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#AMERICANAUTUMN What 'diversity of tactics' really means for Occupy Wall Street by Nathan Schneider | October 19, 2011, 12:02 pm Occupy Wall Street marchers watch from the pedestrian walkway as hundreds of their comrades take to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Even as Occupy Wall Street shapes the public conversation about high finance, political corruption, and the distribution of wealth, it has also raised anew questions about how resistance movements in general should operate. I want to consider one of the matters that I've thought about a lot over the past month while watching the occupation and its means of making its presence felt on the streets of New York and in the media. "Diversity of tactics," in the context of political protests, is often treated as essentially a byword for condoning acts of violence. The phrase comes by this honestly; it emerged about a decade ago at the height of the global justice movement, especially between the 1999 demonstrations that shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle and those two years later in Quebec. While all nonviolent movements worth their salt will inevitably rely on a variety of tactics-for instance, Gene Sharp's list of 198 of them-using the word "diversity" was a kind of attempted détente between those committed to staying nonviolent and those who weren't. Consider this characterization by George Lakey: "Diversity of tactics" implies that some protesters may choose to do actions that will be interpreted by the majority of people as "violent," like property destruction, attacks on police vehicles, fighting back if provoked by the police, and so on, while other protesters are operating with clear nonviolent guidelines. Those who extoll the importance of total nonviolent discipline-as Lakey eloquently goes on to do-might be disappointed to learn that Occupy Wall Street has made "diversity of tactics" its official modus operandi. However, the way that the occu

Diversity of Tactics and Democracy By George Lakey Clamor magazine March-April02 Last fall while working with activists in Europe I had the chance to hang out more with young people from Otpor, the resistance movement that brought down dictator Slobadan Milosevic in Serbia in October00. These Otpor activists were ages 19-23, typical ages in the movement that catalyzed the downfall of Milosevic (pronounced "Milosevitch"). They taught people twice their age some powerful lessons about how to overthrow a dictatorship, including how to keep going despite years of arrests and beatings. Some of the young people who started Otpor in 1999 had already been doing direct action in 1996 in the student pro-democracy movement. There they learned a hard fact: as the demonstrations grew the government paid infiltrators to pretend to be activists and do property destruction and street fighting. The government's tactic was brilliant because it scared away the potentially hundreds of thousands who were getting ready to join the movement, and gave back to government the moral high ground. Refusing to be discouraged, those who made a fresh start in 1999 made a critical decision: in order to win, Otpor would establish a policy of nonviolence. The stakes were too high, they reasoned, to have the luxury of everyone doing their thing. Milosovic was desperate, and surrounded with thugs who had no scruples. Only a policy of nonviolence could avoid the mistakes of 1996. I was impressed by the fast learning curve. Most movements do have a learning curve that enables them to benefit from their experience, but Otpor confronted a very hard lesson and quickly changed their policy of tolerance for diversity of tactics. Maybe their youth gave them an advantage in flexibility. Was Milosevic's tactic unusual? So many powerholders have used the tactic of what the French call "agents provocateur" that it is virtually predictable. Not only the "bad guy" authoritarians like Milosevic do it; liber