Abstract
Amid a widening crackdown against critics of Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos and his 36-year authoritarian rule, the jailing of a book club struck observers as a particularly naked assault on free expression. “The Angolan regime is afraid of books,” wrote Angolan journalist and Index on Censorship award winner Rafael Marques de Morais. But why?
Index put the question to Sharp, whose works – which also include Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle and his three-volume opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action – have been suppressed by authoritarian regimes around the world, from Burma to Belarus, Iran and China.
“They have good reason to be afraid,” said Sharp. “Some words are more powerful than guns.”
Political power, in Sharp’s view, is never taken; it is only given by the people. From Dictatorship suggests 198 ways people can stop giving.
That idea has animated 87-year-old Sharp for six decades, from his own imprisonment for civil disobedience in the 1950s, through an academic career researching theories of non-violent struggle, to his establishment in 1983 of the Albert Einstein Institution, which supports research and education to translate those theories into action around the world.
Einstein wrote the introduction to Sharp’s first book, a study of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent tactics. The young Sharp, facing prosecution for civil disobedience in his stance against US conscription during the Korean conflict, had written to the eminent scholar and pacifist seeking advice – and a favour.
Gene Sharp pictured in in his office in Boston in 2009
Credit: Elise Amendola/AP/Press Association Images
“He supported people who were standing up for free speech, and who were in trouble because of that,” Sharp said. Einstein had his work blacklisted in Nazi Germany, was targeted under McCarthyism when he moved to the US, and spoke up for human rights throughout his career. “So I wrote him a letter and said, ‘Excuse me, but I’m about to go to jail. And by the way, I have this manuscript of a book on how Gandhi used civil disobedience and non-violent struggle.’”
To Sharp’s surprise, Einstein agreed to write the introduction and the two continued their correspondence until Sharp went to prison. The book, with Einstein’s introduction, was not published until after the physicist’s death.
“I never met him,” said Sharp, who is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the fourth time this year. “I should have, I guess. The executor of his estate, Otto Nathan, scolded me later for not going down to Princeton. But I was also getting ready to go to jail.”
Today, Sharp believes his understanding of Gandhi was in some ways naive. Like others, Sharp thought that Gandhi’s followers converted some opponents through the moral weight of their non-violent tactics. “I believed you could melt their hearts,” said Sharp, palms pressed in supplication below sarcastic puppy-dog eyes.
The classic example was Gandhi’s first campaign of mass civil disobedience, against caste-based segregation in the Indian village of Vykom. Sharp said he now agrees with political scientist Mary King, whose recent book Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India argues that the Vaikom Satyagraha, as this practice of resistance was known, did not melt the hearts of the upper castes; small concessions were instead squeezed from the state through tactical pressure and compromise.
The tactical, rather than moral, dimensions of non-violent struggle have defined Sharp’s later work. Sharp said he disdains violence not as a pacifist but as a strategist. “The idea that power comes out of the barrel of a gun,” he said, “was an idiotic statement from someone who didn’t know anything about how to win a revolution.”
In 1993, Burmese dissident U Tin Maung Win asked Sharp to contribute to his underground journal, New Era. Sharp told Tin Maung Win he was unfamiliar with Burma but offered to write in general terms about strategic non-violence. The result was From Dictatorship to Democracy, which has since been translated into more than 40 languages and praised by democracy activists from Serbia to Indonesia to Ukraine to the Arab Spring.
Sharp’s influence has led critics from authoritarian regimes and the far left to accuse him of fomenting “soft coups” on behalf of the US government. In response, 138 scholars and activists, including Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, signed a 2008 letter supporting Sharp and rejecting any link between the Albert Einstein Institution and US foreign policy.
Sharp is used to suspicion. Soviet agents trailed him through the Baltic states in 1991, Chinese agents outside Tiananmen Square in 1989. “They were quite friendly,” he recalled. “Spoke excellent English. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? And so forth.”
The Albert Einstein Institution does not seek out activists, Sharp said, and it offers its materials to anyone who asks. In a statement expressing concern about the detention of Sharp’s readers in Angola, the institution offered its resources to Angola’s president. If Dos Santos is truly worried about a coup, the statement read, “We recommend that he read our publication, The Anti-Coup, on how non-violent action can deter and defeat coups d’état.”
In recent years, the institution has operated out of Sharp’s home in East Boston, a working-class neighbourhood of immigrants adjacent to Logan airport. The comfortable, shabby offices befit a retired academic, but Sharp has no interest in retirement. He and the institute’s five-person staff are working hard to collect, revise and publish six decades of work, driven by an unspoken urgency to keep up all the work while Sharp still has the energy.
The institution’s website offers most of Sharp’s works for free. From Dictatorship to Democracy, which was originally smuggled into Burma by river, can now be downloaded from anywhere in the world. In the last year, they say the site has tallied visits from all but four countries.
“This new technology is much more dangerous,” Sharp said. And dictators know it.
“The regimes have become more aware of my writing,” he said. “Maybe≠ because I became more explicit about how you can get rid of these regimes, the fact they’re not permanent, they don’t last forever. They’re on their way out.
“And they don’t like news like that.”
© Alan Leo
