Disobedience constitutes the essence of non-violent struggle. The major goal of change movements is to be a magnet for the public; therefore resistance should not be clandestine. Since change movements seek to teach people how to disobey and refuse to comply, they do not keep themselves out of the people’s sight. Participants do not purposefully keep their activities hidden from the authorities, hence writing a political slogan or some message on a wall in the dark of the night will neither be protesting nor resistance, even if it could bring about satisfactory political outcomes.
For that reason non-violent movements are fully aware that citizens are the chief target of disobedience. The people must see for themselves some individuals while practicing non-compliance, otherwise it would not be true disobedience which means rejection; namely overt rejection of tyrannical regimes and unconcealed non-compliance of unfair laws.
Change movements have to convince the public that practicing disobedience and resistance does not require special abilities and that all the people can take part in their activities.
The movement’s skill will materialize as its media organ picks up and exploits on such activities. The more suppression against protesters escalates, the more non-compliance will be likely to succeed. The media organ of the resistance must make use of each and every act of harassment, clash, insult, slip of the tongue, immoral act, death threat or death of an activist to provide irrefutable evidence that the people has decided to rebel. In case the media organ misses such incidents, it will lose a tool that should have been influential and instrumental to success. The momentum of activities in the canon of disobedience may lie in the punishment that will target resistant activists, if well invested by the media organ of the resistance.
Disobedience movements may resort to secret action on the tactic level rather than the strategic level, for example some leaders can be hidden away to avoid severe repression. What is meant by the phrase “resistance should not be clandestine” does not necessarily apply to the interpretation of the movement’s overall historical course for one movement could begin as an opposition movement that does not adopt non-compliance, and as time passes by it turns into a noncompliant movement. We still must distinguish between the movement’s having to keep some secrets of its own or having to keep some of its activities unannounced to maintain the element of surprise and strategic deception on the one hand and the movement’s being based upon clandestine activities on the other hand.
Answerd by Academy of Change
Translated by Mohammed Ismael