they might know what called the organizer to become an organizer.  I haven't yet told you the full version of my story of self.  Today you'll get to read it.  However, according to the Harvard course, telling my story of self is supposed to take no more than two minutes, and the version I am about to give you will take slightly longer than that.  (If you are a member of the Leading Change Network and you are reading this, please don't tell on me...!)  One other note: on my blog is a request that commentary contain only clean, family-friendly language.  For today's post and today's post only, I'm going to relax that policy just a bit.

*   *   *

 

I still remember when my mom told me to go into the front yard and fight a kid who was bigger than me.  It was on a summer afternoon between my 6th and 7th grade.  Our family had moved into our house the year before, and the house was located in a very white part of Southern California, and that was in the days when blatant racism was the norm in American society, and we were a Black family.  My dad – a military officer – had been stopped by the city police because he was walking through the neighborhood shortly after we moved into that house.  At the school I attended, I was regularly hit or slapped by other kids whenever I dared to speak up.  These kids openly called me a nigger to my face.  I felt powerless because my attackers were many and in many cases bigger than me, and I was only one person.  And most of the teachers were not helpful.  

During that summer, some of the more aggressive bullies used to play baseball in the vacant lot next to our house, and they would come right into our front yard and freely drink from our water hose without asking.  My mom knew who these kids were from my frequent complaints to my teachers and parents about them.  On this particular afternoon, my mom heard these kids insulting me after she sent me out to put the water hose away. What she heard pushed her over the edge, and she told me to go outside and fight the biggest bully.  “If you don’t fight him,” she said, “then I will whip you!”

I beat the kid twice – both the first time, and then after he had gotten his parents and his parents had gathered a mob of neighbors and they had come back to my house and my mom had come outside and hit his mom with a stick because she dared to put her hand on me.  The incident became for me a snapshot of the United States – a narcissistic, thuggish nation that trashed (and still trashes) other people in order to “make America great!”  And the fight showed me what I was capable of when I got really, really angry.  I discovered just how tired I was of being treated like a punching bag.

When I became an adult, I thought those unpleasant days were behind me, because I was able to put myself through college and start a career as a technical professional.  So it took me a long time – too long – to realize that the racism of American society had never really gone away.  It had just gone underground.  But six years ago the murders of unarmed Black victims by White cops exploded into the news.  When I read of Michael Brown lying dead in the sun for three hours – and that Darren Wilson was not punished – I saw how little Black lives actually matter to the people who run present-day American society.  I saw that there were worthless white supremacist bastards who had worked hard for decades to bring back the days when they could openly treat people of color as punching bags or as garbage, and who wanted us once again to accept being treated like garbage.

That has made me really, really angry – angry as hell.  Once again, I am being pushed to fight.  But this time I intend to both fight and win by building a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance among my people.  [Note: I did not say "nonviolence"!  Nor am I trying to be spiritual!  Rather, I read some books that taught me that this is the best way to win.]  Oppressed people begin to resist by building a new identity for ourselves based on our own self-determination.  This is is why I have chosen to start organizing my people for our own self-reliance.

*  *  *

So there you have it - my story of self.  And there you have the reason why every time I've read of some pig cop or group of pig cops shooting yet another unarmed African-American and getting away with it, I am taken in my mind back to that grade school fight.  Because that grade-school fight was typical of much of my childhood in this piece-of-garbage country known as the United States of America, this country which became great for a certain select group of people by trashing all the other peoples of earth.  You might well say that the incidents of the last several years have been rather triggering for me.  Those who suffer from PTSD will know what I mean.  And there you have the reason why the study of strategic nonviolent resistance - especially as presented in the writings of Gene Sharp - has held such appeal for me.  For Sharp's writings show how the power of oppressors can be disintegrated without the use of physical weapons.  Indeed, strategic nonviolent resistance - skillfully applied - is capable of regime change, as seen in Chapters 5 and 9 of From D to D.  I want to take strategic nonviolent resistance as far as I can possibly take it.

You may ask, Why?  Why go to such a radical extreme?  Because the events of the last decade have caused some irreversible tectonic shifts in the thinking of some of us who are members of communities of the oppressed.  We learned in our grade-school histories that the United States has been guilty of some really evil things in its bid to make itself great - yet we also learned that from time to time, there were seeming moves toward repentance.  The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation were such a move, the gains of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's were another.  But the last ten years or so have shown us that there is an irreducible, unrepentant core of ugly people within the United States who cling to their dreams of supremacy at all costs, people who will never be converted and with whom it is impossible to build "beloved communities" according to "Kingian nonviolence."  Instead, our policy must be informed by the most up-to-date best practices for dealing with personality-disordered people.  We know that those with malignant personality disorders will never change, so why build a strategy for coping with these people based on trying to change them?  Rather, as blogger Anna Valerious once wrote, we need to "distance ourselves from those who won't distance themselves from evil deeds."  

You may say, "How do you know these people can't be changed?"  My answer: because they haven't repented.  For true repentance, it's not enough to just shed a few tears.   There's something the offender must also pay.  When Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderer of Eric Garner, the murderers of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, of Breonna Taylor, of Elijah McClain, of Philando Castile, of Stephon Clark and of other victims like them are all taken off the street, rounded up and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, then it might become possible to say that the masters of our present society have changed.  When the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agents who tore Latino migrant children from the arms of their parents and threw them into cages during the Trump years are themselves thrown into prison with no way out, we might begin to say that American society has begun to repent.  When the red-state Republican governments restore voting rights which they illegally took from people of color, then we might begin to believe that they are "bringing forth fruits in keeping with repentance."

Some last things.  There are those from the dominant culture who have studied strategic nonviolent resistance and have seen how devastatingly effective it has been in toppling hard-core repressive regimes in the past.  Some of the "scholars" from this group are now busily trying to screw up the teaching of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to cause the liberation struggles of the present and future to fail.  Their strategy depends on a belief that we who are among the oppressed are stupid and gullible.  They might wind up very disappointed.  For there will emerge a world - sooner or later - which is shared equitably by all the earth's people, regardless of race, skin color or national origin, a world in which there is no one group of people which enjoys ungodly privileges compared to everyone else.  You who are of the dominant culture can fight against the emergence of that world, and for a while it may even look like you've won - but the price you will pay is that you will go to hell.  Read Luke 16:19-31.

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.

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The Plight of the Little Red Hen

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D). As we have moved into Chapters 8 and 9, the focus of these posts has turned to way in which oppressed communities use strategic nonviolent resistance to achieve long-term shifts in the balance of power between themselves and those who oppress them.  I have argued that the key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of those shifts 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 return to a quote from Chapter 9, "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, emphasis added.

How then does the building of parallel institutions by the oppressed fit into the general schema of strategic nonviolent resistance?  I'd like to suggest the following progression:

• 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.

One illustrative case study of this process in action is the Montgomery bus boycott, an action of coercive strategic nonviolent resistance that took place from December 1955 to December 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama.  The boycott was initiated by the African-American community in Montgomery due to the racist policies of dehumanizing segregation which were being enforced by the white supremacist political leaders in that city.  The grievance which was specific to the public transit system was that African-Americans were forced by law to give up their seats on a bus to any white passengers who demanded the seats, and that African-Americans were forced at all times to ride in the back of the bus.  The boycott is commonly portrayed in American mainstream media as an action that just "spontaneously" happened on a day when an African-American woman named Rosa Parks was arrested while returning home from work because she refused to give up her seat to a white man.  

In truth, there was nothing spontaneous about the boycott.  The African-American community already had a pre-existing social network of communal support, namely the network of Black churches in Montgomery.  There had already been organizers who were looking for a suitable occasion to challenge the evil law which humiliated Black bus riders on a daily basis.  Rosa Parks' arrest was merely the spark that kindled a confrontation that had already been largely planned by activists within the Black community.  And the boycott itself was sustained by the simultaneous emergence of a parallel institution which consisted of a network of African-American ride-sharing that allowed boycotters to continue to go to work each day.  

Other examples of parallel institution-building within the American context include the formation of the United Farm Workers union by Cesar Chavez.  The UFW had initially been conceived, in part, as an organization dedicated to meeting the needs of its members through such things as medical clinics and a funeral/burial fund.  Note that these things were funded by member dues, which were collected from poor migrant farm workers!  These member dues also built the strike fund which enabled the UFW to take care of its members who were put out of work by participating in strikes and boycotts.  But I want to point out that within the American context, such examples as these come largely from the fertile movement-forming middle decades of the 20th century which influenced American politics to enable communities of color to win significant rights - at least, on paper.  

Fast forward to today, a day in which it often seems that the only sort of mobilizing that comes easy is mobilizing people to participate in mass marches or rallies that take no more than a few hours of time or a few dollars of expense from those who participate.  A day, moreover, in which the most well-known members of the oppressed (as well as some of their more well-to-do self-appointed "spokespersons" from the dominant culture) busily excuse the oppressed from having to do anything for themselves at a collective level, saying instead that "these people have been downtrodden for so long that they are not mentally or psychologically capable of organizing for their own liberation."  Where does such a statement come from - especially when uttered by so-called "saviors" from the dominant culture?

To answer that question, I turn to some of the lessons I learned during the 2019 "Leadership, Organizing and Action" course that I took through Harvard University.  Module 1 of that course contains a relevant reading from the book No Shortcuts: Organizing For Power In The New Gilded Age, by Jane F. McAlevey.  McAlevey describes how movement generation has degenerated from the mid 20th-century recruitment of masses of disenfranchised people for collective long-term disruptive action.  Instead, nowadays, "...Attempts to generate movements are directed by professional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top-down theory of power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active participants in, their own liberation...", and, "Aiming to speak for - and influence - masses of citizens, droves of new national advocacy groups have set up shop..."  

These "activists" - many of whom are professional "activists" - have created activities which looks like movement-building, but in fact are nothing of the sort.  Among those activities are advocacy - in which a small, well-manicured, photogenic, upper-middle-class, and usually white cadre uses its access to media to speak "on behalf of" marginalized groups of people.  So we have people who wear buttons that say "Black Lives matter to me!"  (Thanks, but I may as well be a specimen of wildlife based on the way you are advocating for me, as if you were saying something like "Save the polar bears!")  The other ersatz activity that falls under this heading of ersatz activism is mobilizing, in which a small, well-manicured, photogenic, upper-middle-class, and usually white cadre gets together to draft a "theory of change" and a "plan of action" for a movement, and afterward recruits all the rest of us to help them implement their "plan".  So we are "mobilized" to implement a plan which may not represent our interests, since we had no say in drafting the plan in the first place.  

Let me tell you straight up that organizing - genuine, pure-D, 100 percent organizing - is harder than any kind of advocacy or mobilizing.  For organizing involves at every step - both in leadership, strategy, and execution - the ordinary people who comprise communities of the oppressed.  To quote McAlevey again: "In workplace strikes, at the ballot box, or in nonviolent civil disobedience, strategically deployed masses have long been the unique weapon of ordinary people...", and, "Organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people...the primary goal [of organizing] is to transfer power from the elite to the majority..."  In my experience, the hardest organizing of all is trying to organize present-day, 21st-century communities of the oppressed to begin to pool their resources to meet their own needs themselves, apart from any false charity offered by the dominant society.  

I have wondered often why this is so.  But first a little clarification.  I took the Harvard 2019 Leadership, Organizing and Action course after I had already tried - and completely rejected as useless - the so-called online civil resistance course offered by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2018.  The ICNC course was free, while the Harvard course cost over $2,000 and worked me like a dog for fifteen weeks.  Yet I don't regret spending a cent of that money.  The Harvard course was like a refreshing drink of cold, clean water in a desert after the swill of the ICNC course, and it most definitely was not a waste of time.  However, I must say that many of the examples we discussed in the Harvard course focused on organizing as a tool for building electoral power in order to prevail in the American electoral political process.  To me, it has seemed far, far easier to organize people to participate in a political campaign than it is to try to organize them for their own long-term collective self-sufficiency.  

Perhaps this is because of the sense of powerlessness that is far too frequently instilled in communities of the oppressed by those dominant power-holders who wear the "third face of power" described by Steven Lukes.  This third face of power dictates to the members of a society what the members can and cannot believe to be possible.  This is why it is so easy to find activists (including "saviors") from the upper-middle-class, college-educated strata of society and why it is relatively harder - significantly harder at times - to find people with the same activist zeal among those who inhabit the lower economic strata.

But perhaps this difficulty in organizing for collective self-sufficiency comes down to the innate laziness of so many of us (a sin shared by all of humanity at large), amplified by addiction to social media and the mind-numbing entertainment we receive through our glowing screens.  This has a corollary: namely the fact that so many of us have been conditioned to be freeloaders because of the "programs" of false charity which have bought off members of our communities in the past.  For an explanation of the deleterious effect of these programs, see "Services Are Bad For People" by John McKnight.  And note that I'm not saying that the dominant culture has no reparations that they need to make.  The fact is, they do - serious reparations indeed, lest they be damned!  But unless the reparations are so sweeping that they leave the dominant culture with no more power to dominate, they will function merely as a tool of control by which an oppressed population continues to be pacified.  Study the practice of euergetism in the ancient Greco-Roman world.  That euergetism has turned too many of us into the cat, the dog, and the duck in our attitude toward the frequently frustrated Little Red Hen organizer.  

I want to close with a final observation and a request.  The observation is that perhaps the framework of the story of self/story of us/story of now which has been taught by Marshall Ganz and the Leading Change Network may need to be revisited - at least a little bit.  (By the way, the Leading Change Network rocks!)  I can see how in the organizer's initial call to others to join him, his story of self needs to be brief and evocative, highlighting that pivotal moment which called the organizer to organize.  But I think the story of us necessarily takes some time, since it is a story which must be written in collaboration with other members of communities of the oppressed.  The same applies to the story of now.  And if the cost of the commitment which the organizer is asking of people is high, the amount of time required to craft a collective story of us and story of now will also increase.  A short story of us/story of now is good for nothing more than recruiting people into an electoral political campaign.  In order to organize our own parallel institutions, I think we need something deeper.  (Or maybe I just need to go back and study my notes from the Harvard course...?)

So perhaps practitioners of community organizing need to step up and tell their stories of how they succeeded in getting people to do the hard collective work of building communal self-sufficiency.  In other words, how did you successfully organize a long-term potluck among people who could only afford the ingredients for stone soup?