Crawshaw - Small acts of resistance: how courage, tenacity, and ingenuity can change the world

How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crawshaw, Steve.

Small acts of resistance : how courage, tenacity, and ingenuity can change the world / Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4027-6807-1 (alk. paper)

1. Government, Resistance to. 2. Civil disobedience. 3. Human rights. 4. Social action. 5. Social change. I. Jackson, John, 1964- II. Title.

JC328.3.C73 2010

322.4--dc22

2010013813

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016
2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson
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Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-6807-1

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A person with inner freedom, memory, and fear is that reed, that twig that changes the direction of a rushing river.

NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM

by Vclav Havel

In 1978, I wrote an essay that explored the untapped power of the powerless. I described the incalculable benefits that might follow, even in the context of a highly repressive government, if each one of us decided to confront the lies surrounding us, and made a personal decision to live in truth.

Many argued that those ideas were the work of a deluded Czech Don Quixote, tilting at unassailable windmills.

In many ways, that skepticism seemed justified. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who just ten years earlier had sent tanks into Czechoslovakia to end political reform, was still in power in the Kremlin. The Solidarity movementwhose remarkable victories in neighboring Poland against unwanted rulers would give comfort to other eastern Europeans and millions of others seeking to live in truth in the years to comedid not yet exist. I myself, like many of my friends, had spent time in jail and would do so again in the years to come.

And yet, just eleven years after I wrote about what ordinary people can achieve by living in truth, I saw and lived through a series of extraordinary victories all across the region, including in my own country. In what came to be known as the velvet revolution, Czechs and Slovaks defied official violence to ensure the speedy collapse of the seemingly impregnable bastion of lies in November 1989. It was all over in barely a week. After the revolution, I was privileged to become the president of my country as it moved into a democratic era.

Today, millions around the world live in circumstances where it might seem that nothing will ever change. But they must remember that the rebellions that took place all across eastern Europe in 1989 were the result of a series of individual actions by ordinary people which together made change inevitable. Small Acts of Resistance pays tribute to those who have sought to live in truth, and the impact that can have.

In my lifetime, I have repeatedly seen that small acts of resistance have had incomparably greater impact than anybody could have predicted at the time. Small acts of resistance are not just about the present and the past. I believe they are about the future, too.

Prague
March 2010

We have all seen images on our television screens of a political drama unraveling in some distant country. A dictator has fallen, crowds dance in the streets, statues are pulled down, a new flag is hoisted. The camera zooms in, trying to find ways to convey the elation and the exhaustion.

Such moments, however compelling in that instant, often feel like walking into a movie a few minutes before the end. What led to this dramatic moment? How did these people keep going through the long, difficult years? What kept their spirit of defiance alive?

Here we pay tribute to those backstories. Collecting tales from around the world, Small Acts of Resistance tells storiessome well-known but many underreported and little recognized in the history booksin which people have found innovative and inspiring ways to challenge violent regimes and confront abuses of power.

We offer accounts of those who refuse to be silenced, showing in the process that it is possible to bring down dictators, change unjust laws, or simply give individuals a renewed sense of their own humanity in the face of those who deny it. Each represents the universal desire to live in dignity and freedom.

The title of this book is in some ways an obvious misnomer. Many of the stories chronicled here are not small acts at all. They involve extraordinary courage, though few of the participants most closely involved saw things that way. At the risk of being beaten, jailed, or even killed in retribution for speaking out, the people in these pages would say they were merely standing up for basic principles. They would claim they were merely doing what anyone else would do. To the rest of us, they stand as powerful reminders that a defiant spirit can make the invincible crack, the unchangeable change.

The people in these stories treat the impossible as the possible that just hasnt happened yet. Some have achieved the change they were struggling for. For others, the biggest change is yet to come.

Steve Crawshaw
John Jackson
New York
March 2010

Said the boy: He learnt how quite soft water, by attrition
Over the years will grind strong rocks away.
In other words that hardness must lose the day.

Bertolt Brecht

Brian: Youre all individuals!
Crowd: Yes, were all individuals!...
Man in crowd: Im not.

Monty Pythons Life of Brian

The rise of Solidarity, a popular movement created in August 1980 by striking workers in the shipyards of Gdask and across Poland, caused panic in the regime that had ruled the country since the Second World War. On December 13, 1981, the Communist authorities put tanks on the streets to stop Solidarity once and for all. Hundreds were arrested; dozens were killed.

Despite the tanks and arrests, Poles organized protests against the ban on Solidarity, including a boycott of the fiction-filled television news. But a boycott of the TV news could not by itself embarrass the government. After all, who could tell how many were obeying the boycott call?

In one small town, they found a way. Every evening, beginning on February 5, 1982, the inhabitants of widnik in eastern Poland went on a walkabout. As the half-hour evening news began, the streets would fill with widnikians, who chatted, walked, and loafed. Before going out, some placed their switched-off television set in the window, facing uselessly onto the street. Others went a step further. They placed their disconnected set in a stroller or a builders wheelbarrow, and took the television itself for a nightly outing.