Gene Sharp

Progressive, The, March, 2007 by Amitabh Pal

Q: You've said that you prefer people to think of Gandhi as a pragmatic tactician, rather than as a Mahatma.

Sharp: Not tactician, strategist. That's bigger and more important. Yes, people say, "Oh, Mahatma, Oh Mahatma! I'm not a saint. There's nothing I can do." That belittles him.

Q: How did you write From Dictatorship to Democracy?

Sharp: A Burmese exile asked me to write it. I had been let illegally into Burma. I didn't know much about Burmese society, and to plan a struggle, you need to plan a strategy, you need a grand superplan. You need not only an understanding of nonviolent struggle, which we almost never have, and you also need an understanding of that society and that particular situation, which only they had. I couldn't write that. So I had to write a generic booklet on the basis of a study of dictatorships and the experience of the past few decades, and an understanding of nonviolence. I had to put all of those together.

Q: I read somewhere that you were denounced by the Burmese regime.

Sharp: We conducted two workshops in Burma. From Dictatorship to Democracy was published in Bangkok, both in Burmese and in English. The SLORC military dictatorship was extremely upset and issued denunciations in newspapers and radio and television. We also managed to get From Dictatorship to Democracy translated into four so-called ethnic languages. They were horrified. They denounced us as harshly as they could and they gave out our home addresses. I've been told that the denunciations didn't stop in '95. They continued. Recently, four people were sentenced to seven years in prison--for only having a copy of From Dictatorship to Democracy, not for doing anything.

Q: To what do you attribute the fact that your work has gotten so much more play abroad?

Sharp: I'm not sure. The kind of issues that people found most urgent, situations of desperation, like in the Baltic countries, like in Burma, haven't existed here. And among many Americans, there is a great belief in violence as being omnipotent.

Q: Have you reflected on the applicability of your work in protesting the Iraq War or other Bush Administration policies?

Sharp: I don't think you get rid of violence by protesting against it. This is how I differ from the multitude of people who don't like violence. I think you get rid of violence only if people see that you have a different way of acting, a different way of struggle. Gandhi didn't organize demonstrations against the Indian National Army; he offered another way, and most of the people could follow that. The civil rights movement didn't get strength by campaigning against those people who were favoring violence. It offered another way to do the struggle. And I think this is the way. Part of my analysis is that if you don't like violence, you have to develop a substitute. Then people have a choice. If they don't see a choice, then violence is all that they really have.

Q: You haven't been disappointed by a lack of efficacy of the anti-war protests?

Sharp: The thing that has been most shocking is that the Bush Administration acted on the basis of the belief--dogma, "religion"--in the omnipotence of violence, which ignores the history of how the dictatorships under communist regimes and certain other regimes had been removed. It's by people power. That's all ignored. The assumption is an invading country can come in, remove its official leader, arrest some of the other people, and well, then, the dictatorship is gone.