Time for another stream-of-consciousness thread that feels right now as random thoughts but I think will coalesce into something as I go on

"If your cause is moral, and your opponent is evil, and you can demonstrate that clearly to the world, then you will win". This is a huge lie. A comforting lie, but a huge lie.

I don't want to throw a wrench into the global human rights machinery (although that machinery doesn't work anyway). I don't want to ruin it for the many great human rights activists out there. But giving up on what doesn't work is an important first step towards a solution.

Winning is a matter not only of the morality of your cause, it's a matter of power. Justice has to have power, just like power has to have justice. Without power, all of your human rights slogans are nothing but slogans.

I've been in the human rights community for a nearly a decade. After my 2014 expulsion from my former country, I lost my entire social circle, and the human rights community pretty much became my real community. I love those guys, but I also have to dissent, I have to

I'm surrounded by human rights activists who think that exposing or documenting human rights abuses will change things (it won't). Or those who think that all we can do is bear witness to the suffering of our people as they're slaughtered because winning is impossible (it isn't).

Or those whose jobs are to appeal to the power of "international institutions" to act on their behalf (they won't/can't). Or who get a kick out of "sticking it to Western institutions" with a few quips when they're already drawing within lines set for them by said institutions.

Or those, most of them, who are so used to having no power that they shrink away from it when it falls at their feet. Their attitude towards power isn't that power-building is an essential part of their job; but that power is something dirty to be pushed away and pushed against

How many of our native human rights activists have gotten comfortable being eternal martyrs on a Western stage? Performers for a Western audience?

How many have gotten into human rights activism with a revolutionary zeal, only to get domesticated into the delusion that "international institutions" will bring you justice if you just document human rights abuses enough and speak eloquently about the morality of your cause?

How much of our dreams, hopes, and energy were wasted on a model of pro-democracy activism that simply does *not* work? How much funding was wasted on yet another of these initiatives?

Don't get me wrong, I still call myself a human rights activist, and the human rights community is my community. But I came at this from a very different angle, and @gatnash and I refused to be sucked into that world. Its paradigms never really attracted or convinced us.

The morality of your cause is a given. The immorality of your opponent is also a given. Your central job as an activist isn't to keep arguing for that, although you do need to. Your job is to build power for your movement and to disrupt, destroy, and deny power to your opponent.

What power are we talking about here? Financial and military power are important but aren't the only form of power. And it's stupid to fight your enemy on a field they have an absolute advantage.

No, you need to fight your enemy in a way they don't want to be fought. You need to meet them on a battlefield on which they have a disadvantage, and where their resources matter far less.

Dictators are individuals, not superhuman monsters. For their regime to function, people must follow orders; they must acquiesce. The world must engage them; they must rubber-stamp.

The power of dictators itself rests on a narrative of legitimacy that gets them to convince their own people, and the world, that they should have power.

They don't have to make the case that they're the best - of course they don't. They just have to make the case that they're the least terrible of all options; or that they're the only option.

Sometimes they don't even have to do that. All they have to convince you is that they're here to stay - just wipe from public imagination the idea that their rule may end. "If he's gonna be in power for the next 20 years I might as well live with it.".

Dictators literally rule through suffocating all realistic hope that there can be any kind of realistic, competent alternative to them. They literally win through spreading, upholding, and deepening despair.

That is legitimacy for authoritarians; it's not any kind of enthusiastic approval, but a grudging acceptance that there's no alternatives. That's why many dictators don't even care if they're seen as evil tyrants. Sometimes it even helps them to be seen as that.

The battle is over narratives of legitimacy. Once a dictator loses the battle over narratives of legitimacy, he's taken an off-ramp onto a one-way road towards collapse. That road may be long or short, but there's no way back, and the destination is a foregone conclusion.

If you want to fight tyrants, having a moral cause is important but not enough. Exposing human rights abuses is important but not enough. You have to be in that battlefield over narratives of legitimacy (aka social contracts). All of your power building is done on that field.

If your dictator's social contract hasn't broken, you need to push it towards breakage. If your dictator's social contract has broken (or is about to), you need to get busy building an impressive alternative that convinces both your own people and the world.

This kind of power building needs to be real and needs your commitment. Power building requires a radical belief in your cause and your people's dignity.

It shows in the way you talk, it shows in your choices and your plans and projects. It sends a message to your people that they need to stop fucking compromising, and instead of appealing to powerful others, they should awaken to their own power.

I won't spell it all out, but this is the paradigm of activism that we follow at @Kawaakibi. We believe in the morality of our cause, but we aren't naive to think that that alone will carry it to victory. We have to stab them where it hurts, even as we build power for our cause.

When the Norwegian intelligence came to my house to take me away and tell me that my life is threatened by dictators, this is what I said: "If they don't want to kill me, then I'm not doing my job"

If all we were doing was documenting human rights abuses, no dictator will want me dead. They want me dead for a good reason - we're fighting them the way they don't want to be fought.

This is only the beginning.
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