May 8, 2012

Occupy Blitzkrieg!



"It is possible to be militantly non-violent."

With this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced two sides of a dichotomy that often arises within social movements: the question of whether to be militant or non-violent. There is a long history steeped in both approaches, from Gandhi's non-violent civil disobedience to guerilla war tactics employed to overthrow oppressive regimes.

Filmmaker Corey Ogilvie agrees with MLK in regards to being well organized and disciplined in non-violent power struggle. His film craftily evokes the post-WWII era in which Americans were united against a foreign enemy, except the enemies in this piece are not the Axis Powers but the greedy bankers within our borders. Ogilvie takes the motif of the American war machine and turns it on its head with the assistance 1950's-era cartoons and television and film footage, and the result is a fun, engaging and informative piece of propaganda brought to you by the filmmaker of the popular #OWS video, "I Am Not Moving".

"Considering MLK's statement led me to the question: What would a nonviolent blitzkrieg look like?" Ogilvie said. "Imagine if all the elements of Occupy - organizers, protesters, flashmobs, whistleblowers, donors, filmmakers, journalists and hacktivists - could focus fire on just one government official, one bank, one corporation, one institution, all at once, for one month, with one simple demand. Blitzkrieg simplifies the complexity of the battlefield for the attacker, focusing every weapon on one target at one time. This made it the most groundbreaking strategy in the history of violence. Maybe it also has a place in the history of nonviolence."

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