Sympathy of the Masses
\r\nEvery movement, no matter its goals, exists primarily to arouse the sympathy of the masses. Men with beards and guns aren’t the most sympathetic of figures. Even without witnessing gory images of victims and attacks, people will cross the street in order to avoid a dude who’s carrying an AK- 47 and walking like the Terminator. But a smiling young woman with a cool and witty sign is a different story. You want to join her, because it’s hard not to be swept up in her energy, commitment, and enthusiasm. Just take a look at the YouTube videos of Manal al- Sharif, the brave Saudi woman who defied her country’s ban on female drivers by making instructional videos of herself behind the wheel. You watch them and suddenly you want to ride shotgun in the car with her.
\r\nIf you have machine guns and tanks on one side and tens of thousands of people marching with flags, signs, and flowers on the other, there can be very little confusion about who’s the beauty and who’s the brute. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this principle well. “There is more power in socially organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men,” he wrote. “Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people.”
\r\nWith armed resistance you have to be careful, because the sword cuts both ways. One side shoots and bombs and kills, the other side shoots and bombs and kills back, and good luck figuring out who’s to blame and who’s simply practicing self-defense. There’s a real danger to a movement that becomes violent, and it’s that violence makes it hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
\r\n Compiled From:
\r\n \"Blueprint For Revolution\" - Srdja Popovic, pp. 203, 204