Nonviolent Method # 10: NewsPapers & Journals

Today we’re gonna talk about Nonviolent Method number 10: Newspapers and Journals.

Now a lot of times through history, like with the Indian Independence Movement, you needed newspapers and journals to get the word out. 

Gandhi had a paper called Young India that all the people who wanted Independence read.  And it’s a good way for people to organize and keep people informed about the movement.

But now in modern America newspapers are basically dead.  They’re all corporate-owned and slashing staff and even the New York Times and Washington Post are like “Oh, let’s cut our environmental coverage!”

But we’ve got all kinds of alternative press that we can use.  We can use Blogs, Vlogs, and websites, and aim to get covered by the city sheets and campus press, and, if you can manage to get on it, even the Huffington Post.  Good luck with that, by the way! 

Otpor in Serbia relied on alternative press to get their messages out, but alternative newspapers are getting increasingly less alternative, due to new corporate ownership and their budget slashing. 

Even campus press is now corporate owned, which is bullshit!  “Oh, we’re the voice of the students and...Comcast.”

And by “city sheets”, I’m talkin’ about weekly papers like the LA Weekly, or Madison’s Isthmus, or Denver’s Westword, most cities have ‘em, but even they are now mostly corporate-owned, so they’re smaller with a lot less stories.  So maybe you couldn’t get alternative press to cover you like you used to.

But who cares!  We’ve got the internet!  We can use blogs, vlogs, and websites to promote what we’re doing. 

Now, it helps if you post every day.  I frequently go to 350.org’s page, and read the post that they put up a week ago.  People don’t keep comin’ back if it’s not every day.  If you’re gonna lead the movement that’s one of the realities of how to communicate via the internet.  I’m just startin’ to post everyday, it’s a pain in the ass, but you gotta do it.

One thing Bill McKibben did on his Do The Math tour is he got everybody’s phone number so he could just text out to ‘em when there’s something going on.  Which is smart, I wish I could do that. 

But still, the movement needs sites that post every day, because even if you’re not doing something every day there should always be something going on with the movement.  Somebody should be doing something every day.  I mean, we’re only trying to save the world, right?  Today there should be something happening in Ann Arbor and Annapolis and Albuquerque.  And tomorrow there should be something in Kalamazoo and Kansas City.  

If actions are always happening everywhere, not only is it cool for people to read about but it gives them ideas too, and hopefully inspires them.

Another funny thing would be to have fake New York Times and Washington Post websites, where they’re like “Oops, we forgot to cover the most important story in the history of humanity.  Our bad!”

Anyway, that’s Newspapers and Journals updated to the 21^st century and the internet.

You gotta realize Gene Sharp wrote this book in, like, 1972, when there was like, just one giant computer.  So it’s different now.

Tomorrow we’re gonna do Nonviolent Method number 11: Records, Radio, and Television.


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Nonviolent Method #8: Banners, Posters, & Displayed Communications

Nonviolent Method Number 8: Banners, Posters, and Displayed Communications, has been much used by the environmental movement.  The Ruckus Society and Greenpeace like to climb to the top of towers and unfurl gigantic banners so people can go “Oh, look, there’s a sign hanging from the Statue of Liberty!  Wow that’s clever.”

But, unfortunately, it hasn’t proved to be something terribly effective.  It’s remarkable, but it’s ineffective.  Kudos to them for climbing to the top of great edifices, but at this point, it seems like a lot of effort for not a lot of reward. 

According to my research, it seems like these things really only work when a lot of people are doing it, or a lot of signs are going up.

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the people of Prague put up protest signs all over the city, but then the Russians were like “Well that’s bullshit, we’re gonna tear up all their signs and put our own signs up!”  So one night they went out and they tore down all the signs and put up their own signs.  But at some point during the night the Czechs got wind of what was happening and so they went out and started tearing down the Russian signs and re-replacing them with Czech signs, so by the morning Prague was covered in Czech signs all over again!  That’s pretty scrappy!  They probably had a lot of signs pre-made to do it that fast.

In Rotterdam in 1942, people put up signs urging people to show respect to the Jews that had to wear the yellow stars.  That was very cool and very brave.

Otpor in Serbia turned every Slobodan Milosevic election poster against him by slapping “He’s finished” stickers on top of them. 

Advertisements have been cleverly turned on their heads by looking the same at first glance, but having very different messages.

In India, in 1930 and ’31, sidewalks and even paved streets were used as blackboards for revolutionary messages. 

Sympathetic shop owners could totally help spread the message by putting the signs in their window.  I mean, that would be a smart long-term business strategy for them:  support averting planetary disaster! 

Another cool thing they did in Prague was they painted “U.N.: S.O.S.” on buses.  It was a great way to let people all over town in on the resistance.  

You could put signs on your own car, which is like, legal.  You know that’s kind of cool to do something that’s actually legal.  It could say something like “Join our climate group” and your website.

This should really be done in university towns.  Because, again, what’s the point of an education if the world’s gonna be more or less screwed by the time you’re, like, thirty!

So you could like hang banners from dorm windows and stuff.

Or you could just wear t-shirts that have the message you’re trying to portray.  This works especially well for people who are drop-dead gorgeous.  “Look at her!  What does her shirt say?  Oh, I’m gonna go there!”  People are so shallow!

You don’t have to be gorgeous, you just have to be interesting.  You could have one guy freeze like a statue, and another guy project onto his white t-shirt little silent videos of the melting Arctic and stuff.  People would stop and check that out.  “What’s the deal with these frozen guys?”

They actually have little hand-held projectors that you can project onto anything basically.  You could project stuff onto walls outside theaters and sports arenas where people are lined up at night.  There’s a good way to get the message across. 

“I’m not graffiti-ing, they’re waiting to see a movie so I’m showing them a movie!”

Anyway, those are just some examples of Banners, Posters, and Displayed Communications.

Tomorrow, we’re gonna look at method #9, Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Books.


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Nonviolent Method #7: Slcgans, Caricatures, and Symbols

Today we’re gonna talk about Nonviolent Method number 7, Slogans, Caricatures, and Symbols.

Now, a little editor’s note here: the preceding nonviolent methods, number 1 through 6 that we’ve done, they all fall into the Formal Statements category, and now we’re moving onto a much more exciting category, which is Communications with a Wider Audience.  These are basically designed to gain converts and get sympathy from the other side, and even garner support for the nonviolent group.  Considering only at this point 16 percent of the people really understand how serious climate change is, we really need to cast a wider net, right?  So Communications with a Wider Audience is basically just what the doctor ordered. 

Alright, so Method number 7: Slogans, Caricatures, and Symbols.  This one’s pretty cool, alright?  A lot of these examples are cool.  In 1941 and ’42 in Berlin, there was this awesome group of Jewish youths called The Baum Group.  They’d go out at night and paint resistance symbols on walls and stuff, and it was really dangerous!  Even though none of them ever got arrested it was really dangerous.  But just the ability to do it was considered a test of your revolutionary ardor.  We need that.  We need revolutionary ardor for the climate movement. 

We need people with some stones!  And we also need to ignite the youth.  Young people should be the coolest people in this movement.  After all, most of their adult lives they’re gonna be completely screwed by climate change so they have the most to lose, right?  So they need to lead! If you’re a young person in some little town you need to get people on your side and start goin’ out and doin’ stuff.  Or find the people who are! 

Also in World War II there were these Polish resistance youths called the Little Wolves (I like that, the Little Wolves…  Maybe we’ll have the Little Polar Bears.  I dunno, it doesn’t sound quite as scary, even though a little polar bear could take a little wolf any day…but we’re nonviolent, so we’re not gonna talk about that.)  But the Little Wolves would go out with cans of indelible paint and write on fences, and even on German trucks, and sometimes even on the coats of the Germans themselves.  When they weren’t lookin’ they’d sneak up really quietly, and paint the stuff on their back, and then run away.  I don’t know how they did it, but they did it, right?  So every morning Warsaw would wake up to all these cool messages that this band of little wolves would paint overnight.  That’s so cool, right? 

More recently, in Serbia, this group Otpor would go out every night and just paint and paste the neighborhoods with stuff.  Now, they learned pretty quickly that, even if they only had a few people, those few people could go out at night with cans of spray paint and get the whole city’s attention the next day.  So it made the little group look big!

And they had a clinched fist symbol that could easily be made into a stencil and so you could just slap it against anything and spray paint it on and there was this fist of resistance, right?  Everywhere! 

And as they grew people kinda knew who they were, “Oh it’s the Otpor guys!”  I mean, they didn’t know who they were specifically, but they knew what the movement was about. 

And they got more sophisticated as time went on.   They found that the smaller the message the better.  Eventually they’d have signs that would just say “It’s Coming”.  And by then everybody knew what “It” was!  So they were really smart.

We need good, short messages for our movement.  You know, stuff like “No Hoax!”

Now you gotta be really careful when you go out and do stuff like this because the U.S. has all these tough anti-graffiti laws.  

And I don’t know what the stickers laws are, but if you could get cool stickers, like, I dunno, a Pissed-Off Polar Bear, you know…you could help spread the message fast.  Just slap it on a sign, or on a wall, or something. 

Symbolism really counts.  People are into that.  There’s a reason that corporations spend billions for a tag line and a logo.  This movement spends too much time speaking in paragraphs!  On that note, I’d better shut up!

So remember, it's a great way to spread the message, it’s fun, it’s a great way to show your revolutionary ardor, but you gotta be careful.

Also, if you really want to get inspired about this, go rent the movie about Banksy and Shepard Fairey called Exit Through the Gift Shop.  But only watch the first half.  The second half’s dumb. 

Alright!  Next time we talk about Nonviolent Method Number 8: Banners, Posters, and Displayed Communications.


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Gene Sharp's Nonviolent Method #1: Public Speeches

So at some point this year the President is going to ask us to step up to support his push to do something about climate DISRUPTION.  And we gotta be ready when that happens! 

Currently this movement follows only a couple leaders, and apparently they don’t have the resources to drum up actions more than a couple times a year.  SO, we all need to use our own creativity, resources, and friends to step in and come up with our own Nonviolent Actions.   So you’re gonna need to know all the nonviolent weapons at your disposal!

In Gene Sharp’s book The Methods of Nonviolent Action, he outlines 198 different methods.  Here’s the list.  Good lord!  Those are just a bunch of words!  Just reading that list is kind of a useless exercise for nonviolent activists.

That’s why Sharp included 300 pages worth of examples, which gives you a much more tangible feel of how these things work…and a lot of them could work for the climate movement!

Today, we’ll look at Method #1: Public Speeches.

Now, lots of times public speeches are lame!  The Serbian resistance movement Otpor decided right from the get-go that their movement wasn’t gonna do speeches! 

But they can work.  It depends on who’s giving the speech and when and where. 

For instance, if you stand on a street corner and give a speech about climate change, it’s not likely to be effective.

BUT, if you’re, President Obama, and you go on at length about climate change in your 2nd inauguration speech, that would qualify as surprising and therefore effective. 

I mean, everyone was like “Holy crap, he talked more about climate change than anything else!  My God, he really means to do something about it!”

It was also big news when mayor Bloomberg endorsed Obama after Hurricane Sandy hit his city.  It depended on the moment!

One of the guys Gene Sharp talks about was a Catholic Priest in Nazi Germany named Bernard Lictenberg who told his congregation that he wished to share the fate of the Jews who were being sent off to concentration camps.  That was brave.  And the Nazis did send him off to Dachau, and he did share their fate.  But thousands and thousands of people were dying, and he did the only thing he could.

Now, no minister in America is gonna get killed if they speak to their congregations for action on climate change, but a lot of people in those congregations do NOT believe in it and do NOT want to hear about it.  So it would be a great moral stand for a member of the clergy to do that.

Also, Republican politicians would be really brave and would have an eye-opening impact if they stood up in favor of action.  You know they can’t ALL believe climate change is just a hoax. 

I mean they got kids and grandkids and they need to do the right thing for them.  They don’t want those grandkids to one day say “Yeah, grampa was a senator but I don’t want to talk about him”

“Why not?”

“He was a climate denier dirtbag!” 

“Oh, that’s horrible!  Now America is a dried up wasteland”.

“I KNOW!  Stupid grandpa!”

Seriously that’s how they’re gonna be remembered.  (Polar bears already talk about ‘em like that.  It’s brutal!)

So public speeches can work depending on who gives the speech and when and where. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Method Number 2: Letters of Opposition or Support.

“Oh wow!  He’s gonna talk about correspondence!  Can’t wait!”

Well tune in anyway, we all need to learn all these methods.


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