Pete Knows Nonviolent Struggle, Do You?

(I can't upload the video tonight!  Here's a link to tonight's video posted on youtube:  http://youtu.be/nnhTzCq0AKE)

As a polar bear, I want to clear up some misconceptions about nonviolent struggle. 

People say to me “Pete!  You’re a hypocrite.  You claim to believe in nonviolence, and yet, you’re a carnivore!”

Indeed I am.  I eat seals, not salads.  But I’m am a disciplined advocate of Nonviolent Struggle. 

Perhaps I can explain best by illustrating what Nonviolent Struggle is not.

Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with passivity.  We do not believe people should sit back and say “Gosh, I wish they’d do something about climate change!”  First of all, what’s this “They”?  WE.  We’re going to do something about climate change.  THEY are gonna follow. Capice?

Nonviolent action is a means of conflict where you conduct a struggle on your terms.  Those in power WANT you to use violence because they can easily trounce you with the police and the military.  But with nonviolence you emphasize your strengths, which puts them at a disadvantage.  You use people power, or, polar bear power.

Nonviolent struggle does not depend the assumption people are good.  And I can tell you right now people are not always good. Sometimes they’ve even been known to shoot polar bears just to put our heads on their walls!  Gawd!!!

Also, people think to do nonviolent struggle right, you need to be a saint, like Gandhi, or the Reverend Martin Luther King.  How many people are like THAT?!  Not bloody many!   We’ll be waitin’ forever for another guy like that to come around, and climate change needs to be dealt with NOW!

Take me, I’m a polar bear.  I sneak up on seals, maul them, and eat them.  Then with blood staining my face and dripping from my muzzle, I go out and try to seduce lady polar bears.  This disqualifies me from being Gandhi, who never ever mauled a seal or tried to seduce a lady polar bear!  But, hell!  My Arctic is melting!  I’m gonna do the smartest, fastest thing possible to stop that.  Just so happens that smartest, fastest thing is Nonviolent Struggle!

Here’s the main ingredient of nonviolent struggle:  Stubbornness.  “Massive stubbornness can have powerful political consequences”. Well, I, for one, am stubborn.  Once, I even fought off a pack of wolves who were trying to steal a narwhal kill.  You have any idea how hard it is to catch a narwhal?  It’s like wrestling a unicorn!  I wasn’t about to give that thing up.  And I’m not about to sit meekly by as my Arctic melts away and the rest of the world heats up to catastrophic levels, and neither should you!

No one knows how bad climate change’ll be, but if the permafrost melts it could trigger the sixth Mass Extinction Event EVER!  On the planet!  And the collapse of civilization.  Other than that, it’s not such a big deal!

Compromises and mild solutions aren’t gonna save us!  Nature is spinning out of control faster than anyone ever expected.  We need drastic solutions now! 

But the fossil fuel industry and their allies are gonna use every means at their disposal to keep things the way they are.  They don’t want to hurt their profit margins.  They don’t mind putting the entire world on the precipice, but nothing must touch their precious profit margins!

But ya know what?  As powerful as they are, they depend on lots and lots of people to supply them with lots and lots of things.  If we can make it uncool and unacceptable for those people to do that, we can strip away the power of the fossil fuel industry, and save the world from catastrophe.

Which, I would say, is even better than a nice, juicy narwhal.

Groouumph!




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http://youtu.be/nnhTzCq0AKE

To Make the Climate Movement Great, We Need to Cast Off Our Fear

Day 2 of my analysis of Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part Three: The Dynamics of Nonviolent Struggle, applied to the climate movement. Reading Sharp’s books are a prerequisite for anyone who wants to help save our life-support system. Please go to Dr. Sharp’s website, buy these books, and study them.

Sharp:  “Nonviolent action is not a safe means of struggle; there is no such thing.   People are liable to be hurt and to suffer in various ways, including economic loss, physical injury, imprisonment, and even death….There are, of course, risks in passivity.”

         Like, for instance, having the world overheat to the point that rivers run dry and civilization can’t feed itself.

Sharp: “A high degree of courage is required of nonviolent actionists.”

         There are those in the movement who think we can win with “slacktivism”.  That somehow by clicking “like” on a facebook page people are doing their bit to help defeat the forces of industry.   These people are steeped in the old paradigms activists have been using, unsuccessfully, for the past thirty years.  Until people really start putting themselves on the line, this movement will continue to be ineffectual.

Sharp:  “The coward seeks to avoid the conflict and flees from danger, the nonviolent actionist faces the conflict and risks the dangers involved in pursuing it honorably.  ‘Cowardice is impotence worse than violence,’ concluded Gandhi.

“The nonviolent actionist must have confidence in the right and strength of his cause, in his principles, and in his technique of action.”

         That should not be hard, when you’re attempting to save the world.

Gandhi:  “The Government takes advantage of our fear of jails.”

         In America, businesses refrain from hiring people who have any kind of a criminal record.  Think of it, fighting to save the world can give you a “criminal” record.  We cannot be afraid of that! We can not let a system designed to do something else work against our saving the future for everyone, including the very businesses that supposedly won’t be hiring us. 

In his Do the Math tour, Bill McKibben correctly pointed out that older Americans, especially tenured professors, can be the first ones to be arrested, jail fodder, as it were.  But younger Americans can make a great statement by fearlessly being willing to risk jail.  During the Freedom Rides, Mississippi’s jails became flooded with idealistic young people from all over the country who flocked to the state to take on segregation laws, until Mississipi’s system couldn’t handle it anymore and the Freedom Riders won a change in the unjust laws.  During the Otpor struggle, it became a point of pride to be arrested, as it was in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycotts.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:  “Those who had previously trembled before the law were now proud to be arrested for the cause of freedom.”

We can’t be afraid of jail guys, just remember to be nice to the police, we’re fighting for their futures too.

Sharp:  “Gandhi repeatedly emphasized the importance of this inner psychological change from fear and submission to fearlessness and self-respect as a necessary prerequisite of real political freedom… Gandhi wrote: ‘We have to dispel fear from our hearts.’…Also, participation in nonviolent action often seems to lead to a loss of fear….

         “Courage in this technique is not simply a moral virtue; it is a practical requirement…Courage is required if the nonviolent struggle is to…lead to the increasing strength of the nonviolent group and an undermining of the opponent’s power.”

Rachel pointed out in her Save Face or Save the Planet post that the biggest roadblock we in the movement face is simply putting ourselves out there, for the world to see, as very visible activists.  That does take courage. Don’t hide behind “slacktivism”.  Get fearless and get active.

CH   

I’m including little snippets, but if we’re going to break the fossil fuel industry’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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How We Can "Match Forces" With the Richest Corporations On Earth

Today marks day 13 of my analysis of Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part One: Power and Struggle, Chapter 2, applying it to the climate movement. Reading Sharp’s books are a prerequisite for anyone who wants to help save our life-support system.

Sharp: “Nonviolent action…is a technique of struggle involving the use of social, economic, and political power, and the matching of forces in conflict.”

         It’s hard for some people to envision just how we intend to “match forces” with the richest companies in the world.  They have all the money and all the political power.  But they’re hugely unpopular and they don’t have a moral leg to stand on.  They’re putting everyone’s kids in grave danger, including their own.  They ‘re basically f***ing up the planet for every other person and every other business in every country on Earth.  And even their own workforce won’t escape the catastrophe that’s coming.  So, if we can get all those other people, including their own workforce and their own families, to stand up and say “No more”, we can very handily “match forces” with them.  It's about figuring out where they're at a disadvantage and playing to that.

Sharp:  “People using nonviolent action do not have to be pacifists or saints; nonviolent action has been predominantly and successfully practiced by ‘ordinary’ people.”

In America the two great nonviolent practitioners we know are Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  So it’s easy for people to think you have to be some kind of religious leader to do nonviolence right.  Not even.  Anyone can do it.  Even you!

Sharp:  “When efforts to produce voluntary change fail, coercive nonviolent measures may be employed.”

         Describes the climate movement’s situation to a “T”.  They have tried and tried to do it the usual way for 30 years and no progress has been made.  So we’ll have to create scenarios where we can “match forces” with the fossil fuel industry.

Sharp: “In nonviolent action there is no assumption that the  opponent will refrain from using violence against the nonviolent actionists; the technique is designed to operate against violence when necessary.”

         “Casting off fear” is a big part of nonviolence done right.    You’re taking a big chance when you step into this arena.  But isn’t it worth it to save the future from an unthinkable disaster?  Humans evolved as tribal creatures, and they would do anything to protect their tribe.  That’s why people will often risk their necks to save complete strangers from gunfire or oncoming traffic or whatever.  It’s hardwired in us. 

Those of us who get it, those of us who understand just how bad this is likely to be, need to willing to take great risks in order to save the world from catastrophe.

CH

I’m including little snippets, but if we’re going to break the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold you need to read Gene Sharp’s stuff.  Please muster up the $34.85 (plus shipping) and purchase all three volumes of 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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