The Quaker activist looks back at nonviolent resistance struggles to previous superpower invasions in places like 1968 Czechoslovakia and 1940s Denmark.
What strikes me as extraordinary about these and other successful cases is that the nonviolent combatants engaged in their struggle without the benefit of training. What army commander would order troops into combat without training them first?
We’ve been talking about these kinds of resistance in peace circles for decades and kudos to Gene Sharp, who categorized a lot of the techniques, and Erica Chenoweth, who has done a lot more recent work. When people doubt that pacifism can work, we can turn to this research to prove it does — or can. The trouble is the body count can get high. Putin’s not an empathetic guy and it seems his paranoia and megalomania is getting worse. I’m worried that he’s not above an extended bloodbath if it feeds his vision of a greater Russian.
Ukraine doesn’t need to match Russia’s military might to defend against invasion