Home › Forum Online Discussion › General › What do you think about these Revolutions in Africa and Asia?
- This topic has 13 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 13 years, 7 months ago by Steven.
-
AuthorPosts
-
February 20, 2011 at 2:22 pm #36762STALKER2002ParticipantFebruary 20, 2011 at 11:34 pm #36763STALKER2002Participant
New York Times Notices Gene Sharp
Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2011-02-17 14:53* Nonviolent Resistance
Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
BOSTON Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.
But for the worlds despots, his ideas can be fatal.
Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution most notably From Dictatorship to Democracy, a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.
When Egypts April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around crazy ideas about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.
When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharps 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to protest disrobing to disclosing identities of secret agents.
http://warisacrime.org/content/new-york-times-notices-gene-sharp
February 20, 2011 at 11:45 pm #36765STALKER2002ParticipantNew York Times on Gene Sharp’s Influence in Egypt, Plus Pages of Meaningless Obsession With US President
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2011-02-14 16:09* Africa
* Nonviolent ResistanceA Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGERCAIRO As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.
The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.
They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.
As their swelling protests shook the Egyptian state, they were locked in a virtual tug of war with a leader with a very different vision Gamal Mubarak, the son of President Hosni Mubarak, a wealthy investment banker and ruling-party power broker. Considered the heir apparent to his father until the youth revolt eliminated any thought of dynastic succession, the younger Mubarak pushed his father to hold on to power even after his top generals and the prime minister were urging an exit, according to American officials who tracked Hosni Mubaraks final days.
The defiant tone of the presidents speech on Thursday, the officials said, was largely his sons work.
He was probably more strident than his father was, said one American official, who characterized Gamals role as sugarcoating what was for Mubarak a disastrous situation. But the speech backfired, prompting Egypts military to force the president out and assert control of what they promise will be a transition to civilian government.
Now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt. Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world, said Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the Jan. 25 protests that set off the uprising. He spoke at a meeting on Sunday night where the members discussed sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.
If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes, he said, joking that the next Arab summit might be a coming-out party for all the ascendant youth leaders.
Bloggers Lead the Way
The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. What destroyed the movement was the old parties, said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.
By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.
After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Malhalla a demonstration by the workers families led to a violent police crackdown the first major labor confrontation in years.
Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. We shared our experience with strikes and blogging, Mr. Maher recalled.
For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharps work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubarks Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.
The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fistafter Otpors, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.
Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharps work. One of the groups organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.
The Academy of Change is sort of like Karl Marx, and we are like Lenin, said Basem Fathy, another organizer who sometimes works with the April 6 Youth Movement and is also the project director at the Egyptian Democratic Academy, which receives grants from the United States and focuses on human rights and election-monitoring. During the protesters occupation of Tahrir Square, he said, he used his connections to raise about $5,100 from Egyptian businessmen to buy blankets and tents.
http://warisacrime.org/content/new-york-times-gene-sharps-influence-egypt-plus-pages-meaningless-obsession-us-president
READ THE REST AT THE NY TIMESFebruary 23, 2011 at 4:28 pm #36767Michael WinnKeymasterSTALKER,
I welcome your posts on the forum. But you and Ribosome have the annoying habit of posting 2,3,4,or more posts in a row.
That is technically forum SPAM.
I am requesting that you and ribosome stop this practice immediately, and only post ONE post per topic, like everyone else.
If you persist, I am going to start deleting ALL of a multiple posting. Until you learn to respect the forum space, and not claim it as your personal billboard.If you want to discuss with me offline, contact me at winn@healingdao.com
Thanks for honoring my request.
February 24, 2011 at 10:21 am #36769STALKER2002ParticipantFebruary 24, 2011 at 12:29 pm #36771c_howdyParticipant…the human spiritual energy system is modular. The reason it is modular is because there are seven hyperspace co-dimensions, each vibrating at a slightly different frequency, which receive energy from space through seven vortices located along the physical body. Over a lifetime, these vortices build up human aura. Because all energy systems have to be grounded, the remaining six modules are the legs, body, arms/hands, voice, eye, and mind. When the entire group is ou-of-body as a single entity, then the soul energy powers the body in a manner similar to a battery. The soul looks like a two-inch dimeter orange ball of plasma. If the soul is removed from the body, then the body becomes paralyzedexcept for a small movement of the eyelids. Upon death, all these separate modules are assembled into a single energy being. A light cord from the pituitary gland transfers the modules into energy being for assembly. This energy information transfer is the reason that people in a near-death situation say they saw their entire life flass before them…the spiritual eye of the human energy system is located at the pituitary gland in the forehead. It has the shape of a hollow cone which is composed of the misty white energy of hyperspace. Light coming into this vortex is then transferred by a light cord to a visual energy module which is located in a co-dimension of hyperspace. Because these modules are interconnected by light cords, the mind module is able to interpret the visual pattern the eye is seeing. More importantly, the mind can give logical instructions to this spiritual eye module for it to rotate around or move in a particular direction.
-USPTO#2006072226Who is this John Quincy St. Clair?
Shy Puerto Rican Seer or what?
http://pagentsprogress.com/?p=175
HOWDY
February 24, 2011 at 1:35 pm #36773STALKER2002ParticipantFebruary 25, 2011 at 6:19 am #36775c_howdyParticipantFebruary 25, 2011 at 2:36 pm #36777STALKER2002ParticipantFebruary 26, 2011 at 12:59 pm #36779ribosome777Participantgaddafi-is-right.com
Insha’ Allah…
Barak Allahu Feekum!
Socialism is Islam
February 28, 2011 at 8:48 am #36781c_howdyParticipantWell there are at least two different places were they have Penrose’s tiling scheme in Greater Helsinki. Other one is in Heureka Science Center and more recent one is in Keskuskatu just in front of Helsinki Central Railway Station.
Though this doesn’t have much to do with qigong and Daoist practice.
It must have been much more expensive to lay tiles in this kind of style because each tile has been individually numbered. Much harder also for laborers.
HOWDY
Ps. In one of his books Stephen K. Hayes relates how S.A.S. (British Spetsnaz) guys came to visit him and they told him that they actually are the real Ninjas, I still think that Ninjas are the ultimate stalkers.
February 28, 2011 at 3:24 pm #36783STALKER2002ParticipantMarch 2, 2011 at 9:15 pm #36785STALKER2002ParticipantMarch 22, 2011 at 1:53 am #36787StevenModerator -
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.