Paths for Reconstruction in the 21st Century

The DVD, titled Deadly Mistakes?, runs for a few hours and is actually a collection of shorter films directed by Walter Miale and collected on to a couple discs. . . . To counterbalance these [war-mongering] men, Miale features antiwar Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, activist and writer Grace Paley, Institute for Policy Studies researcher Marcus Raskin and former US Ambassador Robert White.

I asked Miale how the film came about and what his intentions were when he began the project.  His answer was:

"Deadly Mistakes? started out as a fiction film, Democracy is Coming to the USA. I wanted to portray masters of power and violence, and their preposterous views, in something other than the Micky Mouse fashion of popular media…. And I wanted to portray heroes."

The DVD, titled Deadly Mistakes?, runs for a few hours and is actually a collection of shorter films directed by Walter Miale and collected on to a couple discs. . . . To counterbalance these [war-mongering] men, Miale features antiwar Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, activist and writer Grace Paley, Institute for Policy Studies researcher Marcus Raskin and former US Ambassador Robert White.

I asked Miale how the film came about and what his intentions were when he began the project.  His answer was:

"Deadly Mistakes? started out as a fiction film, Democracy is Coming to the USA. I wanted to portray masters of power and violence, and their preposterous views, in something other than the Micky Mouse fashion of popular media…. And I wanted to portray heroes."

"On Wednesday evening, at a packed gala in the majestic Carnegie Institution for Science on 16th Street NW, (Camila) Vallejo mingled with hundreds of admirers who had gathered at the ceremony for the 36th annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards (recipients have included Pete Seeger and a migrant shelter in Mexico)...

"At the sold-out awards ceremony, musicians played songs by Victor Jara, the Chilean leftist troubadour who died in the coup, but there was no mention of the brutal ideological wars that once tore Chile apart. Instead, the evening’s message was couched in nostalgia for the lost idealism of the past and focused on criticism of military policies that once again threaten to divide the Andean nation along class lines.

"What Vallejo and her fellow students are doing today, said John Cavanagh, director of IPS, “means that Pinochet didn’t win.”

"Quiero señalar lo simbólico que es para nosotros que tras la figura de Orlando Letelier se nos entregue este premio, dado que él fue una de las primeras personas que advirtió de qué significaba la implementación del neoliberalismo en Chile", dijo hoy la líder estudiantil Camila Vallejo.

Part two of our conversation with two of Chile’s most recognizable student protest leaders: Camila Vallejo and Noam Titelman. They are in the United States, in part to receive the 2012 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, which is given by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Over the past year, the Chilean students’ movement has led some of the largest protests in Chile since the days of opposition marches to Pinochet a generation ago. The movement has rallied hundreds of thousands into the streets of Santiago and other major cities to demand greater access to affordable university education, as well as deeper structural changes in Chile.

NOAM TITELMAN: "And the second thing is that we are fighting to change common sense. It used to be common sense for people that you had to pay for your education, that you have to pay for your health. And I think that the biggest thing that we managed is to denaturalize certain assumptions that everybody took for given and that is not so. For example, free education is not something so outrageous or strange."

Its two forwards were written by Institute for Policy Studies founder Marcus Raskin and Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, both of whom focused on Hess's faith in his own historical irrelevance.