The Professional Revolutionaries
Over on the member feed, M1919A4 asks, “Is anyone else wondering, as am I, whether the Middle Eastern unrest is coordinated?”
And just a few posts below that, The Great Adventure! wonders whether the revolution will be confined to the Middle East.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Tina Rosenberg introduces us to a fascinating group of traveling professional revolutionaries. Their story suggests that the answer to the aforementioned questions may be yes, the unrest is coordinated and no, the revolution won’t be confined to the Middle East.
The Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) is a pro-democracy organization run by the young Serbs who led the student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s. These professional revolutionaries cut their teeth with the student-populated Serbian resistance group known as Otpor! ("Resistance!" in Serbian). Otpor's secret to success: thinking of political activism as a product, and marketing it as a lifestyle.
Otpor's founders realized that young people would participate in politics -- if it made them feel heroic and cool, part of something big. It was postmodern revolution. "Our product is a lifestyle," Marovic explained to me. "The movement isn't about the issues. It's about my identity. We're trying to make politics sexy." Traditional politicians saw their job as making speeches and their followers' job as listening to them; Otpor chose to have collective leadership, and no speeches at all. And if the organization took inspiration from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it also took cues from Coca-Cola, with its simple, powerful message and strong brand. Otpor's own logo was a stylized clenched fist -- an ironic, mocking expropriation of the symbol of the Serb Partisans in World War II, and of communist movements everywhere.
Otpor steered clear of the traditional opposition tactics of marches and rallies -- partly out of necessity, because the group didn't have enough people to pull them off. Instead of political parties' gravity and bombast, Otpor adopted the sensibility of a TV show its leaders had grown up watching: Monty Python's Flying Circus. Its daily work consisted of street theater and pranks that made the government look silly and won coverage from opposition media. Wit was perhaps not always achieved, but it was always the aim.
After deposing Milosevic, Otpor's leaders founded CANVAS. Through CANVAS, they have
embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries. To the world's autocrats, they are sworn enemies -- both Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Belarus's Aleksandr Lukashenko have condemned them by name….But to a young generation of democracy activists from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran, the young Serbs are heroes. They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world -- and in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria-occupied Lebanon, the Maldives, and now Egypt, those young people won.
[…]
CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning -- tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough -- it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.
"Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous," Ivan Marovic, a former CANVAS trainer, told me in Washington a few years ago. "It looks like people just went into the street. But it's the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks."
What we know:
- Even seemingly spontaneous revolutions take months or even years of disciplined, strategic planning by a group of very committed political dissidents.
- There are groups of dissidents in at least half a dozen or more countries throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America plotting revolution.
- So long as groups like CANVAS exist to instruct and inspire the oppressed to agitate for freedom, this map still has some surprises left in store for the world.
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Oct '10
Re: The Professional Revolutionaries
Another friend of mine - http://explorersfoundation.org/ - introduced me to the same Otpor group yesterday, perhaps inspired by the same FP article:
The young leaders of the Egyptian revolt that toppled Mubarak studied tactics with members of the Serbian Otpor youth resistance who topped Milosevic, Otpor studied tactics in the writings of Gene Sharp, specifically his 90-page pamphlet From Dictatorship to Democracy...http://zenpundit.com/?p=3758Those who think Muslim fanatics are exclusively the cause of the uprisings should consider this too. It's no simple situation with a one-cause explanation. Some interesting links and responses at Zenpundit.
Dec '10
Re: The Professional Revolutionaries
Thanks Diane. In some ways this information is encouraging, but it also is rather sobering. What happens when someone decides to use those tactics against a democracy? Otpor may be thoroughly committed to going after dictators, but eventually someone will want to expand the playing field.
Re: The Professional Revolutionaries
The Great Adventure!: Thanks Diane. In some ways this information is encouraging, but it also is rather sobering. What happens when someone decides to use those tactics against a democracy? Otpor may be thoroughly committed to going after dictators, but eventually someone will want to expand the playing field. · Feb 23 at 6:43am
Yes. The group seems like it could be very easily infiltrated by the very forces they're trying to bring down. And I shudder to think about the consequences of placing the tools of revolution in the hands of a future Lenin or Trotsky.