SCREENINGS & MEANINGS

By Gerald Schmitz

You say you want a revolution

How to Start a Revolution
(U.K./Egypt/U.S. 2011)

The dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are. The people are never as weak as they think they are.
— Dr. Gene Sharp

Gene Sharp is no Che Guevara but he may have had more influence than any other political theorist of his generation. His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern - and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble.
— Ruaridh Arrow

We may not all want to change the world, as the Beatles song would have it, but there's no question that the past year has witnessed some remarkable revolutionary upheavals in unexpected places and widespread discontent with the status quo in many others, even if the “occupy” movements seem to have subsided. The protester was Time magazine's “person of the year.” In its annual list of “100 top global thinkers,” the December 2011 issue of Foreign Policy accorded its first 10 places to “the Arab revolutionaries,” including two who are not Arab but whose tactics of non-violent resistance to oppression were seen as very much in evidence in the events of the Arab spring.

These seminal figures are Dr. Gene Sharp, an 83-year-old Boston academic whose 1993 book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation has been translated into over 40 languages, and a Serbian activist heavily influenced by him — Srdja Popovic of CANVAS (Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies) — who led the youth and student uprisings that helped to topple Slobodan Milosevic.

Both are featured in How to Start a Revolution (http://howtostartarevolutionfilm.com/), an impressive new documentary by first-time director Ruaridh Arrow. Its main focus is on the life's work of the older man that has been applied in diverse contexts across the globe. Gene Sharp, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, attributes his commitment to non-violence to his religious background. In the early 1950s he did prison time for refusing to serve in the Korean War. At Oxford he studied the example of Gandhi, the subject of an early work to which no less than Albert Einstein wrote an introduction. Sharp describes a “eureka” moment of insight that by identifying the sources of repressive regime's power and legitimacy one could work to remove them without resorting to violence.

He went on to conduct research at Harvard University and in 1973 published The Politics of Nonviolent Action. In 1983 he established the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) to promote this work. In 2009 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sharp's university program on non-violent sanctions attracted an initially skeptical Vietnam veteran Col. Bob Helvey who was won over by the power of his ideas. In the late 1980s Helvey began working with the Karen people and pro-democracy movement in Burma, which looked to Sharp for advice. Although Sharp claimed no particular knowledge of the country's circumstances and insists that people must make their own revolutions, he agreed to put together a generic manual of non-violent strategies and techniques. This was the origin of From Dictatorship to Democracy (freely available on the AEI's website: http://www.aeinstein.org/ ), which lists 198 methods of non-violent struggle.

There is nothing soft in its approach, especially as advanced abroad by the colourful blunt-speaking Col. Bob. Sharp who has argued passionately that “non-violent struggle is armed struggle” using different “weapons”; that it is a program to “seize power and deny it to others.”

He's been called the Machiavelli or Clausewitz of non-violence and, although not a household name, authoritarian regimes have certainly regarded him as a serious threat. Possession of his book, called a “bomb” in Russia, has been made illegal. The Iranian regime has portrayed him as in league with the Bush White House. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has denounced him as CIA. The irony is that the AEI is run out of tiny offices in an old house on a shoestring budget. The only other staff is executive director Jamila Raqib, a former refugee whose family fled Afghanistan when she was five. Sharp, the now rather frail octogenarian, shown carefully tending to his orchids in Arrow's film, is the most gentle unassuming revolutionary you will ever meet.

CANADIAN PREMIERE — Ruaridh Arrow is photographed at the Canadian premiere in Ottawa of How to Start a Revolution, Oct. 14, 2011. (G. Schmitz photo)

Arrow, who has extensive journalistic experience reporting from conflict zones, expertly combines interviews with Sharp, Raqib, Helvey, Popovic and other prominent activists with dramatic archival and news footage of non-violent mass protest. Indeed How to Start a Revolution opens with scenes of the Egyptian demonstrations filling Cairo's Tahrir Square where Arrow camped out among them in February 2011. In stirring fashion it presents seven key lessons for carrying out a non-violent revolution:

1. Plan your strategy. The Chinese students in Tianamen Square in 1989 showed bravery, but improvisation without direction or leadership is a fatal mistake. Colours, symbols, ridicule can be used to mobilize organized opposition.

2. Overcome “atomization.” Resisting the regime's efforts to divide and rule is about “changing the obedience pattern” and devising collective forms of public protests. (In Serbia people banged pots and pans during the state television's evening newscast.)

3. Undermine pillars of support. For example, instead of throwing stones at police and security forces, attempt to co-opt them to come over to the people's side.

4. Resist violence. Have disciplined tactics (“put girls and grandmas in front”) for remaining peaceful and avoiding traps set by agents provocateurs.

5. Political Jiu-Jitsu. Find ways to cause groups within society to withdraw their co-operation from the regime and to inspire people to active resistance.

6. Overcome fear. Means of collective mass participation can be used to break the psychology of fear which the regime relies on to enforce submission.

7. Don't give up. In the words of Col. Helvey: “As long as we don't surrender we haven't lost.”

This last may be the most important message of all. The film follows a Syrian activist who makes a pilgrimage to Boston to ask Sharp's advice. He relates how the regime's opponents are using secret cameras all over the country to upload images and video to satellite — to transmit the actuality of resistance and repression through Al Jazeera, websites and social media. “Gene Sharp's ideas are being practiced on the streets of Syria as we speak now.” In the wake of the initial Egyptian revolution, Sharp warns against concentrating too much on getting the ruler to resign (as Mubarak did within 18 days of the mass protests last February). What is crucial is to remove the regime's supports and the dictatorship will fall.

These comments strike a chord given the persistent power of military elements of the Mubarak regime. Egypt's democratic revolution in progress still confronts numerous challenges. Will Syria be able to throw off dictatorship without descending into civil war as occurred in Libya?

One can always find reasons for pessimism. What is more amazing is how the persistent pursuit of non-violent people power can sometimes accomplish more than the trillions of dollars spent by the Pentagon. After a ceasefire with the Karen and the release of political prisoners, transformational if not revolutionary change may even be coming to Burma, described as “on the verge of a breakthrough to democracy” by Aung San Suu Kyi, General Secretary of the long-suppressed National League for Democracy.

The fact that independent films like How to Start a Revolution get made at all - Arrow and his partners largely relied on innovative “crowd funding” through the online platform Kickstarter.com — provides another source of creative inspiration. Arrow and Raqib spoke to an enthusiastic packed house after its Canadian premiere last October during Ottawa's One World Film Festival where it received a special jury award (full disclosure: I was one of three jurors). The word needs to spread so that people everywhere can be exposed to movies like these. Now that would be revolutionary.

*I'll be covering the Berlin international film festival Feb. 9-19. Finally arriving in some Canadian theatres are three acclaimed films that premiered there a year ago: Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut Coriolanus, Iranian Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, likely to win the best foreign-language Oscar, and Wim Wenders' dance homage Pina, Germany's submission in that category which instead scored a best documentary nomination.

Schmitz is an ambassador member of the Canadian Film Institute.