Joaquin Flores explains Electric Yerevan, the Color Tactic and Armenian Power

▶ Electric Yerevan, the Color Tactic and Armenian Power – Joaquin Flores – YouTube

Electric Yerevan and Lessons on the Color-Spring Tactic Written by Joaquin Flores

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The Electric Yerevan protest provides us with an excellent
opportunity to review some of the basic underlying mechanics and
psychology of the Color-Spring tactic. It is important to share these
publicly, for it is indeed probable that the Color-Spring tactic will be
increasingly applied in the world as a “hybrid soft-power/hard-power
tactic”.

A moral principle held by Gene Sharp, who was one of
the tactic’s main developers, was that violence is not necessary for
revolution. What is strange, contradictory, even dishonest here is that
violence is reduced taxonomically to the physical violence of the
state’s gendarmes against the civilians. But we know that violence comes
in many forms.

We live in a time of great violence; physical,
psychological, legal, economic, spiritual violence. Not only has the
Color Revolution tactic engendered the latter four, but its mutation
into the Arab Spring tactic also employs heinous physical violence. We
can see today, tens of thousands dead in Libya, hundreds of thousands in
Syria, and a mounting figure in Ukraine which threatens to surpass the
precedents.

Novices to political science and political
activism may be lured by the spectre and spectacle of the Color
Revolution method that has characterized ostensible movements for
radical social change in the last generation. The symbols have become
iconic and clichéd: the tent city, the die-in, the girl placing flowers
in the gendarme’s gun barrels, water cannons and tear-gas, the fist
flag.

What is missing of course from this view is an
understanding of the real social forces in a society, class and economic
forces. For forty years, genuine activism, labor union militancy, has
been marginalized. In place of direct action against the ruling class at
the very places that make their wealth, is a strange simulation of late
1960′s student activism; shown to us on a never-ending film reel loop……read it all here…Electric Yerevan and Lessons on the Color-Spring Tactic