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. These "chosen few" have been working to turn the entire world into a bit of Hell for the poor and afflicted of the earth. One of these chosen few, a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, tried to turn the United States into a bit of Hell on earth for many of us who live here,
in the role which his government played in installing a certain Donald John Trump into the office of the Presidency of the U.S. Now Trump has been deposed - and it is looking increasingly like
the same thing may be about to happen to Putin.
As long-time readers of this blog know, the book
From D to D outlines how an oppressed people can use nonviolent, yet extremely coercive means to rid themselves of dictators, autocrats, and other oppressors.
From D to D is part of a much larger body of literature on the subject of
strategic nonviolent resistance. Among this literature is the excellent book titled,
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, and the book
Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic (who was one of the masterminds behind the nonviolent overthrow of the regime of
Slobodan Milosevic) and Matthew Miller. Srdja Popovic is the person I credit for teaching us that "there are only two kinds of nonviolent struggle: the spontaneous and the successful." It should be obvious therefore that careful strategic planning and analysis is required of resisters who want their movement to be successful.
So we consider the opening words of Chapter 6 of From D to D, where we read that "if one wishes to accomplish something, it is wise to plan how to do it. The more important the goal, or the graver the consequences of failure, the more important planning becomes." And yet Gene Sharp acknowledges that often resistance movements break out in a spontaneous or unplanned way, that resistance leaders "do not bring their full capacities to bear on the problem of how to achieve liberation." He then asks why it is that people who struggle to free their people so rarely prepare a robust strategy to achieve that freedom. It is that question which I want to address in today's post. For Sharp mentions that among the reasons, it is just possible that "inside themselves, [the resisters] do not really believe that the dictatorship can be ended by their own efforts."
It is obvious that a person's estimate of the possibility of achieving a goal will influence his or her strategic approach to attempting to achieve it. Things that influence that estimate of possibility include the difficulty of the goal, the cost (in money, resources, pain, suffering and other elements) of achieving the goal, and the consequences of attempts that end in failure instead of success. Sometimes also the estimate of possibilities is influenced by the person's own ability to imagine himself or herself succeeding in achieving the goal. This ability to imagine may be weak and undeveloped if the goal imagined lies far outside the person's everyday experience. For instance, if I read that in order to prevent heart attacks, I need to get in 10,000 steps a day, that is something that I can easily imagine myself doing, because walking to get to places is part of my life history. Therefore I know that I can take 10,000 steps a day (although that might take a while, since 10,000 steps is about five miles!). But if I'm watching the Olympics on a screen and I see someone clean and jerk 230 kilograms (that's 506 pounds), or pole-vault 20 feet in the air, or ski jump over 400 feet, that is quite far outside of my personal experience. If someone were to challenge me especially to learn long-distance ski jumping, I would know intellectually that such a thing might be possible - that is, that most humans can train their bodies and minds to acquire the needed skills - but my brain would have very little enthusiasm for the project, due to the likely consequences I'd suffer from making a mistake.
So we see that one thing that de-motivates people in attempting hard things is the realistic assessment of the hardness of the hard thing. And yet we do see people who both try and succeed in the hard thing - Olympians who do indeed win weightlifting records, or pole-vault almost 20 feet (6.03 meters if we want to keep things metric), or ski-jump 132.5 meters. Some of these Olympians look very ordinary, even though they do extraordinary things. We also see people whose performance in certain domains is very much below average, even though there is no mental or physical defect in these people when compared to the rest of humanity. As I mentioned previously, one of the main things that differentiates people in these groups from each other is the ability to imagine succeeding in doing the hard thing. What then influences this ability to imagine, to dream big?
Often the factor that influences this ability is nurture. For instance, parents who show their kids that they don't really believe in them, who refuse to encourage them, who ridicule their failures and ignore their successes, will tend to produce young adults who struggle to dare big things. Yet nurture extends beyond the family unit to encompass an entire society. It is not only parents, but the masters of entire societies who shape the perceptions and imaginations of the people who live in these societies. When a person belongs to a historically oppressed group within a society, or belongs to a historically oppressed society, that person's ability to imagine, to dream big, to visualize possibilities, will tend to be shaped by the dominant oppressive society. This is the "third face (or, 'third dimension') of power" identified by
Steven Lukes, the face that dictates what people can and cannot believe to be possible. This face of power is worn by the dominant power-holders in an oppressive society, who train the oppressed to believe that their oppression is not really "oppression" but simply part of an inevitable and realistic order, and questioning that order is unrealistic, or inappropriate, or "just not done."
According to the e-book
Honouring Resistance: How Women Resist Abuse In Intimate Relationships, "
Whenever people are badly treated, they always resist. In our experience, people always resist violence and abuse in some way." (Emphasis in original.) Note that though this book was written for women in a specific context, the statement quoted above is true whenever people - male or female - are oppressed. Yet the forms and outcomes of the resistance mentioned in this quote - the strategy or lack of strategy of this resistance - will be shaped by how deeply the oppressed or abused have internalized the "third face of power" of their oppressors. Where this "third face" has been allowed to deeply infect the imaginations of the oppressed, their resistance will take on strange and dysfunctional forms.
I will now describe what I as an African-American man have seen of the dysfunctional responses of my own people to this oppression over the last five or so years. To provide readers with my credentials, below is a picture of my desk. The dark-skinned hand you see in that picture is my hand. If you are an African-American and are reading this, watch yourself, because you're about to get some very tough love from one of your brothers.
First, the one-paragraph version of my "
story of self." I was born during some of the hottest action of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States. My dad was a military officer, so I lived on military bases during much of my childhood. Most of the time I was in environments which were very "white," and as a result, I took a lot of physical and verbal abuse from members of the "dominant culture" who questioned my right to share the same benefits they were enjoying. My childhood was therefore rather hellish. When I became an adult, that time coincided with a time in American history in which it seemed that the obvious racism had gone away and I could live in peace. But my experience with white American evangelicalism showed me that the racism had not actually gone away - it had just gone underground. And from 2013 onward - when first Trayvon Martin was shot, then Michael Brown, then John Crawford, then Tamir Rice -
and so on! - I saw that the same narcissistic, damnable filthy pieces of garbage (Lord, help me to keep this clean!) who had made life miserable for me and my people were trying to bring back those days of Hell on earth.
There was no bloody way I was going to let that happen without a fight, so that's when I started reading literature on resistance, and that's when I began to discover the power and effectiveness of strategic nonviolent resistance. But such resistance becomes truly effective not when performed by isolated individuals, but by a people collectively organized into an effective resistance movement. So I tried to do my part to organize that kind of resistance among my people. What I found in response to my efforts was not the beginnings of liberation, but something else, as described below:
These are the people I met who organized "listening sessions" so that we could spill our complaints about the increasingly racist and oppressive treatment our people were experiencing. The goal of these sessions was merely emotional catharsis - so that the facilitator (or his or her bosses) could tick a box in answer to the question, "Do you feel heard today?" Sometimes the catharsis was amplified by reading books about our mistreatment, books written by pessimists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. One thing about some of these kvetchers was the way they tried to prove how "woke" they were by their profanity-laden, Ebonics-flavored complaints against their oppression. Yet they never asked, "Ok then - this is unacceptable. So what are we going to do about it?" For the asking of such a question was deemed to be unacceptable by those who had been conditioned by the third face of power.
In my personal day-to-day life, this manifested itself as the attempt by some of my brothers and sisters to steer any collective activism of ours into directions that posed no threat to established systems of domination. This steering also included sabotaging the efforts of anyone who was genuinely trying to build a disruptive, yet nonviolent resistance. For instance, when Stephon Clark was shot in his grandmother's backyard, there were African-Americans who tried to organize creative forms of protest that would put police departments into a dilemma because these protests did not involve mass picketing, even though they would make the cops look very bad. Yet there were Black employees of municipal bureaus and police departments who, when they learned of these efforts, tried to co-opt them in order to reduce their value as protest, and in order to instead portray these efforts as part of "a larger effort by people both in the police and in the community to solve our problems together!" (The only reason why these municipal bureaus and police departments found out about these efforts is because some of these Uncle (and Auntie) Toms went and told them.)
But this Uncle Tom-ism had its manifestation in much larger circles, extending in some cases even to full-blown Stockholm Syndrome. Cases in point among other members of other minority groups include U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. But Black Americans are not to be outdone in this department, for we have U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (who is married to a doofus), and Herman Cain - a former Republican Presidential candidate, a former businessman and a former living human being whose true belief in Donald Trump cost him his life. But the most egregious example of both Stockholm Syndrome and Uncle Tom-ism is Ben Carson, the former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary. A more pathetic and ridiculous whipped yard-dog of a man would be hard to find. Almost nothing he says makes sense.
Those who read of Gene Sharp's 198 methods know that among the methods classified as "Nonviolent Intervention" are those methods which construct a self-sufficient parallel society among the oppressed so that they can meet their needs without relying on a dominant society that wants to exploit and oppress them. This building of self-sufficiency is an essential component of a successful liberation struggle. And organizing this kind of self-sufficiency is very similar to organizing a potluck picnic or lunch. Yet one thing that ruins such efforts is people who show up looking for a free lunch instead of a potluck. I think particularly of one lady whom I met at a time when I was trying to organize a math club for African-American youth, due to the institutional failure of our public schools to adequately teach African-American children. I tried to make it clear that I was organizing this club as a means of building our capacity to liberate ourselves from a dominant system that was destroying us, and that for this club to work, it would require a collective effort from all involved. She kept on calling what I was doing a "program" (or "pro-graham" as she used to pronounce it), and she kept on referring to me as a "service provider." She would also always say, "Honey, organizing is not my gift. But I support you in trying to help my kid!" Thanks be to God that I haven't seen that woman in over a year. But if I ever see her again, I'm going to challenge her. I'm going to say to her, "Since you refuse to contribute to your own liberation - looking instead for 'service providers' to deliver 'programs' to you - why don't you try going to Winco or Food For Less and loading up a shopping cart full of groceries. Then try walking out without paying for them, while loudly thanking the store for its 'program'! But before you do, please call or text me so I can show up and watch what happens to you!"
An additional danger of "free lunch-ism" is that an oppressed people can be bought off by a dominant power willing to shell out a few bucks to create an actual "program". For the kind of "program" thus created will almost certainly not be designed to correct an actual imbalance of power between the oppressed and the oppressor. Rather, it will be designed to benefit a chosen few from among the oppressed in order to buy them off. And frequently, the program will be run by members of the Uncle Tom group who fight for positions as managers of the "program." Gene Sharp quotes Martin Luther King in calling this sort of thing "tokenism" in Part 3 of The Politics of Nonviolent Action.
These were the people who simply could not be bothered to become activized, even as they saw the atrocities being perpetrated against their people, for they were too submerged in their own lives and their own comforts. To be fair to these people, being fat, dumb and happy is not exclusively an African-American weakness. Rather, I believe it is the inevitable response by any people to having one's basic creature needs met without expecting or wanting anything more from life. Indeed, the phrase "fat, dumb, and happy" was first used by Herman Wouk in The Caine Mutiny to describe the entire United States of America as it was during the 1940's. I have a personal example of fat, dumb happiness in the person of one of my cats whose name is Vashka. His is truly the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind - a mind unspotted by any intelligent thought. There are only three things he lives for: sleeping, eating, and being petted. He used to live for a fourth thing before I had him neutered...
But the problem with being fat, dumb and happy is that such an attitude precludes the exercise of active citizenship and makes people vulnerable to being oppressed in the first place. You can bury your head in the sand only for so long.
As I said, these were the kinds of people and the kinds of responses I encountered in my attempts to organize my own people. And although these responses were indeed very, very aggravating, I must also admit that they were a kind of resistance to oppression - even if the resistance degenerated into the escapism of the fat, dumb and happy. It was a "resistance" in the sense that it was a reflexive personal response to an intolerable situation. Yet it is obvious that this kind of "resistance" does not change anything in the long run. In order to create the kind of resistance that brings permanent, serious change, there must therefore first be a liberation of the minds of the resisters. They must free themselves from the third face of power of their oppressors.
I have some hard news for you. There can be no liberation, no freedom without intentional suffering. This is especially true in strategic nonviolent conflict. Those who have experienced cognitive liberation are those who have come to a point in life where they choose to live in truth, no matter what it costs them. As a Christian, I must say that if you are afraid of paying the price to live in truth, maybe it's because you have no knowledge of God or of the hereafter. My source of strength and of cognitive liberation consists in this: "Since then the children [that is, human beings] share in blood and flesh, He Himself [that is, Jesus Christ] likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives." (Hebrews 2:14-15) But whether you are a Christian or not, you must answer for yourself whether it is better to pay the price of living in truth as free people or to choose instead to be a pack of whipped yard-dogs so that you can persuade your masters to be a bit less cruel to you.
I think again of the example of the Russians (including Alexei Navalny) who right now are resisting both a powerful oppressor and an all-consuming system of oppression. These people are going for broke. I also think of the African-Americans who bravely resisted oppression during the 1950's and 1960's, people whose stories are contained in books like Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, and I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition And The Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Those people went for broke. We should too. Only then will we be willing to craft an effective strategy of liberation.
