Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World
It proposes many interesting strategies and ideas on how to protest in dictatorships. Be subtle, use humor and focus your message on the most common people. Don't call for democracy, free speech or anything like that. You will be branded as foreign forces. Find something every Russian believes in like peace or the brotherly bonds between Russiand and Ukrainians. Pick small battles to win first.
One of commentators said something like: - How is it possible, she's lying, here's no way to get hematoma on abdomen! And reply to him was: - When you will be jailed, you will learn: how is it possible.
So, when you recommending books like this, from the people who wasn't beaten even once, li looks hilarious. How to make revolution with lego figures and funny pictures, wow.
How to get your legs broken during arrest or lose one eye, do you want to know it? Even without new laws. How to get tuberculosis in prison in 30 days? How to get real imprisonment for a years for fabricated felony?
I see a kind of schizophrenia here: if Putin is dictator, he's already can do what he want without approval from electorate, but then I see here accusation for me that I and people like me didn't rid off him. It's not so easy to do, you may know.
More to say, when daughter of some corrupted govenor of one of Russia regions coming to USA, she got visa for extremely talented people, because she owns some startup (captured by her rich daddy).
If I will try to come to USA, I must pass TOEFL, pass through interview for Amazon/Google/whatever and then work, work, and pay rent and smile, and work again. I will have no time for anything except angry dislikes in youtube.
USA and EU made no way for me and people like me in Russia to be involved in politics while being in opposition to my government. It all looks like call "run into Kremlin wall and try to break it with your head, why you didn't it yet?".
All attention is focused on Ukraine. They need all the help they can get. But that means forgetting that Belarusians voted to get rid of Lukaschenko and then were violently supressed. It means ignoring the Russians that are protesting even when they know they're risking everything. I saw a video of a Russian guy protesting alone in Kursk. That's an example of bravery.
I really think the Voice vs Exit[0] thing is very important here. If you can't be heard and can't succeed then you go elsewhere. Both at a personal level, but also at a grand economic level. If all the highly trained people make lives outside Russia, Russia will shrink to become less significant.
I will finish with a couple of short quotes from the book Why Nations Fail[1] (an incredibly dense read, but worth it).
> “NATIONS FAIL TODAY because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction.” ― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
> “A businessman who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated, or entirely taxed away will have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations.” ― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
[0]: https://genius.com/Balaji-srinivasan-silicon-valleys-ultimat... [1]: http://whynationsfail.com/buy/
Part of this is the psychology of the abused spouse frankly - yeah he’s scary and terrible, but he’s on ‘my side’
“Putin is king! Glory to USSR!”
“Synonyms for conflict may contain the words: war, special operation”
“Is the special operation over yet? My mother wants to see my brother”
“What’s next Vladimir?”
Subtle civil disobedience that the cops will overlook until it’s too late (I’m making a lot of assumptions here)
Make it so subtle that it feels like it’s a waste of time to arrest. Until everyone is doing it
Oh, you sweet summer child.
After Putin cried that the sanctions are an act of war they reply that no - it is just a limited special economic operation.
The term's already become a meme in some places on the Internet.
I personally lost any hope to change it one year earlier after participating in pro-Navalny protests. Now, I just don’t want to have anything in common with this government. I’m choosing another one. And I’m not going to pay taxes to Russian government anymore
I can recommend Estonia, though it might feel too close with the current war. Also I love all the Nordic countries (haven't had the opportunity to visit Finland yet).
If you speak English and you're in IT then Australia is also a very good option -- you'll need to be sponsored, but IT doesn't have too many troubles. Great weather and AU political problems are tiny in comparison (though every country has it's challenges).
From my perspective this is the only meaningful change you can make. If my government ever starts getting in my way too much I'll find another one. Voting with my feet literally. We have this luxury as in-demand professionals. Kind of hard for me to empathize with Russian developers when they had decades to make this move, it's not like everything changed a few weeks ago.
That being said, it's hard to blame anyone. Staying and fighting leads to bloodshed, for example when the "green movement" started in Iran in 2009 [0] after the election, the government immediately started firing live rounds at people, arresting protestors and blacking out all communication from the outside world. Both my cousins were beaten in the Evin prison[1] for months and we were without any news from them for months.
Meanwhile, as a Middle Eastern living in the west, the hostility I experienced were enormous during those years and I expect the same to happen to Russian people now. Just look at the comments in the thread, much civility is already lost (and HN is one of the better communities).
Living under a dictatorship is suffocating. My heart goes out to all those suffering.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Green_Movement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evin_Prison
But at least you prevent said country from becoming a global threat. Russia minus its professional class would spiral into total irrelevance in a matter of weeks.
Could you explain? I know people in usa are afraid of religious extremists. but I always assumed if you are comings from Iran, Liban, moroco … and speaking good english they will be friendly to you.
That is because majority of american don’t even know where on a map Iran is :-)
I personally had amazing personal projects going on and finally started to work in game development industry. My dream was to play games and make games. I wanted to get current projects to completion and then look for relocation options.
All these terrible events just taken us by surprise. A lot of my friends are anti-regime, but no one including me expected Putin to go batshit crazy and start full scale war. Of course all we could do is to run.
Also lets be honest here - not all of us are top-notch programmers and finding job and passing interviews is completely different skill that need to be trained. I for instance simply don't have any official degree and while this make no difference for freelancer it's handicap me greatly when it's come to getting work visa.
Also even if I am programmer my girlfriend is not automatically become one too. Finding a good job for her as English teacher (who is not a native speaker) would be much harder in EU / US. So this will put extra strain on my an her life.
Rebuilding social circle and finding new friends also takes a long time. Especially if you dont want to stick to communities of other immigrants.
PS: now this all doesn't matter because we turned into refugees. Yeah we're in much better situation compared to my friends in Ukraine who wake up to bomb shells, but our past life is still destroyed by Mr Putin and his regime.
Things are, The Reality is, much more complicated.
What countries are the best/easiest for immigration?
Technically it should be possible but in reality renouncing requires an exit interview and the US State Department has refused to schedule exit interviews for more than a year.
Pretty much no country will let you renounce your citizenship until you already have a citizenship (not permanent residency, actual citizenship) of another country. This is done to prevent people from becoming "stateless". And the process for renouncing the US one is much simpler and easier compared to a lot of countries out there.
Not trying to be condescending or snarky here, but if that quote accurately represents the level of knowledge you have about immigration processes in general, I suggest you do way more research before you actually attempt to immigrate or even temporarily move to another country.
Source: me being a naturalized American citizen who has been (unsuccessfully) trying to get rid of his Russian citizenship for many years.
It's not easy in the sense that you'll just get a citizenship - but I have many former co-workers that went to Canada, US, Australia, etc., some got the permanent visa/citizenship, some are in the process.
Maybe it used to be that way in the past, but not these days.
When I tried to go to Ireland a year ago, entering the country was impossible due to a multi-year long COVID travel ban. Schengen visas were useless — you needed a job offer AND a job permit just to enter the country.
I passed a bunch of interviews, received preliminary offer from one Irish company, but got rejected during security screening (I have never learnt why). Decided against trying again, because Irish job permit queue was 6 months long and growing.
This was a year ago. Right now it is hardly possible to leave Russia at all — leaving by ground is denied by Russian border forces (remnant of COVID restrictions, which has been repurposed to enact impromptu iron curtain). Leaving by air is impossible because most companies stopped flying, airspace is closed and foreign governments are mass-arresting leased aircrafts. As if that weren't enough, Russian government has enacted a total flight ban, effective starting today.
Even if you somehow leave a country and go to Turkey/Serbia/Georgia with piddly $10000, — then what? You'd have to quickly find a job, rent a place to live, and get a residence permit before you are booted out of country. All of that under extremely hostile conditions, such as not having a bank account and being unable to speak the local language.
With regards to Serbia at least, while I'm not from there it's a neighbouring country, Belgrade isn't that bad and working for westerners should be the same as working from Russia, minus a few hours of TZ depending on where you are from. English should be decent as well with the younger crowd, especially in IT, some older folk know Russian. And 10000$ would get you settled for months, people there don't make that in a year on average. Don't know much about the visa/bank account issues - maybe you could open a business and setup a bank account through that.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is also super cheap and a wild west regarding laws - people buy anything there - diplomas, citizenship. Also have working banking system. But standard of living is considerably worse.
But friends, family and loved ones where they live
How can I not look at Russian society, with a far more controlled environment, and think "how can Russians not know about it? How are they so easily deceived?", well, how are -we-, in the West, so easily deceived? It cuts both ways - but at least Russians have more of an excuse.
I am hoping you and your people find kindness wherever you decide to flee to. It is already difficult enough to uproot yourself (and your family), with an uncertain future, leaving friends and memories of better days behind. We need to advocate for Ukrainian refugees - those who are fleeing Putin's war of aggression - but we cannot forget that, while Ukrainians are the worse off in this conflict, many Russians will also be victims. Many Russians will not be able to return home. And many Russians may see friends and family prosecuted for opposing Putin's war.
It is perfectly possible for there to be two different parties, each of which (to different degrees of course) make bad decisions that hurt innocent people. Being honest about this and calling it out is not the same thing as equating what the "bad guy" and the "good guy" do.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-uk...
Even one arrest record is enough to be disqualified for or complicate any visa or moving abroad plan :(
But I guess that will never happen :-(
However, the thing that works in younger peoples favour is they are less isolated.
Generally people are very social when young and then as life and routine sets in they stop socialising as much and when they do it’s usually with the same people.
Isolated people don’t have the personal experience to be aware that the ads on Facebook are just ads and not the actual conversation going on around them.
And therefore we have this perception that old people are so dumb and easily fooled, while IMO it’s purely the social aspect that’s at work.
(There is also some contribution from lack of technical literacy but honestly even some of my 30s IT coworkers lack that).
My favorite explanation of this was an analogy to cars. Early drivers had to be mechanics, able not only to drive, but maintain and service their cars. Modern drivers just need to know how to drive, and often have no idea how a car works...
I think that maps well to computers. Early geeks had to know how to build, upgrade, program, network, etc. Current users just have to know how to _use_ an application and often have little idea of the 'behind the scenes' stuff..
But I have an aunt who is slightly older and rebuffs attempts to broach political discussion. And she is, so far as I can tell, stable and content with things, even after the passing of her husband. I recall visiting when I was young and the husband carefully managing the TV remote to mute commercials - there was a definite control over exposure and conscious decisions about faith that my own parents would never attempt and only enacted on us children haphazardly.
With people of roughly my generation, I can see the long-term indoctrination creeping up as they settle into careers. It comes and goes more easily early in life, for sure. By eighteen you're molded roughly into whatever society said you should be, and the onset of that is precisely the thing that makes so many teens commit suicide, and so many others foot soldiers to some ideology. But afterwards things become a little more self-inflicted, built off subconscious voices trying to justify how you ended up where you are. Many people do make a break away into "standing for something" that can take them away from the political sphere and engage with life in a more concrete way like my aunt. The terrified, reactionary elderly, I think, never got there, and ended up in a place where they have no pursuits or rules of conduct that would ground them and make them reconsider their concerns about new information. Once you're attached to bad ideas and you have a media source to reinforce them, all your energy starts going to their defense and you have nothing left for yourself - you just hate everything all day and your personal decline only motivates going deeper and rejecting friends and family; additional socialization by itself doesn't do it, it leads to "drama at the dinner table" as the entire conversation is pulled towards their topics of choice; every word out of their mouth inevitably leads back to their attachments. It's really on society to cut off the supply and deescalate, but for now, the war continues, I suppose.
> The younger generations, with their higher level of fluid intelligence, are able to approach things with better critical thinking
Personally I try to write "are more often able to", or "tend to ...", so it sounds more bell-curvish
edit: that goes for myself as well. I'm lazy enough not to verify stuff unless I think its 'important'...
You may be surprised how strong propaganda is. I spoke with quite a few people recently and it is mind boggling. Propaganda victims cannot answer some basic questions such as - “If Ukrainians are nazis why we don’t see millions of refugees?” The problem is they are not ready to get the answer. Instead they became emotional and stressed and start yelling at you for no good reason. I guess this is uncontrolled reaction to prevent their imaginary world from collapsing.
In the US, where I live, we also have tension between the generations, but it has more to do with changing demographics. There's nothing comparable to what Russians experienced when the Soviet Union fell.
Tensions between generations are probably the rule rather than the exception, at least over the last few hundred years of rapid change.
In my circles everyone below 40 years of age is strongly anti-regime. Especially below 30. Many of them have left the country (everyone who could basically, and one has bought the ticket and is waiting to leave soon).
Above that age group it's hit or miss, and depends whether or not the person in question watches television and bothers to read one of the few remaining independent news outlets.
Pretty much everybody above 60 strongly believes in whatever bullshit Putin is saying this week. Although there is one exception that I know of.
The sanctions in Russia could build resistance to the war in Russia, but they could also backfire if the Western governments do not set reasonable criteria for removing the sanctions. So far they have not indicated how to end sanctions.
If Western governments will only remove sanctions if Putin is thrown out, than I fear that there is little chance the war will end soon. The Syrian sanctions will never end without regime change so the sanctions are purely punitive.
I suggest folks re-read about the Cold War. A good short one with the basics is The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (there's many, many other topics in that series). Why? Because the Cold War is a direct result of diverging histories, needs, ideologies between the U.S. and USSR's methods of imposing their view on the vulnerable world. That's probably going to start happening again with Russia as a lesser influence than it was in the first Cold War, and China as a bigger influence in the next one.
I really wish the U.S. would do more to give the rest of the world more power and responsibility for solving these problems in the U.N. The super powers need to be held accountable too if we are to avoid proxy wars. The super powers won't engage in direct conflict because the risk of nuclear escalation is too high. The problem remains with proxy wars.
In the context of the US antiwar movement? Most leftists, even those that have deep mutual disagreements with each other, have long held that NATO expansionism is harmful. But I've been seeing a lot non-leftists use points a-d) to argue that the leftists are wrong. Have you seen this and how would you resolve this?
My own answer has been that NATO is kind of like a road system. Stop building so much and polluting our forests and lands. But if there's an avalanche, it is ethical to use the road to evacuate people. But I still feel I don't understand it fully and I'm not sure what ought to happen or what ought to have happened between NATO versus any country in a situation like Ukraine's.
I came in through left-wing organizing and I've worked with a few groups. Some are officially non-ideological except for being anti-war (but if I had to place them I'd say liberal-left) like Peace Action https://www.peaceaction.org/. They have a lot of members form the Vietnam era Peace movement.
Other visible contributors to the anti-war movement are socialist orgs like DSA and ANSWER Coalition. DSA has a bigger base, but ANSWER really tends to be ahead on organizing street events. Then there are various solidarity groups for countries like El Salvador or Palestine. The Latin American solidarity groups from the Dirty Wars of the 1980s still exist.
These left leaning groups would never work with right-wing groups, and for what it's worth you almost never see right-wing groups try to seriously organize anti-war, or at least they way they organize/lobby is very different.
If it is true that a Russian should have protested and gone to prison, in order to avoid Putin starting this war or the next war - isn't it also true every human is somehow fractionally responsible for not having tried to assassinate him? Like, how could that even work? To what degree are nationals responsible for the actions of their leaders? And when they fail to act, how should they be punished for it?
I'm proposing we still have a significant flaw with our international agreements and institutions intending to preserve international peace. Because there's a lot of mistakes that have been made since WW2. The recent events in Ukraine tell me that despite being flawed, we need these institutions more than ever or we're absolutely going to blow up the world again.
And one of those flaws, in my opinion, is the permanent security council veto power. It is not much security or a counseling, when permanent members can violate the charter and veto resolutions trying to hold them accountable. The U.S. has done this, and so has Russia. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that, and the various violations aren't even comparable. We should hold Russia accountable, but we cannot forget the Treaty of Versailles when figuring out how culpable the Russian people are. What are the proper incentives for any other country in the same situation? Is there something that would be more useful to preserving international peace than punishing Russia?
Hell, maybe a suitable punishment would be making Russia into a democracy, it could be worse. (This is supposed to be funny, but I know in advance it's kindof a bad joke.)
"Courage" really understates the sacrifice that Russian protestors are making. I've participated in a fair number of demonstrations for various causes over the years (in the US), but none of them involved any personal risk or enduring consequences. Attending a single anti-war demonstration in Russia is a much more momentous act.
It's uncomfortable sitting in judgment of even pro-Putin Russians, because as you say we in other countries have also been responsible for grievous harms. But like today's Germans, we can't let ourselves be paralyzed by past history when deciding whether we can legitimately do something about the horror unfolding before us.
I cannot se how you are responsible
And that successful evil uses that to ‘boil the frog’ and constantly shift the normal bit by bit in the direction they want, never doing it enough they get a critical mass of resistance, and slowly pruning out all the good people (with terrible consequences for those folks), and then being able to accelerate as they go due to lower and lower portions of folks willing and able to speak out.
It’s terrifying to watch, even more terrifying to know what it can mean unfortunately.
Because we recognize ‘evil’ as being evil and bad because of the horrible and wide reaching consequences of it for everyone in the longer term.
Hopefully Putin made too big a step here (overconfidence maybe, or his hand was forced by something else), we all have recent even painful experience to react strongly enough, and the backlash will be sufficient to actually result in critical change and not a ratcheting up of the ‘new normal’.
Yes, starting from now, protesting becomes more risky (you may go to jail for years if you get caught second time). But just a week ago, it was mostly harmless (yes, some people get arrested for few days, but will anyone say it's comparable to what's going on in Ukraine?).
And from these 5% who go out now many (including myself) were not protesting in 2014.
So to be honest I cannot see how we are not responsible.
[Edit] 95% is a VERY conservative estimation.
[Edit2] And of course people from other countries are also responsible for crimes which their governments are or were doing (many of these crimes resulted in many more deaths than this conflict yet - hopefully it will remain so). So don't feel good about yourself guys.