Non-violence, Hugo Chavez and Gene Sharp

I just linked to this Airforce Amazons post in relation to South Ossetia, but am linking to it again for the issue it discusses in the later part of the post: non-violence. I had missed Kellie's comments on Gene Sharp at TNC when I mentioned him in this post. My basic view is: that non-violence when taken as an absolute law is dangerous, but when used as a strategic tool can be positive, and is certainly better than many alternatives.

Kellie's mention also makes me take action on something that's been bugging me since I posted it: my characterisation of the Venezuela Analysis crowd as "Marxist Leninists". I took this from Stephen Zunes, who said:

One reason [that leftists spend their bile on gentle Gene Sharp] is that some critics of Sharp subscribe to the same realpolitik myth that sees local struggles and mass movements as simply manifestations of great power politics, just as the right once tried to portray the popular leftist uprisings in Central America and elsewhere simply as creations of the Soviet Union. Another factor is that many of the originators of the conspiracy theories regarding Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution are Marxist-Leninists who have traditionally downplayed the power of nonviolence and insisted that meaningful political change can only come about through manipulation by powerful external actors or privileged elites.

Much as I hate Marxist Leninists, I think this characterisation is unfair to Marxist Leninists. The Venezuela Analysis crowd use some Marxist Leninist terminology to justify (a) insane anti-American conspiracy theories (theories which they share with the very un-Leninist anarchos at Indymedia who shout "COINTELPRO" every time an anarchist does something self-destructive (i.e. often)) and (b) the vulgar or bogus anti-imperialism that divides the world into bad imperialists and good "anti-imperialist" caudillos like Chavez. Nothing to do with Leninism, and even less to do with Marxism.