Protesters in Malaga, Spain, on May 12. By Jon Nazca, via Reuters AlertNet.

Last June, after leaving the encampment in the center of Madrid, people in the 15M movement would say, “We moved from Sol square, but we know the way back.” The day of action on May 12 this year exceeded the expectations of many people who thought the 15M movement was dead, who didn’t recognize that it had only moved to neighborhood assemblies. The one-year anniversary of the movement brought hundreds of thousands people to the streets again in nearly 80 Spanish cities. There were 50,000 in Madrid, 44,000 in Barcelona, 11,000 in Vigo (a northern city with a population of less than 300,000) and many more.

As people from around the country converged on Madrid, various neighborhood assemblies gathered in squares to prepare banners for the demonstration and to share tips for avoiding police repression. At 7 p.m., there were five columns of demonstrators marching toward Sol square, where they planned to arrive at 9 o’clock. But by 8 p.m., the first column had already arrived, filling almost half of the square. Other groups of marchers arrived within minutes, but many people could not enter and had to stay in nearby streets. Sol square was completely full before the meeting time. There, thousands sang “Happy Birthday” to the 15M movement and released balloons.

As Sol square transformed into a party celebrating a year of protest and organizing, the question remained of whether the party could last all night. Some weeks before, the government had announced that it would not allow an encampment in Sol at all, but, last Thursday, it granted the movement a right to stay in the square during “office hours.” When the government’s 10 p.m. curfew came, there were more than 15,000 people in the square, surrounded by about 2,000 police officers.

At 10 p.m., too, the first tent was erected. “Now we have more reason than last year,” said a man named Emilio, the first camper in Sol of the night. “I’m not afraid to be the first one. If the police arrest me, they will have to go through many more people.” A half hour later, above where a dozen police vans were parked, a huge white panel was deployed, on which were projected videos created by the movement.

After midnight, preparations began to hold an assembly. Dozens cleaned the paper and bottles littered across the square, while others placed cardboard on the ground for people to sit on. When the assembly started at 1 a.m., nearly 2,000 participated. “I was worried,” said one of the first people to take the microphone. “This was very much a party, and we have a lot of work to do.” The first question was whether to stay in Sol for the night, and debate continued for more than an hour and a half. Many wanted to remain, but others said that doing so would only be a provocation to the government and that it didn’t make sense.

The assembly ended at 4 a.m., but hundreds of people remained in Sol. An hour later, 30 more police vans arrived, and officers cleared the square. Eighteen people were arrested. Meanwhile, police swept the squares in Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and other cities where activists tried to spend the night. Catalunya square in Barcelona is the only place where the movement has been able to remain, thanks to authorization by the Catalan government.

May 12 was just the first day of mobilization, and the most festive. Leading up to May 15, the movement has planned actions across the country focused on housing rights, employment, economy, democracy and other issues. These are busy days for the movement, and they will certainly be instrumental in shaping its goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

On the morning of April 25, 2012, ACT UP took back those same streets, alongside activists from the Occupy movement, itself aspiring to be the kind of umbrella that can gather and propel young queers and allies to work together. Hundreds of people carried those trademark ACT UP banners (with some homemade signs for that Occupy touch) in a march down from City Hall to the New York Housing Administration to Trinity Church. A break-out action took the intersection at Park Street, where activists set up house with sofas and chairs, chaining themselves together with the cry, “Housing saves lives!” Another group dressed in Robin Hood green locked down an intersection at Wall Street, demanding a 0.05 percent tax on financial transactions to funnel to AIDS relief. I imagined each person I saw in a fading ACT UP shirt — the seriously garish image of Ronald Reagan in neon branded AIDSGATE, and countless pink triangles now on a field of soft grey — to be a surviving elder, or standing in the garment of a lover or friend who should have lived to walk alongside them.

Reclaiming that story — of greed and neglect, and also of resistance and loss — is what drove Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard to produce their film United In Anger, using footage drawn from their joint archive, The ACT UP Oral History Project. Schulman recalls that the film’s origins were in her visceral response to an NPR story on the 20th anniversary of AIDS that she heard while driving a rental car through Los Angeles:

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

I almost crashed the car.

She didn’t crash. She did call up Hubbard, though, and their work began. The film premiered this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of ACT UP.

Now, just a few months after the birth of another direct action protest movement on Wall Street, it is difficult not to connect these familiar images through a quarter-century-long struggle. Here are the throngs of young people linking arms along Broadway, the high sheen of cop uniforms as police push their way into crowds, locked arms being wrenched apart in the grip of twice as many cops as there ever are activists, and the way — as he’s being loaded into a cop wagon — one of the activists turns his head to call back to the others, to the cameras. It’s a performance, and a sincere one, that’s become part of so much protest, and it’s captured here well before the YouTube age.

ACT UP hit the streets just as cheap consumer video did, defining the visual and tactical conventions of activist video. Through the late 1980s, ACT UP spawned several activist video crews, like DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In addition to serving as witnesses at actions, DIVA produced compilation tapes to educate and inspire ACT UP activists around the country and the world, who then shared them with each other at parties, bars or through the mail.

Captured in all that glorious 80s footage is a raw, life-affirming anger. For all the comparisons drawn between Occupy and ACT UP,  Occupy has yet to fully embody this urgency, or this rage, that transforms pain into action and back again. The most moving sequences of United In Anger are set to a funeral march, a low drumbeat that carries through political funerals in Manhattan and Washington, culminating in a group funeral procession to the White House, where several ACT UP members requested their remains be delivered as a final demand.

As powerful as ACT UP’s tactics are to observe — banner drops at Shea Stadium and Grand Central Station, storming the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration — it’s the testimony of ACT UP members that provides real depth, humor and contradiction to these victories and contentious setbacks.

The most dramatic of these was ACT UP’s legendary Sunday-mass protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which turned even some of their supporters against them. For many in ACT UP, that was no failure. “We said for years in ACT UP that our job was not to be liked,” said Ann Northrop, an early member. “We were not doing what we were doing to get the public to like us. We were doing what we were doing to accomplish something about particular issues, and I think we did that, enormously successfully.”

What cannot be ignored, in this film or in our attempts to make sense of the early years of the epidemic, is the power of people to organize in the face of death, to claim expertise, to lead. As the gatekeepers in medicine and government struggled to catch up with the virus, ACT UP took caring for their communities into their own hands and took their fight to the doors of those in power. Through United In Anger, we meet activists who worked to redefine AIDS, to take account of their lives and what could be done to preserve them, and to hold those who abandoned them to death accountable. “In my view as a witness, people did not die of AIDS,” Shulman said in a recent interview. “They died of government neglect and indifference. These are political deaths.”

Illustration of self-defense, from James E. Homans' 1908 New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information.

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

The reality is that there is no way to guarantee safety. What we can do is to increase the chances of survival for our comrades and ourselves while building a movement that can win. Activists have for at least a century been creating methods for consciously increasing the chances for survival. Some of these methods are similar in both violent and nonviolent strategic struggle. Everyone can learn from them.

It helps first of all to accept our primal human programming: When deeply threatened, we’re driven to fight or flight. There are pacifists who want to avoid this choice, and they with others have invented the field of conflict resolution; many useful things have come out of that world. Nevertheless, when the troops or thugs are sent to kick your butt, the choices are fight or flight.

While both military commanders and nonviolent organizers believe there is such a thing as strategic retreat, participants in both kinds of struggle are trained to fight, not run away. Running away usually means the loss of the battle and a weakening of one’s forces, whether violent or nonviolent. Even though the point of running is to try to be safe, flight often increases the number of casualties for our side.

I remember Andrew Young, a key organizer working with Martin Luther King Jr. telling a group of us in the North that we were probably misreading the frequent tactic in the Southern civil rights movement of bringing a group of people to the point of violent confrontation and then having them get on their knees and pray. “You probably thought we were praying for divine intervention,” Andy smiled, “and we were, but we also knew that if those people facing the guns and dogs broke and run, more of them would get hurt! And we’d lose that battle.”

“The thing about praying is,” he said as his smile broadened, “you can’t run on your knees!”

Fight or flight. How many soldiers in combat have heard a loud voice inside them urging them to run away from a situation where they are likely to get hurt or killed? The same is true at hard moments in nonviolent movements, probably in an equal percentage of heads. Unless a strategic retreat is sensible, which means of course an organized retreat, the smart choice is to stay and fight.

I saw how unsafe the flight response can be during the first campaign in which I was arrested, a civil rights struggle in which the state police were called in to back up the local police. As the Chester, Pa., freedom struggle of 1963 escalated, more people joined who had no idea what their black sisters and brothers had learned in the South. Sometimes the Chester people met ugly police charges with courage and stood their ground, out of sheer grit. But sometimes they broke and ran, and the police went crazy, sometimes chasing them upstairs and into their apartments to beat them mercilessly with their nightsticks and guns.

A few years later I saw the largely white demonstrators in the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention make the same mistake. In my experience white activists are even less likely to learn from the actual experience of the civil rights movement than black activists, so I wasn’t at all surprised when the demonstrators broke and ran from scary police charges. As in Chester, but on national television, the police chased the demonstrators, even to the point of soaking carpets with blood in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. The convention demonstrations were largely a strategic loss for the movement, as almost all convention mass confrontations have been, but at least thanks to television coverage the police behavior was roundly criticized as well.

The history of flight is not a pretty one, so let’s go on to the “fight” option. We can choose one of the most dangerous nonviolent campaigns in U.S. history, the 1961 entry of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into Mississippi, the hardest of the hardcore segregationist states of the South. Mississippi was ruled by the White Citizens Councils and, more brutally, that long-lived American terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

For readers who take seriously the question of self defense, I recommend the Danny Glover film Freedom Song, which pulls no punches as it shows what young people experienced in those early days. The staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) knew they would get no protection from local law enforcement; men who were police in the day could at night be wearing the white sheets of the KKK. State police were hostile. The FBI was hostile, and Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department was mostly trying to look the other way. SNCC was on its own.

The film shows SNCC workers leading training workshops for young students. At one point the trainers harassed a young man in a role-play to toughen him up. When the student lost control and attacked the harasser, the trainers held him and tried to reassure him. The young man said something like, “I can’t do this. I gotta fight back.”

The reply came quickly: “By joining us, you are fighting back.”

SNCC’s lesson in 1961 was that safety and effectiveness came from fighting back with nonviolent methods. A second big lesson for the young man came a couple of weeks later. He asks the biggest and most muscled SNCC organizer whether he has adopted nonviolence as a way of life. The organizer explains that if someone threatened him at another time he’d beat up the assailant, but he’s adopted nonviolent action as a strategy, in order to win the struggle.

This stance was typical of people I met throughout the civil rights movement; most weren’t pacifists but learned that in highly dangerous situations, nonviolent discipline gave them the best chance to stay safe — and to win.

SNCC workers said that nonviolence didn’t remove the danger – protesters would still get hurt, and some might be killed. SNCC’s first chairman, and now a member of Congress, John Lewis, was beaten dozens of times, and very narrowly escaped death. He and others in SNCC said the stakes were too high to expect racist privilege to give up easily. But the nonviolent discipline removed the pretext justifying long-term and widespread repression. In fact, the repression most often worked against the perpetrators, just as in jiu-jitsu the savvy warrior uses the violence of the opponent against him. Typically, when white racists used violence against the movement, it grew, and allies appeared, and the racists started dividing among themselves, and the campaign won in one more town.

The best-known leader of the armed Deacons for Defense, Charles Sims, was quoted in The New York Times as favoring nonviolent direct action as the best way to gain civil rights. The Deacons could be found without their guns inside demonstrations. At the same time, Sims believed that nonviolent demonstrators should be protected by guardians carrying guns, accompanying protests to deter the KKK and others, and the Deacons did exactly that.

If you have ever read Dr. Seuss’s environmentally-themed children’s classic The Lorax — or had it read to you — perhaps these words will sound familiar:

“But now,” says the Once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not!”

This message of individual responsibility has served as an introduction for many children to the idea of environmental stewardship. And now it is being spread to a vast audience on the big screen. When it premiered earlier this month, The Lorax was not only the biggest box-office debut in 2012, but also the biggest opening weekend in Universal Pictures history. Not bad for a story that condemns the voracious industrialism of the Once-ler, who clear-cuts the forests for the sake of shortsighted profits, and champions the Lorax, a forest creature who “speaks for the trees.”

But what about this message of individual responsibility as salvation? Is it really the radical fix our culture needs to save the planet? Or is it a message more befitting of a big-budget Hollywood film with 70 different product tie-ins?

To be fair, The Lorax is such a seminal work in environmental literature that it might be accurately called, as a recent Nature article put it, “a kind of Silent Spring for the playground set.” It is therefore not surprising that when Seuss wrote it in 1971, he drew upon the emerging field of ecology — which promoted a “holistic” worldview where people are inextricably linked to their environments. He also addressed issues of economic externalities, property rights and consumer demands. A close reading of The Lorax reveals advanced economic and ecological ideas, elevated by colorful photos and poetic prose.

Nevertheless, there is another aspect of his analysis that is a product of its time: individualism. It’s no coincidence that the 1970s is remembered as the “Me Decade” — a time when many activists emerging from the counterculture of the late 1960s became disillusioned with political activism. Indeed, Charles Reich’s 1970 bestseller The Greening of America argued that a shift in individual consciousness was essential for ecological social change. Perhaps the most concrete example of the counterculture’s influence on modern environmentalism comes from the title of Reich’s book: the term “green” (as in Green Party and green consumerism).

Stewart Brand’s classic 1968-1972 Whole Earth Catalog offers perhaps the best example of this depoliticization and turn to individualism. The catalog promoted a wide range of energy-saving devices, appropriate technology, and other environmentally friendly tools for saving the planet. The same year The Lorax was published, Brand said, “Individual buyers have far more control over economic behavior than voters.” Brand’s emphasis on individual responsibility (rather than political solutions) and technology is central to contemporary American environmentalism. Today, thoughtful politicians can barely even phase out inefficient light bulbs — much less legislate comprehensive solutions — and every environmental problem is addressed with a technical solution.

Like the Whole Earth Catalog, The Lorax suggests that environmental destruction is both a personal shortcoming — such as the ethical failure of the Once-ler — and a personal responsibility — exhibited by the small boy, who at the end, is entrusted to replant the forest. While the moral force of an individual is essential to nonviolent social movements such as environmental justice, the myopic focus on individual responsibility too often obscures systemic problems.

I don’t mean to suggest that the personal actions people take to reduce their environmental impact are pointless, but rather to argue that these actions have the unfortunate tendency to render environmentalists complacent. I’ve known too many people who bike and recycle, and think they have done their part. This is known as the “single action bias.” As Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions discovered, when people react to a threat like climate change, they often rely on just one moderate action, such as riding a bike. The researchers concluded, “People often take no further action, presumably because the first one succeeded in reducing their feeling of worry or vulnerability.”

This often leads into another shortcoming of individual action called the “rebound effect.” Too often, conscientious consumers — myself being no exception — save money on energy efficiency, then immediately turn around and purchase more products with the saved money.

Recycling is another virtuous and well-intentioned environmental act, but it too often becomes an end in itself, a sacred act devoid of a larger context. Because only 3 percent of the total waste in the United States comes from municipal sources (and not all of that waste is recyclable), if everyone were to religiously recycle 100 percent of all recyclable products, 99 percent of the solid waste would still remain. We too often celebrate recycling, and neglect the more important actions of reducing and reusing. Ultimately, we need to challenge our disposable culture of hyper-consumption that creates these vast mountains of waste.

Fortunately, there are resistance- and awareness-raising efforts underway, such as with Buy Nothing Day, No Waste Day, Boycott Black Friday and Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping. But it will take more than living simply and rejecting “commodity fetishism.” We will also need to build and strengthen our communities because, as the venerable environmentalist Bill McKibben has argued, “individual actions don’t add up to enough.”

Imagine if we had lists of “Ten Things You Can Do to Save the Planet” that included “organize a group of your friends and meet with your community leaders” or “engage in a direct action protest at your local coal plant.” It’s this idea of communal cooperation, as opposed to isolated efforts, that gives rise to powerful social movements. A perfect example is the Green Belt Movement, which was initiated by the late Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. By connecting individual actions — undertaken as part of a larger group mission — with larger social imperatives, Maathai and her Green Belt Movement planted over 40 million trees and in the process challenged a corrupt government and exploitative industries.

Perhaps the final scene of The Lorax can be read with this in mind. As the future of the forest — the last “Truffula tree” seed — is entrusted to a small boy, he is instructed to “Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from the axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.” After all, that’s an awful tall order for just one person.

Minnesota winters can be brutally cold, full of ice and snow, and drearily bleak come this time of year. And while this year’s winter has been unexpectedly mild and inconsistent, with temperatures fluctuating from well-below freezing to the high 40s—likely due to the instability of climate change—we still look for ways to escape cabin fever. The Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF), on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, was just the break I needed. But it was also an inspiring weekend full of hopeful films, cinematic social critique, information tables, and workshops on the environment and activism.

The festival, which began in Winona in 2006, shows films from Mountainfilm—a film festival held in Telluride, Colorado in May that takes its films on tour throughout the rest of the year. Mountainfilm “is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.” Likewise, the FRFF—whose films are a combination of the Mountainfilm Tour and locally or regionally-submitted films—has a similar mission:

The Frozen River Film Festival identifies and offers programs that engage, educate and activate viewers to become involved in the world. These programs provide a unique perspective on environmental issues, sustainable communities and extreme sports.

For Winona, the festival is also a time to learn and celebrate the unique landscapes and fertile soils of the Mississippi driftless area that was carved out during the last glacial age. FRFF Director, Crystal Hegge, highlighted the new film about regional legend Aldo Leopold, Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time, that capture’s the conservationist character of the festival: “(Viewers) will be able to ask questions about what’s going on here in Winona, and how they’re utilizing [Leopold's] message and creating a great landscape for the Winona community.” In a small community like Winona, the festival really brings the community together for important conversations that are sparked by the common experiences of viewing a film and hearing rarely-told stories.

One of those rarely told stories, and winner of the FRFF People’s Choice Award, is Dakota 38. The film is a moving re-telling of the mass execution of 38 Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 by the order of President Lincoln in Mankato, Minnesota. The film is a stark reminder of the ugly and often unjust history of how the Dakota were forcibly and violently removed from their ancestral lands, including Winona, and how little of that history most Minnesotans actually know. Nonetheless, the film retraces a healing journey for Jim Miller—whose vivid dream of the execution sparked the journey—and others who decided to ride 330 miles on horseback to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution.

David Holbrooke, Festival Director for Mountainfilm, spoke with me over the phone about the role film and festivals can have in positive social change. “The documentarian is one of the last of the truth tellers,” Holbrooke said, “and we celebrate those filmmakers and storytellers who bring issues to light in untarnished ways.” Mountainfilm’s origins, telling the stories of climbers and mountaineers, were about doing things that haven’t been done. At its core, Holbrooke sees Mountainfilm as being about pushing the limits about what is possible and going places where others have not gone.

The intersection of sports, culture, and the environment appeals to a large swath of people—some of whom are already engaged in issues of social change, but many who are not. Each block of film sessions contains anywhere between two to six films that vary in length from as short as a couple of minutes to as long as a feature-length film that is guaranteed to pique one’s imagination and raise the consciousness to a new level.

The films are an eclectic mix that really do inspire, educate, awe, and touch the viewer in many different ways; some do so very deeply, such as The Economics of Happiness which reveals the serious social, economic, political, and environment challenges humanity faces. But when the film, which tells about the ills of globalization, ends on a hopeful note about the positive and successful potential of “localization,” the viewer is inspired to hook up with one of the many practical alternatives or organizations documented in the film. The Economics of Happiness was also paired up with two other films: Mr. Happy Man and Yelp. There was a unique pedagogical process at work in that Saturday evening film session. In Mr. Happy Man, we meet Bermudan Johnny Barnes who spends his days standing on a busy intersection spreading his love to all who pass by. It is a simple, genuinely love-filled gesture that spills out even across the silver screen. Following that uplifting exposé, Yelp‘s rant against technology causes the viewer to ponder the distraction and disruption that technology may be causing in our lives. The film ends with a climatic crescendo, urging us to “UNPLUG!” After having been calmed by Johnny Barnes and willfully considering our relationship to technology, The Economics of Happiness gives a coherent and digestible debunking of capitalism’s growth at all costs and how it is effecting the planet, communities, and individuals while modestly presenting viable alternatives. The filmmakers are even hosting a conference featuring the film’s interviewees in March.

“The world can be a better place than it is now and our filmmakers and guests [speakers] help us get there” said Holbrooke, who first saw the now Academy Award-nominated film Gasland at the Sundance festival and then played it at the Mountainfilm in 2010. “I had never heard of fracking until Gasland,” admitted Holbrooke. “And it’s happening miles from us in Telluride. It’s happening miles from my home in Brooklyn.” Past guests at Mountainfilm have included Tim DeChristopher and Port Arthur, Texas community organizer and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Hilton Kelley, who is featured in this year’s tour film My Toxic Reality.

“We look for people who are out changing the world. We need hope and solutions and we want to tell the stories of those who are fighting for what they believe in. We are in extraordinary times and we need extraordinary people taking extraordinary measures. Mountainfilm celebrates those people.” At the FRFF, one of those people is Jim Tittle. Clips from his forth-coming documentary on silica-sand mining (a key ingredient needed for fracking), The Price of Sand, debuted for the Mississippi River community that is facing the growing threat of such mining that creates open pit mines along the river and in nearby farm country. The film screening was accompanied by a panel discussion and also included opportunities for folks to get involved with organizing against the mining companies to pass town and country ordinances in favor of protecting the river bluffs.

In a testament to the role arts and film have in organizing and training activists, Peaceful Uprising, the organization co-founded by the now-imprisoned climate activist DeChristopher, had a powerful presence over the weekend by leading a workshop on civil disobedience—attended by about twenty people—and presenting the film-in-the-making Bidder 70. Hegge met Peaceful Uprising in Telluride at Mountainfilm’s 2011 festival and invited them to the FRFF.

When Ken Butigan writes about “mainstreaming nonviolence,” I think workshops on civil disobedience and nonviolence at film festivals (and well attended, for a small town like Winona) may just be what he had in mind. It is exciting to see the tools and awareness needed for nonviolent social change becoming more commonplace and celebrated.

Among the films shortlisted for an Academy Award next month is the powerful documentary If a Tree Falls. It chronicles the house arrest of Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist facing life in prison for the arson of an Oregon lumber company, and the movement to which he belonged, the Earth Liberation Front.

Far from taking sides, the film explores the middle and complex ground between martyrdom and terrorism–the latter being how the United States government saw McGowan’s actions. No matter how one feels about such volatile property destruction, it would be difficult, however, to leave the film without feeling some sympathy for McGowan. Perhaps it’s his own self-reflection and ultimate remorse that does it. But credit the filmmakers for creating an atmosphere conducive to humanization.

As director Marshall Curry noted in a recent interview, “It took a lot of time just explaining to people we were honestly interested in their point of view, and the film wasn’t going to be their point of view but it would reflect their point of view. That we were interested in having the best arguments from different sides bang against each other, rather than setting up straw men to knock down.”

Even the police are given their moment of self-reflection, where they’re able to transcend the black and white, good guy, bad guy mentality that’s so core to their profession. They seem to get that McGowan is not a terrorist and that on some deeply human level, his actions, which arose out of anger toward the destruction of nature and the urgency to see immediate results, as well as the alienation such beliefs often bring, are wholly understandable.

Nevertheless, for those who have studied nonviolence and know its success rates are far higher than violent uprisings–or simply witnessed the major events of the last year–the film will make you anxious to spread the Gospel, so to speak. It is so clear that the Earth Liberation Front, which rose in the mid 1990s as a response to the abuse of peaceful protesters, lacked a basic understanding of the dynamics of nonviolence. They saw young people getting pepper-sprayed at sit-ins and beat up by police and thought something bolder needed to be done. And so they did exactly what you shouldn’t do: alienate everyone who doesn’t share your point of view.

What they failed to consider, despite their efforts to ensure no one was ever hurt in an arson, was that their actions did hurt people, emotionally. As the film reveals, timber company owners feared for their lives and those of their family–something that only rallied the community and media against their environmental message.

Rebecca Solnit spoke to this kind of situation in her recent and widely praised essay on tactics and Occupy Wall Street.

So when episodes of violence break out as part of our side in a demonstration, an uprising, a movement, I think of it as a sabotage, a corruption, a coercion, a misunderstanding, or a mistake, whether it’s a paid infiltrator or a clueless dude. Here I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.

It’s hard to ignore comparisons to Occupy Wall Street these days, but to be fair, it’s probably more than just coincidence that a film like this would come out now, this so-called “Year of the Protester.” Things have been building in this direction for quite a while and now ideas about activism are being discussed like never before, and the work of prominent nonviolent theorists has emerged to recognition on the global scale.

Curry himself is excited about the current relevance of his film and potential of a timeless message:

It has overlapped with the emergence of the Occupy movement, and that has been very interesting. The pepper spray stuff you see on the news could have been lifted from the movie. The frustration with the system is something we’re seeing now. I feel like the film is a cautionary tale for activists to think about the tactics they take and the ethics and effectiveness and legality of tactics.

An exciting new cross-media project called Everyday Rebellion has launched its Advent Calender of Nonviolent Struggle, in which Srdja Popovic will offer a short tip for activists every day until Christmas.

The video above is about the role of humor in nonviolent action. Others address the importance of having numbers and an appealing vision for the future to success in nonviolent struggle, among many other topics. (To watch and share these tips as they are posted, follow the project’s YouTube channel.)

As we’ve mentioned many times before, Popovic was one of the leaders of Otpor, the nonviolent movement that brought down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and now runs the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade.

To my surprise and delight, this month he was also named, along with several other important players in the Arab Spring, at the top (#1) of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list—beating out President Obama, who came in at #11. This would have been unthinkable last year and shows that nonviolence is finally starting to get its due among more mainstream foreign policy analysts and political scientists, although we still have a long way to go.

A couple weeks ago I met with Arash and Arman Riahi, the filmmakers behind Everyday Rebellion. They filmed a long conversation between Popovic, Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men and myself about the Occupy movement and activism more generally.

The following day, the film crew came over to our apartment and interviewed Bryan Farrell and I about this site for the documentary Everyday Rebellion, which is only one aspect of their ambitious project, and filmed a series of tips for activists that will debut in 2012. In an email interview, Arman Riahi described the project as a:

cinema and television documentary and a web platform about non-violent forms of protest and civil disobedience during the 21st century… seen not only through the current Arab and Iranian uprisings, but also through former successful and less successful revolts and new movements like Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to the documentary, Arman told me that Everyday Rebellion plans on developing an extensive website that will include, among many other things, personal stories about nonviolent resistance:

artistic works that have been or are banned… and interactive tools like an app with tips and tricks for the daily fight or educational games for younger audiences to learn in a playful way about different nonviolent methods.

For the Riahi brothers this is more than just another project. They were born in Iran and their family fled the country for Austria after the Islamic Revolution. “We feel it’s a necessity for us to use our craft to bring this project to life in order to support suppressed people,” Arman explains.

From our conversations with them, Everyday Rebellion looks to be an important resource for all of us, and we will continue to blog about the project as it develops over the coming months.

The past month has seen a startling growth in creative means to improve “communication” with the 1%. We’ll showcase three of the latest educational tactics. On November 3rd, for example, members of Occupy Chicago introduced Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to the mic check. An elite, obviously well dressed audience was saved from a potentially dreadful speech and disabused of any notion that “business as usual” can still occur, even in the elegant setting of the Urban League Club, without the participation of the rest of us.

Do note how seamlessly the protesters were embedded in the crowd. They had not only paid to attend, but had enjoyed a sumptuous breakfast and politely listened to speakers preceding the governor, apparently without raising the suspicions of security. Successful infiltration requires a detailed attention to current fashions, a quality sadly lacking in many Occupy circles. Fortunately, the Urban League Club had posted their dress code online. For those of you anticipating attending future corporate meetings, let me suggest perusing the fashion section of Billionaires for Wealthcare, or you might want to read this excellent posting on “How to Dress Like a Republican.”

The mic check intervention within “sacred” corporate space was preceded by a wave of flash choir performances (sometimes with dance routines) across the nation, highlighted by a very brave and moving musical occupation of a home foreclosure hearing in a Brooklyn court (reported on by Frida Berrigan). Some experts in the field believe the two forms can be fruitfully combined, a fact to remember for the upcoming season of corporate shareholders meetings. I’m told the timely purchase of just one share of a corporation’s stock will allow you to forgo burdensome fashion considerations when attending a shareholders meeting.

In Washington DC, organizers took a venerable American tradition, the outdoor movie drive-in, and on November 4th brought it to a gala reception of a Koch Brothers front group known as Americans for Prosperity. Projecting videos onto the walls of the Washington Convention Center, participants were treated to a “Guerrilla Drive-in” with free popcorn, lemonade and award-deserving videos. For those interested in hosting their own drive-in movies or flash billboards using the walls of their favorite banks, Esquire magazine recommends three digital projectors for outdoor use: the Epson Moviemate 72, the Optima HD 71 and the Panasonic PT-AX200U.

The video below catches the high spirits of the drive-in theater.

Finally, a group called Occupy the Board Room is circulating a brilliant idea for those who can’t attend corporate events or prefer the comfort of their own occupation zone. OTBR proposes adopting a corporate CEO or board member as a pen-pal and writing or e-mailing him or her. Their website notes that “Life gets awfully lonely for those at the top. What can we do to let them know someone’s thinking of them? Maybe they need some new friends!” It’s the spirit of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. The site allows people a choice of over 200 actual executives whose e-mail boxes you can choose to flood with helpful advice.

Carrying this concept a step further, a group of OTBR activists in New York decided that as long as they had written physical letters to executives, they might as well deliver them to save the U.S. Post Office unnecessary work. So with open hearts they set off together on October 28th to deliver their mail to Goldman Sachs, Chase and Citibank CEOs. They deserve credit for introducing the promising new chant “You have mail.” See the entertaining results in this next video.

What I really admire in each of these examples is their childlike simplicity. Not allowed to use an amplified microphone — ok, we’ll be the microphone. See that tall building’s blank wall — wouldn’t it make a great movie screen? We’ve written all these great letters, why don’t we go deliver them? It brings to mind Gandhi’s choice in 1930, when handed the task of launching India’s campaign for independence, of marching 200 miles to the sea and just picking up a pinch of “illegal” salt.

The innocent openness (on the surface) of adopting corporate pen pals suggests some tactics for the more confrontational mic speak engagements of the future. Elite audiences can be expected to adapt to unwanted interventions as was witnessed in a recent mic speak “discussion” with Michelle Bachman. Her supporters responded by loudly chanting “Sit down” and then “U-S-A, U-S-A.” Now ask yourself, using your eight year-old-mind, what is the job of a microphone when a speaker says “U-S-A”? Yes, join right in. Or we can improve the chant by preceding each “U-S-A” with an “It’s our…” and let the other side complete the sentence.

Mic speak presents wonderful openings for “turning” the negativity of the 1%. For example, if a main speaker finds fault with an educational intervention, they’re likely to shout something like “You’re interfering with my right to speak.” Mic speak effortlessly turns those words right back on the speaker. But I suspect it takes preparation by the infiltrating agents, much like a football team prepares for different defenses.

Opportunities abound. The 1% appears to be on the verge of learning that when the call “mic speak” goes out, their event has become the site of a General Assembly.

Did I get your attention? While titles that draw attention to women’s physical features may summon most of the male population, a title like, Women, War and Peace was probably written off as a women-only television series. You know: “girl’s stuff” or women-as-victims drama.

Over the past month, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a fascinating series that showed real women around the world in their roles as serious nonviolent organizers. The five-part film series, now completely available online, offers five cases of women’s activism in the following contexts (I have edited the website’s language with a nonviolent conflict perspective, bolding the significant political achievements of their efforts):

I Came to Testify is a story of how 16 Bosnian women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the story of the Liberian women who took on the warlords and regime of dictator Charles Taylor in the midst of a brutal civil war, and won a once unimaginable peace for their shattered country in 2003.

Peace Unveiled follows three women in Afghanistan who are risking their lives to make sure that women’s rights don’t get traded away in the deal for peace talks with the Taliban.

The War We Are Living travels to Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, where two Afro-Colombian women are braving a nonviolent struggle over land. They are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.

War Redefined, the capstone of Women, War & Peace, challenges the conventional wisdom that nonviolent leadership is a male domain through incisive interviews with leading thinkers. Although we in the nonviolent conflict community – thinkers, scholars, activists, writers and educators – don’t generally agree with the so-called “leading thinkers” interviewed in this episode, on this topic they are worth hearing out. Unfortunately, the world is short on policy makers, including women, who are committed to nonviolence. I wish the producers had instead featured leading thinkers who specialize in civil resistance, both women and men.

The film production team is mostly women, led by Abigail Disney who also produced the award winning film, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which exposed Liberia’s women’s movement as a critical component of the end to Liberia’s bloody conflict. Just this year, we witnessed the film’s protagonist, Leymah Gwobee, win the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Africa’s first female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.  By the way, an excellent Al Jazeera People and Power documentary segment, titled, Yemen: A Tale of Two Protests, features the third Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tawakkul Karman, of Yemen.

Watching each of the recent PBS episodes, one can see how the women from each of these countries took on huge political struggles, albeit through a very local angle.  If you can only watch one episode, make it The War We Are Living. The issue of local land struggles amidst political polarization, government and private sector corruption, and the tangled web of institutions and drug traffickers, offers important lessons for nonviolent movements around the world, including Occupy Wall Street.

Just this morning, I came across an article posted by the master of all feminists, Eve Ensler. Perhaps she is dismissed among male circles as the woman who’s always pissed-off about something, but she makes a point about rape that I and many women around the world have to agree with:

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

And if you’re a guy, and I managed to get your attention with the title of this blog post, then Eve Ensler’s recent Huffington Post article, Over It, may be for you! Women’s rights, women’s community organizing, women defending land, and women fighting against rape is not just a “girl” thing. The episodes in Women, War and Peace help shed light on where some of the solutions to the world’s acute injustices lie . . . with the full inclusion and leadership of women. Now that is gorgeous.

The scripts run deep.

Faced with violence or injustice, we’ve often been trained by our families, our media, and our societies to react in one of three basic ways: avoidance, accommodation or violence. These well-grooved neural pathways are not only moral positions—they are often survival strategies. Not getting involved, going along or meeting violence with violence promises us survival and safety.

These scripts, though, often upend this promise by failing to engage deeply and effectively with the realities at hand. The conflicts in our lives or our world have a life of their own, feeding and stoking the embers of fear, powerlessness, despair and retaliation if they’re not dealt with. Often it’s only a matter of time before another fire gets rolling.

In spite of the tenacity of these scripts, a nonviolent shift is underway. This doesn’t mean a utopia free of violence and injustice is coming. Instead, it means we are steadily creating resources and practices that equip more and more people to deal effectively with the violence they face. This transition, in fact, also includes a shift of thinking for those of us who are peacemakers: from a vision of establishing an impossibly idealistic world to one where, while still facing violence and injustice, tools for nonviolent transformation are more plentiful, accessible, and increasingly the default.

We are living in a time when these resources for nonviolent change are proliferating, from restorative justice to trauma healing; from nonviolent communication to forgiveness research; from anti-racism training to third-party nonviolent intervention. Each of these “transformation technologies” offers options beyond the deeply ingrained scripts.

One such practice that has emerged over the past fifteen years is the Not In Our Town movement.

Unlike the exclusivism of its NIMBY cousin (working to keep everything from homeless shelters to toxic waste plants out of its “backyard”), the Not In Our Town movement is not about protecting its existing milieu as much as coming to grips with that milieu’s violence and doing something about it.

A hate crime occurs every hour in the US, and the Not In Our Town movement has produced a series of powerful documentaries since 1994 (many broadcast on public television) that highlight ways that cities, towns, and schools have grappled with hate crimes in an active healing, and effective way.

A project of The Working Group, NIOT’s first video focused on Billings, Montana, where members of the Jewish community were under attack by hate groups in the early 1990s. Rather than avoiding or accommodating these episodes, town-members publicly demonstrated their solidarity with their besieged neighbors. Since then, the series has focused on a wide spectrum of hate crimes.

The Working Group’s goal is not simply to document and disseminate a series of moving stories, but to support and help build a movement that challenges hate from coast to coast. Through its website and newsletter, it encourages other communities to take action, to share their innovative initiatives, to network among communities, to foster ongoing intergroup and interfaith dialogue, and to strategize and brainstorm with individuals and groups seeking to stand up to hate in their communities. It is, as the project says, “working together for safe, inclusive communities.”

This fall, the Public Broadcasting Service aired “Not in Our Town: Light in the Darkness,” a one-hour documentary focused on the ways that Patchogue, New York, responded to a wave of anti-immigrant violence that culminated in the murder of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant who had lived there for 13 years, by seven white youths from nearby communities. The film tracks the call from the Latino community for justice and for the town’s grappling with the underlying causes of this violence, the efforts to listen across racial and class lines, and the fragile and the slow work of creating a more just and enduring peace.

The Working Group has posted numerous video reports on communities that have done Not in My Town work, including in Kootenai County, Idaho and my hometown, Olympia, Washington. A number of institutions of higher education are featured, including Princeton University. And numerous communities and schools have responded to the hate speech of the Westboro Baptist Church, including Charleston and Wheeling, West Virginia, and Gunn High School in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can see more videos here.

What are some of the factors that mark this growing movement?

One is the fact that a relatively sizeable segment of the community makes a decision to publicly take a stand. Most violence and injustice is sustained by indifference or silence. Here are examples where a decision was made to break this silence and, most powerfully, to align with those who have been traditionally and systemically rejected, excluded or dehumanized. It is one thing for a handful of people to do this. It is quite another for this to become a decision made by the public, especially because it often (though not always) implies a criticism of the existing public order.

Second, the community searches for creative ways to name and embody its opposition to violence and its affirmation of what often becomes a new approach or set of civic relations.

And third, such actions reverse a typical “crowd” dynamic, where the group rallies in favor of the dominant order by scapegoating a person or a group. (“Unanimity minus one,” as author Gil Bailie puts it.) Here there is solidarity with the victim or victims but also, in some cases, using creative and nonviolent approaches to defuse the situation. (Gunn High School students, for example, didn’t put its energy into verbally or physically attacking the Westboro Church folks but, instead, turned their school into a festival of song and affirmation for the day.)

The Working Group’s Not in Our Town movement has built on many past examples of communities refusing to hate and even risking themselves to do so (for example, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France and Denmark during World War II). And while it is increasingly mainstreaming this option, clearly much more work in this area needs to be done.

Nevertheless, this a powerful model—and perhaps it is expanding before our very eyes. In many ways, the Occupy movement is a type of Not In My Town action. It is responding to the community-rending emergency in which millions have experience the structural violence of being forced into poverty, unemployment, foreclosure and marginalization.

While, strictly speaking, it is probably inaccurate to call these “hate crimes” (though it is intriguing to reflect on its definition), there is a huge, systemic injury being visited on millions—and the Occupy movement is taking clear action to say, Not in Our Town, Not in Our Nation, Not in Our World.

Like those in Billings and Charleston and Olympia, Occupiers are going public. They are not avoiding. Not accommodating. Not using violence. Instead they are using the most powerful symbols at their disposal—their own vulnerable bodies—to sound the alarm, to show solidarity, and to embark on recreating a society in need of healing and transformation.

A more fitting debut could not have been conceived for the new feature documentary “How to Start a Revolution,” given its world premiere on September 18th as part of the 27th annual Boston Film Festival. In attendance were the director, Ruaridh Arrow, as well as a few of the people featured in the film: Robert Helvey, Jamila Raqib, and the man himself, Gene Sharp. At 83 years old and with rather limited mobility, Dr. Sharp  rarely makes public appearances these days. But the several hundred who had turned out to see him in Boston were by no means disappointed, responding with at least three standing ovations on the afternoon. For those of us lucky enough to have been there and hear him speak, including a number of his close friends and colleagues, it was impossible not to recognize the deep significance of the moment, with the humble Dr. Sharp visibly moved by the outpouring of support.

Contextualizing the legacy of Dr. Sharp through the recent uprisings in the Arab world, the film introduces him anew, in a way that prior attempts had never quite been able. Until very recently, biographical portraits had been rather few and far between—a deficit due, not to lack of interest, but rather to Sharp’s insistence upon the importance of his work above all else, including the details of his personal life. This new film offers a unique, unprecedented look at a man to which no journalist—let alone filmmaker—had ever been granted this kind of access. After speaking at length with the director, Mr. Arrow, I got the sense that he both understands and appreciates the unique opportunity he’d been given, as well as the responsibility he now had. For the story of Gene Sharp, and of the Albert Einstein Institution (which Sharp founded in 1983 and where I later worked), is one that should have been widely told long before revolutions came in different colors.

At times the film can be both extraordinarily personal and profoundly global in scope, taking us from a small office in East Boston to Egypt, Iran, Syria, Serbia, Burma, West Virginia, and back again. Guided by seven lessons gleaned from Sharp’s body of work, we’re led on the trail of his most well known tract, From Dictatorship to Democracy. Sharp’s friend and former colleague, retired US Army Colonel Robert Helvey, provides a welcome bit of flavor and personality to the film, as well as more than a degree of humor. The segments with Jamila Raqib, Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution, lend the film a level of authority and intimacy that is certain to affect viewers.

Gene Sharp and AEI Executive Director Jamila Raqib

Some of the most personal and touching moments of “How to Start a Revolution” are between Sharp and Raqib, who in ten years of working together have grown quite dear to one another. Propelled by exquisitely shot sequences interspersed with powerful archival footage, the documentary also features interviews with an impressive supporting cast, including Srdja Popovic and Ahmed Maher—instrumental in the takedowns, respectively, of the dictators Milosevic and Mubarak.

Additionally impressive, especially for Mr. Arrow’s first film, is the way it confronts head-on some of the controversy surrounding Dr. Sharp’s influence in recent years. The film tastefully shows how amid the charges by some on the left of collusion with the CIA, the real story is vastly different, and far less glamorous. Operating out of a two-room office on the ground floor of an East Boston row house, the Albert Einstein Institution has lately garnered quite a disproportionate amount of attention, which speaks to the strength of Dr. Sharp’s ideas. What many who attended the premiere were surprised to learn from Ms. Raqib, however, is that even with interest at an all-time high, the work of the Albert Einstein Institution remains significantly under-funded, its very solvency at times coming into question.

Some of this has to do with the history of the Institution, which in the film is never quite told in full. The director explained to me that, while trying to be as thorough as possible, the omissions were partly due to him being unable to secure key interviews despite repeated attempts. Still, it does seem like more could have been done to include other, more recent scholars of nonviolent action, if only for them to underscore the fundamental importance of Dr. Sharp to the field. The critique most likely to be levelled at the film, though, is that it over-emphasizes Sharp’s role in nonviolent revolutions throughout the world. To this I’ll let Mr. Arrow respond, from his June 2011 interview with TheFilmStage.com:

What Gene Sharp has given is a strategic plan for revolution. He hasn’t put a million people in the streets of Cairo or Belgrade; what he’s done is help them make their movements more effective. His work tends to go to the leaders of the movement, the intellectuals, … they distill it themselves, and they create the strategic plan based on that work. Then they feed it out to their population … So, most people involved in a revolution won’t know that Gene Sharp had anything to do with it, or that his writings were used. When the New York Times does a big article saying how influential Gene was in the Egyptian revolution, suddenly everyone throws up their arms and goes, “we never heard of him.” That’s completely normal, there’s no reason they should have …

So while Gene Sharp may or may not have had as large and looming an influence as the film does at times imply, it’s never been up for debate that the man’s writings are a powerful force. He was the first to identify nonviolent action as a distinct political phenomenon, isolate it in such a way that it could be studied on its own, and codify it for others to use more effectively. As Dr. Sharp himself is always very quick to point out, he did not invent strategic nonviolent struggle. But to use that to downplay his importance is a bit like saying Newton isn’t such a big deal because he didn’t actually invent gravity. It’s very refreshing to see someone who’s never put an ounce of effort into self-promotion finally start to get the recognition they so greatly deserve.

On this point I’m sure the director of what may very well become the definitive documentary on Gene Sharp, would agree. Ruaridh Arrow is a 31-year-old Scottish newspaper and television journalist who himself reported from Cairo in February for the BBC. First in contact with the Albert Einstein Institution in 2008, he’s been working on “How to Start a Revolution” more or less ever since, eventually raising an impressive $60,000 on Kickstarter earlier this year. He told me he sought to make a film that wasn’t just educational and entertaining, but that also stood up to academic scrutiny and created important footage for the historical record. With this first feature-length documentary of his, I would say Mr. Arrow has very much succeeded. And judging by the response of those in attendance at the premiere, I’m not the only one with that opinion.

In the Q&A session that followed the viewing, one woman from Egypt who was at Tahrir Square said she had just recently learned of Dr. Sharp, but was fascinated. Her question, timely and well placed, echoed a theme that scholars of nonviolent action find themselves increasingly being asked to discuss: “The toppling of Mubarak was easy; now what we’re trying to do is hard. How do you safeguard your gains after the revolution?” Flanked on either side by Dr. Sharp and Ms. Raqib, the retired Colonel agreed it was a difficult question, but put forward that removing the dictator is only phase one; phase two is building a democracy. Helvey said too many people think they’ve won as soon as the first phase is over, stressing that it’s never good strategy to abandon the battlefield halfway through. “You need to start planning phase two on the very first day of phase one,” he said.

If “How to Start a Revolution” gets people asking questions like this, informed by the lessons of Dr. Sharp but tailored to the problems facing them, the film is a success no matter what. Less than a week after its world premiere it had already managed to win two awards at the Boston Film Festival: Best Documentary, and the Mass Impact Award, “given to a filmmaker whose movie illuminates a social issue that positively affects humanity.”

As far as finally getting to see the film, there should be a number of options. In addition to various screenings and other festivals, including London’s Raindance this year on Gandhi’s birthday (October 2nd), it will also appear in a condensed television version, and eventually, one hopes, be featured at theaters around the world. The DVD, Mr. Arrow assured me, will be available sometime early next year.

Keep an eye out for when it plays near you: www.howtostartarevolutionfilm.com

Little Town of Bethlehem shares the life stories of three different people who grew up within the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and who each chose nonviolence as their ways of life. I deliberately selected a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian because the three faiths are seen as reasons for war, and because the three faiths are all commanded to love their neighbors.

I recognize that every story is someone’s perspective and therefore it can be said that every story has some level of bias. At the same time, the art of storytelling is about exploring the human condition. Whatever bias exists the audience is going to see it, and that is going to tell them something as well. It is going to tell them if the protagonists and filmmakers are honest, and if there is anything rewarding to learn from their perspectives. In the end the audience remembers a film or story because they believe they gained something from it, and that the story reveals something worthwhile about our common humanity. In as many words that describes why I wanted to make this film and what I wanted the film to achieve. I believe the voices of nonviolence are an underrepresented perspective and they tell us a great deal about ourselves.

We started filming in Jordan and southern Lebanon just after the 2007 war between Israel and Lebanon. It wasn’t the best time for an American film team to be in southern Beirut. Many of the craters had signs over them saying “Made in America,” in reference to the arms support America provides Israel. I knew that this was going to be a hard film to make and that many of my friends in America would not understand why we were doing this. At the same time I was challenged by what this story said about us—and by us I mean humanity. I knew that whatever the cost this was an important story to know for myself and to share with my friends and the world.

There is so much history to this conflict, and people on both sides are continually trying to rewrite the history. I thought, well, let’s just have three contemporary people who grew up with their own understandings of the history share what the conflict looks like to them. They each inherited the conflict. They each have good reasons for continuing the conflict. They each overcame the past in order to face the future, so their stories should be pretty interesting. Little Town of Bethlehem is their story. We didn’t use an announcer. The three protagonists share their personal journeys and what it was like for them to choose nonviolence as the way forward and why.

I also knew that if we could show how nonviolence brought life to them then the film wasn’t limited to one conflict or geographic area but spoke to all conflicts. The goal was to present the story and see whether this assumption is true, and like any good filmmaker I believe it is only true if the audience arrives at that conclusion for themselves.

To find or host a screening of Little Town of Bethlehem, or to purchase a copy, visit the film’s site here.

Our friends at Narco News TV have just produced another episode of their excellent series of interviews with the people who made the revolution in Egypt happen. (Don’t miss the last one, with blogger and viral video producer Aalam Wassef.) This time the star is Mohammad Abbas, who was a young member of the Muslim Brotherhood when the uprising broke out in January. He narrates its beginnings, and explains its roots in decades of organizing and coalition building. Even so, what happened on January 25th seemed to him nothing short of a miracle.

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

McCord, though he is understandably tense, does not seem to be completely  unnerved by the trauma. Instead, it forced him to wake up from the lies that had put him in a uniform to kill other people’s children halfway across the globe, and he took it upon himself to try waking up others. Among people who have lost loved ones to gun violence—like, for example, Azim Khamisa, who now works to dissuade school children from joining gangs after his son was mindlessly killed by one—some have discovered that turning grief and guilt to reconstructive work can be psychologically restorative. But their number is not legion. Many, many more have gone, and are now going, the way of Suzy from In Our Name. According to a covered-up story that is about to be released by Project Censored, a Northern California-based media watchdog service, the number of active-duty soldiers or veterans who have committed suicide has just surpassed the number of those killed in combat.

We are facing a social problem of massive proportions, as our already-grim experience with returning veterans from Vietnam should have warned us. Psychologist Rachel McNair developed the concept of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) to bring home to us the fact—now dramatically supported by neuroscientists—that you cannot send people out to kill and maim without expecting them to suffer enduring torments themselves, no matter how thoroughly you try to desensitize them beforehand. Thank God! Where would we be if this capacity to respond to the joys and sufferings of others could really be squelched?

There have been admirable attempts to get needed help to these spiritually wounded men and women; but the real answer, the only sane and compassionate answer, is prevention. And that means only one thing: to stop glorifying violence in our social culture and national policy—in other words, renounce war. It won’t be easy. Colonel Harry Holloway, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, told journalist Dan Baum recently, “As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we’re causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we’re accomplishing is worth the harm we’re causing … if we get into this business of talking about killing people we’re going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience.”

But what is the alternative? Those children who opened Ethan McCord’s eyes were killed by a machine in the sky a mile and a half away with 30mm cannon rounds—ordinance tipped with depleted uranium and meant for penetrating armor, not tearing apart human beings. If truth is the first victim in war, humanity is a close second. Thus, if we do not “pathologize” what is truly sick, we end up pathologizing what isn’t: peace. (Remember the “Vietnam syndrome?”) If we do not fear our own bestiality we end up producing a climate that, as none other than General Douglas MacArthur said, “renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.”

Perhaps those who still believe that war is an “absolutely necessary experience” would reflect with us on the following story. It was Poland, in 1942. The Gestapo was raiding the apartment of the Kshenskys, who had participated in the Jewish underground. Finding the “incriminating” evidence, they were about to take the mother, who was home alone with their two-year-old son, out to the courtyard and shoot her when she saw, with horror, that her toddler was playing with the shiny buttons on the Gestapo captain’s uniform. He, too, noticed, and stared down at the child.  After what must have seemed an eternity he looked up, his face totally changed, and said,“I have a son at home just his age, and I miss him very much.” Then he added, “Your son has saved your life,” and ordered his men out of the apartment. The child did not survive the war, but the Kshenskys miraculously did; their daughter, Lili Kshensky Baxter, is a former Chair of the National Council of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation.

There is a way out of this dehumanizing dilemma, and that is to rise up and say, “No!” War is not a necessary evil, nor indispensable activity. It is a horror and a travesty on human nature. We have international courts now; we have nonviolent intervention teams. There is, as there has always been, the possibility of conversation among civilized people—provided we elect them. And there are the arts of nonviolence, of which a Kurdish gentleman in Kirkuk said recently, “It may be slow, but you don’t lose your humanity.” Journalist Marshall Frady has given a beautiful description of how this kind of struggle not only preserves, instead of surrenders, our humanity but makes it into a spreading force:

In the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, … an oppressor can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience toward compassion and justice.

At the heart of Gandhi’s revolution was a new kind of hero: brave, but also compassionate; bold, but also empathetic; powerful, but also unarmed. For millennia, traditional heroism had been fueled by the implacable absolutism of the Us vs. Them script (“we are good, they are evil”) enforced by justified violence. Gandhi’s new heroism-subverting hero—whom he called a satyagrahi, a practitioner of Soulforce—bet her life on challenging and dissolving this ceaselessly reinvented and endlessly lethal dividing line.

“The Interrupters,” a new documentary from director Steve James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, vividly dramatizes this gamble in the midst of a culture of extreme youth violence on Chicago’s South and West Sides. The film is an up-to-the-minute account of the haunting terror of seemingly inescapable gang conflict that is continually threatening to spin out of control—and that often does.

What sets this sobering account apart, however, is that it settles neither for ineffectual hand wringing nor a more traditional criminal justice perspective, including prosecution and incarceration as the solution to gang violence. Instead, it tracks over the course of a year a trio of “violence interrupters” – Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra –who, like Gandhi’s satyagrahis, are nonviolent first responders intervening in numerous disputes on the streets that threaten immediate carnage but also could touch off a larger war.

These and other interrupters are part of CeaseFire, an innovative nonprofit organization that “intervenes in crises, mediates disputes between individuals, and intercedes on group disputes to prevent violent events.” The interrupters “know who to talk to, who has influence, and how to de-escalate a situation before it results in bloodshed.”

CeaseFire touts what it calls a public health approach that seeks to prevent violence “on the front end” through interruption, intervention, risk reduction, and changing norms and behaviors. On the front lines are the interrupters, who have street credibility, rooted in years on the street and often long prison sentences for gang-related activity. Here are what Ceasefire reports are the results of its model:

 CeaseFire launched in West Garfield Park, one of the most violent communities in Chicago in 2000 and was quick to produce results reducing shootings by 67% in its first year. CeaseFire’s results have since been replicated more than 18 times in Chicago and throughout Illinois and has now been statistically proven by an extensive, U.S. Department of Justice funded, independent three-year evaluation. This evaluation scientifically-validated CeaseFire’s success in reducing shootings and killings by 41% to 73% and demonstrated a 100% success rate in reducing retaliatory killings in five of the eight communities examined. The Model has been replicated more than a dozen times nationally and has two international sites in Iraq.

In June 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., head of the Department of Justice referenced CeaseFire as an example of “a rational, data-driven, evidence-based, smart approach to crime – the kind of approach that this Administration is dedicated to pursuing and supporting.” The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted a subsequent evaluation of the Baltimore-based CeaseFire replication with initial results consistent with earlier Department of Justice evaluation findings and the University of Kansas demonstrated a 38% reduction in homicides for the first CeaseFire zone in Kansas City.

The film, however, does not dwell on these lofty results or analyses. Instead, it relentlessly takes us into the up-close immediacy of street-level battles and the ways CeaseFire’s Interrupters engage these volatile and unpredictable situations, often with a combination of deep listening; confrontation; improvisation (including the offer to take an angry gang-banger to lunch, which he unexpectedly accepts); a worn wisdom that shows in their faces as they listen to the parties and weigh their next move; and a gritty, down-to-earth suasion rooted in their street cred. They’ve been there, and they know the outcome is often lockup or the cemetery.

The narrative effectively interweaves riveting real-time incidents or vignettes—a peace summit after the savage killing of a high school student; a tense funeral; a trip to the hospital where a CeaseFire supervisor visits with the first Interrupter to be shot in the line of duty—with the moving biographies of Ameena, Cobe and Eddie and their own difficult journeys of transformation and the day-to-day choice, against all odds and sometimes even their better judgment, to keep at it.

There are numerous cases in the film where they stay the course, even when the results seem miniscule or uncertain—as in the example of the mother and two sons who are in different gangs and who have deep fractures between them. Cobe persistently, but carefully, keeps opening doors, and gradually it seems that they decide to slide through them together, however tentatively.

But then there is the case of 18-year-old Lil’ Mike who summons the gumption to apologize to the owners of a barbershop he had robbed a few years before, and now is a CeaseFire Interrupter working with youth. The scene, mixing Lil’ Mike’s forthrightness with the barber owner’s anger, truth-telling, lack of sentimentality, and gesture of reconciliation, is jaw-droppingly moving. From many angles the film makes the point that both violence and nonviolence hinge on a subtle dance between an individual’s journey, the abiding challenges of interpersonal relationships, and the larger narrative of the community’s story and history.

There is a short but intriguing debate in the film about the larger impact of CeaseFire’s approach. One the Interrupters calls it a Band-Aid, while the director says that the broader project of structural change—including job creation and new community resources—itself depends on this kind of violence reduction.

Aside from these perspectives, it is possible to discern in this initiative an emerging anti-violence movement and potentially a broadly based movement for nonviolent social change. Ameena, Cobe, Eddie—and the many others featured in the film, including the people they are working with and supporting on the street—may become the leaders of an inclusive project that invites people from all sides of the line to turn from cycles of violence to building powerful movements struggling for economic justice and human rights.

The work of the Interrupters offers to all of us a clear and detailed example of how nonviolent change works. It is not passive, weak, ineffective, naïve, simplistic, or utopian. It is not perfect. It can be courageous, intentional, messy, creative, and able to re-weave the web a little bit at a time.

We have much to learn from this startling film.

To see a list of theatrical screenings across the US, click here.