From Dictatorship To Democracy
The “Monkey Master” fable
A Fourteenth Century Chinese parable by Liu-Ji, for example, outlines this neglected understanding of political power quite well:
In the feudal state of Chu an old man survived by keeping monkeys in his service. The people of Chu called him “ju gong” (monkey master).
Each morning, the old man would assemble the monkeys in his courtyard, and order the eldest one to lead the others to the mountains to gather fruits from bushes and trees. It was the rule that each monkey had to give one tenth of his collection to the old man. Those who failed to do so would be ruthlessly flogged. All the monkeys suffered bitterly, but dared not complain.
One day, a small monkey asked the other monkeys: “Did the old man plant all the fruit trees and bushes?” The others said: “No, they grew naturally.” The small monkey further asked: “Can’t we take the fruits without the old man’s permission?” The others replied: “Yes, we all can.” The small monkey continued: “Then, why should we depend on the old man; why must we all serve him?”
Before the small monkey was able to finish his statement, all the monkeys suddenly became enlightened and awakened.
On the same night, watching that the old man had fallen asleep, the monkeys tore down all the barricades of the stockade in which they were confined, and destroyed the stockade entirely. They also took the fruits the old man had in storage, brought all with them to the woods, and never returned. The old man finally died of starvation.
Yu-li-zi says, “Some men in the world rule their people by tricks and not by righteous principles. Aren’t they just like the monkey master? They are not aware of their muddleheadedness. As soon as their people become enlightened, their tricks no longer work.”
Necessary sources of political power
The principle is simple. Dictators require the assistance of the people they rule, without which they cannot secure and maintain the sources of political power. These sources of political power include:
Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
Human resources, the number and importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers;
Skills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors which may induce people to obey and assist the rulers;
Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and noncooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation which are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.
All of these sources, however, depend on acceptance of the regime, on the submission and obedience of the population, and on the cooperation of innumerable people and the many institutions of the society. These are not guaranteed.
Full cooperation, obedience, and support will increase the availability of the needed sources of power and, consequently expand the power capacity of any government.
On the other hand, withdrawal of popular and institutional cooperation with aggressors and dictators diminishes, and may sever, the availability of the sources of power on which all rulers depend. Without availability of those sources, the rulers’ power weakens and finally dissolves.
Naturally, dictators are sensitive to actions and ideas that threaten their capacity to do as they like. Dictators are therefore likely to threaten and punish those who disobey, strike, or fail to cooperate. However, that is not the end of the story. Repression, even brutalities, do not always produce a resumption of the necessary degree of submission and cooperation for the regime to function.
If, despite repression, the sources of power can be restricted or severed for enough time, the initial results may be uncertainty and confusion within the dictatorship. That is likely to be followed by a clear weakening of the power of the dictatorship. Over time, the withholding of the sources of power can produce the paralysis and impotence of the regime, and in severe cases, its disintegration. The dictators’ power will die, slowly or rapidly, from political starvation.
The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule. As the political scientist Karl W. Deutsch noted in 1953:
Totalitarian power is strong only if it does not have to be used too often. If totalitarian power must be used at all times against the entire population, it is unlikely to remain powerful for long. Since totalitarian regimes require more power for dealing with their subjects than do other types of government, such regimes stand in greater need of widespread and dependable compliance habits among their people; more than that they have to be able to count on the active support of at least significant parts of the population in case of need.
The English Nineteenth Century legal theorist John Austin described the situation of a dictatorship confronting a disaffected people. Austin argued that if most of the population were determined to destroy the government and were willing to endure repression to do so, then the might of the government, including those who supported it, could not preserve the hated government, even if it received foreign assistance. The defiant people could not be forced back into permanent obedience and subjection, Austin concluded.
Niccolo Machiavelli had much earlier argued that the prince “. . . who has the public as a whole for his enemy can never make himself secure; and the greater his cruelty, the weaker does his regime become.”
The practical political application of these insights was demonstrated by the heroic Norwegian resisters against the Nazi occupation, and as cited in Chapter One, by the brave Poles, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, and many others who resisted Communist aggression and dictatorship, and finally helped produce the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. This, of course, is no new phenomenon: cases of nonviolent resistance go back at least to 494 B.C. when plebeians withdrew cooperation from their Roman patrician masters. Nonviolent struggle has been employed at various times by peoples throughout Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australasia, and the Pacific islands, as well as Europe.
Three of the most important factors in determining to what degree a government’s power will be controlled or uncontrolled therefore are: (1) the relative desire of the populace to impose limits on the government’s power; (2) the relative strength of the subjects’ independent organizations and institutions to withdraw collectively the sources of power; and (3) the population’s relative ability to withhold their consent and assistance.
From Dictatorship To Democracy, by Gene Sharp
Greenspan: Bush, Blair Iraq War - Million Die For Oil
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said that the war in Iraq, propagated and pursued by George Bush and Tony Blair was, after all, and as everyone has always known, about nothing other than exploiting oil reserves.
Greenspan memoir links Iraq war to US thirst for oil
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, for years an inscrutable seer on the economy, is causing a stir by alleging in his new memoir that “the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Greenspan, who as head of the US central bank was famous for his tight-lipped reserve, is uncharacteristically direct in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” also accusing President George W. Bush of abandoning Republican principles on the economy.
“I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows — the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he wrote in reported excerpts of the book, which is set for release on Monday.
Greenspan labels oil as prime motive for Iraq war
AMERICA’S elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil. Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. President George W. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.
The former Federal Reserve chairman’s book also criticises Mr Bush for not responsibly handling spending and racking up big budget deficits.
“The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” Greenspan writes. “They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”
Today on CNN’s Late Edition, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) said he agreed with Greenspan “to a large extent,” adding, “I think it is very remarkable that it took Alan Greenspan all these many years and being out of office for stating the obvious.” Watch it:
[...]
Transcript:
BLITZER: Alan Greenspan has a new book that has just come out, Chairman Lantos, entitled, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, in which he makes a very, very sharp charge about the war in Iraq. I’ll read it to you: I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows. The Iraq war is largely about oil. Do you agree with him?
LANTOS: To a very large extent I agree with him, and I think it is very remarkable that it took Alan Greenspan all these many years and being out of office for stating the obvious. It is self-evident that this administration would not have taken the position it has had it not been for the oil issue.
Greenspan’s damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.
More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials.
[...]
The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by George Bush and British officials. In private, however, the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as ‘close to best practice’.
You could always say, why believe Alan Greenspan? Are you going to believe Bush and Blair? Well, are you?
Tony Blair: Right Hand Of God Part I
Tony Blair - Photo European ParliamentRead these exclusive extracts from Tony Blair’s new blockbuster autobiography, not only before anyone else, but before they get written!
Tony Blair - Photo European Parliament
As the world waits with bated breath for a publisher to be dumb enough to cough up a fortune for a load of pulp fiction, we bring you a prequel to Tony Blair’s unwritten autobiography “Legacy of a People’s Prime Minister”.
Cripes! Who would have thought that a mere 54 years ago, someone would come into the world who would change everything. Someone of such stature that they could bestride the world like a colossus for ten long years and all that time carry the weight, the burden, of the hand of history on their shoulder?
Listen. That was me. I did all that.
I remember well the moment I was born because my father, my old dad, said something then which has stuck with me ever since. Do you know what it was? He said, as he wiped his eyes on his old workman’s cap and struggled to form the words through his tears, he said: “One day, this child will be the people’s prime minister”.
Of course, at the time, I thought, “What does this old ship’s carpenter know? This man who goes out daily from the shipyards of Newcastle to do battle with God’s elements to put a meagre scrap of fishy on the dishy of his laddy?”
Perhaps it was then that I began to see that not only was I destined to be the most powerful man on earth, but also a fisher of people. A fisher man.
Look. Listen. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Quite frankly, let’s just start at the beginning.
Birth of the Messiah
This may seem dramatic, but for anyone who knows me, they will know it is actually quite modest. They know I am a pretty straight kind of guy.
I was born into poverty and I am not ashamed to admit it. Obviously, we had money. It was not the kind of poverty where lack of funds limited ambition. We chose poverty as a symbolic demonstration of solidarity with the working classes, the salt of the earth.
We knew in our heart of hearts, our mind of minds, that a leader would arise from the masses to save the world. Some of you may already be able to guess who that leader was.
At the time, though, I was just like any other child growing up, although, obviously, with far more talents and abilities than anyone else. It always surprised me and many others that occasionally my evident talents were not fully appreciated by everyone, which is a burden I have had to carry to this very day.
At the age of about eighteen months I had to have a word with my father. I told him that I was not prepared to fulfil my destiny with him bringing me down by stinking of fish and sawdust all the time. I told him he had better shape up and knuckle down to a proper job where he could wear a nice suit. This has been my motto ever since. Clean jobs good, dirty jobs bad. Middle class good, working class bad. Celebrity good, obscurity bad. You get the idea. Morally, you will find it a pretty sound way to live and it has certainly never let me down.
My father took my advice and managed to get qualified as a lawyer and we travelled the world, he saving poor people from oppression and challenging despots to figurative legal duels, while I conveyed the essence of my new philosophy to the masses and turned wine into vinegar.
Next time: The Shapeshifting of the Third Way
Credit: Photo European Parliament
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