*“This is the image that they want to give as regards young people and university students. They use a “semantic banditry”, which involves taking certain words and turning them round, and now those who suppress, talk of order, peace and security and those who want more freedom are violent, terrorists and dangerous”*, indicated in the frame of the exhibition forum *“For life….always”*, the key theme of which was non-violence and which was organised by USACH students.
Tomás Hirsch used this moment to state that *“I thought that the march was brilliant”*, but what was shown on national television and on the main news was distant from the demands and content of the announcement. *“What was shown on television is disgusting, they only showed what happened at the end of the march, which they caused and nothing, absolutely no pictures of the crowds, nor the content which was being suggested”*, he said, under the intense gaze of the historian and academic Maximiliano Salinas Campos, another of the speakers at the event.
The ex-Presidential candidate of the HP then added that *“violence is not demonstrating. Violence is what students suffer daily when they try to convince them that they are violent”*, and he explained the importance of giving more detail of a suitable interpretation of the terms.
**Understanding the human being**
In the activity, organised in tribute to the event that the former president Salvador Allende never managed to organise in the Universidad Técnica del Estado in September 1973, with the objective of delivering a message which would avoid a civil war, Tomás Hirsch explained why New Humanism uses the methodology of active non-violence.
*“We suggest non-violence for many reasons. For personal sensitivity, for love, and for an understanding of what it is to be human”*, he expressed, clarifying, from the current of thought that represents, *“what defines the human being is intention, the transformation ability of themselves and the world”*.
*“If human beings are, in essence, intention, everything that limits or impedes the expression of this intention is going to quash the human, and this is what we call violence”*, he stated.
For Tomás Hirsch, non-violence is related to *“promoting the multiplicity of expressions of the human being. From this point of view it is active, it is not merely a passive posture or attitude but a dynamic action in the world”*, he concluded.
*Translated from Spanish by Kirsty Cumming*
