Why Are These Weapons Strong?

I've been scanning recent news articles that deal with nonviolent resistance.  As is to be expected, almost all of these recent articles deal with the ongoing protests against police brutality and the murder of unarmed people of color in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.  Some of these articles are misleading - perhaps unintentionally or perhaps not.  So I thought it good to write a post clearing up a few misconceptions regarding nonviolent resistance.

As I have come to understand nonviolent resistance in the light of the literature I've been studying from the end of 2016 until now, I've come to my own definition of the term, stated below:

Nonviolent resistance: a system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction.

This definition comes from my reading of histories of those who have used nonviolent resistance to defeat oppression including conflicts with some of the most repressive regimes the world has seen within the last 120 years.  Because nonviolent resistance is a system of means employed by the oppressed, it is not passivity or inaction.  Below are some other things that nonviolent resistance is not:

• Nonviolent resistance is not just nonviolence.  (However, nonviolent resisters are nonviolent!)  Why make this distinction?  Because oppressors (along with some misguided members of the oppressed) frequently equate nonviolent resistance with the kind of "nonviolence" that consists only of being passive in the face of oppression, or of trying to "rise above" your oppressor by showing him or her that the oppression doesn't bother you, or by finding creative ways to continue to turn the other cheek or to learn to "live gracefully" under ongoing oppression.  The term "nonviolence" has come thus to have almost New Age "spiritual" connotations.  But if you are an African-American mother whose children were exposed to heavy metals in Flint, Michigan, when Republicans destroyed the safety of the city's water supply, or if you are a relative of the unarmed African-Americans who were murdered by police, or if you are a Latino U.S. citizen whose relatives were wrongly deported, don't you have a right - even a duty - to be bothered?

• Nonviolent resistance is not weak.  Moreover, it is not weaker than violence.  Oppressed populations who rely on nonviolent struggle are twice as likely to achieve their aims as those who use violence, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  In that book, Chenoweth and Stephan present the results of a statistical analysis of both nonviolent and violent conflicts which shows that nonviolent struggles achieved an outright success rate of 52 percent.  The rate of partial success was even higher.  Those who used violence succeeded only 26 percent of the time.  As for those violent actors who failed...well, let's just say that many of them did not get a second chance! 

• Nonviolent resistance is not just protest. Scholar Gene Sharp identified 198 methods of nonviolent action, which he grouped into three general categories.  While I am heartened by some of the recent tactical victories I have seen in the recent anti-racism protests, I have to repeat once again that the methods of protest and persuasion are actually the weakest of the categories of methods of nonviolent action, because they have only limited power to apply pressure to an oppressor.  Strategic nonviolent resistance can be used successfully even against oppressors who don't have any better angels to appeal to, because strategic nonviolent resistance relies on more than just protest.

Nonviolent resistance is a set of means by which the oppressed can assert their humanity and dignity in the face of their oppressors in a way that effectively disrupts the power of their oppressors.  And it has an impressive track record, as seen in a brief survey of examples:

• The Philippine "people power" revolution that deposed Ferdinand Marcos was waged nonviolently.  It succeeded after the repeated failure of violent Communist insurgencies.
• The South African struggle which ended apartheid succeeded because its practitioners learned to skillfully apply strategic nonviolent resistance.
• The Polish Solidarity (Solidarność) movement toppled the Communist Jaruzelski regime without violent combat.
• The Serbian OTPOR! (ОТПОР!)movement was part of the Serbian nonviolent resistance that toppled strongman and genocidal maniac Slobodan Milosevic in 2004.

Nonviolent resistance does depend on the participation of large numbers of people.  As more and more people decide to participate, the oppressor's psychological and social pillars of support begin to crumble.  However, there is one weakness of civil resistance: if the resistance turns violent, the number of people willing to participate drops drastically.  And the more violent the resistance becomes, the greater is the ability of the oppressor to justify violent repression against the resisters.  This is why when a nonviolent liberation struggle begins in an oppressed population, the oppressors almost always try to inject violence into it so that they can more easily crush it.

So now we come to the articles I read this week, some of which raised my eyebrows, articles like this:

• "The Limits And Dangers of a Fixation on Nonviolence", Rebecca Pierce
• "In Defense of Destroying Property", R. H. Lossin

Rebecca Pierce claims to be both Black and Jewish, and her essay appears in the New Republic.  Let me just color her misinformed both about nonviolent resistance as a strategic toolkit and as a strategy which works best when not mixed with violence.  R. H. Lossin is white, and does not have to face the sort of demonization which a Black person would face for even suggesting that property destruction is an acceptable way to advance a social movement.  Her article appears in the Nation.  Both the New Republic and the Nation are prominent magazines.  How is it that these people were given the permission to publish such pieces?  Who gave them that permission, and why?  Who benefits from teaching the oppressed to believe that including violence and property destruction in their "variety of tactics" is helpful to those involved in a liberation struggle against a more powerful oppressor?  (What kind of doofus would try to persuade a child to challenge a grizzly bear to a bare-knuckle fight???)

Two last things.  First, in my writings on nonviolent resistance, I have studiously avoided any mention of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King.  I could leave it to you, the reader, to guess all my reasons for leaving him out of my discussion, but I will help you by giving you one reason.  King has been flattened by public school history books and popular culture into a character who fits the description of "nonviolence" I mentioned in my first bullet point above.  So if one goes to communities of the oppressed saying, "We need to practice nonviolent resistance like King did," there will be voices both within and outside the communities of the oppressed who question whether it is realistic to try to convert the oppressor or to build "beloved communities" between oppressor and oppressed, or to ask the oppressed to keep trying to "love their enemies," blah, blah, blah.  In other words, these voices will set up King as a straw man who is easily knocked down, thus hindering the oppressed from seeing the real power and aims of strategic nonviolent resistance. King has therefore become a distraction.

Second, it is instructive to consider the history of Syria over the last ten years or so.  You might be surprised to know that the civil war which started in Syria several years back began as a peaceful nonviolent resistance movement.  In this form, it posed the greatest danger to the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and was beginning to seriously weaken the pillars of support of his regime.  Assad correctly concluded that if the nonviolent struggle were allowed to continue, it would force him out of power (thus bringing Syria into the list of countries which experienced regime change during the Arab Spring).  To prevent that from happening, Assad injected violence into the nonviolent movement by committing outrageous atrocities against the resisters, in order to provoke them to violence.  He also planted caches of weapons in the hopes that the resisters would find them and try to use them against the regime.  (See this also.)  Assad's hope was that by turning the resistance violent, he could shift the resisters onto a battleground in which the State held a decisive advantage.  The only reason why the resulting civil war lasted as long as it did and came close to ousting Assad was that the violent resistance was able to obtain outside sources of funding and supply.  Had that not been the case, the Assad regime would have quickly crushed the resistance movement.  Let that be a warning to those who have a cavalier attitude toward the use of violence in the current struggle against racist oppression in the United States.

The Strong Weapons Come Out

A makeshift poster I made for a rally out of a white board and markers

I've been to two rallies against racism this week.  The first was held downtown yesterday evening and the second was held downtown this afternoon.  I wanted to attend yesterday's rally so that I could provide some guidance in a limited way to the protestors who have been demonstrating against the continued racism directed against Black Americans, so I used a large dry-erase white board and some erasable markers to make the "poster" which you see in the picture above.  I asked a number of people to take a picture of it and post it on social media.  The poster asks people to do some homework, namely to read books like Why Civil Resistance Works, How Nonviolent Struggle Works, and the CANVAS Core Curriculum.  The poster also asks people to watch community organizing videos from Marshall Ganz.

Yesterday afternoon I also received an invitation from a friend of mine to the rally that took place today under a mix of sunshine and rain.  I was given a blessed opportunity to stand at the mic for a few minutes, and here is what I told the people present.

First I gave then my name and I told them my profession.  (For the purposes of this blog I am a "degreed technical professional" although I used a much shorter title in front of the crowd).  Then I said the following:

I am an African-American!  I am also a Christian!  And the Bible says that every human being on earth has the right to the things they need so that they can fulfill their purpose in life!

But there are some people who don't agree with this - they want to take all the good things on earth and keep them for themselves while they deprive the rest of us of everything we need to live a decent life.  How can we overcome them?  How can we liberate ourselves?

It is through nonviolent resistance that we liberate ourselves!  Nonviolent resistance is a way of shifting the power balance between the powerful and the powerless, between the oppressor and the oppressed.  Nonviolent resistance is not just turning the other cheek and turning the other cheek and turning the other cheek until you have no cheeks left!  It is about shifting the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed!

So I'm going to give you all some homework!  I want you to read: Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.  You all want me to repeat that?! (The crowd answered, Yes! So I did.)  And I want you all to read How Nonviolent Struggle Works! (I repeated this title too.)  You all can download it for free from the Internet.  And I want you to watch some videos by a community organizer named Marshall Ganz. 

Who's going to do their homework?! (A bunch of hands went up.)  If we're gonna liberate ourselves, we've got to learn how!  Do your homework!

A number of cameras were recording me while I was talking.  While I normally don't like that sort of thing, today it was fun.  In fact, I had a lot of fun this weekend!

P.S. Trump's pillars of support keep crumbling.  Over 55 retired military leaders have denounced him, and many of them have endorsed Joe Biden for the Presidency.  Let me just say one thing about Biden.  A trick used by Russian trolls and Russia-influenced media outlets during the 2016 election was to try to paint Hillary Clinton as being just as evil as Donald Trump.  The conclusion these mouthpieces wanted us to make was that "hey, since there's no difference, why vote, it will do no good, blah, blah, blah..."  But to me, there is a clear difference between Trump and Biden.  So I'm going to vote.  (How that must kill you, Vladimir!)  And I'm going to vote for Biden!  (Volodya, that must kill you even more!)  If progress is almost always incremental, we start with what we have instead of refusing to start the journey of progress because it doesn't instantly lead to paradise.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.  To refuse to vote or to vote for Trump is a step in the wrong direction.

The Defeat of the Violent Flanks

In two of my most recent posts I wrote that protest is not a good method of nonviolent resistance in the age of Trump, because oppressors know how to inject violence into nonviolent protests in order to discredit the protests and legitimize violent crackdowns on protest. But it looks like I’m going to have to eat my words based on the reports I’ve been reading over the last 24 hours concerning the protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

Believe me, I’m quite happy to eat my words just now. Some of the things that are now being reported are wonderful. It now appears that the leaders of the protests have figured out how to separate their protests as far as possible from the violent infiltrators who are coming from the Antifa, the Boogaloo Boys, and other violent white extremist groups. Because the protest leaders and the relatives of those African-Americans recently killed by police violence are insisting that the protests remain peaceful, the protests have gained increased legitimacy among the general public. Because the protest leaders have sought to promote strict nonviolent discipline among the protesters, the protest leaders have been able to get police and National Guard personnel to join with the protesters in showing solidarity with the victims of racist violence, as seen in the many recent media pictures of National Guard troops laying down their shields in support of the protests and police kneeling with the protesters to show their solidarity with the cause of the protests. (See this, this, and this.)  In some cases, police can be seen not only kneeling with the protesters, but holding hands with them and marching with them in solidarity. (See this also.)  And in one case, police who knelt with protesters joined with them in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

This has made it much harder for Donald Trump to justify sending the U.S. military in to stop the protests. In fact, former President George W. Bush released a statement affirming the right of Americans to protest injustice and calling on Americans to build a society which is just and fair for all. Even televangelist Pat Robertson has spoken against Trump’s call to send in U.S. troops against U.S. citizens. And the U.S. defense secretary has stated that he will refuse any orders by Trump to attack American citizens.  It appears that Trump’s pillars of support are dissolving!

Lastly, it appears that the protest leaders have discovered some of the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance. One of the protest leaders spoke of the triumph of “people power.” The phrase “people power” was used by Filipinos to describe their nonviolent overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos back in the 1980’s. Trump is now starting to look like Marcos, or like Slobodan Milosevic just before OTPOR overthrew him in Serbia's own nonviolent revolution.  The protesters against racism in America have powerfully succeeded in making oppression backfire on the oppressor.

I wonder what Putin’s Russia thinks of all of this, since it is clear that the Russian government has been behind the rise of many far-Right national leaders (including Trump) over the last several years.  It must be hard for him to see that all the work he did to mess up the United States seems now to be going up in smoke. Maybe a people power revolution will come soon to a town near him!

One warning: though there is much good news coming out of the re-emerging movement for racial justice, we can't yet claim victory.  Trump is still President.  Therefore, we must remain vigilant, stay on the offensive, and make ourselves as smart and resourceful as possible.

Decency and Gratitude

I am an American citizen.  I am also African-American.  My patriotism is at a very low point today, and has been for the last several years.  Patriotism to me has come to mean worshiping a narcissistic country that has made itself great by trashing everyone else on earth.  Therefore I was quite willing to write this country off.

However, over the last several hours, I am finding signs of decency even among the members of the dominant culture in this country.  Here are a few:

• When Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg refused to take down inflammatory posts by Donald Trump, several hundred Facebook employees and their managers walked off their jobs.
• When Trump gave a speech in front of an Episcopal church yesterday, religious leaders from many denominations condemned his use of the church without the diocese's permission, calling it a publicity stunt.  And some Republican congressmen are condemning the use of force to clear peaceful protestors from Donald Trump's path as he walked from the White House to the church.
• The Minneapolis Public School Board is deliberating about removing Minneapolis police from their public schools.  (It's about bloody time!)
• Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden gave a wonderful speech in which he promised to be an agent of healing instead of division.  Moreover, Biden frankly admitted the depth of healing required.  As the Guardian reports, "American history isn’t a fairytale,' Biden said, describing 'the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.'"
• And while members of white Antifa/anarchist/right-wing groups have infiltrated protests in order to loot and vandalize, the fact remains that many, many people from every ethnic background (including many white people) are standing in solidarity with the African-American and other nonwhite communities around the world against the racism which has for too long been directed against us.
• Trump's belief that he can use the military against U.S. citizens may be wishful thinking.  In at least one case, the National Guard has sided with protesters who asked Guard troops to lay down their shields.  That protest, held in front of the Tennesse State Capitol, may force me to eat my words regarding the use of protest in these times in Trump's America.  The protestors got a few things right!  Because of their nonviolent discipline, they managed to weaken the pillars of support of their enemy.
• The State of Virginia refused a Pentagon request to send National Guard troops to Washington DC.

I could go on, but I'll stop here.  I can only say, Thank you!

Matthew Lee Rupert

As I mentioned in my last two posts, for communities of the oppressed in the United States, protest is not a good method of nonviolent resistance at this time.  The reason is that members of the dominant culture (as in, violent radical white supremacist and anarchist groups) are infiltrating protests by dark-skinned communities of the oppressed in order to incite violence.  Lest anyone think that this is a baseless accusation, here's proof:

Image retrieved from WCBU on 1 June 2020.

See this also.  These people have nothing in common with the communities they are infiltrating - neither goals, nor values, nor morals.  Yet another example of nihilism...

Alternative Resistance Tool: The Boycott

As I said in my last post, the methods of protest and persuasion are actually the weakest methods of nonviolent resistance against oppression.  There are much stronger methods, which are effective because they withhold from the oppressor the benefits he reaps from the compliance of the oppressed.

Let me introduce a concept that comes from the world of union and community organizing.  The first is the concept of power analysis - a means by which organizers of the oppressed map out the power relations among themselves, among their opponents, and between the oppressed and the oppressors.  From that power analysis you can then build a strategy for disrupting the power relations of the oppressor.  One excellent means of disruption is the boycott.

Boycotts are useful for the following reasons:

1. They are low-risk actions.  Riot police find it much harder to go after you simply because you refuse to support a business.  No one I know has ever been arrested for refusing to shop.
2. They are extremely hard to infiltrate.  Right now, I am hearing reports of violent white right-wing groups infiltrating many of the George Floyd protests.  They can't infiltrate a boycott.
3. They hit the oppressor where it really hurts.  Boycotters can do the financial equivalent of choking their oppressor to death.

But boycotts must be strategically planned in order to be successful.  A boycott without strategic planning is likely to fail.  The boycott should have a clear, quantifiable, verifiable goal, such as forcing the city of Minneapolis to reduce police funding by a certan percent and to lay off a certain percent of its police force.  On the other hand, if boycotters simply say, "We are boycotting everyone and everything until police brutality is ended!", that is not a clear, quantifiable goal.  The demand of protestors that all four of the officers who arrested George Floyd be arrested and brought to trial is a good start.  

Secondly, a boycott should focus on a specific target, namely a specific business whose compliance with the boycotters' demands would have a measurable strategic benefit, and whose downfall would send a clear message to the other businesses in its particular geographic location and market sector.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott is a good example of this.  Read also Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.  (But take Alinsky with a grain of salt.)  Or study the highly effective strategy used by the United Farm Workers in the boycotts of grape growers in the 1960's.  You can also read Why David Sometimes Wins by Marshall Ganz.

Lastly, here is a partial list of Fortune 500 companies based in Minnesota.  Whether any of them is a good boycott target will depend on the power analysis performed by the oppressed.  Whether a boycott succeeds in forcing your demands will depend on your strategy.  The list:

• Polaris Industries
• Thrivent Financial for Lutherans (Why am I not surprised that a Lutheran financial institution is in a racist state?)
• Hormel Foods
• Ecolab
• Land O'Lakes (a food company that makes cheese and other products)
• General Mills

These entries are taken from this source.  In your analysis, ask which of these firms are pro-police.

One other note: I believe that the violence perpetrated by infiltrators at the George Floyd protests were meant to give Donald Trump a strategic opportunity to boost his popularity by demonizing nonwhite people.  Now that it is being revealed that these infiltrators are mainly white, Mr. Trump seems to have lost his strategic advantage.

Effective Resistance is NOT Protest

In response to the police murder of George Floyd, protests have erupted across the United States.  I agree with the anger of the African-Americans who have chosen to express their anger through protest.  I too am an African-American.  However, I do not think that protest is a wise means of expressing that anger at present.  Protest has not been a wise means of resistance ever since Donald Trump seized the presidency.  Therefore, to rely on protest as a means of tactical and strategic change is a tactical and strategic mistake.

As I have written in previous posts, protest is actually the weakest of the methods of nonviolent resistance, because it by itself does not apply effective pressure to an oppressor.  It is also a dangerous method to use when the oppressor has an understanding of how nonviolent struggle works, because the oppressor can then inject violence into what started as an act of nonviolent resistance.  Once the oppressor is able to inject violence into a nonviolent movement, it becomes much easier for the oppressor to justify the use of violent state repression against the nonviolent movement.  For more on this, please read the excellent Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.  Or just watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.

This is why I am highly suspicious of the violent actors (mostly white; see this also) who have invaded the nonviolent protests by African-Americans against police brutality.  (Note that the second source I just cited has reported that many of the looters and rioters who have attacked businesses in St. Paul owned by people of color and immigrants over the last two days have been white people from out of town.)  Over the last three or so years, we have witnessed time and time again the provocative actions of the Antifa who show up uninvited to protests by people with legitimate grievances in order to turn those protests violent.  Thus the Antifa turns the protest away from a voicing of legitimate grievances by an oppressed group in order to focus attention solely on the Antifa (and to provoke outrageous reactions in their opponents by means of the outrageous actions of the Antifa).  Therefore, the destruction which is now happening in many parts of the country is not about police brutality against African-Americans, or about the brutality of ICE against Latinos, or about any actual grievance of any oppressed dark-skinned minority groups in the United States.

Based on what I have read and heard about strategic nonviolent resistance, I would like to offer a hypothesis.  First, I believe that the Antifa is funded by the same people who put Donald Trump into power.  Second, I believe that the real purpose of the Antifa is to provide a pretext for Donald Trump to impose martial law on the United States (or at least to boost his chances for re-election).  Third, I believe the Antifa has managed to infiltrate even some organizations whose ostensible mission is to teach strategic nonviolent resistance.  (See this, for instance.  By the way, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict needs to take out some trash.  Seriously.)  By engaging in violence, the Antifa is actually strengthening the pillars of support of Donald Trump in a day in which those pillars of support should be weakening due to his incompetence and malignancy.  And I think (because it has been explained to them time and time again) that the leaders of the Antifa know all these things.  This is yet further evidence that the Antifa is not really about opposing fascism.

So for those who want to support communities of color in these times, please listen to the voices of some of the most prominent members of those communities of color (here, here, and here, for instance).  Do not engage in mass protest.  Let it be seen clearly who the agents of violence actually are.  Instead of protest, study how to build effective organizing skills in order to liberate yourselves from oppression without the use of violence.

One thing just occurred to me - maybe I'll make up some bumper stickers and hand them out to friends.  The stickers could say something like

THE ANTIFA IS PAID FOR BY TRUMP

or,

ANTIFA: PAID FOR BY TRUMP

Hmm...