CounterVortex

Gene Sharp behind Russian protests?
Gene Sharp is in the news again. Cue the paranoids and freedom-haters.

Well, Putin and Medvedev seem to have got away with a cynical little switcheroo, with the former once again president and latter about to become prime minister—a reversal of the roles they held over the past term, when Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive one. This of course follows a tainted election, and is taking place in an atmosphere of terror akin to that which has obtained in neighbor Belarus over the past several years. Now the New York Times writes, in a May 9 story entitled “Protesters in Moscow Alter Approach to Avoid Arrest”:

Since Monday, the police have been arresting any people they think even remotely resemble antigovernment demonstrators, sometimes just because they are wearing white ribbons or even white T-shirts.

In response, protesters in Moscow have adopted new tactics, “dilemma protests” and flash mobs, to avoid the mass arrests.

The evolving tactics in Moscow are not novel. In a primer on nonviolent protest, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle,” Gene Sharp, an American intellectual, described a “dilemma protest” as a performance of an action so inchoate and unorthodox that police are trapped. If they let it happen, they are encouraging it, but if they arrest people they risk looking either silly or arbitrary and unjust, which is the point.

“This type of activity enables resistance to continue against opponents who are applying extreme repression,” Mr. Sharp wrote. Acts of resistance in small groups, he wrote, are effective when larger “bases for resistance have been neutralized, controlled or destroyed by the opponents.”

How long before the conspirosphere is bleating about how the Russian protests are all an astroturf illusion conjured by this mysterious puppet-master? The countdown begins…