How to Resist Political Tyranny
by Lorin Peters Jul 26, 2022
How to Resist Political Tyranny
Putin, Trump, or Otherwise
Perhaps the most obvious form of political tyranny is foreign invasion, eg, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (ignoring NATO’s threats to Russia for the time being). When polled in 2015 about a hypothetical Russian invasion, half the people of Ukraine voted for violent, military resistance, and half voted for nonviolent resistance. Not surprisingly, when Russia actually did invade in 2022, half the Ukrainians started shooting.
Like many, I have been very concerned about Russia’s invasion. But unlike most, I have been equally concerned about Ukraine’s choice of violent resistance. Scholars have discovered that in the 20th century, only 25% of all violent campaigns resisting invasions were successful, while nonviolent campaigns succeeded in 54% of their cases ("Why Civil Resistance Works," Chenoweth and Stephan, p 9) (It turns out that nonviolent campaigns attract much more public support.)
When Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Czechs chose to offer friendly nonviolence. Instead of shooting at Russian soldiers, they talked to them, offered them food and drink, flowers or cigarettes, and built trust. Then they asked, “Why have you come?”
“To rescue you from your dictator.”
“We love our prime minister. He said, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’ (Historians call this ‘Prague Spring.’) We have free speech, multiple political parties, democracy.”
Within a week the Russian soldiers stopped obeying orders.After six months the Russian leaders gave up and went home. In those six months of resistance, only 72 people were killed.
In 1985 Gene Sharp used Prague Spring as a template for his book “Making Europe Unconquerable.” There he develops the concept of “civilian(-based) defense,” and proposes refinements through research, policy studies, feasibility studies, contingency planning, preparations, and training. Such civilian defense can be applied as a supplement to military methods, or after military defeat, or as a permanent and complete nonviolent defense policy.
This deterrence and defense are accomplished by social, economic, political, and psychological struggle, including noncooperation, strikes, boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, disruptions and interventions. These are used to wage widespread noncooperation and to offer massive public defiance. They aim to deny the objectives of the invaders, and to make their society politically indigestible and ungovernable by the invaders. They also aim to subvert the loyalty of the aggressors’ troops and functionaries, to make them unreliable in carrying out orders and repression, and even to induce them to mutiny.
Sharp’s fundamental insight is that violence is not the source of power in politics. Rather its source is the cooperation of people and human institutions … which can be refused. Nonviolent struggle can generally wield great power, even against ruthless rulers and regimes, because it attacks the most vulnerable characteristic of all hierarchical institutions: dependence on the submission and cooperation of the governed. Sharp also offers many helpful suggestions for how to help a nation work through many of their reservations about civilian defense.
The other form of political tyranny is domestic “invasion,” eg, President Trump’s attempted coup d’etat. Trump appears to operate as a cult leader. That means he is able to persuade his followers to not think critically about what he says. Almost all of his lawsuits against the 2020 elections have been thrown out of court for lack of evidence. Yet his followers still claim that he won the election. Worse yet, he attempted to overthrow our Constitution by instigating the 2021 insurrection on January 6.
Now our democracy does have several problems. Democracy by definition is inclusive – most people in prison are citizens and still need to vote. Some states are attempting to prevent certain citizens from voting. And our elites have changed the rules so they can buy more and more elections. But Donald Trump appears to want to eliminate elections themselves. This obviously threatens our democracy (or what’s left of it). This attempted coup is in effect a domestic “invasion.”
When I first began to wrestle with the danger to democracy posed by President Trump, I became somewhat depressed (for the first time in 60 years). But then I finally remembered that Gene Sharp taught that civilian-(based) defense works equally well against coups d’etat.
When President Trump began challenging elections, even before the November 2020 election, a number of civilian groups began preparing Americans to defend our democracy, eg, Count Every Vote, Indivisible, Choose Democracy, and many other pro-democracy groups. Gandhi Team San Jose worked with county commissioners to ensure that all votes would be counted. We also asked the city police, in case of escalating protests, to let us try to de-escalate before they intervene with tear gas or other forceful tools of crowd control.
If Mr Trump should succeed in a future coup d’etat, his “government” would depend on the cooperation of the American people and institutions. That cooperation is expressed primarily in paying taxes. If three or four percent of us insist on paying our taxes to non-federal alternatives, our cities will begin to discuss leaving the union (I heard Johann Galtung once speculate about such urban secessions).
This can be done (self-disclosure – I have been paying, with partial success, the military part of my taxes to non-governmental alternatives since Vietnam). If our cities begin to leave, some of our counties, and states, will begin to secede. At some point, the seceding jurisdictions will need to begin constructing a parallel government.
At the same time, education and training in nonviolence will be essential. We will need to plan and organize in detail, and to rehearse and refine our tactics. The discipline of such a movement would determine its success or failure. Violence from the secessionist side could spiral into violence and a civil war. The coup d’etat would likely deploy agents provocateur, so our discipline will be key to maintaining public support. Training nonviolent “warriors” is at least as difficult as training violent warriors, and requires similar rigor. Gandhi trained his satyagrahis (truth holders) before their most famous Salt March for 14 years. Resisting a domestic “invasion” is not that different from resisting a foreign invasion.
Lorin Peters
"Self-rule will come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few,
but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused.
In other words, independence (true freedom) is attained by educating the masses
to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority." (Mohandas Gandhi, 1925)