WEBVTT

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Good afternoon, I'm proud
to be here at TEDxKrakow.

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I'll try to speak a little bit today
about a phenomenon

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which can, and actually is
changing the world,

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and whose name is people power.

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I'll start with an anecdote,

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or for those of you
who are Monty Python lovers,

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a Monty Python type of sketch.

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Here it is.

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It is December 15, 2010.

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Somebody gives you a bet:
you will look at a crystal ball,

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and you will see the future;
the future will be accurate.

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But you need to share it with the world.

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OK, curiosity killed the cat,
you take the bet,

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you look at the crystal ball.

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One hour later, you're sitting
in a building of the national TV,

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in a top show, and you tell the story.

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Before the end of 2011,

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Ben Ali, and Mubarak,
and Gaddafi would be down,

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and prosecuted.

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Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria

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would be either challenged,
or already on their knees.

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Osama bin Laden would be dead,

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and Ratko Mladic would be in the Hague.

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Now, the anchor watches you
with a strange gaze on his face.

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And then, on top of it you add:

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"And thousands of young people
from Athens, Madrid and New York

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will demonstrate for social justice,
claiming they are inspired by Arabs."

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Next thing you know,
two guys in white appear,

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they give you the strange t-shirt,

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take you to the nearest
mental institution.

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So I would like to speak a little bit

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about the phenomenon which is behind
what already seems to be

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a very bad year for bad guys.

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And this phenomenon
is called people power.

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Well, people power
has been there for a while.

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It helped Gandhi kick
the Brits from India,

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it helped Martin Luther King
win his historic racial struggle.

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It helped a local, Lech Walesa,

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to kick out one million
Soviet troops from Poland,

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and in beginning the end
of the Soviet Union as we know it.

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So what's new in it?

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What seems to be very new,

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which is the idea I would like
to share with you today,

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is that there is a set of rules and skills

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which can be learned and taught

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in order to perform
successful nonviolent struggle.

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If this is true, we can help
these movements.

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Well, the first one - analytic skills.

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I'll try where it all started
in the Middle East.

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And for so many years,

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we were living with a completely wrong
perception of the Middle East.

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It was looking like the frozen region.

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Literally a refrigerator.

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And there were only
two types of meal there.

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Steak, which stands for a Mubarak-Ben Ali
type of military police dictatorship,

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or a potato, which stands for
a Tehran type of theocracies.

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And everybody was amazed
when the refrigerator opened,

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and millions of young,
mainly secular people

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stepped out to do the change.

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Guess what - they didn't watch
the demographics.

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What is the average age
of an Egyptian? 24.

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How long was Mubarak in power? 31.

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So, this system was just
obsolete, they expired.

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And young people of the Arab world
have awakened one morning,

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and understood that power
lies in their hands.

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The rest is the year in front of us.

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And guess what? The same Generation Y,

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with their rules, with their tools,
with their games,

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and with their language,
which sounds a little bit strange to me.

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I'm 38 now.

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And can you look at the age
of the people on the streets of Europe?

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It seems that Generation Y is coming.

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Now, let me set another example.

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I'm meeting different people
throughout the world,

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and they are, you know, academics,
and professors, and doctors,

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and they will always talk conditions.

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They will say: "People power will work
only if the regime is not too oppressive."

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They will say: "People power will work,

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if the annual income of the country
is between X and Z."

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They will say: "People power will work
only if there is a foreign pressure."

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They will say: "People power
will work only if there is no oil."

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And, I mean, there is a set of conditions.

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Well, the news here
is that your skills during the conflict

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seem to be more important
than the conditions.

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Namely, the skills of unity, planning,
and maintaining nonviolent discipline.

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Let me give you an example.

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I come from a country called Serbia.

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It took us 10 years to unite
18 opposition party leaders,

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with their big egos,
behind one single candidate

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against the Balkan dictator
Slobodan Milosevic.

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Guess what? That was
the day of his defeat.

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You look at the Egyptians,
they fight on Tahrir Square,

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they get rid of their individual symbols,

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they appear on the street
only with the flag of Egypt.

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I will give you a counter-example.

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You see nine presidential candidates
running against Lukashenko,

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you all know the outcome.

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So unity is a big thing.

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And this can be achieved.

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Same with planning.

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Somebody has lied to you

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about the successful and spontaneous
nonviolent revolution.

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That thing doesn't exist in the world.

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Whenever you see young people
in front of the row

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trying to fraternize
with the police or military,

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somebody was thinking about it before.

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Now, at the end, nonviolent discipline.

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And this is probably the game-changer.

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If you maintain nonviolent discipline,

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you'll exclusively win.

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You have 100,000 people
in a nonviolent march,

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one idiot or agent-provocateur
throwing a stone.

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Guess what takes all the cameras.

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That one guy.

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One single act of violence
can literally destroy your movement.

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Now, let me move to another place.

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It's the selection
of strategies and tactics.

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There are certain rules
in nonviolent struggle you may follow.

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First, you start small.

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Second, you pick the battles you can win.

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It's only 200 of us in this room.

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We won't call for the march of a million.

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But what if we organized the spraying
of graffiti throughout the night,

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all over Krakow.

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The city will know.

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So, we pick tactics
accommodated to the event,

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especially this thing we call
the small tactics of dispersion.

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They're very useful in violent oppression.

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We are actually witnessing the picture
of one of the best tactics ever used.

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It was on Tahrir square,

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where the international community
was constantly frightened

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that, you know, the Islamists
will overtake the revolution.

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What they organized --

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Christians protecting Muslims
where they are praying,

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a Coptic wedding cheered
by thousands of Muslims,

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the world has just changed the picture,

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but somebody was thinking
about this previously.

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So there are so many things you can do

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instead of getting into one place,

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shouting, and you know, showing off
in front of the security forces.

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Now, there is also another
very important dynamic.

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And this is a dynamic
that analysts normally don't see.

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This is the dynamic between
fear and apathy on the one side,

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and enthusiasm and humor on another side.

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So, it works like in a video game.

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You have the fear high,
you have status quo.

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You have the enthusiasm higher,

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you see the fear is starting to melt.

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Day two, you see people
running towards the police

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instead of from the police, in Egypt.

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You can tell that something
is happening there.

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And then, it's about the humor.

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Humor is such a powerful game-changer,

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and of course, it was very big in Poland.

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You know, we were just a small group
of crazy students in Serbia

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when we made this big skit.

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We put the big petrol barrel

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with a portrait of Mr. President on it,
in the middle of the Main Street.

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There was a hole in the top.

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So you could literally come,
put a coin in,

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get a baseball bat, and hit his face.

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Sounds loud.

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And within minutes,

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we were sitting in a nearby café
having coffee,

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and there was a queue of people
waiting to do this lovely thing.

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Well, that's just
the beginning of the show.

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The real show starts
when the police appears.

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(Laughter)

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"What will they do?"

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Arrest us? We were nowhere to be seen.

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We were like three blocks away,
observing it from our espresso bar.

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Arrest the shoppers, with kids?

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Doesn't make sense.

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Of course, you could bet,
they did the most stupid thing.

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They arrested the barrel.

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And now, the picture
of the smashed face on the barrel,

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with the policemen
dragging it to the police car,

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that was the best day
for newspaper photographers

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that they will ever have.

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So, I mean, these are
the things you can do.

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And you can always use humor.

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There is also one big thing about humor,

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it really hurts.

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Because these guys really are
taking themselves too seriously.

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When you start to mock them, it hurts.

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Now, everybody is talking
about His Majesty, the Internet,

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and it is also a very useful skill.

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But don't rush to label things
like "a Facebook Revolution,"

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"Twitter Revolution."

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Don't mix the tools
with the substance.

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It is true that the Internet
and the new media are very useful

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in making things faster and cheaper.

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They also make it a bit safer
for the participants,

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because they give partial anonymity.

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We're watching the great example
of something else the Internet can do.

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It can put the price tag
of state-sponsored violence

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over a nonviolent protester.

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This is the famous group
"We are all Khaled Said,"

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made by Wael Ghonim
in Egypt, and his friend.

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This is the mutilated face of the guy
who was beaten by the police.

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This is how he became known to the public,

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and this is what probably became
the straw that broke the camel's back.

NOTE Paragraph

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But here is also the bad news.

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The nonviolent struggle is won
in the real world, in the streets.

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You will never change
your society towards democracy,

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or, you know, the economy,
if you sit down and click.

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There are risks to be taken,

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and there are living people
who are winning the struggle.

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Well, the million-dollar question.

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What will happen in the Arab world?

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And though young people
from the Arab world

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were pretty successful
in bringing down three dictators,

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shaking the region,

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kind of persuading the clever kings
from Jordan and Morocco

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to do substantial reforms,

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it is yet to be seen
what will be the outcome.

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Whether the Egyptians and Tunisians
will make it through the transition,

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or this will end in bloody
ethnic and religious conflicts,

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whether the Syrians
will maintain nonviolent discipline,

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faced with a brutal daily violence
which kills thousands already,

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or they will slip into violent struggle

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and make ugly civil war.

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Will these revolutions be pushed
through the transitions and democracy

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or be overtaken by the military
or extremists of all kinds?

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We cannot tell.

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The same works for the Western sector,

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where you can see
all these excited young people

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protesting around the world,
occupying this, occupying that.

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Are they going to become the world wave?

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Are they going to find their skills,
their enthusiasm, and their strategy

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to find what they really want
and push for the reform,

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or will they just stay complaining
about the endless list

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of the things they hate?

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This is the difference
between the two paths.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now, what do the statistics have?

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My friend Maria Stephan's book

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talks a lot about violent
and nonviolent struggle,

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and there are some shocking data.

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If you look at the last 35 years
and different social transitions,

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from dictatorship to democracy,

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you will see that,
out of 67 different cases,

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in 50 of these cases
it was nonviolent struggle

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which was the key power.

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This is one more reason
to look at this phenomenon,

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this is one more reason
to look at Generation Y.

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Enough for me to give them credit,

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and hope that they will find their skills
and their courage

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to use nonviolent struggle

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and thus fix at least a part of the mess
our generation is making in this world.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)