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?