The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (38 page)

Once he had the program up and running, Helvey invited Sharp to come to Burma to evaluate the training sessions. For Sharp, this was a new experience; he was curious to see his own ideas applied. So he flew to Bangkok, where Helvey had someone waiting for him. From there, they traveled by truck to Mae Sot, a Thai-Burma border town. In Mae Sot, they slipped into Burma and made their way to the Moei River. Sharp boarded a cigarette boat sent by the opposition that would secretly transport him to Manerplaw, then the strategic base of the Karen National Union. “I was in Manerplaw and the radio came on,” recalls Helvey. “We just got a report. There is a boat headed in this direction. It’s got a white man and a big suitcase.”

Helvey went down to the river. A boat came around the bend with Sharp on board. It docked, and the professor came ashore. Helvey smiled. “Dr. Sharp, I presume.”

He fondly remembers those days in the Burmese jungle, and he thinks it meant a lot to Sharp, too. The training program impressed him. Moreover, Sharp was amazed to find members of the Burmese resistance who could quote his work verbatim. One person in particular, a university professor and member of the opposition, had anxiously looked forward to meeting Sharp. “I think Gene found nirvana,” says Helvey. “Here in this little jungle outpost he meets a guy who has read his book and could ask him specific questions. It was the most beautiful thing. These two professors walking down this shady path for hours talking. Gene made a big hit over there. And of course, that’s when he started writing
From Dictatorship to Democracy
.”

Sharp had spent years studying the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. He had written tomes on how nonviolent strategy
could exploit a dictatorship’s weaknesses. But the work that people know best is a slim, seventy-nine-page essay that he began writing in the Southeast Asian jungle. The Burmese had made clear that as valuable as Sharp’s insights were, they needed something that distilled his wisdom in a concise volume, something they could share and disseminate easily.
From Dictatorship to Democracy
became that work.
It has been published in more than twenty-five languages and freely downloaded from the Internet hundreds of thousands of times. In it, Sharp is straightforward and unsentimental. His essay never examines or targets a specific regime, but rather offers a generic analysis on how to unseat any dictator. Call it Machiavelli for the people.

Early in the essay, Sharp makes two simple but central observations. First, violence almost always favors dictators. “
Whatever the merits of the violent option … one point is clear,” he writes. “By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.” Second, the people have tremendous power of their own. “
Dictators require the assistance of the people they rule,” writes Sharp. In other words, a ruler cannot rule if the people do not obey. Any rulers, even dictators, govern through the consent of the people. When enough people withdraw their consent, a dictator can no longer remain. He then goes on to identify the sources of power for dictatorships, the common vulnerabilities of these regimes, and the way in which nonviolent strategy can exploit these weaknesses to strip a government of its legitimacy, raising the probability of its demise. Despite a broad and reaching analysis, the essay is sometimes startling in its specificity. Sharp, for example, identifies seventeen common weaknesses of dictatorships. (They include a routinized system unable to adapt, a fear among subordinates of reporting information that may displease the regime’s leadership, an erosion of the ideology, and an increasingly inept bureaucracy.) Many people think of nonviolent campaigns as being either strikes or protest marches. Sharp pinpoints 198 specific methods of nonviolent protest, including mock funerals, skywriting, and the withdrawal of bank deposits. Throughout, he stresses the need for preparation and planning, moving from low-risk, confidence-building actions that achieve limited objectives to bolder initiatives. It is fair to say that for many activists,
From Dictatorship to Democracy
is close to scripture. In the course of my reporting, I met Venezuelans, Iranians, Tibetans, and Egyptians who could quote it chapter and verse.

On a dreary winter morning in February 2010, I visited Sharp at his home in East Boston. He lives in a simple town house that doubles as the offices of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Sharp founded in 1983 to help promote his work. The organization is no more than two small adjoining rooms on the town house’s first floor. Its staff is Sharp and one assistant.
Sharp has lived at this address since 1968, when he found the building abandoned and bought it for $150. Although the place remains in modest disrepair, he says it is nothing like the condition in which he found it. “
The house was in ruins,” Sharp tells me. “When it rained, the water went through the back wall’s bricks and made a lake on the third floor. There was no heating. No toilets.” Today, he lives on the second floor, rents the third floor to tenants, and keeps the fourth floor as an indoor greenhouse to “help clear my head.”

The first-floor office is dimly lit. The only light comes from two desk lamps that shine small spotlights on his immediate work space. The room itself is almost impossible to navigate, covered as it is with towering stacks of books, boxes, and what appears to be an old aquarium no longer in use. Besides a few oriental wall hangings, there is a single framed picture of Gandhi. Occasionally, while we talk, a small tan dog—“she is named Sally, but I call her good girl”—emerges to be petted and then disappears behind a stack of books. He recently adopted her from an animal rescue north of Boston after his Great Dane, Caesar, passed away.

It is hard to imagine Sharp as a dangerous man. At eighty-two, he is stooped, speaks in a whisper, and walks with the help of a cane. But for many of the world’s dictators, he is the closest thing to public enemy No. 1, a threat worthy of diatribes and denunciations.
Burma’s generals call him an “American spy” who engages in “dirty and wicked psychological warfare.”
Hugo Chávez has alleged that the octogenarian is in league with the CIA and is attempting to overthrow his government. The Iranian government took Sharp seriously enough that it requested his books. (“We sent them,” he says.) The Iranians have allegedly set up a unit devoted to spotting and countering the techniques
of strategic nonviolence. He has been denounced or had his books banned in Belarus, China, Russia, and Vietnam, to name a few places. Sharp sees all the attacks, charges, and government-backed conspiracy theories as a positive. “It’s a good sign,” he says. “It means that the knowledge that this kind of struggle can be powerful has gotten through to them. It’s a compliment.”

The strange truth is that Sharp is probably better known in the world’s least free places than anywhere else. On the day that I visit, his assistant, Jamila Raqib, tells me she had just received a new request from Venezuela. Someone there was interested in doing a local printing of Sharp’s work. Most people get their hands on his writing by downloading it from the organization’s Web site. Typically, she says, they have no idea of the identity of those who contact them seeking books or reprints. “
If people do contact us directly, they often do so anonymously. It is one thing to pick up a book and read in your own space. It’s another to be in touch with a U.S.-based organization that has this high profile, has been denounced by your government and linked to the White House and all these other crazy things,” she says. “People are very intelligent. They know the risks they should be taking and what they shouldn’t do.”

Raqib knows, for example, that Sharp’s work is popular in her native Afghanistan. (She fled the country with her parents when she was five years old in the wake of the Soviet invasion.) “[Afghans] find very attractive the idea that we actually can be responsible for our own future. We can be self-reliant,” she says. “We don’t have to wait for outsiders, because outsiders have only caused harm. We are on our own here, and violence has not worked.”

Although the demand may come from all over, there is one refrain they hear time and again. “ ‘This book was written for us.’ We have heard that a number of times,” Raqib says. “It’s an indication of the quality of the analysis.”

For his part, Sharp is optimistic. He thinks it is becoming harder to be a dictator today and, more important, the people who are challenging regimes are getting smarter. “We are learning more about the means of struggle and how to wage them skillfully, as well as what not to do.” Nonetheless, he is struck by the number of people who take up such dangerous work and still fail to think strategically. “The
advocates of political freedom aren’t using their heads as much as they need to,” says Sharp. “This is tremendous power, and people can grasp it. But they must do their homework.”

Sometimes, they also need teachers.

It is pouring rain in South Charleston, West Virginia. I am sitting on Bob Helvey’s back porch, which sits high up in a dense neighborhood overlooking the Kanawha River. We are drinking our second cup of coffee as he tells me the basics of training democratic activists in nonviolent conflict. His coffee cup says a little about his past. It reads, “Burma Democracy Leader,” and shows a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the country’s democratic movement. After Burma, Helvey went on to train activists in Belarus, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Palestine, and Zimbabwe, among others. He says he thinks one of the reasons he ended up training so many groups is that people were intrigued to hear a military man discuss nonviolent strategy. “I think it has opened doors,” says Helvey, referring to his military experience. “People think, ‘What’s this infantry officer doing teaching this shit? We better listen to him. He may be crazy, but we better listen to him.’ ”

What they hear is an expert tactician take three decades of military service and apply it to principles of defeating a dictator nonviolently. He teaches them the rudiments of thinking strategically, down to the way they see their streets and neighborhoods. “Life is nothing more than pattern analysis. Planning involves the habit of pattern analysis, and every living thing lives by a pattern,” says Helvey. “We need to know what that pattern is so that when it changes, the first question we ask is, ‘Why?’

“When the young policeman walks away from the pretty girls to the ugly old woman, I want to know why. Maybe she is an informant? Maybe she is a drug pusher? I want to know why,” Helvey continues. “And that’s one of the things you want to teach the people you are training. That you are always looking for an opportunity. Then you start to develop a menu of opportunities you can pull from because you have done this pattern analysis.”

He teaches them how to make a strategic estimate that establishes the movement’s objective or mission. While quoting Clausewitz and the British strategist Liddell Hart, he teaches them how to break down the regime’s sources of power and understand the difference between its capabilities and its intentions. He offers small pieces of wisdom from past conflicts. (For example, there is tremendous value in recruiting the children of generals and police officers to your movement. “Generals don’t like to attack crowds with their children in the front ranks.”)

But if you take a course from Bob Helvey, the thing you may understand best is the power of propaganda. In a contest where you are unarmed, your message is critical. “How do we want them to see our movement?” asks Helvey. “We want to convert these people into believing that this movement for democratic change is nonthreatening to different groups, especially military people.” An opposition group’s propaganda is often its first assault on a regime’s legitimacy, and you must ultimately destroy its legitimacy. “My personal view is that the greatest weapon is propaganda,” says Helvey. “People don’t like to use that word, because it sounds cheap. They like to say ‘media relations’ or ‘PR.’ But it is all propaganda.”

Helvey takes the example of Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. On its face, the Venezuelan case is a difficult one. Chávez’s government is able to claim more legitimacy than most authoritarian regimes because of its success at the ballot box, even if that success is highly engineered. Still, Helvey believes a propagandist has many openings to exploit. First would be Chávez’s reliance on foreign governments, especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. “Who are these fucking foreigners? Are you telling me we can’t train our own people to become medical doctors? We are buying fucking Russian jets, Russian missiles, Russian planes, instead of training our own doctors. Are you telling me that we can’t train our own people to be security officers for our own country? Why are we depending on the only Communist state in the Western Hemisphere to staff our government? Oh, boy, we got a good one here,” says Helvey, rubbing his hands together. “Tell your propagandist, ‘Get on this jerk! Never let go of it. Every time something happens, blame it on those fuckheads. If there is a flood somewhere, that isn’t an act of God; that is an act of incompetence on the part of the government.’ ”

Helvey trains his students to be exceptionally disciplined, especially when it comes to their message. “No spokesman or representative of the movement should ever say anything hateful about anybody. Don’t hate the policeman, don’t hate the intelligence officer, because, as a democratic movement, we want to pull those people into our camp, and we can’t do that spewing hate,” he says. “We have to have a majority to win. Strategic nonviolent movements are not minority movements. If hate has to come, you focus it as narrowly as possible. One man: Mugabe. If you want to hate somebody, don’t hate everybody in the regime. Hate Mugabe.”

And there is another point on which Helvey counsels his students: the need for patience. “The thing about strategic nonviolent conflict is that I like to use the word ‘yet’—we haven’t won yet,” says Helvey. “Using the word ‘yet’ means the struggle is continuing. Like any long war, you have good days and you have bad days. The thing about insurgents, which basically is what opposition movements are, is you don’t lose until
you
say you have lost. We determine when we lose, the government doesn’t. That is our decision to make, not yours. And that is a powerful message if you can get the people to understand what that means. We decide when it’s over.”