They also list South Africa, where Westerners love to give themselves all of the credit via boycotts when in actuality fighting Apartheid used all means available and necessary, including escalating violent campaigns and associated political parties who were the main representatives at negotiations.
Most examples of “non-violent” liberation (in some cases I should say “liberation”) are like this, it is a PR campaign putting a microscope on their preferred group or “movement” and failing to discuss the totality or criticize the incompleteness of outcomes and how this could relate to an adherence to nonviolence.
Example: MLK was notoriously incorrect about the propaganda power of seeing participants in nonviolent direct action arrestes and hurt by cops. Most people, particularly whites, disliked King, thought he and his methods were too extreme, and opposed the movement. They won impact through organizing ground game, by turning an increasing number of people out. But their wins were incomplete and King was martyred when trying to pivot to capitalism as the main racial oppressor that would live on after the legislative concessions. The groups he was active in fell apart or became a recuperated part of the system he opposed, many of his compatriots killed or houndes into silence by the FBI and local cops, and of course, black people still face mountains of discrimination and disadvage today, particularly by the “subtle” effects of the economic system. We should potentially blame nonviolence for the collapse of the movement, as it wed itself to bourgeois electoralist concessions and primed it to accept that as sufficient rather than steeling the public for a protracted fight that would not rest until liberation, e.g. New Afrika.
I’ll go through some other examples from this database.
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Soviet Bloc Independence campaigns after the fall of the USSR. These were, by and large, primed by CIA-funded “civil society” organizations that congealed around liberalization (read: privatization) campaigns. Some employed violent coups to accomplish this while their states were weak due to a diminished Moscow. But in what world is the backing of the dominant superpower simply a win for non-violent action? The knife was already at their throats, they would receive the shock therapy treatment like Russia or Ukraine if they did not fall in line. Rather than an example of the power of grassroots non-violent organizing, these are examples of a great powers struggle. And once the liberal parties were in power, they enacted their privatization with brutal violence.
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The Arab Spring. This was not non-violent and it largely failed due to disorganization and a lack of militant discipline. It was another case of cooption snd defanging by “civil society” style groups, but different ones this time. No Arab Spring uprisings led to a better country for their people, for liberation, for the demands sought. They list Mubarak and then fail to mention Morsi and Sisi or explain why they head the new government or what the military had to do with it. They just vaguely tut-tut Egyptians about not “keeping” the “freedom” they had won.
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Latin American non-violent campaigns were essentially all crushed with violence via US-backed military coups or are otherwise misrepresented. Carlos Ibañez del Campo was removed via coordinated strikes and protests that were not non-violent. They had to fight cops. But all of this is simply called non-violence rather than organized class struggle. They list the overthrow of Pinochet without mentioning that Allende was deposed in a US-backed coups or that Chile more or less retains the Pinochet dictatorship constitution. The single man was removed from power (and allowed a comfy retirement in the US) but the system was left in place. And again, not a simply non-violent campaign and again one premised on class struggle and collective labor power.
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They incorrectly label the GDR a dictatorship and fail to accurately describe the outcomes, which were primarily the DDR illegally annexing the country, stripping it for parts, and impoverishinh the people there. They don’t mention that East Germans preferred their own country and state nor that, with these conditions imposed and left parties bsnned, East Germany is still comparatively poor and is now far right. And, again, this was something pushed and funded by the US.
Note that this article was written by George Lakey, the academic behind this database. As a tenured professor for decades and now emeritus, he has no excuse for these gross cases of ignorance / omissions. He is literally paid to think about such things, to spend the time to skeptically investigate and question his own biases. But of course, such people are recruited and funded and promoted precisely bevause of their bias and selective incompetence.
o7