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Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

Srdja Popovic

By Ali Binazir
Published: May 24, 2016
Category: Non Fiction

GUEST BUTLER ALI BINAZIR, M.D., M.Phil. is the author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible. He holds degrees from Harvard College, UC San Diego School of Medicine, and Cambridge University. He practices clinical hypnotherapy in San Francisco. Find more of his writing at his blog.

In 1992, Srdja Popovic was a cool rocker kid who loved nothing better than going to Belgrade’s Republic Square to hear Rimtutituki, his favorite punk band. But one day, the performance was different — the band seemed to be openly mocking the regime:

“You didn’t have to be a genius to understand what was going on: with the war still raging, Belgrade was filled with soldiers and tanks en route to the front, and here were the boys in the punk band mocking all this militarism, speaking out against the war, advocating a normal and happy life. And this in a dictatorship, where spitting out such slogans in public could get you in a lot of trouble.”

That’s when Popovic had a series of epiphanies:

“I understood that activism didn’t have to be boring; in fact, it was probably more effective in the form of a cool punk show than as a stodgy demonstration. I understood that it was possible, even under the most seemingly dire conditions, to get people to care. And I understood that when enough people cared, and enough of them got together to do something about it, change was imminent.”

As one of the founders of Otpor! — Serbian for “resistance” — Popovic masterminded the nonviolence movement that eventually toppled the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević. Later, he and his colleagues consulted with the nonviolent movements in the Maldives, Egypt and Burma. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

“Blueprint for Revolution” draws upon these frontline experiences: what worked and what didn’t. Comedy works — you can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time, and oppressive regimes prefer that you be afraid so they can control you. So create street theater ridiculing your adversary while being totally legal. Violence doesn’t work. You’re trying to hit a much bigger opponent at his strongest point. Also, all that dying makes it a bit unsustainable.

One of Otpor!’s most memorable and effective pieces of street theater involved white flowers stuck on turkeys:

“In one protest against Milošević… Otpor! activists in the Serbian town of Kragujevac took white flowers—which represented the dictator’s despised wife, who had worn a plastic one in her hair every day—and stuck them onto the heads of turkeys, a bird whose Serbian name is one of the worst things you can call a woman. The freshly accessorized turkeys were then let loose in the streets of Kragujevac, and the public was treated to a comical display of Milošević’s ferocious policemen running around and foolishly tripping over themselves as the birds scattered and squawked all over the place. The best part about it all was that the cops didn’t really have a choice, as to let the turkeys run free was to signal to Otpor! that their insubordination would be tolerated. But once you’ve seen a burly cop chasing a turkey, like a character from an old-fashioned cartoon, can you ever be afraid of him again? It was an example of creative thinking that turned the security forces into a punch line in front of all the morning commuters and plenty of smirking journalists who arrived on the scene to take photos, and all it took was a trip to the poultry farm and a bit of imagination.”

Popovic conveys his hard-earned wisdom with hilarity, but he also makes a point of emphasizing the rigor of nonviolent struggle. To go far, you must adhere to the holy trinity of nonviolent discipline, unity and planning:
— Discipline means training your members so they keep themselves in line. Everything they do must remain legal and nonviolent. It only takes a handful of yahoos to ruin your hard-earned reputation and popularity.
— Unity means having a message with appeal broad enough to create not just a protest, but a movement. To unite, we must also give up the thinking you know better than everyone else so you can compromise: “As we’ve learned from the Egyptians and the Maldivians, a revolution only picks up steam once two or more groups that have nothing to do with one another decide to join together for their mutual benefit.”
— Planning means knowing what your “goose egg” is — military-speak for your ultimate target. The Arab Spring fizzled in Egypt because they thought their goose egg was toppling the dictator, when it was actually democracy. That’s why you use inverse sequence planning: start with your ultimate goal, then work backwards to figure out the steps to get there.
— Finally, you must know when to stop. In 1989, the students of Tiananmen Square forgot to do that, with dire consequences: “Because the Tiananmen Square activists refused to accept the minor yet meaningful victories they’d already been handed by the party, the government panicked at the thought of further unrest and crushed the uprising. As a result, social movements in China were set back nearly two decades.”

While the anecdotes, humor and pithy wisdom of the book make it plenty worthwhile, what makes “Blueprint for Revolution” truly inspiring is its ability to render the daunting endeavor of revolution seem wholly accessible to ordinary folks. Perhaps this sentence best encapsulates that ethos: “When you think of power, remember that exercising it comes at a cost, and that your job as an activist is to make that cost rise ever upward until your opponent is no longer able to afford the charges.”

This is a manual both for restless students trying to topple a ruthless dictator, and the suburban mom trying to stop the mega-mall next door. So the next time you find yourself feeling powerless against an odious politician, corporation, or government, pick up this book instead and consider its precepts. You may just find out that you’re much more powerful than you had imagined.