Now...or later?

When there are identity issues at play in conflict, and when an expressed view is really hard to handle, it is very legitimate, wise, even, to request a break. Re-centering, re-casting your compassionate curiosity in an environment of fear and anxiety, is tough. 

It is also critical to take the shortest break possible, the most brief time when you can reasonably process what is transpiring in a way that you can re-enter the conflict conversation with good balance. Asking for 10 minutes is right there for you; asking for 10 hours, 10 days, or more is not necessarily a healthy or helpful request (let alone demand). 

Gathering your sense of caring for all--including yourself--and then resuming dialog across difference is adaptive and can avoid a jumbled trainwreck of ineffective reactions to challenging information, ideas, assertions, or conclusions.

Pro-life: Seriously?

Ah, those pro-lifers. 

Walking, talking, shooting oxymorons.

You can tell the pro-life extremists. They're the ones who want their enemies--the women and men who support a woman's sovereignty over her own body--dead by any means at their command.

Mike Lee, the brilliant Republican US Senator from Utah, went on Elon Musk's social media platform, X, and posted about the fatal shooting of Democratic politicians in Minnesota over the weekend, that, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.”

Allegedly, the shooter in Minnesota left a notebook that included some of his "reasoning," and also a list of future targets of his, 100 percent of whom were Democrats if they were elected officials.

Mike Lee, explain how this relates in any way to Marxists (sorry, Mike, nobody likes the Marxists, so just cut it out), to Democrats, to anyone except Trump-supporting Republican anti-abortion zealots like the shooter.

Yes, there are plenty of abortion opponents who do not include murdering anyone on a different side of that question as an enemy who qualifies for assassination. Swell. Is the bar really that low in our Trump era?

I am on a peace team. We do some accompaniment work occasionally. We've helped escort for Planned Parenthood. They had folks on the shooter's list too. It has never computed for me. Kill in the name of being pro-life?

Then again, there are many other threats to life that "pro-lifers" frequently either ignore or outright support the life-threatening side. I'm thinking about: 

·       Radioactive material, all of which causes cancer, as well as mutagenic and teratogenic harm. This applies to the nuclear material in power plants, bombs, and waste.

·       Petrofarming with biocides that cause cancer.

·       Big Oil, which causes and is accelerating climate chaos, taking more and more lives every year.

·       Assault weapons.

·       War.

Of course there are many more such anti-life threats that many "pro-life" people support. Am I being a radical idealist here, or just asking us to try to hold what the late Jesuit priest, Fr. Daniel Berrigan named a "seamless philosophy" about it all?

Dan was pro-life. He opposed abortion, war, industrial practices that cause great harm, and he repeatedly went to prison for his lack of hypocrisy. His late brother Phil, a Josephite priest and then a radical anti-racism, antiwar nonviolent resister, also held a set of values that were for life without exception, and went to prison even more than his little brother Dan.

Few can live lives of complete adherence to values and principles that do not effectively contradict each other. It is basic decency, however, to at least attempt to practice our places in the world that are not ethically or morally mutually exclusive, to the best of our abilities. 

I'm waiting for our "leaders" begin demonstrating such golden rule lives. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is one version of the Golden Rule. He who has the gold rules is, of course, the opposite other golden rule. 

Back in the day, zealots would preach that you need to follow their moral practices or go to hell. I hope we've begun to evolve to teach our children that doing right by everyone, practicing nonviolent conflict transformation, is its own reward, right here, right now.

How to transform autocracy to democracy: Learn the inside game/outside game strategy

When I consider the interplay between nonviolent civil resistance and a negotiated end to a most foul regime, I think about several luminaries and their wisdom. 

First, Dr. King, who wrote in his canonical Letter from Birmingham jail: 

"You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth."

Then, I turn to Bill Ury and the authors of Getting to Yes, who first taught me about the BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It's something a party to a conflict should be quite transparent about. For example, "Okay, ruler, we need you to either honor all human rights and civil rights or step down, and if you cannot manage to do one of those two things within the next four weeks, we are going to begin a deep national nonviolent resistance campaign that will impose some serious costs. This is your choice." In other words, Ury and Fisher might have called what Dr. King wrote about as a perfect example of the use of a BATNA. Dr. King and the movement didn't stop nonviolent civil resistance until they were invited to the White House to negotiate, which ultimately resulted first in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

The third scholar activist who comes to mind in this is Mary Frances Berry, especially her 2018 book, History Teaches Us to Resist, in which she cogently explains all this as the inside game/outside game. The synthesis of them can look exactly like the above Civil Rights Movement example or any number of other uses of nonviolent civil resistance (the outside game) to drive actual policy or even regime change (inside game). 

Nonviolent resistance is not necessarily working outside the system, in other words. It is a legitimate tool for the goals that have temporarily exhausted all the available legal inside game avenues.

How to transform autocracy to democracy: Build an active website

How many times have you missed an event because no notice of it came to you? How many other people also had no notice and missed it?

Your website should have a notification list sign-up pop-up so that any visitor can easily enter their email or text # and get advance notices of all your events. A passive website with announcements for those who take the time to visit is utterly inadequate. 

As all the research shows, numbers matter. Recruitment via active outreach is a big help. 

If you have a complex array of events, published reports, and other possibilities for outreach, it may help to allow people to choose what categories of notices they want. For instance, if you are ramping up event after event, a list of types of notifications that subscribers can choose might be only events, not analysis, reports, interviews with experts, etc. Making it possible to tailor what they receive might make them more inclined to sign up and to read all messages you send them. If they are deluged by you with all the other categories, they may skip reading most or even all of your outreach. 

A brilliant and dedicated web manager is a massive key component these days in successful organizing against an autocrat. As we found in Arab Spring, they can make all the difference, even devising workarounds when the government attempts to block access or outreach capacity. Techies are as crucial as anyone to your leadership and effectiveness. 

In a somewhat dated, but still valuable, analysis[1] of the value of tech, Dan Shannon notes: 

"Today’s technology strengthens the powers of networks in three important ways: 

·       It allows for networks that are global in nature. Online or mobile-based organizing is not limited by geography, only by access, which even in developing countries is increasing rapidly.

·       It allows for networks with fewer barriers to entry. Lowering the entry point from attending a meeting to signing an online petition opens up networks to exponentially more people.

·       It allows for networks with more decentralized power. Today, a movement entrepreneur with a vision and an internet connection has the tools to create networks, launch campaigns, and organize millions."

---

[1] https://www.bsr.org/en/blog/how-can-new-technologies-strengthen-social-movements

How to transform autocracy to democracy: Maintain fierce nonviolent discipline

During the Vietnam War many of the protests turned to violence, factions of the antiwar movement identified or fetishized Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers, and even, God help us, Mao Tse Dong. This strand of the antiwar movement was pathetically easy for agents provocateurs to infiltrate and promote violence. 

Why would an agent of the police seek to convince a campaign to commit acts of violence?

Every time a campaign throws things at cops, or roughs up a corporate official of a war profiteering company, or tosses a brick through a war-voting politician's office, the media of course covers it. When the public sees such destructive actions they react in these understandable ways: 

·       They fear for their safety and decide not to participate in any public displays of opposition to the leaders or policies they don't like.

·       They begin to shift their point of view away from whatever the protesters advocate. 

·       They stop trusting the word of the protesters. 

·       They begin to shift toward understanding of, and even support for, the violent crackdown on the protesters. 

These reactions, of course, are exactly what hawkish politicians, war profiteers, and any police in league with them, want. This is how you destroy a campaign. It is how the Black Panthers were destroyed. It is how the peace movement failed for years to make progress to end the brutal slog of war in Vietnam. 

This is a predictable sequence of negative outcomes of campaign violence or what the public feels is violent.

My question to those who advocate violence is, "Since you should know that these are the actions conducted by agents provocateurs, why would you advocate for them?"

The late Rev. James Lawson referred to the Civil Rights Movement discipline as "fierce." He was America's first nonviolence trainer, and Dr. King called him the "architect" of the Civil Rights Movement. There is no substitute for that fierce discipline.

How to transform autocracy to democracy: Establish momentum

Rising up against dictators, autocrats, and aspiring authoritarians is virtually impossible when all organizing and focus is on achieving a primary goal in a huge outpouring. The birchbark fire is bright with blazing flames--and quickly dies out. A movement to overthrow a wannabe dictator needs a sequence of events over time, each aiming to achieve as much as possible in a few weeks so the victories can be felt and lauded--even as the next goal along the path to the final overarching goal is announced. 

Essentially, the message after the first success is, "Wow! We did it--great work, everyone! We won! That sets us up to do some wider work--join the movement if you've only been admiring it and pivot now to this next campaign if you have been one of the winners today!"

This doesn't mean choose easily done interim goals; they should be all you can accomplish in a few weeks, using your wisest hive mind. Some know history; some are intuitive social movement winners, some feel the state of the available media, some know the influencers and what mood they are in. Everyone is an expert in some facet and a strategic planning group attempts to incorporate the wisest intersectional thinking.

Like any plan, it needs reëvaluation periodically and adjustments as necessary--speed up, slow down, alter a subgoal, change the frame, or any other adaptation needed.

How to transform autocracy to democracy: Reject authoritarian's claim of "unity"

When aspiring autocrats seek power they frequently claim to be working to unite citizens, whereas once they have consolidated power that "unity" becomes an imposed set of practices that often exclude self-determination for the people who are now subjects, no longer citizens. This is clearly the case in dictatorships, such as the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan (Tutumlu, Önemli & Rustemov, 2025). Karimov's assertions are not unlike those that used to come from dictators like Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi, claiming a cultural indigenization of democracy even while ruling by brutal oppression and fear.

Academics and activists sometimes analyze such claims of a special form of democracy as anti-neocolonial, seeming to justify repression in the name of rejecting "Western" models of governance. Other academics and activists hew to a more benign indigenization paradigm that, for example, stresses indigenous concepts such as African ubuntu, a variant of empathic humanism that has a much more unconditional positive regard for all.

To promote a kinder gentler form of governance, be very aware of the duplicitous claim of unity that is leading toward a unity based on giving more power to the leader and none except forced obeisance to subjects of that leader. 

For instance, claims that it was liberating to strike down Roe v Wade and return the power to make laws about reproductive rights back to the states is a false unity assertion, not one that frees people or bolsters self-determination--ask women in states where abortion is basically outlawed. 

Clarity on claims of democracy as an aspiring autocrat defines it are either roundly rejected or that leader takes another step toward being a ruler.

Reference

Tutumlu, A., Önemli, B., & Rustemov, I. (2025). Deciphering dictators’ discourse on Indigenous democracy: a case of Karimov’s Uzbekistan. Central Asian Survey, 44(1), 64–84. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1080/02634937.2024.2393386