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<http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/23/world/gene-sharp-revolutionary/index.html?hpt=hp_c1>

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Gene Sharp: A dictator's worst nightmare
By Mairi Mackay, CNN
June 24, 2012 -- Updated 0057 GMT (0857 HKT)

At 84, American political scientist Gene Sharp has seen his
lifelong work on nonviolent resistance echo around the world.
At 84, American political scientist Gene Sharp has seen his
lifelong work on nonviolent resistance echo around the world.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Political scientist Gene Sharp has been called the father of
nonviolent struggle
Sharp wrote a manual on how to overthrow dictatorships, "From
Dictatorship to Democracy"
Sharp says no regime can survive without the support of its
people
Arab Spring put a new spotlight on Sharp's work

London (CNN) -- It's a dark January evening, and in an anonymous
townhouse near Paddington station, a man is talking about how to
stage a revolution.

A young Iranian asks a question: "The youth in Iran are very
disillusioned by the brutality of the violence used against them
.. It has stopped all the street protest," she says. "What would
you say to them? How can they get themselves organized again?"

The man thinks for a moment. He's an unlikely looking radical --
slightly stooped with white hair, his bent frame engulfed by the
low chair he's sitting in.

When he opens his mouth to speak, all eyes in the room are fastened
on him.

"You don't march down the street towards soldiers with machine
guns. ... That's not a wise thing to do.

"But there are other things that are much more extreme. ... You
could have everybody stay at home.

"Total silence of the city," he says lowering his voice to a
whisper, punctuating the words with his bent hands, as if he's
wiping out the noise himself.

"Everybody at home." The man's eyes scan the room. "Silence," he
whispers again.

"You think the regime will notice?"

He looks around the room, nodding almost imperceptibly. On the wall
behind his head hangs a huge print of the Hiroshima atomic bomb
mushrooming into the sky.

This is political scientist Gene Sharp, and explosive ideas are his
specialty.
\
"From Dictatorship to Democracy" has spread like a virus since
Sharp wrote it 20 years ago. Its influence was cited repeatedly
during the Arab Spring uprisings.

He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. He could be
also described as a revolutionary's best friend. Or perhaps, more
accurately, as a dictatorship's worst nightmare.

Now 84, the American academic has dedicated most of his life to the
study of the bold, some might say reckless, idea that nonviolence --
rather than violence -- is the most effective way of overthrowing
corrupt, repressive regimes.

On this winter night, he's talking at The Frontline Club, London's
journalism hub, and it's standing room only.

Those without seats have crowded in at the back of the room under a
huge photograph of a girl offering a flower to a line of riot
police. She could have been inspired by Sharp's writings.

His practical manual on how to overthrow dictatorships, "From
Dictatorship to Democracy," has spread like a virus since he wrote
it 20 years ago and has been translated by activists into more than
30 languages.

He has also listed "198 Methods of Nonviolent Action" -- powerful,
sometimes surprising, ways to tear power from the hands of regimes.
Examples of their use by demonstrators and revolutionaries pop up
over and over again.

In Ukraine, during the 2004 Orange Revolution that propelled
opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to electoral triumph, hundreds
of thousands of demonstrators turned Kiev's Independence Square
into a sea of orange flags -- the color of Yuschenko's campaign.

No. 18 on Sharp's list: Displays of flags and symbolic colors.

In Serbia, activists fighting then-President Slobodan Milosevic in
the 2000 presidential elections printed "Gotov Je!" "He's
Finished!" on stickers, T-shirts and posters to help the population
understand he was not invincible.

No. 7 on Sharp's list: Slogans, caricatures and symbols.

In Cairo during last year's Egyptian revolution, protesters lived
in a tent city in Tahrir Square, where they produced art, made
music and sung anti-Hosni Mubarak songs. Many Egyptians would
gather there for Friday prayers followed by mass political rallies.

Nos. 20, 37 and 47 on Sharp's list: Prayer and worship. Singing.
Assembling to protest.

His ideas of revolution are based on an elegantly simple premise:
No regime, not even the most brutally authoritarian, can survive
without the support of its people. So, Sharp proposes, take it away.

Nonviolent action, he says, can eat away at a regime's pillars of
power like termites in a tree. Eventually, the whole thing
collapses.

For a half century, Sharp has refined the theory of nonviolent
conflict and crafted the tools of his trade. His methods have
liberated millions from tyranny -- and that makes regimes from
Myanmar to Iran quake in their boots.

In 2009, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. During the
Arab Spring uprisings, his methods were cited repeatedly.

The applause comes after "decades of hardships," he says. His
methods have been dismissed and misinterpreted -- he's even been
accused of working for the CIA.

But he's kept on with "the work," sometimes near penniless. He runs
his organization, the Albert Einstein Institution, out of his home
in East Boston because he cannot afford office space.

He'll give almost anyone a half hour of his time, even a high
school kid doing a project. And the pilgrims come.

They come from all over the world because they want to change their
situation. They come to hear the extraordinary ideas that Sharp has
stubbornly built over a lifetime: ideas that have started
revolutions.

The first rebellion

When Sharp graduated college in 1951, he moved to New York and
worked odd jobs to put food on the table. He spent his spare time
holed up in the New York City Library working on a book about the
Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi, who he still loosely
describes as his hero.

He was also dodging the draft.

The U.S. was fighting the Korean War, and Sharp was refusing to
cooperate with the military draft board. He wouldn't report for
physical examinations or carry a draft card.

"I had chosen a particular kind of conscientious objection, I guess
the most obnoxious kind that existed -- civil disobedience."

It amounted to draft evasion, a criminal offense punishable by up
to 14 years in prison.

His father, a Protestant minister, and mother were distraught. He
was an outstanding student. Why was he throwing away his future?

"They put all kinds of strong, strong pressures on me," he
remembers. But he continued. "It was just something I had to do and
be done with it."

At first, Sharp applied for conscientious objector status but was
refused. Then he changed his mind: "I realized I shouldn't have
done it in the first place, I shouldn't have applied for it."

And when the board finally did give it to him, he wouldn't accept
it.

By 1953, things weren't looking good for Sharp. He had been
arrested by the FBI and locked up in a federal detention center,
awaiting trial. But during this tough time, he had an unlikely and
important ally: Albert Einstein.

Sharp was just 25, but already he displayed the intellectual
chutzpah that would come to characterize his later work. He wrote
to the physicist, asking him to pen the foreword to his book and
telling him about his court case.

A notable pacifist in later life, Einstein shared Sharp's
admiration for Gandhi. He agreed to write the foreword.

"I earnestly admire you for your moral strength and can only hope,
although I really do not know, that I would have acted as you did,
had I found myself in your situation," Einstein wrote in a letter
dated April 2, 1953.

Einstein also wrote the foreword to Sharp's book, describing it as
"the art of a born historian" and adding: "How is it possible that
a young man was able to create such mature piece of work?"

Sharp used Einstein's name in a speech he made at his trial. In the
end, he was sentenced to two years in prison.

His mother, Eve, who had traveled from Ohio for his sentencing also
wrote to Einstein. And he wrote her back. Her son, he told her, was
"irresistible in his noble sincerity." The letter was, Sharp says,
"a big help" to his parents.

In the end, Sharp served nine months and 10 days.

"You count the days in those places," he says now, adding that if
he hadn't followed his conscience, it would have been tragic for
him.

"I would not have had the self-respect and internal integrity to go
on and do in the future what might lie ahead."

Eureka moment

After his release from prison, Sharp concentrated on his work once
again.

After a short spell in London as an editor at the pacifist journal
Peace News, he moved to Norway where he joined the Institute for
Social Research in Oslo.

"It was the first time I had financial support to do my own
research and my own thinking and my own writing," says Sharp.

He had been invited by philosopher Arne Næss, who shared Sharp's
interest in Gandhi and who, much later, would gain prominence as
the father of environmentalism.

For a while, things looked promising. Næss persuaded the institute
to fund a major research program into nonviolent conflict.
That's a great advantage -- to know what you don't know. You have a
chance of learning -- if you want to and you're not arrogant.
Gene Sharp

But almost before it got off the ground, it was bypassed in favor
of a new and more fashionable area of study: peace research.

To this day, Sharp has refused to allow his work to be absorbed
into the grander narrative of Peace Studies, losing out on
immeasurable funding.

"I still think a lot of the peace researchers are quite naïve and
romantic under the guise of science," he says.

Amazingly, Sharp was kept on at the institute to do his own
research for a couple of years. It was there that he laid the
foundations of his work, tapping out page after page on his little
portable typewriter.

But in Norway, Sharp also began to see the flaw in his work: He
didn't understand political power.

"That's a great advantage -- to know what you don't know," he says
now. "'You have a chance of learning -- if you want to and you're
not arrogant."

So he returned to England to pursue a degree in political science
at The University of Oxford. He studied under Alan Bullock, the
first biographer of Adolf Hitler, reading everything from
Machiavelli to Auguste Comte and David Hume; analyses of
totalitarianism; histories of dictatorships.

And as he put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together, Sharp
started revising his work and asking critical questions.

What gives a government -- even a repressive regime -- the power to
rule? The answer, he realized, was people's belief in its power.
Even dictatorships require the cooperation and obedience of the
people they rule to stay in charge.

So, he reasoned, if you can identify the sources of a government's
power -- people working in civil service, police and judges, even
the army -- then you know what a dictatorship depends on for its
existence.

Once he'd worked that out, Sharp went back to his theories of
nonviolent struggle: "What is the nature of this technique?" he
asked himself. "What are its methods ... different kinds of
strikes, protests, boycotts, hunger strikes ... How does it work?
It may fail. If it fails, why? If it succeeds, why?"

Suddenly, he got it. If a dictatorship depends on the cooperation
of people and institutions, then all you have to do is shrink that
support.

That's when the light went on in Sharp's head. That is exactly what
nonviolent struggle does. By its very nature, nonviolent struggle
destroys governments, even brutal dictatorships, politically.

It is a weapon as potent as a bomb or a gun -- maybe more so.

"That was the eureka moment," says Sharp. He remembers sitting in
his little room in Oxford, shocked and, he says, relieved.

"This was not just a theory. This was actually something that had
been applied in many different historical cases."

That moment would evolve into Sharp's first big text, "The Politics
of Non-Violence," which was published in 1973. It was immediately
hailed a classic and is still considered the definitive study of
nonviolent struggle.

The viral pamphlet

Sharp's best-known work, "From Dictatorship to Democracy," is a how-
to manual for overthrowing dictatorships.

It started life in Myanmar as incendiary advice printed on a few
sheets of paper and surreptitiously exchanged by activists living
under a military dictatorship. Those found in possession of the
booklet were sentenced to seven years in prison.

>From Myanmar, it was taken to Indonesia, then to Serbia. After
that, Sharp says, he lost track of the book. But it took on a life
of its own, spreading from activist to activist and eventually,
some say, inspiring the uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

Ahmed Maher, a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement that
played a key role in last year's Egyptian revolution, told The New
York Times that the group read about nonviolent conflict.

He said some members of the group traveled to Serbia to exchange
ideas with members of The Centre for Applied Non Violent Actions
and Strategies . The Belgrade-based institution was formed in 2004
by former members of Otpor!, the youth group that helped overthrow
Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 using Sharp's methods.
Sharp\'s manual on how to overthrow dictatorships, \
Sharp's manual on how to overthrow dictatorships, "From
Dictatorship to Democracy," has been translated into more than 30
languages.

Journalist and filmmaker Ruaridh Arrow, who made a documentary
about Sharp's work called "How to Start a Revolution," was in Egypt
during last year's revolution. He says a young activist told him
Sharp's work had been widely distributed in Arabic, but he refused
to talk about it on camera for fear that knowledge of the U.S.
influence would destabilize the movement.

Sharp has written about 30 books and has a 900-page guide to self-
liberation available for free download on his website. He says
military people often have taken his work more seriously than
pacifists.

"They could understand the clashing of forces and the use of
strategy and tactics."

One such convert was Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel who
met Sharp at Harvard University in 1987.

Sharp was director of the Program for Nonviolent Sanctions at the
Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and Helvey, a
decorated Vietnam veteran, was a senior fellow there.

Helvey's experiences in the Vietnam War had convinced him that
there had to be an alternative to killing people. After hearing
Sharp speak, he was hooked. Myanmar, Helvey decided, was the
perfect place to bring Sharp's theories.

Helvey had been a U.S. military attache in Rangoon (the former
capital of Myanmar, now called Yangon) and had become sympathetic
to groups opposing the regime. After leaving the army, he started
doing consultancy work for the Karen National Union, conducting a
series of courses on nonviolent struggle for the leadership of the
democratic opposition.

The Burmese were amazed by Sharp's theories. They couldn't believe
they had been fighting and killing for 20 years when there was an
alternative.

The late U Tin Maung Win, a prominent exiled Burmese democrat,
asked Sharp to write something for them.

"I couldn't write about Burma honestly because I didn't know Burma
well," Sharp says, "and you should at least have the humility not
to write about something you don't know anything about.

"So I had to write generically -- if there was a movement that
wanted to bring a dictatorship to an end, how could they do it."
Clearly, the news is getting around that nonviolent struggle
exists. And clearly it comes almost as a revelation to people that
they are not helpless.
Gene Sharp

And so, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for
Liberation" was born.

Today, the book has been translated into Amharic, Farsi, French,
German, Serbian, Tibetan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Arabic and dozens of
other languages.

"Clearly the news is getting around that nonviolent struggle
exists," says Sharp. "And clearly it comes almost as a revelation
to people that they are not helpless."

Despite the Arab Spring pushing his work into the spotlight in 2011
like never before, Sharp remains skeptical about his actual,
measurable influence.

"Even today, I'm credited with some major influence in Egypt, for
example," he says. "I haven't seen hard data that would prove that."

Einstein's legacy

Today, Sharp spends much of his time running the Albert Einstein
Institution -- the organization he founded in 1983 to spread his
ideas and secure some much-needed funding, something he's struggled
with his whole career.

"(Nonviolent struggle) was not credited with being realistic or
with being powerful," he says.

It's a shoestring operation with outsize influence that he runs
alongside Executive Director Jamila Raqib. She's his right hand; a
subtle organizing influence, watchdog and second brain when Sharp's
memory occasionally fails him.

She also supervises the people who come from all over the world to
visit Sharp, allowing her to see his influence on those struggling
against tyranny or living under a dictatorship.

They come from India, Syria, Russia, Sri Lanka -- from all over.
They leave, says Raqib, "with stars in their eyes."

"There's something happening," she adds. "Oftentimes people would
say, you know, 'This can't work for us, my situation is unique, my
situation is worse, the repression is particularly harsh.'

"And what he does during those conversations ... they leave with
the understanding that, you know ... a seed has been planted; a new
possibility is there."

Sharp sees himself as a kind of mentor.

"I always refuse to tell them what to do. I'm trying to get them to
realize that they understand maybe more than they thought they did.

"There's one phrase that's been quoted -- 'Dictatorships are never
as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as
they think they are.' "

Earlier this year, he released "Sharp's Dictionary of Power and
Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts." He says the
major unsolved problems of our time -- genocide, dictatorship, war -
- require us to rethink the very language we use to define them.

His dictionary contains some 900 terms. It reconceives many words
we take for granted -- such as power or defense. "The defense force
-- sometimes they attack," Sharp says.

The institute also supervises translations of Sharp's work into
other languages -- a task made more complicated by the precisely
defined concepts.

They rely on activists for translating, rather than professional
translators, because they understand the nature of the work the
words describe.

For Sharp, the language is crucial: "If our language doesn't have
clear meanings and accurate meanings, you can't think clearly.

"If you can't think clearly, you have no ability to evaluate or
influence what happens. So the distortions of our language help
make us helpless."

Sharp has no plans to settle into a comfortable retirement, not
now, when things are finally taking off.

He admits that he "gets tired sometimes." But there's so much to do.

"The last few weeks I've been waking up in the middle of the night
and finding some ideas ... or a solution to a problem I've been
trying to solve for a week or two or three."

At the Frontline Club, the questions from the audience keep coming.
Sharp's answers, more than anything, underscore his modesty and
lack of pretention.

What about government defectors who want to join freedom groups,
asks another Iranian. When should you allow them in and when should
you reject them?

"An outsider like me can't tell you what to do," he says, "and if I
did, you shouldn't believe me. Trust yourselves.

"You've got to be smart. This takes time and energy ... know your
situation in depth."

For those who are serious, Sharp has a condensed version of what he
says are the required readings of his work, a guide to self-
liberation, available free on the Albert Einstein Institution
website.

"It's only 900 pages in English," he deadpans, raising a chuckle.

"And if you're not interested in reading 900 pages, you're not
interested in getting rid of the dictator," he retorts, whip smart.
"Quite seriously."

At the end, people crowd forward to speak to him, kneeling at his
chair as if he were royalty, asking him to sign copies of his books.

Later, as he's helped into his flecked black coat and handed his
walking stick, he grins and says how much he enjoyed the evening:
"The questions were good and hard."

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Nobody reads this imbecile mogyothwar's postings.
He is a waste of space !