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Saturday 4 July 2009

Gandhi led the Indian people in a non-violent but complete freedom from a much more powerful occupying force; Martin Luther King, Jr, was inspired to use these same techniques in the American civil rights movement; and Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu did the same in South Africa. Today the people of Tibet, led by the Dalai Lama have halted violent means of securing their freedom and in so doing have shown the Chinese invasion for the travesty that it is while providing spiritual and inspiration for people of all nations. But what if the practice of non-violence resistance had extended further back and had been employed in the Americas? Would the French revolution been less bloody? Would a non-violent American revolution changed our understanding of conquest and freedom and altered interactions with native American populations and with our neighbors to the south and north? Paul Raushenbush

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