It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked. Harold Pinter
Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is – sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent. Margaret Heffernan
I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent. Rebecca MacKinnon
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. William O Douglas
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. Robert H Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette 319 US 624 (1943) at 641
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Elie Wiesel
If you separate a man from what he loves the most, what you do is purge what’s unique in him. And when you purge what’s unique in him you purge dissent. And when you purge dissent you kill the revolution. Revolution is dissent. Reds 1981 starring Warren Beatty & Diane Keaton & Jack Nicholson & Gene Hackman & Edward Herrmann & Jerzy Kosinski & Paul Sorvino & Maureen Stapleton & Nicolas Coster & William Daniels & E Emmet Walsh & Ian Wolfe & Bessie Love et al, director Warren Beatty, Jack
If the oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers’ instructions, they are therefore conscious enough to be able to challenge them. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction
There are men – now in power in this country – who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit. John Lindsay
And the shipyard workers did what they came to do – they carried their campaign to the streets of London. Martin Bell, BBC News
Doubt as sin – Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature – is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. Edmund Burke
For truth’s sake, our Protestantism must protest perpetually ... No peace with Rome. Charles Spurgeon, The Sword and the Trowel, 1873
‘They weren’t natural at all. They were things that could be changed. And they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change.’ Storyville: The Internet’s Own Boy, Aaron Swartz, BBC 2015
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology and into a broader range of political causes. ibid.
The arrest took its toll on Swartz. ibid.
Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto: Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage published over centuries in books and journals is increasingly being digitised and locked up by a handful of private corporations. ibid.
‘You are powerful ... You are making a difference.’ ibid. Swartz
Years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance, Swartz was already concerned. ibid.
They [Japanese workers] don’t object. That is really the heart of the matter. And they take things, they accept things, that to most of us would be intolerable. And acceptance of very very cruel regimen, at the working place, be it a factory or be it an office ... Will they go on accepting it? ... Might there not be a feeling among their fathers that perhaps it was not worth it? Edward Seidensticker
A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority. Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
Even in the post-miners’ strike eighties, there were sparks of mass defiance. There was a series of enormous demonstrations against apartheid, and every party lit up when the Specials’ ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ came on. Public Enemy left a trail of fury wherever they went. The Redskins accomplished the extraordinary feat of getting into the top forty with a dance song about Russia being state capitalism. But every workplace and every pub had someone who’d bought Telecom shares and their council flat, and talked loudly about how well Thatcher had tamed the unions. It also had people who despised Thatcher but were generally reticent about speaking out. Mark Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful
The seven weeks of the Gulf War was possibly the most political time I have ever known … The one-third of society who opposed it were doing so despite round-the-clock propaganda, which forced them to question every aspect of the way the world was presented. ibid.
The struggle of ordinary people for jobs, security and dignity is the story of modern Britain. It’s been an epic story of gain and setback and courage – the miners, the transport workers, the nurses, the dockers, and it’s still going on especially here in Liverpool, although you wouldn’t know it reading the people’s papers. John Pilger, Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect, ITV 1997
What Obama and the bankers and generals and the IMF, the CIA, and CNN and BBC fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, fear that suddenly people convert their fear to action as they have done so often in history. John Pilger, lecture Socialism Chicago 2009, ‘Power Illusion and America’s Last Taboo’; viz also website
A cultural war … a war against any real form of dissent … the kind of dissent that marshals our intellect and our sense of ourselves against the possibility of extinction. John Pilger, lecture Riverside Theatre Australia 2017, ‘Obama, Clinton, Trump …’, Youtube 1.18.55
On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. ‘That’s typical of the public,’ he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. ‘I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq,’ he said to Brian, who cautioned him: ‘You'll spend the night in the cells, mate.’ We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.
As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an ‘offensive’ T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the ‘purpose’ of searching him was ‘terrorism’ and the ‘grounds for intervention’ were "carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info" (sic).
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held ‘on suspicion’. Some of the ‘evidence’ against them, whatever it is, the government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what?