- The preaching of the doctrine of the pre-Tribulation rapture, in which believers will supernaturally be whisked away from the earth to Heaven just prior to the period of human history in which mankind must suffer through the final conflict of this present age.
- The teaching that the reason why the United States is not mentioned in the Biblical account of that final conflict is because most of the people of the United States will be caught up in the pre-Tribulation rapture, thus causing the U.S. to cease to exist as an earthly nation.
- The reason why most of the people of the United States will be raptured is because this is a Christian nation! Hey, it's obvious - especially when we vote Republican, oppose gun control and socialism (note: whenever you say this word, be sure to pronounce the "s's" with a sinister hiss - something like this: "ssssssocialisssssmmmmm..."), support family values and the free market, and believe that the United States is Biblically mandated to kill anyone who thinks otherwise.
Thursday, January 7, 2021
The Confused Villains Of The Piece
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
A Time for Celebration and a Time for Caution
It is with great satisfaction that I am enjoying some of the news this evening. The Democratic Party has just retaken control of the United States Senate. This was due in no small part to the groundswell of community organizing and constructive resistance in the African-American community. This encourages me to add diligence to my own organizing plans. I also find it bitingly funny that the African-American players in the WNBA managed to oust a team owner from the U.S. Senate.
The news is not all good, however. The supporters of Donald Trump - consisting mainly of white evangelicals who don't seem to read their Bibles - rioted in Washington DC to prevent the Congressional ratification of Joe Biden as the next President. These are the people who regularly use the term "thugs" to describe unarmed people of color. Who are the real thugs here? Even in this, however, there is a silver lining: those who study strategic nonviolent resistance know that violence always backfires against those who choose to be violent. As a result of the violence of the pro-Trump rioters (who were incited by Trump himself), some of the Republican members of Congress who had intended to object to Biden's ratification have chosen instead to support him. Even Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have turned against Trump. Trump has become a lame duck in every sense of the word, as it was Vice President Pence who coordinated with the military to call National Guard troops to stop the rioting. Clearly Trump is no longer counted among the adults in the room.
For you who are among the marginalized and oppressed, continue to organize constructive resistance! Continue to remain nonviolent. Continue to speak truth to power. Support those even among the Republicans who are finally beginning to speak truth.
One last thing. I believe it is time for those of us who desire to be decent people to organize a permanent boycott of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and possibly YouTube as well. The role of these social media platforms in facilitating the kind of chaos that has characterized the Trump years is undeniable. The boycott should therefore last until the owners of these platforms are bankrupt.
Sunday, January 3, 2021
From D to D, Chapter 5 (Continued): On The Trail of Tommy The Traveler
- To try to make the practitioners of nonviolent struggle resemble the oppressor as much as possible by adopting the oppressor's means of fighting to the greatest extent possible. This shifts the struggle onto a ground in which the means of fighting are chosen by the dictator, and thus the struggle is easy for the oppressor's regime to combat.
- To redefine the concept of strategic nonviolent resistance in such a way that the moral and ethical advantages of would-be resisters are erased.
- To reduce the popular conception of nonviolent resistance into a small set of activities that can be easily controlled, outlawed or hijacked - for instance, by defining resistance solely as mass protest rallies and marches.
Sunday, December 27, 2020
Technology Delay - December 2020
I had every intention of writing another post today for my series on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. But...technology woes intervened over the last week, during which I spent an inordinate amount of time researching a solution to some intermittent Internet access issues. The issues are finally fixed as of 4 PM this afternoon, but I have no desire to begin writing a research-heavy post so late in the day. So we'll have to wait a week.
I do want to mention that sometime in the future I'd like to begin writing a series of posts on the subject of autarky. Autarky as practiced by empires is a very bad thing. However, there is a good kind of autarky, a kind which does not involve making oneself self-sufficient by knocking one's neighbor over the head and taking his stuff. Certain Scriptures from the Good Book come to mind just now. This good form of autarky does, however, require hard, meaningful work. And it is especially relevant in a world in which the ability of certain groups of people to enrich themselves by using the tools of empire at other peoples' expense is coming to an end. Stay tuned...
Sunday, December 20, 2020
From D to D, Chapter 5: Exercising Power
- It does not accept that the outcome will be decided by the means of fighting chosen by the dictatorship.
- It is difficult for the regime to combat.
- It can uniquely aggravate weaknesses of the dictatorship and can sever its sources of power.
- It can in action be widely dispersed but can also be concentrated on a specific objective.
- It leads to errors of judgment and action by the dictators.
- It can effectively utilize the population as a whole and the society's groups and institutions in the struggle to end the brutal domination of the few.
- It helps to spread the distribution of effective power in the society, making the establishment and maintenance of a democratic society more possible."
- The struggle group uses a variety of tactics to wage the struggle, instead of fixating on only one or two methods. This is one key ingredient which makes a successful struggle hard for the ruling oppressive regime to combat. Note that Gene Sharp identified 198 methods of nonviolent action which can be used and which have been used historically in nonviolent struggle. And Sharp himself admitted that there were many other effective methods of nonviolent action which he had not included in his list.
- The tactics of nonviolent struggle are chosen according to a wise grand strategy of liberation, a strategy with strategic goals.
- The struggle group maintains high ethical and moral standards in its conduct, standards which enable it to present a stark contrast between itself and its the oppressors who are its opponent. Among these high moral standards are the commitment to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," because "no lie is of the truth." This leads to the commitment to live in truth, as Vaclav Havel pointed out in his writings. This choice to behave according to high moral standards also puts the oppressor into a dilemma whenever he or his agents try to shut down the struggle group.
- As part of maintaining high ethical and moral standards, the struggle group maintains nonviolent discipline even when facing a violent opponent. In other words, the struggle group refuses to take up arms, to engage in violence against human beings (including retaliatory violence), or to destroy property.
- As part of the display of high ethical and moral standards, the struggle group operates very much in the open. Secrecy and conspiracies are rejected. Instead, the group openly declares its aims and methods. This shows both the opponent and the general population that the struggle group has nothing to hide, because it is not engaged in anything that is immoral.
- To try to make the practitioners of nonviolent struggle resemble the oppressor as much as possible by adopting the oppressor's means of fighting to the greatest extent possible. This shifts the struggle onto a ground in which the means of fighting are chosen by the dictator, and thus the struggle is easy for the oppressor's regime to combat.
- To redefine the concept of strategic nonviolent resistance in such a way that the moral and ethical advantages of would-be resisters are erased.
- To reduce the popular conception of nonviolent resistance into a small set of activities that can be easily controlled, outlawed or hijacked - for instance, by defining resistance solely as mass protest rallies and marches. Note that Russian lawmakers have been busy passing a number of extremely restrictive laws against mass protest. Perhaps Putin's regime is feeling a bit insecure, no? And yet mass protest can be fairly easily neutralized or hijacked, as was demonstrated during some of the many Black Lives Matter protests this past summer.
Friday, December 18, 2020
Repost: Fighting With Broken Weapons
Sunday, December 13, 2020
From D to D, Chapter 4: Power Analysis
- What change do we want?
- Who has the resources to create that change?
- What do they want?
- What resources do we have that they want or need?
- What's our theory of change? In other words, how can we organize our resources to give us enough leverage to get what we want? Or, how will what we are doing lead to the change we want to see? "Theory of change" is another term for strategy, which Gene Sharp discusses in Chapters 6 through 8 of From D to D.
- Who usually wins?
- Who usually gets to set agendas?
- Who usually benefits or loses from the decisions of the powerful?
Saturday, December 12, 2020
The Gross Polluter of the North
- Mineral fuels including oil (52.2 percent of total exports)
- Iron, steel (4.3 percent)
- Gems, precious metals (3.6 percent)
- Machinery including computers (2.1 percent)
- Wood (2 percent)
- Fertilizers (2 percent)
- Cereals (1.9 percent)
- Aluminum (1.4 percent)
- Electrical machinery & equipment (1.3 percent)
- Copper (1.2 percent)
Sunday, December 6, 2020
From D to D, Chapter 4: Dictatorships Have Weaknesses
- A border wall that symbolizes continued U.S. hostility to dark-skinned, non-European immigrants
- A network of over 200 immigrant detention centers holding over 500,000 people, including children
- A prison-industrial complex that feeds on communities of color starting with children in preschool
- A cancerous growth in "law enforcement" budgets in cities throughout the United States - even though crime rates have dropped. The bulk of this "law enforcement" goes toward hiring officers to terrorize minority neighborhoods. This money comes at the expense of taxpayer-funded programs that could improve the quality of life of the poorest residents of these cities. For instance, in Long Beach, California, 43 percent of the city budget is spent on police.
- The continued extreme and growing inequality in wealth and access to life resources between the richest U.S. citizens and the rest of us.
- They are able to skillfully deploy soft power to keep their people compliant. Sometimes this comes through making an implicit or explicit bargain with certain sectors of the population. Sometimes the bargain is made between the dictator and the entire population. Often the bargain can be stated thus: "You let me bring a certain measure of material prosperity to you, and in exchange, you let me be the boss. Don't question how I get things done - or else!"
- They are able to skillfully centralize power in ways that don't raise eyebrows. What Trump tried to do clumsily, autocrats like Putin have done skillfully - and these autocrats have justified their centralization by pointing to the same centralizing tendencies at work in so-called democracies which have allowed radical concentrations of wealth in the hands of a rich few. (However, that centralization of power eventually becomes a weakness of the autocratic regime.)
- They are able to skillfully divide in order to rule. Often, they are able to do so by means of a well-developed libertarian ideology of selfishness which disconnects people from each other and causes them to deny their mutual duty to one another in order to try to get rich.
- They are able to skillfully take advantage of the sins and weaknesses of their political opponents in order to divide them. Thus Trump has managed to take advantage of the conservative social values of many members of the groups of people he has sought to marginalize, in order to dissuade these people from supporting his opponents. He succeeded because many leaders of the so-called American "Left" no longer speak in any meaningful way for working-class people of color - especially when those people of color hold conservative religious or cultural values (like I do). Rather, the Democratic Party has begun to take communities of color for granted, assuming that we will always be content to be the foot soldiers of an agenda that does not reflect our concerns or our struggle. A case in point is the way in which the largely White leaders of the Left have defined the present Civil Rights struggle as a struggle for "diversity"*. But they have defined "diversity" in a way which elevates so-called sexual "diversity" to the most prominent place in the "diversity" agenda, even while African-American kids continue to be deprived of a quality education and get locked up by punitive and harsh public schools, while African-American families continue to suffer appalling disparities in wealth, and while African-Americans who get sick continue to be killed by a hostile medical system. To the leaders of the gay rights movement, I have a straight-up request: get off my back. Get off the backs of my people. We are not better together. Stop trying to hijack the struggle of communities of color in order to form a so-called "rainbow coalition" whose actual agenda has nothing to do with the priorities of communities of color. Your efforts hinder us from liberating ourselves. You know this. And for those "corporate Democrats" who assume that communities of color have no viable choice except to vote Democrat, I have the same request: get lost. Rahm Emmanuel has NO place in any position of government.
Thursday, December 3, 2020
A Journey and Its Next Few Steps
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Maintenance Day November 2020
Thursday, November 26, 2020
A Bad Place To Lie
Sunday, November 22, 2020
From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): The Social Movement Organization
Today's post continues our discussion of Chapter 3 of the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. This will be the last post that deals with Chapter 3. The next post in this series will begin to cover Chapter 4. The book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) teaches how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of their oppressors. This knowledge is especially appropriate for these days, in which a number of racist, White supremacist and Global Far Right leaders have in the last decade come to power in many nations, including the United States, where Donald Trump was illegally helped into his seat of power by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. (The Russians helped many of the other authoritarian strongmen come to power as well.) Mr. Trump has clearly and legally lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, yet he is refusing to concede his loss and he is resisting being ejected from the seat of power which he has occupied (a seat which he has been soiling) for the last four years. Therefore, it is quite possible that oppressed people in the United States will have to use the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to achieve regime change right here in the U.S.A.
Chapter 3 of From D to D explains how an oppressed population can shatter the power of a dictator or oppressor by the mass withdrawal of political and economic cooperation from the oppressor's regime. But that noncooperation works best when it is exercised as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society. Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration. Sharp listed a number of normally independent groups and institutions which are also normally apolitical, such as families, gardening clubs, sports clubs, musical groups, and the like. As noted in an earlier post in this series, in order for such normally apolitical groups to become part of a strategic nonviolent resistance movement, they must be politicized or co-opted by movement organizers.
According to Sidney Tarrow, this collective action must be sustained collective action in order to be considered the basis of a social movement. To quote Saru again, "So, according to Tarrow, a social movement occurs when people with limited resources - in our world, we call that the people most affected - are able to sustain - that word is important - contentious actions in conflict with powerful opponents." (Emphasis mine.) Social movement organizations are the basis of social movements; therefore, social movement organizing is much more than just organizing a march or a petition drive or a mouse click campaign. For a social movement organization is a collection of people who are willing to work together collectively in a sustained manner in order to shift the balance of power between themselves and powerful opponents.
Now the work of a social movement organization is not just to engage in sustained collective action as an organization, but to create an environment in which, according to Saru, "something else happens and gives way to a much broader, much wider movement in which many more people...who are not affiliated with any organization...are suddenly across a very wide swath of society engaging in contentions actions over a long period of time." When the social movement organizations trigger this kind of sustained societal shift in behavior, that's when a social movement is born. These movements, are, however, built on the ongoing, patient work of social movement organizations. It is a series of patiently accumulated small steps and small victories which lead to the big breakthrough movement moments.
The necessary initial work of a social movement organization must first be to teach the people most affected to begin to reclaim agency over their lives. This is done by building structures of self-reliance. As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group." Therefore, the movement organization must begin to build its own means of taking care of the needs of its members. To illustrate this, let's look at some of the demands of some of the Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States. One of those demands is the demand for equal access to quality education for Black and Brown children. But the people who have set up inequitable systems of education did so for a reason. Therefore, what makes BLM think that these people will respond to the demand of the people most affected to change these systems? Instead of demanding decency and humanity from people who don't have any, why doesn't BLM organize its own education system as a necessary prerequisite to organizing a crippling mass boycott of the system set up by the dominant culture? When racist teachers who are part of punitive schools face empty classrooms, they learn quickly that their jobs are in danger! Similarly, the low-wage workers who are employed by exploitative employers must begin to build the self-reliance they need in order to go without work for a while in the event of a strike. Building self-reliance of this kind is not easy when you're being exploited, yet it has been done time after time by people who successfully liberated themselves. The United Farm Workers did this very thing when they built the structures which enabled them to use strikes and boycotts against large California farms in the 1960's.
The building of structures of self-reliance is also the means by which social movement organizers chip away at the legitimacy of the structures of the dominant culture. For if the structures built by the powerless actually work better than the structures built by the powerful, people will start to notice! Thus Asef Bayat, in his book Life as Politics, says "I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity." (Emphasis added.)
This concludes our study of the necessary groundwork that must be laid by the people most affected by oppression in today's world, the people most threatened by White supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the collection of strongmen who want to Make Their People Great Again by trashing all the other peoples on earth. We will next begin a discussion of strategy. However, I may also decide to write a post describing the Global Far Right in terms of a religious cult, and describe in that post how we might use some of the resources created by cult researchers such as Steve Hassan to reach out to those who are trapped in that cult mindset.