Climbing Out Onto The Skinny Branches

Those who have read my blog over the years know that at present I "own" two cats, and that the reason why these cats live with me is that a neighbor foisted them off on me.  (However, I now wouldn't trade them for the world.)  When they were kittens, they frequently got themselves stuck in some of the trees in my backyard as they indulged their impulse to climb things without having learned how to get themselves back down to the ground.  Therefore, from time to time, I had to get a ladder and fetch my cats out of some of the sticky situations they got themselves into.  Eventually they figured out that what goes up must also learn to get down, and they learned to get down out of and off of various high things.  So an evening came in which, as I was leaving my house to go to the store, I looked behind me and saw two cat heads on the roof staring down on me in the moonlight.  Rather spooky it was, but by then I was confident that they'd find their way safely back to earth.

Now a competent cat weighing a handful of kilograms can climb trees and traverse branches that a human weighing several dozen kilos would (or at least should) fear to tread.  And there's a reason why the phrase "going out on a limb" has metaphorical punch even after decades of use.  So it surprised me (and the world) to hear that Vladimir Putin had gone out on a rather skinny limb a few weeks ago with the announcement that Russia had developed the first coronavirus vaccine approved for widespread use.  In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up around 2,000 points, and other stock exchanges rose significantly.

An effective vaccine would be welcomed in many corners, and if Russia were the nation to discover such a vaccine, it would certainly boost Russian prospects of being regarded as the most awesomely cool nation on earth.  It would also help Putin's image not only as a physically robust national leader who goes hunting bare-chested in Siberia in the winter, but as a chess master, judoka, expert strategist, and totally awesome dude without equal in the world.  ("Who is like the beast?  Who is able to make war with him?")  But almost immediately, the branch onto which Putin had climbed (bringing his nation with him) began to show some signs of cracking.  For starters,

• The development of this vaccine has been horribly (and irresponsibly) rushed.  
• A number of sources state that the vaccine developers would only have been able to complete Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials within their stated timeframe of development.
• Some sources (such as this and this) state that the reality is that the Russian vaccine has not even yet passed Phase 1 trials.

Add to this the lack of transparency to date in Russian data on the trials of their vaccine, combined with the unfortunate tendency for bad things (falls from windows, poisonings by tea, etc.) to happen to Russians who provide information or criticism damaging to their country's prestige, and one can see why prudent people don't want to climb out onto the branch Putin is occupying.  And even Putin's government has slightly, ever so slightly, walked back some of its rhetoric lately, saying now that the Russian vaccine is now "ready for mass trials."  Some of those trials will take place on people who are not Russian and who don't want to climb onto any skinny branches, but who may find that they have no choice.  For instance, autocrat Philippine president (and Putin groupie) Rodrigo Duterte has stated that large-scale inoculations of his nation's people will begin in October, although Duterte himself won't volunteer for a shot until he sees how well his countrymen respond.  My, what courage!

From these events, we can see the following things:

• First, we see what world leaders and economic ecosystems Putin now has in his pocket.  With a net worth of $200 billion, Putin might have a surprising number of people in that pocket.  Some of those people might be behind the most recent stock market rallies - rallies which are by now completely divorced from the actual on-the-ground economies of the nations these markets are supposed to represent.  Watch also for national leaders who rush to volunteer their populations as guinea pigs for the Russian vaccine.
• Second, we see the harm that the damaging and toxic mix of malignant narcissism and unethical competition can produce.  I am reminded of YouTube videos of Margaret Heffernan discussing the damaging effects of competition on the creation of things of genuine economic value.  One of the reasons for the damage is the intense pressure felt by people in highly competitive environments to overstate their accomplishments, to plagiarize the work of others, and to outright fake results.

As you can tell, I am skeptical about Russian claims of awesomeness in any domain just about now.  But I am going to provide a caveat and thus position myself on the lowest possible skinny branch in case I am proven wrong.  So here it is: I am not a doctor or biologist.  But I can be persuaded by verifiable results.  Let's see how the Russian vaccine developers do when they are judged by a jury of their peers.  As for now, I am still wearing a mask.

Report on CANVAS Summer Academy

I had the opportunity to attend a recent online Summer Academy in strategic nonviolent resistance hosted by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS.  This online academy featured speakers and leaders from several nonviolent liberation movements around the world, and showcased the large diversity of nonviolent tactics being employed by men and women waging struggles for liberation or democracy under difficult and hostile regimes.

The first lecture presented a troubling statistic - namely, the number of formerly democratic regimes which have slid toward authoritarianism in the last ten years.  (Yes, the United States is in that list!)  That fact motivated the following goals for the Summer Academy:

• Understanding the principles of successful nonviolent movements
• Learning lessons from those movements which fail

The first lecture's host, Srdja Popovic, made a statement that he repeated several times during the workshop:

"There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

This highlighted the need for careful planning and development of wise strategy as a prerequisite for success.  One of the readings that went along with that first lecture was "How Protests Become Successful Social Movements."  Here we could see how, although protest can be an important element of a social movement, it is not enough in itself to guarantee movement success.  (Read the article if you want to find the additional required ingredients!  Also, note that "leaderless movements" like the Occupy protests are not likely to achieve anything without a means of clearly deciding and stating what their goals are.)

During the first lecture, a movement leader from another country discussed how his organization was opposing his country's authoritarian leadership by highlighting the regime's corruption.  Corruption is almost always the soft underbelly of authoritarian regimes, since these regimes are created by strongmen in order that the strongmen may receive all the economic and political benefits of the societies they rule while giving nothing back in return.  The spokesman for this movement organization talked about how in many towns and villages in his country, it is hard to get clean water because of burst water delivery pipes which the government has refused to fix until recently.  This man's movement organization therefore started printing large, highly visible "burst certificates" (sort of like a "birth certificate" notifying the world of the birth of a water leak)  and posting them next to broken water mains in locations which motorists could see.  This motivated the government to start fixing their water mains!

The second lecture discussed how social movement organizers are adapting to organizing during the current COVID-19 pandemic.  One organizer from Latin America described how her movement organization has provided basic health care education and services like free masks to poor people - showing the role of parallel institutions in building a successful social movement.

The third lecture was focused on the anti-racism protests that have taken place since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.  We heard from two Black Lives Matter organizers, and we also heard from Will Dobson, fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy and author of The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy.  Mr. Dobson spoke first, and his assessment of the Black Lives Matter protests was highly positive.  He spoke of the large shifts in public awareness and opinion over the last two months as a result of the protests, and he also spoke of how Donald Trump's response to the protests has actually hurt Trump's reelection prospects.  However, when the BLM organizers spoke, some of us (myself included) questioned them about whether they had created effective structures for weeding out violent infiltrators from their protests, whether they had a training program for participants in strategic nonviolent struggle, and whether they had explored other methods of movement struggle besides mass protest rallies.  Their answer was that they have indeed begun to explore these things, and there is a Black minister in Los Angeles who has started doing nonviolent resistance trainings in the style of the Reverend James Lawson, who conducted similar trainings in the 1960's. (Note that I called them "nonviolent resistance" trainings - not just "nonviolence trainings".  The word resistance is always an essential part of the phrase "nonviolent resistance.")

The last lecture was the most unexpectedly interesting, in my opinion.  It was titled, "Creative Activism, Dilemma Actions, And The Use of Humor - Hilariously Groundbreaking Tactics."  Sophia McLennen of Penn State University was the guest speaker.  To provide a bit of background, the OTPOR! movement (of which Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders and original organizers) depended on the use of humor as a key tactical weapon to de-legitimize Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  It turns out that Sophia and Srdja have done some original research that shows that the use of humor and other dilemma actions greatly boosts the success rate of resistance struggles.  Moreover, dilemma actions and "laughtivism" can be used to de-legitimize the corporate or State-owned media of the oppressor.  Laughtivism can be used successfully against Fox News, One America, and other far-Right or White supremacist media, for instance...

An example of a dilemma action: toys protest corruption in Minsk.

Did the cops arrest the toys?  How did that make them look?

Image from Radio Free Europe article dated 10 February 2012, 

retrieved from Radio Free Europe on 16 August 2020

I am planning to write a series of posts walking us through a key text on strategic nonviolent resistance.  The name of the text is From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp.  Those who want to read ahead can download the print copy of the book here, or they can download an audio recording of the book here.  Remember this quote from Srdja: "There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

The Tribes of the Agents Provocateurs

In a number of posts (here, here, and here for instance) I have asserted that the majority of violence which has taken place at Black Lives Matter protests in the United States over the last two months was caused by White infiltrators.  I have therefore argued that basing a nonviolent resistance struggle solely on the tactic of mass protest rallies and marches is a dangerously short-sighted strategic approach.

But some may wonder whether my assertion that mainly White actors have been responsible for the violence is accurate.  Therefore, I'd like to share the following news stories:

• "‘Umbrella Man’ went viral breaking windows at a protest. He was a white supremacist trying to spark violence, police say", Washington Post.  Note that the "Umbrella Man" made his appearance at one of the first Minneapolis protests against the murder of George Floyd.
• "White Women Tagging ‘Black Lives Matter’ On Starbucks Caught By Black Protestors", BET.
• "Nearly two dozen arrested in Richmond as weeks of peaceful protest turned violent over the weekend," Washington Post.  Note that the mayor of Richmond identified the violent instigators as White supremacists who were outsiders to the community.
• "Why are white supremacists protesting the deaths of black people?", The Conversation.
• "A white supremacist channel on Telegram encouraged followers to incite violence during police brutality protests by 'shooting in a crowd,' according to internal DHS memo," Business Insider.
• "Violence mars Portland protests, frustrates Black community," AP.  Note that the troublemakers are not content to limit themselves to causing trouble at protests, but are part of the White violence against minority businesses and neighborhoods in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests.
• "Finley: Violent white protesters hurt cause of racial justice," The Detroit News.
• "Meet the ‘Boogaloo boys,’ the violent extremists attracting members of the US military," Task and Purpose.
• "As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement," Washington Post.  Note that members of the Boogaloo movement have been linked to the shootings of police and Federal security guards that took place after the murder of George Floyd.
• "Far-right groups like the “Boogaloo” and “O9A” continue to attract troops and veterans," Military Times.  Note that the senior officers of the U.S. military recognize the presence of a far-right element in the U.S. military as a serious problem.  Note also the link between these far-right elements and Satanism.
• "A woman accused of throwing Molotov cocktail at a police car suggests a protester gave her the device," CNN.  Note that although this woman claimed that Black protestors gave her the Molotov cocktail, the police who investigated her discovered that she was lying.  What gave her away was the presence of her fingerprints and the fingerprints of a friend of hers on a note about glass bottles...

A few comments.  First, I am extremely grateful for the many White people who have shown themselves to be both decent and moral in their support for communities of color during the evil reign of Donald Trump.  I am grateful not only for those White people who are sincerely standing for Black lives, but also for those White people who were sincerely revolted by the news that Donald Trump's goons were ripping Latino children from the arms of their parents at the southern border and putting these children into cages and detention centers.  I am a Christian, but I am grateful for those White people who sincerely opposed Donald Trump's attempts at a Muslim travel ban.  I am grateful for the Wall of Moms, the Wall of Dads, and the Wall of Vets.  When I think of the Wall of Vets, I am especially grateful for its founder, a White vet who allowed himself to be beaten by Trump's Homeland Security goons in order to stand against racism and fascism.  I am grateful for those members of the dominant culture who refuse to enjoy the passing pleasures of the sin of being made great at the expense of their fellow human beings on the earth.

However, it must also be noted that there is a deeply dysfunctional element in the American dominant culture.  This element consists of people who have based their entire lives and their entire identity on the power they have been able to exercise in order to dominate, bully and ruin the lives of their intended victims.  They are the forever "Cowboys" - unreconstructed, unreconstructable, and unrepentant - who demand that the rest of us play the role of the forever "Indians" or the forever "slaves".  A woman I recently heard in an online workshop said that bullies have thin skins.  I would also add that bullies are not really sure they exist in the world.  Being afraid of their own ghosthood, they can only reassure themselves of their existence by trashing someone else's life.  The Boogaloo movement, for instance, is one of those far right movements who are trying to push society into chaos so that they can build a fascist, White supremacist empire out of the ashes.  These are the Elliot Rodgers of the world, who seek to ruin in order that they may possess.  Rather like Satan, aren't they?  And if communities of color base their struggle solely on the tactic of mass protest, guess who will come in to hijack the protests!

Therefore, a key response of the historically marginalized, of the communities of color, of the communities which have not been historically dominant must be a response of collective self-organization.  By organizing ourselves to meet our collective needs, we build our social power - power which is to be used not to dominate others, but to help ourselves fulfill our own ontogeny, and to help other afflicted communities fulfill their ontogeny.  And it is collective and sustained self-organization that is the foundation of successful nonviolent resistance movements - not mere protest.  Study Gandhi for instance, and you will discover not only the acts of mass noncooperation against the British, but also his insistence on what he called the constructive program - a key part of an oppressed population liberating itself from oppression by learning to rule itself.

So this brings me to my last comment.  Given the weakness of struggles that rely solely on mass protest, and given the ease with which both State and non-State opponents can hijack such struggles, I once again urge the Black Lives Matter organizers and the organizers of the struggles of other communities of color to look beyond mass protest as your go-to tactic.  Broaden your knowledge of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Please read some good books on the subject.  (Maybe one of my future posts will be simply a list of recommended good books!)  And please learn the art of strategy!

I leave you with one comparison from military history.  World War 1 was almost lost by the British because of one man, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.  Haig assumed command of British troops in 1914, and proceeded to launch a number of offensives against the defensive German lines.  For over three years, his go-to strategy was to try to wear the Germans down by attrition, and to try to punch a hole in German defenses so that his horse-mounted cavalry could charge to victory.  Such a strategy might have worked in the 1800's...but by World War 1, there were these inconvenient little things called barbed wire, machine guns and heavy artillery.  The Germans also used a tactic known as defense-in-depth.  Haig became highly predictable in his tactics, in the same way that having mass protests day after day for over 60 days in the U.S. in 2020 has become highly predictable.  Therefore, the Germans played rope-a-dope with him, costing him several hundred thousand men.  Britain was saved from defeat by the entrance of the United States into the war.  But did Haig learn from his mistakes?  Not at all, according to a quote of his from 1926.

Basing a strategic nonviolent resistance or liberation struggle solely on spontaneous, poorly-planned mass protest rallies in these days should therefore seem about as stupid as relying on horse-mounted cavalry in modern warfare, shouldn't it?

2nd Repost: The Libertarian Lifeboat

COVID-19 continues to march through the "Land of the Free," leaving a trail of death, joblessness and bankruptcies of small and large businesses.  The United States of America is reaping the fruits of having allowed itself to become "Murdochified."  And in case you are one of those people now suffering hard times who thought a few months ago that it could never happen to you, I've got a story for you.  The story will help you to figure out what it is that you bought when you made a deal with the Devil - that is, the devil of libertarianism, greed, hatred of social safety nets, and selfishness.  This story will also be of benefit to those of us who have had to put up with a Murdochified country for the last three and a half years.

The version of the story which I am linking here is actually its second incarnation.  If you want to read the original version, click here.  And I will have a more research-heavy original post this weekend, God willing.

Repost: The Recovery of Subversive Virtue

I am running a bit ragged this weekend, so I won't have time for a research-heavy post.  However, if you want ideas for a low-risk way of resisting a dominant oppressive system, please check out my post from a few years ago titled, "The Recovery of Subversive Virtue."  See you next week, God willing.

An Open Letter to the Black Lives Matter Organizers

I am writing as an African-American who really wants us to win our struggle for liberation and who really wants us to succeed in removing Donald Trump from office.  But I am afraid that events that took place yesterday in Seattle may make it more likely that we will lose.  This is why I am writing today.

You know, I am sure, that the world is watching the ongoing protests against the murders of unarmed Black Americans in this country and in Portland.  These protests fall within a certain category of tactics of nonviolent resistance.  (By the way, when I talk about strategic nonviolent resistance, I am not talking about Martin Luther King!  Rather, I mean what Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution is talking about in her TED video.)  In the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, nonviolent resistance actions can take two forms: tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  Tactics of concentration include mass rallies and street protests.  One problem with street rallies is that they can be hijacked by agents of the State who incite violence (including property destruction) in order to discredit the protesters by claiming that they are anarchists.  Thankfully, that narrative had begun to shift because of the Wall of Moms in Portland (joined lately by the Wall of Dads and the Wall of Vets).

But in Seattle yesterday, violent infiltrators disrupted what should have been a peaceful protest and instead provided the world with images that play right into the hands of Donald Trump.  Those images make us look like criminals and undermine our attempts to discredit the system that is oppressing us.  Note also that the NAACP has commented on how what started as a Black expression of struggle against White oppression has been dangerously hijacked.  The protests are no longer really about Black lives, but about attention-seeking White people.  As I said above, I support the Wall of Moms - especially because they have put themselves at the service of their Black and Brown neighbors.  But I agree 100 percent with the NAACP condemnation of the anarchists and other agitators.

Therefore, I am begging you as a fellow African-American to shift your resistance to tactics of dispersion.  I'd also like to ask that you please stop holding mass rallies and protests unless you create a system to make sure that everyone who shows up will remain nonviolent.  This applies especially to White people who show up at a protest, because most of the violence (including property destruction!) that has been perpetrated at protests over the last two months was done by White people.  If you want to see why nonviolent discipline is so important, please watch this video by Professor Erica Chenoweth (and this one also).

I would also ask that you all study not only the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, but that you also study the literature on effective community organizing.  This falls right in line with what the family of George Floyd asked of us all in the aftermath of his murder by the police.  Note that George Floyd's brother condemned the violence that had erupted even in the early days of the protests over George Floyd's murder, and he demanded that those who want to see changes happen work in a positive manner to make those changes happen. 

I have not suffered like George Floyd's family (or Tamir Rice's family, or Michael Brown's family, or Stephon Clark's family, or Breonna Taylor's family).  But as a kid I was exposed to a lot of intense racist physical bullying.  I went to White churches where the racism was more subtle, yet just as damaging.  I've been followed by police and even stopped by police simply because I am Black.  I've suffered workplace harassment.  To me, it seems that Donald Trump wants to bring back an America in which it's okay for white supremacy to treat us all like trash.  Trump has been losing this year because of his incompetence.  But if he wants to try to rescue his reelection by picturing himself as a law-and-order president protecting the world from chaos, why do you want to hand him situations where he can "prove" his claims?  I don't want to suffer another four years of his garbage.  Do you?

And if you are White and you are reading this, please stop showing up to BLM protests unless you know that you can control yourself and not vandalize property or provoke law enforcement officers by stupid stunts like throwing firecrackers or other objects at police.  You're not the heroes you seem to think you are when you pull such stunts.

Thanks to all who take the time to read this.

A Teaching Moment: What Is Backfire?

If you've been following Donald Trump's attempts to quell peaceful protests against police killings of African-Americans, and if you are wondering how to make sense of it all, I'd like to offer a bit of assistance in explaining the dynamics of nonviolent civil resistance.  By the way, I am in no way an expert.  I've just read a lot of books over the last three and a half years ;)

So from time to time over the next three months, I'll be pointing out certain elements of what's going on in the United States right now, and I will be using and explaining terms from the literature on civil resistance.  Today's term is backfire.

What is backfire?  It is the phenomenon that occurs when an oppressor tries to crush a nonviolent movement by means of violent State repression only to find that the violence perpetrated by the State makes the citizens of the country even more disgusted with the oppressing government.  When an oppressor's repression backfires, three things happen:

• The oppressor's legitimacy in the eyes of the country's citizens decreases
• The nonviolent movement actually becomes stronger and bigger as people formerly on the margins join the movement as an expression of their disgust with the oppressive regime
• And the oppressor's pillars of support are further weakened.

Backfire works best when the civil resistance movement maintains strict nonviolent discipline, including abstaining from property destruction. Moreover, skillful nonviolent resisters are able to amplify backfire through a wise selection of tactics.

The backfire dynamic is strongly at work in the confrontations between Trump's Federal storm troopers and unarmed citizens in the Black Lives Matter protests.  Before Trump sent Federal agents to Portland, the BLM protests had been declining.  But Trump's move not only highlighted the brutality of the Federal thugs, but it also provoked a "Wall of Moms" who came out to protect their children from attack by forming a human shield.  That "Wall of Moms" has now been joined by a "Wall of Dads" armed with leaf blowers to combat tear gas fired by the Feds.  And there will soon be a "Wall of Vets".  Far from crushing the BLM protests, Trump has only made them grow bigger and more energized.  Moreover, these "Walls of Parents" are spreading rapidly to other cities.  And a Republican former Homeland Security director has openly criticized Trump for sending Federal troops uninvited to American cities that did not ask for these troops.  These developments show that Trump does not understand backfire.  They also show that neither he nor his current DHS secretary are exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Want to learn more about backfire?  Read Making Oppression Backfire by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies.  You can download it for free.

By the way, please also read my two previous posts.  They contain some necessary criticism of the ICNC.

The History of the Suffragettes - Further Proof Of What the ICNC Has Lost

The International Center On Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has recently tried to advise those protesting the brutal racism against people of color in the United States, and specifically those protesting the murders of unarmed African-Americans.  As I have written previously, I used to be a supporter of the ICNC and greatly enjoyed reading its offerings, as I thought that the ICNC presented an excellent education in strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of neutralizing an oppressor's power.

But during the last several months I became concerned by the appearance of writers and "teachers" attached to the ICNC who suggested that low-level violence (including property destruction!) could help a nonviolent movement succeed faster with better outcomes than strictly nonviolent resistance.  Because of my previous readings on the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance and my understanding that autocrats and oppressors frequently try to inject violence into a nonviolent movement in order to undermine it, I could only conclude that the ICNC had been infiltrated by a person or persons working for Trump, Putin, or the regimes they represent.  One example of my concern lies in the article written by Professor Tom Hastings in which he lays out his opinion of "when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign," as well as his own story of how he was arrested three times for destroying military property.  From his article it is obvious that Mr. Hastings believes that there are times when property destruction is both justified and helpful to a movement.

The only thing is, Mr. Hastings is dead wrong.  And the experience of the suffragette movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Britain and the United States proves it.  According to a 2015 analysis by George Lakey, the British suffragette movement achieved much less than the American movement, and it did so even though it started earlier and many more women were involved.  Why?  Because the American women who agitated for the right of women to vote did so using entirely nonviolent acts, whereas in Britain (oh, such a staid and proper society!), women resorted to arson, blowing up post offices, and smashing windows.  That's why, by 1920, while waging a nonviolent campaign that ran all the way through World War 1, the American suffragettes won equal access to the ballot box, while in Britain (where the women were forced to suspend their campaign during the war), by 1918 only women who were over 30 and owned property were granted the right to vote, even though they had begun their campaign five years before the American suffragettes.  It wasn't until 1928 that British women gained fully equal access to the ballot box - eight years after this victory was won in the United States.  Lakey asks what slowed the British women down, and the answer is that they undermined themselves and their movement by engaging in property destruction.

Mr. Hastings should maybe read the article by George Lakey.  Or he might read the essay by Jack DuVall (formerly of the ICNC) which criticized the property destruction instigated by some supposed "anti-fascists" in the early days of the Trump administration.  That violence played directly into the hands of Trump.

Thankfully, the protesters now facing down Federal troops in Portland do not seem to be listening to Tom Hastings.

(God bless the Wall of Moms!  Now that shows innovation in tactics of protest!  Compare what they are doing with what the Mothers of the Disappeared did to the Argentine military regime before it fell.  They also did it to the Pinochet regime in Chile. And note: the Wall of Moms is spreading to other cities.  How can Chump - er, I mean, Trump - call these women thugs?!)

As long as these protesters continue to remain nonviolent in the face of Federal violence perpetrated against them, they will continue to show the world that the real thug and violent actor is the one and only Donald J. Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voting As An Act of Civil Resistance, Or, Whose Idiot Is Umair Haque?

Logo of OTPOR! Serbian nonviolent resistance movement

which ousted Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Image By Le serbe - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14240808, 

retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 12 July 2020

Ever since Donald Trump's capture of the White House in 2016, I have been fixated on the question of how oppressed people (or people targeted for oppression) can shatter the power of their oppressors without resorting to violence.  My initial research led me to the writings of Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, and Gene Sharp.  Later, my reading expanded to include the work of Srdja Popovic.  From these thinkers and activists I learned to see strategic nonviolent resistance as system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction, as I wrote about in an earlier post.

This shift in the balance of power occurs when skillful nonviolent resisters are able to weaken or destroy the pillars of support of an oppressive government by shifting the loyalty of the people who comprise those pillars of support.  For those readers who may not be familiar with strategic nonviolent resistance, "pillars of support" are those organizations which provide social power and legitimacy to a regime and its leaders.   These include the police, the military, banks and other financial institutions, and the media, as well as others.  Skillful strategic nonviolent resisters are able to weaken the allegiance of the members of these organizations to the regime by two means: first, by pointing out the corruption, evil, destructiveness, and specially, the unsustainability of the current regime, and second, by presenting a righteous alternative to the regime.  By employing both of these means, the nonviolent resisters weaken and eventually destroy the legitimacy of the regime.  Once the regime loses legitimacy, it can no longer command obedience - therefore it can no longer survive.

In reading the history of successful nonviolent resistance campaigns, I have recently been struck by the role which elections played in the resistance struggles.  Elections can be a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, skillful dictators and autocrats use them as a tool to divide the opposition so that the dictators can retain the appearance of a mandate to power.  This was the strategy of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, as documented by Chenoweth and Stephan in the chapter of Why Civil Resistance Works titled, "The Philippine People Power Movement, 1983-1986."  This was also the strategy used by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who retained his power for several years by dividing and co-opting his opposition as documented here and here.

But there are times when elections as a weapon are seized from the hands of autocrats and dictators by an opposition who skillfully uses the elections to remove the legitimacy of the dictatorial regimes.  They do so not only by publicizing the evils of the current regime and the possibility of a righteous alternative, but also by the following additional means:

• Massive "get out the vote" drives, especially among disaffected and marginalized populations,
• The development of a robust network of volunteers into an effective, independent means of monitoring election results,
• And the development of a means of nonviolently causing painful sanctions against the regime in the event that it tries to cheat, rig the election, or refuse to accept the results.

The development of an independent election monitoring network was the means used by both OTPOR! and CeSID in Yugoslavia to verify that Milosevic had in fact lost the 2000 election, as documented here and here.  The bulldozer strike and subsequent mass march on Parliament provided the painful sanctions that forced Milosevic to resign.  In a similar way, the Philippine opposition skillfully used the 1986 election to de-legitimize Ferdinand Marcos, employing a network of half a million volunteer election monitors to expose the cheating of the Marcos regime, and employing a massive general strike and huge mass protests to provide the pressure that forced Marcos out of office.

Now in 2020, those who treasure the continued supremacy of a favored few are hanging their hopes on the slim possibility that Donald J. Trump will pull off some sort of Election Day miracle that will enable him to "win" the election (meaning the Electoral College) even if he loses the American popular vote by several million.  In order to get the American people to passively swallow the results of such an "election," the election must be made as close as possible.  Thanks be to God that right now, it doesn't appear that the election will be close at all, and that it appears that not only Donald Trump, but a lot of Republicans are about to be ejected from office as if by the violent projectile emesis of the American body politic.  Yet those who want another four years of Trump continue to fight on.  And some of their tactics are sneaky.  Those of us who lived through 2016 can spot these tactics.

One particular tactic is to try to say that there's really not much difference between Biden and Trump, or to characterize the choice between the two men as a choice between the "lesser of two evils."  The users of this tactic seek to increase its effectiveness by using supposed voices from the Left to make such assertions.  These supposed members of the Left claim to oppose Trump and winner-take-all capitalism, yet they also claim that voting for Biden is an act of ideological impurity and that we who stand to suffer the most from another four years of Trump should not lower ourselves to vote for someone like Biden.  Among such voices is Omar Haque, who lumps both supporters of Trump and supporters of Biden into the same category, which he calls "The American Idiot."  Omar is not the only idiot trying to pull such a stunt.  There is also the website In These Times (published by the Democratic Socialists of America), who last month wrote an article titled, "Want To Defeat Trump Without Campaigning for Biden? Here's How."  Note that if you read their article, you may conclude that it should have been titled, "Want to Waste Your Time In Symbolic Opposition To Trump While Handing Him A Second Term?  Here's How."  (Note also that In These Times has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to downplay the evidence of Russian interference in the American electoral process - even though the entire American intelligence community is united in their assertion that Russian interference is real and did take place in 2016.)

This reminds me of blogger Olga Doroshenko's excellent description of the Russians who claimed to be opposed to Putin and to his aggression against Ukraine, yet who criticized the attempts of the Ukrainians to liberate themselves from Russian aggression because those attempts did not meet the Russian standard of "perfection".  As she pointed out, when you are doing all you can to liberate yourself, yet someone criticizes your efforts on the grounds that they are not "perfect", it is a sign that the critic really wants you dead.

Let's take a lesson from the Serbians who successfully used elections to oust Milosevic.  They rallied a formerly fractured opposition behind a candidate who stood the best chance of delivering them from both Milosevic and from the ongoing destruction of the nation under Milosevic.  Was that candidate "perfect" No!  But was he aimed in a radically different direction than the continued slide into self-destruction under Milosevic?  Yes!

Biden is not perfect.  (What mortal human being is?!)  Yet he is aimed in a radically different direction from Trump.  As was said of Milosevic, it can be said of Trump that his language smells like death.  I want life to win this year.  Therefore, I am voting for Biden.  And I am wondering if we have the political will to organize ourselves effectively in the next three months in order to put teeth into an electoral loss for Trump.  Are we willing to do what the Serbs and the Filipinos did?

The Go To Jail Truth

My worldview during the last five years has been based on the following premises:

1. That the universe which we all inhabit is a moral universe ruled by the moral standard of a righteous Creator;
2. That an essential pillar of that moral standard is the duty of each human being to treat his or her fellow human beings with dignity and charity;
3. That the Creator of the universe stands ready to enforce His righteous moral standard by imposing consequences on those who break that standard;
4. And that since the most privileged members of the United States have broken that moral standard in making themselves great by murdering and oppressing their fellow human beings, the consequences of this moral breach have begun to spread throughout American society.  I have called these consequences the outworkings of damnation. 

The theoretical basis and starting point for my worldview (and especially of point #4 of that worldview) is found in passages such as Proverbs 22:22-23; Jeremiah 7:9-10; Ezekiel 18:4; Ezekiel 22; and James 5:1-6.  Now when a worldview first comes into being, it is nothing more than a hypothesis.  In order for the worldview to become mature, it must be tested by observation.  Therefore, in order for me to be able to confidently assert the worldview I have laid out above, I must be able to point to destructive or damaging consequences which threaten the privileged and which are the direct result of the dirty tricks used by the privileged to gain and keep their privilege.

But what is interesting is that in searching for the evidences of the outworkings of damnation among the privileged, the searcher encounters various flavors and levels of "truth".  The particular flavor of truth which the searcher encounters will depend on whom he asks for that "truth".  If he or she asks the holders of power and privilege, the answer contained in their words will be very different from the answer which might be obtained by planting hidden cameras, listening devices and skillful spies to observe the affairs of the holders of privilege and power.   This is not surprising, since the wealth of the privileged consists not only in the actual physical assets which they have, but in the image of wealth and power which they are able to project to the world.  In fact, if a person's image is strong enough, he can get a lot of what he needs or wants based on image alone - whether it's obtaining a huge line of credit because he looks like he is rich enough to repay his loan, or whether it's successfully intimidating someone else because the bully has made himself look too powerful to resist.  We might call this projection of an idealized image "managed truth."  (Kind of like "managed democracy", isn't it?)

Last week, the United States was treated to an example of this "managed truth" in the latest employment report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Trump administration celebrated this report by shouting that the American economy is "coming back faster, bigger, and better than we ever thought possible" in the face of the coronavirus pandemic because 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy between mid-May and mid-June.  However, as a number of sources have reported (see this, this, and this for instance), this supposed recovery does not reflect the state of the economy as it is today.  For these jobs were added during the hasty and ill-conceived rush by many states to reopen their economies, and those states are being forced now to backtrack their reopenings due to an explosion of COVID-19 cases.  Moreover, the vast majority of jobs that were added are in the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors - sectors which are most likely to be shut down again due to the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some actual figures from the BLS are given below:

• Hospitality and Leisure - 2.1 million jobs added
• Food Service and Drinking Places (bars) - 1.5 million jobs added
• Amusements, Gambling and Recreation - 353,000 jobs added
• Retail Trade - 740,000 jobs added.

That adds up to a total of 4.69 million out of the 4.8 million jobs that were added.  It should be noted that the resurgence of the pandemic threatens all of the job gains in these classes which I have listed.  Not only this, but the last two BLS jobs reports have contained a "misclassification error" which falsely lowered the reported unemployment rate.

So if seekers for the truth of things - especially those who wish to accurately track the outworkings of damnation - cannot rely on official statements from those who are experiencing that damnation, where can they turn?  One possible source of truth is the official reports and communications which the most privileged members of society share with each other, for it is these reports which are most frequently used as the basis for the decisions made by these privileged members.  Petroleum geologist Arthur E. Berman once referred to these reports as "the go to jail truth".  Why refer to these as the "go to jail truth"?  Because if the captains of certain industries lie to each other (or to government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission) about the actual state of their industries and market sectors, a whole lot of people stand to lose great big money - thus (hopefully) obliging the liars to go to jail.  The threat of jail time is usually enough to keep most people honest in their official reporting.

But what if the most privileged members of society have corrupted themselves to such a point that they will stop at nothing in order to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense?  For evil is progressive.  The first step is to disregard moral restraints against taking advantage of one's fellow human beings.  The last step is to disregard even the physical or financial realities of one's situation in the desire to be godlike.  Along the way, people who have thus given themselves to evil stop telling even the "go to jail truth", and the organizations, businesses and polities headed by them enter the realm of willful blindness.  Last week the State of Texas entered this realm, as a state which rushed the reopening of its economy and which is now facing the overwhelming of its medical system due to COVID-19 cases that have spiraled out of control.  But if you want to find out how much the Texas medical system has become overwhelmed, good luck asking the State government.  They won't tell you.

According to Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril, organizations and polities operating under willful blindness have certain characteristics.  First, most of the lower level inhabitants or employees know that something smells rotten.  Second, many of them can actually see some of the skeletons in closets and/or dead bodies under beds.  Third, the higher-ups in these organizations and polities will have created an environment that is hostile to truth-tellers.  Fourth, such organizations and polities tend to break down rather suddenly and dramatically in a way that surprises the outside world even though the lower level people on the inside could see the breakdown a long time in coming.  The collapse of Enron is a good case in point.

How can seekers of truth track the outworkings of damnation through organizations or polities which have entered the phase of willful blindness?  Ms. Heffernan gives us some suggestions on pages 237 and 238 of her book.  First, we need to have a sense of history - especially the history of the collapse of dysfunctional organizations.  By studying the collapse of a multitude of types of organizations along with a multitude of types of organizational dysfunction, we can get a sense of the general trends along which the outworkings of damnation are likely to propagate.  Once we recognize these trends, we watch the dysfunctional organization to see if we can spot the "weak signals" which indicate a trend.  Where the weak signals accumulate, a trend is likely emerging.  It was attention to these weak signals that enabled a CIA analyst named Herb Meyer to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union several years before it happened.

And this bears thinking about a bit more deeply.  For I'd like to suggest that Putin's Russia may be headed for a second collapse.  As someone living in America, I have focused largely on trying to track the outworkings of damnation in American society - yet the United States is by no means the only nation which is worthy of damnation.  Russia has proven itself over the years to be at least the equal of the U.S. when it comes to national narcissism and the desire to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  (See this, this, this, this, and this for instance.)  Putin's use of dirty tricks (such as election-tampering, promotion of far-Right/racist/skinhead organizations, assassinations, and now bounties) to make Russia great by tearing down the West have also been well-documented over the years.  Indeed, when one reads M. Scott Peck's description of malignant narcissism in his book People of the Lie, one can't help but think of Russia under Putin.  To quote Peck, "As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life - usually in the name of righteousness."  When observing Russia, therefore, some weak signals to watch out for include watching what happens to truth tellers in Russia who reveal Russia's imperfections.  Another (not-so-weak) signal is the Russian attempt to meddle in other people's lives in order to destroy them. (He who spends all his time minding other people's business doesn't have time to mind his own!)  A third weak signal is seeing how frantic the Russians (and their mouthpieces in the West) become when the fig leaves sewn by Russia to cover its shame slip in the least bit to expose some raw flesh.  Watch the weak signals.

Repeat Post: The Ontogenic Battle

My schedule for the next several days is full of things I need to do in order to take care of business (including the earning of daily bread).  So I won't have time to do the research needed to put together a fresh blog post.  However, I hope you will find that the things in the fridge, in the freezer and in the cupboards are just as tasty.  Here is a link to a post I wrote back in 2017.  It is just as appropriate today for all those of us both in the United States and throughout the world who are under threat from a dominant culture that wants to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  Enjoy.

Whadja Do With The Money?!

Two Filthy Men, Two Filthy Regimes

Image captured in late 2016, retrieved from phorum.vietbao.com 

on 21 June 2020.  Similar images from 2016 and early 2017

can be seen here, here, and here.

*Note: I noticed this weekend that this blog had several dozen visits from people who live outside of the United States.  Thanks very much for reading my posts!  If English is not your first language, please let me explain the title of today's post more clearly.  The word "whadja" is not actually proper English.  It is instead an American slang contraction of the words, "what did you...", or of "what do you..."  So my title in standard English would read, "What did you do with the money?!"  And now, on to today's post.

From the time I was six years old to the time I turned eight years old, my parents sent me to Catholic school.   The schools I attended provided lunch for their students, but this was contingent on the families of each of the students paying a weekly lunch allowance.  It's been a long while since those days, but I vaguely remember that the usual procedure for families was to put each week's "lunch money" into an envelope, and attach the envelope to each child's clothes with a safety pin on each Monday morning before the kid went to school.  I think my parents used to admonish me to give the envelope to the nuns the moment I got to school.  

But one morning I became curious to know what was in the envelope, and so I opened it before my arrival.  When I found out what was inside, I became full of ambitious ideas of how I would like to spend the money.  The result was that when I got to school, I handed the nuns an empty envelope.  Little did I know that the school was not going to feed me just because of my good looks.  Little did I also know that they would place an urgent call to my parents.  But what I did know was that my parents were firm believers in the laying on of hands in order to cure their children from foolishness.  When I got home that day, hands were therefore laid on me.

These events should have served as a valuable lesson, namely that money is a means of transmitting the benefits of honest labors between two people.  My dad had worked hard in order to earn the money which was given to me to give to the nuns in exchange for the hard work that other adults had done in making a nutritious lunch for a bunch of kids.  Money therefore could be seen as a reliable transmitter of value only as long as it symbolized an exchange of the value of one kind of necessary work for the value of other kinds of necessary work.  Empty lunch money envelopes, on the other hand, were not a symbol of exchange of one kind of value for another.  I wish I could say that the events of that day had taught me right then this valuable lesson, but at the age of six, I was still just a goofy, gel-brained boy out "raising Cain", to put it euphemistically.  

I do understand the lesson now.  But as I look at the uses to which American money have been put lately, I am not sure that very many of the people at the top of the American economic pyramid understand this lesson.  Nor am I quite sure that some of these people are not still gel-brained six-year-old Cain-raisers trapped in adult bodies.  For it increasingly appears that the exchange of money between the most powerful players no longer represents an exchange of differing kinds of necessary, valuable labor.  American money is therefore increasingly not a reliable transmitter of value between two parties who both do various kinds of necessary work.  

I am thinking of the American stock exchanges (NYSE, S&P 500, and NASDAQ, to name a few) in the aftermath of Donald Trump's seizure of the White House in 2016.  What is interesting to note is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) shot up over 2,000 points from November 2016 to February 2017.  (Source: Statista.  See this also from MarketWatch.)  Since January 2017, the DJIA has closed below 20,000 only once.  The DJIA has instead flown on a somewhat phugoid trajectory within a range from 22,000 to 28,000 points for most of Trump's presidency.  During the upswings in the DJIA and other exchanges, Trump has boasted of these upswings as proof that he is indeed "Making America Great Again!"  But what has really been going on behind the scenes?  (Aside from the exploding numbers of tent cities and homeless encampments throughout the United States!)

First, it is no secret that much of the increase in corporate asset prices has been driven by stock buybacks, as noted in the following stories:

• "Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous For The Economy," Harvard Business Review, January 2020.  (Note: this essay was published before the coronavirus pandemic became a major economic issue.)
• "Companies Have Been Buying Back Massive Amounts Of Stock This Year," CNBC, July 2019.
• "S&P 500 Q4 2018 Buybacks Set 4th Consecutive Quarterly Record at $223 Billion; 2018 Sets Record $806 Billion," S&P Global, March 2019

According to various sources, corporate buybacks of publicly traded stocks in U.S. stock exchanges have totaled over $2 trillion from 2017 until now.  This is troubling because it used to be that the price of a share of a company's stock was a reflection of the value of the amount and quality of the work done by the owners and employees of the company.  But due to the tax cuts passed by a Republican-controlled Congress under Donald Trump, the money that should have gone into corporate taxes or into investment in increasing the value of meaningful labor has instead gone to boosting shareholder dividends, stock prices, and CEO bonuses.  The prices of shares of corporate stock therefore no longer reflect the genuine value of the things produced by the corporations whose stock is publicly traded. 

This is even clearer when we consider what has happened to U.S. productivity during Trump's presidency.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported widespread declines in American manufacturing productivity in 2018.  This is a reflection of a decline in global worker productivity during 2018 and 2019.  American worker productivity also declined during the last half of 2019.  The decline in productivity extends also to the construction industry, according to this source.  And Servaas Storm of the Institute for New Economic Thinking states his view that the reasons for falling American productivity are "‘under-consumption’ driven by stagnating real wages, rising inequality and greater job insecurity and polarization."  In other words, falling American productivity is being caused by the very factors which Donald Trump has maximized.

But as I said in a previous post tracing the outworkings of damnation on American society, I am not here to editorialize or to moralize.  I write this post only to hypothesize how this situation might end.  For "the wages of sin is death", and the regime of Donald Trump is based on the premise of America's most privileged holders of wealth and power sinning against the rest of humanity by making themselves great at everyone else's expense.  I am therefore wondering how this one special group of parasites is about to die.  For the most powerful economic players in the United States have made it clear in 2020 that one of their main objectives is to prop up the value of the financial assets of their cronies at all costs.  Therefore, the Fed has this year made itself a purchaser of corporate bonds.  This includes buying the debt of corporations which should have crashed and burned because the value of the things they produced declined to the level of junk.  This is also why the DJIA for instance has consistently closed above 23,000 over the last two months even as the coronavirus pandemic deals a shattering blow to the actual productive capacity of the U.S. economy.  (Note: it is not only the U.S. central bank which is propping up asset prices.  See this also.)

Now, if the financial "bodily organ" which creates U.S. dollars uses them to prop up stock prices of corporations which produce no real value, what does that do to the U.S. dollar as a reliable transmitter of value?  (To put it another way, what would happen to your body if your bone marrow suddenly began producing red blood cells that could not carry oxygen to your vital organs?)  Consider also that the Fed's ability to prop up asset prices depends on the Fed's ability to sell U.S. debt to foreign governments.  And consider that the U.S. government is already hopelessly in debt (especially due to huge deficits under Trump), with the likelihood of repayment growing more distant by the day.  What happens when foreign governments begin to refuse to buy any more U.S. debt and start asking, "Whadja do with the money?!"

Why Are These Weapons Strong?

I've been scanning recent news articles that deal with nonviolent resistance.  As is to be expected, almost all of these recent articles deal with the ongoing protests against police brutality and the murder of unarmed people of color in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.  Some of these articles are misleading - perhaps unintentionally or perhaps not.  So I thought it good to write a post clearing up a few misconceptions regarding nonviolent resistance.

As I have come to understand nonviolent resistance in the light of the literature I've been studying from the end of 2016 until now, I've come to my own definition of the term, stated below:

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

This definition comes from my reading of histories of those who have used nonviolent resistance to defeat oppression including conflicts with some of the most repressive regimes the world has seen within the last 120 years.  Because nonviolent resistance is a system of means employed by the oppressed, it is not passivity or inaction.  Below are some other things that nonviolent resistance is not:

• Nonviolent resistance is not just nonviolence.  (However, nonviolent resisters are nonviolent!)  Why make this distinction?  Because oppressors (along with some misguided members of the oppressed) frequently equate nonviolent resistance with the kind of "nonviolence" that consists only of being passive in the face of oppression, or of trying to "rise above" your oppressor by showing him or her that the oppression doesn't bother you, or by finding creative ways to continue to turn the other cheek or to learn to "live gracefully" under ongoing oppression.  The term "nonviolence" has come thus to have almost New Age "spiritual" connotations.  But if you are an African-American mother whose children were exposed to heavy metals in Flint, Michigan, when Republicans destroyed the safety of the city's water supply, or if you are a relative of the unarmed African-Americans who were murdered by police, or if you are a Latino U.S. citizen whose relatives were wrongly deported, don't you have a right - even a duty - to be bothered?

• Nonviolent resistance is not weak.  Moreover, it is not weaker than violence.  Oppressed populations who rely on nonviolent struggle are twice as likely to achieve their aims as those who use violence, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  In that book, Chenoweth and Stephan present the results of a statistical analysis of both nonviolent and violent conflicts which shows that nonviolent struggles achieved an outright success rate of 52 percent.  The rate of partial success was even higher.  Those who used violence succeeded only 26 percent of the time.  As for those violent actors who failed...well, let's just say that many of them did not get a second chance! 

• Nonviolent resistance is not just protest. Scholar Gene Sharp identified 198 methods of nonviolent action, which he grouped into three general categories.  While I am heartened by some of the recent tactical victories I have seen in the recent anti-racism protests, I have to repeat once again that the methods of protest and persuasion are actually the weakest of the categories of methods of nonviolent action, because they have only limited power to apply pressure to an oppressor.  Strategic nonviolent resistance can be used successfully even against oppressors who don't have any better angels to appeal to, because strategic nonviolent resistance relies on more than just protest.

Nonviolent resistance is a set of means by which the oppressed can assert their humanity and dignity in the face of their oppressors in a way that effectively disrupts the power of their oppressors.  And it has an impressive track record, as seen in a brief survey of examples:

• The Philippine "people power" revolution that deposed Ferdinand Marcos was waged nonviolently.  It succeeded after the repeated failure of violent Communist insurgencies.
• The South African struggle which ended apartheid succeeded because its practitioners learned to skillfully apply strategic nonviolent resistance.
• The Polish Solidarity (Solidarność) movement toppled the Communist Jaruzelski regime without violent combat.
• The Serbian OTPOR! (ОТПОР!)movement was part of the Serbian nonviolent resistance that toppled strongman and genocidal maniac Slobodan Milosevic in 2004.

Nonviolent resistance does depend on the participation of large numbers of people.  As more and more people decide to participate, the oppressor's psychological and social pillars of support begin to crumble.  However, there is one weakness of civil resistance: if the resistance turns violent, the number of people willing to participate drops drastically.  And the more violent the resistance becomes, the greater is the ability of the oppressor to justify violent repression against the resisters.  This is why when a nonviolent liberation struggle begins in an oppressed population, the oppressors almost always try to inject violence into it so that they can more easily crush it.

So now we come to the articles I read this week, some of which raised my eyebrows, articles like this:

• "The Limits And Dangers of a Fixation on Nonviolence", Rebecca Pierce
• "In Defense of Destroying Property", R. H. Lossin

Rebecca Pierce claims to be both Black and Jewish, and her essay appears in the New Republic.  Let me just color her misinformed both about nonviolent resistance as a strategic toolkit and as a strategy which works best when not mixed with violence.  R. H. Lossin is white, and does not have to face the sort of demonization which a Black person would face for even suggesting that property destruction is an acceptable way to advance a social movement.  Her article appears in the Nation.  Both the New Republic and the Nation are prominent magazines.  How is it that these people were given the permission to publish such pieces?  Who gave them that permission, and why?  Who benefits from teaching the oppressed to believe that including violence and property destruction in their "variety of tactics" is helpful to those involved in a liberation struggle against a more powerful oppressor?  (What kind of doofus would try to persuade a child to challenge a grizzly bear to a bare-knuckle fight???)

Two last things.  First, in my writings on nonviolent resistance, I have studiously avoided any mention of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King.  I could leave it to you, the reader, to guess all my reasons for leaving him out of my discussion, but I will help you by giving you one reason.  King has been flattened by public school history books and popular culture into a character who fits the description of "nonviolence" I mentioned in my first bullet point above.  So if one goes to communities of the oppressed saying, "We need to practice nonviolent resistance like King did," there will be voices both within and outside the communities of the oppressed who question whether it is realistic to try to convert the oppressor or to build "beloved communities" between oppressor and oppressed, or to ask the oppressed to keep trying to "love their enemies," blah, blah, blah.  In other words, these voices will set up King as a straw man who is easily knocked down, thus hindering the oppressed from seeing the real power and aims of strategic nonviolent resistance. King has therefore become a distraction.

Second, it is instructive to consider the history of Syria over the last ten years or so.  You might be surprised to know that the civil war which started in Syria several years back began as a peaceful nonviolent resistance movement.  In this form, it posed the greatest danger to the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and was beginning to seriously weaken the pillars of support of his regime.  Assad correctly concluded that if the nonviolent struggle were allowed to continue, it would force him out of power (thus bringing Syria into the list of countries which experienced regime change during the Arab Spring).  To prevent that from happening, Assad injected violence into the nonviolent movement by committing outrageous atrocities against the resisters, in order to provoke them to violence.  He also planted caches of weapons in the hopes that the resisters would find them and try to use them against the regime.  (See this also.)  Assad's hope was that by turning the resistance violent, he could shift the resisters onto a battleground in which the State held a decisive advantage.  The only reason why the resulting civil war lasted as long as it did and came close to ousting Assad was that the violent resistance was able to obtain outside sources of funding and supply.  Had that not been the case, the Assad regime would have quickly crushed the resistance movement.  Let that be a warning to those who have a cavalier attitude toward the use of violence in the current struggle against racist oppression in the United States.