11–20 of 88 posts
Not to take anything away from Gene Sharp, but per CNN: He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. Should Gandhi be the father of nonviolent struggle, or someone before him.
Well Gandhi never wrote it in book form that could be read by others and implemented. Gandhi could be the father and Gene could be the "Engineer" of non violent struggle ... :)
Not to take anything away from Gene Sharp, but per CNN: He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. Should Gandhi be the father of nonviolent struggle, or someone before him.
Well, Gandhi's techniques aren't really generalizable to anything else - any other imperial power than the British Empire would simply have shot him and massacred his followers. You couldn't do it in China for example (remind me what happened to the guy in the photo in Tianenmen Sq, standing in front of the tank). By the time Gandhi started his movement, the British had learnt the secret that had eluded everyone else…
People frequently say this (right down to the cliché about how lucky he was to be facing the British), but it's obviously untrue. Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance. He is increasingly being proven correct. (Popular movements pretty much instantly lose their legitimacy when they turn violent.) That some authorities massacre people doesn't refute it.
Let's not forget that Gandhi's techniques were considered ridiculous and guaranteed to lose by most people at the time. It was only once he won that the "obvious" position had to be revised to "well of course it worked in that situation, but..."
Gandhi didn't invent these ideas but he demonstrated their practicality in a shockingly counterintuitive way. If his techniques truly weren't generalizable to anything else, they wouldn't have worked for him either.
All that an no link to his seminal work itself, "From Dictatorship to Democracy". Free download. Or drop a dime on him. http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drop_a_dime ?
"Spend a penny" apparently isn't quite what I had in mind either.
Fork over some bread to the guy is the sentiment I'm trying to get across.
But what (good) people usually want is social change, not merely regime change. And achieving that is much, much more difficult through violence: justice is achieved by broadening civil society and strengthening its institutions, and violence always does harm to those.
Not to take anything away from Gene Sharp, but per CNN: He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. Should Gandhi be the father of nonviolent struggle, or someone before him.
Well, Gandhi's techniques aren't really generalizable to anything else - any other imperial power than the British Empire would simply have shot him and massacred his followers. You couldn't do it in China for example (remind me what happened to the guy in the photo in Tianenmen Sq, standing in front of the tank). By the time Gandhi started his movement, the British had learnt the secret that had eluded everyone else…
1. Pledge not to endorse or resort to violence no matter what.
2. Travel around, survey the problem: understand core factors which allow the injustice to continue, despite mass discontent.
3. Cripple those core factors by means of non-cooperation and/or civil disobedience still adhering to rule no. 1
In summary: Maintain moral higher ground to gain popular support and attack the institutional machinery.
Behind the legend surrounding Gandhi people tend to forget that, unlike the man who stopped the tank in Tiannenmen, he was a statesman. By the time his movement gained momentum, even if he would have been assasinated, he had already infected a good segment of the population to the point of being overzealous with his program.
>By the time Gandhi started his movement, the British had learnt the secret that had eluded everyone else: empires are actually more trouble than they're worth, how do we get out of here?
This is wrong. For example Winston Churchill, 1931[1] and any of his speeches as late as 1945 he vehemently opposed the idea of an independent nation. It was Gandhi that made the empire economically unfeasible, and not until then were Churchill and others ignored.
[1]http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-w... A Quote: "I am against this surrender to Gandhi. I am against these conversations and agreements between Lord Irwin and Mr. Gandhi. Gandhi stands for the expulsion of Britain from India."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, Gandhi's techniques aren't really generalizable to anything else - any other imperial power than the British Empire would simply have shot him and massacred his followers. You couldn't do it in China for example (remind me what happened to the guy in the photo in Tianenmen Sq, standing in front of the tank). By the time Gandhi started his movement, the British had learnt the secret that had eluded everyone else…
Gandhi's techniques aren't really generalizable to anything else People frequently say this (right down to the cliché about how lucky he was to be facing the British), but it's obviously untrue. Gandhi's great insight was that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance. He is increasingly being proven correct. (Popular movements pretty much instantly lose their legitimacy when they turn violent.)…
Hitler wasn't shameable, nor Stalin. America wasn't in fighting the native tribes in the 19th century, or the Philippines at the turn of the 20th. The Japanese at Nanking and elsewhere. The Ottoman Empire in Armenia (a matter Turkey to this day will not acknowledge or discuss), in Greece, in Assyria, and Kurdistan following WWI. China in Tibet. Britain/Australia and the aboriginal populations.
Guatamala (1968-96). Pakistan (1971). Burundi (1972 & 1993). North Korea. Equatorial Guinea. Indonesian in East Timor. Agentina (1976-1983). Rwanda. Cambodia.
Nonviolence is a tool. It's not the only tool. It is frequently, but not always, disproportionately successful.
Not to take anything away from Gene Sharp, but per CNN: He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. Should Gandhi be the father of nonviolent struggle, or someone before him.
Well Gandhi never wrote it in book form that could be read by others and implemented. Gandhi could be the father and Gene could be the "Engineer" of non violent struggle ... :)
http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Thoreau/Civil%20Disobedience.h...
Not to take anything away from Gene Sharp, but per CNN: He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. Should Gandhi be the father of nonviolent struggle, or someone before him.
Well, Gandhi's techniques aren't really generalizable to anything else - any other imperial power than the British Empire would simply have shot him and massacred his followers. You couldn't do it in China for example (remind me what happened to the guy in the photo in Tianenmen Sq, standing in front of the tank). By the time Gandhi started his movement, the British had learnt the secret that had eluded everyone else…
He became a legend. Dissenters in China have that image burnt firmly in their mind regardless of however hard the government tries to erase it.
Sharp's (and Gandhi's) thesis holds in this case - the Chinese government has popular support (probably because people are ready to sacrifice long-term social freedom for short-term economic gains - that's a problem in India as well with different effects, though - but, in the long term, as Keynes said, we're all dead) - and that's primarily because everyone has links to the CCP or the PLA.
Remember, their government has ultimate authority because it has the largest military in the world under its control. But the members of that military also have family members - whose welfare is paramount to them (except for, maybe a few ideologue nutcases) - if civilian support for the government ever went away, the army would soon follow.
Egypt is the 2nd highest recipient of US aid after Israel. The 1000+ civilians that the Egyptian military regime has killed were killed with US-made bullets and were showered with US-made teargas canisters, the armored cars they were run over with were US-made and paid for by us American taxpayers.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5309.htm "U.S. military aid to Egypt totals over $1.3 billion annually."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/biden_01-... "JOE BIDEN: Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he's been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel.
And I think that it would be -- I would not refer to him as a dictator."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0AUd8U_8jY 'Egypt bullets made in US' January 2011
http://publicintelligence.net/u-s-tear-gas-rubber-bullets-su... U.S. Tear Gas, Rubber Bullets Suppress Peaceful Uprisings Around the World June 30, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/21/tahrir-square-us... US firm's teargas used against Tahrir Square protesters
Egypt's military junta fired CS gas cartridges made by Combined Systems Inc of Pennsylvania, say demonstrators
The story of the murdered civilians of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Israel/Palestine and Bahrain is the same; American taxpayers' money is used to fund the brutal dictatorships as long as the dictators are willing to follow orders. Same story, different faces, different numbers. As long as they are "Our sons of bitches."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasio_Somoza_García Though the Somozas were generally regarded as ruthless dictators, the United States continued to support them as a non-communist stronghold in Nicaragua. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) supposedly remarked in 1939 that "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."[4][5][6]
Edit: The only country that gets more aid than the Egyptian junta is Israel which gets more than $3 billion in military aid as well as diplomatic shielding for its nukes (as opposed to Iran which is an NPT-signatory, has the right to civilian nuclear power and is under sanctions since 1979 when they kicked out the US-installed dictator Raza Shah Pehlvi who was installed in the 1953 coup carried out by CIA and MI6), diplomatic shielding against any UN resolutions against its 40+ years old military occupation and 60+ years of denial of right of return to the UN-registered 1948 non-Jewish refugees that made up about 65% of the country until 1947 and many more billions of dollars in the form of direct and indirect subsidies (google up if you're curious, US has used some 40 vetoes in UN since 1970, almost all of them to protect Israeli occupation). Democrats and Republicans agree; no money for grandpa's healthcare or student loan bailouts but we'll fund and arm the butchers of Israel, Egypt, Saudi, Yemen and more.