Nonviolent general strikes have overthrown at least seven Latin American
dictators: Carlos Ibanez del Campo of Chile (1931), Gerardo Machado y
Morales of Cuba (1933), Jorge Ubico of Guatemala (1944), Elie Lescot of
Haiti (1946), Arnulfo Arias of Panama (1951), Paul Magliore of Haiti
(1956), and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Columbia (1957).
In 1989-1990 alone, fourteen nations underwent nonviolent revolutions,
all of them successful except for China, and all of them nonviolent
except for Romania. These revolutions involved 1.7 billion people. If we
total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the figure
comes to 3.4 billion people, and again, most were successful.
And yet there are people who still insist that nonviolence doesn’t work.
Gene Sharp has itemized 198 different types of nonviolent actions that
are part of the historical record, yet out history books seldom mention
any of them, so preoccupied are they with the power politics and wars.
--Walter Wink, /Jesus and Nonviolence: //A Third Way/ Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2003.
