“The tree of liberty,” goes the Thomas Jefferson maxim, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” The quote has become a favorite of Tea Party supporters, cited at rallies of pistol-packing partisans.
The idea that an armed citizenry is the best assurance of freedom is deeply imbedded in American thought, starting with the Second Amendment and those maddeningly imprecise words: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
But this philosophy hasn’t been a good export. The Egyptian revolution is only the latest example of how people can bring down tyrants without firing a shot. A century of successful nonviolent mass movements, in fact, makes the case that America’s bloody insurrection against British rule was the anomaly, and perhaps not worthy of emulation.
Consider the uprisings thus far in a year that could end as a historic triumph for humane change, or might still spin off into new variants of police-state suppression. Tunisia, a small country, had its Jasmine Revolution. Though it was inspired by the self-immolation of a long-suffering merchant, the Tunisian rebellion succeeded because of new-century social networking and old-century demonstrations. Armed with information – in this case, leaks about corruption of the ruling party – people took to the streets en masse, with very little bloodletting.
Egypt, with its 80 million people, is the bigger miracle. Their 18 days that shook the world seemed to happen in some kind of medieval time warp. On the worst days, camels, swords, sticks and stones were used in skirmishes in Tahrir Square. But in the end, it was a sea of peaceful humanity that washed away Hosni Mubarak.
Of course, the big gun in the square was the Egyptian army, and had they turned their barrels on unarmed citizens, the country might well be in a civil war or state of chaos. But suppose the protestors had been armed, as residents of any American city might be? Would the army’s response have been the same?
The first successful Egyptian revolution was not without violence, but a series of strikes and nonviolent demonstrations against British occupation ultimately led to independence in 1922.
The 20th century is full of similar lessons from cooler heads. The best-known is Mohandas Gandhi’s epic crusade for India against a British occupier, a campaign by the world’s second most-populous nation for the right to rule themselves. (Are the Brits always on the wrong side of history?)
In India, there were massacres by colonial forces, and bloodshed from infighting, but eventually a free and independent nation was born, and the world was given a grand counter-narrative to violent revolution.
Gandhi inspired Martin Luther King Jr., in the American South. And both of them inspired Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and modern European revolts. The Czechs threw off a Soviet puppet with the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989. The Berlin Wall came down about the same time. Before then, it had been an article of faith among the right that no communist regime would ever peacefully cede power to democratic forces.
More recently, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia showed how governments could change hands without putting a bullet to the head of a despot (see Romania, 1989).
Now look at the bloody revolutions. In France, what started with powerful Enlightenment ideas and storming of the hated Bastille broke down with a Reign of Terror that is still startling more than two centuries later. The Russian revolution — throw off your army uniforms, peasants, and rise up against the Czar! — was carnage on a horrid scale, and led to a 20th century of misery under homicidal dictators.
Iran is another negative role model, a revolt launched by students in 1979 that hardened into a theocracy of long-bearded thugs who torture their own people because they dare to ask for basic human rights. Bahrain, this week, seems determined to show that troops and tear gas will trump Facebook any day.
Such is the ceaseless struggle — fear against hope, blunt force against universal ideas. Into this mix, the United States should consider what we promote. A fascinating footnote to the Arab revolutions is the story, reported by my colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg, of the quiet Boston scholar, Gene Sharp [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17sharp.html (the post to which this is a reply)], whose ideas of focused pacifism were adopted by young Egyptians and Tunisians.
And Hillary Clinton this week said the State Department would spend $25 million [ http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/02/156619.htm ] next year supporting Internet freedom around the world. It’s small change, and a bargain should anything come of it, compared to the nearly $1 trillion we spent on the alternative: a bloody attempt to impose democracy in Iraq.
As for that Thomas Jefferson quote, which was in a letter written from France during the early days of tumult, even great minds produce a few clunkers. Remember Timothy McVeigh, the homegrown terrorist whose bombing in Oklahoma City killed 168 fellow Americans? When he was arrested, McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt with the Jefferson’s line about the tree of liberty written on the back.
Duane Clarridge .. who? .. Duane Ramsdell "Dewey" Clarridge, (born 1932) was an operations officer for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and supervisor for more than 30 years, who became known in the mid-1980s for his role in the Contra end of the Iran-Contra Affair. He is the reputed planner of the clandestine mining of Nicaragua's harbors during the Nicaraguan Revolution. Clarridge was the founding director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center.
CIA Career
Clarridge was born into a "staunchly Republican family" in Nashua, New Hampshire on April 16, 1932. His father was Duane Herbert Clarridge and his mother was Alice Scott Ramsdale. Duane Herbert Clarridge worked as a dentist. [..]
Insert: Imagine yourself a country who desired to get off your oil fix one who had a good and honest leader as eg Mossadegh (whose mother allegedly gave him sound advice) .. http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/biography/ .. or even today .. this man is on the other side ..
Clarridge currently runs a "private spying operation . . . from poolside at his home near San Diego. According to the New York Times, "he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan." Specifically, he "has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict." In addition to these efforts, Clarridge's "dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.
Colleagues say that Clarridge now views the CIA "largely with contempt." He has "likened his operation, called the Eclipse Group, to the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s World War II precursor.
The secret architect of the Arab Spring casts an eye on Occupy Wall Street.
By Liel Leibovitz March 2012 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
late last year, while visiting the United States to accept his nomination as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers, Srdja Popovic took time to talk with a number of Occupy Wall Street activists in New York. He left those conversations with a mixed impression.
“The good news,” Popovic, a wiry Serb, told me, “is that for the first time in many years, something has awakened the enthusiasm and the activism in this country, which is not typically an activist society.” Yet he added that Occupy had to make sure it got three things exactly right: a clear vision of tomorrow, a clear plan for pursuing that vision, and a clear understanding that whatever happens in New York or Boston or Denver is connected to a larger global movement that stretches from the alleyways of Cairo to the beaches of the Maldives. “Talking about the 99percent and the 1percent can be applied in so many ways,” Popovic said. “But this is not just a story about capitalism. It’s a story about unjust societies around the world.”
Popovic is something of an expert on unjust societies, and in particular their rectification and reconstruction by nonviolent means. Just over a decade ago, Popovic was a student activist in Belgrade working to oust Slobodan Miloševic. After that odds-defying campaign ended with the Yugoslav president’s one-way trip to The Hague, Popovic spent a few years in electoral politics before founding the Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, and began training activists interested in copying the Serbian model of bottom-up regime change. CANVAS has worked with people from 46 countries, and graduates of Popovic’s program include organizers of the successful movements in Georgia, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Maldives. The young Iranians rioting against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 downloaded 17,000 copies of Popovic’s guide to nonviolent action. The Syrians currently standing up to Bashar al-Assad are the latest in the long line of advice-seekers. With little fanfare, Popovic, who is 39, has become an architect of global political change. And no one is more surprised about this than Popovic himself.
“It all started as a hobby,” he told me. A freshwater-biology student with a yen for politics, he organized march after march to protest Miloševic’s increasingly authoritarian rule. But the marches had no effect: the president stifled criticism, defanged the press, and repeatedly waged war on Serbia’s neighbors, converting the inevitable surges in nationalism and anxiety into greater political power for himself. It was then that Popovic and a group of close friends had the idea of making regime change fun.
They painted Miloševic’s face on a barrel and invited people on the street to bash it as hard as they could with a bat. The gimmick presented a quandary for police: Go after the angry citizens and their bats, and you risk provoking rage. But try to haul the offending object away, and you guarantee a front-page newspaper photo of an officer placing a barrel under arrest—which is exactly what happened, enhancing the mystique of Popovic and his friends. Marching under a banner featuring a tightly clenched fist, they gradually accumulated more than 70,000 supporters, and in September of 2000 they helped drive 72percent of all eligible Serbian voters to the polls. A few weeks later, Miloševic was out.
Popovic was elected to parliament as an ally of the reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. But when Djindjic was killed by a police officer working for the Serbian mob, Popovic lost his passion for electoral politics. He missed the freedom of the grass roots, the marches in the streets, the theatrics. So in 2003, he quit politics and started CANVAS [ http://www.canvasopedia.org/home.php ].
Almost immediately, aspiring activists from all over the world came calling. “It was amazing for me to see that people from Zimbabwe or Belarus are getting inspired by the Serbian political revolution,” he told me. Putting together a curriculum for a five-day seminar, Popovic began teaching everything he knew. “We cover 20 different issues,” he said, “from understanding nonviolent struggle to the nature of political power, pillars of support, how power is expressed in society, and then moving on to how you build your vision of tomorrow.” The training is far from abstract, focusing on matters such as fund-raising, resource management, and campaign tactics. CANVAS offers its training to activists for free, and sends easily reproducible materials—DVDs, PDFs—to those who can’t make the trip to Belgrade.
A few months after its founding, CANVAS registered its first success, when a number of its Georgian trainees helped lead the protest movement that elected the young Mikheil Saakashvili president. A year later, the group played a similar role in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In each case, analysts in the East and the West alike had predicted that efforts to democratize the former Soviet regimes would prove futile, and that what had worked in Belgrade was doomed to fail in Tbilisi and Kiev.
Imran Zahir, a Popovic trainee, heard a comparable warning when he joined the struggle to end the oppressive rule of Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. “We were told these ideas wouldn’t work in such a small place,” Zahir said, or that the island’s Islamic culture would not be receptive to Popovic’s tactics. But heeding his tutor’s mantra that fun can overcome fear, Zahir linked his cause with musicians and other cultural mainstays, and in 2008 watched the regime topple. “We became the only 100percent Muslim democracy to elect a conservative democratic party over the Islamist party coalition in the first free and fair elections,” he told me.
Popovic was now being called “the professor of revolution.” To many, this wasn’t a compliment; a number of disgruntled regimes even accused him of being a tool of the CIA.
In 2009, a delegation of young Egyptians who called themselves the April6 Youth Movement—a reference to a renowned local labor strike—attended a Canvas training session. In homage to their mentor, the Egyptians had adopted the clenched-fist emblem; when the uprising began in Cairo, the fist was flying everywhere as Popovic’s trainees stunned the world and helped usher in the Arab Spring.
Still, for all his method’s success, Popovic feels that those who should be paying the most attention—academics, politicians, journalists—instead continue to view politics largely as a game played by governments and decided by war. “Nobody, from very prominent political analysts to the world’s intelligence services, could find their own nose when the Arab Spring started. It is always this same old narrative: ‘It happened in Serbia by accident. It happened in Georgia by accident. It happened in Tunisia by accident. But it will never happen in Egypt.’ And this is the mantra we keep hearing—until it happens.”
His method, Popovic is quick to concede, is far from foolproof. Like everyone else, he admitted to watching Egypt with trepidation, uncertain how to advise his former students once their revolution had succeeded. CANVAS is about effecting change, not about converting movements into parties and policies or guaranteeing long-term stability. But even if Egypt falls into theocracy, he argued, the lesson from Tahrir Square will remain the same: that the next time a dictator is brought down somewhere, it’s likely to be by a ragtag bunch of nobodies with some organizational skills, not by established movements with clear hierarchies and agendas and foreign military support.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
