Subject: On the use of nonviolent struggles for regime change
From: George Salzman <>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:32:08 -0500
To: George Lakey , Erika Thorne , F. William Engdahl , Gene Sharp
Oaxaca, Thursday 25 October 2007
Dear friends,
The attached draft (hopefully near completion) is intended as an open letter to you, Gene Sharp and George Lakey. Very soon I will send it to my entire e-mail distribution list and also post it on my website. Since you, George, specifically asked for an opportunity to re-examine material in your 19 Feb 2007 letter to be sure it is phrased so as to avoid any possible misinterpretation prior to my making it public, please, at your early convenience check the part of my letter with quoted and paraphrased bits of your letter.
If any of you wish to suggest changes and/or corrections to my draft, or to send a statement you would like me to include in my distribution and posting, I will welcome them. If you wish, you can reach me at:
Skype: georgesalzman is my ‘Skype name’
Regular phone: 011-52-(951)-514-8242
With best wishes to each of you,
George
P.S. Erika, thank you for your e-mail last night. I include you among the recipients so that you can forward the attachment and this note to George.
2007-10-25-2.rtf
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Subject: Your letter from Oaxaca
From: Gene Sharp <>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:41:30 -0400
To:
CC:
Dear George,
It has been a long time! You seem to be well and very active.
I am only sorry that this long distance reunion has been stimulated by allegations in Engdahl’s article and that a man of your intelligence takes them so seriously.
I am saddened that you have taken his allegations and innuendos as truth. You do footnote sources of accurate information, but weigh his claims as superior to George Lakey’s and my long records and many actions.
I have read Engdahl’s article very carefully, and actually three times. Most of it does not deal with either George or myself but with US oil interests and activities. I cannot of my own knowledge speak to that.
I do know a lot about what I have done personally and what the Albert Einstein Institution has done and none of that work was planned or “scripted” by the US government. The words have been chosen by Engdhal to do us harm, as by calling AEI “a US intelligence asset.” Claims that the “colored revolutions” are mere products of decisions and actions of powerful groups in Washington slanders the masses of people in several countries who carefully considered what they should do and acted bravely and without foreign orders. Calling me a “concert master” of diverse revolutions is totally false and assumes that I have capacities I neither have nor want. It is true that my writings about nonviolent struggle have at times been influential, but that is a very different matter.
Engdahl states that AEI is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when we have not had an office there for well over five years. He says that we arrived in Beijing two weeks before the demonstration in Tiananmen Square, implying that we had something to do with its occurrence. We responded to the remarkable television reports by going there in the midst of the student occupation of the square solely to find out why the students had chosen nonviolent means of acting. One “attack” noted that my first book on Gandhi (published in India) carried an Introduction by Albert Einstein who had been dead several years before the book was published, implying that the Introduction could not be genuine. It took me seven years to get a publisher, by which time I had been in prison and Einstein had died.
No one tells us where we should consult. We rarely can respond positively to requests for consultations. We never offer ourselves, even where our advice might be of interest, because we are not the likes of foreign missionaries. Our consulting policy you cited, that we have had for years, is accurate and is followed. The false accusations and our activities in accordance with the policy do not match.
If the accusations made by Engdhahl and others were true we would have lots of money. We are very poor, have moved to a rent-free space, dismissed most of our already limited staff, and every day work under great stress, are constantly exhausted, and face many difficulties.
My writings have been attacked for years. Fair criticisms on the basis of accurate information are welcomed. We do not need falsehoods spread by anyone, much less our friends.
Suerte con tu trabajo en Oaxaca.
Gene
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Subject: Your response to my letter from Oaxaca
From: George Salzman <>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:02:15 -0500
To: Gene Sharp <>
CC: George Lakey <>, F. William Engdahl <>
Oaxaca, Thursday 25 October 2007
Dear Gene,
Thank you very much for your prompt reply. I am by no means knowledgeable about your work or writing, about that of George Lakey (except for some of his writing) or about F. William Engdahl’s work. So far as I know each of the four of us is moved to do what we do largely because we each want to replace the global society we live in with a humane, true civilization. I know that my efforts are but a miniscule part of what I hope will become a mammoth collaborative grassroots movement.
It is true, as you said, that Engdahl’s article deals mostly with U.S. oil interests and [related geopolitical] activities and only slightly with you (Lakey isn’t mentioned in the article). The only explicit reference to you by Engdahl is as follows:
----
The tragedy of Burma . . . is that its population is being used as a human stage prop in a drama scripted in Washington by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), . . . and Gene Sharp’ s Albert Einstein Institution, a US intelligence asset used to spark “non-violent” regime change around the world on behalf of the US strategic agenda.
. . .
The concert-master of the tactics of Saffron monk-led non-violence regime change is Gene Sharp, founder of the deceptively-named Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge Massachusetts, a group funded by an arm of the NED to foster US-friendly regime change in key spots around the world. Sharp’s institute has been active in Burma since 1989, just after the regime massacred some 3000 protestors to silence the opposition. CIA special operative and former US Military Attache in Rangoon, Col. Robert Helvey, an expert in clandestine operations, introduced Sharp to Burma in 1989 to train the opposition there in non-violent strategy. Interestingly, Sharp was also in China two weeks before the dramatic events at Tiananmen Square.
----
These few statements are very damning. If some of them are false or slanderous or contain misleading innuendos, Engdahl ought to, and probably will publicly correct them and apologize in the same venue that published his article. I say this because I believe, judging from his treatment of his major theme -- the “Saffron Revolution” in the framework of U.S. geopolitical manuevering -- that he is a good person who is trying to contribute to our understanding of contemporary realities, and if he has misjudged your work he will acknowledge it, both out of common decency and in order to maintain his own credibility. I know from my own experience that on several occasions I wrote on my website derogatory material for which I subsequently apologized publicly, and which I corrected.* None of us is perfect; we all make mistakes.
Clearly I don’t regard you or George Lakey as anything other than friends in the common struggle. And for you I have special regard as a fellow victim of the cabal which, in the early years of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, was attempting to gain power manipulatively and dishonestly. I believe that the prolonged and painful stress that my wife Freda was subjected to as they (the cabal leaders) tried to drive us out of the faculty, which went on for years, was an important factor in her early death from cancer, an affliction without prior history in her family. Of course most people who read Engdahl’s article will not know of your early victimization at the hands of Paul Gagnon, Richard Powers and George Goodwin.
I think we all recognize that the United States is playing a very destructive role in the world, using all the means it can deploy. One consequence of this is that anyone or any group associated with an agency involved in the dirty work must expect to be viewed with suspicion. If, for example, it is not true as Engdahl writes, “Sharp’s institute has been active in Burma since 1989, just after the regime massacred some 3000 protestors to silence the opposition. CIA special operative and former US Military Attache in Rangoon, Col. Robert Helvey, an expert in clandestine operations, introduced Sharp to Burma in 1989 to train the opposition there in non-violent strategy", you can best respond by explicitly countering the accusation, making clear the role, if any, of the AEI. I also mentioned in my draft Helvey’s book which the AEI publishes in both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese and commented that this action is seemingly in accord with U.S. geopolitical interests in supporting opposition to the Chinese government. Your letter addressed neither of these involvements of Helvey with the AEI.
I realize of course that human relationships are often quite complex, and even a close relationship doesn’t imply that the two people see eye-to-eye on many issues. But it does seem to me, from your website and from George Lakey’s 19 Feb 2007 letter that there may be some truth in the passage from Engdahl’s paper that I copied in the preceeding paragraph. I also know that explaining something more than superficially and inadequately may require a fair effort and some time. In as much as your response to me was done very soon after you received my draft, you may have simply opted to avoid the complexity at the moment. His mistake in locating AEI in Cambridge rather than Boston is simple to correct, which you did. But it is indicative only of his not looking at your current website, i.e. it is a minor error of no real consequence. From what I can see, he tries to cover a broad range of social problems (geopolitics of oil and genetic manipulation are mentioned as subjects of two books) and it is understandable that there may be occasional minor errors of fact. All errors are undesirable, but some are more serious than others.
Until now I’ve not heard anything from George Lakey, though I did get a note from Erika Thorne thanking me for the draft paper and implying that she was sending it on to George. I would like to include your response(s) as part of the post to my website, in the hope that the exchange will be fruitful in clarifying the issues around the development of and consulting on the technology of non-violent struggle. I myself am a strong advocate of this mode of social struggle. By the way, there is an aspect of the struggle in Oaxaca which, so far as I know, has not found a place in the work of George Lakey or yourself, an aspect which to me is of major importance. The popular struggle here has aimed not just at overcoming repressive power but at doing away with power relationships. I see that as of fundamental importance which will give to the Oaxaca revolution greater significance in the history of human social evolution than even the French Revolution. It is a dimension that in my opinion takes us ‘beyond Ghandi’ .
With all best wishes,
George
* Apology to Manuel Stefanakis in article, “In Oaxaca, Harvard Comes to the Rescue – of Capitalism", posted at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/S2/2007-04-01.htm .
Apology to Dr. Daniela Soleri in article “The People are Deciding, every day! – Report from Oaxaca, Mexico posted at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/S2/2007-07-13.htm .
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Subject: Your challenge regarding training for nonviolent struggle
From: George Lakey <>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:46:26 -0400
To: George Salzman <>
CC: Erika Thorne <>, F. William Engdahl <>, Gene Sharp <>
Hi George Salzman,
I very much appreciate your courtesy in sending your draft to me. Your doing that promotes comradely dialogue and debate and models for the left what principled discussion looks like. In a half century of activism I’ve often found it possible to work with people I disagree with (essential in coalitions and popular movements) when I actually understand where they’re coming from, and vice versa. What seeds distrust and prompts worries about betrayal is ambiguity and misinterpretation. So, thanks, and also regrets that I’ve not been the prompt correspondent I would have liked to be.
I also appreciate the attention you’ve given to the Oaxaca struggle and your reminder of how dramatically it shows the power of nonviolent mass struggle. I think of us as allies in wanting activists to be affirmed when we take large risks to struggle for justice in ways that maximize effectiveness and at the same time minimize our casulties. I know that you, unlike so many on the Old Left (and Old Right and Old Middle) are willing to be pragmatic in choice of strategy and tactics, rather than rigidly adhere to the doctrine that only violence does the job. (Even Marx acknowedged that there are places where a nonviolent revolution is in the cards -- I so wish his followers had retained his flexibility!)
I was a white working class boy influenced by his socialist and anti-racist grandfather, and I found a passion for justice very early. As with most people of my class, cyncism about the agenda of the rich was natural -- it’s middle class people who get confused about that. (I’m always amused by middle class people trying to teach me -- maybe William Engdahl is one -- that I should be cynical about the machinations of those who run the U.S. Empire. We working class people have a head start on that one.)