Occupy This: Learning From the Dark Side

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

22 November 11

"Maybe I ought to spend more time promoting changes here in the United States because we're going in a direction that doesn't look good for democracy in our own country."

-- Col. Robert Helvey, US Army (retired), Peace Magazine, Jan-Mar 2008

ver the past several years, the American government has encouraged, tutored, and funded nonviolent destabilization efforts and color revolutions from Burma and the countries around the former Soviet Union to Venezuela, Iran, and Egypt. Most of the local activists involved had righteous grievances and deserved international solidarity. But, American and allied European interventions pursued their own interests and agendas, whether to extend control over oil, gas, and other natural resources, secure oil and gas pipelines, expand NATO into Eastern Europe, or privatize local economies.

Drawing a distinction between local movements and foreign intervention remains crucial. But, Occupy and Indignado activists can learn as much from the foxes as from the hens and roosters. Many are already learning the important lessons.

Col. Robert Helvey was clearly a fox. As a former military attaché in Burma working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was among the first in his world to see how to use nonviolent conflict in pursuit of Washington's global ambitions. You'll find the story in "Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance" in Peace Magazine, and my controversial "How Washington Learned to Love Nonviolence."

Helvey took his inspiration from Professor Gene Sharp, who greatly expanded on the pragmatic, post-Gandhi approach that student movements stumbled into at Berkeley, Stanford, and other hotbeds of 1960s activism. We tended to see non-violence primarily as a pragmatic choice of tactics, though at times we thought more strategically. In the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, for example, many of the graduate students and teaching assistants clearly saw in advance how a massive sit-in could lead to a strike that would close down the university, and how that would push a majority of the faculty to come down on our side against the administration. With that in mind, we chose our tactics, timing, and outreach to faculty members.

Gene Sharp went much farther and deeper. On the tactical side, his "198 Methods of Nonviolent Action," remains a classic to which we should add as the movement creates new forms of struggle. On the strategic side, Sharp and Helvey went even farther, reformulating "strategic nonviolence" as an ongoing strategy to promote major political change, such as bringing down a government.

At the heart of their approach was Sharp's rediscovery of a basic truth that the French anarchist thinker Étienne de La Boétie explained in the 16th Century, and that the Arab Spring, the Indignados, and the Occupy movement are bringing to life. No tyranny can endure if large numbers of people simply refuse to go along with it.

As a career military man, Helvey added a precise strategic sense to planning extended nonviolent campaigns. The best descriptions I've found are in his 4-day training of Serbian activists from OTPOR and in his book, "On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict," which was funded in part by the United States Institute of Peace, an agency of the federal government.

Helvey's language, at least in print, can seem stiff and his approach more appropriate to military staffs than to movement activists. But we need to learn from his insistence on having clear objectives and a strategy, and in following Sun Tzu's teaching in "The Art of War": "Know your enemy, know yourself."

Helvey's students from Serbia knew their enemy by name, which made strategic planning fairly straightforward. The question was how to build a movement that could bring Milosevic down. In addition, Washington and its allies contributed bombing raids, propaganda broadcasts, and other forms of psychological warfare.

Occupiers face a much tougher situation. Overthrowing a tyrant is relatively easy compared to bringing down a tyrannical system, especially one that we have not yet named. Are we fighting against global finance, as suggested by the original name Occupy Wall Street? Or are we fighting against the warfare state, the giant corporations who game tax systems around the world, the student-loan system, or all of market capitalism?

If we cannot agree on who we are fighting, we will never create a workable nonviolent strategy to defeat them.

But don't despair. The movement is just beginning. It has brought the question of economic inequality to the forefront. And it has created real and virtual spaces where we can raise the hard questions and come together to find the best possible answers.

So, what do you think? Who exactly are we fighting against? And how do you see a nonviolent strategy to defeat them?

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes on international affairs.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.