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Pro democracy? Learn the strategy and techniques for non violent toppling of goverments that act more like dictatorships than so-called democracies.
Velvet Revolution: An interview with Gene Sharp
Laura Secor has an interview in the Boston Globe Ideas section with Gene Sharp, the author of a pamphlet, From Dictatorship to Democracy, that has been used by pro democracy groups from Serbia to Ukraine, to learn the strategy and techniques for non violent toppling of dictatorships. Sharp’s ideas are often misunderstood as being inspired from a pacifist sensibility, but what the nonviolent revolution strategy is really about is something else: it works and has been proven effective when more belligerent techniques have demonstrated worse outcomes. Here are some excerpts from the interview:
...IDEAS: In your book there is a chapter on something you call political jujitsu, in which a regime uses violence against nonviolent resistance, and this backfires, creating deeper and more widespread defiance.
SHARP: When I was starting out this study the belief was, oh, this is fine for the Indians, they‘re all Hindus, they all believe in reincarnation so it doesn‘t make any difference if they get killed. Literally! But if you look at the Russian 1905 revolution, it‘s the same thing.
Political jujitsu will not work if the people get scared, if they don‘t know what to do, or if they don‘t understand that it‘s necessary to hold their ground and risk some danger. Guerilla warfare has huge civilian casualty rates. Huge. And yet Che Guevara didn‘t abandon guerilla warfare because people were getting killed. The same is true in conventional war, of course. But then they say if you get killed in nonviolent struggle, then nonviolent struggle has failed. Some people don‘t understand what they‘re doing and they say oh, we have to go over to violence.
IDEAS: Of course, nonviolent movements don‘t necessarily produce democracies. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was by and large nonviolent.
SHARP: Yes, but they didn‘t plan for the transition, and so various people who had their own ideas of what the new regime should be took over. Now we have this other booklet on the anti-coup, or how to block seizures of power and executive usurpations. That time after a successful nonviolent struggle is very dangerous.
Our work has had major influence in Iran, except that it hasn‘t got a movement quite succeeding yet. ‘‘From Dictatorship to Democracy” is in Farsi on our website. The translation was all done inside Iran. That‘s dangerous, and people were gutsy enough to do it. But the booklet has been declared illegal to circulate in Iran. Still, the knowledge is there, and it fits into Persian history, like in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and then more recently in the struggle against the shah.
Worth reading.
More background here,
here, and
here.
– http://www.opendemocracy.net/blogs/...
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From Dictatorship to Democracy
by Gene Sharp
Title: From Dictatorship to Democracy
Author: Gene Sharp
ISBN: 1-880813-09-2
Published: 1993, May 2002, June 2003
Languages available: Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Burmese, Chin (Burma), Jing-paw (Burma), Karen (Burma), Mon (Burma), Chinese (Simplified Mandarin), Chinese (Traditional Mandarin), English, Farsi, Indonesian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Ukrainian
Price: $6.00 each (discounts available for bulk orders)
You may order or download this publication.
Contents: FROM CHAPTER 1...
In recent years various dictatorships-of both internal and external origin-have collapsed or stumbled when confronted by defiant, mobilized people. Often seen as firmly entrenched and impregnable, some of these dictatorships proved unable to withstand the concerted political, economic, and social defiance of the people.
Since 1980 dictatorships have collapsed before the predominantly nonviolent defiance of people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, Madagascar, Mali, Bolivia, and the Philippines. Nonviolent resistance has furthered the movement toward democratization in Nepal, Zambia, South Korea, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Brazil, Uruguay, Malawi, Thailand, Bulgaria, Hungary, Zaire, Nigeria, and various parts of the former Soviet Union (playing a significant role in the defeat of the August 1991 attempted hard-line coup d’état).
In addition, mass political defiance has occurred in China, Burma, and Tibet in recent years. Although those struggles have not brought an end to the ruling dictatorships or occupations, they have exposed the brutal nature of those repressive regimes to the world community and have provided the populations with valuable experience with this form of struggle.
The collapse of dictatorships in the above named countries certainly has not erased all other problems in those societies: poverty, crime, bureaucratic inefficiency, and environmental destruction are often the legacy of brutal regimes. However, the downfall of these dictatorships has minimally lifted much of the suffering of the victims of oppression, and has opened the way for the rebuilding of these societies with greater political democracy, personal liberties, and social justice.
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