Daniel,

Thanks so much for raising these points - and particularly how you raised the need to be "strategically accountable". I wanted to bring attention to one of your previous posts in the New Tactics dialogue on "Training for Nonviolent Action" where you highlighted a wonderful and very informative article by Training for Change founder George Lakey. He writes about the protests organized during the 2000 Republican Convention. I think his points provide some very interesting and useful insights as we look to examine the recent protests during the 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis and try to harvest lessons for the future. George Lakey's full article can be found here: Globalize Liberation: 5 Stages for Social Movement

The excerpt below from the article highlights some of the challenges that both you and Philippe have raised in this dialogue rearding the need to examine the question of "diversity of tactics": [start quote]

"Heighten the contrast between protesters and police behavior

The power of the confrontation stage is in the drama. Drama in the streets is, however, different from an off-Broadway play. A sophisticated theater audience might prefer characters to be multifaceted, without a clearly-defined "good guy" and "bad guy." The social change drama of the streets cannot be so subtle: it really does come down emotionally to "the goodies" vs. "the baddies" -- in our case, those who stand with oppressed people vs. those who stand with greed, privilege, and domination.

The fence-sitters in the mainstream watching the drama in the streets are surprisingly open-minded about who are the goodies and who are the baddies. In their eyes maybe the goodies will turn out to be the protesters, and then again, maybe the police will be the goodies. Since drama motivates, some in the audience are curious to see who will turn out to be who.

The protests at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia provide a clear example of this. Some widely-publicized police violence prior to the convention damaged the police image. Those of us organizing the Convergence training in the week just before the Convention did effective media outreach, receiving highly favorable publicity from the big media. The result was, going into the Convention, that the burden of proof was on the police to re-establish their credentials as responsible and controlled, and the protesters occupied the moral high ground. A succession of three clearly peaceable marches in three days sustained this, even though the marchers on the third day had been promised arrest. The group organizing that third march, the Kensington Welfare Rights Organization, took care not to be politically isolated, so that their civil disobedience would bring allies out in support. The police felt they had to back off the arrest threat on the third day, lest they confirm the fence-sitters suspicion that the police really are "the baddies."

The second phase of the Convention actions, beginning August 1, reversed roles. The police did not have to be lambs; in the context of public fears and expectations, they only needed to show restraint, flexibility, and control. This they did, avoiding tear gas, major pepper spray, rubber bullets, charges with or without horses. Protesters were caught without a style that would put them in stark contrast with the public behavior of the police. The blockading protesters looked . . . well . . . disruptive. (Which we'd said over and over was our goal!) And the police were helping the public by getting traffic moving again. The police chief, who had on national television been on the defensive, became a folk hero. The Philly mainstream could breathe a sigh of relief that "our hometown police are much better than those brutal, out-of-control Seattle police, and where did these protesters come from, anyway?"

The great lesson to be learned here is that the drama of the streets cannot carry a complex analysis that requires long dissection and persuasion. The drama in street confrontations needs the simplicity of contrast between the protesters' behavior and that of the police.

The symbols used to heighten contrast depend on the situation. Black student sit-inners wore dresses and coats and ties, and remained calmly seated at the counters while hysterical white racists hit them. Gandhi designed a raid on a salt works in which demonstrators calmly walked across the boundary where they were beaten down by soldiers. Vietnamese monks sat in meditative positions in the streets of Hue, in front of tanks, to help bring down the dictatorship in 1963. Philippine participants in "people power" mass action overthrew a government partly with flower necklaces for the dictator's soldiers.

A few years before young Serb activists started Otpur, some of them had tangled with the state by launching student protests. That earlier wave of activity died out, and one reason was that young cops adopted student dress and joined the protests in order to smash windows and fight uniformed police. The plainclothes police provocateurs were highly effective in changing the public focus from the dictatorship to the "student violence." Learning from that experience, Otpur decided from the beginning, as a matter of policy, that anyone who looked like an Otpur member but was caught fighting the police would be assumed to be a police spy and would no longer be considered an Otpur member. Otpur felt the stakes were so high (both success in overthrowing Milosevic and the safety of their members) that the group needed to draw a line.

Again, our power lies in our choices. We can choose to design our confrontations using appropriate symbology so that the part of the public we most want to influence will see us as the people standing up for justice. It's our choice." [end quote]

This brings us directly back to strategic accountability - how do our actions we chose combine to bring us closer to our strategic goals and ultimately to the vision and reality we are trying to achieve. 

Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager