Today KUOW aired an interview with Ivan Marovic of Otpor, the Serbian resistance movement that played a critical role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic. He talked about a non-violent strategic game that he helped developing (called A Force More Powerful). The game is currently used by grass-root activists groups around the world to train their leaders.
One example in the game that Ivan mentioned mentioned, was to not to responde to your component (i.e. the computer AI dictator). His reasoning is
1) If you responde, you become part of your opponent's strategy, which will only play against you.
2) It's hard to effectively responde in a very short period of time
3) You need to develop your own strategy, which shouldn't be distracted by what your opponent do.
Another examplar teaching built in the game is that there are 2 threshold. One is dictator awareness: before the movement reaches that threshold, you mainly recruiting and raising fund, keeping your actions secrete, so that the dictator wouldn't be able to quench you. Once you go on the street and began handing out fliers, you went over the "awareness" threshold, and officially declare the nonviolent "war" against the dictator.
The other threshold is "threaten", where the dictator begin to feel threatened by your movement. This is when your movement gather more supporters and grow larger in scale, that really threatens the regime. Once you cross that threshold, the dictator will use extreme action to kill the movement (like assasination, exile, blackmail).
It's interesting how gcd will react to such tutorial, because their political science book used to teach people how gcd carried on underground movement before 1949. As the current incumbent, they probably wouldn't want to many people to follow their recipe.
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