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Friday, November 26, 2004
Nonviolent Resistance courtesy of America
So it turns out that the big demonstrations in the Ukraine and all the civil disobedience stuff has been the result of months of careful preparation and campaigning funded by the U.S. government and the Democrats and the Republicans. The same folks who organised, trained and supported the overthrow of Slobadan Milosevic. According to an article in today's Guardian:
"But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
The article goes on to give a brief history of the four nonviolent resistance movements that have been effectively waged by groups organised, trained and funded by the US state department, USAid, The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute and the Republican party's International Republican Institute.

So does this mean for nonviolent resistance as a strategy and as a theory when some of the most succesful high profile examples have been funded by the biggest empire on the planet? There are a couple of ways to look at it. From one point of view you could see this as the result of a growing legitimization of nonviolent resistance as ane effective tactic. Or does U.S. involvement represent a corruption of the ideals of nonviolence and overshadow any potential positives?

I don't think I've figured this one out myself, but two historical examples come to mind, for better of worse. The first is the co-option of Christianity by the Roman empire. When it got tired of fighting the spread of this resistance cult it simply took it over and turned it into another hierarchical domination system. Can nonviolence be co-opted in a similiar way? Perhaps this scenario really only has parallels with nonviolence if you take the principled approach and see nonviolence as a way of life rather than just a tactic.

The other parallel comes out of a view of nonviolence as a tactic. During the time of the European empires colonized people learned the tactics used against them by colonial powers (i.e. military organisation, western education, etc.) and used them against the powers. Some of our most potent symbols of nonviolent resistance came out of this anti-imperial movement, but also many screwed up military dictatorships. Now that the empire itself is teaching nonviolence will we see a second wave as these tactics are turned against the empire itself or will nonviolence become seen as a tool of empire flunkies?

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