NP but working for a world in which we can continue to read Pynchon

[Doug Millison]

Strategizing Against The Iraq War October 02, 2002
By George Lakey 

Here's an approach to add immediately to your strategy
tool kit, just in time as activists are gearing up to
oppose another U.S. war. The good news is that this
approach doesn't require getting a coalition of 80
grumpy people into a room. The bad news is that it
does help to get a half dozen or so folks together,
and even that news isn't necessarily bad because many
of us do our best thinking when we're interacting with
others. (In fact, it may pay intentionally to invite a
few people who are different from you, to allow
yourself to be stimulated by difference.)

This strategy approach is actually quite flexible and
is sometimes helpful in large coalition meeings. The
reason I'm referring to small group use is that, in
the true spirit of decentralist politics, the more
small groups use this approach and become familiar
with it, the more effective it will be when large
groups use it. This approach to strategizing serves
bottom-up preferences in building social movements. In
Starhawk's terms, it serves power-with rather than
power-over, and is inherently democratic.

[...] There's no need whatever to win the opponent,
the group at the other end of the spectrum, to our
point of view. Relax. Bush, Cheyney, and Rumsfeld can
want war forever. We can still stop the war, if we
move the wedges one step toward us.

There are plenty of examples of that in recent U.S.
history. The civil rights movement won campaign after
campaign without converting their arch enemies to
racial equality. The U.S. pulled its troops out of
Vietnam even though our war-mongering powerholders
still wanted to bomb the country back to the stone
age. Gay rights activists win again and again even
though pulpits continue to reverberate with homophobic
thunder.

This is why it is both incorrect and a waste of energy
for activists to focus so much attention on their
opponents. When I hear activists talk I sometimes
visualize a radical equivalent of People Magazine --
such fascination with the personalities and opinions
of people we don't need to obsess about!

What counts -- to win -- is the wedges in between "us"
and "them" -- especially from the fence-sitters on
over, and the wedge just to the right of the
fence-sitters. Move each of those wedges one notch,
and one notch only, and we'll stop the war.

The opponents know this, and so they don't usually
waste their time obsessing about us (except for
Richard Nixon, who truly was an obsessional figure).
The opponents' objective is to isolate us, and so they
focus most of their attention on the wedges in
between, not on us. The National Rifle Association is
not going to waste its time picketing the Quakers. The
NRA is much more interested in the wedges in between.

[...] 

Picture groups of various sizes in your town, and
state, and nation, "taking on" other parts of the
population that need to confront the reality of the
war and what it means. Listen to the buzz which that
creates, and you'll be listening to the kind of buzz
that brought down Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic
when the thousands of young people in Otpor did this
kind of outreach and brought each wedge a step closer
until the dictator was isolated. 

Enjoy the empowerment that comes from putting yourself
outside the comfort zone of futile messages directed
to Washington, and make yourself warm and sweaty by
plunging into the civil society that is this country
at its best.

It adds up to victory, not simply by tens of thousands
of groups acting from their own initiative with their
own creativity, but because the use of this strategic
principle promotes synergy: the whole becomes greater
than the sum of its parts. Will macro-movement
coordination come about? Will charismatic leadership
appear which adds soul and eloquence? Will well-funded
national organizing initiatives emerge which add
focus? Perhaps, and in my controversial opinion all
three might be terrific.
[...]


...read the whole thing at
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-09/15lakey.cfm









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