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Key insights from
Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use
Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize
Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World
By
Srdja Popovic
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What you’ll learn
In the beginning, everybody is a nobody. This is what Srdja Popović tells
activists from other countries who feel that change is not possible in
their home country, that dictators can’t be overthrown, and corporations
with predatory practices can’t be stopped. Popović is one of the founding
members of the Serbian resistance group Otpor! that successfully ousted a
longtime tyrant in 2000, and the founder of the NGO CANVAS (Centre for
Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies). His experience in the resistance
efforts has become a lifelong passion, and his resumé as trainer for
nonviolent resistance has helped ragtag groups from all over the world
become effective organizers for positive regime change. From Buddhist monks
in Burma to intellectuals in the Maldives to students in Lebanon, Syria,
and Egypt, his methods have a proven track record that continues to make
him a sought-after consultant. In a word, Popović is on a mission to make
the principles of successful nonviolent movements user-friendly.
Read
on for key insights from Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding,
Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities,
Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World.
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1. Otpor! was the
Serbian resistance movement that provided the blueprint for revolutions all
over the world.
The ideas that would
eventually lead to the Serbian student resistance movement Otpor! began
percolating when Popović’s favorite music group, instead of playing songs
on a stage, sang snatches of their songs from the back of a flatbed truck
that circled Republic Square. The songs they sang were against the war
Serbia was fighting with Croatia. (What else could they mean by “There’s no
brain under the helmet”?) The young people who had come out began chasing
after the truck. It was a fun and joyous moment of spontaneous protest at a
time when speaking against the war earned a beating or arrest.
It was also a moment of
realization for the author, a young, apathetic university student at the
time. He saw that protest did not have to be an insufferably stuffy, somber
affair. It could be an enjoyable experience. Even under difficult
conditions, people could be convinced to care. He saw that if enough people
who cared could be brought together, change could actually happen.
The Serbian dictator in the
90s (Slobodan Milošević) left much to be desired and moved Serbia steadily
toward totalitarianism. In 1996, he declared invalid a legitimate
parliamentary election that would have ousted his favorite political crooks
and cronies. In 1998, he seized total control of Serbian universities, from
management to curricula.
The nonviolent student
movement Otpor! materialized as the list of injustices and overreaches
continued to grow. One of the author’s friends created a logo of a black
fist and that became emblematic of Serbian subversion.
It might sound ridiculous,
but a logo is a necessary tool to create an association with resistance. If
the band of indignant college kids had tried to drum up support from
friends and family for a march, they might have gathered a few dozen. Not
exactly inspiring. But if they graffiti the fist 300 times on buildings
around the capital city, people might be more intrigued. In a city
terrorized by Milošević, it would give the appearance of a large, well-run
underground movement.
The fist symbol proved
effective. Otpor! became a trendy, alluring organization that people wanted
to learn more about and join. To get rid of the half-hearted and the
informants, the core group would send out those interested with the stencil
and spray paint and tell them to tag certain parts of the city. The fist’s
presence spread and the group’s numbers grew.
The movement was
emphatically nonviolent from the beginning. A dictator with thousands of
police and the military at his beck and call is not a fight that can be won
through arms. But if they could make a movement so popular that he could
not refuse to open up elections, maybe life in Serbia could improve.
They also decided against
building the movement around a charismatic personality. If they relied on
one key figure, it would be easy for the regime to chop the head off and
let the resistance organism die out. Otpor! had to be structured in such a
way that it could withstand arrests of key members and still gain momentum.
The goal was to create the kind of movement where the arrest of one would
win a dozen more recruits.
In order to win support,
Otpor! needed to win a string of small but memorable nonviolent clashes
with the government. These small wins had to convey a sense that change was
not only possible, but already coming to Serbia.
Eventually, Otpor!
demonstrations became the places where people wanted to be. Only the
anti-social and those who hated having a good time did not show up. Arrests
became a kind of social currency, a badge of honor. There was an aura of
adventure and risk that the youth found enticing. Even the nerds at
university started getting arrested and landing dates with girls who would
have been out of their league under normal circumstances.
But these were not ordinary
circumstances. This was the start of a movement that was beginning to
leverage power through creative and peaceful means, and would successfully
overthrow the Milošević regime.
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2. Get rid of the
nagging skepticism that “It happened there, but it can’t happen here.”
The first step that must be
taken to start a movement is to eradicate the belief that what happened
there cannot happen here. Disbelief is self-sabotage that ends the movement
before it ever begins. It stunts creative thinking and extinguishes hope.
Of course every place is
different. The Ukranian movement that involved women baring their chests to
police forces to protest gender inequality would not catch on in Riyadh or
Cairo. But the assumption that nonviolent protest is impossible—end of
discussion—is completely wrong.
A dictatorship is like a brand. It is the worst kind of quality, but it is
the only one available. Dictatorship is the political equivalent of a
monopoly. But a dictatorship needs airtime and no competition in order to
keep control. The trick with an opposition movement is to launch a brand in
the political market that can compete against it. All you have to do is
create a better brand. In Serbia, the revolutionary Otpor! brand used
the fist symbol. They graffitied that fist thousands of times on the sides
of buildings and covered elevators with stickers.
It is best to begin with an action small enough that no one gets killed or
beaten to a pulp, but is also memorable and piques community interest. When
Pinochet ruled Chile, the masses protested by walking in slow motion. Cab
drivers would drive at half speed. His brand tagline was “Me or chaos”
and the Chileans responded with small creative protests that formed a kind
of alternative brand.
People will choose the dictator’s brand as long as it is the only brand.
Advertise another brand that isn’t based on corruption, violence, and
terror, and you will find that a movement is possible wherever you are
from.
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3. Laughtivism is
a newer, more effective form of activism that channels the power of humor.
Martin Luther King Jr., and
Gandhi have a lot in common: Both were gifted, visionary leaders of
nonviolent protest movements that expanded the freedoms of millions. Yet
another commonality is that neither was very funny. For all they got right,
they missed an opportunity.
Humor is the totalitarian’s
worst enemy.
A tyrannical regime is
built on fear, and the best response to terror is laughter. In the age of
the internet, where a movement or a moment can be mobilized quickly, humor
helps. In the days preceding widespread internet usage, Otpor! used street
theater in Belgrade. It was never on-the-nose politics. That would have
been boring. The point was to make people laugh.
In one major city, Otpor!
took white flowers (which had come to symbolize the hated wife of the
dictator Milošević, who always wore a white flower in her hair), and
attached them to the heads of turkeys. To deepen the insult, the Serbian
word for “turkey” is an incredibly offensive thing to call a woman. The
turkeys were released across town, and it fell to the police to collect the
birds. The longer the birds roamed downtown, the longer the message of
resistance was broadcast, but in order to quell that message, the police
spent the morning tackling turkeys. How can people stay afraid of a cop
they just saw running after turkeys to preserve his master’s image? It only
cost a few turkeys and some time to find a creative way to make the forces
of oppression look silly in public.
A group of Russians put the
same principle to work in 2012 when another election came and went and
Vladimir Putin once again won by a landslide. Those in the opposition party
found video evidence of voter fraud, and applied to their municipality to
protest the results. Application after application was denied. Instead of
risking arrest or worse, activists collected their children’s toys and
positioned an assortment of Lego men, stuffed animals, model cars, and toy
soldiers in the town center. This toy army was carrying signs denouncing
fraud and corruption. If you look up photos, you find even some of the
police could not help but laugh at the spectacle. Within days, there were
similar toy armies rising up all over Russian cities, protesting the
election. The police shut down the Siberian provocateurs’ attempt to stage
another toy protest, but they had to respond with overly serious
bureaucratic severity, which made them sound even more ridiculous and out
of touch with the people.
Vladimir Putin has a
well-crafted image of a former KGB officer who knows no fear. There are
plenty of memes about him wrestling bears and achieving other outrageous,
superhuman feats. Could this man really be afraid of Lego armies and teddy
bears? Even the most daunting public image is susceptible to a good sense
of humor.
This laughtivism is a newer
form of revolution that older revolutionaries failed to utilize. You will
not find many pictures of Mao or Stalin or Lenin looking jolly and thrilled
to be alive. The revolutions of yesterday were fueled by rage and
bitterness. Today’s successful revolutionaries not only integrate humor
into their campaigns, they make it the basis
of their campaigns. Revolution that begins with fun has proven far more
effective and far less bloody. To bring a revolution is certainly a serious
business with weighty implications for political economy and society. But
in the past several decades, the role of humor has become increasingly
clear. When tyrants retaliate to jokes in anger or emotional tone deafness,
the joke only gains traction, and so will the movement.
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4. When people
living under oppression describe the kind of life they want, the changes
they envision are simple and tangible.
Unfortunately, creating a
vision of tomorrow sounds like a slide from a profoundly boring PowerPoint
presentation. We want to stay away from these associations, but a vision of
tomorrow is crucial for a movement to be attractive. It has to be something
catchy that captures the interests of everyday people.
In Syria, activists simply
desired life to be “normal,” and to convince people that life under Assad
was far from normal. In Serbia, that meant peace and cool music, like they
had experienced even under the Communist dictator, Tito. When the
xenophobic Milošević took power in the late 1980s, only a goofy blend of
traditional folk and techno was permitted. In the days of Tito, he helped
Serbia stay connected to the rest of the world. He was very open to the
best of the arts from around the world. Famous bands like Deep Purple and
the Beatles recorded with Serbia’s record label. Serbia remembered a time
when there was music allowed and the arts were not just tolerated but
embraced. Even if there were not free elections, most Serbs considered Tito
a thoughtful leader and far more open than anyone else in the Eastern bloc.
Otpor! wanted a Serbia that was open to the world, that maintained good
relations with bordering nations, and held free elections. That was the
vision of tomorrow that Otpor! was selling.
But what do you do in a
nation that has been under a dictator’s thumb for 30 years, where most
people don’t even have a concept of what could be different? In the islands
of Maldives off the coast of India, intellectuals were among the few who
wanted to see things change, and this was because many of them had traveled
to the United States or Europe for education and had seen how different a
society could be. The vast majority who left Maldives did not want to come
back. It was brain drain by design: The fewer people who knew life could be
different, the fewer objections to the way the dictator Gayoom was running
his country.
And at any rate, Western
notions of free press and human rights were meaningless to a village
fisherman catching tuna off the pier with a hook and scrap of plastic for
bait. Those intellectuals who did come back needed a more concrete vision
of tomorrow that their people could relate to.
In the early 2000s, some
Maldivian activists got their hands on a translation of the Otpor!-produced
DVD Bringing Down the
Dictator, and sought out Popović. They had begun organizing
rice pudding parties on the beaches of Maldives. It was an act of civil
disobedience in the eyes of the government that prevented any kind of
gathering, and it had effectively leveraged the universally beloved
Maldivian dessert. The police would come, confiscate the pudding, and break
up the protest. The meetings became increasingly popular, but they weren't
going anywhere. Rebellious pudding parties were a good initial step, but the
activists needed a simple alternative vision of tomorrow that regular
people could get behind.
They needed to find out
what different major sectors of society actually cared about and
incorporate those concerns into the vision of tomorrow. Lofty ideals are
not enough. This meant getting a sense of the concerns of fishermen, police
officers, hotel workers, and village elders.
When you ask people what
they really want for their community, they talk about things that are
significant, but ordinary. They want safety for their families, peace on
their streets, and they want to be paid on time for the work they do. This
was the start of a new vision of tomorrow for Maldives, and it is a vision
that made significant headway in the years that followed.
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5. The Syrian
revolution flopped because they were all passion and no planning.
Syrian activists zealous
for change leaped before they looked. They were inspired by the thousands
of young Egyptians marching against Hosni Mubarak (interestingly, while
donning the same fist emblem that Otpor! had used in Serbia).
Unfortunately, a peaceful revolution is a fire that builds slowly—not an
explosion. The Syrian protests were well-intentioned but ineffective.
Thousands of young Syrians took to the streets as they had seen the
Egyptians do, but the Syrians did not realize that several years of careful
planning had preceded the Egyptian coup. The Egyptian activists had
consulted with Otpor! members and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action
and Strategies and sought training to develop their strategy; they had
taken the time to win small victories; they had built their vision of
tomorrow; they developed a brand that the people associated with resistance
and the possibility of change.
When a group of Syrian
activists met with Popović to discuss the revolution, he showed the group
how a tyrant relies on pillars of power to hold him aloft. Some are
military, others are political, and still others are economic. In an
African village, the tribal elders would be one such pillar, the local
shaman might be another. In Serbian towns, it was doctors, priests, and
professors whose opinions carried weight in the community. For
corporations, stakeholders form a pillar of power. Some activists make the
mistake of going after the military, which is usually the most impenetrable
pillar and leads to heavy casualties. Violent revolutions play into the
hands of the powerful, not the plebeian. If you want to beat a professional
soccer player, you do not meet him on the soccer field—you challenge him to
a game of chess.
Economic pillars are
usually the most vulnerable. Topple these and a dictator will eventually
fall. Invariably tyrants take cuts from industries. Send tremors through
those industries and you disrupt cash flow. Reduced cash flows mean fewer
bombs and fewer guns. There is no such thing as absolute power, whatever
image a regime attempts to project. If you bring down one pillar, the
others will start to crumble, too.
As long as the totalitarian
machinery stays humming along, the dictator stays in power and it is
business as usual. The activist must find a way to disrupt that usual flow.
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6. Use the
momentum of barbaric repression to your own advantage.
Since 1962, the southeast
Asian nation of Burma has lived under a repressive military dictatorship.
When an opposition party won decisively in a 1990 election, the regime
declared the results invalid and talk of elections were stowed for several
decades. In 2007, economic policies were so stifling that people began
protesting.
One unexpected activist was
a short, thin, soft-spoken Buddhist monk named Ashin Kovida. Somehow,
Kovida obtained an illegal copy of the film Bringing Down the Dictator, translated
into Burmese. In some off-the-beaten-path Buddhist monastery, Kovida watched
as Otpor! members detailed the story of how a handful of Serbian university
students organized a movement that eventually ousted Milošević.
Kovida saw what was
possible and decided that revolution needed to come to Burma. He sold his
religious robes and used the funds to make pamphlets encouraging the people
of Burma to come march with him. Hundreds of monks joined him for the
protest.
The people watching were
convinced that not even the army would attack monks. However repressive the
dictator, this was Burma, where monks are considered the gold standard of
goodness. Tragically, the army opened fire on Kavida and his cadre of
monks. Many were killed, and many more were arrested.
This was the harshest
suppression by the Burmese government in years. It was so harsh that it
backfired. What kind of a regime allows its army to train their weapons on
Buddhist monks peacefully and respectfully protesting? These moments
inevitably come to any regime. Dictators will eventually go too far, and it
galvanizes the population into super focused, concerted, unified action.
That tragic massacre of monks catalyzed the Saffron Revolution (saffron, a
reference to the color of the monks’ robes). That first troublemaker, the
rebellious monk Kovida, continues to be heavily involved in campaigns for
democracy.
Recognizing moments where
tyrants have sunk to new lows and then using the force of their moral
failures against them is a skill that any activist must learn.
In order to recognize these
moments and make the most of them, we have to understand the mechanics of
oppression. Tyrants of any stripe, whether a dictator or a grade school
principal, use oppression in a calculated way. It serves the dual purpose
of punishing dissent and sending a warning to anyone thinking about trying
anything like it. The point is not to make you fearful for the sake of
fear. The goal of the tyrant is to make you obey.
Always remember that the choice to obey or not to obey is always available
to you.
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