Last night my wife and I watched an hour-long video from the Maryknoll missionaries called Where there is hatred.
The video that looks at three struggles – against Pinochet in Chile, against Marcos in Phillipines, and against Israelis in the West Bank from a non-violent perspective. It’s not totally kid friendly because there are a few spots where you see heaps of dead bodies, but probably not much worse than your average R horror movie.
The film features interviews with principles in the resistance movement interspersed with news footage and commentary from Gene Sharp, a nonviolence scholar from the Albert Einstein Institute.
I think it’s well worth watching because:
- It shows that nonviolent resistance works (at least in Chile and Phillipines).
- It shows that there is more to nonviolence that singing songs.
- It shows that nonviolence takes bravery and the ability to take on military forces with nothing but truth and right on your side.
- It shows that people do get hurt when practicing nonviolence.
Aside from this, I think the movie has an important message to the US peace movement — lose the anger and hatred. Whenever the movie featured people in Chile and the Phillipines, they showed people who were smiling, clapping and full of positive energy. They didn’t gloss over bad things – you’d see them carrying banners announcing how many people had been tortured that week. But at least in the tiny bits featured in the movie, they didn’t allow the violence against them to let them respond in kind.
At least here in Juneau, there is an element of personal animosity against the regime which I think makes it harder to win people sitting on the fence. Maybe that’s just me. Please watch the video and make your own judgements.
Oh. And you can’t get the video through Netflix. You’ll need to turn to Interlibrary Loan like I did!
Filed under: nonviolence, videos
