Snow on trees

Snow pencils the trees
delicate white, copying
life with frozen lines.

CJM
Switzerland, February 2012

The mountain in winter

From dark, cthonic rock
purity of ice suspends
each earthbound drop.

Chemin suisse, février 2012
CJM

How to start a revolution

A favourite song of mine is “Papa, cuéntame otra vez,” by the Spanish singer Ismael Serrano. “Dad, tell me again,” goes the lyric, about the heady days of 1968 in Paris, when youth poured on to the streets in widespread protest against cultural tyranny and inspired others to resist the power of what Isma colourfully terms “dictadores oxidados”, rusted dictators such as Franco.

But the note of the song is pessimistic. Where are the gains now? One kind of tyranny has been replaced by another and it seems as if all the promise of that Paris spring has blown away like dust. I was in Paris myself for “le petit mai” of 1970, and it was all too plainly already a subdued echo of the original student-worker uprising two years before.

Yet we are in a long-term game here, and the truth is that we are still living in revolutionary times. Some have compared the present shaking of the branches right down to the roots of our political, economic and social inheritance, to the upheaval throughout Europe in 1848.

Of more promise is that now we see emerging a new dynamic of resistance, looking back not to the bloody clashes of the past, but promoting a radically different and nonviolent manifestation of people-power. The special interest of these new principles is that they arise from the thinking of two men who, in themselves, could hardly be seen as revolutionaries.

Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy and Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous, between them have provided manifestos for change without violence on an international scale, and they are already producing widespread results. The focus of each is different, but their combined appeal to a universal sense of "enough is enough" has  fuelled and inspired movements and strategists around the globe.

Both have said, in different ways, that the end-game is not the destructive overthrow of regimes or rulers. Such results, like the downfall of Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt, deliver great joy to the oppressed, but leave a potentially dangerous vacuum after them which can simply fill up with more of the same under a different name.

No, the real aim of this approach is not to overthrow rulers, but to change how rulers behave. And in Hessel's view, not only blindly short-term rulers, but the entire culture of politics and big business in an unholy alliance of self-interest.

I thoroughly recommend Ruaridh Arrow's recent documentary about the work and ideas of Gene Sharp, which is inspirational. Here is a link to the trailer, but try to see the complete film, shown this week on the channel current.com.

So Ismael Serrano need not feel so disappointed now. Los indignados of the 15-M movement and of Democracia Real YA, are back on the streets in Spain, fillling the squares of dozens of cities, and if they follow Gene Sharp's advice, they will not give up.