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Thursday, January 07, 2010

The Playbook

Getting back to Iran, a recent article in the Times was quite illustrative on the current uprising. Apparently, a retired professor from Harvard, Gene Sharp, has written a manual on how to conduct successful and peaceful uprisings. His resume is quite impressive...from Burma to Belgrade...and has 198 points on how to move a country from dictatorship to democracy.

Obviously, each country is different and the folks in Iran that are currently trying to get rid of their resident psychotics in power do have their hands full. But the article did show a few things that they did borrow from Sharp which I found interesting.

Here are some of the tactics that are being used in Iran that are detailed in Sharp's pamphlet.

7. Slogans

18. Symbolic colors (green)

26. Paint as protest

28. Symbolic sounds

38. Marches

52. Silence

71. Consumer boycott
(Nokia, Siemens)

135. Popular nonobedience

194. Disclosing identities of
secret agents

I recommend reading the whole document which can be found here.

1 comment:

juris imprudent said...

His resume is quite impressive...from Burma to Belgrade...and has 198 points on how to move a country from dictatorship to democracy.

Impressive? Are there better points of reference in it than Burma or Belgrade? Neither one of those can be pointed at as shining examples of transition to democracy. Has he been in Mogadishu as well?