US army could help Venezuela with nonviolent resistance against Maduro: West Point prof

Social movements are notoriously decentralized, which makes power more diffuse yet consensus difficult. That works fine in Silicon Valley conference rooms, but is less compatible in downtown squares in Kiev or Cairo. “[N]onviolence isn’t magic,” as Daniel Fermin notes. “It can fail. It needs discipline, organization, clear goals, and unity of purpose.” A new book by Ivan Marovic, “The Path of Most Resistance,” echoes this point. The former Serbian youth campaigner provides a how-to manual for why nonviolent resistance needs to embrace the strategy and tactics more commonly employed by the military.

My notes:

The Maidan didn’t quite go the way the author states. Poroshenko financed the Maidan, himself, to gain popularity. The U.S. government and CIA were responsible for the snipers.

As for Maduro’s ‘colectivos,’ it’s the Opposition’s demonizing term, for the collectives.

The word ‘collective’ has different uses, but basically it’s any gathering of people that wants to resolve certain conditions that they have in common.

A good article on the ‘colectivos,’ is here.

Both Juan Guaidó, and Leopoldo Lopez, have already been trained to use Gene Sharp’s tactics to overthrow a ‘dictator’ in ‘nonviolent ways’, which was used by US-funded Otpor, to overthrow Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, in 2000. Ivan Marović was a member of Otpor. Another member, Srđa Popović, went on to start CANVAS, which worked with Stratfor to spy on activists and overthrow governments. CANVAS has been declared a terrorist group in the UAE.

At least the author acknowledges that a military intervention would be like an Iraq-style invasion or the Bay of Pigs.