The considerable legacy of Gene Sharp, the unassuming Boston
political-science professor whose writings influenced national
liberation movements around the globe, is spotlit in Ruaridh Arrow's
admiring docu "How to Start a Revolution." This U.K. feature is well
timed amid the ongoing events of the Arab Spring, as well as the Occupy
Wall Street spinoffs in various U.S. cities, in which Sharp's methods
of popular nonviolent resistance resonate. Straightforward, informative
pic could carve out niche viewership in various formats, especially via
broadcast and educational channels.
Tending orchids in his spare time or working alongside the
sole other staffer at his nonprofit Albert Einstein Institution,
83-year-old Sharp hardly seems the sort to topple dictators. But his
books -- in particular the handbook "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A
Conceptional Framework for Liberation," first self-published in 1993 --
is cited here by movement leaders for its importance in helping to
shape recent popular uprisings in Serbia and other Eastern European
nations, as well as, very recently, Egypt and Syria.
Another measure of Sharp's influence is that people have been
imprisoned for owning, transporting or reproducing his work; long after
the Cold War's end, two Russian bookshops stocking his writings
"accidentally" burnt down. Iran (as seen in a computer-animated
propaganda clip) accuses him of being a CIA agent, while Hugo Chavez
has lumped him with George W. Bush (a very strange bedfellow) as
stirring imperialist insurrection.
The miracle of Sharp's methodologies -- related here as
calmly laying out ways to undermine a repressive regime without
protesters resorting to armed struggle themselves, with the aim of
winning military and police over to an increasingly popular cause -- is
that they work far more effectively, inexpensively and constructively
than the bomb-them-into-democracy approach of Western interventionists.
Yet Sharp has never attracted research dollars or other
support from the U.S. government, no matter that foreign foes claim
he's in the pocket of the Pentagon -- even though his ideas don't
include the empire-building tenets of developing a country's
exploitable resources from the outside.