These are the views of George Lakey and not necessarily those of Training for Change. For this article he draws on the experience of TfC's trainers, who led workshops in Seattle and Washington, D.C. TfC also played a major role in setting up training for the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia in August, 2000. For almost ten years TfC has been providing training services to grassroots groups in the U.S., Canada, Russia, Thailand, Cambodia, South Africa, Burma, and other countries, and has an active, neighborhood-based training program at its center in Philadelphia to which people come from many countries.

1 This campaign, which has more to teach us about direct action than there's room to go into here, is described blow-by-blow by Richard K. Taylor, "Blockade" (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977). This campaign in solidarity with Bangladesh happened in 1971-72. Back to text

2 One of my favorite books by Martin Luther King, Jr., is "Why We Can't Wait", the behind-the-scenes story of the Birmingham campaign. The book also includes his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." (Book available in various editions.) Back to text

3 There are trainers who can lead workshops on campaign design. For more information on the successful antinuclear struggle, see Bill Moyer's paper which is a must-read for direct action strategists, "Movement Action Plan," available from the Social Movement Empowerment Project, 721 Shrader, San Francisco, CA 94117. Bill's model has been picked up by a number of movements, for example the whole issue of World Rainforest Report for Sept. 1994 in Australia is devoted to MAP. You'll find a summary in chapter two of "Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times", by Berit Lakey, George Lakey, Rod Napier, and Janice Robinson (Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers, 1995). Back to text

4 More on this dynamic is in my book, "Strategy for a Living Revolution", which was revised as "Powerful Peacemaking" and published by New Society Publishers in 1986. Back to text

5 The historically accurate version in the film Gandhi is worth watching repeatedly. Back to text

6 A good source for learning from the master strategist Gandhi is the television documentary "A Force More Powerful", which also includes the cases of Danish resistance to German Nazi occupation, Polish resistance to Communist dictatorship, and the Nashville sit-in movement. Available from Public Broadcasting System, which aired the program in September 2000. Back to text

7 To read about one choice, called security culture, read the article "Security Culture" at tao.ca, which states its basic assumption at the beginning: "To minimize the destructiveness of this government harassment, it is imperative that we create a 'security culture' within our movement." Some movements, operating in much more dangerous situations than the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe, have found that security culture maximizes rather than minimizes the destructiveness of government harassment. Back to text

8 This is one of a long list of dictatorships that have been overthrown by nonviolent "people power," despite the state's using military repression to defend itself. Just in the past few decades mass nonviolent action has played a decisive role in ousting one-party states and dictatorships in: Bolivia, Haiti, Argentina, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, the Baltic States, Mali, Malawi, Madagascar, and Benin, and prevented military-backed coups in Thailand and Russia. See Stephen Zunes, Lester R. Kurtz, and Sarah Beth Asher (eds.), "Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective" (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Back to text

9 Fortunately we can create many, many tactics that do not rely on surprise. One resource to jump-start our creativity is Gene Sharp's book "The Politics of Nonviolent Action", where he describes 198 tactics that have been used historically (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973). Back to text

10 During the movement against the Vietnam War F.B.I. documents included a discussion of the importance of making activists believe there was "an F.B.I. man behind every mailbox." During a spokescouncil meeting preparing for the protests at the Republican National Convention, an activist took a break to call an anarchist house in West Philadelphia and learned from activists there that, when they randomly took their phone off the hook, they heard the spokescouncil meeting! Back to text

11 Actually, I believe that a healthy movement includes a lively discussion of pacifism, too, because it represents such a dramatic break from the dominant cultural theme of violence/militarism/sexism/imperialism that we see from playgrounds to movies. Back to text

12 An example of Black Bloc interest in dialoguing with the movement is the statement put out by the Bay Area Black Bloc dated October 7, 2000. Their e-mail address: BlackBloc@ziplip.com Back to text

13 I don't mean that violence and property destruction are the same discussion. Principled pacifists and nonviolent actionists Daniel and Philip Berrigan are well known for their use of property destruction, for example. And believers in assassination might not consider property destruction valuable. Back to text

14 Betsy Raasch-Gilman emphasizes the freshness and innovation of this approach in her paper, "Chaos Theory and Nonviolence: A Trainer's Report on the WTO, IMF and World Bank Protests." Back to text

15 Barbara Deming develops this theme and applies it to macro-level change in her important and practical book, Revolution and Equilibrium (NY: Grossman, 1971). Back to text

Copyright © 2000 George Lakey