The Cheating Elephant, Part 2

This is a follow-up to my most recent post.  Lately, reality (both personally and as a U.S. citizen) has been so stressful that I've taken to watching YouTube videos of musicians making music from countries outside the Anglo-Euro-Slavic orbit.  Seeing them make their music and seeing how happy and mentally balanced they are is therapeutic for me, especially when I don't have the time to make my own music.  One thing I don't like, however, is YouTube ads which are political in nature - especially when they promote Donald Trump or Fox News or other right-wing sewage.

Tonight there was an ad on YouTube sponsored by Facebook promoting their new "Voting Information Center."  Whenever Facebook says that they are trying to do something good, I get suspicious.  The new Facebook Voting Information Center is supposed to provide accurate fact checks on statements made during the U.S. election campaigns.  But according to Vox, in August of this year Facebook had not yet fact-checked or contradicted Donald Trump's false statements about voting by mail.  That makes me wonder what else they have not yet fact-checked.  Also, they have not blocked Trump from making Facebook posts.  To me, it still looks somewhat like Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are still joined together in unholy union.  I'll check my own facts, thank you.

The Cheating Elephant

I don't have the availability to write a long post this weekend - especially a post that involves heavy research.  But I want to point out an item that appeared in a community newspaper in Southern California.  According to an article on the front page of the Mid-October 2020 issue of the Fullerton Observer, a regional field director of the California Republican Party was caught advertising illegal election ballot drop boxes as places for voters to drop their ballots.  The drop boxes being promoted as "Official Ballot Drop Boxes" by the California Republican Party are in fact not official, nor are they sponsored, installed, or sealed by the California Secretary of State or any County Registrar's office.  The California Secretary of State has issued cease and desist orders to the Los Angeles, Orange, and Fresno County Republican Party offices ordering them to stop telling voters to drop their ballots in boxes that have not been designated official ballot drop boxes by the California Secretary of State or registrars of any County governments.

This leads me to wonder what election fraud tactics and ploys the Republicans are trying to pull in other states.  This is the party that says it is the defender of true Christianity and that accuses everyone else of breaking the commandments of God, thus giving the Republicans the "right" to exterminate the lawbreakers (and to seize their possessions!).  Yet the Republicans have broken the commandment that says, "You shall not bear false witness."

Thoughts Upon An Emergent Occasion

(My title being a nod to the poetry and prose of a British guy who has been pushing up daisies for the last 400 years or so...)

When I shop for groceries, I sometimes pass a couple of the many homeless encampments that have sprung up in my city between 2017 and now.  This year, at each of these encampments, there has been a tent whose owner attached an American flag so that the flag has been flying over the tent.  That has struck me over the last few months.  

I don't think that most homeless people anymore are homeless because of drugs or laziness.  But I do tend to think that many members of the "dominant culture" in the United States who believed the promise made by a certain man who promised to "Make America Great Again!"  are now getting a rude awakening.  Yet they still believe in their dream and the man who hypnotized them.

I was reminded of flag-waving this evening by a man I saw on I-205 in Clackamas County, an elderly man standing in the emergency lane of the freeway next to one of those sorts of large trucks which many men like him try to substitute for actual manliness nowadays.  The man was wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat and staring resolutely at the oncoming traffic while waving a big sign that said "TRUMP - PENCE.  KEEP AMERICA GREAT."  As I passed him, I wondered at his definition of "greatness."  What I've seen over the last ten months or so doesn't look very great to me - unless you count a pandemic in which the United States has been for several months the world leader in infections and deaths, a pandemic which continues to hobble and hollow out the American economy, a nation which contains homicidal and corrupt police, a nation whose refusal to acknowledge climate science led to horrific wildfires and air on the West Coast that was so foul that for several days there were carbon monoxide and particulate smoke warnings from the Canadian border down to Southern California, a nation which has been slammed repeatedly by hurricanes.  Certainly the dominant culture and the people now in power are capable of making great big messes and of committing great evils.

And I was thinking of the foundations of American "greatness" this evening when, during my regular Bible reading, I was reading 1 Timothy 1.  In the version I read, in verse 10, among the people whose sins Paul condemns are those who are referred to as "kidnappers."  But I looked up the original Greek and discovered that the correct term is actually "slave dealers."  So a key part of the foundation of American greatness is something that is actually condemned by the Good Book which many American patriots claim to believe.  Now the foundation is beginning to crack, the poorer members of the "dominant culture" are finding that the bill is coming due for them, and the alpha wolves whom they tried to imitate are starting to chew on them.  I hypothesize that over the next year or so, much of the "greatness" to which Americans have become accustomed will evaporate.  How many of us will be able to take it in stride?

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Centers of Democratic Power

In the previous post in this series, we looked briefly at the mechanism by which the power of an oppressive regime is destroyed: the mass application of defiance and noncooperation by the citizens or subjects of the regime.  This was illustrated by the 14th century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks (renamed "The Monkey Master fable" by Gene Sharp in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy which I have shortened to From D to D in my posts), which described how an old man fed himself by enslaving a troop of monkeys, and how the monkeys killed the old man - not by a violent physical attack, but by escaping from him.  For in enslaving the monkeys to serve him, the old man had become dependent on them - thus granting them a certain power over him, a power which they applied in refusing to serve him any longer.

We then moved on to a discussion of the institutions and groups which comprise an oppressor's institutional base of power, as well as those institutions and groups which comprise the base of power of those who resist oppression.  Obviously, these two bases of power are in opposition to each other.  And each of these is engaged in a contest to strengthen itself and to dissolve its opponent.  In the oppressor's base of power, there are three groups of people.  The first group consists of those who are so ideologically, socially or psychically wedded to the oppressor's cause that they are unreconstructable - they will never repent of their desire to oppress and dominate, and they will never abandon the oppressor.  The second group consists of those who may side with the oppressor as long as the oppression is personally beneficial to them and their associates - yet who can be persuaded to abandon the oppressor when their allegiance to the oppressor begins to seriously cost them.  As an example of this second group, many "Red" state Republicans in the U.S. who have decided to vote for Biden did so because their allegiance to Trump began to seriously cost them - especially as a result of the trade war with China and the spread of COVID-19 into Trump country.  The third group consists of those supporters of the oppressor who are sincerely deluded, yet who can be persuaded by moral arguments to withdraw their support.

Similarly, the society ruled by an oppressor is composed of three groups of people.  The first consists of the oppressor's base of support.  The second consists of those who are neutral as far as their actions are concerned - who, regardless of how they feel about the oppressor, continue to obey him due to social inertia or unquestioned, unexamined submission to the oppressor's authority, the long-standing subconscious conditioning by psychological and ideological factors which produces that submission.  The third consists of those who have been activized to resist the oppressor and to disintegrate his regime in order to replace it with something better.  These activized people comprise what is known as the struggle group.  In order to disintegrate the oppressor's regime by nonviolent means, the struggle group must work through the society's independent institutions and groups to persuade a critical mass of people to withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor's regime.  That noncooperation can be social, political, or economic, yet when it reaches a certain critical mass (and is accompanied by a compelling "vision of the future" articulated by the struggle group), it causes members of the formerly neutral population to take notice and to begin to join the movement of noncooperation.  As the noncooperation movement begins to gather strength, it causes the pragmatists and the sincerely deluded who are members of the oppressor's pillars of support to begin to question their allegiance.  This is especially true as the support provided by members of the oppressor's base begins to get costly for the supporters.  It is by this means that the psychological and ideological factors which cause people to grant authority to the oppressor are neutralized.

Let me repeat: it is through the society's independent social groups and institutions that mass noncooperation must be applied.  (Note: the word "independent" means free from dependence on or control by the oppressor's regime or its agents.)  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 3 of From D to D, "Isolated individuals, not members of such groups, usually are unable to make a significant impact on the rest of the society, much less a government, and certainly not a dictatorship."  So let's examine these independent institutions and groups in more detail.  In addition to such obviously political organizations as political parties, trade unions, and human rights organizations, Sharp mentions a number of other types of such groups, including those which are not obvious change agents such as families, sports clubs, religious organizations, gardening clubs, and musical groups.  Yet the existence of such groups and institutions - even when they are independent of the oppressor - does not automatically guarantee the emergence of a successful movement for liberation.  In other words, the existence of these groups is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

To see what more is needed, we need to turn to another social movement scholar, namely, feminist scholar Jo Freeman, who wrote two essays that describe additional necessary ingredients.  The name of one of these essays is "On the Origins of Social Movements," and the other is "The Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement."  In these two essays, Freeman delves more deeply into the subject of how a movement is constructed from pre-existing conditions.  For a movement to emerge from pre-existing independent groups and institutions which are not necessarily "movement" organizations as far as their origins, three things must be present:

• A preexisting communications network or infrastructure within the social base of the organizations.  If such a network does not exist or only partially exists, then an organizer or team of organizers must create that network.  
• The network must be "co-optable to the new ideas of the incipient movement."  To co-opt a group is to turn that group from its original purpose and agenda to the agenda of the co-opters.  As Freeman says, "To be co-optable, [the network] must be compsed of like-minded people whose background, experiences, or location in the social structure make them receptive to the ideas of a specific new movement."  These like-minded people must also be able to imagine channels for social action which can realize movement goals.  Or, as Freeman says, "A co-optable network, therefore, is one whose members have had common experiences which predispose them to be receptive to the particular ideas of the incipient movement and who are not faced with [or, my note, who know how to overcome] structural or ideological barriers to action.  If the new movement as an 'innovation' can interpret these experiences and perceptions in ways that point out channels for social action, then participation in social movement becomes the logical thing to do."
  
• This network must find itself in a situation of strain in which action can be precipitated - either by a crisis or by an organizer or organizers who "begin organizing... or disseminating a new idea."  The organizers' job is easiest when they have "a fertile field in which to work".  This fertile field is characterized by emerging spontaneous groups who are acutely aware of the issue around which the organizer seeks to organize.  If these spontaneous groups do not exist, the organizer's first job is to create them by bringing together the people most affected by oppression, to begin to talk about their common experience, or, in other words, to "raise the consciousness" of the people most affected.

A few closing remarks are in order.  First, for the co-optation of a co-optable network to take place, there must obviously be one or more "co-opters."  These are the activized members of the struggle group for whom continued passive existence under oppression is an intolerable and unacceptable option, and who therefore engage in the work of co-opting preexisting organizational networks to a new purpose.  For it must be recognized that many of the sorts of independent organizations listed by Gene Sharp in Chapter 3 of From D to D do not start out as social movement organizations.  For the leaders of such organizations, the idea of working together to radically re-imagine and re-structure society is a radical new idea.  Not all independent institutions and organizations will be receptive to such an idea - especially when the implementation of that radical idea involves risk.  That is, not all of these groups will be co-optable - even when they are formed by the oppressed for the oppressed.  Jo Freeman cites the example of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs which refused to become a movement organization even though it shared many of the same grievances as the members of the more activist organizations in the American women's movement.  And in the biography America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century, author Gabriel Thompson notes how Fred Ross was suspicious of organizations composed of the middle and upper-class members of oppressed communities of color, as these were dependent on "both sides of the tracks.  They could talk a good game, but many advocated 'gradualism, patience, endless conciliation and discussion; in short, anything but direct, purposeful action.'"  Ross was talking of the Latino community, but I can say the same thing most emphatically about many of the long-standing and now moribund organizations of the African-American community.

Yet there have been social groups which have seemingly been in the hip pocket of the oppressor, but which were successfully co-opted by savvy and skillful organizers.  Two examples come to mind.  The first is case of the State-sponsored Communist trade unions in Poland during the 1970's and 1980's, several of which were actually taken over by the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) trade union movement against the wishes of the government, as cited by Gene Sharp in From D to D.  The second example is the case of the Nashi (Наши) youth movement which was created in 2005 by the government of Vladimir Putin in order to co-opt burgeoning Russian opposition movements.  The trouble for Putin is that Nashi began to take on a life of its own, and the youth who were its members began to attack the practices of the most privileged members of Russian society, as these practices caused suffering for average Russians.  Thus they began to bite the hand that was feeding them, leading to the cutting of government support for Nashi and the er, ah, "complication" of relations between Putin's government and Russian youth.

Lastly, as Jo Freeman states, "The role of the organizer in movement formation is another neglected aspect of the theoretical literature" - a statement which was true at the time she wrote her essays, but which by now is somewhat out of date.  At this time we have a somewhat larger body of knowledge about the role of the organizer in constructing a social movement.  We will explore this topic in more detail in the next post in this series, God willing.  The organizer is such an important topic because as Freeman says in her essay, "The art of 'constructing' a social movement is something that requires considerable skill and experience."  The organizer's skills can overcome structural barriers to movement formation.

From D to D, Chapter 3: Whence Comes The Power?

This is the third installment of my commentary and "study guide" on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.  (In my series, I am shortening the title of the book to "From D to D.")  In the last post of this series I made the following statement:

The goal of the organizers of effective resistance against a dictator is to turn a large number of their fellow sufferers into a coherent, focused source of effective non-cooperation, and to focus that non-cooperation on one or more of the dictator's pillars of support until the pillars start to shatter.

The key to effective resistance against a dictator is therefore a strategy of focused, coherent non-cooperation and defiance by a large number of the citizens of a country against its ruling dictator and the dictator's institutions of power.  The question therefore that arises from this realization is how to persuade that large number of oppressed citizens to withdraw their cooperation from the dictator.  Chapter 3 of From D to D begins to answer that question.  But the chapter starts first with showing the reader what that noncooperation might look like - and the devastating effect that such noncooperation would have on the power and survival of anyone who might wish to live by oppressing others.

Sharp presents a fourteenth-century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks, about an old man who made his livelihood by enslaving a group (pack? tribe? barrel?  Ah, it is a troop!) of monkeys.  Without spoiling the fable for you, let me just say that in exchange for his exploitation of the monkeys, the old man became dependent on the service they provided.  Therefore, the monkeys were able to kill the old man - not by a violent attack against him, but simply by withdrawal of their service.  This illustrates a principle stated by community organizing scholar and teacher Dr. Marshall Ganz - namely, that systems of oppression always depend on those whom they exploit.  The Monkey Master fable (as Sharp calls it), has become very popular among those who study and seek to bring about the disintegration of dictatorships, as can be seen here, here, and here, for instance.

Every state or polity has institutional bases of power which enable its leaders to foster the cooperation of the citizens or subjects of that polity.  In addition, in free societies, the citizens or subjects have  bases of power which are separate from the leaders of the polity and which can potentially act as a curb or brake on excesses committed against the subjects or citizens by the leaders of the polity.  To quote Dr. Sharp, the ruler's bases of power include the following:

• Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
• Human resources, the number and importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers.  (Not: these obedient persons and groups cannot exist at all unless there is a base of the population who believe that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it.)
• Skills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
• Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the rulers.  (Note: it is vital to understand the psychological and ideological factors which underlie the loyalty of the dictator's human resources noted above.  These may vary from regime to regime.  This is why opponents of the dictator's regime must learn to study their opponent.  Or, as a character in a mildly interesting 1990's action movie once said, "Полезно знать что думает противник, не правда ли?")
• Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
• Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and non-cooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.

Note the interdependencies of these bases of power.  Without authority, the ruler has no human resources.  Without the requisite psychological and ideological factors, the ruler has no authority.  Without skills and knowledge, the dictator's human resources are useless.  Without human resources, the dictator has no access to material resources.  Without human resources or material resources, the dictator cannot apply sanctions.  The members of the dictator's regime who are committed to him comprise his human resources and are known institutionally as his pillars of support.

On the other side of the equation are the bases of power that are independent of the government and are held by the subjects or citizens of a free society or of a group of oppressed people who seek to liberate themselves.  These consist of the groups and institutions that have been founded by citizens or subjects and that are not under government control or dependent on government support.  When these groups become weak or begin to disappear from a democratic society, that society becomes increasingly vulnerable to democratic backsliding and authoritarian takeover.  In Chapter 3 of From D to D, Sharp notes that dictatorships frequently target these independent groups for co-optation or destruction, but such groups can die by means other than deliberate destruction at the hand of a dictator.  Thus it is that in the United States, independent groups such as strong trade unions have been deliberately weakened or disintegrated by the application of State power and the power of the filthy rich.  But American social life has also been disintegrated by a culture that is addicted to electronic entertainment, excess mobility fostered by the automobile, and other factors which were not necessarily deliberate, but rather emergent properties of certain technologies.  

The first task of democratic resisters against dictatorship is therefore to re-build independent groups and institutions in the oppressed society.  Let me repeat: this is the FIRST resistance task, the prerequisite to all that follows of successful strategic nonviolent resistance, just as bread is the prerequisite before you can have a sandwich.  As Gene Sharp says, "Their continued independence and growth [that is, the independence and growth of these independent groups] is often a prerequisite for the success of the liberation struggle."  Note also that Mohandas Gandhi said much the same thing in outlining his program for nonviolent liberation of India from British rule.  Gandhi started his organizing by organizing Indians to come together to meet their needs collectively without reliance on the British.   He called this approach the "constructive program," and said that "... my handling of Civil Disobedience without the constructive programme will be like a paralyzed hand attempting to lift a spoon."  

This is why basing a liberation struggle solely around mass protest marches and rallies is such a losing idea.  It lacks the prerequisite strength for long-lasting success.  Even when it seems to succeed, as in Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, the "victory" is fragile and thus easily taken over by a new round of would-be dictators as the Muslim Brotherhood and later, the Egyptian military, did in the aftermath of Tahrir Square.  (For a couple of commentaries on the failure, see this and this.  Note that I do not endorse everything these authors say.  Take them with a few grains of salt.  YMMV.)  (Second note: I am a great fan of the OTPOR! nonviolent revolution that deposed Slobodan Milosevic.  However, I would say that one potential weakness of the OTPOR! strategy and of the CANVAS Core Curriculum is perhaps a failure to look at the prerequisite of building or re-building independent groups and institutions by the democratic nonviolent resisters.)

The building (or re-building as the need may be) of these independent groups and institutions is such an important topic that my next post in this series will focus on this subject.  And I will refer to some additional sources that will shed light on the subject of institution-building from multiple angles.

Apologies for a Delay

This past weekend I had fully intended to post my third installment of my commentary and "study guide" for Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  But last Friday, I allowed my computer to perform an operating system upgrade that broke more things than it fixed.  So I spent a number of sleepless hours over the weekend trying to figure out what was wrong.  Finally I gave up in disgust and loaded a fresh copy of the latest version of Linux Mint.  I like troubleshooting computers almost as much as I like working on cars - which is to say, not very much.  At least things work now.

While I was thus occupied, it seems that Donald Trump was hospitalized because of a COVID-19 infection.  I just found this out yesterday.  Although the situation is still quite fluid, I believe that the study of strategic nonviolent resistance is still relevant for those who are members of oppressed and marginalized peoples.  Regardless of what happens to Trump (and I hear that he "released" himself from the hospital yesterday and returned to the White House), we must remember that Trump himself is merely a symptom of a larger disease.  Therefore, I will publish that third post this upcoming weekend, God willing.

In the meantime, please check out the following recent posts of mine:

• Nihil Nixed
• The Go to Jail Truth

Link - All The Wiser Interview With Dawn Smith

For those readers who may still be involved in the toxic dump known as White American evangelicalism, I have a resource that may detoxify you.  Here is a link to an interview I just listened to.  The subject of the interview is a person I knew back in the day when I was involved in a toxic, abusive evangelical cult - a cult which made me for a while a toxic, abusive person until I learned to walk away.  The language in the interview is mostly family-friendly (except at the very end), and I agree with almost everything the interviewee says - especially her critique of White American evangelicalism.  As for me, as a person of color I will never join a White church again.