Translator: Claudia Sander Reviewer: U-Jean Jung
When I was a child,
I remember seeing Soviet tanks on the streets of Afghanistan,
where I was born.
I was completely terrified.
The tanks seemed inhuman and indestructible.
I felt powerless, next to the tanks.
And in my country people seemed powerless too.
At that point of my life, and for many years after,
for me tanks came to represent war.
To my young mind, they seemed like the most powerful weapons in the world.
And the idea that people could defeat them,
without having a more powerful military weapon, seemed absurd.
But now I see things differently.
I no longer look at a tank and see it as indestructible.
In fact, I've learned to look at a tank and see its weaknesses.
Almost all of you will recognize this image.
It's Tiananmen Square, in 1989,
and hundreds, if not thousands of protesters, have just been killed.
But in a stunning moment of defiance
one man decided to block the path of a tank using only his body.
Most people assume that after this picture was taken
the man was crushed by the tanks.
But that's not what happened.
In fact, the tank did stop.
And then it swerved.
The man once again jumped in front of the tank.
The tank swerved again.
This entire column of tanks was blocked, if only for a few moments,
by this one man.
The poet Bertolt Brecht escaped Nazi Germany.
And he wrote the following,
"General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
it needs a driver."
Brecht saw something that if only we could all see it
would change the world.
The most powerful weapon is not a tank.
It's not a military weapon at all.
It's a human one.
Is the capacity and the willingness
of human beings to disobey
and to defy and to refuse to cooperate
with injustice and oppression.
It's the political application of a type of behavior
that thankfully comes very naturally to all of us.
It's basic human stubborness.
In short, it's the power of "no".
And the power of "no" is the fundamental basis
of nonviolent action.
I've been studying nonviolent action
and working to promote it around the world
for fourteen years.
And during that time I've learned something
that I'd like to share with you today.
Nonviolent action can make a tank as useless
as if a bomb have been drop on it.
Brecht, our poet, says that a tank has one defect:
it needs a driver.
But actually a tank has many defects or weaknesses.
For a tank to work it needs engineers and oil drillers
and truck drivers, factory workers,
and communications specialists.
And you get the point.
For a tank to work it requires a lot of people.
And if just one of these groups refuses to cooperate,
a tank can be made useless.
For example, tanks need fuel.
And if petroleum workers go on strike,
tanks can't move.
In Iran, in 1978,
almost 40,000 oil workers went on strike
to demand political change.
And the strike paralized the economy so badly
that it caused the government to collapse.
And it forced the ruling shah and his wife
to flee the country.
Also to build a tank and to keep it running
requires a lot of money.
And people can refuse to supply that money.
In 1971, the Defense Minister of France
announced plans to expand a military base
in a countryside area called Larzac.
And here is the problem, there were hundreds of sheep farms on the land
and the farmers refused to leave.
They gained supporters from around the country
and that year thousands of people refused to pay their taxes.
Instead, they donated the money to the farmers.
This went on for ten years
and eventually the government gave in
and all the farms were saved.
Last but not least, as Brecht says, a tank needs a driver,
a driver that is willing to obey commands.
When the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in the early 1990s,
they sent tanks to take over Lithuania's government buildings and military bases.
But over one million Lithuanian citizens from all walks of life
surrounded the government buildings.
When the tanks approached the buildings
they were faced with a sea of people.
And when Moscow ordererd the tanks to push through the crowd
the drivers refused.
Lithuania has maintained its independence ever since.
But a tank is just one tool in the military system.
And the military itself is just one system
that a government can use to impose its will on the population.
There are others.
The media, the judiciary, the police,
the administrators, the financial systems
and the transportation systems.
And all of these systems
depend on countless people in order for them to work.
Without widespread obedience and cooperation from multitudes of people
a government can not maintain its power.
Let's look at one of these institutions.
The media, for example.
In many oppressive states,
the media is just a tool for government propaganda.
But even a state-controlled television channel
requires producers and financers and directors and camera builders
and actors and a studio and camera operators.
And if just one of these groups refuses to cooperate,
propaganda can be made useless.
In the 1980s, there were a lot of people in Poland
who were fed up with government propaganda.
In a small town called Swidnik,
people found a creative way to show
that propaganda doesn't work if no one is watching.
So each night, when the evening news came on,
they took their televisions for a walk.
They put their TVs in shopping carts and baby strollers
and simply walk them down the streets.
(Laughter)
Other people unplugged their televisions
and placed the television sets in the windows facing the streets.
The government was angry, but what could they do?
Going for an evening stroll wasn't illegal.
There are countless people around the world
who are facing their own seemingly impossible struggles today.
They're facing their own tanks,
oppressive systems that seem all powerful and overwhelming
and impossible to overcome.
Too often people try to fight oppression with violence,
but this is precisely where oppressors are the strongest:
in military capacity.
What if instead, we fought oppressors where they are weak,
where they depend on our cooperation and our obedience?
Because here is the crucial point.
If we can see how an oppressive system depends on what we do
or what we refuse to do,
then we can begin to build a nonviolent strategy
that can actually change that system,
or even destroy it.
We are at an important moment in human history.
Nonviolent struggle is being used by people around the world
in new and creative ways.
Right here in Baltimore, there have been ongoing protests
since Freddie Gray died in police custody last April.
And what's happening here has inspired and informed
the larger Black Lives Matter movement around the United States
as well as anti-oppression movements
around the world.
A lot has happened this year.
People in Guatemala carried out a general strike
in which they refused to work
until their corrupt president resigned from power.
This action, among others,
was succesful, within five days.
Women in Uganda stopped the government from seizing their village
by taking off their clothes when soldiers came for their land.
It's considered a curse in Ugandan culture to see an older women naked.
(Laughter)
May be in others cultures as well.
(Laughter)
So when the soldiers were ordered to shoot on the women,
they refused.
And when demonstrations were banned at last month's climate summit in Paris,
activists found another way to fill the streets.
They used only their shoes.
Even Pope Francis sent his shoes, to join the demonstration.
And all of this is happening with more strategic planning than ever before.
People are beginning to understand
that we must learn from the available knowledge
of how nonviolent struggle works,
and the history of those who have used it to gain freedom,
like Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
And not only them, but others whose names are less well known.
We no longer need to rely on intuition or improvisation.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
The tools to conduct nonviolent struggle effectively and skillfully exist.
And they're being improved and refined every day.
People around the world are beginning to understand and realize
what my colleague and mentor Gene Sharp has famously said,
"Oppressors are never as strong as they tell you they are.
People are never as weak as they think they are."
So I challenge you to shift your perspective.
What is the tank that you want to disassemble?
What is the oppressive system that seems impossible to overcome?
And then, instead of seeing that system as one entity,
see it instead as made up of different parts,
parts that rely on our cooperation, participation and obedience.
Because just as a tank has fatal weaknesses
so also do other systems.
And that fatal weakness could be your desobedience
and your willingness to say no.
Thank you.
(Applause)