No, judging from the behavior of military dictatorships that have been overthrown by nonviolent action. Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic had overwhelming military power in 2000, and was thrown out by a nonviolent movement. Same with Philippines dictator Marcos in 1986. Same with the East German, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish dictatorships in 1989. The Shah of Iran had one of the ten most powerful armies in the world and a secret police whose ruthlessness was second to none. He was overthrown 1977-79, nonviolently. (6) I could go on and on.

What makes Ward's argument in this book so disempowering to activists is that he discounts people power, which is the main power we have access to! Grassroots activists can't match the government's money, and we can't match the government's violence. What we have potential access to is people power, and discounting people power is an invitation to despair.

The underlying assumption in Ward's book is that violence is the most powerful political force in the world. This is conventional wisdom, shared by most right-wingers, left-wingers, and people in the middle; it's as popular as the old consensus that the earth is flat. And it is just as incorrect.

Activists frequently discover the weakness of violence through our own experience. I remember during a training for the United Mine Workers Union talking with a leader who was recalling his days as a teenager in the coal mines. "I have to tell you that I prefer the good old days when a strike meant that we could also tear things up, beat up scabs, shoot at company trucks -- you know, we had a lot of guns and knew how to use them. But," he sighed, "that stuff doesn't work any more. Go ahead, teach us nonviolent struggle!"

I call that "nonviolent action as a last resort."

A classic case was in El Salvador in 1944, when an armed uprising failed to overthrow dictator Hernandez Martinez. The government was strong enough to beat back armed struggle. So the students initiated a nonviolent insurrection, making a big point of the nonviolent part because of the defeat using violence. They threw Martinez out nonviolently -- "people power" succeeded where violence had failed. The students in neighboring Guatemala were so impressed that they initiated a nonviolent insurrection against the "iron dictator of the Caribbean" -- Jorge Ubico -- and Ubico was thrown out, too. (7)

A number of liberation movements that used armed struggle in the Third World have now given up those means and switched to others. The Zapatistas of Chiapas are perhaps the best known example of this phenomenon. In the early 1980s the African National Congress realized that its armed struggle strategy was failing; it was woefully insufficient to defeat apartheid. It couldn't even involve the masses of people in the cities who were eager to act for freedom. So, without formally giving up their guerrilla activity, they plunged into nonviolent struggle: boycotts, strikes, demonstrations of all kinds. The result was the end of apartheid despite a very well-armed state with a terroristic police force. (8)

When movements are pragmatic enough to learn from their own experience, they often turn away from violence, and even from property destruction. The Solidarnosc labor movement in Poland, for example, was largely a youth movement for freedom from the military dictatorship of the Communist Party. In their early direct action campaigns they mixed some property destruction in with their strikes and occupations. As they evaluated, they realized that the property destruction only gave the dictator justification to come down hard on them and reduced the number of allies they could get. So they decided to give that up, broadened their movement, and went on to win. Of course the military state wanted to crush them, but wasn't able to because people power is simply more powerful than military power.

Because this fact flies in the face of conventional wisdom, I was puzzled about how it could be so. Bernard Lafayette, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staffer from the deep South, explained it to me with a metaphor. Bernard said that a society is like a house. The foundation is the cooperation or compliance of the people. The roof is the state and its repressive apparatus. He asked me what happens to the house if the foundation gives way. He went on to ask: "How will it change what happens if more weapons are put on the roof, bigger tanks, more fancy technology? What will happen to the house then, if the foundation gives way?"

I had to admit: if the foundation gives way, the roof will fall no matter how much money is invested in weapons.

One way to test this is to look at a case like the fall of the Shah of Iran. He had not only one of the larger armies in the world and a completely ruthless secret police, but also the backing of the U.S.A. The opposition leadership chose to use a completely nonviolent strategy, which worked. How could it have? Nothing in Ward's book explains how this is possible. It couldn't happen, according to Ward, because militarily powerful states smash nonviolent movements.

The foundation of the house of the Shah was the compliance of the people. When the foundation gave way, the house collapsed.

Nothing is more important for today's activists to know than this: the foundation of political rule is the compliance of the people, not violence. People power is more powerful than violence. The sooner we act on that knowledge, the sooner the U.S. Empire can be brought down.