When The Wicked Perish, There Is Joyful Shouting

I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd.  I had my doubts as to whether the American so-called "justice" system which has been used so devastatingly against unarmed people of color would actually be willing and able to dispense justice to some of the perpetrators of that devastation.  Derek Chauvin is to me a throwaway person - a worthless pile of used toilet paper like so many cops in America's police forces, a piece of garbage thug, a worthless junkyard of a human being.

Yet the news of Chauvin's conviction has also unleashed a great, shaking anger in me.  For there are many just like him who have gone unpunished.  These include Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderers of Philando Castille and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor, and the murderers of Stephon Clark.  The anger I feel right now is never very far from the surface of my consciousness.  Yet that anger is what drives me to the study of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For that resistance is not about trying to be "spiritual" or trying to build "beloved communities" with unrepentant racist white supremacist piles of garbage.  I'm not trying to melt their hearts.  Their souls are their problem.  My conception of strategic nonviolent resistance is about using indirect means to put myself and my people into a position in which we can no longer be assailed by such thugs.  In other words, it is the most radical example of the strategy of indirect approach.  

One salve for my anger is the thought that these unrepentant murderers haven't really gotten away with anything.  For a day will come in which they leave this earthly life - even though it be from old age - and then they will stand before a Judge who cannot be corrupted.  The smoke of their torment - literally, the smoke of their torture - will rise forever and ever.

From D to D, Chapters 6 and 7: A Rut By Any Other Name

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. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

This topic is timely even today, even though Donald Trump is no longer the President of the United States.  For the structures of inequality which he amplified are not yet dismantled.  Thus the need of the hour for communities of the oppressed is to organize ourselves for our collective liberation.  For organizers, this involves learning to persuade significant numbers of people to do things that are hard, that involve cost, that involve risk.  My interest in studying the art of community organizing has therefore been to learn to do just that: to learn to persuade my brothers and sisters to engage in effective liberating collective action.  To me it seems that the study of community organizing is a natural outgrowth and next step in the study of strategic nonviolent resistance, since this resistance is most effective when it is practiced by organized collectives of people instead of isolated individuals.

But the act of liberating oneself and one's people from long-term oppression is unavoidably disruptive to those who benefit from the present oppressive status quo.  This is especially true when the oppressed follow a strategy which their oppressors are not ready to meet, and which these oppressors therefore cannot counter.  Therefore, the masters of the present oppressive systems will do all they can to prevent the rise of this kind of effective, disruptive resistance.  In this pursuit, these masters have developed their own strategy.  That strategy has been to condition society in such a way that any expressions of collective discontent emerge within certain channels for which the masters have already prepared effective countermeasures, and which these masters are therefore quite ready to meet.

One example of the strategy of the oppressors has been the ways in which collective labor action has been tamed over the decades to the extent that officially recognized unions in their dealings with organized business are forced to follow rules of engagement which effectively de-fang and de-claw these unions so that they are no longer a threat to big business.  Therefore these unions have become worthless, because their most powerful weapon - the strike - has been declared unlawful (or "unprotected") in the vast majority of cases.  Also, most officially recognized unions have by now become "business unions," whose leadership actively discourages their members from the kind of disruptive collective action that could actually threaten economic inequality.  Collective bargaining and organized labor have therefore become the kind of challenge that holders of concentrated wealth and power are quite ready to meet.

I'd like to suggest that another strategy of the oppressors has been to define nonviolent resistance solely as mass protest.  Leaders of oppressive regimes (and of oppressive systems in supposedly democratic countries) have known for a fairly long time that the most disruptive change-making movements are nonviolent.  Therefore they have known for a long time that the best way to neutralize such movements is to inject violence into them.  While there are well-documented cases of this injection of violence into Russian anti-tsar protests and American labor strikes in the 19th century and early 20th century, it is important to note the history of the injection of violence into protests from the 1990s to the present day.  This was especially apparent during the clashes between the "Antifa" and various right-wing white supremacist groups before the 2018 U.S. elections and the infiltration of Black Lives Matter protests by various white supremacist groups in 2020.  (For documented proof of white supremacist infiltration in the protests of 2020, see "Riots, White Supremacy, and Accelerationism" by the Brookings Institution, "Far-right extremists keep showing up at BLM protests. Are they behind the violence?" by the Kansas City Star, "Small But Vocal Array of Right Wing Extremists Appearing at Protests" by the Anti-Defamation League, and "Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests:Indicators of White Supremacists," by Mia Bloom of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.)  As these events have shown, it is childishly easy for an oppressor to inject violence into a supposedly nonviolent protest.  After this injection occurs, it then becomes childishly easy for the oppressor to justify the use of lethal force to crush the protest.  To base a "movement" solely on the tactic of mass protest is therefore to mount a challenge that the holders of concentrated privilege are again quite ready to meet.

(One note about that last paragraph.  The advice given by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict during the "Antifa" clashes of 2018 and the BLM protests of 2020 is yet another reason why I have largely stopped listening to the ICNC - as I think at least some of their members have gotten into the business of deliberately giving bad advice to victims of American oppression who are trying to free themselves from that oppression.  Otherwise, how can one explain Tom Hastings' criminally stupid suggestion that there are cases where destroying other people's property can help a nonviolent movement?  And to think that the ICNC let him say that under their masthead!  Or Steve Chase's suggestion that we who seek to prevail by means of strategic nonviolent resistance must sometimes be willing to work with the kind of "protestors" who embrace "diversity of tactics" and follow the "St. Paul's principles" as he suggested during a 2018 online civil resistance course hosted by the ICNC?  He failed to mention that nonviolent organizations which attempt to partner with or dialogue with groups who embrace violence can themselves also become legitimate targets of police action!  Or take Daniel Dixon's suggestion during that same online course that movements that combine both violent and nonviolent tactics can achieve greater synergies than movements that remain strictly nonviolent.  What an idiotic thing to say - especially since history shows that movements that combine violent and nonviolent tactics are more easily crushed by their opponents!)

But there is yet another strategy of the oppressors which should be pointed out.  And that is to define the goal of community organizing as the building of power by a constituency in order to prevail in a political contest and a political system whose rules of engagement have actually been set up by people who dominate and exploit that constituency.  In other words, we are told that the main reason why we organize should be in order to help us prevail in electoral politics according to the rules of the present political system.  To say such a thing, however, is to ignore the fact that the rules of that system were set up by rich, powerful oppressors in order to maintain and preserve the power and positions of those oppressors.  To play the game by these rules is therefore to lose unless you are one of the privileged people for whose benefit the game was originally created and rigged.  To me therefore, the goal of learning to organize is not to try to build power to win at a game that was actually rigged to make me a loser.  The goal of learning to organize is to teach myself and my people to start playing a different game altogether in order to make the first game irrelevant.  Here it must be remembered that nonviolent civil resistance is a means of seeking change by means that lie outside of existing institutions.  That is the goal of my organizing and of my study of the art of organizing.

Let me close by re-quoting Basil Henry Liddel-Hart:

The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move so that, as in jiu-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.

And from Gene Sharp, 

Even in military conflicts, argued Liddell Hart, generally effective results have followed when the plan of action has had "such indirectness as to ensure the opponents' non-readiness to meet it."  It is important "to nullify opposition by paralyzing the power to oppose"...

In other words, don't get stuck in ruts that someone else has dug for you. 

 

From D to D, Chapters 6 & 7: What You Do With What You Have

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. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

The previous post in this series explored the role of grand strategy in the exercise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  We noted that the concept of grand strategy is part of the strategic framework which nations use in order to achieve their highest and most important goals.  Specifically, grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity to achieve its goals.  We also noted that national governments have the ability to compel their citizens or subjects to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  This compulsion can come in the form of taxes or compulsory national service such as being drafted into the military.  However, this ability to compel is not available to those who live under oppression and who seek to liberate their people from that oppression through strategic nonviolent resistance.  You may be part of an oppressed group of people and you may be moved to try to organize a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Yet you cannot force your brothers and sisters to join your movement or to give their resources to support your grand strategy.  What you can do, however, is to craft a compelling "vision of tomorrow" to set in front of your people - a vision that concretely describes where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.

And there is a second thing you can do.  Let's repeat Gene Sharp's definition of grand strategy here:

Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched. (Emphasis added.)

Here's the thing.  As Gene Sharp pointed out in Part 3 of his work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, "Rarely, if ever, does either the nonviolent or the opponent group include the whole 'population,' or group of people, whom they purport to represent or serve.  In a given nonviolent campaign the active participants are usually a relatively small percentage of the whole population in whose interests the nonviolent group claims to be acting." (Emphasis added.)  This "relatively small percentage" needs to develop its own grand strategy, its own plan that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all the resources at its own disposal in order to attain its objectives in its struggle.  In other words, the struggle group itself needs to develop a plan for how it will coordinate and use its own resources in building a successful long-range liberation struggle.

There are two things to note in considering the grand strategy of a struggle group.  First, it is a well-known historical fact that many successful movements have been created by small groups of people with few resources.  The fact that these movements were successful in bringing about large changes in societies shows the skill of these small groups in developing a wise grand strategy for the use of their own resources in bringing about these large changes.  One example of this is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members went into Mississippi to desegregate centers of white power and to win the right of African-Americans to vote and participate in electoral politics without fear of violence.  The story of SNCC is told in books such as I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne, PhD.  The story of SNCC also partly refutes Doug McAdam's assertion that political movements emerge only where the dominant power structures allow "political opportunities."  For the white supremacists who controlled Mississippi at that time fought very hard (and violently!) to thwart the efforts of the SNCC organizers.  Yet SNCC won.

From this observation comes the corollary observation that the long-range outcomes produced by a social movement organization are a reflection and embodiment of its grand strategy.  Some groups have access to many resources, yet they produce meager or worthless results.  Other groups are small and have few resources, and they work under extremely threatening circumstances - yet they change their societies.  And sometimes they change the world.  I argue that the difference in outcomes comes down to a difference in grand strategy.

What then is this difference?  I would argue that it may just be possible that the difference comes down to a basic difference in motivation, a difference in desire.  And I'd like to suggest that in so-called social movement organizations that have existed for a long time, we can see in many cases a certain corruption of desire.  The reasons for this are found in the third chapter of Doug McAdam's book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930 - 1970, in which he lists three dangers which are faced by a social movement organization: oligarchization, co-optation, and dissolution of indigenous support.  

Oligarchization refers to the way in which the leaders of social movement organizations can tend to forget over time that the reason why their organization exists in the first place is to make a needed change.  They then start to think that the only reason why their organization exists is to exist, and that the leaders' job is simply to make sure that the organization keeps existing.  Co-optation is what happens when a social movement organization forgets that a key to the liberation of an oppressed people is the building of self-reliance among the oppressed.  Once the organization's leaders forget this, they start begging for funding (or applying for nonprofit status) from resource-rich members of the members of the dominant culture.  But they forget (or willfully blind themselves to the fact) that he who pays the piper gets to call the tune.  Therefore in receiving or asking for funding, the leaders of an indigenous social movement organization tend quickly to abandon the disruptive original goals of the social movement.  By being bought off, they cease to be a threat to an unjust status quo.  Dissolution of indigenous support is what then happens when a social movement organization has allowed itself to be oligarchized and co-opted.  For the people most affected by injustice - the people on whose behalf the social movement organization originally came into existence - will now look at that organization and correctly conclude that it has become a bunch of worthless Uncle Toms (and Auntie Tammys).

This is why I'm not terribly impressed with the NAACP anymore or with many other historic Black social movement organizations which have survived to this day.  For when Aiyana Stanley Jones was shot in her own bedroom - and when Trayvon Martin's murderer was acquitted - and when the long spate of publicly witnessed and recorded police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans ensued - and when the Trump presidency was busy committing its own atrocities - I would have expected that these organizations should have been able to mount a nonviolent, yet extremely coercive response that could have stopped this garbage in its tracks.  Instead, I was reading news articles that described the NAACP as "moribund".  (This is not a new criticism, by the way!)  At the same time, it was revealed that a White woman had risen to the leadership of a chapter of an organization that existed supposedly to solve problems faced by the Black community, namely, the NAACP!

I would suggest therefore that many historically Black social movement organizations have become moribund, and thus worthless.  In this, they mirror a broader phenomenon which has taken place in the American labor movement, in which certain unions which had come into existence decades ago as extremely scrappy and coercively powerful organizations were transformed over time into toothless "business unions."  But I would also like to suggest that social movement organizations that become worthless in this way face a danger.  This danger comes because their "grand strategy" has degenerated into a strategy of merely trying to continue existing and to keep obtaining funding in order to pretend to fight for the people they claim to represent.  This is then their way of "making the best of a bad situation" by profiting from that situation.  But what if the bad situation suddenly disappears?

I am thinking now of the Cold War and of the thriving and wealthy American defense industry which resulted from it.  If you talked with many employees of defense plants of that era, they would have told you that "war is good for the economy."  Clearly their career plans had been built on a strategy of "making the best" of a long-term bad situation.  Yet there were people in the Soviet Empire who were tired of this bad situation.  Among these were the Solidarnosc organizers in Poland, and the organizers of pro-democracy and liberation movements in other satellite countries.  They did not want to "make the best" of a bad situation.  Instead, they wanted to end that situation.  

And they succeeded.  This caused a massive disruption of the American defense industry.  I suggest that it was a contributing cause of the recession of the early 1990's which took place in the United States.  One of the casualties of the collapse of the Cold War was the Hughes Aircraft Company plant in Fullerton, California.  That plant (called the "Huge Aircrash Company" by some employees) occupied several acres of land in the Sunny Hills part of Fullerton, and employed thousands of people.  In 1990, it lost its raison d'etre.  It is now a bunch of supermarkets and big box stores.

Working Like A Dog

Those who follow this blog will have noticed that I was unable to write a post for last weekend.  The title of today's post explains why.  I suddenly find my occupational skills to be in very high demand - which is a good thing as it helps me to buy groceries!  However, I will try to have a post for this coming weekend.  In the meantime, here is a link to a fascinating article exposing the actual basis of the 2020 profits of the Tesla corporation.  The linked source, along with others, points out that Elon Musk's company has been unable to this day to be profitable on its own by selling its own cars.  The only thing that has helped the company post profits recently is the selling of carbon credits.  This is interesting, because Musk has built a PR campaign over the last year to portray himself as a smart, cutting-edge businessman and intellectual.  (See this also.)  Beware of celebrity culture; you know the old warning about all that glitters...

Link - Arab Tyrant Manual podcast with Jamila Raqib

Here is a link to a podcast interview of Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution.  Jamila is the executive director of the Institution, which was originally founded by Dr. Gene Sharp to study the development and application of strategic nonviolent resistance.  The interview was conducted by Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash of the Kawaakibi Foundation, an organization which describes itself thus:

Kawaakibi Foundation is an accelerator for thinkers and doers, with a focus on the future of liberty in Muslim communities and in the Arab world. Our work causes headaches and sleepless nights for tyrants and terrorists.

We envision a world free from tyranny, terrorism, and foreign intervention; one in which society trumps the state, extremism and illiberalism have no appeal, and individual rights are sacrosanct.

The Kawaakibi Foundation is also very active in training movement organizers in effective nonviolent change.  To quote them again,

We don't do traditional activism - our projects are innovative and radical. We develop cutting-edge research and apply new methodologies and a rigorous theory of change to the root causes of problems. That's why our small team have caused headaches to the world's worst tyrants.

Their Arab Tyrant Manual is an initiative designed to fight the spread of illiberal and authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab world.   

The interview with Jamila covers ground that will be familiar to long-time students of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But it breaks some new ground as well in discussing how a successful nonviolent movement depends less on changing the heart of the oppressor and more on changing the hearts of the oppressed so that they begin to discover their own power.  The podcast also discusses questions of how to carry on the legacy of Dr. Gene Sharp.  Enjoy!

From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Grand Strategy

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our minds

Have no fear for atomic energy

'Cause none of them can stop the time

How long shall they kill our prophets,

while we stand aside and look?

Some say it's just a part of it, 

We've got to fulfill the book ...

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?

'Cause all I ever have:

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

- Bob Marley, Redemption Song

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. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power.  Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it.  That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

A key word in the phrase "strategic nonviolent resistance" is the word "strategic."  The success of this kind of resistance therefore depends heavily on the formulation of a wise collective strategy of liberation by the oppressed group.  What then makes for good strategy?  In Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D, Gene Sharp seeks to answer this question.  In Chapter 6 therefore, Sharp starts by laying out the skeleton of strategic planning.  To do this, he defines the following four terms: grand strategy, strategy, tactic, and method.  Today's post will discuss what is meant by grand strategy.

What then is grand strategy?  In Chapter 6 of From D to D, Sharp defines it thus: 

Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict.  Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents.  Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched.

This definition draws heavily from the definition contained in B.H. Liddell-Hart's book The Strategy of Indirect Approach, in which Liddell-Hart says that

As tactics is an application of strategy on a lower plane, so strategy is an application on a lower plane of 'grand strategy'. If practically synonymous with the policy which governs the conduct of war, as distinct from the permanent policy which formulates its object, the term 'grand strategy' serves to bring out the sense of 'policy in execution'. For the role of grand strategy is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation towards the attainment of the political object of the war - the goal defined by national policy.

These definitions serve to describe what grand strategy does; yet they may seem to fall short of describing what it actually is.  Liddell-Hart comes closer to the mark in saying that grand strategy is simply a higher plane of strategy in general.  And he offers a very concise definition of strategy as "the art of distributing military means to fulfill the ends of policy."

Since Liddell-Hart, others within the realms of governments have tried to create a concise and stable definition of "grand strategy."  Among these are Dr. Tami Davis Biddle, who quotes John Lewis Gaddis in describing grand strategy as “the calculated relationship of means to large ends. It’s about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go.”  Timothy Andrew Sayle quotes Jeremi Suri in writing that "grand strategy is the wisdom to make power serve useful purposes."  Peter Layton says that "Grand strategy is the art of developing and applying diverse forms of power in an effective and efficient way to try to purposefully change the relationship existing between two or more intelligent and adaptive entities."  Andrew Monaghan wrote that grand strategy is the art of “using all of the nation’s resources to promote the interests of the state, including securing it against enemies perceived and real.”

From these and other sources, we can conclude therefore that grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity in order to achieve its goals.  (That's the TH in SoC definition!) Therefore, the ultimate goals of a nation direct its grand strategy.  And while sometimes those goals are rationally chosen and planned, it is also true that often the goals of a nation are an emergent product of the nation's culture, and thus not always consciously obvious even to the nation's leaders, as pointed out by Sayle, who provides the following quote from Edward Luttwak:

All states have a grand strategy, whether they know it or not. That is inevitable because grand strategy is simply the level at which knowledge and persuasion, or in modern terms intelligence and diplomacy, interact with military strength to determine outcomes in a world of other states with their own “grand strategies.

Here's the thing.  The only polities that can get away without an explicit, consciously planned grand strategy are those centers of empire that are at the height of their power.  And they can get away with this only for so long before there are consequences.  Most of the world's oppressed peoples are those whose oppression is a consequence of their own lack of a grand strategy.  If you don't make good plans for yourself and your people, be sure that other people - most of whom are very powerful and not very nice - will make plans for you.  Often those plans will involve things like roasting you over a slow fire and sticking you between two pieces of bread.

Careful readers will note that I pulled most of the definitions of grand strategy quoted above from thinkers and writers who are paid by governments to think and write.  And the relationship between governments of nations and grand strategy is that these governments usually employ people whose job in life is to carefully document the state's resources, both military and otherwise.  These record-keepers include census workers, tax collectors, and paid researchers.  A second characteristic of this relationship is that strong governments are usually able during emergencies to use their authority (backed by State force) to compel their citizens to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  How does this compare to members of an oppressed people who are planning the nonviolent liberation of their people?

The first difference to note is that often those who are activized to start organizing their people won't have access to some detailed, nicely curated database of their people's resources, capabilities and weaknesses.  Nor will they have the wherewithal to create such a database - at least, not at first.  Therefore their knowledge of their people and of their collective situation will have to be gained during a long period of observation, of meeting people, of listening to their stories, of asking questions.  In other words, developing a grand strategy may well have to start with an extensive fact-finding phase.  Nor can this fact-finding be limited solely to learning about one's own people.  One must also learn to identify the strengths, weaknesses and resources of one's allies, potential competitors, and opponents.

There is a second difference between grand strategy as applied by a national government and grand strategy as applied by the organizers of a liberation struggle among an oppressed people.  That difference is that unlike the heads of a state, the organizers of a nonviolent liberation struggle can't compel or force people to give themselves and their resources to the organizers in order to fulfill the grand strategy of the organizers.  These leaders and organizers can't create draft boards to seize young men and put them into the organizers' services.  They can't condemn real estate or use eminent domain or levy taxes to seize the assets of their brothers and sisters.  Instead, they must ask and persuade; they must accept that resources will only be given voluntarily.  The question for the organizers then becomes how to persuade this voluntary giving.  This difficulty is real, yet not often as obvious as it should be to people like Derek Sivers who talk of movement-building as if it was as easy as a shirtless dancing guy on a beach getting everyone else on the beach to start dancing.

I therefore suggest that a process of creating a grand strategy of liberation for an oppressed people begins with crafting a "vision of tomorrow" - that is, by setting before one's people a concrete description of where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.  Some necessary aspects of this vision of tomorrow:

• First, it must be a high-level description which lays out general goals and methods, and does not descend too deeply into specifics (avoiding "getting down into the weeds", as they say).  As Guy Kawasaki says, a mission statement with a couple of dozen points is very unwieldy!
• Second, it must be open to revision at first as the organizers engage in dialogue with the people whom they seek to organize.  For instance, the organizer may discover during the listening and asking questions phase of his or her work that there are things that are very important to the people being organized which were missed by the organizer in the first conception of the vision of tomorrow.
• Third, the vision of tomorrow must serve to motivate people to give of themselves and their resources to a cause which involves their entire people and not just the wishes of the organizers.

A few weeks ago I sketched out my own tentative version of a "Vision of Tomorrow" for the African-American people.  Here it is:

The goal: To organize the African-American people into a people who are:

• Self-sufficient, both individually and collectively (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12);
• Fully equipped to fulfill our ontogeny;
• Expert in producing beautifully good work to meet necessary needs (Titus 3:14);
• A people who can no longer be oppressed.

How we will get there: 

• We will organize our own mutual aid networks.  (A potluck, NOT a free lunch!)
• We will organize our own education.
• We will organize our own training to create experts in community organizing and strategic nonviolent resistance.
• We will begin to use our collective power strategically to deny our oppressors any payoff from their oppression.

This is what I intend to work for and how I intend to spend my time when I engage in organizing.  But it's only a start.  In order to get buy-in for this sort of vision, I need to hear what my brothers and sisters think about it and how and where they think it should be changed.  It may also need to be shortened and condensed to make it more punchy and memorable.

I will close by suggesting that readers study some of the more well-known successful nonviolent liberation struggles in recent history to see how grand strategy was conceived and evolved, and who did the strategizing.  Particularly, how did Gandhi do it?  Or how about the Reverend James Lawson or OTPOR! or Solidarnosc?  How did these craft a compelling "Vision of Tomorrow"?

A SUGGESTED READING LIST

• "Defining and Teaching Grand Strategy - Foreign Policy Research Institute", Timothy Andrews Sayle
• "Defining Grand Strategy," Peter Layton
• "Grand Strategy," Wikipedia
• "It Was Grand, But Was it Strategy? Revisiting the Origins Story of Grand Strategy", David Morgan-Owen
• "Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to Know", Tami Davis Biddle
• "What Is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield", Rebecca Friedman Lissner

Солнечный свет

Sunshine go away today

I don't feel much like dancin'

Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life

He don't know what he's askin'

When he tells me I better get in line

I can't hear what he's sayin'

When I grow up I'm gonna make it mine

These ain't dues I been payin'...

- from Sunshine by Jonathan Edwards (a 1971 blast from the past!)

I am still busy with the kind of work that pays bills, so I will have to postpone the continuation of my posts on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by Gene Sharp.  But I want to comment today on something I came across while researching the material for my most recent post in the From D to D series.  

That post drew from a book by Basil Henry Liddell-Hart titled, The Strategy of Indirect Approach.  That book was inspired by Liddell-Hart's experiences in World War 1, both as a combatant and and an observer.  And because this book was written in the 1940's, Liddell-Hart reserved the last chapter for a commentary on the opening events of World War 2.  That chapter is appropriately titled, "Hitler's Strategy."  Liddell-Hart holds up Adolf Hitler as an outstanding example of the power of the indirect approach to warfare, saying that "The peaceful Powers have suffered a lot from 'missing the bus' through their slowness to gauge what he [that is, Hitler] would attempt next."

Liddell-Hart comments that this "missing of the bus" is a strange thing given the fact that before his ascent to power, Hitler spelled out exactly both the general strategy and the specific methods by which he would attempt world domination.  Through his autobiographical Mein Kampf and his public speeches, Hitler laid all his cards on the table.  Of particular note is the fact that Hitler sought to disarm and disintegrate his opponents as much as possible through means that did not involve actual war, so that when the time for arms actually came, a military victory could be achieved with the least possible cost.  To quote Hitler, "People have killed only when they could not achieve their aim in other ways ... There is a broadened strategy with intellectual weapons ... Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself."

A key method of destroying enemies from within consists of understanding and playing on the weaknesses of the great men of the nation one seeks to conquer.  Liddell-Hart therefore described how Hitler used this method to destroy the Weimar Republic in order to install himself as the supreme leader of Germany and the Nazi Party as the sole political instrument of Germany.  But what is more disturbing is how Hitler then used the same methods to undermine the other nations of Europe.  Among the things done to implement this strategy are the following:

• Support of the emerging fascist government of Italy
• Support of General Franco's successful overthrow of the Spanish government
• A series of relatively bloodless military victories against militarily inferior neighbors.  These military moves were made under the pretext of answering the call for help made by supposedly oppressed German minorities and sympathetic partisans in these countries.
• From page 306 of Liddell-Hart: "To prepare the way for his offensive, he [Hitler] sought to find influential adherents in the other country who would undermine its resistance, make trouble in his interest, and be ready to form a new government compliant to his aims.  Bribery was unnecessary - he counted on self-seeking ambition, authoritarian inclination, and party-spirit to provide him with willing and unwitting agents among the ruling classes." (Emphasis added.)

It is this last point which I want to emphasize.  When the members of a polity are decent, moral people, this moral and ethical purity is a source of strength even if the polity may be militarily weak.  But when there are members of the polity who seek to make themselves great by trashing their fellow human beings, they expose themselves to the possibility of being trashed in turn by a power greater and more skillful than themselves.  That power is itself a power of darkness, and it finds an open door of assault when the darkness within it calls out to the darkness of the great men of the polity - and finds a ready answer.  (This, for instance, is how Hitler almost destroyed Josef Stalin.)

So it is that the darkness within Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin has called out to many of the great men of the West and has found a ready answer.  For the strategy and the strategic moves of Putin's Russia have been in many ways an almost exact mirror of the opening moves made by Adolf Hitler over 80 years ago.  I would like to suggest that among Putin's most "willing and unwitting agents" are many members of the Republican Party, the white American Evangelical/Protestant church (see this also), and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.

In mentioning Putin's close relationship with many of the leaders of the white American evangelical/Protestant church, I want to be clear that I do not believe for a moment that Putin is actually a Christian.  Nor do I believe he has any noble spiritual motives.  But I do believe that Putin, like Hitler before him, is an embodiment of the kind of global hegemon which the world will see in the perhaps not-too-distant future, a ruler described thus: 

And in his place a despicable person will arise, on whom the honor of kingship has not been conferred, but he will come in a time of tranquility and seize the kingdom by intrigue...And after an alliance is made with him he will practice deception, and he will go up and gain power with a small people... (Daniel 11:21, 23; see also Daniel 8:23-25)

Could Putin then be "da man"?  может быть; кто знаете?

P.S. If you want to read more of my posts on Russia, the following are a good place to start:

• The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 1)
• The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 2): The Role of Russian Orthodoxy
• The Revanchism of the Third Rome: Symphony's Chords
• The Revanchism Of The Third Rome, Part 4: Caesar's 21st Century
• The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
• No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
• The Tearing of the Fig Leaf Dress