For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. -Sun Tzu
Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”
Interesting story and it just reaffirms the view I had that it wasn’t gadgets like Facebook or Twitter that won the day, but just good ol fashion kick ass strategy and planning. I also like the quote up top because it also reinforces the strategy that Boyd talked about by isolating your enemy ‘morally, mentally, and physically’. With protest, if you decide to go violent and use arms against a government, you have now given that government the moral right to kill you with arms. Plus if you are killed, you cannot continue the revolution or fight.
Although what is interesting about this is that there was talk of Mubarak’s forces using their agents as looters to make the anti-Mubarak crowds look morally illegitimate. The attack on reporters, like with Lara Logan, could have been another way of making the anti-Mubarak forces look morally illegitimate. This to me is the essence of the kind of fight going on within a riot in countries with dictators and tyrants. There is much strategy involved with such endeavors.
Or those governments just pull the trigger, and could care less about morality. Might makes right and being feared is better than being respected, etc….
Either way, I wanted to put this up as food for thought. Especially after reading that the Muslim Brotherhood was interested in these concepts of strategic nonviolent action. Of course if dictators and tyrants have it coming, they deserve what they get. But the snakes in the grass called jihadists will benefit from these revolutions in the Middle East and elsewhere. It will create power vacuums, and they will certainly do all they can to fill that vacuum.
Of course on the surface, the West will always try to present the idea that we support dictators and tyrants being overthrown–if it is within our national interest. But be that as it may, the West also has a lot riding on the relationships, business and treaties it has with these people. Mubarak was an important ally in our war against jihadists, all the way up until he was overthrown. Now we take the side of the revolutionaries and disgruntled population that overthrew him. Unfortunately this group of revolutionaries have jihadists in the wings that benefit directly, and they participate either overtly or covertly to push these revolutions along. That is why folks like the Muslim Brotherhood have copies of Gene Sharp’s manual in their possession.
On the flip side, countries like Iran or China should be very fearful of publications like this, and to a degree, the west would benefit from this fear. These countries have horrible human rights records, and they both military or economic threats. Don’t forget the really horrible dictators in Africa which should equally be fearful of this current wave of revolution. I would love to see Mugabe taken down, or any of the other nut job dictators that cause so much grief in Africa.
Now on to the potential application for our industry. A company that offered strategic nonviolent action training and advising services, or advising countries facing this kind of attack on government, could be an interesting business to get into. There are models of success to emulate here, and this kind of work defines the ultimate in winning without killing or fighting. Another way to look at this type of thing is as a tool to create the right environment for a bloodless coup/non-violent regime change. Notice how the Egyptian Army is now in charge of Egypt, and they didn’t have to fire a shot (figuratively speaking–there were deaths in this uprising).
I do realize the history of meddling in other nation’s business and stoking revolutions–sometimes you get what you ask for. lol But what is different now is the advent of super empowered individuals, jihadists, organized crime, and nations with ill means, all being able to apply these principles to the overthrow of leaders to achieve strategic goals. Could a criminal organization like a drug cartel use these concepts in their war against governments and leaders? How about Hamas or Hezbollah using these methods to foster overthrow in their target countries (with Iranian support of course) I mean this stuff isn’t just for peaceniks. With revolutions and protest blowing up across the middle east, this stuff is very important to analyze and ultimately synthesize solutions for attacks or defenses.- Matt
From Dictatorship To Democracy, by Gene Sharp (also on my Sribd)
Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
February 16, 2011
BOSTON — Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.
But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.
Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.
When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.
When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.
Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”
Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.
While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”
He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes.
It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raquib, whose family fled Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker that reads “Gotov Je!” — Serbian for “He is finished!”
In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site. (“I should,” he said apologetically.) If he must send e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raquib has taped to the doorjamb near his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and papers. “To open a blank e-mail,” it reads, “click once on icon that says ‘new’ at top of window.”
Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a lefty — in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called “Peace News” and he once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist and pacifist — but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes himself as “trans-partisan.”
Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”
Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part of a conspiracy to set off demonstrations intended “to bring down the government.” (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr. Sharp’s writings.)
In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries,” an assertion his fellow scholars find ludicrous.
“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”
That is not to say Mr. Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he flew to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Colonel Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war. “Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene Sharp’s work by candlelight,” Colonel Helvey recalled. “This guy has tremendous insight into society and the dynamics of social power.”
Not everyone is so impressed. As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, was outraged by a passing mention of Mr. Sharp in The New York Times on Monday. He complained that Western journalists were looking for a “Lawrence of Arabia” to explain Egyptians’ success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians.
Still, just as Mr. Sharp’s profile seems to be expanding, his institute is contracting.
Mr. Ackerman, who became wealthy as an investment banker after studying under Mr. Sharp, contributed millions of dollars and kept it afloat for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ackerman wanted to disseminate Mr. Sharp’s ideas more aggressively, as well as his own. He put his money into his own center, which also produces movies and even a video game to train dissidents. An annuity he purchased still helps pay Mr. Sharp’s salary.
In the twilight of his career, Mr. Sharp, who never married, is slowing down. His voice trembles and his blue eyes grow watery when he is tired; he gave up driving after a recent accident. He does his own grocery shopping; his assistant, Ms. Raquib, tries to follow him when it is icy. He does not like it.
He says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a manuscript for a new book, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. He would like readers to know he did not pick the title. “It’s a little immodest,” he said. He has another manuscript in the works about Einstein, whose own concerns about totalitarianism prompted Mr. Sharp to adopt the scientist’s name for his institution. (Einstein wrote the foreword to Mr. Sharp’s first book, about Gandhi.)
In the meantime, he is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He was struck by the Egyptian protesters’ discipline in remaining peaceful, and especially by their lack of fear. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” Mr. Sharp said. “If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”
Story here.