For Love of Country, for Love of Planet Earth, We Need to Make Some Noise

Today marks day 11 of my analysis of Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part One: Power and Struggle, Chapter 2, applying it to the movement to save the world from man-made global warming.  As you can see I’m moving ahead to chapter 2.  Here’s the thing about these books: they’re huge!  The three volumes of this book alone are nearly 850 pages.  When I started reading I perused the table of contents and thought “I’ll need this, not that, etc.”, but I kept reading, and ended up so grateful that I’d read it all  You really do need to read it all to get properly steeped in nonviolent struggle.  There’s so much to know, and all of it will help everyone who wants to help this movement save our life-support system!

Sharp: “Subjects may disobey laws they reject.  Workers may halt work, which may paralyze the economy.  The bureaucracy may refuse to carry out instructions.  Soldiers and police may become lax in inflicting repression…When all these events happen simultaneously, the man who has been ‘ruler’ becomes just another man…The ruler’s military equipment may remain intact, his soldiers uninjured, cities unscathed, the factories and transport systems in full operational capacity, an the government buildings undamaged.  But everything is changed…When people refuse their cooperation, withhold their help, and persist  in their disobedience and defiance, they are denying their opponent the basic human assistance  and cooperation which any…heirarchical system requires.  If they do this in sufficient numbers for long enough, that…heirarchical system will no longer have power.  This is the basic political assumption of nonviolent action.”

         Our opponents are the fossil fuel industry and their allies in our government, media, and society.  These people are forcing inaction on climate change and basically putting everyone in the world’s future in grave danger. They’ve done a magnificent job of marginalizing people who want to do something about this before it’s too late.  That must stop, so we must be really, really smart about how we do this.  Nonviolence by itself won’t do it, there needs to be a grand strategy, and ultimately most of society must be on board.  Big challenge, but if you read your Gene Sharp, it all becomes doable! 

Sharp:  “Nonviolent…actionists conduct the conflict by doing – or refusing to do – certain things without using physical violence…Nonviolent action is not passive.  It is not inaction.  It is action that is nonviolent…Whatever the scale of the conflict, nonviolent action is a technique by which people who reject passivity and submission, and who see struggle as essential.”

         If you have done nothing more to stop global warming than changing your light bulbs, you’ve been pretty damned passive, haven’t you?  In the meantime nothing has been done about climate change.  Struggle, my friends, is essential.

Sharp:  “Conciliation and appeals are likely to consist of rational or emotional verbal efforts to bring about an oppenent’s agreement to do something, while nonviolent action is not verbal – it consists of social, economic, and political activity of special types…Nonviolent action is so different from…milder peaceful responses to conflicts that several writers have pointed to the general similarities of nonviolent action to military war.  Nonviolent action is a means of combat, as is war.  It involves the matching of forces and the waging of ‘battles’, requires wise strategy and tactics, and demands of its ‘soldiers’ courage, discipline, and sacrifice.”

         So you can see how, by Sharp’s reckoning, nonviolent action is a means of last-resort, only to be used when all other means have been exhausted.  We’ve been trying to stop “The Greenhouse Effect” and “Global Warming”, and “Climate Change” for three decades now.  I’d say all other means have been exhausted.

Sharp:  “Nonviolent action must not be confused with anarchism.”

         This country’s history is full of extraordinary acts of nonviolence, from the Tea Boycott at our nation’s founding to the Abolitionist Movement to the Women’s Suffrage Movement to the Civil Rights Movement to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.  They recognized the need to go to extraordinary lengths to make a more perfect union. 

         For love of country, for love of the planet earth, we need to make some noise.

CH

I’m including little snippets, but if we’re going to break the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on our democracy, you need to read Gene Sharp’s stuff.  Please muster up the $34.85 (plus shipping) and purchase The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  You can order it HERE.

  

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Understand: Fossil Fuel’s Stranglehold is Fragile! We CAN Break it!

Like Cesar Chavez or Martin Luther King, we are not trying to supplant our government.  The power Chavez and the United Farm Workers faced was a consortium of growers, the power King and the Civil Rights Movement faced was a system of unfair state laws and a culture of intimidation.   The power we face is the fossil fuel industry and their allies within our government and institutions.

Their control over our nation’s energy policy seems unbreakable.  They have so much money and many tailor-made laws that favor their position (remember, the oil corporations have been running the show since the Standard Oil Corporation of Ohio started throwing around it’s weight in the later 19th century).  We see global warming kicking in.  We know it will be catastrophic in our lifetimes and ruinous for future generations.  We want to stop it but feel powerless in the face of the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold.

In the first pages of Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action – Part One: Power and Struggle, we learn that our impression of their power is wrong.  It is we who have the power.  Some highlights:

 “An erroneous or inadequate view of the nature of political power is unlikely to produce satisfactory and effective action for dealing with it.”

“One can see the people as dependent on the good will, the decisions, and the support of their government, or of any hierarchical systems to which they belong.  Or…one can see that government or system as dependent on the people’s good will, decisions and support…One can also see power as self-perpetuating, durable, not easily or quickly controlled or destroyed.  Or political power can be viewed as fragile, always dependent for it’s strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of a multitude of institutions and people – cooperation which may or may not continue.

“Nonviolent action is based on the second of these views: that governments depend on its people, that power is pluralistic, and that political power is fragile because it depends on many groups for reinforcement of its power sources.”

All power “can be weakened and shattered by the undermining of its sources of power”.

So the first step toward breaking Dirty Energy’s stranglehold is to understand that it can be broken.

I’m including little snippets, but if we’re going to break Dirty Energy’s stranglehold you need to read Gene Sharp’s stuff.  Please muster up the $34.85 (plus shipping) and purchase The Politics of Nonviolent Action.  You can order it HERE.

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