“Whether you want to get the villagers on your side against a bloodthirsty dictator or force McDonald’s to add healthy options to the dollar menu, you have to know which pillars you need to jostle.” (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. |
“Proper revolutions are not cataclysmic explosions; they are long, controlled burns.” For instance, it had taken two years of winning small victories for the group of Egyptian revolutionaries trained by CANVAS1 in Belgrade, while building coalitions and branding their movement, before they undertook their action in Tahrir Square in 2011. Besides, “As we’ve learned from the Egyptians and the Maldivians, a revolution only picks up steam once two or more groups that have nothing to do with one another decide to join together for their mutual benefit.” These were the first thoughts that came to Srdja Popovic’s mind when he looked at the group of young Syrians whom he and Slobodan Djinovic were about to train for a week to carry out the project to topple Bashar al-Assad.
Popovic began by inviting them to set aside the moral superiority of peaceful resistance for a moment and focus on their situation from a practical standpoint. Violence is the one thing that dictatorships excel at; they have trained armies engaging in all possible aspects of it to crush any form of open dissent. It follows that a violent campaign against a dictator necessarily starts out at a disadvantage. Moreover, “a violent campaign can make effective use of only your physically strongest activists. Those are the guys who can battle in the streets, lug the heavy equipment around, and work the machine guns. Everyone else in your society who might otherwise want to support you—grandmothers, professors, or poets—won’t be able to take part. And to take down a dictatorship, you need to build a critical mass with everyone on your side. It’s almost impossible to do that with violence.”