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Good evening.
My name is Srdja Popovic. I used to be a revolutionary, MP, teacher, professor,
but before all I'm a great fan of a phenomenon I call "people power"
and I think that phenomenon is worth your attention today.
My great friend, Will Dobson, who introduced us here
and whose book is, by the way, in your package, read it,
will start his presentation--and I'm stealing this from you, Will, I'm paying a drink for this--
It has been never tougher being a dictator.
So when you look at the last two or three years, you can really see that things changed.
Twenty some years ago Assad's father can get inside Hama and
slaughter 20,000 people. All he needed to do is ban the foreign media from reporting.
Now wherever you see a bunch of the people demonstrating anywhere in the world, from Venezuela to Bahrain, somebody is taping.
So it's very difficult now to hide the things you want to hide,
and it's very difficult now to rule in a global world the way North Korea is ruled.
Well, that is the good news. We also have more good news.
We have Gaddafi down. We have Saleh of Yemen leaving. We have Ben Ali and Mubarak being prosecuted.
We have Assad being seriously challenged. We have nonviolent struggle growing around the globe.
When you look at 2011 and 2012, you can say that these were the bad years for bad guys.
But only on the surface, because if you look at the democracy report for the last year,
you can see that basically the level of the democracy didn't increase.
Why? Because these guys are learning.
Everywhere around the globe as we speak, there is this phenomenon we call "people power."
We were listening to the brave people from Tibet and China today. We know it's happening in Zimbabwe.
We know it's happening in Venezuela, as our host will definitely say. Thor, are you listening? Hope you do.
We have it all over the globe, and whether we are talking to the Burmese people at the Burma-Thai border,
to the Maldivians in the beaches of Sri Lanka, to the Venezuelans,
we try to learn how this phenomenon operates.
And we try to find the rules, because every single activist in the world will come to you
and say, "Oh it worked nicely in Serbia, but it's never going to work in our country,
because our regime's too oppressive, or because our people are too busy buying in Wal-Marts."
And we try to find the answer to the question, how this is possible,
and is there this little pattern which can help you build your nonviolent movement?
We came to the great conclusion--and I'm so sad that Will stole it in his book, once again--and the conclusion here is that
if the 20th century was about arms and about the arm race, the 21st century is about the education race.
So can we teach these groups how to struggle more efficiently for democracy and freedom
faster than the bad guys can learn how to fraud the elections?
How to get 65%--it's not 96% now, nobody believes in 96% anymore--but 65% with a decent opposition?
How to control media, how to close down NGOs on baseless accusations that they don't have fire extinguishers in the wall?
Because this is what they do now.
Our education lacks from the very beginning, which is elementary school.
You remember your history books? What was the level of history about the wars? This thick.
What was the level of history about the nonviolent struggle? This tiny little thing.
Let's go back through the history, and look at the consequences,
because what counts in the history are the consequences.
World War I. Started by a crazy Serb, of course.
As many other troubles, it shifted for four years, displaced and killed millions of people.
Consequences: redistribution of colonial power, and of course the most important consequence, World War II.
World War II was a completely different animal. Three big ideologies.
Two big ideologies went to bat together. They kicked the third guy, the fascism.
So now the most important consequence, instead of the million dead and displaced people, the Cold War.
So now we can look at the Cold War with all of its little proxies--in Korea, in Vietnam, and the Berlin Wall.
And by the way, talking about history, how many movies have you seen about the Vietnamese War? Dozens.
How many good movies about Martin Luther King? One?
One about Gandhi with Ben Kingsley. One really cool movie about Harvey Milk.
That's your little seedy library on nonviolent struggle.
So what I want to say is that we were talking for ten minutes but there is not one serious consequence we can count upon.
Now let us look to these guys, starting with Mohandas Gandhi.
Lawyer from India launching the movement to displace colonial power. Successful.
Consequences? The biggest colonial power losing it's biggest colony, the end of colonialism as we know it.
Second guy with the mustache is Martin Luther King,
launching the struggle for the rights of black people, engaging with a lot of white people.
The movement ended in another part of the globe in Pretoria, the last fortress of racial segregation.
Results? It is highly politically incorrect to judge anybody by the color of their skin,
and, by the way, there is a black man running the United States of America.
The third guy with the mustache--I don't know what happens with these mustaches--*** Walesa.
Shipyard worker from Gdansk. The last person in the world you think will impose political change,
and as my favorite writer Tolkien says, "It's always the hobbit,"
because even the smallest creature can change the destiny of the world.
Well this guy started a strike. The strike had one million Soviet troops.
Result: end of Soviet Union, beginning of united Europe as we know it. Now we are talking consequences.
Now let us rationalize things.
As Martin Luther King once said, there is more power in massed organized people than in the arms of the few men.
Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a nonviolent group.
How true? 323 cases of wars and nonviolent campaigns compared in a great book by American academic Erica Chenoweth.
Results? You want to wage a war? Your chances are about 26% that you will win.
You want to wage a nonviolent campaign? Double that big.
Even better, when it comes to democracy, you want a Syrian or Libyan scenario? You have about 4% chance to end up in a stable democracy.
You want to try a nonviolent struggle? About 41%. Because more people participate, more people become the shareholders of the change.
Now the lessons learned. First of all, these are the principles of success we need to have in nonviolent struggle.
You want to win? You need unity. Then, as Will Dobson said, you need planning.
Sorry to disappoint the lovers of big crowds on TV. There is no such thing as a spontaneous and successful nonviolent revolution.
You want a nonviolent revolution? You want a plan for it.
Nonviolent discipline, because only one single drunk idiot throwing a stone compared to 100,000 people in a march--
who's going to be on tomorrow's cover page of the New York Times? That guy.
So these are the things we learn. We are also learning the key dynamics.
You have these status quo powers like fear, apathy,
and then there are ways to break it down, to build everybody's enthusiasm
The power of humor. Why are these kids so powerful?
Why banging the big barrel with a dictator's face will bring you all the cover pages,
all the support from the people, and all the anger from these big people.
Because these people standing in power for too long start taking themselves really seriously.
It ended up with Putin banning the toy protest in Barnaul, Siberia, because the toys are not citizens of Russia.
That was the official explanation, but how does this seem to you? As a powerful man, or somebody afraid of toys?
We also learn about successful strategies and tactics, what works in one place will not work in the other.
Do not try to run out the railways with hundreds of thousands of people where the live rounds would be shot.
What you want to look at are the low risk tactics where people can participate and still get away with it.
Education, education, education.
Now the questions. What can we learn and how can we teach people these tactics?
I spent the last ten years with a bunch of crazy guys from Serbia and Georgia and Ukraine and South Africa and the Philippines
meeting the troublemakers and trying to empower them.
We learned that there are ways to empower them, but what if the new technologies can help us?
What if we can build online education with the help of people from companies like Google or Facebook?
What if we can reach more people with this little truth?
So here we are thinking on what we can learn.
We were reading so much about the Facebook revolution but trust me, the revolution is something you win in the real world.
At the end of the day, is teaching people power about to change the world?
What is this thing you can offer to the groups worldwide rather than foreign military intervention and sanctions,
which is unfortunately on the top of the repertoire of a majority of the countries?
What if investing in the knowledge of these groups
and teaching them how to effectively fight for democracy and freedom is far more successful?
What if Benjamin Franklin was right when he said that there are three types of people on this planet.
There are unmovable people, there are moveable people, and there are people who move.
We know people who move. Help us teach them how to move faster and more efficiently than the oppressors of this world.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.