Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of
geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc
was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships
and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the
global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain—so what
do we do
The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries,
is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has
built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from
a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to
topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive,
and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning—
tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by
nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship
that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination
of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply
the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not
enough—it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use
such moments to bring down a government.
“Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous,” Ivan Marovic, a
former CANVAS trainer, told me in Washington a few years ago. “It looks
like people just went into the street. But it’s the result of months or years of
preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can
organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the
time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks.”
CANVAS is hardly the first organization to teach people living under dictatorship
the skills they can use to overthrow it; the U.S. government and its
allies have funded democracy-promotion organizations around the world
since the early years of the Cold War. Living under two dictatorships—Chile
under Augusto Pinochet and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas—and visiting
perhaps a dozen others, I had seen armies of them at work and served
as an election monitor myself. But I had never seen anything like CANVAS.
Traditional democracy-promotion groups like to collaborate with wellcredentialed
opposition parties and civil society groups; CANVAS prefers
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