I slept long, until 9.30 am

• I slept long, until 9.30 am. About 9 hours and I am fresh again.
• The weather was really nice and I had to get out. So, I decided to walk to the office to collect my new bike. It took 1h40minutes (10km).
• I read a story of the Chinese man called XXX (in Guardian Weekly), who was selected in the local government in some elections a few years ago. He has been using legalistic tactics in opposing the misdeeds some politicians have performed (corruption, rigginh elections etc). This lead me to think about forms/strategies of resistance/revolution in general. I can see at least the following general strategies:
  1. Open confrontation by military force (e.g. Mao, Lenin, Castro, Boxer rebellion, Frech revolution, ANC, militias in USA, ETA, IRA, ... )
  2. Civil disobedience (e.g. Gandhi, ex eastern Europe, South-Afcica (ANC), ...)
  3. Legalism (Finninsh in the 19th century, some Chinese now, USA (I sue you. Let's sue the government. 2nd amendement), ...)
  4. Satire (ex Eastern Europe)
  • All these strategies have pros and cons.
    • Number 1 can be quite succesfull in short time given enough milatary power in the hands of the opposition. The problems is the high toll in terms of human suffering and also the rather big likelyhood of establishing a new dictatorship.
    • Number 2 requires huge mobilisation of people and thus charismatic leaders. The human toll can be quite high if the other side resorts to using military force (Indian independence is a success story, the uprisings in Hungary 1956 and Checkslovakia 1968 are not, nor is what happened in China in 1989).
    • The number 3 is more interesting. It relies on the fact the almost any dictatorhip needs to keep up a facede of legal structures (just to win some popular support since pure fear and violence is quite non-economical). So, using the legal facede itself can be quite succesfull. In Finland, we used this in 19th century. When the emperor of Russia published edict restricting the freedom of the Finns, we sued him and in the end some of the edict were discarded (you can see this tradition in Finland even nowadays, in the respect for law all Finns tend to have). Number 3 can also fail miserably when the establishment feels that losing the lagal facade does not present a real risk and thus resorts to force (killing, imprisoning etc). If succesfull, number 3 leads to number 2.
    • Number 4 prepared groud for numbers 3 and 2. This can be real succesful. Remember e.g. Havel, Polish sci-fi, dadaism, ...
    • Note that so called terrorist can also use all the tactics (of course they mostly use covert version of 1).
    • Note that here I do not say anything about whether revolutions are good or bad. I think taking a stand about this would spoil the whole idea. From the point of forms of resistance all revolutionary movements are equal. Being a pacifist I do dislike loss of human life, but one could dislike it purely on economical reasons too - or religiuous etc. Not that any research would be completely free from the values of the researcher.
  • I think I could write a Master Thesis in political history about this. It would be fun. I think I will contact my friend Heikk Patomäki, who is the professor of international relations in the university of Helsinki. Maybe he would be willing to supervise it. Maybe I switch my career into something related to political history and international relations. Or then I just write a paper on this issues and publish it in some suitable journal.
• Other things to write about in the near future (so much, but most of them I already have written in my head. I just have to type them out).
  1. Analysis to Giga-RNC plans and project
  2. Analysis of using COTS in large scale product development. See MattiOnCots. This will be part of 5 (too).
  3. Analysis of A43 program plans for B2 and E0
  4. Analysis of RNC system desing organization (actually, I intend to write a counter proposal)

Alun perin julkaistu koosteessa "Diaries 2003 Q1".