nerd

Reading: The Failure of Nonviolence

Chapter: The Color Revolutions By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN

I'm already frustrated by this engagement in focusing on “colour revolutions,” which... Again, it feels like denying the agency of a lot of people and ignoring the realities of what's up on the ground... and shit in Western EU, the US, Canada, Australia... never gets called out for being similar in the same way, as “colour revolutions.” This is largely because we already get “Marxist-Leninists” (who refuse to acknowledge they are, in actuality, Stalinists) making these claims while they ignore the agency of local people, the desires of local people, and the ways that these governments are oppressive.

They might make choices you hate, but not everything about every movement is funded by the US or the rest of the imperial core (which somehow never includes Russia, despite Russia still maintaining a lot of imperial and colonial structures)... and it would also mean that we have to look for the ways in which even the movements we don't classify as “colour revolutions” have had interference and funding by external governments who benefit from those movements.

The main “Color Revolutions” have already been mentioned: Serbia’s “Bulldozer Revolution” in 2000, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003, Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, and, following a slightly different model, Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” and Kuwait’s “Blue Revolution” in 2005.

Time to dive into fact-checking, but I'm going to bet that there were key elements of all of these that go unchecked and ignored because... that's what he does, honestly.

It's worth recognising that people in a position of privilege who end up “leading” these movements (regardless of where they receive funding for) are weaponising disappointment that people already feel. Something that Peter hasn't engaged in was discussing who Slobodan Milošević was and what he (and his government) did that might prompt people to look to any solution they find (like how Serbian nationalism was utilised within his government and by people who were under his rule, fueling increased repression of Muslims and the genocide of the Bosniaks).

Not to mention, when discussing anything about Yugoslavia... would've been good to recognise that the Western powers were initially supporting (or at least looking away from) Milošević until they “just couldn't” any more. (And this article makes assertions about Europe being the puppet of the US in this time because they were “militarily weak,” which is... largely bullshit, if we're honest. They try to make the comparison to the US staying out of shit in WWI, and that's just not the complete story. Also ignores how Western Europe routinely colonises and engages in imperialism of its neighbours.)

If anything, Milošević looks like part of a different pattern.

Although Otpor activists seem content to give him all the credit—they were, after all, personally trained by Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute—they also drew on numerous characteristics of Philippine’s 1983-86 Yellow Revolution, not explicitly dealt with in FDtD. The specific configuration of tactics they chose served as the undisputed model for all subsequent Color Revolutions.

I'm going to say that I haven't found anything where most Otpor! activists gave Gene Sharp all of the credit, but I have found sources that say that “some students” utilised his book (From Dictatorship to Democracy). However, if you look at the kinds of sources that are largely available? It's all from organisations and institutions who benefit from promoting this book (and I'm not even talking just about state institutions; it's people who literally benefited materially from the promotion of Sharp's work and people who benefited from being able to create workshop-creating organisations).

Let's see if any of that gets addressed.

It’s no coincidence that every single Color Revolution has replaced a government that had a close relationship with Russia with a government that wanted a closer relationship with the United States and European Union. Each and every Color Revolution received positive media coverage in Western media, usually beginning before the revolution had even started, so that the public was already trained to think of Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan as a corrupt regime in need of changing.

Just going to highlight that this is a particularly bizarre perspective for an anarchist. It ignores what Russia did and does, even if it's not exactly on the scale of the other powers. (And again, it ignores the agency of people who do participate, the propaganda about democracy in comparison to Soviet-style “communism” (or other authoritarian communist regimes)... It ignores that there are always unhappy people, including whole demographics who are repressed because of their ethnicity...

An anarchist should recognise both as being bad, regardless of who is worse.

And in every case, the organization responsible for conducting the so-called revolution received funding from progressive capitalists like billionaire George Soros, or from US and EU governmental institutions like USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and Freedom House.

Gene Sharp’s own think tank, the Albert Einstein Institute (which trained activists from Otpor in Serbia and Pora in Ukraine), receives funding from some of these same institutions. The AEI refutes the charge that they are funded by the government. Stephen Zunes, writing in defense of Sharp for Foreign Policy in Focus, claims that “Absolutely none of these claims is true […] Such false allegations have even ended up as part of entries on the Albert Einstein Institution in SourceWatch, Wikipedia, and other reference web sites.” On SourceWatch, we find the information that AEI has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy (the first name should be well known to readers, the latter two are funded by the US Congress). Are these false claims? Buried in a single paragraph in the middle of his 42-paragraph article, Zunes mentions in passing “a couple of small grants” from the IRI and the NED. Evidently, these allegations are not so false after all. We also find the interesting tidbit that Gene Sharp’s doctoral dissertation was funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

These are more interesting pieces of information than... anything else he brings up prior. It also would focus a better conversation that should be had: that of co-option, both by people within the movements and people outside of them.

Democracy is merely another way to organize exploitation, oppression, and social control. Democratic governments have coexisted with slavery, colonialism, warfare, the most patriarchal societies with some of the most unequal concentrations of wealth, the destruction of the environment, starvation, extreme poverty, the pathologization or murder of trans people, labor exploitation, job and housing precarity, homelessness, exclusion from healthcare, genocide, and any other bad thing we can think of. The most brutal forms of poverty and the worst destruction to the environment have occurred since democracy became the predominant form of government on the planet.

This is just annoying because he's not entirely wrong, but he's also not right either. You can't say that “the most brutal forms of poverty” have occurred since democracy because that requires... being able to actually create a lot of statistics to prove it and also neglecting entire parts of history (and I'm not comfortable trying to Oppression Olympics history because I think we're all capable of recognising things as bad and holding multiple thoughts in our heads). I'm not denying that democracies routinely enable a lot of extreme and brutal forms of poverty (because they do), but you're not going to convince me that other forms of government wouldn't be doing the same thing should they be the dominant global form (monarchies seem to do quite well, authoritarian “communist” regimes have done well at this).

There are better questions to be considered here than what he's implying and kind of ignoring for the sake of some simple, punchy rhetoric.

And it's not just by adding more simple, punchy rhetoric and going WELL, IT'S CAPITALISM. Because yeah, but that's not the full story, either.

It's also wild for him to frame it like this, and I'm saying that as someone who isn't pro-democracy (because I recognise that our democracies only feign what they claim to be—as an immigrant, it's hard to believe in democracies when they're allowed to exclude me because of where I was born and where I my passport's from; it's weird to be told that I shouldn't have a say in whatever happens where I live simply because I'm not a citizen, as if that makes what they do less impactful on me). Maybe it's because many of these other governments existed with less ability to surveil people in the way we've had in my lifetime, but I'm pretty sure this is less about democracy (even if there is a better conversation to be having regarding democracies, which he's undermining with most of this book).

Governments can be democratic or not, more or less corrupt, but they will still pursue the same basic goals, and they will still be controlled by an elite. Government by its very nature concentrates power and excludes people from making decisions over their own lives.

Even if this is all he has to say on it, this clearly indicates that he knows he should've framed this differently. And that this is the better conversation, which he's fine with skimming over.

The line between democracy and dictatorship is fictitious. Whatever difference there is is primarily one of formalism and ritual. The two classes of government are often interchangeable, and when a government changes from one to the other, many of the same people tend to stay in charge.

At least he acknowledges this, but it keeps coming too late.

More than anything else, democracy is a good business model, and it has always been spread by invasions or bourgeois coups. The contradiction is in using the masses to overthrow one government (one that has become an obstacle to business) without letting them lose their respect for government or think they could overthrow it again on their own initiative.

I'm going to be a broken record, BUT THIS IS THE MORE INTERESTING TOPIC. Why does he waste so much time on dodgy rhetoric that he later denounces?

By being exclusively political movements that only seek a legal reform or a change of politicians, they can accomplish no real change.

Just going to wait for him to actually recognise that what he labels Colour Revolutions... are often seeking the same thing as people within the US. I can remove this sentence from this whole thing, and it sounds just like the goals of movements in the US (some of which that he claimed were largely successful).

He isn't inherently wrong, but the explicit Cold War structure of his argument is questionable.

Compare a violent (Tulip) and nonviolent (Orange) Color Revolution, and you will find there is no difference in the results. In both cases, the movement accomplished a regime change, and within a couple years, everyone was disillusioned because the new government proved to be the same as the old government. This is an especially critical observation, given how proponents of nonviolence frequently insist that the presence of violence exercises an almost magical effect in turning on police repression, driving away support, or reproducing authoritarian dynamics. In a direct comparison between two highly similar political movements, we see that violence is a non-factor. If the pacifist hypothesis were correct, we would see quite different results between the Tulip Revolution, where people rioted, beat up cops, and took government buildings by force, and the Orange or Rose Revolutions, where people were entirely peaceful. That difference is absent. Violence is a false category. It is only a question of what actions are effective at overcoming structures of power without reproducing them.

This is the final paragraph of this chapter, and it's infuriating because it highlights so many of the things I keep complaining about: It highlights his failure to actually discuss the interesting aspect of the issue (if a violent revolution and a nonviolent revolution end up in similar results, what should we be talking about?), it re-highlights the dichotomy he claims is false (violence is false? so why have a nonviolence vs violence discussion, which you're having regardless of what you call it because you won't leave someone else's rhetorical ground), and... suddenly changing the goals of the conversation (in that these two revolutions are the same, so pacifists are wrong!).

... This paragraph highlights how weird the structure of this rambling book is.