17 April,2011 07:40 AM IST | | Dhamini Ratnam
As a journalist in East Europe, Steve Crawshaw was witness to acts of defiance against the Soviet bloc. We witnessed the Indian middle class version two weeks ago thanks to Anna Hazare's fast. Now read about civil disobedience around the globe
You wouldn't be too off the mark if you called Small Acts of Resistance a handbook, although the authors Steve Crawshaw (advocacy director for Amnesty International) and John Jackson (once the director of the Burma Campaign in UK), are clear that they aren't propagating anything. The book, however, makes a compelling case for civil disobedience through small, powerful acts of dissent via its collection of incidents from around the world. Its release is timelyu00a0-- we've already witnessed what a people's movement can do in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, in the past few months.
There are brave stories of men and women who defied fascist rulers like as Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat, who supplied vital information about Hitler's plans to the Allied Forces, and churchmen Jaime Wright, Cardinal Paulo Arns and Philip Potter, who sneaked documents that offered graphic details of state torture to create a book Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again) in 1985. Potter, who was at the time, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, raised funds and, says the book, "used the kind of financial secrecy associated with Mafia-style money laundering than with a church-funded book on human rights abuses."
In the midst of these tales of heroism, you'll find accounts of collective resistance that never made it to the pages of world historyu00a0-- from how Oxford students played a part in forcing Barclays, a multi-million dollar bank, to exit South Africa during the Apartheid regime, to the Burmese developing an ingenious method to protest against the military junta after it became too dangerous to step into the streets. They tied pictures of the military leader around the necks of stray dogs, who, unlike them, were allowed to roam the streets without fear of being shot.
The idea behind the motley selection of stories, says Crawshaw, is to show how mischief can be an equally powerful tool to unsettle dictators. "We (the authors) have both lived in places where we've seen how bad it gets. We wanted to show the connection between politics and daily life through humour, and how mischief is as much part of protests," says Crawshaw, who saw the fall of the Soviet Bloc in East Europe through the late '80s and early '90s, while serving as the political editor of The Independent.
The other point that the book makes is the power of the faceless men and women living in a seemingly all-powerful regime. This is best brought out through one storyu00a0-- in 1981, the Communist authorities in Poland put tanks on the streets to end the people's Solidarity movement against the regime. In retaliation, the people decided to boycott the propagandist television news. In the town of Swidnik, every evening at 7.30, the time the news was aired, people would go for a walk outside their homes.
Some even went to the extent of taking their TV sets for a walk, in wheel barrows and baby strollers. This tactic, informs the book, spread to other towns and cities too, infuriating the government, which responded by advancing the time of curfew from 10 pm to 7 pm. "The citizens of Swidnik responded by going for a walk during the earlier edition of the news at 5 pm instead."
Pick this up: For its interesting anecdotes of untold world history.
Don't expect:u00a0 Detailed analysis of political events.
Small Acts of Resistance Union Square Press published in India by Penguin. Available at leading bookstores for Rs 399
Extract : Chapter 9, personal lives, public impact
A Love Supreme
In the early hours of July 11, 1958, in the tiny community of Central Point, Virginia, the county sheriff, his deputy, and the jaileru00a0-- a group that made up the entire law enforcement establishment of Caroline Countyu00a0-- marched into the unlocked home of Mildred and Richard Loving. Once inside, they entered the downstairs bedroom and shone flashlights into the faces of the newlyweds.
The sheriff demanded that Richard, startled from sleep, explain what he was doing in bed with "that woman." While Richard did not immediately answer, Mildred explained, "I'm his wife." Richard then pointed to the marriage certificate hanging on the wall. The sheriff retorted, "That's no good here!" The Lovings, married just a few weeks earlier, were taken to the local jail.
The Lovings had been childhood sweethearts. When Mildred became pregnant, she and Richard traveled to Washington, D.C. and quietly married there. By travelling out of Virginia, they thought they had avoided the ban on interracial marriageu00a0-- miscegenation, to use the official, ugly termu00a0-- that existed in Virginia and in many other states across America. They were wrong. They were charged with "unlawfully and feloniously" leaving Virginia to get married, and with illegal cohabitation.
The Lovings were sentenced to one year in prison, suspended on condition that they leave the state and never return as a couple. They moved to Washington (which Mildred Loving hated). Occasionally they visited their friends and family back in Virginiau00a0-- but they were only allowed to do so separately.
Still, though, the couple remained unhappy at what they saw as the court's denial of their rights. Five years after the original conviction, Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking for his help. Her request was simple: that she and her husband be allowed to visit their families in Virginia together.
With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lovings appealed to the Virginia courts. Turning down their appeal in January 1965, Judge Leon Bazile explained that the ban on mixed marriage was God's idea of a well-ordered world. Phyl Newbeck's account of the case, Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers, quotes the written judgment: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." By falling and remaining in love, in other words, the Lovings were deemed to have proved their ungodliness.
The Lovings appealed again, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. Richard Loving went to the heart of the matter: "I love my wifeu00a0-- and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia." Finally, the judges agreed. On June 6, 1967 the Supreme Court overturned the Lovings' convictionu00a0-- thus also overturning the bans on interracial marriage that still existed in many U.S. states. The justices reached a simple, unanimous conclusion: "The freedom to marry has long been recognised as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free menu00a0... These convictions must be reversed.
It is so ordered." The Lovings returned home to Central Point, where they lived out the rest of their lives. Richard died in a car accident in 1975, just eight years after the court decision; Mildred lost an eye in the same crash. She raised her family, attended church, and remained largely out of the public arena for decades.
In June 2007, on the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, Mildred Loving made a new public statement of her ownu00a0-- this time, on behalf of those who are forbidden to marry because of a different kind of prejudice. Her testimony in favour of same-sex marriage drew directly on her own experience: My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right.
The majority believed what the judge said, that it was God's plan to keep people apart, and that governments should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry.
I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about. Mildred Loving died in May 2008, at age sixty-eight.
Six months later, Barack Obama was voted into the White House. When the forty-fourth president of the United States was born in 1961, the "miscegenation" of his Kansan mother and his Kenyan father was illegal in more than half of America's states. Mildred and Richard Loving changed that.
