How to topple a dictator - Srdja Popovic

[Music] Good afternoon and proud to be here on TEDx Krov. I'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon which can and is actually changing the world, and whose name is people power. I'll start with an anecdote, or for those of you who are Monty Python lovers, a Monty Python type of sketch. Here it is.

It is December 15, 2010. Somebody gives you a bet; you look at a crystal ball and you will see the future. The future will be accurate, but you need to share it with the world. Curiosity killed the cat. You take the bet, you look at the crystal ball. One hour later, you're sitting in a building of the national TV in a top show, and you tell the story: before the end of 2011, Ben Ali and Mubarak and Gaddafi would be down and prosecuted, Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria would be either challenged or already on their knees, Osama Bin Laden would be dead and Ratko Mladic would be in hell.

I know the anchor watches you with a strange gaze on his face. And then, on top of it, you add, "and thousands of young people from Athens, Madrid, and New York will demonstrate for social justice, claiming that they are inspired by Arabs." Next thing you know, two guys in white appear; they give you the strange t-shirt and take you to the nearest mental institution.

So I would like to speak a little bit about the phenomenon which is behind what already seems to be the very bad year for the bad guys. This phenomenon is called people power.

Well, people power has been there for a while. It helped Gandhi kick the Brits from India. It helped Martin Luther King win his historic racial struggle. It helped local Solidarność to kick out 1 million Soviet troops from Poland, marking the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union as we know it. So what's new in it? What seems to be very new, which is the idea I would like to share with you today, is that there is a set of rules and skills that can be learned and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle.

If this is true, we can help this movement.

Well, the first one: analytic skills. Try where it all started—in the Middle East. For so many years, we were living with a completely wrong perception of the Middle East. It was looking like a frozen region, literally a refrigerator. There were only two types of meal there: steak, which stands for a Mubarak, Ben Ali type of military police dictatorship, or a potato, which stands for a theocratic type of regime. Everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened, and millions of young, mainly secular people stepped out to effect change. Guess what? They didn't watch the demographics.

What is the average age of an Egyptian? 24. How long was Mubarak in power? 31. So this system just expired. Young people of our world awakened one morning and understood that power lies in their hands. The rest is the year in front of us. And guess what? The same Generation Epsilon, with their rules, tools, games, and a language that sounds a bit strange to me—I’m 38 now, and can you look at the age of the people on the streets of Europe? It seems that Generation Epsilon is coming.

Now let me set another example. I'm meeting different people throughout the world, and they are, you know, academics and professors and doctors, and they always talk about conditions. They will say people power will work only if the regime is not too oppressive; they will say people power will work if the annual income of the countries is between x and z; they will say people power will work only if there is foreign pressure; they will say people power will work only if there is no oil.

I mean, there is a set of conditions. Well, the news here is that skills bring in the conflict seem to be more important than the conditions—namely, skills of unity, planning, and maintaining nonviolent discipline.

Let me give you the example. I’m coming from a country called Serbia. It took us 10 years to unite eight opposition party leaders, with their big egos, behind one single candidate against the Balkan dictator Slobodan Milošević. Guess what? That was the day of his defeat. You look at the Egyptians: day five on Tahrir Square, they get rid of their individual symbols. They appear on the street only with the flag of Egypt.

I will give you a counterexample: you see nine presidential candidates running against Lukashenko, you will know the outcome. So unity is a big thing, and this can be achieved. Same with planning. Somebody has lied to you about a successful and spontaneous nonviolent revolution—that thing doesn't exist in the world. Whenever you see young people in front of the road trying to fraternize with the police or military, somebody was thinking about it before.

Now, at the end, the nonviolent discipline, and this is probably the game changer. If you maintain nonviolent discipline, you will exclusively win. You have 100,000 people on a nonviolent march; you have one idiot or agent provocateur throwing stones. Guess what? It takes all the cameras. That one guy, one single act of violence, can literally destroy your movement.

Now let me move to another place: it’s the selection of strategies and tactics. There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow. First, you start small. Second, you pick the battles you can win. It's only 200 of us in this room; we won't call for a march of a million. But what if we organize spraying graffiti throughout the night all over Krakow City? The city will know. So we pick the tactics that accommodate the event.

Especially this thing we call the small tactics of dispersion. They're very useful in violent oppression. We are actually witnessing the picture of one of the best tactics ever used. It was in Tahrir Square, where the international community was constantly frightened that the Islamists would overtake the revolution. What they organized: Christians protecting Muslims while they are praying; a Coptic wedding, cheered by thousands of Muslims. The world has just changed the picture, but somebody was thinking about this previously.

So there are so many things you can do instead of getting into one place, shouting, and showing off in front of the security forces.

Now, there is also another very important dynamic, and this is dynamics normally analysts don’t see. This is the dynamic between fear and apathy on one side, and enthusiasm and humor on another side. It works like in a video game: you have fear high, you have status quo, you have enthusiasm higher. You see, fear is starting to melt day by day. You see people running towards the police in defiance. From the police in Egypt, you can tell that something is happening there.

And then it's about humor. Humor is such a powerful game changer. Of course, it was very big in Poland. We were just a small group of crazy students in Serbia when we made this big skit. We put a big petrol barrel with a portrait picture of Mr. President on it in the middle of the mainstream. There was a hole on the top, so you could literally come, put the coin in, get the baseball bat, and hit his face. It sounded loud, and within minutes we were sitting in a nearby café having coffee, and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing.

Well, that's just the beginning of the show. The real show starts when the police appears. What will they do? Arrest us? We are nowhere to be seen; we are like three blocks away observing it from our, you know, espresso bar. Arresting the shoppers with kids? It doesn't make sense. Of course, you could bet they've done the most stupid thing: they arrested the barrel. Now the picture of the smashed face on the barrel, with the policeman dragging them to the police car, that was the best day for photographers from newspapers they ever will have.

So, I mean, these are the things you can do, and you can always use humor. There is also one big thing about humor—it really hurts because these guys are really taking themselves too seriously. When you start to mock them, it hurts.

Now, everybody's talking about His Majesty, the Internet, and it is also a very useful skill. But don't rush to label things like Facebook Revolution, Twitter Revolution. Don't mix tools with substance. It is true that the Internet and new media are very useful in making things faster and cheaper. They make it also a bit safer for the participants because they give the part of humanity.

We are watching the great example of something else the Internet can do. It can put the price tag of state-sponsored violence over nonviolent protesters. This is a famous group we all know, made by Wael Ghonim in Egypt, and his friend. This is the mutilated face of the guy who was beaten by the police. This is how he became public, and this is what probably became the straw that broke the camel's back.

But here is also the bad news: the nonviolent struggle wins in the real world, in the streets. You will never change your society towards democracy or, you know, economics if you sit down and click. There are risks to be taken, and there are living people who are winning this struggle.

Well, million-dollar question: what will happen in the Arab world? Although young people from the Arab world were pretty successful in bringing down three dictators, shaking the region, kind of persuading clever kings from Jordan and Morocco to do substantial reforms, it is yet to be seen what will be the outcome. Whether the Egyptians and Tunisians will make it through the transition, or this will end in bloody ethnic and religious conflicts. Whether the Syrians will maintain nonviolent discipline faced with brutal daily violence, which kills thousands already, or they will slip into violent struggle and make an ugly civil war.

Will this revolution be held through the transitions to democracy or be overtaken by military or extremists of all kinds? We cannot tell. The same works for the Western sector, where you can see all of these excited young people protesting around the world, occupying this, occupying that. Are they going to become the wave of the world? Are they going to find their skills, their enthusiasm, and their strategy to find what they really want and push for reform, or they will just stay complaining about the endless list of the things they hate? This is the difference between two towns.

Now, what the statistics has—my friend's book, Maria Stephan's book, talks a lot about the violent and nonviolent struggle. There are some shocking data. If you look at the last 35 years and different social transitions from dictatorship to democracy, you will see that out of 67 different cases, in 50 of these cases, it was nonviolent struggle that was the key power. This is one more reason to look at this phenomenon.

This is one more reason to look at Generation Epsilon. Enough for me to give them credit and hope that they will find their skills and their courage to use nonviolent struggle and thus fix at least part of the mess our generation is making in this world. Thank you.