How nonviolent discipline transforms fear into constructive action

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In this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we speak with Latin American peace educator and activist Pietro Ameglio about civil resistance in Mexico and the deeper dynamics of nonviolent struggle. Drawing on decades of organizing with grassroots communities, families of the disappeared, and movements confronting cartel violence, Ameglio reflects on concepts such as the “spiral of violence,” the difference between fear and terror, and the practice of what he calls “putting the body inside the conflict.” His work is rooted in a Christian peace tradition and shaped early on by the influence of Maryknoll priest Fr. Donald Hessler, a colleague of Dorothy Day who helped introduce Ameglio and others to Gandhian nonviolence through faith-based organizing and community work. While Ameglio acknowledges the complex realities communities face, he is not proposing a “diversity of tactics,” but pointing instead to the inner discipline and moral courage that nonviolence requires — the transformation of fear into constructive action and the cultivation of dignity, courage and solidarity that make civil resistance possible.

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Stephanie Van Hook: Greetings and good morning, everybody. I’m Stephanie Van Hook. I’m here with my co-host, Michael Nagler, and we’re from Nonviolence Radio. You’re here at Nonviolence Radio. We are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California. And the purpose of this show is to explore nonviolence in all of its forms, from theory and practice and activism and history and science and all of that. And we’ve always had some really great conversations and guests. And today will be no different, also includes our Nonviolence Report. So Michael Nagler, how are you this morning? Let’s do a quick check in.

Michael Nagler: I’m just fine, Stephanie. Yeah, happy to check in with you. 

Stephanie: Yeah, well, the world is full of horrors and nonviolence continues to be a signal of hope. You can speak to that, I’m sure. 

Michael: I’ve never spoken for anything else. I hope you recognize that reference, folks. That was a quote from the Gandhi film where at one point Nehru says, “they’ll let you out of prison if you’ll speak for nonviolence.” And he pauses for a moment and he says, “I’ve never spoken for anything else.” 

Stephanie: Well, there you have it. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot happening, including a war that the U.S. has launched into the Middle East and taking on Iran with Israel, with the support of other countries as well. But things are not looking so great there. Continued genocidal conditions in Gaza. Recently, you know, just our international politics and the role of the U.S. is continuing to provide incredible challenges for a future for peace and justice. And within the country, too, with the rise of authoritarianism that we’re seeing worldwide, it’s also happening in the US and divisions are being created. But also there’s a lot of work of bridge building and resistance and nonviolent action, which we try to go into that nonviolence and say, how is this working and how can we grow it and spread it and let’s think about it and honor it and see it. Because if we don’t see it, what happens, Michael? 

Michael: If we don’t see it, for us, it ceases to exist. 

Stephanie: There you go. So we have a great interview for you today. We’re speaking with Pietro Ameglio, which I’ll tell you a little bit more about him, in a minute. But this is in response to a larger issue. Pietro is currently living and working in Mexico. And a couple weeks ago, at this point, the head of a major drug cartel was assassinated or killed by the Mexican military, but also pushed by the U.S. to do this and it set off violence throughout Mexico by the cartel as they struggled to put somebody else in the position of leader of the cartel. And it’s the kind of approach of violence to solve problems of violence. It’s just, it feels so wild that people still believe that you can just cut the head off of an organization and then that will stop the way that that organization functions. The same mentality in Iran and – but, Michael, we’ve been talking about this for a long time at Metta, haven’t we? There’s something that we say, oft-quoted, is that it’s not about putting a different person in power, it’s about awakening a different power in people. And if our sense is that the only way to have power is to be in a leadership role and then, you know, “get you out of there, we’ll put somebody else in there,” we’re not changing the fundamental structure of power itself, which led to those people being in charge.

Michael:  I’m remembering a comment that one military spokesman made in Iraq. He said, we’re making terrorists faster than we can kill them. It just brings out the tragedy and the futility, the utter futility of using violence to overcome violence.

Stephanie: And so many sectors of society do come out and start working on the nonviolent solutions in various ways, including religious organizations. And that’s Pietro, in a way, our guest today, is going to be representing Christian nonviolent resistance as he’s involved in that movement very well. He said that even he has been in rooms with Pope Francis trying to get him to go to Gaza, for example, before he passed away. 

So today we’re honored to welcome Pietro Ameglio. He’s a historian, educator, and activist whose life’s work has been to bring Gandhi and civil resistance into the heart of Latin American struggles for justice. He was born in Uruguay and based for many years in Mexico, and he spent decades studying Gandhi’s philosophy and translating it into practical action through peace education, civic organizing, and nonviolent movements confronting violence and corruption. His work is deeply shaped by a Catholic and Christian peace tradition, which has influenced many Latin American movements for justice and human dignity. In the late 1980s, Ameglio co-founded the Mexican chapter of Servicio Paz y Justicia, SERPAJ, and is part of a wider Latin American network inspired by Christian commitments to human rights, reconciliation, and nonviolent resistance during the region’s “dirty wars.” Through this work, he helped develop forms of civic education and public action rooted in what he calls Mexico’s “moral reserve,” the cultural values of dignity, solidarity, and compassion that support nonviolent resistance. He later became a key organizer in the movement for peace with justice and dignity, which emerged in response to the devastating violence of Mexico’s drug cartels and the violence that emerges from that. Alongside poet Javier Sicilia, Ameglio helped to organize the historic silent march from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, bringing tens of thousands into the street to honor victims and call for a different path. He’s a professor, author, and longtime peace educator. He often prefers the term civil resistance rather than nonviolence, emphasizing that organized, courageous action for justice is an active and transformative force. Through both scholarship and activism, he continues to explore how Gandhian methods can help societies move toward what he calls “peace with justice.” Let’s hear from Pietro Ameglio. 

Stephanie: So you have led a life committed to nonviolence and we’d love to hear your story. When did nonviolence become real to you? 

Pietro Ameglio: Well, we are very little pieces in a very big world. Everything that we do, I think is humble, but real. And that is something that gives us a little moral force to share as we are doing now. And as I know that the Metta Center and Michael are in their lives and many others also in the United States. So it’s perhaps a little bit long, the story, and I don’t want to exaggerate in that, but we’ve been introduced in nonviolence by a very key North American priest of Maryknoll that was Father Donald Hessler. He was a very, very great soul and spirit and man of action with a lot of love of church, but also a very big criticism about church and its commitment in peace and nonviolence and the work with poor people. He had the grassroot of Catholic Worker. He knew Dorothy Day directly in his young life, and she introduced in him all the nonviolent culture and action. He was in the Second World War prisoner in Hong Kong. And when English army liberated Hong Kong from Japanese, they told him to go away and be free because he was in a concentration camp. And he said, “I won’t go away until the last Japanese prisoner leaves this camp, because they treated me very well and I want to see that you treat them as they treated me.” So Donald Hessler introduced peace and justice service in Mexico in the 60s and introduced very much about nonviolence and about the culture of peace and justice service of Argentina and South America in the 60s. And he worked in base Christian communities in Mexico City and other parts of the country.

And after that, we’ve been learning and working very much with children that live in the street, with peace communities, with Zapatistas in indigenous Maya communities of Chiapas, with young people in their struggles, and now the last 15 years, very close with relatives of disappeared people all over the country that searched clandestine graves, their loved people. So we also believe very much in nonviolence as a community experience. So we’ve been involved many times in building collectives and communitarian grassroots experience, more with young and poor people trying to live together, to struggle and to share challenges in life together. So that was a little bit the beginning and the continuation till today, with teachers of grassroots in Mexico, but also in other places of Latin America that are the best teachers for us about the coherence between action and reflection. 

Michael: Is that movement spreading? 

Pietro: Yes, it’s important because there is a kind of crisis, for one of the problems here is the ages. Most of the persons that are now in Christian-based communities have, as me, more than 70, 60, many of them 80 years. And the problem is that young people haven’t been introduced as it happened in the 60s and 70s. So nowadays they are little groups, yes, all over the country, more in the southeast of the country in zones, but it has been changing, changing in other ways of organizing and commitment. And the main word in Mexico for social grassroots organizing is collectives, that’s the magic word, also in feminine, in a feminine way, with “a” not with “o” as a masculine way and it’s full and all over young people and not so young people use more that word than base communities. And the center is social justice and another very important word in Mexico that is civil resistance. In Mexico, the word nonviolence is not at all extended. People use the word civil resistance as a way of understanding Latin American culture where civil resistance has many ways of acting, not only the nonviolent way. So we respect other cultural ways of struggling. We try to push the nonviolent culture also, but we must be humble and understand that the story, the culture of communities and grassroots people, sometimes they use some mixed methods, not only nonviolent methods, but some kind of a little bit more aggressive methods or tools. 

Stephanie: And when you’re working with people, how do you convey to them some of the principles of nonviolence? What do you need in order to cultivate courage when you’re taking on nonviolence in the struggle?

Pietro: Yes, you are putting me in a very deep reflection of life because we have more than 40 years trying to translate in our culture the concepts you speak; you mentioned about the large nonviolent culture in the world, not only the Gandhian culture. In the United States, you have a very deep culture. Now we can see all that in all your struggles against ICE, how you are awakening a lot of your own story about (Martin) Luther King, about Cesar Chavez, about Catholic Worker and lots, lots of experiences, very rich. We have a similar problem. For example, 40 years ago, we made lots of workshops, 40, 30 and 20 years ago of direct action of nonviolence, and we never mentioned the word nonviolence, because in the moment we mentioned, people would go away, especially peasant people, indigenous people, and young people. And also, how you say, workers. 

The word nonviolence, we write it all together, not with a line between and separated non from violence. People in their mind have a separated “non-violence,” so they think that it’s forbidden the word some kind of violence. Father Donald Hessler, that I spoke of him, taught us a very deep reflection. nonviolence altogether is the more violent of violences. I define myself as a violent person, but it doesn’t use the violence for destroying another person. It uses the violence for making a person understand that we can walk in another way together that will make both freedom and more plenty as human beings. So the kind of violence that we use is nonviolence. 

But I’ve seen all my life, and I don’t know if you, Michael or Stephanie, have experienced that, that when we speak and act in nonviolence, the other person that is in front gets very violent, gets angry with us. He would prefer that we would use some violent methods that are his methods. And he gets more angry with nonviolence than with violence, if we use. 

So nonviolence generates a positive violence for justice, dignity around because it touches deep parts of the humanity of the other person you have in front or organization or police or social movement. So in that sense, I think, I don’t know if we share this, that nonviolence is not opposed to violence. It’s opposed to inhumanity, to injustice. But I won’t promote violence, but I understand that there are some situations in human life that human species, we don’t know how to stop violence without using a kind of similar violence. 

But, and this is for me the secret of nonviolence, not making the spiral of violence grow. This is an art. It’s very difficult because generally when we use a similar violence to stop violence, we make the war, the hate and the spiral of violence grow up. But what can you tell now to Iranian people to do with the bombs in their heads or to Palestinian people in Gaza? I am searching a lot of other alternatives. Our lives are in that. But we can’t tell them not to stop that kind of genocide violence without using any kind of violence. And that’s sometimes story, the culture that people in Latin America have in their minds. So we must start sharing reflections, as Stephanie said, and we call it “put our body inside.” That’s one of the words we use for defining nonviolence. Put the body inside of a conflict, between parts in conflict. So we must show with the example and we organize people that nonviolence works and that makes us more human in all senses. After that we can use other concepts as the strong of love, the force of love, the force of truth, satyagraha, what you want, but not before, because before people will put a wall between you and them and they won’t listen. But, little by little, people I think all over the world are creating new words for nonviolence, no? People Force, the force of people that don’t have force, no?  Václav Havel. In Mexico, the word is civil resistance. With that word, everybody can understand and accept the other methods. 

Michael: We have noticed, Pietro, that in the Philippines, they had a very interesting word. This is in the People Power uprising. They called it “offering dignity.”

Pietro: Yes, people power is one of the words they use very much to throw down Marcos dictator. It’s a great experience of base Christian communities and bishops. This is one of the biggest problems we have and I think also in Gaza, that church is not directly committed in nonviolence, but most bishops, cardinals, because they have a social force, moral, important to confront authorities, because it’s as if we, and other grassroots Christians do things, authorities don’t care very much, but if the bishop does a nonviolent action in Gaza, for example, things would change. I’ve passed the last two years and I’ve been in Vatican with Francis Pope for trying to tell him that he must go, should have gone to Gaza, and stayed there with some other religious leaders because that would have helped something to stop Netanyahu, United States, and other genocide powers. And the Philippines struggle is a good example where bishops put their body in the street in front of tanks. And the army of Marcos, dictator, no? Yeah. And now all your bishops and Israeli religious leaders should be in the street saying, stop bombing Iran. You can’t bomb somebody about another faith. Well, it’s a dream, nonviolent dream.

Stephanie: I wanted to tie our conversation into current events in Mexico in particular. There was recently some cartel violence, especially in the state of Jalisco, with the head of a cartel being killed by the Mexican military. I think it was at the behest of the United States pressuring Scheinbaum to do this. Can you speak to that event and what took place afterward? 

Pietro: Yes, the situation, well, all over the world, but in Latin America, is that very wrong concept about drug war. It’s completely wrong, and your government put that in all Latin America, and our governments use that for hidden reality, because in many governments, not in the government we have now in Mexico, the drug gangs, the criminals, are inside of the government structures. Not now in Mexico, in a big way, but they are. But this way of confronting a very hard social violence, very deep, needs one hand in all the social network, peace building, that many programs, social programs for young people, for women, old people, all kind of peace work in the social fabric, no? 

There is a very, very deep work that government speaks about hugs and not bullets. But in a Christian way, that’s a very deep social policy because we put first the peace, the social justice in the grassroots, but there must also be some kind of a police or military confronting the military and structure of criminal gangs. Otherwise, it’s impossible because it’s a war. Not a drug war: it’s a kind of war in communities, in local cities, in local towns, in state level, that criminal gangs have in some times more weapons than the government and than the police. So there is this other part that in Mexico, the last governments, not López Obrador and Sheinbaum, but the ones before, were very close to criminal gangs. You have in United States our Minister of Civil Security, García Luna, that has 30 years of jail, judged by a judge from United States in New York, in Manhattan court. So he was the chief of national security and he was the chief of a criminal gang. And that completely proved. 

So, we had very much of that, and the difference now is that this government and the one before are catching some of these leaders, chiefs, and trying to break inside the criminal structures. But, and this is important, it’s a very big mistake also in nonviolence and in life, to think that if you cut the head of an organization, the violence stops.  It’s the Trump’s mentality that thinks that taking away Maduro; things change in Venezuela, and killing the Ayatollah Khamenei, things will change in Iran. That’s completely out of reality. And we know very well that the killing of El Mencho, the biggest criminal leader of the country and one of the three biggest of the world, it’s not a little leader, it won’t change the criminal process, but it will help to destroy in a little bit the criminal structure because his criminal gang, the number three in the world, very hard after Chinese and Russian mafias, has the characteristic that he was a very concentration leader of power. He was a kind of dictator inside of the organization and his family members. One of them has jail for all his life in the United States. His son is in prison. So this surely has been a big but also structural organization of crime action. It’s important. It’s a message that impunity inside of governmental structure will be stopped. It will take decades, but it’s good beginnings. 

Stephanie: And thank you for that. What I understood took place as well is that when the leader was killed, the cartel began to do violence, indiscriminate violence in towns all over. And people are held hostage inside of their houses. They can’t leave. Cars are being exploded. Grocery stores are being set on fire only just to hold the population hostage. And all of the acts of people who take care of each other, participate in mutual aid during those times, as well as the people who say they won’t be intimidated by cartel violence. Can you talk a little bit about what happens in the aftermath of violence against the cartel and how the population then responds? 

Pietro: Yes. Good, very good question. And I will tell you something about our nonviolent workshops experience. Look, a big violence of fire, of burning, of blocking streets, was more or less one day. The police, the military, the government stopped totally that. Now we don’t have nothing and it’s four days. So criminal gangs and violent people always try to activate violence spiral. That’s the key. And the key for us is activate nonviolence spiral and civil resistance spirals to stop and regret that violence culture. Violence spiral in our country and in all over the world, Gaza, Iran, it’s Trump, Netanyahu, has an important characteristic that we use very much in our nonviolent workshops. 

One of their keys is building terror. Terror is different from fear. You understand fear, miedo? That’s very, very important to understand for social activists because very easily we go from fear to terror. And when a person is terrorized, she loses the capacity of thinking with his own head, because he says, “I can’t go out of my house, I can do anything, I will be killed in half an hour.” You start living with a lot of ghosts, of situations that are not real, but you live them inside of you as real. So when a person is terrorized, we say in a nonviolent activist way, it’s better that he stays at home and he doesn’t go outside to struggle because as Saint Paul said, we don’t do the good we want to do or the bad we don’t want to do because you lose the capacity of thinking clearly. 

So I gave for 20 years but with many relatives of disappeared people and young activists in nonviolence, many workshops trying to regret terror to fear. Person that lives in Mexico and of course in United States, of course Gaza, Iran, can’t live without fear because fear helps you to defend better. Fear is a nonviolent tool or weapon, as you want, because it advises you that things outside have changed. It’s not the same reality in our streets with criminal gangs that five years, two years or 10 years ago. Things have changed. So you used fear for organizing your defenses better and organizing with other people. Fear is not a bad word, is not a social stigma. Fear is a nonviolent weapon to organize your defenses better. 

A person that, I have a child of 24 years, it’s ridiculous that I don’t have fear when he goes out in the night at two o’clock in the morning. But that fear, completely normal. I try not to pass it to terror in the sense of saying to him, “don’t go to a party, don’t go to the street because you are young and criminal gangs want very much to capture young people and use them for many criminal and human actions.” If I would have terror I would forbid my child to go in the street after the light goes down after eight o’clock in the night, but no, I have fear, I try him to have some keys of security, little of the phone and some little keys, go with friends, not alone, and manage fear. We must learn how to manage fear in violent high situations of action. For example, in your protests in Minneapolis, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Of course, you must manage fear, because how can you not be fear with ICE? They are professional criminals with all the impunity of the state and the president. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t go to a march or what you like, no?  That’s a very key. And medias that in Mexico, the medias, most of them, are paid by the extreme right opposition by the conservatives by the Republicans, by the right. They are terrible, they lie all the times, as in your country of course; so they are specialized in building terror in citizens, specialized, and they say that the terror is built by the government incapacity. We must break that reflection. 

Stephanie: Thank you very much. I just have one more question for you in the time that we have, and that’s, if someone listening wants to start practicing nonviolence at a deeper level or get into nonviolence, what would you recommend that they do? 

Pietro: Well, I’ll share a little idea we use very much starting with young activists and it works very much. We call nonviolent gymnastic. Every day we must make some kind of gym about disobeying unhuman orders, dishuman orders. Dishuman orders can be orders, little orders, big orders, in family, in the work, with the couple, with my wife, in many levels, and also in the street struggles and big struggles. We must learn how to say no. For us, nonviolence is a way of being free in the reflection and in the action, not telling others what to do. In that sense, I believe in something of the gospel that says, if you have fidelity, I don’t know that word, in little things, you have fidelity in big things. In the sense that if you do little gym of nonviolence in little things, you will be able after to block streets and to confront ICE. But you must start with little actions in your life of every day with the persons you have close or not, that when you see something that it’s not being justice, peace, even if it’s little, you must learn how to say “No.” That’s a big training, not easy. And in that way, you start a long walk to other kind of actions. 

Stephanie: You’re here at Nonviolence Radio, and today’s guest was Pietro Ameglio. He’s a historian, educator, and practitioner of civil resistance working in Mexico and across Latin America. He authored the book, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: Mexico Today. And his interview, Michael, I just really appreciated the crash course in nonviolence, nonviolent dynamics that he offers in his presentation from understanding that this idea “moral jujitsu,” where, you know, you as a nonviolent practitioner, you use the violence that’s being directed at you, but you transform it into something else. You use the violence that’s coming up in yourself and you transform it into something else. And I liked when he talked about hugs, not bullets, also about the spirals; violent spirals and nonviolent spirals; and how we’re pushed into the provocation of violence, But what we need to do is help show people spirals of nonviolence. So when someone’s trying to corner you into a violent response because it’s for their benefit, by overcoming terror and reusing your fear, but in nonviolent ways, you start showing other people that you can show up and not be terrorized by the violence, but that you use the fear in more constructive ways. So I just really appreciate his work and his voice. Yeah. 

Michael: Yeah, Pietro has been at this for a long time and he’s very thoughtful. And he’s been enjoying that very creative combination of action and reflection, you know, the theory and the practice. 

Stephanie: Yeah, there’s a lot more to learn. And we hope to continue to hear from him and collaborate with him. So Michael, take us into some more…. Let’s transition now, let’s transition into some more news and ideas that you’ve been watching that come across your desk every single day from the world of nonviolence. We need a little bit of constructive understanding of what’s happening in our world, as Pietro was mentioning, that the media can be so corrupt, and it’s owned by people who have interest in seeing violent solutions. So let’s hear from the people who have no interest in those violent solutions. 

Michael: If you don’t mind, Stephanie, there’s one kind of negative I wanted to get off my chest before we launch into the… 

Stephanie: That’s okay. Just spiral it into nonviolence. 

Michael: Spiral us over. Yeah. Unfortunately, with regard to the conflict in Iran and related areas, Lebanon and so forth, U.S. commanders have now been explicitly telling their troops that they are preparing Armageddon and the return of Jesus. In other words, they were putting—well, the worst part of it is putting together religion and violence, and that history has shown that once you get those two locked together, it’s very difficult to sort them apart. So you have this conflict in the Old Testament that took place at El Megiddo and that became the myth of Armageddon. And it is really kind of the worst construction that you can impose on violent behavior. And of course, Hegseth is behind a lot of this. I think until we uncouple Christian nationalism with the military, I don’t think we’re going to be able to downgrade, reduce any of these conflicts. 

But to turn around now and look at the places and people who are doing exactly that, I guess the first I’d like to mention is a webinar that’s coming up pretty soon. It’s being held by the Nonviolent Cities Project. Nonviolent Cities Project is a really good idea. Kenneth Boulding and other theorists have often maintained that you’re not going to convert the world from violence to nonviolence, but you can convert certain local areas where the dynamics are more accessible and it’s much better because people tend to know each other and identify with one another a little bit more closely. And then you can sum all of these individual territories into a new world, a new culture. So it’s a very good project, Nonviolent Cities, been going on for a long time. And now they have a nonviolent city in the nation of Colombia. which has seen a lot of violence for the same reason that Mexico does. And this is the first nonviolent municipality. It’s a town called Caicedo. And this webinar will take place on April 1st, 2 to 3.30 our time Pacific. And Pace e Bene is the outfit that’s organizing. It’s an online event. I particularly was responding to the term, the name Caicedo, because there was

a psychiatrist from, I think, Argentina who wrote a book a long time ago called India of the Yogis. And I just will drop that in there.

But still in South America, we have an interesting initiative in the works called Brasil da Paz, or Brazil of Peace. And what they are trying to do is to coordinate, or at least network, the many resistant and other nonviolent activities that are going on across this vast territory. Again, Nonviolent Cities is one very good new institution form. So is this networking and coordinating of disparate groups. And, of course, Brazil is the home of the MST, the nonviolent Landless Workers’ Movement, which provides a very, very supportive groundwork for nonviolence. So I took a lot of courage from that. 

Also, in Brazil, after a months-long struggle by thousands of indigenous people, leading it anyway, they blockaded the Cargill port facility. And so, President Lula has finally reversed what was called the waterways decree that put Cargill in charge of the maintenance of the port and the dredging of the Tapajós River, a really good example of foxes guarding the henhouse. But the indigenous communities recognized the danger and immediately mobilized in opposition, they set up a blockade of the facility, they called for a reversal of the rule, and now they have succeeded. And one spokesperson said, this is really, really nice, what he said is, “what won today was life. The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won.” And that’s an indigenous council which represented 14 different peoples in the state of Pará. 

So it’s really wonderful when people can see the broader connection of their local movements. What won today was life. Sounds a lot like our own river protests in the U.S., Now, across our country, resistance to ICE is galvanizing high school students. They’re leading anti-ICE walkouts. And what makes their work particularly effective, powerful, and this is a general rule that we’ve seen over and over again in nonviolence, is taking a risk. So they’re risking mass suspensions and even arrests to oppose the cruelty of these immigration backgrounds. At the University of Montana, students have got Border Patrol kicked out of a careers fair. That just strikes me as particularly outrageous. And, of course, Columbia University students protested after ICE agents illegally entered a dorm and detained a student. A former ICE lawyer recently blew the whistle on how he was told to teach new recruits to violate the Constitution. Teaching new recruits to violate the Constitution. Quote from him, “never in my career had I ever received such a blatantly unlawful order.” His name was Ryan Schwank, and he revealed this secretive ICE memo that instructed agents to enter homes without judicial warrants. Yeah, it’s a good example of means are ends in the making. 

I wanted to mention also an attempt to cancel a program by Stephen Colbert who had interviewed a U.S. Senate candidate who now has won the Democratic nomination, that’s James Talarico. His interview was intended for broadcast on CBS, but when CBS canceled it, it was posted online where it has now had 85 million views. And it reminded me very much of how, well, in general, how violence often backfires. “Blowback” is what the CIA calls it. They never learn from it, but they name it. And it reminds me of how the British censored the original Gujarati edition of one of Gandhi’s most important works, which was Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. And since they didn’t allow it to be published in Gujarati, he very cleverly turned around and published it in English where it gained much, much more of a readership. So over the past 72 hours, to come back to our situation, 1,320 video uploads featuring Colbert and Tallarico have been registered across YouTube. And the most watched individual clip is the full 15-minute interview, and that’s collected more than 7.5 million views. Yay! 

Stephanie: Is that called a paradox of repression? 

Michael: Thank you, Stephanie. That is exactly what it’s called. You back people into a corner where if they let it happen, it will damage their position. If they try to block it, it will damage their position even more.

So just on a fun note, maybe we’re getting close to the end here. Fun and humor is often a critical part of nonviolence. That’s the way that you shift the vibe from separateness, hatred, into the unity of laughing together. And this is from Rivera Sun, who pointed out that in Chicago, they have officially named one of their snowplows Abolish Ice. That won 70% of the votes in the You Name a Snowplow contest. And it was a contest where you selected the top 25 names to advance to a public vote, which is both a powerful act of resistance and an example of nonviolence at work. 

A friend of ours, whom we have interviewed on our program, whom I’ve known for a number of years, Jamila Raqib, has a very good article which really is concise and to the point in the feature called Minds of the Movement, which is a feature of ICNC. Her article is called Civilian-Based Defense: The Missing Pillar of 21st Century Security. Again, I am kind of unhappy with the fact that we can’t use nonviolence and always say “civilian-based defense” because it’s a little limited. Nonviolence can be used as – Pietro was saying in a kind of aggressive spirit, not just defensively, and it’s not just limited to civil society, though that’s where it will normally arise. People in power can be nonviolent. 

But I wanted to point out that we have these two big institutions that between them are the pillars of a nonviolent response to conflict. One is UCP. You know, we’re like the Army. We have our acronyms. UCP, they have really taken to calling it unarmed civilian protection, and the other is civilian-based defense. They’re both forms of nonviolence, the difference being that in unarmed civilian protection, you insert a trained nonviolent team into a conflict area. Very successful. Been going on now for, oh something like, 25 years, very low casualty rate, and very high level of success in defusing conflict. I think they’re operating now in something like 20 different countries in the world. Civilian-based defense is more the DIY version. You do it yourself. People organizing, the classic example is the Prague Spring Uprising in 1968, 69, where the citizens of Prague, again, their tool that they had in their toolkit was very much humor and courageous resistance, willingness to risk arrest. And they managed to delay an enormous invasion from three different directions of Warsaw Pact countries and the troops into Czechoslovakia. And it was supposed to take four days. The Russian high command proposed it would take four days to bring the country to heel. It really took eight months and provided a lot of training going forward into the future. So nonviolence thrives, we have a lot of nonviolent solutions that are being listed systematically, learning and understanding is going forward. And I think we ought to take a lot of courage from these developments. 

Stephanie: Thank you so much, Michael Nagler, for your Nonviolence Report. For everybody here, you’ve been listening to Nonviolence Radio, a project of the Metta Center for Nonviolence. I want to thank our guest today, Pietro Ameglio, for joining us. I’d also like to thank all the people who helped make this show possible. And, of course, to all of you for listening. Until the next time, please take care of one another. We’ll be back in two weeks.