Photo by www.lascintillaonline.org/   To acquire or lose popular support results in de-construction of the power system in force, and contemporary legitimacy of hitherto voiceless movements, despite the diffusion in the society. Gene Sharp, who elaborated the theory of the “non-violent revolution” and the consequent technique of the revolt, which although functioning in past years, finds itself surpassed by a complex reality capable of operating within democratic or equivalent regimes, rather than against the dualistic contrast of the popular masses – dictatorship. The recent crises of semi-authoritarian regimes, and the consequent fall of Mubarak, in Egypt, and Ben Alì, in Tunis are, principally, the final consequences of internal crises, of class leaders who are increasingly less interested in maintaining the status quo. At the same time, it should be noted how the use of force and the maintenance of consensus, albeit a minority, allow the tyrant to apply the dose of repression, alternated with concessions able to curb the forces of revolt. The question, therefore, is “how to bring about a revolution” today, which reveals the necessity of different approaches in different situations, including the origin of sovereignty.

In a video of February 2008 (1) , the Iranian TV showed the cartoons of a hypothetical meeting at the White House, between Gene Sharp, the theorist of non-violent revolution, George Soros and John McCain, who are organizing the revolution in Tehran. We know much about Soros for the activities of his Open Society Institute (2) and his economic theories – in contrast with the excess of the financialization of the West – which hypothesize the creation of a new global market that will allow universal flows of goods and services, in a context of world democratization (3) .
Iran, as the jihad “of the sword” and some emerging Countries, want the contrary: the end of the age of the Dollar as lender of last resort and the regionalization of the U.S.A, reduced to a regional power in a highly multi-polar context.
It suffices to think, in this sense, of the Iranian Petroleum Stock Exchange of the Island of Kish, which transacts the barrel in Euros and other currencies which are not linked to the Dollar (4) . John McCain was the U.S Presidential candidate most inclined, according to the Iranian propaganda, to allow American military and/or NATO actions on the territory of the Shiite Republic.
But who is Gene Sharp? The theorist of the “non-violent revolution”, whose texts were the basis of the actions in Serbia, when the guys of OTPOR organized their mass actions against the Milosevic regime (5) , and in the various colours and velvet revolutions which took place in all those buffer-countries between geopolitical areas in competition: the Ukraine, Georgia, the Philippines, Panama and, to some extent, in East Germany and in the China of the revolt of Tiananmen Square.
According to Sharp (6) the foundations of power are substantially five:
a) political authority;
b) the Human Resources, i.e. those who actively collaborate with the regime;
c) the specific Knowledge and Capacity held by the members of the Human Resources of the regime;
d) the Material Resources, i.e. the control of the regime over the scarce resources, and the techniques that the power uses to distribute them to the people and to its supporters;
e) the Intangible Factors, i.e. the beliefs, values, and the style of thinking that model the legitimacy and the capacity of a political regime to exercise its power.
To these natural forms of the political power, is added the sanction, i.e. the punishment inflicted on a non-cooperative subject or a group that challenges the “Tyrant”.
The traditional revolution, violence against violence, makes repression easy for the regime, since, to use the old formula of Max Weber, “it holds the monopoly of the legitimate force”.
In the Bolshevik or Fascist models, the revolution is dialectic and dual, according to the Hegelian model re-elaborated by Marx or of the particular Marxism of Giovanni Gentile (7) . And, it is, technically, a coup d’état, a brief and violent action that brings to power a new elite, equal and opposite to the one destroyed (8) . For Pareto, the elites and their incessant circulation are a natural fact in any society (9) . In each case, the masses remain extraneous and completely instrumental to the revolutionary actions. But it is precisely the Weberian legitimacy that is the breaking point of the analysis of Sharp for the American analyst.
If, for a certain period of time, the legitimacy of a tyrant is called into question or openly opposed, his regime becomes irreparably weakened.
It is not said: the Libyan experience with Muammar Gheddafi, for example, demonstrates, still today, that a leader can lose part of the popular support, but maintain, with his own enormous resources, a considerable portion of militants. It is a distribution to the mass that supports the regime, inasmuch as, while the Chief has reserves of money and goods to give to his subjects, he buys them (10) .
Neither is a subjective limit foreseen by the Tyrant for the use of violence against his own people, as the present Syria of Bashar el Assad demonstrates (11) or the actions against indigenous beliefs and Christians in the Sudan of Omar al Bashir (12) .
A tyrant can reach the maximum limit of repression to allow the survival of the “smallest portion” of the population, which permits his military and economic apparatuses to function.
In the relationship between the Tyrant (13) and his people, the maximum utility of the amount of population is countered by the increase of costs for the repression – or for the maintenance – except for international aid, of the population in excess of the amount of his paid supporters. Furthermore, the dialectic between Tyrant and Democracy is not dual, as hypothesized by Sharp.
Every authoritarian political leader manages a range of supporters, of the elite class and bureaucrats, who are not irrelevant, but essential to his power (14) . In this sense, one thinks of the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunis: Ben Alì fell because he found himself substantially against the Armed Forces, and had cultivated an elite class which was made up of his relatives (the Traboulis clan (15) and, above all, had, in fact, substituted his traditional basis of consensus among the Tunisian middle class, with the network of companies owned by foreigners and involved in export (16) . An elite class that was not interested in maintaining the Alì-Traboulis family.
For the Egypt of Hosni Mubarak, the “revolution of the 25th January 2011” was the verification that the “king is naked” because, by then, the regime no longer had control of the Armed Forces, and the National Democratic Party of the regime no longer had control of the civil society, organized by Islamist representation between the new proletarianized middle classes and by the various networks of the Moslem Brotherhood, which has even founded, with its former executives, its own democratic party, where also the Coptic Christians can be active members (17) .
Therefore, the dialectic of the postmodern politics is not that between “democratic” masses and “tyrants”, but between stable and intermediate organizations that mobilize, acquire or lose the support of the population, making the king “naked” or modifying his political agenda (18) .
Unlike that which is sustained by Sharp, the dictator does not always tend to eliminate the intermediate bodies, but desires, above all, to control them and use them as inevitable coverage of his power, also to deviate the anger of the people to someone else, at the right moment.

Returning to the techniques of Gene Sharp, the U.S. analyst holds that the non-violent mass resistance techniques function to the extent in which “the situation of the conflict” changes and forces the power to act in a way different from the usual.
The non-violent action transforms – to use the terms of the Gestalt psychology – the form and the background of the vertical political communication (19) and allows the “signal coverage” emitted by the regime or its contradiction.
It is like the genesis of neurosis, according to the psychologists of Palo Alto: a simultaneous and contradictory command which induces the neurosis in the receiver (20) .
Always according to the technology of the revolt of Sharp, the steps are:
1) the conversion of the members of the regime;
2) the mediation (accommodation);
3) the non-violent coercion, when the power is no longer in the hands of the tyrant;
4) the disintegration of the authoritarian political system. A phenomenology which assumes that:
a) the conversion is tied to the ideas and not to the distribution of assets on the part of the tyrant, or to his blackmailing capacity;
b) that there exists the possibility on the part of the regime not to “see” the accommodation as a technique of massification of the protest – which, often, it is not – since the regimes are less gullible than one believes and also they know the techniques of dezinformatsjia or the asymmetrical operations of the “political war”;
c) that the increase of the mass of the opposers leads automatically to the “signal coverage” emitted by the Tyrant or that this separation between the masses and the power leads automatically to the disruption of the tyranny.

They are hypotheses that function for the already democratic and pluralistic societies, but they may not function for the authoritarian regimes, and which do not possess the political and identarian culture diffused in the West. The question is religious: for Christianity, the separation between God and Caesar is radical and innate (21) and Christ turned out the merchants from the Temple (22) on the basis of the separation between the “house of prayer” (and of bread, Bethlehem) and that of economic practice.
On the basis of the subjective Salvation, and of the “political autonomy” defined by the Gospel, the social pact is created between individuals who grant some of their power to the Sovereign, to make good use of and to protect them from “visible evil”, while that unseen belongs to the practice of the Imitatio Christi.
The social contract, in its version, necromantic for Hobbes (23) and naive for Rousseau, is the mechanism which the royal subjects, objective holders of the natural sovereignty in their community, grant their power, by delegation, to the sovereign, who uses it, according to the dictates of Saint Augustine, for the good of all.
For the Messenger of Allah, the question is radically different.
The sovereignty on earth belongs to Allah alone, who grants it only to his Messengers, provided with evident signs (24) and as temporary counsellors of the ummah. The vela at-e-faqih, the “Government of legal-experts” of the Iranian Islam Shiite of Khomeini justifies itself because the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, has not yet arrived, but is present, alive (25) and hidden, and the power of the “turbans” temporarily substitutes him (26) . In other words, while the “civil society”, in the Western political cultures, has its own specific autonomy, in the Islamic universe, it is derived from the theology of the One and of the subsequent apparitions of the One.
Muhammad created his religion by superimposing Meccane and Medinesi traditions, accepting the rituals of the polytheist era in function of the political command, which he acquired by supporting the rites and the lucrative activities of the merchants tribes (27) and promising the infinite spoils of the jihad (28) .
Therefore, political autonomy does not exist in Islam, neither secularized, and therefore, parliamentary democracy, be it “guided” by autocratic Rais or religious heads, is destined, in the Islamic universe, to follow the lines and directives of the Koranic Law (29) .



The author advises

Révoltes arbes.Premiers regards. Author:Pierre Blanc Editor: L'Harmattan, 2011