The Dissident's Toolkit

Want To Topple An Autocrat? Street Demonstrations Are Just One Tool Among Many.

BY ERICA CHENOWETH

Research shows, in fact, that demonstrations are just one of many tools that civil resistance movements can use to effect change. 

Successful movements are those that use a wide array of methods to pressure their state opponents while keeping their activists safe. The demonstration tactic we're used to seeing is just one of many hundreds of tactics available to civilians seeking change -- and successful campaigns for change must use more than just a single tactic.

Maria Stephan and I conducted research on a related but broader question: "When does civil resistance work?" The results of our research show that opposition campaigns are successful when they manage to do three key things: 

(1) attract widespread and diverse participation; (2) develop a strategy that allows them to maneuver around repression; and (3) provoke defections, loyalty shifts, or disobedience among regime elites and/or security forces.

Attracting participation is perhaps the most important of these tasks, since the ability to provoke defections and outmaneuver opponents often depends on whether the movement enjoys large and broad-based support. The most important singular factor for a successful campaign is its participation rate. 

According to the NAVCO data set, which identifies the outcomes of over 300 nonviolent and violent campaigns worldwide from 1900-2006, none of the cases failed after achieving the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population -- and some of them succeeded with far less than that. 

Of course, 3.5 percent is nothing to sneeze at. In the United States today, this constitutes over 11 million people. But how do movements get this large in the first place, especially in countries where overt participation in a mass movement is highly risky?

One way organizers can grow their movement is by including tactics that are safer and therefore more attractive to risk-averse participants. 

For example, instead of relying solely on demonstrations or protests, many movements will allow people to participate through "electricity strikes" where people shut off their electricity at a coordinated time of day, or by banging on pots and pans in the middle of the night to signal the power in numbers. 

Engaging in these types of actions may draw in more ambivalent people while also allowing them the opportunity to develop a sense of identity with the movement and its goals. 

In Chile under Pinochet, for example, outright demonstrations against the dictator were far too dangerous. In one instance, Pinochet was so threatened by the subtext of some popular songs that he banned public singing; it didn't take much. But when people began to bang on pots and pans, it let them demonstrate their defiance anonymously in the safety of their own homes. 

As the people's metallic clamor for change became louder and louder, anti-Pinochet organizers and their supporters became emboldened to press for more disruptive and overt action. 

A similar movement is underway in Egypt today, where the "Masmou" movement has led thousands of people to bang on pots and pans inside their homes at 9 p.m. each night to signal that there are viable alternatives to both the al-Sisi government and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

In highly repressive environments there is, indeed, safety in numbers. And actions like this can signal that one is not alone, while making it quite difficult for the government to crack down on participants.

Once people do begin to mobilize, the effects on the internal politics of a tyrannical regime can be intense. 

As Gene Sharp rightly argued, no regime is monolithic. Every leader is 100 percent dependent on the cooperation, obedience, and help of the people that form the regime's pillars of support: security forces, the state media, business or educational elites, religious authorities, and civilian bureaucrats. And when such people begin to reevaluate the regime's role in their long-term interests, they can actually be pulled away from supporting the leader. This is much more likely to happen the more people are mobilized against the opponent.

Why? Because no regime loyalists in any country live entirely isolated from the population itself. They have friends, they have family, and they have existing relationships that will bring with them in the long term, regardless of whether the leader stays or goes. 

As the literary critic Robert Inchausti is credited as saying, "Nonviolence is a wager -- not so much on the goodness of humanity as on its infinite complexity." 

Take an example from the so-called "Bulldozer Revolution," a Serbian people power revolution against Slobodan Milosevic that toppled him in October 2000. In this case, once it became clear that hundreds of thousands of Serbs were descending on Belgrade to demand that Milosevic leave office, policemen ignored the order to shoot on demonstrators. When asked why he did so, one of them said: "I knew my kids were in the crowd."

This policeman wasn't alone in Serbia or elsewhere. We find that, in general, security forces tend to defect much more often when they face nonviolent campaigns (as compared to armed uprisings), particularly as the numbers rise. 

Controlling for other factors, security forces are about 60 percent likely to defect when confronted with the largest nonviolent campaigns and over 30 percent likely with the average-sized nonviolent campaign. 

The defection of security forces occurred within the ranks of the Iranian armed forces during the anti-Shah resistance, within Filipino armed forces during the anti-Marcos uprising, and within the Israeli military during the first Palestinian Intifada, to name but a few examples. And these loyalty shifts can be crucial for the outcomes of these campaigns: They increase their chances of success by over 60 percent.

Of course, demonstrations -- and people power movements in general -- tend to fail as often as they succeed. But when we look at outright failures -- such as Tiananmen Square, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, or the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Burma -- a few patterns become evident:

The failed campaigns never spread to include vast proportions of the population, and failed to shift between highly risky tactics and safer ones. 

But they also failed to establish a long-term strategy to make the campaigns sustainable, which was especially important given the brutality of state repression. 

The average duration of a nonviolent campaign was between two-and-a-half and three years, but few of these campaigns had a long-term strategy, besides the wishful hope that tactical victories might make the regime comply with their demands.

Campaigns of civil resistance are underway in many countries around the world, movement planners must carefully analyze the political effects that tactics like demonstrations have. 

If these tactics fail to increase sympathy for the campaign at home or abroad, diversify the base of participants, and encourage defections among regime elites, then they are not helping the movement's chances of succeeding. 

But rather than abandoning the struggle because demonstrations stop working, movement leaders would do well to appreciate the many other nonviolent methods of protest and noncooperation they can bring to bear against their opponents. 

The campaigns that ultimately succeed will be the ones that fully embrace Sun Tzu's warning that "tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION 

Formal Statements 
1. Public Speeches 
2. Letters of opposition or support 
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions 
4. Signed public statements 
5. Declarations of indictment and intention 
6. Group or mass petitions 

Communications with a Wider Audience 
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols 
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications 
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books 
10. Newspapers and journals 
11. Records, radio, and television 
12. Skywriting and earthwriting 

Group Representations 
13. Deputations 
14. Mock awards 
15. Group lobbying 
16. Picketing 
17. Mock elections 

Symbolic Public Acts 
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors 
19. Wearing of symbols 
20. Prayer and worship 
21. Delivering symbolic objects 
22. Protest disrobings 
23. Destruction of own property 
24. Symbolic lights 
25. Displays of portraits 
26. Paint as protest 
27. New signs and names 
28. Symbolic sounds 
29. Symbolic reclamations 
30. Rude gestures 

Pressures on Individuals 
31. "Haunting" officials 
32. Taunting officials 
33. Fraternization 
34. Vigils 

Drama and Music 
35. Humorous skits and pranks 
36. Performances of plays and music 
37. Singing 

Processions 
38. Marches 
39. Parades 
40. Religious processions 
41. Pilgrimages 
42. Motorcades 

Honoring the Dead 
43. Political mourning 
44. Mock funerals 
45. Demonstrative funerals 
46. Homage at burial places 

Public Assemblies 
47. Assemblies of protest or support 
48. Protest meetings 
49. Camouflaged meetings of protest 
50. Teach-ins 

Withdrawal and Renunciation 
51. Walk-outs 
52. Silence 
53. Renouncing honors 
54. Turning one's back 


THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION 

Ostracism of Persons 
55. Social boycott 
56. Selective social boycott 
57. Lysistratic nonaction 
58. Excommunication 
59. Interdict 

Noncooperation with Social Events, Customs, and Institutions 
60. Suspension of social and sports activities 
61. Boycott of social affairs 
62. Student strike 
63. Social disobedience 
64. Withdrawal from social institutions 

Withdrawal from the Social System 
65. Stay-at-home 
66. Total personal noncooperation 
67. "Flight" of workers 
68. Sanctuary 
69. Collective disappearance 
70. Protest emigration (hijrat) 


THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: (1) ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS 

Actions by Consumers 
71. Consumers' boycott 
72. Nonconsumption of boycotted goods 
73. Policy of austerity 
74. Rent withholding 
75. Refusal to rent 
76. National consumers' boycott 
77. International consumers' boycott 

Action by Workers and Producers 
78. Workmen's boycott 
79. Producers' boycott 

Action by Middlemen 
80. Suppliers' and handlers' boycott 

Action by Owners and Management 
81. Traders' boycott 
82. Refusal to let or sell property 
83. Lockout 
84. Refusal of industrial assistance 
85. Merchants' "general strike" 

Action by Holders of Financial Resources 
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits 
87. Refusal to pay fees, dues, and assessments 
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest 
89. Severance of funds and credit 
90. Revenue refusal 
91. Refusal of a government's money 

Action by Governments 
92. Domestic embargo 
93. Blacklisting of traders 
94. International sellers' embargo 
95. International buyers' embargo 
96. International trade embargo 


THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: (2)THE STRIKE 

Symbolic Strikes 
97. Protest strike 
98. Quickie walkout (lightning strike) 

Agricultural Strikes 
99. Peasant strike 
100. Farm Workers' strike 

Strikes by Special Groups 
101. Refusal of impressed labor 
102. Prisoners' strike 
103. Craft strike 
104. Professional strike 

Ordinary Industrial Strikes 
105. Establishment strike 
106. Industry strike 
107. Sympathetic strike 

Restricted Strikes 
108. Detailed strike 
109. Bumper strike 
110. Slowdown strike 
111. Working-to-rule strike 
112. Reporting "sick" (sick-in) 
113. Strike by resignation 
114. Limited strike 
115. Selective strike 

Multi-Industry Strikes 
116. Generalized strike 
117. General strike 

Combination of Strikes and Economic Closures 
118. Hartal 
119. Economic shutdown 


THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION 

Rejection of Authority 
120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance 
121. Refusal of public support 
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance 

Citizens' Noncooperation with Government 
123. Boycott of legislative bodies 
124. Boycott of elections 
125. Boycott of government employment and positions 
126. Boycott of government depts., agencies, and other bodies 
127. Withdrawal from government educational institutions 
128. Boycott of government-supported organizations 
129. Refusal of assistance to enforcement agents 
130. Removal of own signs and placemarks 
131. Refusal to accept appointed officials 
132. Refusal to dissolve existing institutions 

Citizens' Alternatives to Obedience 
133. Reluctant and slow compliance 
134. Nonobedience in absence of direct supervision 
135. Popular nonobedience 
136. Disguised disobedience 
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse 
138. Sitdown 
139. Noncooperation with conscription and deportation 
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities 
141. Civil disobedience of "illegitimate" laws 

Action by Government Personnel 
142. Selective refusal of assistance by government aides 
143. Blocking of lines of command and information 
144. Stalling and obstruction 
145. General administrative noncooperation 
146. Judicial noncooperation 
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents 
148. Mutiny 

Domestic Governmental Action 
149. Quasi-legal evasions and delays 
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units 

International Governmental Action 
151. Changes in diplomatic and other representations 
152. Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events 
153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition 
154. Severance of diplomatic relations 
155. Withdrawal from international organizations 
156. Refusal of membership in international bodies 
157. Expulsion from international organizations 


THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION 

Psychological Intervention 
158. Self-exposure to the elements 
159. The fast 
a) Fast of moral pressure 
b) Hunger strike
c) Satyagrahic fast 
160. Reverse trial 
161. Nonviolent harassment 

Physical Intervention 
162. Sit-in 
163. Stand-in 
164. Ride-in 
165. Wade-in 
166. Mill-in 
167. Pray-in 
168. Nonviolent raids 
169. Nonviolent air raids 
170. Nonviolent invasion 
171. Nonviolent interjection 
172. Nonviolent obstruction 
173. Nonviolent occupation 

Social Intervention 
174. Establishing new social patterns 
175. Overloading of facilities 
176. Stall-in 
177. Speak-in 
178. Guerrilla theater 
179. Alternative social institutions 
180. Alternative communication system 

Economic Intervention 
181. Reverse strike 
182. Stay-in strike 
183. Nonviolent land seizure 
184. Defiance of blockades 
185. Politically motivated counterfeiting 
186. Preclusive purchasing 
187. Seizure of assets 
188. Dumping 
189. Selective patronage 
190. Alternative markets 
191. Alternative transportation systems 
192. Alternative economic institutions 

Political Intervention 
193. Overloading of administrative systems 
194. Disclosing identities of secret agents 
195. Seeking imprisonment 
196. Civil disobedience of "neutral" laws 
197. Work-on without collaboration 
198. Dual sovereignty and parallel government 

Dissent As 'Terrorism': Targeting Public Protest In The Post-9/11 Era

Results from a year-long investigation into the activities of the United States' expansive counter-terrorism apparatus found that, throughout the country, the government has turned the tax-payer-funded intelligence-gathering against its own citizens in an effort to suppress dissent.

Released Monday by the DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy, the report, Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street (pdf), focuses primarily on the many instances of "fusion center" monitoring of Occupy Wall Street activists nationwide.

"Put simply," the report states, "heavily-funded municipal, county, state and federal 'counter-terrorism' agencies (often acting in concert through state/regional 'fusion centers') view citizens engaged in movements of political and social dissent, such as Occupy Wall Street, as nothing less than nascent, if not bona fide, 'terrorist' threats."

In addition, the review of records shows that this "monitoring" and "suppression" of activists and dissident groups has been largely carried out "on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests—the very entities that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and others oppose as usurpers of American democracy."

In a statement released alongside the report, the Center for Media and Democracy says their examination is the first detailed look at the "the breadth and depth of the degree to which the nation's post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights."

The report largely focuses the activities of an Arizona fusion center, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC), whose surveillance of those citizens active in Occupy Phoenix "benefited a number of corporations and banks that were subjects of Occupy Phoenix protest activity," including J.P. Morgan Chase.

Some other key findings of the report include:

• How law enforcement agencies active in the Arizona fusion
 center dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups
 organizing both protests of the American Legislative Exchange Council 
(ALEC) and the launch of Occupy Phoenix and how the work of this 
undercover officer benefited ALEC and the private corporations that
 were the subjects of these demonstrations.


• How fusion centers, funded in large part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, expended countless hours and tax dollars in the monitoring of 
Occupy Wall Street and other activist groups.


• How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has financed
 social media "data mining" programs at local law enforcement agencies engaged in fusion centers.


• How counter terrorism government employees applied facial
 recognition technology, drawing from a state database of driver's
 license photos, to photographs found on Facebook in the effort to 
profile citizens believed to be associated with activist groups.


• How corporations have become part of the homeland security “information sharing environment” with law enforcement/intelligence agencies through various public-private intelligence sharing partnerships. The report examines multiple instances in which the counter terrorism/homeland security apparatus was used to gather intelligence relating to activists for the benefit of corporate interests that were the subject of protests. 


• How private groups and individuals, such as Charles Koch, 
Chase Koch (Charles' son and a Koch Industries executive), Koch 
Industries, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council 
have hired off-duty police officers -- sometimes still armed and in
 police uniforms -- to perform the private security functions of keeping
 undesirables (reporters and activists) at bay.


• How counter terrorism personnel monitored the protest
 activities of citizens opposed to the indefinite detention language
 contained in National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
• How the FBI applied "Operation Tripwire," an initiative
 originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use
 of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall 
Street groups. [Note: this issue was reported on exclusively by DBA/CMD in December, 2012.]

War Or Revolution Every 75 Years

It's Time Again?

By Paul Buchheit
June 11, 2012
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

When Charles Dickens wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" to begin "A Tale of Two Cities," he compared the years of the French Revolution to his own "present period.”  Both were wracked with inequality.  But he couldn't have known that 75 years later inequality would cause the Great Depression. Or that 75 years after that, in our own present period, extreme inequality would return for a fourth time, to impact a much greater number of people. He probably didn't know that the cycles of history seem to drag the developed world into desperate times about every 75 years, and then seek relief through war or revolution.

It's that time again.

Three cycles (225 years) ago, in the years before the French Revolution, inequality was at one of its highest points ever. While it's estimated that the top 10% of the population took almost half the income, as they do today, the Gini Coefficient was between .52 and .59, higher than the current U.S. figure of .47. The French Revolution began a surge toward equality that lasted well into the 19th century.

Two cycles ago, in Dickens' day of the 1860s, European inequality was again at a nearly intolerable level. It took the second industrial revolution and the U.S. Civil War to start correcting the economic injustices.

One cycle ago was the Great Depression. The New Deal, World War 2, and the laborious process of war recovery put an end to this third period of extreme inequality.

Now, nearly 75 years after we started World War 2 production, we again feel the agony of a wealth gap expanding, like grotesquely stretched muscle, to intolerable limits. If history repeats itself, we will be part of another revolution of long-subjugated people. Indeed, it has already begun, in Europe and Canada and with the Occupy Movement.

The face of plutocracy has changed, but not the consequences. Just before the French Revolution, Paris and London were dismal places for the masses, with islands of unimaginable splendor for aristocrats, who, like the multi-millionaires of today, found it hard to relate to the commoners. Dickens portrayed it well. Exclaimed the Marquis St. Evremonde to a gathering crowd: "It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done to my horses?" This he said after his carriage had struck and killed a young child.

Today the two cities could be Los Angeles and Chicago, both among the ten most unequal metropolitan areas in the United States. Instead of lords and noblemen, we have CEOs and hedge fund managers. The economic injustices are fashioned in more civilized ways. Insidious ways.

Los Angeles is the biggest city in a state with a $9-16 billion budget deficit. It is facing severe cuts in education, health care, social services, and the court system. College tuition increased 50% in two years. Public schools are down to one counselor for every 800 students.

But California's deficit wouldn't exist if corporations had paid their state taxes. Apple is a prime example of nonpayment. While the company's 10% federal tax rate has been widely publicized, its 2% state payment (rather than the required 9%) is less well known. For state avoidance purposes, they claim residency in Nevada. And despite conducting most of its research and development in the United States, they channel much of their sales through Luxembourg and Ireland and the Caribbean.

What about Chicago? It has the highest sales tax in the country. Illinois cut 2012 education spending by a greater percentage than any other state. The state tax rate was just increased by 66%. Property taxes went up by about $300 per homeowner. Illinois was recently named one of the ten "Most Regressive State Tax Systems," with the third-highest "Taxes on the Poor."

Yet if just 20 large Illinois companies had paid state taxes at the required statutory rate over the past three years, an additional $7.5 billion would have come back to the state, or about half of the state's current deficit.

Just as Los Angeles loses out to technology, Chicago is victimized by finance. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), with billions of untaxed contracts worth well over a quadrillion dollars, and whose profit margin over the past three years is higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation, demanded and received an $85 million per year tax break.

"A man grown grey in treachery...who once when it was objected, to some finance scheme of his, 'What will the people do?' - made answer, in the fire of discussion, 'The people may eat grass.'" -- Thomas Carlyle, "The French Revolution," the main source for Dickens' novel.

In our 'civilized' times people aren't being run down by noblemen or forced to eat grass. 

The aristocracy has learned a lot about suppressing crowds in 225 years. But they need to fear the growing revolution. They need to fear, as Dickens put it, "the remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them."

This this article was first published at Nation Of Change

I AM NOT MOVING

US Hypocrisy Unveiled

Short Film - Occupy Wall Street
By The People (Filming);
Editing by Corey Olgivie;
Music by Hauschka

Uploaded by CoreyOgilvie on Oct 10, 2011

Creative commons Non-Commercial, Attribution, No Derivative Works license. Pls message filmmaker for translations, which are very welcome : )

Buy song and album at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/versions-prepared-piano/id215661219


http://www.facebook.com/OgilvieFilm
http://www.ogilviefilm.com

If mirroring, please do not change video in any way for its whole duration. Please credit the original filmmaker, musicians and music labels as some people have posted it claiming they made the video, which breaches the ethics of a creative commons.

This said, please share with everyone, including your leaders. Mirroring is encouraged, but pls don't change video in any way. This video is meant to be a warning to our leaders.

Stunning music by: Hauschka, song "Stumm (Kein Wort)"
Music Label: Karaoke Kalk label based in Berlin
http://www.karaokekalk.de/

Including amazing shots from Alex Mallis - http://www.alexmallis.com/
and Kristopher Rae - sociallyawkwrd.tumblr.com

How The US Media Marginalises Dissent

In 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was not invited to participate in the presidential debates. To date, only two third-party presidential candidates have participated in televised debates in the US [GALLO/GETTY]


The US Media Derides Views Outside Of The Mainstream As 'Un-Serious', and Our Democracy Suffers As A Result.

By Ted Rall
Last Modified: 04 Aug 2011 10:50
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


"Over the past few weeks, Washington has seemed dysfunctional," conservative columnist David Brooks opined recently in The New York Times. "Public disgust [about the debt ceiling crisis] has risen to epic levels. Yet through all this, serious people - Barack Obama, John Boehner, the members of the Gang of Six - have soldiered on."

Here's some of what Peter Coy of Business Week magazine had to say about the same issue: "There is a comforting story about the debt ceiling that goes like this: Back in the 1990s, the US was shrinking its national debt at a rapid pace. Serious people actually worried about dislocations from having too little government debt …"

Fox News, the Murdoch-owned house organ of America's official right-wing, asserted: "No one seriously thinks that the US will not honour its obligations, whatever happens with the current impasse on President Obama's requested increase to the government's $14.3tn borrowing limit."

"Serious people."

"No one seriously thinks."


Limiting The Terms Of Debate

The American media deploys a deep and varied arsenal of rhetorical devices in order to marginalise opinions, people and organisations as "outside the mainstream" and therefore not worth listening to. For the most part the people and groups being declaimed belong to the political Left. To take one example, the Green Party - well-organised in all 50 states - is never quoted in newspapers or invited to send a representative to television programmes that purport to present "both sides" of a political issue. (In the United States, "both sides" means the back-and-forth between centre-right Democrats and rightist Republicans)

Marginalisation is the intentional decision to exclude a voice in order to prevent a "dangerous" opinion from gaining currency, to block a politician or movement from becoming more powerful, or both. In 2000, the media-backed consortium that sponsored the presidential debate between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush banned Green Party candidate Ralph Nader from participating. Security goons even threatened to arrest him when he showed up with a ticket and asked to be seated in the audience. Nader is a liberal consumer advocate who became famous in the US for stridently advocating for safety regulations, particularly on automobiles.

Third-party candidates have taken part in televised presidential debates twice: John Anderson in 1980 and H. Ross Perot in 1992. Both, perhaps not so coincidentally, were men of the Right. In 2000, debate bosses excluded Nader using the excuse that his support (as measured by public opinion polls) was too insignificant to impact the election.

That assessment was dubious at best. Most analysts believe that Nader drew enough liberal votes away from Al Gore to cost him the state of Florida, which handed the election to Bush (This is not my assessment. The 2000 race was stolen by corrupt Florida election officials and a judicial coup d'etat carried out by the US Supreme Court). The point remains: Nader was denied access to the debates, and to coverage by the TV networks, because he wasn't an "important" candidate. Yet those same networks argue that he changed the course of the election.

When a personality - almost always on the Left - becomes too big to ignore, the mainstream media often resorts to ridicule. Like Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall, Nader is often derided as "perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader". Personalities on the far right wing, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, are characterised as "refreshing" and "exciting" (if intellectually slight). Acknowledgement, when it happens, is post-mortem. Revisionist historian Howard Zinn and muckraking DC journo I.F. Stone received lengthy accolades in obituaries that appeared in The New York Times, which studiously censored them throughout their careers.

Fox News famously relies on the trope that "some people say …" in order to insert unsourced (i.e., Fox's own) opinions into a news story. "Serious people say" and "no one seriously thinks" are the flip side of this technique. Corporate-owned newspapers and broadcast media outlets use "some people say" in order to define the range of acceptable discourse and "no one seriously thinks" to smear opinions that are widespread among the public at large as marginal, infantile and perhaps even insane.

When "serious people say" something, those who disagree are by definition trivial, insipid and thus unworthy of consideration. "No one seriously thinks" is brutarian to the point of Orwellian: anyone who expresses the thought in question literally does not exist. He or she is an Unperson.

Military Withdrawals Viewed As 'Un-Serious'

Big US media uses the "serious people"/"nobody seriously thinks" marginalisation meme on numerous subjects, but none so often as on war. You guessed it: "Serious people" think wars are necessary and must continue indefinitely. "No one seriously thinks" that the American military can "just" stop fighting a war without suffering all sorts of terrible consequences: "Instability". Becoming viewed by allies as "unreliable". Creating a "power vacuum". Allowing an already difficult situation to deteriorate "even further". Sure, people are suffering and dying now. But if the US leaves, many more people will die. In order to avert a theoretical bloodbath of the future, the United States is obligated to continue its present, sustainable rate of killing and maiming.

In this wacky topsy-turvy world, where the people who are usually wrong get to lord it over those who usually get it right, abject failures like Obama and Boehner - who make logical assertions that are nothing but, and who have presided over fiscal collapse while not making the slightest effort to stimulate the economy with public works and other classic Keynesian responses to the global depression - are lauded as Serious People.

The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were initially popular with the American public. The subsequent occupations, however, have racked up a toll in blood and treasure of which most voters have long tired. Now the government and its media allies are trying to convince Americans, not to support - it's way too late for that - but to tolerate continued expenditures on wars they view as unwinnable wastes.

Throughout the last few years, especially since Obama took office in January 2009 and after the death of Osama bin Laden earlier this year, calls to withdraw from one or both of America's major quagmires have been met with media claims by Very Serious People along the lines that "no one seriously thinks we can just withdraw".

According to a June 21, 2001 Pew Research poll, 56 per cent of Americans favour immediate withdrawal of US occupation troops from Afghanistan. Many of these antiwar voters know that there could be negative ramifications; the same percentage believes that the Karzai regime will collapse without a US military presence. So it is not not true that "no one" thinks we can withdraw. In fact, most people think we should withdraw. And many of them are willing to countenance the possibility that the Taliban would win an ensuing civil war.

For "their" newspapers, radio and television journalists, however, these people - over half the population - don't count. They are "no one". They are certainly not "serious people" who have done the hard thinking. They are not, in other favourite meme, "realistic" or "pragmatic".

"We can't leave Afghanistan at this juncture," former US National Security Council member Rick Nelson told ABC News after US commandos assassinated Osama bin Laden. "There is still a significant terrorist threat emanating from western Pakistan." The US must "commit the resources, personnel, and money against this threat until we are certain that it is completely dismantled", said Nelson, talking as though to a small, slightly dim, child. To which such a child might reasonably respond: How would one know that such a threat had completely vanished?

Fortunately for Nelson, ABC's excuse for a journalist didn't follow up.

"So why not just get out?" asked Newsweek's John Barry in 2009. "As always, it's not so simple."
Sure it is.

To paraphrase my fellow political cartoonist Matt Bors, US soldiers could go to the airport. They could board planes. They could go home.

The US pulled out of Vietnam. Vietnamese and Americans are both better off as a result. The Soviets left Afghanistan. They boarded trucks and tanks and APCs and drove to Uzbekistan. The Russians' big mistake was not leaving sooner. But no one talks about that - at least not on the air.

Barry lists a familiar litany of what-ifs. All that's missing is the possible unleashing of killer blood-sucking zombies:

"If the Americans pull their troops out, the already shaky Afghan Army could collapse. (Once they lost US air support, South Vietnamese troops sometimes refused to take the field and fight.) Afghanistan could well plunge into civil war, just as it did after the Soviets left in 1989. Already, the Pashtuns in the south regard the American-backed Tajiks who dominate Karzai's administration as the enemy. The winning side would likely be the one backed by Pakistan, which may end up being the Taliban - just as it was in the last civil war."

As a decidedly unserious person - in fact, I rather deplore seriousness - I wonder: So what? If the only alternative to endless war and occupation and oppression by US and NATO forces in Afghanistan is civil war and Taliban domination, wouldn't it be better to leave the carnage to the Afghans?

'Serious People' Are Often Wrong


The American Conservative, a pleasurable and often surprising magazine aligned with America Firster and former presidential prospect Pat Buchanan, ran a 2009 essay by Daniel Larison that noted, reasonably, "after the last decade of terrible foreign policy guidance by self-proclaimed 'serious people' there is hardly anything more damning one can say about something than to say that 'serious people' embrace it."

Larison continued:

"There is a problem in hiding behind policy consensus and dismissing those outside it as an irrelevant fringe, and this is that the consensus gets important things wrong with remarkable frequency. Hawkish interventionists were able to create the (false) impression that 9/11 happened because America was too wedded to geopolitical stability and was too willing to tolerate authoritarian governments in the Near East, and then the lazy establishment consensus allowed itself to be dragged along with them to support an unnecessary and disastrous war. Establishment consensus views on Iraq and its weapon programmes were wrong; consensus support for the bombardment of Lebanon and the Gaza operation was also wrong; the 'serious' bipartisan consensus in favour of NATO expansion has been disastrously wrong."

Back to the debt ceiling crisis.

For many Americans the gravity and absurdity of the current economy was crystallised by news accounts that Apple Computer had more ready cash on hand than the US Treasury ($76bn versus $74bn).

Apple isn't alone. "Corporations collectively are hoarding more cash than ever before, posting glowing balance sheets," reports International Business Times. "At the end of 2010, companies held an estimated $1.9tn of excess cash, and so far in 2011 most have not let go." US banks, says The Washington Post, have more than $2tn available to lend.

If you've read Karl Marx you can probably imagine a solution to the US debt ceiling crisis. The government is poor but giant corporations are rich. Why doesn't the Obama Administration appropriate the necessary sums from private companies and wealthy individuals via taxes or nationalisation? The Post answers: "But while the country is flush with assets, it doesn't mean the government can seize them to pay for public debt."

Why not? The article doesn't say. Nor does it use the dreaded phrase "no one seriously thinks that …" But it's there all the same. Because the US doesn't officially countenance socialist economic solutions, advocates of European-style socialised medicine were dismissed by President Obama as naïve (and not Serious). Even when the federal government transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and insurance companies during the 2008-09 meltdown, calls for accountability were dismissed as unrealistic. Not pragmatic. Nationalisation?

Definitely not serious. Clownlike, really.

As Daniel Larison says, the track record of the Serious Ones is atrocious. And yet, on one story after another, even relatively minor ones, the US media continues to turn yesterday's "no one thinks" into today's "everyone knows".

In 2006 Trevor Bormann told ABC-TV viewers that the world would never again see the famous statues blown up by the Taliban at Bamiyan: "Archaeologists and restorers are now cataloguing every significant piece of rubble but no one seriously thinks the Buddhas can ever be rebuilt".

Here's Joanna Kakissis of National Public Radio, less than a month ago:

"At the time they were blown up, the statues were the largest Buddha carvings in the world, and it seemed they were gone for good. But today, teams from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, along with the International Council on Monuments and Sites, are engaged in the painstaking process of putting the broken Buddhas back together."

It won't be as easy to rebuild Americans' trust in their journalistic institutions.


Ted Rall is an American political cartoonist, columnist and author. His most recent book is The Anti-American Manifesto. His website is rall.com.