Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times

Nonviolence was forged in the crucible of dark times—and its lessons can help us powerfully today. From systemic injustices to global crises, we find ourselves facing challenges that call for courage, creativity, and solidarity. It’s easy to feel hopeless or powerless. But all throughout history, in the worst situations, people have turned to the tools of nonviolent action to build “a way out of no way.” They’ve ousted dictators. They’ve ended authoritarian regimes. They’ve stopped wars. They’ve won rights, freedoms, democracy, justice, and liberation. 

This deep, long history of powerful nonviolence reminds us that even in the darkest moments, ordinary people have the tools to rise up for meaningful change.

In Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times, we’ll explore stories from around the world that offer shining examples that can inspire us today. From Chile ousting the Pinochet dictatorship to the Women of Liberia stopping a civil war to the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, we can learn from their hard-won experiences.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun shares stories, quotes, and strategic wisdom in these videos on courage, resistance, defiance, love, humor, solidarity, and soul force. This project was made possible in partnership with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

Episode 1: Forged In the Crucible

In this first episode of an 8-part series, Rivera Sun speaks about how nonviolence was forged in the crucible of dark times. It emerged under dictatorships, occupations, and extreme danger. Hear how Liberian women stopped a civil war, how Chilean mothers ended a dictatorship, and how Danish citizens resisted the Nazis. Find a spark of inspiration in these examples of how people just like us have broken through fear, connected to one another, and risen up for justice. 

Quotes: 

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi“One of the best antidotes to despair is reading about the lives of people who never gave up, visionaries who believed in the impossible despite the overwhelming obstacles they faced; visionaries who never resorted to violence despite the violence unleashed against them; visionaries who turned the impossible into the inevitable.”
― Medea Benjamin in the foreword to Nonviolent Lives “Stories of resistance have been taken from us, the books burned, the songs stifled or forbidden, the troubadours sent wandering in the wilderness . . . but even if we forget, even if the stories are taken away, something in us will remember when the time comes. It’s a mystery but it’s true.”
― Pam McAllister, You Can’t Kill The Spirit

Explore the Stories Further:

Denmark – Watch the Denmark segment of A Force More Powerful Denmark – Explore the creative resource and study guide on the Rescue of Danish Jews in our Nonviolent History Coloring Page Series Liberia – Watch the documentary Pray The Devil Back To Hell Liberia – Explore the creative resource and study guide on the Women of Liberia Mass Action For Peace in our Nonviolent History Coloring Page Series Chile – Watch the Chile segment of A Force More Powerful Read George Lakey’s article: Nonviolent action has stopped coups and ousted dictators in 40 countries

See more episodes here.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the board of Backbone Campaign and the advisory board of World BEYOND War. www.riverasun.com

Transcript

My name is Rivera Sun. I’m an author and an activist, and this is a series called Candlelight, Nonviolence in Dark Times.

I’m going to start with a quote from M.K. Gandhi. It’s one of my favorites. And I think it has a lot of relevance for the times that we find ourselves in today. Gandhi said, “When I despair. I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible. But, in the end, they always fall. Think of it. Always.”

We live in a moment in human history where we’re very concerned about the political dangers, the ecological dangers, the social dangers, we see violence of all kinds is on the rise. And confronted with such times. it’s easy to feel very bleak and unhopeful that anything could change. But what Gandhi’s quote reminds me is that we are not alone, that all throughout history, just as there have been tyrants and dictators who have risen to power, so too have there been people like us, in countries all over the world, who have found the courage and the connection to pick up the tools of nonviolent action and resist and rise and topple those dictators and tyrants from power, not just once but over and over and over again. 

I’m going to talk in a minute about some of those examples. But first, I want to just say that sometimes I think people operate under this illusion that in order for nonviolence to work, things like boycotts, protests, strikes, sit-ins, civil disobedience, non-cooperation, refusals to comply with orders, marches, rallies, protests—in order for all these things to work, we have to live in a very functional, benevolent social-political situation where the rulers in power won’t crack down on us or where our political situation looks very favorably or tolerably on people rallying in the streets, for example. 

And I understand how we can sometimes have this misperception of nonviolence. But the truth is historically, in the case studies, that nonviolence is born in the crucible of tough times, of dark times, when dictators are in power, when authoritarian regimes are arresting everyone, when the people rising up for change have no legal rights, they don’t have social standing, they don’t come from places of privilege. 

Nonviolence is the tools that people have turned to when they feel outgunned by the forces of violence. That they feel if they rose up with those tools, they would simply be crushed as a movement. So they’re looking for a whole toolbox at which their people can excel, more so than the people causing the injustices or harm. 

So nonviolence is what they turn to in Chile under the Pinochet regime to get that dictator out of power. Nonviolence is what they turn to in Liberia when the second Liberian Civil War was breaking out and hundreds of thousands of people had already been killed. Nonviolence is what they turn to in Denmark when the Nazis invaded and occupied during World War II. 

In all of these studies and so many more, nonviolence is born in the crucible of dark times. It rises up as the way out of no way. It gives us a way to resist and to push through until freedoms, rights, and justice are won.

When we think about our times, and we think about how dark and bleak they may be, I think we need to remember what it must have felt like to be in Chile in the 1980s, to be in Liberia in the early 2000s to be in Denmark in 1940s, when success was not a guarantee, they didn’t have the benefit of the hindsight of history, which is always 20/20. They had to think they had to think to themselves in these bleakest of moments, “Who am I and what will I do for justice today? Even though it looks impossible to beat Hitler. It looks impossible to get the two warring sides of our nation and Liberia to put down their guns. Even though it might look impossible to get rid of this dictator in Chile who had disappeared tens of thousands of people.”

Imagine what it must have felt like to be standing in the shoes of a mother in Chile who’s son or daughter had been flown out over the ocean and dropped out of a plane, perhaps because nobody had ever reported whether or not that had happened. You only knew that these things were happening and that thousands of people were disappearing.”

Imagine what it must have felt like in Liberia, that eerie sense of deja vu, of dread—something we can very much resonate with and relate to in these particular political times—as they had just ended one horrifically brutal civil war and were now entering into another one. Everyone knew just how bad it was going to be. And women, most of all. 

Imagine what it felt like in the 1940s when the Nazis rolled into Denmark, took over your country in six hours, installed themselves into the highest offices in the land, were patrolling your streets, who threatened the annihilation of thousands of your people. 

Unfortunately, each of these scenarios are not unrealistic things for us to be concerned about or worried about in these times. That’s why we need to know the stories of what’s happened in the past so that we can learn from them. And hopefully learn faster and better.

As I say, rather than inventing wheels, we need to borrow wheels from our brothers and sisters around the world who have used nonviolent struggle to overcome these great adversities, and we need to put those wheels to work and ride them to someplace new.

In Chile, the mothers of the disappeared gathered in the plaza and demanded one simple question: “Where are our sons and daughters?” Their courage sparked the courage of their fellow citizens and led to the movement that eventually threw the dictator Pinochet out of power.

In Liberia, it was again the women—mothers, daughters, sisters, people who had suffered brutal things during the previous war and were already losing family members to this civil war—who gathered in one place along the side of the road where the dictator Charles Taylor would drive his motorcade down the road and they prayed for peace, the Muslims and the Christians. And they kept praying for peace, with protests, with rallies, with demonstrations, with sit-ins in the halls of power until they force the dictator and the rebels get in a room together and hammer out a peace accord.

In Denmark in the 1940s—of course we know all about World War II, we learn it in school, we learn how the armies worked—but in Denmark, under occupation, some of the worst conditions for organizing, people came together to resist anything the Nazis wanted to do. They rescued nearly 7,000 Jewish people from certain death. They refused to build warships for the Nazi occupiers. And by the end of the war, after years of occupation, they had not completed one single warship for their oppressors. 

If all of these people can resist, and in the darkest of times, so can we. We need to catch courage from one another and from their stories. We need to remember that the fear, the anxiety, the worry, the concern, the love, the heartbreak, the grief, the sorrow, the anger, the outrage that we feel today was felt by them too, in their situations. And the one thing that changed everything was they decided to take nonviolent action.

These are the stories that change everything. These are the stories that we must know and share with one another. We know that nonviolent action has stopped coups and ousted dictators and ended authoritarian regimes and Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Belgium, Colombia, South Korea, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Benin, Nepal, East Germany, Mali, the Soviet Union, Malawi, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Mongolia, Peru, Georgia, the Philippines, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and more. 

If that list alone blows your mind, keep listening to this series on Candlelight: Nonviolence in Dark Times. We’ll be sharing some of these stories. As Medea Benjamin wrote in the book Nonviolent Lives, for the foreword, “One of the best antidotes to despair is reading about the lives of people who never gave up, visionaries who believed in the impossible despite the overwhelming obstacles they faced; visionaries who never resorted to violence despite the violence unleashed against them; visionaries who turned the impossible into the inevitable.” We too can turn what seems impossible into what now seems inevitable.

Learn these stories, take these stories to heart, and let them like a candle illuminate the dark night, pass on their spark to other people, and keep us going until we arrive in the dawn.

Thank you all. I’m Rivera Sun, and this is Candlelight: Nonviolence in Dark Times.

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