SOME STRATEGIC ADVICE FOR GENE SHARP AND HIS "MENSHEVIKS", STEPHEN ZUNES AND ARTHUR D EDELSTEIN

FIRST OF ALL:

Boris Berezovsky wants his money back

NOW, FOR THE ADVICE:

Ultimately, the revolutions we remember are the ones that earn labels, the ones that come to symbolize great changes of epoch, like the ‘springtime of nations’ in 1848 or the Iranian ‘Islamic revolution’ in 1979.

that Ukrainian voters would initially have forgiven a lot economically, if the first two Orange governments had done more to cleanse the system of such fraud, fakery, and corruption. Instead, they put economics before politics,

Fake parties were much less successful the second time around. Ukrainian voters have wised up to ‘big board parties’, whose million-dollar budgets made minimal impacts.

Future historians will continue to write of the ‘Orange Revolution’, if 2004 acquires adjectives beyond mere color, i.e., if the changes in Ukraine come to be seen as a turning point in the region, after which politics moved away from the ‘technology’ of trickery and actually began to improve people’s lives.

So far, negative lessons and the spread of counter-technology have been more apparent.

new counter-revolutionary ‘technologies’. The authorities prevented any meaningful parallel count or exit poll that might have served to set off an ‘electoral revolution’.

They also made it difficult for the opposition to replicate the tactics of ‘strategic non-violence’ advocated by the likes of Gene Sharp, by maintaining a united front and cutting off communication with potential hinterlands of civic support.

Political Technologist like Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladislav Surkov will apply FDTD in reverse. Anyone can do what Helvey does. After all, there is no principle involved and really no brains. All it takes is the backing of a government and an unlimited budget.

Russia will create Nashi.

China will criminalize the Gulan Fong

Belarus will have voters who witnessed how the standards of living of their Russian neighbors declined when Boris Yeltsin "liberalized" the country. They will not believe in the western illusion and they will want to avoid this painful experience in their country.

In other words, nonviolence as a strategic or pragmatic decision, without principles or moral commitment, designed to sell a country out to the "Neo-liberal Economic system of the West"
for rape, pillage and plunder will only work so many times and it appears that your time is up.

ARTICLE

GENE SHARP, MASTER OF NONVIOLENT WARFARE
Adam Larson

• It’s worthy of note both the admission that these ideas represented a weapons system, and that as with other weapons systems, it is initially morally couched as purely defensive in nature.

• – he sought not so much to stop wars as to achieve their goals by other means.

• The book was called Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, yet Sharp rejected the spiritual core of that moral power. In a 2005 interview he explained his research into Gandhi’s struggle was based “not [on] pacifism, not on any mahatma nonsense, but on pragmatic nonviolent struggle.” [7]

• in 1993 he released an early version of his most widely-read book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (abbreviated FDTD). The book was first published not in English, but in the four major Burmese dialects

• The book was also put to use in existing US-sponsored tactical training of Burmese opposition forces, a case we’ll look at below.

• the book served widely as a handbook for all the peoples of Eastern Europe, Central or East Asia and Latin America emerging from Communist oppression or hoping to emerge from any other oppression that was disfavored in Washington.

• Whatever his original intentions in this endeavor, Sharp wound up designing a template for what journalist Jonathan Mowat would later come to call “the postmodern coup d'etat,” one that sneaks in under cover of a people’s movement. [10]

• a disintegrating Yugoslavia which had just whethered two separate NATO bombing campaigns and tightening UN sanctions. Since Sharp's notions were finally used there to finish what the bombs had begun, the "post-military" descriptor takes on a less phiolosophical, more tactical quality. It's not about warfare in a weaponless world, it's about the warfare the commences post-militarily - when the actual bombing is done.

• The president of the Albert Einstein Institution as of 2006 is retired US Army Colonel Robert Helvey, a longtime proponent of Sharp’s theories. More than anyone else it has been Helvey who has weaponized his mentor’s ideas of nonviolent conflict and put it to use in the field.