How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → nonviolent action; “People Power” → in the former Soviet Bloc • TPL

A couple of New York Times articles give an overview of “people power” in light of what’s been going on in the Ukraine. Youth Movement Underlies the Opposition in Ukraine discusses the similarities between the techniques and demographics of the opposition movement in the Ukraine and other recent “people power” movements (though the article doesn’t mention Serbia’s Otpor, that’s the comparison that jumped to my mind first).

Heeding the Roar of the Street gives a run-down of some of the instances of “people power” uprisings over the past twenty-five years or so, and the elements that make for success or failure.

The U.S. government is providing assistance to the nonviolent resistance organizers in the Ukraine, as are some other organizations, for instance George Soros’s Open Society Institute. The Albert Einstein Institution has made available a Ukrainian translation of Gene Sharp’s nonviolent uprising manual From Dictatorship to Democracy.

Reason comments on the situation in the Ukraine and notes that while the demonstrators are certainly being assisted by some deep-pocketed realpolitikers,

Still, the very experience of overthrowing a government this way — of building independent institutions, diffusing power through civil society, and learning first-hand that it’s possible to say no to authority — unleashes something that’s hard for any politician to control. Those tent cities aren’t merely a demand for freedom. They’re acts of freedom themselves: of men and women voluntarily assembled both to defy the old order and to build something new.

Deutsche Welle reports that tax resistance is being used in the Ukraine’s power struggle:

With some powerhouse eastern regions halting payment of taxes to the federal coffers and trade disrupted, [President Leonid] Kuchma said the more than week-long dispute over contested presidential elections was paralyzing the ex-Soviet country.
“Another few days and the financial system could fall down like a house of cards,” Kuchma said in a meeting with [Prime Minister] Yanukovych.
“It is clear today that unremitted taxes have reached a billion hryvnas (€150 million, $200 million). Customs duties have fallen by a quarter,” said Kuchma, according to a statement from the president’s office.

Soj at Flogging the Simian brings us the latest news on “People Power” in Eastern Europe. It seems that the Ukrainian group Pora, which was instrumental in unstealing the election there this winter, is hoping to open some franchises elsewhere — Belarus and Moldova to start with.

This campaign is being encouraged by Dubya and probably underwritten by U.S. intelligence. Would that more of Dubya’s alleged democratization agenda was pursued in an empower-the-people fashion rather than in the blow-them-up style.

The geniuses in the Dubya Squad seem to think that the best path to democracy for Eastern Europeans is to rise up and overthrow their governments nonviolently, while the best path for those in the Middle East is to be bombed into rubble and then to submit to the quasi-democratic constitution we airlift in after the attack (or to forget about the whole democracy thing and patiently submit to those dictators we arm to the teeth).

With the way People Power forced the U.S. to allow for popular elections in Iraq, and with the recent People Powered collapse of the occupation government in Lebanon, there’s a possibility of a democratic renaissance in the Middle East that has no resemblance to democratization via shock-and-awe.

The Albert Einstein Institution, Gene Sharp’s nonviolent resistance think-tank, has been busily translating its how-to guides for nonviolent revolution into dozens of languages. Some of the readers of these booklets will be in the running for covert U.S. aid; others will face soldiers armed with “Made in the U.S.A.” weaponry.