Friends,
I'll have a lot to share with you about the session on 8/27,
as well as the one coming up tomorrow in Eugene... and even
the Green Tortoise bus experience.
---
Paul De Armond (below) makes lots of sense. An excerpt...
Successful movements are not a contest of brute strength.
This means persuasion and conversion; growing a movement,
not fighting an establishment; understanding and seeking
truth; staunchly holding a position that is transparently
clear to those watching and wavering; and never surrendering
to the easy, the cheap, or the sensational. It means taking
casualties without flinching and standing fast (or sitting
quietly) when attacked. It means courage and conviction.
But most of all, it requires a realistic vision of a world
transformed.
bye for now,
rkm
============================================================================
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 10:37:39 -0700
To: •••@••.••• (undisclosed list)
From: Tom Atlee <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Can WE co-creatively USE our insights?
Dear friends,
On the surface, the article below is about police; but
that's not why I'm sending it to you. Far more importantly,
it is about us -- about those of us who are trying to make
the world a decent place -- and about how ill-prepared we
are to respond, together and intelligently, to our changing
circumstances.
Paul de Armond wrote one of the most insightful reviews of
the Seattle WTO protests, "Netwar in the Emerald City: WTO
protest strategy and tactics", which is referenced below and
linked on my site. Now he has written a broader critique of
how the movement [defined in my Footnote 1 below] is missing
the boat in its use of nonviolence and its relations with
police. I find it one of the clearest, most useful
commentaries yet on recent protest actions.
But, to me, his most significant statement is this: "I
found that the growing global justice movement paid little
attention to what I've had to say, but law enforcement and
security people gave it considerable attention." This is a
powerful fact. Paul de Armond finds it odd and puzzling. I
don't. On the one hand, I see the police with their
strategic centers where they reflect on what's going on and
figure out what to do next. On the other, I see no such
centers in our movements; no coherent "we" that is capable
of paying collective attention; precious little time given
to learning from our collective experience; and little
inclination to research better ways to reflect and
strategize that fit the decentralized, self-organized
character of our movements.
In my view, the significant question is this: What
structures/ media/ processes/ traditions/ understandings
could be shared by those of us who are trying to make a
better world, through which we could collectively,
coherently reflect on what's happening (and what _we're_
doing), and together create intelligent, imaginative
initiatives and responses that would make sense to the vast
majority of those involved? This capacity is needed at all
levels -- from the smallest groups to the largest coalitions
and networks.
We don't need centralized decision-making structures -- and
wouldn't follow them if we had them! In lieu of such power
centers (which the police DO have), we need the _capacity_
to think together consistently and coherently -- to talk, as
Onandaga Iroquois Chief Oren Lyons says, "until there's
nothing left but the obvious truth" -- truth so obvious that
everyone involved can see it and act on it. I believe it is
possible to build that capacity. I furthermore believe,
with Richard K. Moore, that that capacity could grow, with
the movement, to "become the democratic process of a newly
empowered civil society." (For more on that capacity, see
"Making a decision without making a decision" in
http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-decisionmakingwithout.html
or the next issue of COMMUNITIES magazine).
If we had that capacity, the kind of good thinking and
powerful information we find among us wouldn't just be
living in individual minds, conversations and email
in-boxes. It would be interacting to generate real wisdom,
useful understandings, and a sense of what we could do
together that would really make a difference.
If any of you have good connections in progressive,
environmental, social justice, holistic or transformational
movements, and feel passionate about building this capacity
into these movements, let me know. I think the time is
ripe.
Coheartedly,
Tom
Footnote 1 - When I talk about "the movement," I'm not just
referring to activists and demonstrators and members of
large nonprofits. To me, a social _movement_ is "a
collective motion -- a societal coming-alive-ness" regarding
some concern. Everyone on this list -- and everything we
all do to make a difference -- is part of our society's
collective motion towards greater social wellbeing.
Demonstrations and activism are important parts of that
motion (that social movement), but they are only parts. It
is this larger, actively concerned "we" that I'm referring
to, and that I'm inviting all of us to see ourselves as part
of. It is this movement, this "we", whose effectiveness
concerns me here.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:19:14 -0700 (PDT)
To: Tom Atlee <•••@••.•••>
From: Paul de Armond <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Police and imagination
Tom,
some thoughts on the relationships between law enforcement
and transforming civil society.
As you know, I've written about the tactical aspects of the
WTO protests. Oddly enough, I found that the growing global
justice movement paid little attention to what I've had to
say, but law enforcement and security people gave it
considerable attention. I found this very puzzling, because
the global justice movement has far more at stake than
security forces. Read it at
http://www.nwcitizen.com/publicgood/reports/wto
One of my conclusions is the direct corelation between the
level of violence deployed by police and the relations
between the police and civilian authorities. In Seattle,
there has been a long and very public problem with police
corruption, racial profiling, use of force, etc. These are
all related because they define the degree and extent of
civilian control of the police. Seattle has a good police
force, better than many larger cities. But it also has a
long history of conflict over corruption. There are many
cities of equal size where the corruption is worse, but few
where there has been such a long and unsuccessful attempt to
clean things up. It's not the corruption, per se, but
rather the *unhappy* nature of the corruption. Where police
are happily corrupt, there is little conflict with civilian
control (which is also happily corrupted).
Where relations are bad, police morale is bad, discipline is
erratic, command control, communications and intelligence
(C3I) are uncertain and chain of command is frequently
unreliable. There is a breakdown between staff and line, so
to speak. There is also the tendency for the chain of
command to weaken to the extent that mutiny and insurrection
become likely at the street level. In Seattle and
Minneapolis, these breakdowns in command became the defining
factor of the police response. In Boston, DC, Philadelphia
and Los Angeles, the police C3I retained its cohesion.
The second point I would like to make is directly responsive
to the initial question you posed about police attacking
demonstrators rather than restraining them or dispersing
them. The Rage Against the Machine concert incident in LA
was a fairly crude example. The selective violence in DC
was a more sophisticated example. In both incidents, the
attacks were planned and carried out successfully. In
Seattle, the Wednesday night police riot on Capital Hill
looked like the same thing, but was actually quite
different. Similar out-of-control attacks (but much more
limited in scope) occurred in Minneapolis.
To the targets of the police attacks, the incidents may seem
the same. Cops surrounded crowds, cut off their line of
retreat and basically beat the hell out of people. This is
the armed conflict at the tactical level.
The strategic level is very different. In DC, LA and
Philadelphia the attacks were planned as offensive actions
to cow the protesters and assert the crude moral authority
which comes from the use of force. In Seattle and
Minneapolis, the attacks were improvised defensive actions
which rapidly got out of control. In the latter two
incidents, the police were not in control and were very
close to panic. In military conflicts, these are the sorts
of situations where massacres happen. Victorious troops
don't commit massacres, but frightened, losing ones do.
It must be recognized that trapping and attacking crowds is
a standard military tactic in supressing insurrections. It
can be done on a small scale, as occurred in DC, when a
squad of police target individuals and attack them to take
them into custody. This is done to cow the rest of the
crowd, increase their uncertainty and deter them from
seizing the initiative. The Rage Against the Machine
incident was similar in strategy, but larger in scope. The
strategic purpose is maintain the initiative and break the
will of the crowd to act in solidarity. Against all but
seasoned and disciplined opponents, it is usually
successful. In LA the choice of target was rather
cold-blooded, as the crowd was not engaged in protest. The
provocateurs (it hardly matters whether they were cops or
not, though the evidence suggests that they were not) thus
played into the hands of repression.
Police tread a thin line between being law enforcement and
military. Up to a thin and poorly discernable line, the
police act as part of civil society -- officers of the court
-- their duty being to uphold the law, apprehend suspects
and bring them before the courts. If the degree of
resistance against this authority exceeds an indistinct
limit, the police cease to act as officers of the court and
enter the territory of uncivil society. In so doing, they
become a military force, acting by military rules.
The old Roman saying, "inter armes silent leges" (when
armies speak, the law is silent) captures the lawless and
unrestrained aspect of military, as opposed to civilian,
policing.
The whole point of non-violent civil disobedience is to move
a conflict into the territory where there is no
justification for the police assuming their military role.
The strategic and tactical failure of the protests since
Seattle is centered on the inability of the protest movement
to clearly perceive this boundary and act accordingly. When
protests get steered into what Paul Schultes calls
"remonstrative violence" (even if it only involves passive
aggression) the movement loses. When pseudo-revolutionaries
and other thugs engage in vandalism and the provocation of
violence, the movement loses even worse.
For the protests to succeed, there will have to be a broad
and widely held understanding that civil disobedience
requires asserting a right and defending it -- in a way that
denies priviledge and protects the rights of opponents.
When the protests can be portrayed as an assault on civil
society, such as the clumsy failures to "shut down" this or
that institution, the movement loses.
It requires great courage and even greater understanding to
assert and maintain a right without transgressing on the
rights of others. It takes a clear moral vision and a
hopeful view of the future to sustain injury, insult and the
loss of liberty. The movement came out of Seattle without a
clear understanding of what happened in the WTO protests and
has mistakenly substituted skirmishing with police for
persuasion by moral action. The movement will continue to
flounder until participants gain a shared understanding of
what the world will look like after they have changed it and
what they must do to prevail.
Social change occurs when minorities become pluralities or
majorities by gaining the assent of civil society.
Successful movements are not a contest of brute strength.
This means persuasion and conversion; growing a movement,
not fighting an establishment; understanding and seeking
truth; staunchly holding a position that is transparently
clear to those watching and wavering; and never surrendering
to the easy, the cheap, or the sensational. It means taking
casualties without flinching and standing fast (or sitting
quietly) when attacked. It means courage and conviction.
But most of all, it requires a realistic vision of a world
transformed.
Imagine the future correctly and it comes to pass.
Paul de Armond
Research Director, Public Good Project
http://www.nwcitizen.com/publicgood
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * Eugene, OR
http://www.co-intelligence.org
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_Index.html
============================================================================
Richard K Moore
Wexford, Ireland
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
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