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Mass Civic Resistance Pt1: What May Soon Be Required [1]

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Date: 2025-02-12

Gene Sharp (January 21, 1928 – January 28, 2018) was an American political scientist. He was the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the study of nonviolent action, and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.[2] He was known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle, which have influenced numerous anti-government resistance movements around the world.” — Wikipedia

This marks the first installment of a diary on providing a tentative answer to the perennial question: “What is to be done?” I have seen some debate here on the question, though little in terms of concrete forays into this discussion beyond appeals for people to “hit the streets ” should Trump dynamite our precious republic. Or the suggestion that protest marches will simply invite violence, so “why bother.” Street protests are, in some ways, the least dynamic ( and least useful and imaginative, in some cases) of non-violent techniques at our disposal ( there are hundreds of methods one can thoughtfully apply), that is, if we are truly serious about shutting down the evil coalescing in the executive branch, and save our bleeping democracy.

I sincerely recommend you read this book. It is an eye-opener. In the meantime, I will be sharing short excerpts and expanding upon them to get us thinking along these lines. PS. there are also shorter, pamphlet-sized books by Sharpe as well, but this one is probably his most exhaustive.

The book is proof that our options need not be a binary choice between voting and violence, “the ballot or the bullet” as it were.

While I am not a pacifist, I sincerely believe that militant non-violent actions ( mass boycotts, strikes, peaceful direct action, machine-breaking) are ultimately more effective tools than violence, in bringing tyrannies-- and other forms of concentrated power-- to heel. The above tome by Gene Sharp is a compendium of case studies across history, across cultures, and across entities. He looks at the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, Gandhi’s India, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, and multiple Eastern Bloc countries (Color Revolutions), in great schematic detail. He does this with the dispassionate eye of a scientist

Sharpe has nothing less in mind than examining ways to hollow out power centers, to identify the various “pillars” that prop up such regimes. One such pillar is the investment in the system by WE the governed— the cooperation that we engage in, often unconsciously, with the regime. Sharpe quite pointedly suggests that EVERY regime ( including extreme ones such as Nazi Germany) requires some investment and legitimation by its “people” to exist, to, in effect, hold power. The investment of consent-- of obeying, is something we do every day. In more extreme totalitarian states, the stakes are of course higher, and “consent” is coerced with the very real and omnipresent reality of violence. But even in extreme states, the willing consent of people to go along with the proverbial shit often aids in the smooth running of the machine. At some point, we will need to decide if it is in our interests to continue to do so here in the United States of America in the course of restoring our republic.

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