Last Sunday I Washed My Car

...instead of going to church... 

And I put out a little sign so my neighbors could see what I did!

So Then, What Is Soft Power?

In a previous post I mentioned the concept of "hard power" as applied to nations.  A simple definition of hard power is the ability of a particular nation to use economic and/or military means to force other nations to submit to its will.  A question naturally arises: what is the definition of "soft power"?  And what contrasts exist between the definitions of hard power versus soft power, as well as the difference in their mechanisms of action and their effects?

To answer that question, we can look to the sorts of formal, scholarly definitions crafted by well-credentialed academics.  One such academic was the late Joseph S. Nye, who originally developed soft power as a formal concept.  (See Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Chapter 4, 04/05/2004.)  Another academic, Rebecca Kivak, summarized Nye's conclusions as follows: "Soft power refers to a nation's ability to attract and persuade others through culture, political values, and foreign policies, fostering a sense of admiration and shared objectives...Soft power is the capacity of a country to get what it wants by endearing itself to others through attraction...Countries who use soft power rely on earning admiration." ("Soft and Hard Power," Kivak, EBSCO, 2025.)  Kivak also stated that "Soft power operates through the resources of culture, political ideals, and foreign policies...Culture consists of a country's values, ideals, and social practices, including its popular culture."

These formal definitions of soft power may be a mouthful to digest, but I'd like to focus on a few key words: namely, admiration, attraction, and persuasion.  It seems reasonable that admiration would lead to attraction, and attraction would lead to persuasion.  Admiration is the first step, the prerequisite to every other step in the process.  How then does a person or a collective of people (up to and including a nation) go about earning admiration?

It is interesting (and bitingly funny in a dark sort of way) that the nations of the Global North sought to use propaganda as a tool to foster admiration in the people at whom the propaganda was aimed.  Nye's book talks about how in the 20th century, the U.S., Britain, and Germany tried to use propaganda to earn points with audiences in Latin America and other nations of the Global South, and how even when Britain, the U.S., and Germany were at war, each tried to use its organs of propaganda to influence the citizens of the nation which it was fighting.  Thus did propaganda and national mass media (including visual art, movies, novels, music, and TV shows) come to be counted as tools of soft power.  This assessment of soft power was only partially accurate.  To quote one former CCM musician who was "defrocked" after cheating on his wife in the first decade of the 21st century, "the lie is always cheaper than the truth."  Or, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, "Let be be finale of seem."  Propagandists who sell things that don't live up to their hype eventually get found out.

So then, what steps are required to build a durable foundation for admiration?  Let's look at how a single individual might truthfully craft a persona worthy of admiration.  It seems that the first thing such a person needs to do is to manage his own affairs well.  In other words, what's needed is a person who provides for himself by means of honest work, a person who takes care of himself, a person who is not enslaved to addictions, a person who lives within his means, a person who to the utmost of his own personal ability tries to live an orderly, wise, and self-controlled life.  The challenges to such a life are increasing in these days of rampant inequality, yet this ideal is what we should all be aiming for, as encapsulated in the quote: "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing." - 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12.

The second thing our admirable person needs is to cultivate and possess a useful skill, a skill or craft or competency that meets needs in the world at large, even as it says  "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful." - Titus 3:14.  The kinds of skills that meet the emerging needs of the 21st century will require setting aside regular daily and weekly time for self-cultivation and self-education.  Acquiring these skills may also require enrolling as a working adult in continuing education classes and seminars taught by reputable teachers.  I would also like to suggest that for many people, the ultimate goal of this self-cultivation should be to achieve full self-employment.  But self-employment is just my own personal bias.  YMMV.

The third thing our admirable person needs is to actively practice hospitality.  This hospitality should consist of deeds of active charity toward others, and especially toward those who can't repay the favors shown to them by the person practicing hospitality.  In the New Testament, this is seen in the hospitality shown by the Good Samaritan toward the man who was almost killed by robbers (Luke 10:25-37.  Note that this hospitality was cross-cultural, inter-ethnic, and inter-religion!), and in passages like Luke 14:12-14 and James 1:27 and 2:15-16, and 1 John 3:17.

To sum up, a person who manages himself well, possesses and continues to cultivate an occupational skill useful in the larger world, and shows practical, material kindness and charity to those around him (especially those who are poor or marginalized or who can't pay him back) will be regarded by many as an admirable person.  Such a person will then be an attractive person as well.  That admirable character and attractiveness will make him a persuasive person.  And his persuasiveness will not depend on expensive PR/marketing campaigns, propagandists or spin doctors, but on the genuine evidence of the person's genuine beneficial character.  Now when we have not just one such person but entire collectives of such people, they can wield a tremendous amount of soft power.  And the reputation, benevolence, and values of such collectives can serve as a powerful contrast to the societies in which these collectives are embedded when those larger societies have been taken over by autocrats, tyrants, dictators, fascists and others who want to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by trashing everyone else.

Thus a key goal of the people who build parallel institutions in order to resist the society of the tyrant should be to cultivate this kind of genuine soft power.  Those who are part of such parallel institutions should aim to earn the reputation of providing needed works or services which the society of the oppressor is unwilling to provide.  To quote from "How to Undermine Authoritarian Control: On Empowering Parallel Institutions" (Goldman and Levin, Z Magazine, 2 April 2026), 

As authoritarianism attempts to take root in America, there are several time-tested strategies from other countries and contexts on how to fight back most effectively when the ruling regime controls most branches of government. One strategy that has been especially effective across diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts is building parallel institutions: filling the voids of government functions, services, and resources created by authoritarian regimes and their abandonment of obligations to the people. By showing government shortcomings instead of just talking about them, then organizing regular people to help fill those gaps, parallel institutions build alternative power and influence.

 From Brazil to Ukraine and India to Sudan, parallel institutions have been effective at safely and peacefully undermining authoritarian control by taking care of people where the government won’t.   [Emphasis added.]

When such parallel institutions cultivate themselves to such an extent that their soft power exceeds the cultural power of the autocratic society in which they are embedded, the collapse of the autocratic regime is only a short step away.  This power reversal should be simple to achieve in autocratic or dictatorial societies, since the whole goal of the dictator or fascist is to create a society in which one small privileged group of people gets all the goodies of the society while everyone else is starved to death.  I am thinking particularly of Russia just now as a nation that has been so thoroughly cannibalized by rich parasites that it may be on the verge of economic collapse.  As Russia's collapse is being aided and abetted by rampant elite corruption, the United States under Trump and the Rethuglicans has begun to head down the same path.  In these days, let us who count ourselves among the resistance cultivate our individual and collective soft power!

Resistance Gardening

As I mentioned in a previous post, we know that many American farmers - especially farmers who are in red states - solidly support Trump.  We also know that these farmers have begun to feel serious pain from the sanctions imposed on them by the nations to which they used to export their produce.  These sanctions were imposed by these nations in response to the tariffs on these nations' exports which were imposed by Trump.  We can increase the pressure on Trump's base by reducing our dependence on the things produced by his base.  This includes farm produce. Therefore a few months ago, I recharged my garden beds with composted cow manure and in February I started planting vegetables.  I've been planting every couple of weeks since then.  Here's what things look like today:

Snow peas, fava beans and radishes
(along with salsify and potato volunteers from last year).

Fava beans, radishes, and asparagus.

Some of the books I've been using for guidance.

This coming weekend, I intend to plant more.  I'd like to succeed in growing lettuce and bok choy (also known as 白菜）.  Also, my apple and pear trees should do well this year.  This year's garden produce represents things that I won't be buying at the supermarket.  Readers can look at my urban garden as my small step toward imposing my own sanctions on some of the red state farmers who supported Trump.  I expect that my sanctions will be delicious...

P.S. Please do continue to support those farmers who are not aligned with the Trump regime, but who instead are part of the resistance.  In particular please support the farm of Aimee and Homero.  Aimee writes the blog New To Farm Life.

The Unavoidable Cost of Process

I want to open this post with a quote from something I wrote back in January 2021, when there were high hopes among historically oppressed peoples in the United States who thought that the election victory of Biden and Harris meant that we all could put days of horror and oppression permanently behind us.  The quote is as follows:

...Those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Blessedly, these exploiters have suffered a setback as a result of the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.  However, it would be a mistake for those who are members of historically oppressed groups in the United States to take the incoming Biden administration as a permanent state of affairs in the United States.  Nor should the incoming administration be regarded as permission for these groups to become lazy or complacent.  As the Good Book says, "Do not trust in princes, in a son of a man in whom there is no salvation."  A world free from the tyranny of the few, a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples - this world will not magically come into being by itself.  We who are among the oppressed must still organize or die.  

I have further argued that this organization must be the kind of deep organizing that produces lasting structures of power by, for, and of the historically oppressed.  Why is this kind of organizing necessary?  And why is hasty short-term mobilization of people inadequate to produce lasting change? To answer that question, I present the following quotes from Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy:

Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors. [Emphasis added.]

And, 

It should be remembered that against a dictatorship the objective of the grand strategy is not simply to bring down the dictators but to install a democratic system and make the rise of a new dictatorship impossible. To accomplish these objectives, the chosen means of

struggle will need to contribute to a change in the distribution of effective power in the society. Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak... [Emphasis added.]

When we look at a nation such as the United States, we see how government capture by wealthy people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and by wealthy corporations such as Target, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, News Corporation and others has led to a drastic weakening of the power that ordinary people in the United States have over their own lives.  This capture has driven the rapid increase in inequality in the U.S., and is a powerful cause of the capture of the U.S. Federal government by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  While resistance to the present state of affairs can be expressed through economic noncooperation such as refusals to buy things from the owners of such corporations, a robust resistance movement also requires the oppressed to start building structures of collective self-reliance among themselves to replace the structures built by their oppressors.  To quote from another book, Recovering Nonviolent History, by Maciej Bartkowski,

An important element of the indirect form of resistance described in a number of chapters was the development of an autonomous society with every aspect of self-rule well before a formal independence was achieved.  Often, it took the form of society’s own schooling system, self-managed economic cooperatives, social services organizations, and judicial or quasi- governing institutions. The idea was not to take the fight directly—with the use of collective actions—to a more powerful and brutal adversary but rather to transform the society first and, through that transformation, liberate it from the control of the [oppressor]. This was a stealth resistance more than an open confrontation. Society was seen as a social organism that could grow, defy [the oppressor], and defend itself via its own self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement. [Emphasis added.  Words in brackets also added by me.]

To put it quite bluntly, those who are among the historically oppressed are going to have to start building their own collective structures for meeting their own needs.   (Hopefully I can write in more depth on this topic in future posts.) Those structures (also known as organizations) will have to start small, but we must all start somewhere.  Over the long term, moreover, these collectives must become the foundation of a society of equity and equality that can't any longer be dominated by the big, the rich, and the powerful.  This combination of economic and cultural withdrawal from the dominant systems (through such things as frugality and boycotts) along with the creation of parallel structures, collectives, and institutions that are NOT part of the dominant systems is what eventually erodes the power of unjust dominant systems and causes their collapse.  And this approach works far better than simply engaging in repeated mass protest marches.  Those who think that hasty mobilizations and mass protest marches are the only things needed for effective resistance should read the short story 拔苗助长。It's an object lesson on what happens to people who don't understand the proper process which must be followed to make something grow!  Bringing about certain processes involves a certain unavoidable cost, a certain unavoidable investment of effort and time.  In other words, ya gotta pay your dues...

The Shrinking Superbowl?

At present, the most popular televised sporting event in the United States is the Superbowl.  For those readers who do not live in the U.S., the Superbowl is the final championship event of the American football season.  American football is an interesting cultural invention, springing as it did out of the "muscular Christianity" promoted by prominent 19th-century white American and British theologians who rejected the New Testament's commandments to nonviolence.  (See also "In the Hands of God: Theology and the Benefits of American Football", Ethan Levin, Harvard University, 2022; and The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, Paul Emory Putz, Oxford University Press, 2024).  

Because this "muscular Christianity" rejects nonviolence, American football is surprisingly violent - as seen in the large number of concussion injuries sustained in youth football such as played in Pop Warner leagues.  It should be no surprise that the rate of concussions increases as athletes grow, mature, and become stronger.  Thus high school football players face greater concussion risk than Pop Warner players, and the risk increases still further for college football players.  The grand prize for violence (and concussions) goes to the NFL, where really big guys are paid lots of money to crash into each other as hard as they can.  Typical performance statistics for one of these typical living crash test dummies are as follows (information taken from gobigrecruiting.com):

• Height: 6'5"
• Weight: 280 lbs.
• 40 yard dash time: 5.0 seconds
• Bench press: 320 lbs.
• Squat: 450 lbs.

As for the Superbowl itself, according to one source, over the last fifteen years viewership has never been less than 100 million people.  According to several sources, the 2025 Superbowl was the most watched event in television history in the United States.  However, most media sources report that the 2026 Superbowl suffered a ratings decline.  The most optimistic estimates state that the decline was no more than two percent.  However, other sources question both this statistic and the methodology by which it was derived.  These other sources estimate that the actual decline in viewership was closer to ten percent.  (See also "Samba TV Shows Second Year of Viewership Decline for Super Bowl Halftime Show as Media Touts Record Bad Bunny Viewership", in which more rigorous tracking methods produced an estimate of the actual decline at 13 percent.)

It is interesting to read of the reasons given by certain media pundits for the viewership decline.  Some commentators state that this year's game was simply not that interesting because of weak player and team performance.  Other commentators point to a weakness of the halftime show which featured some guy named "Bad Bunny."  (Who is he? Never heard of him.)  Some have gotten a bit closer to the truth of the matter in their noting that Gen Z seems increasingly disinclined to get wrapped up in sports at all.  But almost none of the usual commentators seems to have noticed that an increasing number of Americans of all ages are consciously, openly, vocally disconnecting from the mainstream American culture that has been vomited onto them by the organs of that mainstream American culture.  This includes an increasing number of people who are choosing not to celebrate the 4th of July, not to participate in Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopping orgies, and ... not to watch the Superbowl!  As for myself, I don't give two cents and a stick of chewing gum about American football or the Superbowl, and thus I haven't watched a single televised football game in a very, very long time.  American football stands in my mind as a symbol and symptom of the pathology, emptiness and uselessness of modern mainstream American culture.  Perhaps this year's ratings decline is a sign that other Americans are coming to the same conclusion.  I can't help but wonder if the decline in this year's Superbowl ratings isn't also a collective act of strategic nonviolent resistance - in withdrawing economic and cultural cooperation and patronage from the systems of our oppressors.  Perhaps it's a message to the masters of our present economy that the days of fun and games are over for them as long as they continue to support a murderous and corrupt President and his political party.  Time will tell...

The Coercive Power of Withdrawal

As many readers know, in those posts on my blog which deal with strategic nonviolent resistance, I have cautioned against relying solely on protest rallies and marches as a tactic of resistance.  I have also emphasized that tactics of noncooperation - especially economic noncooperation - are far more powerful, as these tactics can impose far more painful costs on an oppressor than mere mass protest.

So we come to the tactics which have been deployed against American businesses which have supported the fascist, racist, supremacist regime of Trump and the Rethuglican party.  I don't have time to go into an exhaustive analysis today, but I can definitely tell you that boycotts have definitely hurt the Target chain of big box stores.  Target was targeted (no pun intended) by boycotts because in 2025 it rolled back its employee diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in order to please Donald Trump. As a result, by September 2025, Target stock had lost 33 percent of the value it held at the beginning of 2025.  This drop in stock value erased over $20 billion in shareholder value.  By October 2025, Target had eliminated 1,800 corporate jobs.  And Spotify is starting to lose stock value.  Boycotts do indeed bite.

Boycotts should be part of a larger strategy of decoupling from existing oppressive systems in order to create smaller, local alternative institutions and arrangements that are more equitable.  So instead of hoping merely to "apply pressure" in order to try to "change" Spotify, why not go for broke and create arrangements which don't require the use of any streaming music service?  Does anyone remember CD's and CD players?  If you haven't thrown your old CD player away, you can always fish it out of the attic or garage, dust it off and fix it up, and enjoy great high fidelity music without ever again subscribing to Spotify.  In doing so, you will help small indie artists in the process.

And as far as boycotts and creating alternative institutions and arrangements, here's something the international community can do to help those of us in the U.S. who still remain decent people and not fascist monsters.  You in the international community can help us by ending your buying of U.S. debt.  You can also help us by getting rid of the U.S. Treasury bills that you already have.  Think about this: the U.S. is already over $38 trillion in debt.  The interest on the U.S. debt has begun to exceed $1 trillion per year.  Whatever debt you buy, I think it's safe to say that a point will come when the interest on the U.S. national debt exceeds the annual tax receipts of the U.S., or at least that portion of annual taxes which the U.S. government is able to dedicate to paying the interest without collapsing due to the starving of other sectors of government spending.  Then you may never see your money again.  And by continuing to buy U.S. debt, you will be financing a huge buildup of the U.S. military (for Trump wants to boost war spending to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027).  That money will be used to build the capability to bully and threaten the entire world with violence so that the fascist, supremacist element in the U.S. can get its way. Please, for the sake of all of us, decouple from the U.S.  The sovereignty you save may be your own.

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.

Of Monkeys, Gourds, and Peanuts

I've been pleased to learn over the last few weeks that Donald Trump is losing the support of his base, as reported in such articles as "Three Polls That Show Donald Trump Is Losing His Base" (Newsweek, December 2025), "Trump's Support is Collapsing. But why?" (Vox, December 2025), and "How divides emerged at the heart of Trump’s Maga world" (BBC, December 2025). It is interesting to see that among the reasons for the collapse of Trump's support among white American males is the fact that MAGA Trump-ism has begun to seriously hurt the economic prospects of the people who comprise his base.  This is due to such factors as the costs of Trump tariffs to ordinary Americans, the harms to American industries and businesses from the international backlash against Trump-ism, and the negative economic impacts of Trump's mass deportations on America's farming sector.  But it must also be acknowledged that some of the negative economic impacts are due to the boycotts of businesses whose owners support Trump-ism.  Consider, for instance, how badly Elon Musk's businesses were hurt by boycotts in early 2025.  Consider also the decrease in revenue suffered by Amazon, Target, and Home Depot over their abandonment of workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their bid to curry the favor of Donald Trump.

So today I'd like to write a bit more about the agenda of Donald Trump and his supporters, and the necessity of economic noncooperation from those who are the intended victims and targets of Trump and his supporters.  To be quite plain and blunt, Donald Trump is one of the de facto leaders of a revanchist movement among white supremacists.  He and his supporters want to bring back a world which is the undisputed empire and sole possession of a small group of fat, privileged, evil people who have Made Themselves Great Again at the expense of all the other peoples on earth.  This is the goal of his international policy, which is why he is engaged now in violently trying to conquer other people's countries.  It is also his domestic policy, a policy whose goal is to return the United States to being a paradise for one privileged group of people while turning the rest of us into the domestic servants of this privileged group.  

But he and his supporters depend on an economic machinery which in turn depends on the support and patronage of large numbers of the very people whom he wants to dispossess and subjugate.  In this he and his supporters are like the British were in relation to India and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  India was a supposed British "possession", yet the prosperity of the British economy depended on Indians buying British goods.  This fact was expertly used by Mohandas Gandhi to hurt the British economy during India's struggle for independence.  For Gandhi persuaded his fellow Indians to stop buying British goods and to begin to develop their own self-sufficiency.  This drastically raised the costs of empire for Britain and was one of the factors that led to India's independence from Britain.  As Marshall Ganz once said, systems of oppression always depend on the people whom they exploit.  One powerfully effective, yet nonviolent way for the oppressed to hurt the owners of these systems of oppression is to deny them the payoff they are hoping to gain from their oppression.  Don't feed the beast.

A more-than-likely fictional example may be helpful.  I'm going to repeat a story I heard long ago when I was a member of an abusive church, and which I've seen repeated since in the evangelical-o-sphere.  Supposedly there are countries in the developing world in which villagers go out day by day to hunt monkeys.  They are supposedly able to trap these monkeys by spreading hollowed-out gourds on the ground.  Each gourd has a small hole in its shell, and inside the gourd are a few peanuts.  When monkeys find the gourds, they reach inside and grab the peanuts as the hunters watch.  When the hunters come to seize the monkeys, the monkeys are so fixated on the peanuts that they won't let them go - even though by holding the peanuts they are unable to remove their hands from the gourds.  The gourds in turn are so big and heavy that the monkeys cannot run away from the hunters.  Thus the hunters are able to catch the monkeys and crack their skulls, and the monkeys are turned into monkey stew.  One note: I personally don't know whether most monkeys anywhere in the world would fall for such a trick, as I've never owned a monkey as a pet.  I specialize in cats.  I also suspect that the originators of this story have never seen a monkey in their lives, except in pictures or on TV. But let's assume for the moment that this story is true.

Now consider a person who is a member of a historically marginalized group, or a group which is targeted for oppression by a rich, powerful piece of garbage like Trump or like one of his supporters.  If the person who has been targeted for oppression continues to buy things made and sold by the Trump-oids, isn't he financing the very people who want to bash his brains out and turn him into cooked monkey meat?  How many of us allowed ourselves to be made into monkeys during this past holiday season?  How many of us splurged in our spending during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Years? How many people of color bought Teslas in 2025?  How many will want to buy a Tesla in 2026? How many of us will watch the Superbowl in 2026? How many of us will join the military in 2026 even though the U.S. military is likely to be deployed against our brothers and sisters in foreign lands?  How many of us are signed up for Amazon Prime and YouTube and Hulu and Fox and Netflix and ESPN and HBO? How many of us are still using Spotify (which has for a long time been involved in cheating musicians out of their earnings, and which in 2025 ran recruitment ads for ICE)? Boycotts and other forms of economic noncooperation mean letting go of the peanuts. Don't let the present system of oppression make a monkey out of you.

Image courtesy of Craiyon (craiyon.com). Created 17 October 2025.

(Yes, yes, I know - this is a picture of an ape and not a monkey.

But you can't expect too much from the free version of an AI service!)

Boycotts Have Begun to Bite

Truly this is an age in which those people who have been historically marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed and enslaved by dominant powers are being called on to rise up and resist their continued mistreatment.  That means that this is the time for us to resist the Trump administration and its attempts to revive exploitative supremacy.  Over the last eight years much of my writing for this blog has therefore focused on the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I have repeatedly stated, this kind of resistance consists of much more than merely staging mass protest marches and rallies.  As noted in Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, there are at least 198 methods of strategic nonviolent action.  (His book lists only 198 methods, but he himself acknowledged that there are actually many more methods than these.)

One of the categories of tactics of strategic nonviolent resistance is the category of economic and political noncooperation.  This kind of noncooperation - especially of economic noncooperation - can impose extremely painful costs on a would-be oppressor or dictator (such as Trump) and on those rich and powerful people who comprise the dictator's pillars of support.  I'd like to suggest that the use of boycotts has begun to catch on in this year, 2025.  A number of large retailers who terminated their diversity, equity and inclusion programs this year are now feeling the bite of consumer boycotts.  Such retailers include Amazon, Target, and Home Depot (or, as I like to call them, Home Cheapo).  This year's holiday season may not be a very merry Xmas for such retailers as these.  You can read more about these holiday boycotts here: "Can Holiday Shopping Boycotts Make a Difference?", Yale Insights, December 2025.  Note that even though the cited article seeks to cast doubt on the effect of these boycotts, the fact remains that the boycotts are having enough of an effect to force the mainstream organs of power to take notice.  

The Advice of Benjamin

I must apologize to any readers who might wish that I had posted more frequently over the last several months.  Admittedly, my posting has been light.  In particular, I have stepped back from regular updates to my series of essays on the subject of economic precarity.  This is not because this subject has become less relevant.  Indeed, it has become increasingly relevant as the governments of many nations are being taken over by the Global Far Right.  However, my eyes are on a number of trends which have yet to come to full fruition.  Until those trends mature fully, I think it best to keep quiet.  To quote from one of the characters in A Canticle for Leibowitz, "Probing the womb of the future is bad for the child."

And like that fictional character, in a manner of speaking I too have chosen in these days to live a somewhat anchorite life at the top of my metaphorical desert mesa, wrapping myself evening by evening in my metaphorical prayer shawl.  However, I am not so detached that I haven't noticed recent news reports about the global wave of protests against corrupt and conservative governments around the world this year.  These protests have been led predominantly by the members of Generation Z, or Gen Z for short.  I am more than a little too old to be part of the Gen Z cohort, yet if Gen Z'ers don't mind, I'd like to offer some advice.  First, although mass protest is not without effect, I would strongly caution you all NOT to base your activism solely on mass protest marches.  In other words, don't have just one tactic in your suite of tactics. The scholar Gene Sharp identified at least 198 tactics of strategic nonviolent resistance.  These methods include both protest and much, much more than just protest.  Study his writings.  Read his book From Dictatorship to Democracy to learn how to think strategically.  Read the writings and watch the videos of Jamila Raqib.  Use the resources offered by Srdja Popovic and his organization CANVAS.  Learn how the widespread practice of radical frugality can disrupt the holders of concentrated wealth and power.  Learn the power and necessity of maintaining nonviolent discipline in your struggle.  And if you feel so inclined, please read the posts I have written for this blog from the end of 2016 until now, particularly the posts titled "From D to D" which I wrote as a study guide for Gene Sharp's book.  In solidarity I wish you all the best.

Escalating Noncooperation

This week the Trump administration has begun operations designed to destroy the government of Venezuela.  This is totally unnecessary, as Venezuela has presented no threat to the United States.  Rather, these operations are an expression of American white supremacist narcissism.

So what should decent, moral people do?  Many today are engaged in mass protest marches.  I have written extensively about the dangers and disadvantages of relying solely on mass protest as a tactic or strategy of strategic nonviolent resistance.  (See "Peter Ackerman's Accuracy" for instance.)  Acts of mass noncooperation and withdrawal from the dominant system remain a far stronger tactic than mass protest - especially when that noncooperation and withdrawal are economic in nature.  So let me suggest an avenue of noncooperation and withdrawal.

We know that many farmers - especially farmers who are in red states - solidly support Trump.  We also know that these farmers have begun to feel serious pain from the sanctions imposed on them by the nations to which they used to export their produce.  These sanctions were imposed by these nations in response to the tariffs on these nations' exports which were imposed by Trump.  We can increase the pressure on Trump's base by reducing our dependence on the things produced by his base.  This includes farm produce.  So if you want to do something constructive to help the resistance, start planting your winter vegetable garden.  Or start thinking about what and how you will plant next spring.  See how much you can reduce your dependence on supermarket farm produce.

A Deeper Dive Into Dilemma Actions

Here is a link to an interview which provides a clearer picture of a concept which I mentioned in my last post.  The interview was given by Srdja Popovic on the Democracy Paradox podcast and was posted on March 7, 2023. Srdja Popovic is the founder of CANVAS (The Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies). CANVAS provides training to organizers who need to wage campaigns of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to liberate themselves and their people from oppression and build durable democratic societies. 

In the interview Mr. Popovic emphasizes several points which have also been mentioned on my blog, The Well Run Dry.  In particular, he talks about how essential it is for the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance to start by developing a wise master strategy.  He also talks about why movements need leadership in order to be successful and why so many "leaderless movements" of spontaneous mass protest have accomplished so little over the last two decades.  He explains the concept of a dilemma action and shows how it can be a powerful tactic when wielded by skillful resisters who implement this tactic as part of a larger, well-formulated grand strategy.

The points he makes fit in well with my most recent post, which makes the case that struggle groups who wish to win need to evolve their tactics in order to fit with the ever-evolving nature of the space in which they struggle.  This particularly applies to the methods of protest and persuasion listed by Gene Sharp in books like From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I have mentioned previously that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Yet they are not useless - they can still augment the power of a resistance movement as long as the tactics of protest have evolved to meet the changing nature of the struggle space, and especially as long as these methods are part of an entire suite of strategically chosen tactics which accomplish more than just protest.  Calling for mass protest marches is not a tactic that fits the present times, due to the extreme ease with which an oppressor can neutralize this form of protest by injecting violence (including vandalism) into any such protest marches.  Feel free to listen to Srdja as he describes more innovative and effective tactics of protest.

How Tactical Tools Adapt or Die

In a few previous posts on this blog, I have pointed out that relying on mass protest marches as the sole tactic of a struggle of strategic nonviolent resistance is as stupid as the British High Command's insistence on constant daily frontal assaults against German positions was in World War 1.  This observation may be disputed by some, yet the observation points out the fact that practitioners of strategic nonviolent resistance have often learned valuable lessons from the study of armed conflict.  In particular, it is possible to notice those commanders of forces who made the most out of limited resources in order to achieve surprising victories.  It is also possible to notice and study those commanders who were inept, hidebound, or who otherwise doomed themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - even when these commanders started out with overwhelming numerical and material advantages.

And it is possible to trace how tactical tools evolve in their composition and methods of use as they are deployed by wise commanders who are observant, willing to listen to different perspectives, and who otherwise display the characteristics of reflective practitioners.  So let's consider in this post how the experiences of World War 1 influenced the development of infantry as a component of the armed forces of modern nations.  At the outset it must be said that the poor use of infantry by the Allies throughout much of World War 1 led to large losses on the Allied side.  From 1914 to 1916, it was also true that the German military suffered heavy losses as well.  However, the Germans seem to have been the quicker to realize how massed artillery and machine guns had altered the battlefield, and what tactical and strategic adjustments were needed to make their fighting forces more survivable as a result.  On the other hand, the British and French forces continued to use outdated and obsolete tactics in deploying their infantry, with the result that a casual observer might be forgiven for concluding from the British example that dismounted infantry had become obsolete.  But infantry as a tool had definitely not become obsolete.  This was shown by the German development of the concept of defense in depth.  Defense in depth greatly reduced the effectiveness of British and French artillery against German defenders, and enabled the Germans to inflict heavy casualties on British and French attackers while suffering relatively few casualties of their own.  The Germans also developed a more flexible skill in maneuver warfare which made German forces highly dangerous and much more survivable during the German offensive of 1918 than the British and French had been in previous Allied offensives. (To their credit, however, the British army became much more effective toward the very end of the war, when they also began to implement defense in depth.)

After World War 1, those nations which had observant and teachable commanders and generals carefully studied the battles of the war in order to apply lessons to their own armies.  As a result, the militaries of the United States and other powerful nations began to make changes to the tactics of infantry deployment, switching from trench warfare to the use of foxholes in the defense, learning also to deploy elastic defense-in-depth, and beginning to learn new techniques for offensive operations at the small unit level and beyond.  However, the Germans once again proved to be far ahead of their peers in applying these new lessons, as demonstrated by the World War Two deployment of the blitzkrieg method of combined arms offensive warfare.  Learning by observation of enemy tactics, tools, and technologies on the part of both the Allies and the Axis powers led to the continued evolution of infantry by the armies of these nations, including evolution of technologies such as the assault rifle, the armored personnel carrier, and the tools of combined-arms assault, as well as changes to small-unit offensive tactics which resulted in the development of the traveling, traveling overwatch, and bounding overwatch dismounted squad formations.  The result is that a modern army which has incorporated modern tools and techniques for the deployment of its infantry can easily defeat a military which digs long lines of trenches for defense, which is rigid and inflexible in its use of artillery, and which day after day at regular times sends its infantry troops on assault in neat lines of men who move at a slow walk.  (By the way, according to a number of historians, this inflexible style is what characterized the British army in World War 1 under Sir Douglas Haig.)

In other words, by observation, learning from history (and especially from mistakes), and responding to that learning by making the necessary tactical innovations, the infantry as a component of modern militaries has continued to make itself relevant even to the present day as a key component of an effective fighting force.  What lessons can we take from the infantry's continual self-reinvention to apply to the field of strategic nonviolent resistance?  

Well, let's take the methods of protest and persuasion as a key category of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I said at the beginning of this post, I have argued that the use of mass protest marches as the sole go-to tactic of resistance is stupid, because this has become the method of resistance which oppressors are most equipped to meet and to counter.  But does this mean that the entire category of methods of protest and persuasion is now obsolete? Not necessarily.  It is true that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of nonviolent action, just as it is true that the squad-level dismounted small infantry unit is the weakest troop unit in warfare.  But just as the squad-level dismounted unit is still relevant in war-fighting, the methods of protest and persuasion still have value in the battlefield of 21st century strategic nonviolent resistance.  What is needed, however, is an evolution of tactics, of tactical thinking, and of methods.  And these tactics and methods must be deployed by wise leaders whose tactical and strategic thinking has evolved with the times in order to remain relevant and effective.

A hypothetical, yet concrete example may be helpful.  Suppose you are a resister against the fascist Trump regime and you want to weaken his pillars of support.  We know that the white American evangelical/Protestant church remains one of the staunchest pillars of support of the Trump regime.  (By the way, that shows just how little white American evangelicals are actually interested in obeying the words of Jesus!)  Let's say that you want to plan a series of operations designed to weaken this church as a pillar of support of Trump.  You could adopt one of two possible approaches.  The first would be to gather as many people as you can by means of Facebook, Reddit, or other social media announcements in order to besiege as many churches as you can with armies of protesters carrying picket signs to show your outrage over the white evangelical support of Trump's fascist policies and imperial overreach.  To make things even more interesting (and stupid), let's say that you want to repeat this same tactic Sunday after Sunday for several weeks in a row.  Let's examine such a tactic through the lens which Peter Ackerman provided us in one of his Fletcher Summer Institute lectures.  In particular, let's ask what is the purpose and what are the risks of such an action, and how likely it is that such an action would achieve its stated goals.  Below is my summary of possible answers to these questions.

• Purpose: To attempt to shame the white American evangelical church by expressing outrage over its hypocrisy, its worship of secular power, and its use of religion to support the oppression of the poor and nonwhite in the U.S. and throughout the world.
• Likelihood of success: very small.  Why? In attempting to shame these people by means of a series of mass protest marches, you are attempting to appeal to their better angels.  But most of them don't have better angels.  They are perfectly willing to do or to say whatever it takes in order to maximize their secular economic and political power and supremacy, regardless of the morality of their actions.

• Risks: Very, very high! Why? Because of the following factors:
• Your protest marches will provoke a violent response from the organs of right-wing power in this country.  In particular, you can count on Trump taking over the local police forces, sending in troops from the regular military (and not just the National Guard), and initiating a massive crackdown on civil liberties.
• To facilitate and legitimize that violent crackdown, the fascist element will inject violence into your protest by means of agents provocateurs.  They will then blame the outbreak of violence on you and your fellow protestors, using such organs of right-wing media as Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp media empire (including Fox News) to make their case.  On the TV screens in every household there will be scenes of rooms full of stone-faced middle-aged men sporting buzz cuts and wearing blue uniforms who announce that in town X or city Y the police had to "declare a riot" because of the actions of "subversive hooligan elements bent on sowing CHAOS because they HATE AMERICA!!!"
• By your protest marches you will make your opponents look like innocent little lamb martyrs who are being "persecuted solely for the name of Christ" (that is, being persecuted merely for being "innocent and nice people"), thus boosting their standing in society and actually strengthening them as one of Trump's pillars of support.  And you will get yourselves painted as "attackers of the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom".

So we see that such a direct deployment of mass protest marches would actually not work in weakening the white evangelical church as a pillar of support because it would not persuade the members of that church to abandon Trump, and because Trump and his fellow fascists would easily be able to turn the effects of such protests against the protestors, thus actually boosting the power and prestige of white evangelicalism.

Now let's consider the second approach.  Suppose you have studied the changing battlefield of strategic nonviolent action and you decide to deploy a smarter tactic of protest.  Your goal remains the same: to weaken the white American evangelical/Protestant church as a pillar of support of a fascist regime.  But instead of calling for massive protest marches to picket as many churches as possible, you talk to your physical, flesh-and-blood neighbors and say, "From now on, let's each put out a sign on our lawns every Sunday which says 'THIS SUNDAY, I AM WASHING MY CAR.'" And let's say that you all agree that at the hour in which most churches have their Sunday services, you and your friends start washing your cars.  Moreover, let's say that you video yourselves all washing your cars at 11 am every Sunday and post those videos online.  Let's say that you make it abundantly clear that your choice of 11 am every Sunday for car-washing is an act of protest, your sending of a signal that you will not be attending church on Sunday because the churches have become the corrupt handmaidens of a fascist regime.  What can Trump or his goons or the liars who work for Rupert Murdoch possibly do to counter such an act of protest?  

What I have described in this second approach is what is known as a dilemma action.  (See this also.) And it is a tactic of dispersion, which is much harder to repress than tactics of concentration. It is also an action which has the capacity to produce massive amounts of backfire if the oppressor tries to stop it.  For instance, if ICE or Marine Corps troops violently seize someone and beat him up simply for washing his car on a Sunday morning, how will such an act look in the eyes of witnesses?  Won't such a response produce serious questioning of the Trump regime, as well as serious revulsion toward that regime?  Moreover, as the idea of washing your car on Sunday (or pulling weeds, or cleaning your gutters, or my favorite - sleeping in!) catches on, the revenue and attendance numbers at most evangelical churches will start to show a definite decline.  And there will be very little they can do to stop it! (You can also boost the effectiveness of your tactic by making bumper stickers that say "I AM NOT GOING TO CHURCH THIS SUNDAY" or "I'M SLEEPING IN THIS SUNDAY.")

Thus we see that just as in the use of weapons and tactics in war-fighting, a method or category of methods of nonviolent resistance can remain relevant and effective as long as the practitioners of that method or of those methods continue to evolve their capacity for tactical and strategic thinking.  A key to the evolution of tactics of nonviolent resistance can be found in the methodology which the German army used to re-invent itself on the fly during World War 1:

• Perception of the need for change
• Solicitation of ideas, especially from the front-line units
• Definition of the change
• Dissemination of the change
• Enforcement throughout the army 
• But in this case, since we are dealing with a civilian movement rather than a military operation, the word "enforcement" may be too strong. For the members of civilian movement organizations, a better way to phrase this is the building of a culture of discipline throughout the organization.  This discipline must facilitate adherence to wise strategy.  An essential part of this discipline is the maintaining of strict nonviolent discipline.
• Modification of organization and equipment to accommodate the change
• Thorough training
• Evaluation of effectiveness
• Subsequent refinement

Note: the above outline is quoted from The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War, by Timothy T. Lupfer, published in July 1981.  (I told y'all that y'all need to read some books!)

Brain Failure in L.A.

Those of you who read this post will be able to tell at a glance that I don't follow the news closely.  It took a next door neighbor's relatives for me to find out today that there have been ongoing protests in Los Angeles over the immigration policies of Donald Trump.  I knew about the No Kings rally.  However, I did not know that the protests in Los Angeles had continued after that rally.  It turns out that even though I did not know about the continuation of the protests, I could easily guess the turn which these protests have taken, as noted below:

• Some of the protests have turned violent.  This violence has included vandalism and property destruction.  (NOTE TO ANY BONEHEADS WHO SAY THAT VANDALISM AND PROPERTY DESTRUCTION ARE NOT THE SAME AS VIOLENCE: VANDALISM IS VIOLENCE!) 
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and various law enforcement agencies ample justification for an overwhelmingly heavy police/military presence in Los Angeles.
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and the major right-wing media outlets in this country a gold-plated opportunity to portray those who oppose Trump as lovers of chaos who want to bring chaos into America.
• I strongly suspect that at least some of the violent actors in the protests were and are agents provocateurs either paid by the Trump administration or inserted by various police and Homeland Security units in order to strengthen support for the Trump regime by discrediting the critics of Trump.
• The protests were ongoing throughout the entire month of June and into July of this year - EVEN THOUGH THE PROTESTORS COULD SEE THAT THE PROTESTS HAD BECOME VIOLENT AND EVEN THOUGH THE VIOLENCE INJECTED INTO THE PROTESTS WAS BEING USED BY RIGHT-WING MEDIA TO DISCREDIT THE PROTESTORS AND THEIR CAUSE.

I just want to say that normally I don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS as it comes off sounding like I'm shouting.  But in this case, I am!  I hate Trump as much as any decent person ought to.  I hate the demographic from which he has emerged, as well as the members of his pillars of support.  But what makes me extremely angry is when I see people who claim to hate Trump and who claim to be part of the resistance against Trump choose tactics and strategy (or a slap-dash, boneheaded failure of strategy) which can so easily be hijacked by the very regime they claim to oppose.  A truly effective resistance uses a multitude of tactics, and is not fixated solely on the tactic of mass protest marches.  A truly effective resistance is able to switch to tactics of dispersion if its leaders see that tactics of concentration have begun to lose their effectiveness or to be derailed by violent agents provocateurs.  Hint to the boneheads: mass protest marches are a tactic of concentration!  A truly effective resistance is guided by a wise strategy and is implemented by actors who display tactical ingenuity and creativity.  And among the most important of all, a truly effective resistance is composed of people who maintain strict nonviolent discipline, as they know that allowing any violence - including property destruction - hurts their cause because it hardens the oppressor's pillars of support!

To those who want to be identified with righteous resistance, I say, Please, please, PLEASE study the theory and practice of successful strategic nonviolent resistance!  Please understand that if you call for a mass protest march or rally, an autocratic thug like Trump will find a way to inject violence into the protest march so that he can justify deploying a violent military or police response in order to crush it.  As I have said before, relying on mass protest as your sole go-to tactic of resistance is as stupid as relying on daily frontal assaults was in World War 1.  Please, please, PLEASE read some books!  Learn how to organize and deploy such highly disruptive tactics as the stay-at-home, the strike, and the boycott.  It is almost impossible for an oppressor to justify arresting citizens simply for refusing to shop or refusing to go out to an amusement park or restaurant.  Find out what Trump's economic pillars of support are and go after them with tactics that are street-legal, nonviolent, and guided by wise strategy.  Use such strategy and tactics to go after the wealth of the entire Trump family.  Read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read the book No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey.  Above all, read the writings of the Albert Einstein Institution - especially Gene Sharp's list of 198 methods of nonviolent action.  (That's right folks - 198, count 'em, 198 methods! Not just one!) I leave you once again with a quote from Theodore Sturgeon: "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."

Peter Ackerman's Accuracy

Here's another short post that is a follow-on to the post I wrote yesterday.  My encounter with the protest march in Portland yesterday got me so agitated that I actually went back to watch a YouTube video that was made by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2013.  As long-time readers of my blog know, I believe the ICNC went seriously off the rails from 2017 to 2020, and that as a result they gave some advice that was seriously flawed, both morally, tactically, and strategically.  So in my posts from 2020 onward, I have scrupulously avoided referring to any materials or videos published by the ICNC.  However, I must admit that the materials they published and released up to 2016 are actually quite good.  Their Fletcher Summer Institute video series is a particular example of this.  Also, I've grown to strongly dislike YouTube for reasons which I have mentioned on this blog, yet to this day YouTube remains the best place to find videos of talks and lectures by people such as Srdja Popovic, Jamila Raqib, Marshall Ganz, Zeynep Tufekci, and other scholars of people power, community organizing, and strategic nonviolent resistance.  So to use an analogy, even though I hate the taste of cheese, because I'm hungry and there's nothing else to eat, I guess I'll have to eat this cheese sandwich...

Anyway, the video I am referring to is "FSI 2013: Why Skills Can Make Civil Resistance 'A Force More Powerful'" and it is a recording of a talk which was given by Peter Ackerman, who was one of the founders of the ICNC.  (By the way, Peter Ackerman passed away around three years ago.  I'm sorry to hear of his passing.)  In his talk he makes the point that the development of skills and wise strategy among the participants in a nonviolent liberation struggle is the key to winning the struggle.  He has some interesting things to say about the lack of effectiveness of mass protest marches when those protest marches are nothing more than an expression of collective outrage:

"Well..you know, again, we're always talking about probabilities. But a strategy to go to the street because you're angry - to let off steam - recognizing you probably have a finite amount of steam - that's probably a not good use of your steam.  [Sic] And I don't believe you should...even consider a tactic without understanding its strategic context.  Why would you just go out and do something without thinking it through?...Tactics are not a strategy. [Emphasis added.]  "What makes a tactic have a strategic context is the forethought that comes to it. [Emphasis added.] 

"And the military gets this...as some of you know, I have a son who was in the military and...as a combat officer before he went out on any activity he had to write a 40-page paper about what was the purpose, what were the risks, and on and on and on! We should submit ourselves to that same kind of discipline.  If you don't do it, you're gonna lose!"

To those who want to craft an effective resistance to the autocrats who have taken over their countries (as Trump and the Republican Party have done in the United States), I say the same thing.  Educate yourselves in the theory and practice of effective strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read some books - especially the books published by the Albert Einstein Institution.  Learn to craft an effective strategy of resistance, an effective theory of change.  If you don't do it, you're going to lose! 

Cassandra's Sore Throat

I was planning to meet some friends for coffee (or in my case, green tea) today in downtown Portland, Oregon.  Because I don't have a TV and don't watch the news on my computer, I was completely surprised by the presence of a huge anti-Trump protest rally (one of over two hundred taking place across the nation) which blocked several downtown streets, including the street I needed to take to reach the coffee shop where my friends and I were supposed to meet.  

As readers of my blog know, I am utterly opposed to the Presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also utterly opposed to the Republican Party.  Even though I am a Christian, I find that regrettably, I must now stand in complete and utter opposition to the white American evangelical/Protestant church in all of its manifestations.  So I could certainly sympathize and agree with many of the grievances of the protestors - especially because I am a black African-American.  Yet I must say that the sight of the protestors filled me with a strange mix of feelings.  This mixture of feelings was even more agitated when I gave up on trying to reach my coffee shop friends and parked my car instead in order to talk to some of the protestors.  I learned that many people had come to the protests simply because they had heard about them during this past week, and that they had not received any prior training in the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Moreover, the protest march seemed at times to be very little more than a nearly inchoate venting of grievances.  

So I asked a few of the protestors if they had ever heard of the study of the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I stressed that this three-word phrase meant far more than simple "nonviolence."  I asked them if they had ever read any of the books of Gene Sharp or if they had ever heard of Jamila Raqib or Marshall Ganz.  I asked them if they had ever heard of the difference between tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  I asked them if they were willing to start reading the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, and particularly on the methods of organizing a strike, a boycott, or a stay-at-home.  (One note about that last link: it leads to a webpage written partly by Erica Chenoweth.  While I greatly enjoyed Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, written by Chenoweth and by Maria Stephan, I must say that I did NOT enjoy a subsequent book by Chenoweth titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  If you want my reasons for disliking that book, please click here.)  I told them that the use of mass protest rallies is actually one of the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, and that if they wanted to mount an effective resistance to Trump and the demographic he represents, they needed to learn the far more powerful methods of organizing economic noncooperation.  I told them that people who relied solely on mass protests as a tactic did not know what they were doing.  I warned them that people who only know how to organize mass protests can be undermined by the government if the government chooses to infiltrate the protests with violent agents provocateurs.  I ended by urging them to read some books.

They politely listened to my near-diatribe and graciously answered my words, yet I must wonder how it must have felt for them to be button-holed by a total stranger and lectured for several minutes.  If any of them are reading these words now, my deepest apologies for any heartburn I caused in you.  Nonetheless, I have over the last several years felt like the Cassandra of Greek mythology who was condemned to scream out warnings which were not heeded by her hearers.  Then again, maybe things are not as bad as I sometimes fear.  After all, tactics of economic noncooperation effectively drove Elon Musk out of his role as one of Trump's henchmen.  These tactics have almost bankrupted the Tesla corporation and are starting to hurt Starlink, which is another of Musk's businesses.  And things like these boycotts should be proof enough to my fevered brain that I'm not the only one who can come up with a good idea.  Still, like Cassandra, it's hard sometimes to resist the urge to scream my head off...

Non-Starlink Alternatives to T-Mobile?

It is heartening to see how much of the rest of the world is responding to the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  Several boycotts of goods made in the United States have sprung up, and these are growing.  Unfortunately, some of us may find that we are still beholden to the Trump administration and to Elon Musk, due to hidden dependencies in existing products and services.

Musk owns SpaceX which operates a fleet of Starlink communication satellites.  I just found out today that T-Mobile has teamed with Starlink to increase its phone coverage.  This is distasteful to me as I am a T-Mobile customer.  Does anyone know of a cellular or Internet service provider who has not partnered with Starlink?  If so, please let us all know.  In any case, I may wind up canceling one of my Internet access plans with T-Mobile in the very near future.  One thing to note: T-Mobile was acquired by Deutsche Telekom in 2001, so perhaps economic boycott pressure can be applied to other holdings of Deutsche Telekom as well.

Oh, and here's a message to Mr. Trump: you don't get to tell people that it's illegal for them to refuse to spend money on a particular product.  I can't see you sending your jackbooted cop thugs into people's houses to force them to buy a Tesla - especially when those people live in other countries.  You should be more careful when you run your mouth.

Effective Cures Versus Social Placebos

Today's post will be short.  我很忙，所以我没有很多时间！Anyway, here goes.

Over these last few weeks, I've heard of at least one protest that took place to oppose the new policies of the Trump administration, and there is a call for at least one more protest to take place sometime in the next few weeks.  I can definitely understand the anger and distress many people are feeling because of the revived Presidency of Donald Trump.  (Ah, Trump! To what may I compare him? Perhaps to a vampire that wasn't effectively dispatched - maybe the people who drove a stake into his last Presidency did not use a stake made of the right kind of wood.  He certainly seems to be a zombie revenant from a horror movie...)  However, hearing of the revival of mass protest in response to the revival of Trump, I feel the need to repeat myself.

So once again, let me say this: the use of mass protest in these days as a tactic or strategy of resistance is a very bad idea.  I say this for the same reasons I mentioned in previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  First, mass protest is actually one of the weakest of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Protest merely registers an opinion - it does not have the power to coerce power-holders into taking the protestors' opinion seriously.  Second, autocrats and tyrants have by now figured out very effective ways of destroying the effectiveness of mass protest rallies and marches.  All these tyrants have to do is hire thugs and goons as agents provocateurs to infiltrate the protest marches in order to commit violence.  Then the tyrants have a ready-made justification to violently crack down on the protests and to move closer to martial law.  Third, it seems that too many people who have organized protests in the United States over the last several years have treated mass protests as their sole go-to tactic of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Thus the tyrants whom these protesters oppose are easily able to skirt around this one tactic.  Remember from my previous posts on this subject the lesson of the British strategic failure in World War 1 in the 20th Century - a failure that consisted of Sir Douglas Haig's insistence on daily frontal assaults for months on end in a war of attrition that Britain would have lost had it not been for the entry of the United States into the war in 1918.  Or, to quote Theodore Sturgeon, "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."  (Gene Sharp knew at least 198 tricks!)

The most effective methods of strategic nonviolent resistance remain those which have the following characteristics:

• They reject all forms of violence.  This includes sabotage and property destruction!
• They employ an entire suite of tactical tools, and don't rely on just one or two tactics.
• They are able to motivate large numbers of the oppressed to withdraw as much as possible from providing any economic or political support to an oppressive regime.
• They are thus able to impose serious, sustained, long-term economic and political costs on the oppressive regime.

The most damaging costs that the oppressed can impose on the tyrant and his pillars of support consist of economic costs.  To impose these costs, the oppressed must create  alternative ways of getting their needs met, both individually and collectively.  They also need to understand what constitutes true "needs."  We need food, clothing, and shelter.  We do not need to watch the Superbowl or drink beer or go to Disneyland or buy a Tesla or become addicted to consumerism or attend churches that preach American patriotic fascism.  Individual and collective self-reliance and frugality remain potent weapons.  These weapons must be deployed as a lifestyle of resistance by which the oppressed withdraw from a corrupt prevailing order so that they can build a righteous alternative order.  This withdrawal is what weakens the corrupt prevailing order to the point that it collapses.  This can work even against a chump like Trump.  Imagine, for instance, the impact of a sustained, long-term stay-at-home strike or a sustained, long-term mass boycott of certain consumer goods sold by businesses that support Trump or that benefit from his policies!

So if you are a reader of my blog, and you want to join a righteous resistance, and you think I may have something good to say, please read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  You can find links to them in the sidebar.  Thank you!

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...