“As Monty Python skits have always been up there right with Tolkien for me, I knew very well that humor doesn’t just make you chuckle—it makes you think.” (Srdja Popovic)
| This post is part of a reading series on Blueprint for Revolution, by Srdja Popovic. To quickly access all chapters, open the book title tab on the Authors & Books page. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the authors’ ideas. |
Mark Twain said that the human race has one really effective weapon, against which nothing can stand: laughter.
One day, at the beginning of the Otpor! movement, Srdja Popovic and his friends had an idea. “We retrieved an old and battered barrel from a nearby construction site and delivered it to our movement’s ‘official’ designer—my best friend, Duda, designer of the Otpor! clenched-fist symbol—and asked him to draw a realistic portrait of the fearsome [Milošević] leader’s face. . . . We asked Duda to paint a big, pretty sign that read ‘Smash his face for just a dinar.’ That was about two cents at the time, so it was a pretty good deal. Then we took the sign, the barrel, and a baseball bat to Knez Mihailova Street, the main pedestrian boulevard in Belgrade. . . . Before long some parents were encouraging their children who were too small for the bat to kick the barrel instead with their tiny legs. Everybody was having fun, and the sound of this barrel being smashed was echoing all the way down to Kalemegdan Park.”
When the police came and hauled off the barrel in their squad car, a photographer from a small students’ newspaper was there to shoot the spectacle. The stunt ended up on the cover of two opposition newspapers. “That picture was truly worth a thousand words: it told anyone who so much as glanced at it that Milošević’s feared police really only consisted of a bunch of comically inept dweebs.”