Threat or Opportunity: non-violent protest?
An intriguing FP post, which opens with:
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As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world's attention has been drawn to the causes -- generations of repressive rule -- and tools -- social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter -- animating the wave of revolt....
The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists.
Curiously the group hails from Serbia.
Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...ion_u?page=0,1
We have touched upon the state's responses in other threads, looked at the media, speculated on the motivation of the protesters, but not the methods used by them.
I would expect some security analysts in the Middle East - at least - are studying a lot more.
How will those who would seek power, maybe hiding their intentions and methods, respond to this model? In particular those who preach violence.
I tried to locate CANVAS website and each visit hit a barrier. So I used the cached edition of:http://www.canvasopedia.org/
Meantime this link is to an Egyptian protest manual (with translation), although some steps on meeting the police I expect were revised: http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...nslated/70388/
Threat or opportunity ...
It depends - political "METT-T" ;)
The SWJ Blog has picked up this theme, Callwell, Mao, Galula, Sharp?, with a good comment by Dave Maxwell:
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I remember when the book linked in the article above about the author Gene Sharp came out. I remember discussions with people who say that Unconventional Warfare in the classic sense of overthrowing a government, particularly a despotic or totalitarian regime, was a romantic notion of the past and no longer relevant, particularly in the post Cold War and post 9-11 world. Just like COIN after Vietnam, classic UW was no longer of value. Add this book to Hoffer's and Gurr's works and I think you have the basis for an Unconventional Warfare curriculum that has stood and will stand the test of time.
and also Sharp as a Modern Jomini? (with links).
Sharp's publications (and other links) are found at Albert Einstein Institute.
Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, Why Civil Resistance Works - The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2008), is extensively footnoted.
Centre for Applied NonViolent Action & Strategies - CANVAS comes up fine on this computer.
Have to run now to see "MAJ MIKE, the Flight Surgeon" (quarterly checkup) - maybe later with more stuff.
Regards
Mike
Re: LBJ - I've got to go with Jones ....
not Robert Jones, but James Jones in 1988:
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Behind L.B.J.'s Decision Not to Run in '68
By James R. Jones; James R. Jones, President Lyndon B. Johnson's chief of staff in 1968, was a Democratic Representative from Oklahoma from 1973 to 1987
Published: April 16, 1988
WASHINGTON — It's now just a shade over 20 years since Lyndon B. Johnson's speech to the nation that closed with this surprise: ''I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.''
Most Americans couldn't believe that this larger-than-life figure could voluntarily relinquish the reins of power. Scholars and politicians still argue over what really motivated his decision to step down.
My perspective was that of the President's administrative chief of staff. My office was next to his. I can state categorically that fear of losing the 1968 election was not the reason he retired. Several days before the speech, Mr. Johnson commissioned a poll, which indicated that he would be re-elected over all possible candidates. I always have felt that he took that poll to satisfy himself that he wasn't being run out of office.
The real reason for Mr. Johnson's withdrawal was Vietnam. It was an involvement he had questioned as a Senator and about which he brooded as President. But his sense of Presidential continuity compelled him to pursue the commitments made by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
As our casualties grew, the abstract agony caused by the daily situation reports became a personal pain for the President when his own son-in-law, Charles Robb, a Marine captain, entered combat.
In addition, Mr. Johnson had begun to doubt our ability to prosecute the war to any clear-cut victory. He worried about the discrepancy between Government reports and news stories in The New York Times written from Vietnam. The President mused aloud on more than one occasion that either The Times's reporter, R. W. Apple Jr., was working for the enemy or that our Government's intelligence apparatus was misleading him. ... (much more background in story)
During March 1968, LBJ was advised by his "Wise Men" that he was not going to achieve a clear-cut victory:
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Johnson meets with 'The Wise Men,' March 25, 1968
On this day in 1968, as pessimism over U.S. prospects in Vietnam deepened, President Lyndon B. Johnson met with 14 informal advisers. In 1945, some of them had forged a bipartisan foreign policy based on containing the Soviet Union. They went on to craft key institutions like NATO, the World Bank and the Marshall Plan. They were known, collectively, as “The Wise Men.”
They met with LBJ after being briefed by officials at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. They had been informed of a request from Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam, for additional troops in the wake of perceived U.S. setbacks in the Tet Offensive.
Present at the White House meeting were Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Clark Clifford, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dillon, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Robert Murphy, Cyrus Vance and Gens. Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor.
In the words of Acheson, who summed up the recommendations from 11 of the men, “we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Murphy, Taylor and Fortas dissented.
and from a PBS Transcript - first re: the Nov 1967 "Wise Men" meeting with LBJ:
Quote:
McCullough: [voice-over] By the end of 1967, a grim sense of siege was settling over the White House. The President dug in. He had spent a lifetime climbing to the pinnacle of power; his whole political life now hung on only one issue -- Vietnam.
Clark Clifford: He decided to call in the men whom he respected most. They became known as "the Wise Men." There were about ten of them. If you put the total service, those men must have had two hundred and fifty to three hundred years of government service.
McCullough: [voice-over] These were the architects of American foreign policy -- Dean Acheson, John McCloy, Averell Harriman. "Contain Communism, don't let it spread" had been their advice to every President since Truman.
William P. Bundy: The picture that was given to them was that we are making slow, grinding progress and we thought we could see, at some point, a break, with the other side really starting to really weaken and go downhill.
McCullough: [voice-over] Dean Acheson said later, "I told him he was wholly right on Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on."
Clark Clifford: They voted unanimously for him to go on with his course. He was greatly comforted by that.
William P. Bundy: The advice they gave was, "Look, the country doesn't see it the way you're describing it. You've got to develop a way to make your assessments of the situation more credible."
George Ball: Well, they gave him perfectly silly advice. They were sensible people, and why they were so silly, I don't know. Their main advice was, "Well, you ought to improve your public relations." Well, after the meeting, I spoke to Dean Acheson and John Coles and Arthur Dean, and I said, "You old bastards, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You're like a lot of vultures sitting on the fence and sending the young men out to die." And I walked out of the room.
but, the consensus disappeared in March 1968:
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McCullough: [voice-over] By the middle of March, Clark Clifford despaired of ever changing the President's mind. Only one group of Americans might be able to influence him -- those foreign-policy experts called "the Wise Men". Five months before, the Wise Men had cheered Johnson with their support. Now, Clifford encouraged the President to meet with them one more time.
Clark Clifford: Although it might sound somewhat conspirational, I thought it wise to contact a good many of them first, so I did. I knew them all, I'd known them all for years, and I got a feeling from them. I made four, five or six contacts and found that in each instance, Tet had changed their minds. They all came back; we went through the same process -- reading cables, getting briefed; then we met with the President. They had all turned around. The impact was profound -- so profound that he thought something had gone wrong, and he used the expression "I think somebody has poisoned the well."
Richard Goodwin: He had picked these old Cold Warriors that were still fighting the battle of containment, and he listened to their advice, and as long as they stayed with him, he felt that he must be doing the right thing. Then, finally, at the end, they left him. They all said, "It's not working," and they walked out of the room, and there was Lyndon Johnson all alone with his war, the last believer.
So, that sums the evidence - although much more could be easily added (e.g., see Dean Rusk Transcript & George Ball Transcript).
Regards
Mike
That's a flawed myth to offset the ignominy of Viet Nam and save a leftist icon.
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
We'll never know for sure what might have happened.
Obviously. However as one who'd been voting for about 20 years at the time and thus was paying attention, Nixon was distrusted as was Johnson he was the less distrusted until mid 1967 when too many rumors of dumb things related to Viet Nam and his personal pecadilloes were circulating and he became the 'untrust' front runner. He was a sitting President, yet he drew two challengers for his own party's nomination?
McCarthy had the student and academic vote, Kennedy had the working Democrat vote -- both campaigned using war errors as fodder -- and Johnson had less than 20% support among Democrats in the polls. Viet Nam sunk him -- as it should have. It also killed him, a good part of his decision was based on his belief that another term would kill him. He died two days after it would have ended.
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I personally subscribe to civil rights role as being what cost him the most...and from what I have seen and read it was the blowback to his work on civil rights that drove his rapid decline after leaving office.
We can disagree on that. :cool:
Addendum: Started this, stopped, went to dinner came back an posted without looking. Mike had posted in the interim and I didn't see it until this post had arrived on the Board. Good catches, Mike. All makes sense, and with due respect to Clark Clifford, et.al. (very little, I'm not a Clifford fan -- nor a Vance fan...) Lyndon left due to Viet Nam. James R. Jones not withstanding, I'm not at all sure that Lyndon would've trumped Nixon. The press had long disliked Nixon; they had come to dislike Lyndon even more...
Isolation - one response by autocrats
LBJ and Gandhi aside I do wonder as autocratic states look around the scene what are the lessons learnt?
First and foremost electronic communication is so dangerous. If you are a developing autocratic state, would you want to allow this to develop? I understand it is easy to switch off mobile phone networks, the UK has a preferential system in place for emergencies, so state mobiles work and for example others can only get calls in. Isolating international links, which are via a few nodes, unless you have a sat phone, appears to be easy.
Limited or slow communications would be attractive for an autocrat. In another thread on Burma I have commented that without imagery 24/7 news has a much reduced impact. Large chunks of the world are not on the 24/7 editors list.
Reducing international exposure is possible, although even the PRC has learnt not easy after rioting in Tibet was filmed by tourists and a BBC reporter on a holiday. Plus the ethnic rioting and state response in Urumchi.
Tourists are a mixed blessing, in Egypt the vast majority were miles away from the focal point, the cities, on beaches in Sinai and above all usually have little interaction with the locals. More problematic are the resident expats, especially if widely dispersed like preachers, NGO etc.
Did the Internet matter in Tunisia and Egypt?
From Open Democracy:
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An audio interview in which Nabila Ramdani describes the role of the social networks in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions – to what extent are Morozov's and Gladwell's arguments proved wrong by events?
Closing sentences:
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There will be numerous attempts to re-impose autocracies dominated self-styled leaders of the people. However, the biggest historical change highlighted by revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia is that these people are nowadays hugely well informed, questioning and technologically savvy.
This should be our greatest cause for optimism as we consider the future of the Arab world.
Link:http://www.opendemocracy.net/tony-cu...-02-19%2005:30
Gene Sharp, 'Clausewitz Of Nonviolent Warfare,' Amazed By Egypt's Youth
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He's been called "the man who changed the world," by the editorial board of the Boston Globe, and the Karl Von Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare" by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
As Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep notes, former Harvard reseacher Gene Sharp has been an inspiration to young revolutionaries in countries such as Serbia and Egypt, where they used his manual From Dictatorship to Democracy and his book The Politics of Nonviolent Action to help guide them through what turned out to be successful — and peaceful — revolts against oppressive regimes.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...-youth?ps=cprs
Links to Gene Sharp and Albert Einstein Institute
in this thread Threat or Opportunity: non-violent protest? (links to Gene Sharp and Albert Einstein Institute publications, here & here).
Regards
Mike
Social Movement Leadership
Certainly not new IMO social movements taking on the state / government, modern IT is clearly an enabler and a vulnerability. Communication is simply faster.
So I spotted this comment on ICSR's blog, entitled 'No matter what he says, Wael Ghonim is a leader: Social Movement Leadership...'
It open with:
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There has been a steady stream of thought-provoking remarks about the role of leadership (or lack thereof) in the activist movements that coordinated via social network sites to overthrow the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Most recently, Clint Watts wrote a thoughtful post on the subject at his blog, Selected Wisdom. His comments were sparked by a Steve Inskeep interview with Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian activist and Google executive who played a significant role in the uprising. The occasion of the interview was the release of Ghonim’s new book, Revolution 2.0, which I blogged briefly about the other day.
Link:http://icsr.info/blog/No-matter-what...ian-Revolution
The protesters toolkit - revolutionary apps
Protest has not gone away, although in Europe it is not so rife, except in Greece:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17505944 and with the odd reminder here in the UK:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17496073
Here is an event at London's Frontline Club: 'Events Feed On the media: 'The protesters toolkit - revolutionary apps':http://www.frontlineclub.com/events/...e-media-1.html
Quote:
Governments and security forces are becoming increasingly wise to the role of social media in organising and enhancing protest movements. As a result they are developing new ways to block, hack and track citizens tweets, Facebook and other social media tools in order to prevent unrest.
Protesters and citizen journalists the world over are able to stay one step ahead, however with the help of Open Source developed phone apps that allow them to communicate effectively without being tracked as easily. From letting friends know if you've been arrested to getting your story public, there is an app for all possible situations.
Tools of protest: Disobedient Objects
Art sometimes appears on SWC, so this current exhibition in London, at the V&A, fits in:http://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...-objects-vanda
First:
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some of the most powerful exhibits are the simplest ones – things that engage with the more theatrical side of a demonstration and show how the balance of power on the street can be swung with just a bit of mischievous wit. In one corner, a cluster of gigantic inflatable cubes hangs above a line of placards, like metallic clouds. These are
inflatable cobblestones, made by the Eclectic Electric Collective, and used in worker protests in Berlin and Barcelona in 2012, as a way to outwit the authorities.
"The police just don't know what to do with things like this," says Grindon. "Do they throw the inflatable back, in which case they're engaging in this weird performance? Do they try to bundle it into a van and arrest the cobblestone? Or do they try to attack it and deflate it?" Either way, as accompanying footage shows, they end up wrongfooted and humiliated, their authority brilliantly undermined by an ingenious reference to the traditional tool of the street protestor.
The linked article expands on the inflatable theme, although it is hard to see what effect it had in one film clip of a protest in Berlin. The photo below is I think from Paris.https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v...00-610x406.jpg
The Poles have always a strong sense of humour, so to them next:
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A similar tactic is embodied by another object, an orange felt hat: 10,000 of these were worn at a 1988 protest against communist rule in Poland by members of the Orange Alternative. Declared by its anarchic organisers to be the "Revolution of Dwarves", the demonstration resulted in the police having to round up and arrest thousands of people in dwarf hats – a farcical scene not lost on an image-hungry media. A statue of a dwarf, dedicated to the memory of the movement, stands today in the city of Wrocław, where the Orange Alternative has its origins.
Advice for protestors today from the past
The actual article's title is 'How anti-Vietnam War activists stopped violent protest from hijacking their movement' with a sub-title: 'Governments welcome violent protests and know how to deal with them. It’s a lesson the anti-Trump movement should remember.' The author is a Quaker.
Maybe rather historical, but this is the only thread that it fits in. I have not read anything on the Vietnam protests, although some imagery remains in my memory. Then it offers some advice for contemporary protestors, so fits in well here.
Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/robert-levering/how-anti-vietnam-war-activists-stopped-violent-protest-from-hijacking?
Yes I have re-opened this thread.:wry:
Spain: how a democratic country can silence its citizens
Via Open Democracy and a timely republication of a 2014 article after the clashes in Catalonia last weekend between national police forces and those who wanted to vote in a referendum on independence:
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Nearly 900 people were injured as the police, trying to enforce a Spanish court ban on the vote, attempted to disperse voters.Thirty-three police officers were also hurt.
Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41540994
The sub-title:
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Spain, one of the European countries at the sharp end of imposed austerity measures, has also been in the vanguard of imposing restrictions on protest against them.
This is a classic silencing tactic:
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When there is a peaceful assembly the police usually carry out a collective identity check, asking each of the participants for ID and recording their details. Some might find out weeks or months later that they have been fined for participating in an un-notified demonstration or for obstructing traffic.
Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/opense...-its-citizens?
