Project for the Study of the 21st Century



011430000 Leaderless revolutions and their challenges: a PS21 discussion with Srdja Popovic and Jack GoldstoneFebruary 9 2015Jack Goldstone: I’m very pleased to be hosting this group. This is one of several kind of intellectual feasts that the Project for the Study of the 21st Century is organizing here and in London so I welcome those of you here in Washington today and those of you who are getting the information via the internet. I’m glad to have you all here. Our guest today is Srda Popovich. Srda is an activist, a politician, and an author. We have his latest book on sale here. I’ve already bought my copy and I urge you to do the same. It’s called “Blueprint for Revolution: How to use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or simply Change the World.” That tells you our speaker is someone with indefatigable optimism. He has been a speaker throughout the world on the topic of nonviolent resistance and has been something of a guru for activists in a wide variety of countries and movements. I heard last week at a conference here in Washington that you can learn a lot from scholars and books about nonviolent resistance, but there is absolutely no substitute for the wisdom and inspiration of those who have actually participated in movements that have achieved change and that’s something that out guest has done. I’ll say briefly that my name is Jack Goldstone and I am a scholar at the George Mason University and the Woodrow Wilson Institute. I’ve spent most of my career studying revolutions from the safety of the library and the armchair and going over data and trying to discern patterns behind what this revolutionary change and revolutionary success. So you’ll get the academic and the activist perspectives here, maybe clashing, maybe merging, you’ll have to wait and see. I’m going to start with a few questions for our guest and then after a brief conversation here we’ll open the floor to all of you. Srdja, again, thank you for coming here and let me say we’re sitting here, we’re being tweeted and I hope this will be broadcast, at least the audio, on the web, and I hope you get some traditional media coverage as well. But you said in one of your presentations that you cannot change the world simply by sitting and clicking. With all the enthusiasm we now about virtual communities, online activism, the role of social media, Twitter revolutions, what are your reflections now on the role of social media and making nonviolent resistance work?Srdja Popovic: Well, first of all, glad being here, glad being part of PS21. I know some great guys who are working there and I am honored to be on a PS21 event and thank you to Peter Apps, who is not here, but who really made this thing.Jack: Can everyone hear by the way? Good.Srdja: So one of the reasons why we came out with this idea of “Blueprint for Revolution” and this book presents a bunch of stories of the common people, which I love to call hobbies, who are changing the world and some of them are traditional leaders of political movements, people who we know from history, people like Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk, and some of them are nowadays heroes who are sitting in jails in Egypt or who are running the shows in places like Venezuela. And what you will discover is that these are people like us and I think one of main reasons we really wanted to step out of this book is that its people like us. Second, is that these people are making change in the real world which addresses your question on the social media. We tackle this a little bit in the book and there is a great person in NYU, where I teach, and he’s like Clay Shirky, he’s a worldwide expert on media mobilization and social media and has a great book called “Here Comes Everybody.” He is super enthusiastic that new media will change the course of nonviolent struggles. I think there are three positive impacts on the new media, and we’re trying to put this in a course at Harvard and NYU. First, new media makes things faster and cheaper. So fifteen years ago if you wanted to organize a rally, you needed posters, leaflets, radio commercials, knocking on doors, and a large organization. Plus it came with a certain amount of risk because the people who proposed this are very slow. Now I can make a Facebook group and everyone will know. The second very important thing that new media brought to nonviolent struggles is the phenomenon you call citizen journalism and wherever you can look in the world, even the most offline place like Yemen, you can see people demonstrating but they’re videotaping it on their cameras. So you can make sure that any kind of state/police brutality that happens will be seen by the world. Unlike Assad’s father, who could kill twenty thousand people in Hama twenty-five years ago, all he needed to do was expel foreign journalists and nobody can see, it goes under the carpet. Now, whatever you do, everybody sees it. The last, and in my case most important event that new media brings is the power of horizontal learning. For us, learning from Gene Sharp, learning from different academics in the Serbian struggle was a tough choice because you really needed all of these fat volumes, and Sharp liker her books, and putting them in a short manual and presenting them there. Now you look at, for example, the power of viral video. There is a little girl who made a viral video called “What’s Wrong with Venezuela: In a Nutshell” and it became viral. Three million people have seen it. The price for producing the video was anywhere between thirty and forty dollars. Now somebody sees it in Ukraine. Here comes the video in Ukraine with seven million views. The ways that groups can learn from this child is something that we’re really really exploring now. My organization is called the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies and we produce this tool for activists so they’re available for free download in six languages. Our book on how to create movements has been downloaded seventeen thousand times during the time of the “Green Revolution” in Iran. Can you imagine the level of effort and risk you need bring on the forbidden book to a place like Iran in seventeen thousand copies? It’s probably close to impossible. We are now exploring the possibility of teaching courses online to the activists so this is one big event. But every coin has two sides. I’m super thrilled about making things fast and cheap, but, I will tell you, clicktivism is a big problem. We all remember many great online campaigns like Kony 2012. It was super exciting, a lot of people were working there. Millions were raised, but Kony is still unfortunately where Kony used to be in 2012. The fact that you’re liking the page for saving the polar bears doesn’t necessarily mean that you have saved the polar bears. So this is the phenomenon of clicktivism. Nonviolent struggles are waged in the real world. The second very important thing it can be used for is a tool against the actors because the first thing a government will do now is track your Facebook password, so now it can be used as a tool to lure your friends into a trap. Because unlike a phone, where I can tell if it’s you or a secret police guy, I can’t tell who is talking through your social network profile. The last thing of great importance for me when it comes to this real problem with new media is this phenomenon we call “Occupyism.” What is it? You look at the tactics of nonviolent struggle, there are two hundred of them and probably one hundred and fifty of them mentioned in this book, and you always look at the tactics of dispersion. Concentration is super sexy for media, but they’re very demanding on the part of the organizer to put ten thousand people in one place. It’s a waste. You want to use these ten thousand people to cover more territory, to reach more people, especially if they’re doing the high risk tactics of occupation. Look at Hong Kong. All mainland China needed to do was sit and wait. And all they needed to do was maintain this protest day after day after day, disrupting traffic, disrupting trade, making enemies of the very people they tried to recruit as supporters. And all they had to do was sit and wait. I think the real problem with new media is that however thrilling it may be to big together a lot of people fast, gaining numbers in a nonviolent struggle, which is partly the lesson in “Blueprint for Revolution,” if you gain numbers before you have organization, you will lose the numbers or you will lose the nonviolent discipline and end up with people throwing stones at the police. These are the big menaces. The very power to summon a lot of people in one place leads you to this idea: “Oh let’s occupy and let’s go stay there forever.” But then on day three, how are they going to go to the toilet? On day six and day eight? You need to think about this stuff before you click invite to ten thousand people on your Facebook event. So it’s a double-headed sword. It’s a great tool for organizers, but please don’t think that these battles are won in the virtual world. They are won and lost in the real world which is where the change occurs. Jack: Now you mentioned the ease of dispersing information. Sometimes I wonder if the media has made it too easy. In the old days, you had to print mimeos and task people to carry them out to certain areas, you had to organize on the basis of building trust, building organization, learning to cooperate. And those things are still absolutely important right? Srdja Popovic: Absolutely. I think the power of the organization…This is the thing that the story book takes you through… it’s a story of: “It will never happen here.” You start thinking that fear and apathy in your society are too big to break. And then you think big and start small. And small means achieving small, tangible victories. Things like graffiti, recruiting ten people, street theater. These things are tremendously important because they show your commitment, they show your presence, but they also build your numbers. Also they teach your people how to do stuff. And whenever you look at a nonviolent social change, and whenever it was successful, there was a tremendous level of grassroots organization. And I think nothing can replace a grassroots organization in such a type of movement. Plus grassroots movements also guarantee that you can control your troops because one of the thing you want to win at is unity, you need a unifying force. And whenever you look at a conflict you can have the perfect conditions for change, like in Venezuela now, but then you have disunited opposition which is completely incapable of challenging the government because these guys spend too much energy fighting each other. And then you look at the planning, which is exactly what you say, you need meticulous planning from planning your strategy, planning transition, to planning what you are going to do tomorrow. And then you need nonviolent discipline, and I think a powerful grassroots organization is a recipe for nonviolent discipline. And this is a skill, because one single stone or Molotov cocktail can completely destroy the reputation of the movement. Plus it will give fuel to your enemy to respond very actively and nastily. Jack: I was with your friend Maria Stephan last week. She was in Washington. Maria Stephan was coauthor of an extremely influential and important book that analyzed the success of nonviolent resistance and finding over the last thirty-five years that nonviolent movements have a much higher success rate in changing regimes and leading to democracies and going against hard authoritarian regimes than do violent movements. So it is very good evidence and encouragement of Srda’s point of view. But she also confided to me that in the last four years, the data does not look as favorable to the success of nonviolent movements. If you look at the Green Movement in Iran which did bring millions of nonviolent protesters into the street, it did not get anywhere. Hong Kong, which you mentioned, I was in Hong Kong and I could not imagine a more discipline or orderly social protest and the young people in Hong Kong maintained for months, and yet, as you say, the government just waited them out. In Bahrain you probably had a larger mobilization as a portion of the population than anywhere in history, over ten percent of the entire population, seems to have been involved on the peak day of the movements and yet, that was suppressed. So this is frustrating at the very least, so let me ask: Do you think that dictators are also learning and becoming more effective? Do the tactics have to change in order for things to work? I mean, do you think the same things that worked before 2010 will also work in the future or does the formula really have to be revamped? Srdja: Well it’s both. I think, first of all, that there is another great book you’ll want to read if you’re into dictatorship. It’s called “The Dictator’s Learning Curve.” It is written by Phil Dobson, the very person who is taking me to an NBA game after this event here and a dear friend and a great guy. He was looking at how dictators learn. So we know the groups learn, we know there is horizontal learning, we know that there is training, and we know that the groups are very creative in coming out with new tactics. But also dictators learn. I think the main lesson that people like Putin got, was that they need to prevent these events before they come into place and before the movements get into the engagement phase, which is the phase when we are talking about the numbers, the organization, and the strategies. And this is where suppressing the movement is really really high cost, when you have tens of thousands are in the street, you really need to invest a lot into breaking this down. And you can see that the dictators are learning as well and I think they’re learning several things. The first thing they learn is to put a velvet glove on the iron fist. There are more NGOs shut down in oppressive places in the world for not following fire regulations, as opposed to being anti-governmental. They will find a sneaky way to ban your work. “Oh it’s absolutely legal to have a demonstration in Russia, all you need to do is put down a $10,000 deposit.” Which of course you don’t have. It’s like, you know, there are ways that they try to discover. Secondly, it’s also a propaganda war. And now there are groups that are trying to distract people from the very idea to get to this knowledge because this knowledge is coming from the CIA, secret service, whatsoever. So they are trying to label this thing as something that is exported/imported rather than something that is indigenous, because the worst nightmare of this type of regime is people discovering that they, in fact, have power. Which is why the “Blueprint for Revolution” is talking about stories of Frodo, you know, the most unlikely person to bring the change to Middle Earth is, at the end, the person who brought the change to Middle Earth. We looked through the history of these uprisings and it’s always the outsiders, the power of outsiders in modern political life, whether we agree with them or disagree with them, it’s growing. We are looking at the outsiders playing the very important roles in elections and mainstream politics in Europe as we are speaking. So, I mean, this role of unlikely political players which are somehow shaking the sclerotic and not very responsive mainstream political institutions in the world we are living in. But what we need to is, we need to enable these groups to learn faster. We’ve spent the last two years cutting the stack of content down to the very basic level so my organization will be out with free video on how you create a vision of tomorrow, on how you challenge authority, how you bring down regimes. Like five minute animated cartoons designed for people, and of course translated and subtitled in different languages. And this book is more for college students. This is not our attempt to get scientific. At the same time, we are talking with Harvard and NYU and several very prominent schools about how we can structure the online courses because we want hundreds of people across the world to participate. And it comes with a great cost. And, you know, getting educational institutions in this will not only help educate activists. We need elites who are educated in understanding what the movements do. And we really have the elites who have a great idea about what movements do. I mean, look at the contemporary media. The reason I’m honored that Peter invited me to be with PS21 is that how pissed off I get when I watch mainstream media. Every time there is an anchor standing in front of a crowd saying, “How beautiful spontaneous demonstration is…” I mean, for God’s sake, there are only two types of political movements in history: they’re either spontaneous or successful. Ok, there is no such thing as a spontaneous and successful nonviolent movement. Because you don’t get from ten to ten percent of the population by being spontaneous. No, you get there by being strategic, by planning, by recruiting, achieving small victories, getting to unity, and also focusing on two things, which this book is about. One is doing political ju-jitsu with oppression because you can make oppression backfire and groups have done this in the past. And, at the same time, the use of humor. And this book tells a lot about how humor is an unlikely, but very very powerful tool against different opponents. Sometimes all it takes to bring down state actors and politicians is knowing how sensitive they are. Audience Question: Could you give us an example that you didn’t include in the book?Srdja: I can give you several examples. From the point of humor, we coined this thing called laughtivism, and we’re looking for it throughout the many many different ages. Serbia. The Serbs are known for not being politically correct. We are super non-politically correct and we grew up on Monty Python slang so it’s the worst combination of Serbian non-political correctness and evil British cynical humor. It can’t get much worse than that. So we started by…because we were a really small group of people… we took a petrol barrel and put the face of Mr. President on the petrol barrel. And there is a hole in the top of the barrel so you put a coin in. And there is a bat so you can hit him. And then you will leave it in the main street, like Georgetown, where people are running with their bags. So immediately, you show people how the drill works and there is a line of the people ready to do this. That’s not the funniest part. The funniest part is when the police arrive because: What will they do? Leave people to hit the face of the beloved Mr. President so people everywhere around the country get the idea that this is the way to spend the afternoon? Or arrest people for doing this and accuse them of what? I mean, they would be released in five minutes. So of course they did the most stupid thing: they arrested the barrel. So now they’re dragging the barrel into the police car and stuff like that. Photo Slate published this photo which is in the book. So, where ever you look, humor plays a major, gigantic role of successful nonviolent movements. You want to look at Russia in 2012. You have these protests in St. Petersburg and Moscow and the government was clever not to bring them down but, anywhere else, you couldn’t protest so in small town in Siberia, which is the place I can’t find on a map, five thousand people beg, and here are the people with a great idea. They take the Lego toys from their kits and build a Lego town and here come the Lego toys with signs that say “106% for Putin,” protesting the election fraud. And the first day, everyone is taping, everyone is having, the police are happy, but then it goes on YouTube and it get viral. The Kremlin calls the police chief in this little town of Siberia and says, “This must stop.” So now the protesters, when they apply for the next protest, which is on Thursday, they get a ban signed by the chief of police for the demonstration of one hundred Lego soldiers, thirty toy cars, fifty Lego toys are banned because the toys are not citizens of Russia and only citizens of Russia can protest. And now we are talking about Putin being afraid of toys and I will remind that this is the guy who spends a lot time posing shirtless, wrestling Siberian tigers, saving dolphins from drowning, all this kind of stuff. He’s afraid of toys. The difference between simple political satire and the laughtivism is the framework of dilemma action. And this is effective because someone was putting the opponent into a lose-lose scenario. So if they let toys protest, everybody will see the toy protest, but if ban toy protests then they are afraid of toys. So now you understand how this drill functions. This idea of laughter and the use of humor and of course there are several others working on this, and there is a young Thai girl who published her PhD in the use of laughter in nonviolent struggle. This is a growing field. And of course I am not a scientist in this field, but I am getting the fantastic stories which are very inspiring, and what is really really interesting is that whenever you squeeze one space, it somehow appears somewhere else. And the more you’re squeezing, the more of the laughtivism you’re getting. I think the role of humor, which we tried to explain in the book, is threefold. First, humor breaks fear. When you need to go to a surgery, the last thing you want to hear is how the doctor will open your chest, and operate on the heart and then here comes the knife and scissors. You want to hear a joke and then you get relaxed. Second, humor is a cool factor. Who is the most popular person you know in your private life: the richest one, the smartest one, the tallest one, or the one who can make you laugh? So laughter is the natural attraction to the people and movements are building this cool factor. Last but not of least importance, there is phenomenon with politicians, not only autocrats, democratically elected politicians get this. They call this “mirror disease.” Because they’ve seen too much of themselves on the cover pages of the newspaper, on the billboard, on the poster, on the TV, and they start believing this image. So the moment you start mocking them, they don’t know how to deal with it which will probably lead them to do something stupid, which will leave them looking even more ridiculous at the end of the day. So “Laugh Your Way to Victory is a chapter in the book.Jack: Well, I’m going to be the dry academic here. I agree with you that laughter is critical, but I going to ask you to get serious for a moment here. Srdja: Very difficult to makes Serbs serious. You tried bombing our country and it didn’t work.Jack: You did a wonderful TED video in 2011 on how to topple dictators in which you described 2011 very colorfully and accurately I thought as a “bad year for bad people.” And it was. Certainly, Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Muammar Gaddafi lost their countries, Bashar al-Assad lost about a third to a half of his country and it was a year really full of hope. I mean, the lessons that you tried to communicate and that other nonviolent activists tried to communicate seemed to be paying off. In Egypt, people took back the street, they took back control of their country, and they achieved a popular election for president for the first time in history. In Libya, people managed to unite from the North and the South, the East and the West against great odds and overcame a very brutal regime that required bombing as a support, but they did overcome Gaddafi and his mercenaries. And in Tunisia they had it best of all. The lessons of organization seemed to be followed and people not only organized to force Ben Ali out, but they continued to use their organizations to build the basis for compromise and new institutions. Unfortunately, we now look at 2014 and it looks like a good year for bad people.Srdja: Or the year of bad hangovers as I like to call it.Jack: Yes perhaps. Or a bad year for good people if you want to look at it that way because a lot of good people have taken some very harsh blows in Syria, the Ukraine, and in Egypt. So my question now is: reflecting on what’s happened in the last three years, what lessons do you draw about how did things that started so well turn out in such a disappointing fashion? Are there things like opportunities that were missed, lessons that are even more vital for the future? How do we understand what happened because, frankly, a lot of my friends in Egypt, and even the Ukraine are starting to lose hope. They think that this doesn’t work so it was be great if you could say, “Don’t give up hope. Here are some things that could have been done differently, and there are still reasons to be hopeful going forward. Srdja: Absolutely, and I think the challenge of finishing what you started, which is one of the things we talk about, it starts with Egypt, the book starts with Egyptian activism and Serbia and it ends with them being in a desperate situation. So it’s like we are following several of these things. First of all, failures are the places to learn, far more than the victories, and I think this is what we need to all look at.Jack: Spoken like a true entrepreneur.Srdja: And the point here is that it’s really difficult to answer the question, “Why do movements fail?” There are so many different reasons why movements fail and they can fail in the very early stage like Occupy if they can’t define the strategy or fail to build up the numbers or the serious organization. They can fail in the engagement phase by making strategy mistakes. In 2007 in Burma, they built number and then they just lost the offense and allowed the military to do whatever they wanted to do. From Tiananmen, there is a story here from a Chinese dissident, whom I met during the research for the book, and he told me this tremendous thing. There were a lot of things that the Chinese government was ready to succumb to during the negotiations in Tiananmen. If these people would go for a settled agreement, proclaimed victory, and got out of there, China would probably be a very different place right now. There are also many many failures. If you look at the Stephan/Chenoweth book called, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” and they come out with the hard data, and I love these two women. They are my idols and I am glad I can call Maria a friend. I also know Erica. They say that forty-two percent of successful nonviolent struggles end up in a democracy. That’s a lot. If you have a cancer called Mubarak and someone gives you medicine with a forty-two percent chance to get rid of this cancer, you will probably take the medicine without even thinking. But then what about the other fifty-eight percent? This is a large portion. And then you look at the successful transitions and the messy transitions. The only things we can say are form our experiences. I’m an expert in freshwater fish not political movements when it comes to my MA. I do teach political movements, but this is America so everything is possible. The point is that you can look the successful and unsuccessful stories. One of the reasons I think the Serbian transition was fairly successful, in that terms that you live in a stable democracy, that you’re going towards the EU, whether the EU is the same animal we dreamed about ten years ago is not really important, it’s what the movement wanted and it got it. And then you know we had free and fair elections and it’s a different place than it was under Milosevic, being relatively peaceful, normal policy towards neighbors as opposed to war with neighbors. So all these things are in place. How come? First of all, I think what went particularly bad in some of the cases was that these people did not understand this conflict as a video game. If you play video games, you understand that video games are made of levels. And then, when Mubarak is down you don’t claim game over. You just say, “Ok, the more nasty people are coming in a nastier spaceship and they will throw more bombs at you.” A new army of Nazi zombies, if this is a video game, is coming. So here come the transitions. One thing to understand is that this is a process and that this process should be planned very early. The second thing is losing unity too early and think unity, which is very important for victory whether we are talking about the political unity which was important in Serbia or the religious unity or the ethnic unity, which was part of the reason why Syria failed, because the Sunnis couldn’t bring the Kurds and the Christians to their side in opposed Assad. That’s exactly the reason Nelson Mandela succeeded in South Africa because he brought colored and the Indians, which were the two tiny minorities, but very important and they just left the white Afrikaans naked and standing alone and oppressing everybody. I think this unity was very important after the process. Look at the Ukraine in 2003. Tremendous nonviolent struggle. Great victory in the Orange Revolution and then Tymoshenko and Yushchenko start fighting the moment they start sharing the office and it all falls apart. Losing unity, not understanding the necessity for transition, and also I think the big problem is building around persona not values. I think if you oust Mubarak, but don’t say, “This is the Egypt we want to make…” The reason why Serbia’s transition was successful was because we knew what we wanted early in the process and when we won we put pressure on the new government to deliver it without even giving them the chance to think that Milosevic’s shoes are very comfortable. The real problem is that when the new guys step in they may find that they can fire minsters or deploy the military or be on the TV all day. It’s a very attractive thing. Srdja: Telling the story of the meeting I had with Occupy, a very good friend of mine, Todd Gitlin, who is a very prominent lefty teacher at Columbia University, told me “Oh you need to meet these guys!” And that was at the peak of their popularity, I think October or November 2011. Everybody was super thrilled. And I was finding myself sitting with maybe 50 people in a room like this, I think it was in NYU in Washington Square in New York. Exceptionally bright, exceptionally educated, exceptionally vocal, really great group of people, you can tell that some of them are you know…I love sitting with people who are more intelligent than me. And, first of all, I couldn’t figure out what they want. Which is very difficult—if you can’t explain this to me, it’s very unlikely that you will recruit people who know less about the political movements. It was only an endless list of the things they are against. So the way you want to look at your political movement or nonviolent struggle, and this is what the book tells a story about, is…you are the king for the day, how will you fix what’s wrong? It’s like, you need to think dreaming big and then doing small things. So if we hate things because they are 1, 2, 3, 4, what is the alternative? And how are we going to fix this problem? If we need crooks to be in jail, once we put them in jail, who is going to run the show? And all of these things should be put as your movement’s vision. And then you build a strategy and then you build tactics. Too often movements start with tactics and stick with tactics, that’s a big problem. Second problem is inclusivity. And if you look at the hard figures of Stefan Chengovic (?) you will see that movements need anywhere between 2.5 and 8 percent of populations to succeed. So all you really need to do is understand that the numbers are not on the fringe, they’re in the mainstream. So while we say super lefty, super liberal, super this and super that, you will never be able to build these numbers. This book tells a story about Harvey Milk learning this the hard way and trying to run once on a gay platform, losing, trying to run twice, concentrating on the vote from San Francisco, losing. And then understanding that what people in San Francisco really care about is not sexuality but the dog’s poop. And then saying, whether straight or gay, I’m the person who will get rid of in San Francisco the dog’s poop. And he gets it. And the rest is, of course, history. Now, the next Republican presidential candidate will probably be pro gay marriage. Okay, but it takes the small things. So my point with them was that enthusiasm is great, topic of social inequality is the most important topic of the 21st century. So the necessity for the movement is there. But you look at what they do and you say okay, what if they just named themselves The 99 Percent? Instead of naming themselves after the tactic. Tactics: very demanding, very hard to maintain, plus, this guy has to teach, he shares the values, but he can’t sit all day long, he has work to do. I have a 6 month old son. He demands my attention. However passionately I stand for what they do, it’s…so on one level, it’s understanding that you need the rednecks from Iowa to join this movement, not only movement of liberal lefty people. Now the powerful rap singer comes in, says I want to support you, and you say you rich scumbag! You don’t do this--you want to embrace, you to grow. Movements are building numbers by pulling, not pushing. So you really want to find a way to become inclusive and let these people shift sides and come to your point of view. So I absolutely agree that the change of distribution in power in this country and many other countries…I mean Russia is far more unfair than America when it comes to power concentration. Serbia is not falling very much behind. So I mean it’s like this is the problem of the modern world. But in order to do it, you want to look at some of the movements like how Spanish Indignados survived and transformed themselves into something that will probably be the winning party in these elections. By going into every neighborhood, by understanding that they need the uneducated housewives together with left-leaning cool students with piercings, and going outside of the zone of comfort. The real problem with these movements is that sometimes you feel so good and so right that you don’t even want to spoil this. And also it’s problematic with Occupy that they have adopted this [waves hands] we need to build a consensus around everything every time. That’s death for an organization. Democracy should exist in these organizations but democracy executing organizations is anarchy and you will never get there. So these are all the reasons why this movement failed and I’m very sad for it but the necessity is there and it takes some time for people to rethink what they want and to come back with what they want. But we’ll see more and more anti-inequality movements in the Western world as the time comes. And some of them will be super organized and turning themselves into viable political forces, some of them like in Bosnia will only be the crime of people breaking out of the buildings, but we’ll see this stuff over and over again because this is the big problem. We are witnessing a generation of young people…I was in NYU last week and you teach this to the students. Jack: […] we’re seeing the revival of this utopian view. This time it takes the role of a religious utopianism like we haven’t seen for several hundred years in the West. But the Islamic State and the Dayashas are kind of pushing this vision of a purified Sunni society as an ideal, virtuous society and they kill anyone who gets in their way. The military in Egypt is adopting the opposite view, they see all religion as dangerous and they condemn everyone and so on and so on…and unfortunately, yes, you’re right, we’re getting there again, but it doesn’t always have to happen. There are at least some examples of how to get to a better place.Althea Middleton-Detzner: My name is Althea, and I’ve worked with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict for a number of years which is how I met Srdja. I was wondering if you could go back to talking a little bit about what you mentioned earlier about when movements build their numbers too quickly but don’t have the organizational structure to support it. I think it actually touches on the coalitions conversation as well where oftentimes movements don’t work with institutionalized groups, NGOs, etc, because they’re not really supportive of their tactics a lot of times or doing things through institutionalized channels. So how do movements sort of negotiate the momentum in the structure? This is a conversation that comes up a lot with former Occupy folks here in the US and I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Srdja: Well, first of all, glad to see you here, and I’m really glad this question comes through. As you said, also, I think there’s a very underestimated understanding of why this coalition building is important and I think the first step is to see the vision of tomorrow. It is, what is the smallest common denominator your movement comes out with and how this relates to different quotient groups. And in Serbian experience we are really reluctant to talk to political parties because the very reason that the king was put in place [?] was that the political parties and opposition miserably failed. But we were very open to speak with student groups and with independent media and with university groups and with labor unions. So one of the things we do, and we decide to teach it in the workshops, we put this very traditional thing on the table which is called a spectrum of allies. So start by listing different groups in society and put them anywhere between 1 and 10 where the 1 would be super opposed to you and ready to act and 10 would be the people who you started with at the very beginning. And then you start looking at their motivations. Why are the people opposed to gay rights? What about gun control, why is the right opposed to gun control? I mean, whatever is the topic that you’re fighting with, you want to put the people on a different kind of spectrum. If you’re planning a movement, you have a spectrum of allies on the table to look at where the numbers lie. One thing we learned through our experience especially working with different groups is that too rarely groups are ready to listen. Listening is a crucial skill in nonviolent struggle because you need to understand that people or groups will participate in your movement because there is something for them. People are selfish. Not too much people are activists per se. They want to see there is something for them. And that something could be like, you know, equal education opportunities for your kids. It doesn’t necessarily need to be something very political or very ethical like you know financial equality. And you listen to these groups and try to tailor your vision of tomorrow so it becomes kind of the smallest common denominator that you start your negotiations about. And as Maria, we can give her the chair and let her teach, because she knows negotiations far better than me, as she would say, you do constantly two types of negotiations in your process. One is horizontal—you negotiate with your potential allies and you try to put this group a little bit bigger. And then you need to negotiate what you want to do with them. And then you negotiate what is the feedback of this because you know Churchill said however the strategy runs, even if good, you may want to look at the results. Groups too rarely do this kind of stuff. And then the next step is you do vertical negotiations, you negotiate with your opposition. Maybe you are knocking on the open door. Maybe you use the tactic of conversion, maybe I can convert you to my goal. Maybe a little irritation is enough. Too rarely movements say, no, get engaged in the conflict only if you’re equal. If you’re weak, considerate it…if you’re strong, go in and demand surrender. Don’t fight. The conflict is the final last resort. So I think negotiating the vision and then negotiating the strategy and then negotiating the tactics and then negotiating the position. And this is so exhausting. And it’s far less sexy than bringing people to the street and shouting to bring down the government. But this is the necessary job that should be done. This is when I want to look at the title of this event, which is, by the way, the title of a book by another good friend, Leaderless Revolutions it’s called. There is this big misconception in nonviolent struggle which Althea and me have heard over and over: you can’t do this because you don’t have a charismatic leader. And if you look at the history of the nonviolent movements you will actually find all kinds of animals. You will find movements that have a charismatic leader like Gandhi who is at the same time the strategy, the speaker, the flagship and the CFO. Then you have another type of movement by people like Nelson Mandela, and these people are not more than flags. Because they’re sitting in a damn jail! They couldn’t lead things. Nelson Mandela had to write, to write one letter every six months. Which was of course read by authorities, so, I mean, what could he lead? He could grow a garden on Robin Island I suppose. Then you have the type of movements like Chilean, also kind of the Czechoslovakian and the Serbian, who couldn’t really put a finger on a person and say okay, this was the guy, or the woman. But leadership is important, and this is the thing people too often underestimate, and I think the real problem with social media is that it is giving us this idea of total anarchy or total democracy, however you want to put it, that we are all believers. And yes, in a successful movement we are training people to be leaders and to really feel like leaders. But there must be a certain level of organization. Somebody needs to get tactics executed. Somebody needs to take responsibility for failure. Somebody needs to lead from the front, though we have a president who leads from behind which is exactly a phrase I don’t understand—Jack: We don’t either.Srdja: I didn’t understand it because you know if you want to lead a nonviolent movement…and then you need two types of leadership. There is a great friend of mine and the Yoda of nonviolent struggle, Bob Hally, who was mentioned in the book, he often says ‘this is like watching the wild river from the top of the mountain.’ You have somebody sitting on the top of the mountain and then somebody who takes care of the scrottage. Because if you’re in a boat you see only the next curve of the river. If you’re involved in demonstrations and day-to-day tactics.And it is so seductive. I’ve been with movements. I’ve been to the exciting places. There is nothing more thrilling than the smell of the tear gas. But if you spend too much time smelling the tear gas then you’ll find yourself too busy for planning. The moment that the leaders tell you, oh we can’t plan we’re too busy, is the moment when the failure starts.So negotiations are important, smallest common denominator is important, which is the reason why we named one of the chapters in this book It’s Unity, Stupid. Jack: If I can add something to this, this is picture of me with Umbrella Man in Hong Kong—Srdja: Umbrella You.Jack: Yeah, Umbrella Me…if you’re gonna have a successful movement, you have to be willing to change tactics. The Civil Rights Movement in this country, they used sit-ins, they used marches, voter mobilization tactics and bus rides, and whatever probing weakness they could find. What happened in Hong Kong was an initial great success, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the street. Defying the tear gas, getting the police to back down. But because of that success, they didn’t feel the need to change tactics. […] I saw national guardsmen with automatic weapons stationed throughout Los Angeles. I thought, this is really sad that it’s come to this, that I actually have to feel reassured to see armed soldiers standing in the streets of my city. So we don’t want to get there. And because of that most regions have had much more effect with police training and community relations. As it happened, Ferguson was not one of those. Ferguson was unfortunately one of those areas where there was still a residual effect of an overwhelmingly white police force in what had become a majority black community. And that’s always been a high risk situation and it’s not surprising that it started. What is, I think, good is that it did provoke a series of examinations of similar incidents around the country and a series of protests that were national in scope. And confessions on the part of police commissioners and mayors that they want something done, they don’t want this repeated. So you can criticize some of the actions by protestors but overall I thought the system worked as it should, and by the system I mean the freedom of people to demonstrate, to get their voice heard, and a responsibility of leaders to respond. Srdja: Three short answers and I think this will be the end. I like this because of course it’s understanding the American context very well. One of the points that we figured out is that the social distance is exactly what our opponent wants us to have. And it is us, and them. And we started by howling at the police, so when they see policemen they go ow ow ow, like ‘we are not better than the dogs.’ Obviously they were super happy meeting us after that.And we ended up chanting at them [something in Serbian] which is like blue guys, blue guys which is the color of the dress of the national soccer team. It took us 8 years to go from here to there and understand that the policemen were just men or women. That’s one thing. It’s like one of the things.Second thing, what you want to do with this type of movement is individualize or totalize. One of the things we’ve done specifically well in Serbia is calling the majority of the police people and focusing on those who are really torturing and beating and doing this for fun or the ideology, and saying okay, these are the people with names and badge numbers. So we want a campaign of social ostracism against this guy, by telling everybody else in the police: we are doing this for your best interest, because these guys are giving you a bad name. So this is not like us and them. These are just a few idiots who are killing people and giving you a bad name.When you reshape the narrative that way you will find a tremendous number of policemen ready to listen. And now you can talk these people and understand what they want. But also you show yourself as somebody who is normal, because they have also been propagandized with the idea that it is us and them. Because the core of the police force, they want to keep them on their side. And this is one lesson.When it comes to nonviolent discipline I think this is key to understanding nonviolent struggle. And as you said with the Hong Kong activists, and we wrote a piece in Slate about how that’s the world’s most polite protestors—these guys published a manual on how to deal with the police weeks before they went in the street. And they performed trainings for hundreds of people to make sure that none of their activists were out of line. And they make it an ideology.Also, one of the things that you want to do, you can bet that there will be a new case of a white policeman killing a black person in anger, as you can bet that there will be a next opportunity for launching a nationwide campaign for gun control. Because you are going to have a crazy kid who goes and shoots up a Walmart again. You can’t say when, but these things are happening. So you want to make sure that you have a movement in place which is ready to respond to this, by clever tactics, by low risk tactics rather than going in front of a police station when people are angry. Because this is a recipe for disaster. So I have a very interesting exercise for my Harvard class and that was one of the topics, this, and then someone came out proposing actually inviting…the real problem is as you say the white policemen in the black neighborhoods. They are behaving as an occupation force. Their psychology is the psychology of the occupation force. And they are patrolling in a hostile environment where they are considered an occupation force. So breaking this perception, whether by employing different police persons, but also bringing these people to the lunch after the church event, because this is how the people in these neighborhoods build communities. And they do invite white atheists to this type of event. I’ve been to a few.So I mean it’s not very difficult to develop this type of conversation. And this is actually drying the swamp as opposed to killing these kids.Jack: We don’t have that much time so I’ll take any other questions as a group.Nejla Asimovic: I’m Nejla, I intern in this building actually, so, I have two questions. The first one is this idea of clicktivism that I find really interesting and increasingly problematic. So I’d like to hear your thoughts on how can we fight this growing phenomenon. And the other thing is, we talk a lot about unity, but how do we go about achieving unity in divided communities? I mean I’m from Bosnia so division is our way of life so…Jack: Second question?Audience Member: My question involves inclusion in an institution where you have to exclude some people, and also about your strategy for finding some momentum…would you accept one from anybody, or would some organizations or people be told to go away?Jack: Third question?Diane Perlman: Thanks, Diane Perlman, I study conflict analysis and resolution. This is a really different context, but the UN Trading Review Conference is coming up and every year hundreds of NGOs will be presenting…there are all kinds of dynamics so…I’m thinking of humor strategies and applying this to that.Jack: So we have clicktivism, unity and divided—Srdja: Inclusion, funding and?Jack: Making nuclear threats funny.Srdja: Okay, so, unity first. I think that it’s a great challenge but in our experience it is exactly the unity that is most difficult to achieve that is most important to achieve. So in the Serbian case it was political unity, in places like Bosnia it would be…I mean, these are very much common problems. I had a great conversation with the editor in chief of one of the Bosnian papers recently. And we went through this over and over. So it’s like, how the hell can you cooperate on things like unemployment, corruption, a very inefficient state system? I mean, Bosnia has the largest number of paid elected officials per capita in the world—or in Europe, like maybe second-largest in the world. These guys have like, one minister, one MP for 7 people—Nejla: Like one in five people run for president. Like who does that?Srdja: Yes! Every other Bosnian is an elected paid official. So it’s probably the most inefficient and…so there are so many things on which you can cooperate and finding the smallest common denominator can sometimes be tough but you can do it, and I think Bosnians and Serbs, they’re capable of cooperating. Especially because they’re having a very lousy economic perspective, they feel humiliated. And I think there can be a smallest common denominator for people to function there.What was funny is that the people who were protesting, they’re from different parts of Bosnia, which was completely uncooperative but they were protesting for the same reasons. So that was really weird. I agree with you.Clictivism, you don’t fight clicktivism, you just understand that it and new media are the tools, not the means. And you stop measuring things by numbers of clicks. That’s what the new media brought us, the super fast ‘oh, this has been shared 3,000 times! This is really important!’ No, it’s not really important, it doesn’t make a change on the ground.Inclusion and exclusion are really interesting stuff. When you talk about nonviolent discipline. It is commitment to nonviolence. So one of the tricks you need to apply, it’s like on one level you preach the discipline, second level you train your troops to be nonviolent when faced with a risk of getting violent. Third and very important, to avoid being aligned with the groups who stand for violence. And there have been numerous cases where it’s like, we have this problem with soccer fans in Serbia. They were super anti-Milosevic. But the moment they saw the police they would get into a fight. We ended up organizing human chains protecting the police from anti-regime soccer fans. It may sound bizarre but that was really really important at the time.The very interesting point was done in Italy. There was a series of demonstrations in support of Occupy in November 2011. And one of the things when you organize a demonstration in Rome, you know that the Black Bloc will be there. Like the Black Bloc is this bunch of radical people, or anarchists, I’m not really sure what they stand for. They are creating havoc. And they appear and spoil every single demonstration for a good purpose including G8 Summit and then all you see is a Black Bloc burning cars. A leftist in Italy demonstrates, all you see is a Black Bloc burning cars. For some reason if you have one hundred thousand people demonstrating and these people have five people burning the cars, guess who is on the cover page of tomorrow’s New York Times? These five idiots.So what the Italians did was particularly good. They organized a kind of contest, and I think there was some kind of awards, like funny awards, like you get a cookie or something like that, for the best photo or video of the people from Black Bloc committing violence. So they actually trained their own troops to help police document but also to help media understand what it is all about. It’s very easy for a Reuters camera to take a photo of 10,000 people peacefully demonstrating and then a shot of a burning car and what you get on CNN looks very different from the message you want to send. Plus, the people who spent so much time training people in nonviolent discipline get a very bad name. So you don’t want to be aligned with groups like that and you need to say very early in the process ‘everybody’s welcome if there is a commitment to nonviolence.’ And, yes, funding, this is a really interesting thing. And I think the big thing here is understanding that first, if you’re fighting the state, you will never be capable of fighting it on material resources because of course the state has budgets, they have taxes and resources. And they will be much richer than you. If you’re fighting the big corporation, same thing. So one of the things we want to do is to bypass this. The way to bypass this is to focus a lot on investment and training and recruiting the volunteers. Because the moment my momentum was at the peak, we had twenty or thirty thousand daily activist supporters. I’m not talking about people with signs or a piece of paper, I’m talking about somebody ready to do the stickers, ready to demonstrate, ready to call the police station, like, you know. This is forty thousand working hours a day, equivalent. Now we are talking about a McDonald’s-size corporation and you don’t need to pay for these people! So building your volunteer base is one way to compete with the material resources of your opponent. And of course we need to put this base in use.When it comes to the funding you will look at the three circles of funding. The first one would be, if you expand your membership base, you will be able to fundraise within your membership base. Plus new media gives you the great opportunity of crowdsourcing which is something that groups are using more and more although that wasn’t happening in Serbia. The second one would be, you will find the pillar of the business community. The moment you become effective you will find the businesses—first the small businesses and then the big businesses—we have the businessmen who are sitting with the government daily on press conferences meeting us in the bars at night and giving us the money. Because the way these guys work, they play red on roulette, but they also want to play a little bit the black, because you never know how it will…and their interest is to run their business however change dictates. And last and most important, you can take money from internationals, but you want to avoid governments. Because the governments often don’t have friends, they have interests. So if you can use the money for your own purposes instead of following somebody else’s agenda, I would advise to do that. If you are not sure whether this money will taint you, I say don’t take it. Because it’s always easy to bypass the money and fill it with more work. So this is the money issue.How to make nuclear conference interesting? Well, I don’t know, make them read this book. Diane: The NGOs, yeah.Srdja: The NGOs. I think there are plenty of NGOs across the world who do very important stuff. I’m…if you read the book you will find me sometimes being very evil towards the NGOism of this world because I found this…I really hate finding myself in conferences where you find people from oppressed and poor countries in Africa running around in their suits shooting out the phrases like possibility-building or social entrepreneurship. I think these guys are actually wasting the resources of the real guys in the field. Which doesn’t necessarily need to relate to the nuclear weapon control and I think there are a lot of good NGOs across the world and this is why we really wrote this book, simply and easy, not for the real scientists like my friend over here, like his colleague and my great friend Lester Kurtz…Jack: Yeah, yeah.Diane: So even I can understand it.Srdja: Even I can understand it!Jack: I also wrote a simple book on revolutions. It’s called Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, it’s about 140 pages so it’s even shorter I think. Srdja: How many footnotes?Jack: None! It’s Oxford University Press and it’s 5,000 years of revolution from ancient Greece to the Arab revolutions.Diane: Do you have any here?Jack: No, sorry. It’s like six dollars for an e-version, I mean, really cheap on the net.Revolutions have been with us for thousands of years. It’s surprising that people don’t learn the lessons. You see this over and over again because we’re captured by this myth of revolution, that if you just get enough people in a crowd to show up one day, the world will change. I wish it was that simple. But it takes coalition building, organizational building, thinking about the day after the revolution. And the day after that, and the year after that. Keeping a focus on your goals and not being distracted by the immediate conflicts.These are hard things to keep in mind, but they are what we learn. And it’s good to know the lessons from this book or my book. I was actually pleased to find out, a lot of convergents here, right, in how we think about these things. Now, you can buy Srdja’s book right here, sixteen dollars, and let’s applaud our speaker. This was a talk that I wish had gone out to a thousand or ten thousand people, but even for every one of you here, if you tell one or two friends and ask them to look at this book it will eventually reach a thousand or more. That’s the magic of communication. So thank you all very much for being here, thanks to the Project for Study of the 21st Century for organizing this and keep your eye out for more such events, it’s gonna be a fun ride. ................
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