From D to D, Chapter 5 (Continued): On The Trail of Tommy The Traveler

Kala ku pandang kerlip bintang nun jauh di sana

Sayup kudengar melodi cinta yang menggema

Terasa kembali gelora jiwa mudaku

Karena tersentuh alunan lagu semerdu kopi dangdut

Api asmara yang dahulu pernah membara

Semakin hangat bagai ciuman yang pertama

Detak jantungku seakan ikut irama

Karena terlena oleh pesona alunan kopi dangdut

Irama kopi dangdut yang ceria

Menyengat hati menjadi gairah

Membuat aku lupa akan cintaku yang telah lalu

Api asmara yang dahulu pernah membara

Semakin hangat bagai ciuman yang pertama

Detak jantungku seakan ikut irama

Karena terlena oleh pesona alunan kopi dangdut...

- from Kopi Dangdut.  Lyrics by Fahmi Shahab.

As I said in a previous post, if you are from outside Europe or Russia or the United States, please keep making good music!  For those of you who, like myself, are native English speakers, try Google Translate if you dare.  And now...

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples. 

The previous post in this series introduced us to Chapter 5 of From D to D, which is titled, "Exercising Power."  In that post we discussed the fact that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy.  For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group.  This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors.  For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.    To repeat a bit of the previous post, the strategy used by the oppressor consists of things such as these:

1. 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.
2. To redefine the concept of strategic nonviolent resistance in such a way that the moral and ethical advantages of would-be resisters are erased.
3. 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.

Today we will consider the first two strategies in this list, and we will consider a method of choice used by oppressors throughout history to accomplish the goals of these strategies.  Note that all three of these strategies fit within a larger political strategy which has been used by worthless and evil power-holders throughout history: namely, to prevail in a political contest by tarnishing one's opponent rather than by conducting oneself in a way that is clearly morally superior to the way of one's opponent.  In other contexts, this larger strategy goes by the very familiar term of mudslinging.  

But what if the organized opponents of an evil power-holder can't be tarnished by garden-variety mudslinging because they insist on conducting themselves wisely and righteously in the sight of all?  Then the evil power-holder is forced to attempt to seduce the struggle group to abandon right moral and ethical principles, or to adopt unwise strategies, or both.  In this attempt, the oppressor's tool of choice is the agent provocateur.  

An agent provocateur (literally, an "inciting agent") is a person sent by a power-holder (whether a government or other holder of concentrated wealth and power) who infiltrates a social organization in order to perform a certain job.  The infiltrator's job is to try to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  The discussion of agents provocateurs tends at times to produce disbelief, especially in the United States, where a significant number of people believe that the government is always an agent for good (that is, when it is controlled by the Republican Party), that the rich are good people, and that "our men in uniform" are engaged in a righteous mission at all times - especially when they are police, and especially when they are killing people of color.  When one suggests to such believers that perhaps the heroes whom they worship are actually up to dirty tricks, they respond by accusing the suggester of believing baseless conspiracy theories.

However, the history of the use of agents provocateurs is long and deep and extremely well-documented.  In pages 592 and 593 of his three-volume work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp documents the ways in which agents provocateurs have been used by both governments and big business, such as the use of such agents in an attempt to sabotage the Indian struggle for independence from Britain, the use of British Army agents during the 1926 British general strike, and the Russian Tsar's use of such agents during the latter half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century.  (Ever heard of the Okhrana?  See this also.  And note that Vladimir Putin seems to be styling himself as a tsar rising from the ashes...)  As for the use of these agents in American labor struggles, John Steuben's excellent book Strike Strategy provides excellent documentation.  

And the use of such agents is not confined to the somewhat distant past.  In a previous post I described how members of various white supremacist groups infiltrated the Black Lives Matter protests which took place in 2020 because of the police murders (yes, I said murders) of George Floyd, Ahmed Aubury, and Breonna Taylor.  However, the 1960's provide some of the richest, most fascinating, most narratively and cinematically pregnant history of the use of agents provocateurs in the history of the United States.  For that decade was the decade in which a number of movements for social justice - patiently nurtured during the previous decades - burst into highly visible fruition.  It was therefore the decade in which the established holders of concentrated wealth and power reacted most colorfully, being terrified by the flowering of movements whose strength they had underestimated.

This was the decade of COINTELPRO, the program created by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on American citizens who were deemed to be a "threat to the established social order" including many members and leaders of the African -American Civil Rights struggles.  Note that in 1976, U.S. Senator Frank Church led a Congressional investigation of domestic spying performed by agencies of the Executive Branch, and discovered that the rights of U.S. citizens had been systematically violated by these agencies.  (You can read about it here.  Just scroll down to the text that reads, "Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976)".)  And this was the decade in which a particularly weird agent provocateur first made his appearance at a number of college campuses in the United States.  His birth name was Momluang Singkata Thomas Tongyai N’Ayudhya, but he soon became known as "Tommy the Traveler."  His fanatical focus was on finding students whom he deemed to be likely to be involved in subversive organizations in order to incite them to commit crimes.  And he stuck out like a sore thumb, not only because he was too old to be a college student (hey, this was way back in the day, ya know!), but because he dressed like a cop and acted like someone who was mildly deranged.  After much effort, he did eventually get some students to firebomb an ROTC office (with the firebomb materials provided graciously by himself), and that led to a raid on the college campus.  During the raid, his identity as a police agent was revealed.  Needless to say, those attending that college in those days were taught a lesson they had perhaps not signed up for.  You can read more about him here.

How then should a nonviolent struggle group structure and position itself to deal with the threat of agents provocateurs, and with the problem of infiltration in general?  I will provide my answer to that question in the next post in this series, God willing.  Hint: the answer is not what you might think.

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...

From D to D, Chapter 5: Exercising Power

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Their strategic method has been to disenfranchise as many people as possible in order to cement the control of the "chosen few." Donald Trump was one of the choice instruments by which these sought to promote and enforce white supremacy and the aims of the Global Far Right.  Even though Trump has lost his bid for another Presidential term, the Republican Party is actively planning measures for further disenfranchisement of the poor and the nonwhite who live in the United States. Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.  It's time to organize or die.

Today we are considering Chapter 5 of From D to D, titled, "Exercising Power" - an appropriate topic for our consideration, given the fact that our opponents do not care at all whether their cause is morally right.  Their only concern is the extent to which they can exercise raw power over the rest of us.  What kind of power can righteously and effectively resist the power of our opponents?  According to Gene Sharp, the answer is the power embodied in strategic nonviolent resistance, which he calls "political defiance" in From D to D.  Chapters 3 and 4 of Sharp's book deal with some of the necessary groundwork that must be laid in order to build effective nonviolent power.  Chapter 5 begins to describe what that power looks like in action.  To quote Sharp, effective strategic nonviolent resistance "has the following characteristics:

1. It does not accept that the outcome will be decided by the means of fighting chosen by the dictatorship.
2. It is difficult for the regime to combat.
3. It can uniquely aggravate weaknesses of the dictatorship and can sever its sources of power.
4. It can in action be widely dispersed but can also be concentrated on a specific objective.
5. It leads to errors of judgment and action by the dictators.
6. 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.
7. It helps to spread the distribution of effective power in the society, making the establishment and maintenance of a democratic society more possible."

Note, however, that these characteristics do not automatically arise whenever a group of unarmed people come together to resist oppression.  In order for these characteristics to characterize a particular nonviolent struggle, there must be a set of corresponding characteristics of the nonviolent struggle group, as noted below:

• 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.

A struggle group which structures itself according to these principles can wield great power.  That power can be aimed at the oppressors themselves as is the case when nonviolent resisters try to convert members of the oppressor group through the witness of their lives and the espousal of their right principles.  However, it must be noted that many oppressors cannot be converted.  Consider people such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, for instance.  These men cannot bring themselves to acknowledge anyone else's will or anyone else's rights, since to do so would be an intolerable affront to the identity which these men have chosen for themselves.  Yet this unrepentance and un-convertibility are not an obstacle to skillful nonviolent resistance, because such resistance is able to change an oppressive society by fundamentally altering the balance of power in the society in such a way the the oppressor's power is disintegrated.  Slobodan Milosevic and Ferdinand Marcos found this out the hard way.

Because the skillful exercise of nonviolent power can accomplish so much, it is only natural that dictators, autocrats, and leaders of other oppressive regimes would have taken a great interest in this means of struggle.  Their interest quite naturally arises from a desire to find ways to make strategic nonviolent resistance ineffective.  Their strategy of neutralization has consisted of things such as these:

• 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.

The strategies by which the powerful seek to neutralize strategic nonviolent resistance deserve some consideration.  We will consider those strategies in the next post in this series, God willing.

Repost: Fighting With Broken Weapons

This blog, The Well Run Dry, started out to be a blog ostensibly about resource depletion.  I have to admit that it has morphed into something of a social commentary on the tantrums being thrown by a certain demographic of the Global North (and of the United States in particular) in response to the inevitable and irresistible shifting of their place in the world.  For a certain key segment of this demographic - namely, those aligned with white American evangelicalism - the tantrums have been spectacular.  Just this week a former policeman in Texas was arrested after running an air conditioning repairman off the road and threatening him at gunpoint.  Why did he do it?  Because he erroneously believed that the air conditioning repairman was smuggling fraudulent ballots.  Yet another cop goes to jail.  And if you want to see more criminal behavior, note that U.S. taxpayers were forced this past year to support "struggling" megachurches whose revenue took a hit due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Thank Donald Trump for that.  I'm glad we the people of the United States were able to put a smile on Joel Osteen's face.  Otherwise, he might have thrown a great big tantrum.

All this has me thinking of a blog post I wrote over a decade ago concerning the difference between the supposed mission of the white American evangelical church and its actual aims - the aims sought by the politicians whom white evangelical pastors tell us we must support.  Here is a link to that post.  Enjoy.

From D to D, Chapter 4: Power Analysis

This post is a continuation of our commentary and "study guide" for the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp.  In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D.  The consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which Donald Trump, a would-be autocrat and oppressor who wanted to Make America Great Again by trashing all the nonwhite people and poor people on earth, has lost his attempt to have the United States Supreme Court overturn his election loss.  Trump's late-game strategic goal has been the goal of the Republican Party and the Global Far Right for a very long time: namely, to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else.  Their strategic method has been to disenfranchise as many people as possible in order to cement the control of the "chosen few."  And although Trump's legal challenges have largely failed, the Republican Party is actively planning measures for further disenfranchisement of the poor and the nonwhite who live in the United States.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among these "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples.

We have been considering Chapter 4 of From D to D.  The title of Chapter 4 is "Dictatorships Have Weaknesses."  After a brief review of the weaknesses identified by Sharp, we discussed the fact that dictatorships have learned to adjust their tactics over the years, and that this highlights the need for democratic resisters to engage in a careful strategic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the autocratic regimes they are resisting, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic resistance group.  This strategic analysis is known by the terms "power analysis" and "power mapping" by students of community organizing.  

The basis of this analysis is the recognition that a ruling elite depends on the subjects whom it rules, and that the power which this elite exerts over its subjects is based on the extent to which the elite can make its subjects dependent on the elite.  This principle is stated in a number of Gene Sharp's writings, including his three-volume work titled, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  A variant of this insight has also been stated by Marshall Ganz, who said that systems of oppression always depend on the people they exploit.  The relative degree of dependence of each side on the other side determines the relative power each side has over the other.  As Ganz says in his community organizing curriculum materials, if you need my resources more than I need your resources, I have potential power over you.  If I need your resources more than you need my resources, you have potential power over me.  Consider the case in which a few people hold control over a large body of resources needed by the many.  This is exactly the case when a rich but small elite holds power over a large mass of poor people.  Each member of the rich elite holds much more power per capita than each member of the poor masses.  However, if the members of the poor masses organize to withhold from the rich elite the aggregate fruits of their labor on which that rich elite depends, the poor masses can control, curtail, and even shatter the power of that rich elite.

Thus the first questions of a power analysis are these (taken from "Speaking of Power - the Gettysburg Project" by Marshall Ganz):

• 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.

Additional questions related to the existing exercises of power in a pre-existing oppressive society are these:

• Who usually wins?
• Who usually gets to set agendas?
• Who usually benefits or loses from the decisions of the powerful?

The answer to these three questions reveal to the democratic resisters the three faces of power as seen in the oppressed society prior to the beginning of a liberation struggle.  The third face of power frequently forms the psychological backdrop of an oppressive society, the understanding by the oppressed of "the way things just are."  All three faces must be challenged by those who resist an oppressive system.

The relations of power and dependence can be captured visually by means of a map of actors.  An example of such a map is shown below:

Map of actors.

Graphic created by me, adapted from the work of Marshall Ganz.

Click on it to make it larger.

Such a map is a great aid in tracing dependencies and beginning to identify the most promising points at which to begin a nonviolent attack against an oppressive regime.  This is key to the creation of a viable strategy which has the greatest chance of success.

Veteran organizer Jane McAlevey elaborates on the concept of power analysis (which she calls power structure analysis) in her book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power In the New Gilded Age.  She makes the very important point that a key reason for power analysis is to map the power your side will need to generate in order to get the members of a rich elite to change goals that are very important to these elites.  To make this point, she quotes Joseph Luders' book The Civil Rights Movement and the Logic of Social Change, in which he asserted that "the most successful organizing drives in the civil rights movement...were those that carried high economic concession costs for the racist regime, that is, those by which movement actors could inflict a high degree of economic pain."  Therefore, a goal of mapping power is to determine first, how much it will cost the members of the elite to grant the demands of the resisters, and second, how much economic disruption and pain the resisters must inflict on the members of the elite in order to make the cost of that disruption greater than the cost to the elites of granting the resisters' demands.  Knowing how these two costs compare to each other before beginning a resistance campaign is key to beginning to formulate an effective strategy of disruption.

Lastly, the mapping of power and dependence serves as a starting point for the democratic resisters to strategize how to reduce their dependence on the ruling elite as much as possible.  This reduction of dependence further weakens the power the elite has over the oppressed society.

The next post in this series will begin to delve into Chapter 5 of From D to D.  Feel free to read ahead.  And feel free to read some of the books I mentioned in this post.  Also, here's a link to another community organizing study guide based on the teaching of Marshall Ganz.  And last, but not least, here's some homework: Study the Cochabamba Water War which took place in Bolivia in 1999 and 2000.  Here and here are sources which describe the conflict.  (Feel free to find other sources as well.)  See if you can identify a map of actors and their interests, resources, and dependencies.  How did the poor Bolivian peasants identify the Achilles' heel of their opponents?  How did they reduce their dependence on their opponents?

The Gross Polluter of the North

Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park

Image by Jarek Tuszynski

Posted to Wikimedia Commons on 28 December 2008 under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

"Jalopy": an old car in a dilapidated condition.  Definition by Oxford Languages.  Synonyms: "rust bucket", carcancha.  Rust buckets are often "gross polluters" - that is, cars that can't pass smog or DEQ tests no matter how much money you throw at them.  I know this, because many years ago, when I was still living in Southern California and I was a dirt-poor undergraduate college student, I drove one.

As we look at what are hopefully the last gasps of the Trump presidency, I think it is helpful to explore the role that the Russian government played in Trump's initial rise to power, as well as the motivations which the Russians had for playing that role.  Trump showed himself to be every bit a "blast-from-the-past" racist, bigot, big-shot Republican, friend of the rich, and anti-environmentalist.  In this, he was a mirror of the regime and mindset of Vladimir Putin.  I have previously traced on this blog the motivations for the racism and revanchism ("Let's Make Ourselves Great Again!") of both these men.  (See this, this, and this, for instance.  Also see this by Olga Doroshenko.)  Trump's friendliness toward the rich has obvious motives.  But why did the Russians see fit to help the rise of such a rabid anti-environmentalist?

As I have considered this question over the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the anti-environmental motives of Trump and Putin have less to do with deep psychological causes than with a certain perverted pragmatism.  Let's look at that pragmatism from a Russian perspective, and we'll start with the current state of the Russian economy.  According to Investopedia, Russia's economy in March 2020 was smaller than any of the top ten national economies in the world.  (It is interesting to note that each of the economies of India and Brazil is larger than that of Russia.)  And according to a 2018 Forbes article, Russia's economy is smaller than that of the U.S. state of Texas.  However, the Russian economy is still very heavily dependent on the export of minerals, whereas the economy of Texas is more diversified.  (Don't let that make you complacent if you live in Texas - the U.S. economy also has certain weaknesses, which I will continue to explore in future posts.)  The Russian economy has not been able to transition to reliance on export of high-value manufactured goods, despite recent dubious Russian claims of having invented a coronavirus vaccine.  

To see how dependent Russia is on exports of raw materials, consider the top ten Russian exports according to this source:

1. Mineral fuels including oil (52.2 percent of total exports)
2. Iron, steel (4.3 percent)
3. Gems, precious metals (3.6 percent)
4. Machinery including computers (2.1 percent)
5. Wood (2 percent)
6. Fertilizers (2 percent)
7. Cereals (1.9 percent)
8. Aluminum (1.4 percent)
9. Electrical machinery & equipment (1.3 percent)
10. Copper (1.2 percent)

As can be seen, the export of finished high-value manufactured goods comprises only 3.4 percent of the total value of Russian exports.  The bulk of the export revenue earned by Russia consists of sales of mineral fuels including oil.

But there's a problem.  While it is certainly true that the global peak of production of conventional oil has certainly passed, it is also true that advances in renewable energy technology have made this peak far less relevant and far less disruptive to industrial societies overall than many of the "peakists" were predicting from 2007 onward.  In fact, the German Energy Watch Group, which correctly tracked the peaking of global conventional oil production, also correctly tracked the rise in use of renewables, particularly solar photovoltaic power production.  This rise in use is being driven by continued advances in solar PV cell manufacturing and battery storage which are driving down the cost of solar PV systems and making them affordable to ever-wider markets.

This presents a big problem for countries whose wealth is predicated so heavily on a foundation of exporting mineral fuels.  I would like to suggest the possibility that the power base of Russian elites relies heavily on the foundation of the extraction and sale of raw materials including oil, gas, and other mineral fuels, and that developments which threaten global markets for these resources or which drive down the price of these resources are a serious threat to the survival of the members of these Russian elites.  It is therefore interesting to note the connection between climate science denialism and the positions of many (but certainly not all) of the most prominent members of the Global Far Right.

Thus it is that in Russia, according to a June 2020 Moscow Times article, renewables (excluding hydropower) account for only 0.16 percent of electric energy production.  Investment in renewable energy installation is almost completely nonexistent.  On the other hand, China is one of the world's leading investors in wind and solar energy, and is a major manufacturer of solar and wind energy conversion equipment.  China is also poised to take the lead in innovative renewable energy technologies.  Thus, the future looks bright for Chinese plans to transition to a non-polluting future, according to this August 2020 Forbes article.  And China is by no means the only nation investing in renewable energy technology.  

Therefore technological advances, serious investments, and the emergence of global climate preservation movements have threatened a key source of Russian export revenue.  Let's consider one potential implication of a successful "Green New Deal": a reversal of Arctic sea ice loss that is potentially great enough to deny Russian access to hypothetical mineral deposits as far north as the North Pole.  Putin showed his own belief in climate change by laying claim to these mineral deposits as far back as 2001 - a claim which the Russian government renewed in 2015.  If the Arctic sea ice returns to anything like its normal non-climate-altered extent, that spells the end for cheap and easy Russian access to additional mineral resources.

Let's close with a snapshot of pollution in Russia, which has recently been "enjoying" record high levels of air pollution (including a city which routinely has the dirtiest air on the planet) and coastal waters that are sickening surfers and killing thousands of animals.  A small price to pay in order to keep certain elites in power, eh?  And now you can understand the helpfulness of the Trump administration toward those Russian elites in the rolling back U.S. vehicle fuel economy standards this year.

From D to D, Chapter 4: Dictatorships Have Weaknesses

This post continues our discussion of how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance as a key component of their struggle to liberate themselves from their oppressors.  As a guide to our discussion, we are continuing our journey through Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Both the book and our discussion of it continue to be relevant in these days for many people who live under exploitative, authoritarian regimes throughout the world.  This relevance also applies to the historically marginalized communities of color in the United States, even though Joe Biden has won the 2020 Presidential election.  For the most powerful members of the Democratic Party will want to define a "centrist" agenda for the United States for the next four years, and some of the most powerful members of both parties will try to legitimize the policies of the recently defeated Donald Trump as the new "center" around which that "centrist" agenda must be built.  However, under that "center", the following injustices will remain:

• 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.

I would not count on the goodness of the most powerful people in the United States to reverse these evils.  Rather, that reversal will come only when the people most affected by these evils create a strong, effective resistance that imposes serious costs on the evildoers.

On, then, to today's discussion.  Chapter 4 acknowledges the sense of powerlessness that even activized people feel when they begin to study whether they can actually challenge structures of oppression and the power-holders who control those structures.  As Gene Sharp says, "Dictatorships often appear invulnerable.  [The structures of power] are controlled by a powerful few...In comparison, democratic opposition forces often appear extremely weak, ineffective, and powerless.  That perception of invulnerability against powerlessness makes effective opposition unlikely."

But Sharp goes on to say, "That is not the whole story, however."  And he begins to make his case that even dictatorships have weaknesses that make them vulnerable to skillful application of pressure by resisters.  The key to that skillful application consists of correctly identifying those weaknesses.  As Sharp says, "[Dictatorships], too, can be conquered, but most quickly and with least cost if their weaknesses can be identified and the attack concentrated on them."

WEAKNESSES OF DICTATORSHIPS

In Chapter 4 of From D to D, there is a list of potential weaknesses common to all dictatorships.  Note that I used the word "potential" as an adjective to describe these weaknesses, for not every dictatorship will have these weaknesses to the same degree.  As an example of a regime in which some of these weaknesses had a greater effect, we can look at the failure of the regime of Donald Trump.  In his case, his failures in 2020 were caused in large part by Weakness #1 ("The cooperation of a multitude of people, groups, and institutions needed to operate the system may be restricted or withdrawn") and Weakness #7 ("If a strong ideology is present that influences one's view of reality, firm adherence to it may cause inattention to actual conditions and needs").  Weakness #1 contributed to his inability to turn public outrage over police murders of unarmed African-Americans into a polling boost by portraying himself as a "law and order" president.  The suburbs to which he was appealing had disappeared between the time of Richard Nixon and the present, so that Trump's "Omar Wasow re-election strategy" failed.  This failure was amplified by Weakness #7, which rendered Trump incapable of responding in a coherent and effective manner to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Weakness #7 also rendered Trump incapable of realizing that most Americans cared far more about the threat of the pandemic than they cared about Trump's "law-and-order" talk.

Trump turned out to be a relatively easy autocrat to depose - at least, if the results of the 2020 election are respected and the rule of law is followed in this country.  (Biden's lead over Trump has grown to over 7 million votes, by the way.)  This was due to the fact that Trump was so blatant an oppressor, and that he made his oppressive intentions so clear throughout most of his presidency.  In fact, if I had to organize a resistance movement against an autocrat or would-be autocrat, I don't think I could ask for a much easier opponent than Trump - simply because Trump was such a polarizing figure.  Yet a troubling thing happened during the final few weeks of the 2020 campaign: Trump was able to successfully reach out to certain members of groups of people whom he had initially targeted for oppression.  Thus he gained a surprising number of Latino votes even though the beginning of his term was marked by threats of mass deportations (threats which he repeated in 2019 and 2020) and a push to build a border wall, and even though he forcibly separated Latino migrant children from their parents and threw them into cages.  He was also able to pick up a number of African-American votes even after threatening to arrest "millions" of us and even after Republican policies designed to disenfranchise and disempower the African-American community.  And he was able to pick up votes from Arab-Americans and Muslims even after his attempt in 2017 to impose a Muslim travel ban.  So perhaps I should say that Trump as he was before the final few months of the 2020 campaign would have been an easy figure to depose.  Many have called Trump stupid, but I'd like to suggest that toward the end, he had begun to travel the path of the dictator's learning curve.  So let's talk about something that Gene Sharp perhaps did not consider in Chapter 4 of his book (although he does address it somewhat in Chapter 7).

STRENGTHS OF DICTATORSHIPS

Dictatorships are weakest, ironically enough, when they are at their most hardline, their most oppressive, and their most polarizing.  For it is then that it easiest for democratic resisters to make an ideological case against the dictator to their fellow citizens, because it is then that the dictatorships are likely to be the most brittle, because they have made themselves the most hateful to their subjects.  The problem is that most successful authoritarians are not nearly so obvious anymore.  As Will Dobson says in The Dictator's Learning Curve, "We like to believe that authoritarian regimes are dinosaurs - clumsy, stupid, lumbering behemoths, reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its final days or some insecure South American banana republic."  However, the truth is that "today's dictators understand that in a globalized world the more brutal forms of intimidation...are best replaced with more subtle forms of coercion...Today's dictators pepper their speeches with references to liberty, justice, and the rule of law...[regularly invoking] democracy and claim to be the country's elected leaders.  And modern authoritarians understand the importance of appearances."  (See this, for instance.)  Skillful autocrats have the following strengths:

• 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. 

THE NEED FOR POWER ANALYSIS

Many of the strengths of autocrats which I have just described exist because of the often self-inflicted weaknesses of the democratic opposition.  Those weaknesses can be moral as in the selfish embrace of libertarian ideology and the desire to get rich which separates brothers and sisters in struggle from each other.  Other examples of moral weakness include a desire for the "American Dream" middle class lifestyle that is so overpowering that it silences people when they should speak truth to oppressive power.  And there is the weakness that comes from making alliances with people with whom one should not be allied.

Therefore, the people most affected by oppression must form associations with each other in order to build their collective power for the purpose of liberation.  The organizations which claim to be on behalf of the people most affected must be built and led by the people most affected.  And in their initial building of their own internal power as well as in their preparation to take on the power of their oppressors, they will need to engage in an analysis of the relative power of each side, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each side.  This analysis, called power analysis by community organizers, is a key prerequisite for building an effective strategy of struggle.  For even though oppressors have gotten smarter and are therefore not as easy to remove, it is still possible to remove them.  Gene Sharp's closing words of Chapter 4 are still true: "Types of struggle that target the dictatorship's identifiable weaknesses have greater chance of success than those that seek to fight the dictatorship where it is clearly strongest."  Therefore, power analysis will be the subject of my next post in this series, God willing.

*Note: Over the last several years, "diversity" has been subject to ever-greater hijackings, expanding to corporate and government-backed "affinity groups" for the "neurodiverse" and author Susan Cain advocating for a place for "introverts" at the "diversity" table.  And in Oregon, people who would normally be regarded as white have successfully gotten themselves defined as "people of color" by a government agency for the sake of receiving benefits!  I am not saying that such groups should be persecuted, but rather, that including such groups in discussions about "diversity" leaves unanswered the injuries of those most affected by historical oppression in the United States.

Another note: one characteristic of "soft" authoritarian states is the presence of an opposition party that does not actually represent the grievances of the people most affected by the oppression of the authoritarian government.  This has been true not only in the United States, but in countries such as the United Kingdom.  For more on this, click here.  This is why effective nonviolent civil resistance works most often outside of established political channels and processes.