The pen is mightier than the sword. Or, words really can protect someone from being chopped up by a machete.

Nonviolence tends to get a reputation as ineffective and weak. Even people who think that nonviolence is a nice sounding idea question whether it would work against unspeakable evil (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mao).

I wrote a research paper last semester demonstrating how the people of Denmark saved nearly their entire Jewish population from the Nazis using nonviolent methods. I concluded that yes, nonviolence could and had worked in the face of genocide.

However, after reading Paul Rusesabagina’s autobiography An Ordinary Man, I have a different question: Can anything but nonviolence counteract genocide?

Paul Rusesabagina, of course, is the hotel manager whose story the movie Hotel Rwanda is based on. I’ve seen Hotel Rwanda at least twice, so the story, which a great deal of the book covers, was familiar to me. The first time I saw Hotel Rwanda was in theatres, the evening that my midterms finished in 9th grade. I had never heard of the Rwandan genocide (or the country of Rwanda) before that, but I found the movie incredibly moving, although terrifying and depressing. The second time I watched the movie was in English class in 10th grade. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed watching it the second time only because it was better than having my 10th grade English teacher teach. What struck me most at the time was how little the world seemed to care about the genocide. The line that stuck with me most was a Western journalist who said, “I think that when people turn on their TVs and see this footage, they'll say, "Oh my God, that's horrible," and then they'll go back to eating their dinners.”

But reading his autobiography, I realized that there was something unique about Paul Rusesabagina—he saved the lives of the 1000+ people seeking refuge in his hotel through nonviolent means. And if you think that nonviolence is for cowards, that it doesn’t take unbelievable amounts of courage, I urge you to look at Paul Rusesabagina. Men with machetes (and there were plenty of them in Kigali at the time) could have easily killed Rusesabagina, entered his hotel, and killed the people inside. But he never thought to protect himself, to protect the people in his hotel with his own gun or machete. He used words.

This is what Rusesabagina has to say on the subject: “All of these come down to a failure of words. And this is what I want to tell you: Words are the most effective weapons of death in man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones. Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the UN. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness. They are so important. I used words in so many ways during the genocide—to plead, intimidate, coax, cajole, and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when I needed to be. I acted friendly toward despicable people. I put cartons of champagne in their car trunks. I flattered them shamelessly. I saw whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that one simple goal. Those words were my connection to a saner world, to life as it ought to be lived.”

I have come to believe that violence cannot protect from evil. People who operate gas chambers and chop people up with machetes because of their ethnicity, race, or religion know how to react to violence. Violence is counteracted with more violence. Eventually a lot of people die and the side with more people and/or better weaponry ends up winning. Nonviolence forces you to appeal to their humanity.

Maybe some wars have to be fought. Wars that people ordinarily come to look upon as just wars often involve stopping slaughter of the innocent—like World War II. But I think that if more people embraced nonviolence and believed that it worked death tolls in genocide could be kept down.

After all, it’s happened before.