Television Where nonviolence worked
By COLMAN McCARTHY
In 20 years of teaching courses on
nonviolence in both high schools and colleges, I have known that one question
is inevitable and that more than one student is panting to ask it: Yes,
nonviolence is a noble idea and enduring ideal, but where has it worked? Often
the question is twinned with another supposed stopper: Do you really think
nonviolence would have defeated Hitler?
Ive never given a classroom answer that came close to
satisfying either the questioner or me. I feel like a math teacher who chalks
the blackboard with calculus equations and then a student -- who has never
taken a math course before and has been told all his life that 2+2=536 -- rises
to say that nothing on the board make sense. But clear it up before the bell
rings.
A bit of help is on the way. A two-part, three-hour documentary,
A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, is
scheduled for Sept. 18 and 25 at 9 p.m. Eastern time on PBS. With a blend of
archival footage, eyewitness testimony and a crisp journalistic account,
narrated by Ben Kingsley, that remains non-ideological throughout, the story is
told that violent force is not the only force: A more powerful and more
effective one exists. But its use requires courage, conscience and
conviction.
Television habitually and ignorantly sends the message that
conflicts can be settled only one way: by violence. Finally, three hours of
film are aired to portray the alternatives. Not since Weapons of the
Spirit -- the 1988 documentary about Le Chambon, the French pacifist
village that defied the Nazis -- has a film so ably captured the essence of
peacemakers at work.
Out of dozens of 20th-century examples, the filmmakers --
including producer and writer Steve York and content adviser Peter Ackerman --
chose six nonviolent campaigns in which organized citizen resistance,
non-cooperation and direct action defeated governmental oppression: student
sit-ins in Nashville during the U.S. civil rights movement; Mohandas
Gandhis 32-year effort to remove the British from India; the 1940s Danish
resistance to German occupation; Solidaritys strikes that took on the
Soviet puppet regime in Poland; the consumer boycotts that led to the end of
apartheid in South Africa; and the 1980s public demands for free elections in
Chile that removed the Pinochet regime.
If a theme runs through these six stories, it is the succinct
thought of Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute in Boston, a group that
supported the films production: A rulers power is ultimately
dependent on support from the people he would rule. His moral authority,
economic resources, transport system, government bureaucracy, army and police
-- to name but a few sources of his power -- rest finally upon the cooperation
and assistance of other people. If there is general conformity, the ruler is
powerful. But people do not always do what their rulers would like them to
do.
When they dont, conflict -- a clashing of wills -- occurs.
The ruled must decide their means of resolution, violent or nonviolent. If
violence had been effective, the world would have been rid of fists, guns and
wars eons ago. But extraordinary faith persists that the next time violence
will work, and peace will reign once the blood dries and the corpses are
stashed.
The story of the Danish resistance to the Nazis provides a
compelling answer to the skeptical dismissal of nonviolent power as dreamily
irrelevant when a führer shows up at the border. Led by King Christian X
who took daily horseback rides through the streets of Copenhagen during the
Nazi occupation -- escorted by bicycling citizens -- the Danes organized an
effective unarmed bloc of resistance. By strikes, work slowdowns, hiding or
helping Jews to flee, they calmly and efficiently defied the SS.
A postwar historian summarized the defiance: Denmark had not
won the war but neither had it been defeated or destroyed. Most Danes had not
been brutalized, by the Germans or by each other. Nonviolent resistance saved
the country and contributed more to the Allied victory than Danish arms could
ever have done.
The educational value of A Force More Powerful is in
its factual challenge to prevailing misconceptions, beginning with the notion
that nonviolent resistance equals passive resistance. Its not a
semantic distinction, says Peter Ackerman. It is the critical
difference between action and inaction. What Gandhi did and what the people in
Chile did and what Lech Walesa did was anything but passive. They didnt
just sit there. They went out and did proactive things.
People in
nonviolent struggles are not unarmed. They are simply not armed with
violent weapons, but make no mistake, they have formidable resources
that flow from the fabric of their society.
A Chilean leader said of the organized resistance against Pinochet
in the 1980s and the demand for fair elections: We didnt protest
with arms. That gave us more power.
The moral significance of these six movements is that the
protesters had little or no previous commitments to nonviolence, much less to a
deep-rooted allegiance to pacifism. They learned by doing. Its to be
wondered how much gore might be prevented -- an average of 40,000 people are
killed a month in the worlds current 35-odd conflicts -- if whole
societies were trained in nonviolent conflict resolution long before
disagreements escalated to crises. The time to stop Hitler was in 1926 when he
first ran for office. The time to stop fires from turning into infernos is when
the first lick of flame appears.
Journalistically, A Force More Powerful brings much
honor to PBS and the individuals and groups that funded the film. The film is a
work of art because, first, it is a work of fact. Professionalism is
immediately obvious in the opening scenes.
For viewers wanting more, a companion book -- a thick 544-page
volume also titled A Force More Powerful -- is being published this
month by St. Martins Press. A 16-page student study guide is available to
teachers and schools through local public television stations. Those involved
with the film intended it to be more than another night of TV. Their intentions
were broad, and sound.
Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in
Washington. His e-mail address is colman@clark.net
National Catholic Reporter, September 8,
2000
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