Protest Against Injustice Quotes

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

Justice has a right to protest against injustice.

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills — against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all.

To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men. The human race Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised Against injustice, ignorance, and lust, The inquisition yet would serve the law, And guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare, must speak and speak again To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God, No vested power in this great day and land Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry Loud disapproval of existing ills; May criticise oppression and condemn The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws That let the children and childbearers toil To purchase ease for idle millionaires. Therefore I do protest against the boast Of independence in this mighty land. Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link. Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave. Until the manacled slim wrists of babes Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee, Until the mother bears no burden, save The precious one beneath her heart, until God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed And given back to labor, let no man Call this the land of freedom.

The human voice is still the most paramount vessel or weapon to use, to uphold justice and to protest against injustice.

[Christian rebellion] arises from the doctrine of mankind made in the image of God, and therefore protests against all forms of dehumanization. It sets itself against the social injustices which insult God the Creator, seeks to protect human beings from oppression and longs to liberate them… it protests against every authoritarian regime, whether of the left or of the right, which discriminates against minorities, denies people their civil rights, forbids the free expression of opinions or imprisons people for their views alone.

Men, I think, are not capable of doing nothing, of saying nothing, of not reacting to injustice, of not protesting against oppression, of not striving for the good of society and the good life in the ways they see it.

ANYWAY,” SAID ADAM, “you’ve got it all wrong about witches.” “My mother said they were just intelligent women protesting in the only way open to them against the stifling injustices of a male-dominated social hierarchy,” said Pepper

Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of Hell? Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and pollutes even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the universe, no good being can be perfectly happy. Against the heartlessness of the Christian religion every grand and tender soul should enter solemn protest. The God of Hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A God who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved – cursed, not worshiped. A heaven presided over by such a God must be below the lowest hell. I want no part in any heaven in which the saved, the ransomed and redeemed will drown with shouts of joy the cries and sobs of hell – in which happiness will forget misery, where the tears of the lost only increase laughter and double bliss. The idea of hell was born of ignorance, brutality, fear cowardice, and revenge. This idea testifies that our remote ancestors were the lowest beasts. Only from dens, lairs, and caves, only from mouths filled with cruel fangs, only from hearts of fear and hatred, only from the conscience of hunger and lust, only from the lowest and most debased could come this cruel, heartless and bestial of all dogmas.

Nihilistic passion, adding to falsehood and injustice, destroys in its fury its original demands and thus deprives rebellion of its most cogent reasons. It kills in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death.

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the worlds ills -­‐-­‐ against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the worlds great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-­‐year-­‐old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. 'Give me a place to stand,

At times I wondered whether writing was not a solipsistic luxury in countries like mine, where there were scant readers, so many people who were poor and illiterate, so much injustice, and where culture was a privilege of the few. These doubts, however, never stifled my calling, and I always kept writing even during those periods when earning a living absorbed most of my time. I believe I did the right thing, since if, for literature to flourish, it was first necessary for a society to achieve high culture, freedom, prosperity, and justice, it never would have existed. But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

Years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the book of Job once again, he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of "unhealthy rapture" that he almost cried. "It's a strange thing, Anya, this books is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me; I was then still almost a child." There is an allusion to this revelatory experience of the young boy in The Brothers Karamazov, where Zosima recalls being struck by a reading of the book of Job at the age of eight and feeling that "for the first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God's word in my heart" (9:287). This seed was one day to flower into the magnificent growth of Ivan Karamazov's passionate protest against God's injustice and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, but it also grew into Alyosha's submission to the awesomeness of the infinite before which Job too had once bowed his head, and into Zosima's teaching of the necessity for an ultimate faith in the goodness of God's mysterious wisdom. It is Dostoevsky's genius as a writer to have been able to feel (and to express) both these extremes of rejection and acceptance. While the tension of this polarity may have developed out of the ambivalence of Dostoevsky's psychodynamic relationship with his father, what is important is to see how early it was transposed and projected into the religious symbolism of the eternal problem of theodicy.

Our lives are a meaningful stand against injustice, and we can make meaningful choices every day. Your food choices are far more powerful than you imagine. Veganism offers a daily way to enact your values while helping to protect the environment and enhance your health. It becomes a daily reminder that change is possible. Social change is not just something we must work for; it’s something that constantly asks us to change.

The greater danger to individual freedom comes from totalitarian regimes that regard any dissenting view as a threat to be destroyed—no matter if the threat comes from a lonely writer protesting against injustice or from another nation.

Self-immolation as a way to protest against the injustices or as a way to fight for freedom cannot be accepted! All the fights must be done in the dimension of existence! Your body is your road to everywhere; if you destroy it, you lose all the roads! Stay firm and fight alive; no cause is more valuable than a man’s life! Keep your body out of the fire! Don’t ever praise the self-immolations; condemn them! Suicide is a defeat! Power is to fight, to fight peacefully, and not to die in agony!

shamed people rarely take stands against injustice. Such a stand would mean they would have to go public, which would only double the shame. Instead, once we are shamed, most of us try to make sense of it by believing we are getting what we deserve. So why would we protest?

Years ago, a member of Congress slipped a laminated quote into my hand that he must have thought I would find meaningful. I paid little attention at first and unfortunately I don’t recall just who gave me the quote. I placed it next to my voting card and have carried it ever since. The quote came from Elie Wiesel’s book One Generation After. The quote was entitled “Why I Protest.” Author Elie Wiesel tells the story of the one righteous man of Sodom, who walked the streets protesting against the injustice of this city. People made fun of him, derided him. Finally, a young person asked: “Why do you continue your protest against evil; can’t you see no one is paying attention to you?” He answered, “I’ll tell you why I continue. In the beginning, I thought I would change people. Today, I know I cannot. Yet, if I continue my protest, at least I will prevent others from changing me.” I’m not that pessimistic that we can’t change people’s beliefs or that people will not respond to the message of liberty and peace. But we must always be on guard not to let others change us once we gain the confidence that we are on the right track in the search for truth.

The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital cause.

After sitting for two games, Kaepernick met with a military veteran. The man asked Kaepernick to kneel instead of sitting for the anthem, as a way to protest injustice against Black people in America while still showing respect for US military vets. Kaepernick took the veteran’s advice and began kneeling in protest instead of sitting.34

You who came of age in the past decade have had eight years of a Black U.S. president, and that gloss looked good, and there were even a few inches gained on some issues such as health care, and maybe that can cause a person to relax a bit. But think of how exponentially drone attacks increased under Obama, how many Black people were shot by police under Obama, because the violence is systemic. How many of the people now hearteningly pledging to sign up for a Muslim registry signed up for a Black Lives Matter or protested the discriminatory immigration program NSEERS? The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System subjected my students from the Middle East to hours of interrogation and intimidation every time they reentered after going home to visit their families, arbitrarily barred tons of innocent people from entry, and was ineffective against terrorism anyway. It's systemic injustice we are after changing, and we should not ever be lulled.

Emerson generally avoided discussing politics and current controversies; he wanted his lectures and essays to be timeless and universal. But he made an exception when it came to injustices against Native Americans and African Americans, which were—and are—violations of timeless and universal principles. In 1838, he wrote an impassioned open letter to President Van Buren (published in newspapers in Boston and Washington, DC), protesting the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their lands.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

It is certainly tragic to see the failure of the most meritorious efforts of parents to bring up their children, of young men to build a career, or of an explorer or scientist pursuing a brilliant idea. And we will protest against such a fate although we do not know anyone who is to blame for it, or any way in which such disappointments can be avoided. It is no different with regard to the general feeling of injustice about the distribution of material goods in a society of free men. Though we are in this case less ready to admit it, our complaints about the outcome of the market as unjust do not really assert that somebody has been unjust; and there is no answer to the question who has been unjust. Society has simply become the new deity to which we complain and clamour for redress if it does not fulfill the expectations it has created.

The New York Times tells us change is necessary and protest desirable, but within limits. Poverty should be protested, but the laws should not be broken. Hence, the Poor People’s Campaign, occupying tents in Washington in the spring of 1968, is praiseworthy; but its leader, Ralph Abernathy, is deservedly jailed for violating an ordinance against demonstrating near the Capitol. The Vietnam war is wrong, but if Dr. Spock is found by a jury and judge to have violated the draft law, he must accept his punishment as right because that is the rule of the game. Thus, exactly at that moment when we have begun to suspect that law is congealed injustice, that the existing order hides an everyday violence against body and spirit, that our political structure is fossilized, and that the noise of change—however scary—may be necessary, a cry rises for “law and order.” Such a moment becomes a crucial test of whether the society will sink back to a spurious safety or leap forward to its own freshening. We

But turning your head away or remaining silent in the face of injustice and crime means collaborating with a politics whose program is death and destruction. And whether it is willing or unwilling collaboration doesn't really matter, because the result is the same. More than a decade after the beginning of the war in the Balkans, it is essential that we understand that is it we, ordinary people and not some madmen, who made it possible. We were the ones who one day stopped greeting our neighbors of a different nationality, an act that the next day made possible the opening of concentration camps. We did it to one another. Maybe this is a good reason for considering whether it is too easy to put a hundred men on trial in The Hague. What about the others who embraced the ideology that led to the deaths of two hundred thousand people? Perhaps they did not believe in it, but they certainly did not protest against it. If it is true that there is no collective guilt, can there be collective innocence?

Officers’ violations of law and policy, according to the report, included the following:           Stopping people without reasonable suspicion           Using unreasonable force           Interfering with a member of the public’s right to record police activities           Making enforcement decisions based on an individual’s demeanor, language, or expression           Overreacting to challenges and verbal slights (“contempt of cop” cases)           Engaging in patterns of excessive force, often during stops or arrests that had no basis in law, and sometimes in ways that were punitive or retaliatory           Arresting people without probable cause, including instances when they were engaging in protected conduct such as talking back to officers, recording public policing activities, or lawfully protesting perceived injustices           Arresting people simply for failing to obey officers’ orders, when those orders had no legal basis or justification           Releasing canines on unarmed suspects, without first attempting to use other methods less likely to cause injury           Using unnecessary force against vulnerable groups such as those with mental illnesses or cognitive disabilities, and juveniles

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)

The alternative to violence is nonviolent resistance. This method was made famous in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who used it to free India from the domination of the British empire. Five points can be made concerning nonviolence as a method in bringing about better racial conditions. First, this is not a method for cowards; it does resist. The nonviolent resister is just as strongly opposed to the evil against which he protests as the person who uses violence. His method is passive or nonaggressive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent. But his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is mistaken. This method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually; it is nonaggressive physically but dynamically aggressive spiritually. A second point is that nonviolent resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness. A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not just the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery, Alabama: ‘The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will be a victory not merely for fifty thousand Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may happen to be unjust.’ A fourth point that must be brought out concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.

When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as part of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”: We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels: But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . . Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners, And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

The slave protests against the condition of his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the human condition in general. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him which will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them it is not only a problem of pure and simple negation. In fact in both cases we find an assessment of values in the name of which the rebel refuses to accept the condition in which he finds himself. The slave who opposes his master is not concerned, let us note, with repudiating his master as a human being. He is repudiating him as master. He denies his right to deny him, as a slave, by making excessive demands. The master fails to the extent that he does not respond to a demand that he ignores. If men cannot refer to common values, which they all separately recognize, then man is incomprehensible to man. The rebel demands that these values should be clearly recognized as part of himself because he knows or suspects that, without them, crime and disorder would reign in the world. An act of rebellion seems to him like a demand for clarity and unity. The most elementary rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. This description can be applied, word for word, to the metaphysical rebel. He attacks a shattered world to make it whole. He confronts the injustice at large in the world with his own principles of justice. Thus all he originally wants is to resolve this contradiction and establish a reign of justice, if he can, or of injustice if he is driven to the end of his tether. Meanwhile he denounces the contradiction. Metaphysical rebellion is the justified claim of a desire for unity against the suffering of life and death – in that it protests against the incompleteness of human life, expressed by death, and its dispersion, expressed by evil. If a mass death sentence defines man’s condition, then rebellion, in one sense, is its contemporary.

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

There is a discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. "These are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows. "But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. "Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again. "Our answer is to rely on youth - not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. They cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger that come with even the most peaceful progress. It is a revolutionary world we live in; and this generation at home and around the world, has had thrust upon it a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived. "Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. "Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.

Farewell Warsaw, the city of joy and anguish, we shall never return! You stood uncaring when we cried to you for help in our despair. I hate you, you let a third of your inhabitants die before your eyes, without a word of protest against that terrible injustice! The ghetto was lit from above by the bright summer sun, but darkness, the smell of burning, and stench of corpses reigned inside. [*]

In this collection of essays and reflection, we present a detailed portrait of Gezi not only as a an act of resistance but as an intentional community that will serve as a beacon for generations in Turkey to come- and, globally, more widely- as examples of resistance to neoliberal and neoconservative and Fascist assault, through chapters by local and international left politicians, activists and academics, providing a deeper insight to Gezi and social movements. As “this is just the beginning”, as we “continue the struggle”; this book is also a beginning, an open text that will never be concluded until the demise of the societies of inequality and injustice.

The words of Corinne Boyer, a Canadian woman who died of ovarian cancer a decade ago, complement the patchwork of sentiments expressed by many of the others I studied: “Is this my protest against what is happening to me? No—it is a protest about what is happening to all women. Or, more exactly, what is not happening for them. I am reconciled for myself, and anticipate the entirely spiritual life that awaits me. What I was not reconciled to—nor should anyone be—is the injustice to women in allocating such a paltry medical research budget to illnesses that are specific to women.

Nothing stings so sharply as injustice, and nothing should; so these verses are not simply vindictive, but put into words the protest of any healthy conscience at the wrongs of the present order, and the conviction that a day of judgment is a moral necessity.”20 Christians should also cry to God day and night against injustice (Luke 18:7). Prayer:

The passion for social justice that we see in the prophets is a protest against systemic evil. Systemic evil is an important notion: it refers to the injustice built into the structures of the system itself.

In his message to Congress on December 3, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Anarchism is a crime against the whole human race and all mankind should band against the Anarchist.” He was not the product of social or political injustice and his protest of concern for the workingman was “outrageous.” The institutions of the United States, the President insisted, offered open opportunity “to every honest and intelligent son of toil.” He urged that Anarchist speeches, writings and meetings should henceforth be treated as seditious, that Anarchists should no longer be allowed at large, those already in the country should be deported, Congress should “exclude absolutely all persons who are known to be believers in Anarchistic principles or members of Anarchistic societies,” and their advocacy of killing should by treaty be made an offense against international law, like piracy, so that the federal government would have the power to deal with them. After much discussion and not without strong objections to the denial of the traditional right of ingress, Congress in 1903 amended the Immigration Act to exclude persons disbelieving in or “teaching disbelief in or opposition to all organized government.” The amendment provoked liberal outcries and sorrowful references to the Statue of Liberty.

he taught me how you can and can’t get out of it. Because of my deeply held biases against Jews, he spent a lot of time with me on the topic of racism and showed that it too was a feature of the box—of mine as much as anyone else’s. ‘If you see people of a particular race or culture as objects,’ he told me, ‘your view of them is racist, whatever your color or lack of color or your power or lack of power.’ He showed me that this is the same for all divisions, whether between rich and poor, old and young, educated and uneducated, religious and nonreligious, Catholic and Protestant, Shia and Sunni. “‘When you begin to see others as people,’ Ben told me, ‘issues related to race, ethnicity, religion, and so on begin to look and feel different. You end up seeing people who have hopes, dreams, fears, and even justifications that resemble your own.’ “‘But what if one group of people is oppressing another?’ I once asked Ben. “‘Then the second group must be careful not to become oppressors themselves. A trap that is all too easy to fall into,’ he added, ‘when the justification of past abuse is readily at hand.’ “‘How would they become oppressors themselves if they simply try to put an end to injustice?’ I asked. “‘Because most who are trying to put an end to injustice only think of the injustices they believe they themselves have suffered. Which means that they are concerned not really with injustice but with themselves. They hide their focus on themselves behind the righteousness of their outward cause.

The burdens of taxation, the lack of due representation, and the desire for freedom were unquestionably integral ingredients in the accumulation of grievances that drove many colonials to take up arms against the king.22 Yet religious issues also played their part, not least in intensifying a sense of injustice over the privileged status of the Church of England in the British colonies.23

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills — by destroying the American way of life. Radio

By a law of August 1822, Jews had been excluded from state academic posts–a ruling aimed specifically at Gans. Ten years later Heine defended his Protestantism as his ‘Protest against injustice’, his ‘warlike enthusiasm which made me take part in the struggles of this militant church’. But this was nonsense, for he also argued that the spirit of Protestantism was not really religious at all: ‘The blooming flesh in Titian’s paintings–that is all Protestantism. The loins of his Venus are much more fundamental theses than those the German monk stuck on the church door of Wittenberg.’ And at the time of his baptism, he wrote to his friend Moses Moser: ‘I should not like it if you saw my baptism in a favourable light. I can assure you, if our laws allowed the stealing of silver spoons, I would not have done it.’71 His saying that baptism was ‘the entrance-ticket to European culture’ became notorious.

King became the movement’s voice and launched a new phase of mass protest. He was a disciple of the teachings of Gandhi and Thoreau, as well as of Jesus. He emphasized nonviolent civil disobedience. The civil rights struggle was not against whites, but against injustice; its most important weapons were not anger and hate but love and forgiveness, King declared. 65 On

This sin weighs heavily upon the Body of Christ and will call down the judgment of God. In Germany there is an even greater sin weighing upon us Christians and that is the crime our nation has committed against Israel, God's chosen people. Six million Jews were killed; because of this the wrath of God is upon us. As Christians we are especially to blame. For when the terrible crime occurred and millions of Jews were tortured with inhuman cruelty and killed at the hands of German people, the Church in our country remained silent. The Christians did not stand up as the Danes did and protest the injustice. With the exception of a number of individuals the church members were not driven by the desire to help the Jews at all costs. Nor did they ring the church bells the night the synagogues were burnt down. The Church gave no reaction - an indication that she was dead. Because we were silent, we heaped guilt upon ourselves, and we were struck by the judgment that later descended upon our nation. Our churches were destroyed. Germans were killed by the thousands in bombings. Refugees thronged the streets, and the Iron Curtain divided our country.

For Marcuse the death drive has the function of protesting against the injustice and deprivations of history: The descent toward death is an unconscious flight from pain and want. It is an expression of the eternal struggle against suffering and repression. And the death instinct itself seems to be affected by the historical changes which affect this struggle, (p. 29) The death drive and its derivatives, along with the sexual perversions,8 are an unconscious protest against the insufficiency of civilization; they testify to the destructiveness of what they attempt to destroy – that is, repression. There is therefore an implicit idealism in them: ‘they aim not only against the reality principle, at non-being, but also beyond the reality principle – at another mode of being’ (p. 109).

In 1973, his refusal of an Oscar was perceived as the ultimate insult to the moviegoing public by an eccentric egotist. Yet, forty-five years later, during the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Jada Pinkett Smith found affirmation for her own decision to boycott the Oscars by watching a clip of Sacheen Littlefeather refusing Brando’s award. Today, calling out Hollywood’s racism is no longer an extremist act. In the 1960s, Brando’s protests against racial segregation and discrimination—he was arrested at least once—were condemned by some as needlessly provocative. Now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, they seem the very least someone in Brando’s position could have done during that period of widespread injustice.

You want revolution? Then dismantle all indifference and stand up - stand up and do not move - do not move from your conviction of justice - do not move from your conviction of equality - do not move from your conviction of humanity - do not move an inch - even if all the artilleries in the world are charged against you - do not move and do not harm - just stand - keep standing - keep standing like a pillar of insanity - an insanity for sanctity - an insanity for serenity - an insanity for unity - let them break every single bone in your body - let all the blood in your veins pour out - let every trace of life seep out of your wounds - but still do not move - till there is a single kernel of life left in you. This is what revolution looks like - this is what civilized revolution looks like - no guns, no bombs, not even a baton, just a whole lot of determination, that even the mighty gods cannot deter - a revolution that turns an animal world into a human world - a revolution that turns a jungle into a modern society – a revolution that turns distance into unity.

When our country was erupting in protests and marches, asking for the end of injustice against African American men and women, I was somewhat chastised by many of my followers for not speaking out against systemic racism. That was the first time it really occurred to me that I had a voice on this new platform. I had a strong voice. A voice that people wanted to hear...There is an old Southern expression: "I don't got a dog in that fight." But I immediately realized that was never going to be the case when it comes to standing up to racial injustice. We all "got a dog in that fight.

He knew how to win votes and he knew what to do with himself when the votes were won. He held the confidence of his constituency. His was a constantly growing popularity. He could do everything but one,--he could not dishonor his conscience. His belief that "slavery was founded on injustice" was the only reason for his protest. He never hesitated to protest against injustice. The Golden Rule had a place in practical politics. The Sermon on the Mount was not an iridescent dream.

My mother said they were just intelligent women protesting in the only way open to them against the stifling injustices of a male-dominated social hierarchy, said Pepper.

My mother said they were just intelligent women protesting in the only way open to them against the stifling injustices of a male-dominated social hierarchy, said Pepper. -Good omens the nice and accurate prophecies of Agnes Nutter Witch

For bearness of injustice may display greatness, but not protesting against injustice is also unjust.

Philosophically, contention can be seen as the dialectical unity of polar energies bringing together opposed forces that need to and must be reconciled if life is to continue. It is not something to be feared or avoided—people seeking balance and harmony must embrace the process of contention. The I Ching also teaches that contention is related to the concept of impermanence, that struggle is constant and that it is only the form of contention that changes over time…. How to fight against colonialism? There is, as one conceivable path, a well-established spectrum of contention that is rooted in the experience of peoples all over the world. Conflict is contention taken to its limit; war is conflict taken to the extreme—always considered as a last resort and and in just cause, but always the end result nonetheless. This idea of struggle, founded on the base power of violence, is in fact a cycle of futility. Feelings of pride rise and the people, who begin to assert themselves, raising voices in protest, causing disruption, eventually acting violently against injustice, causing inevitable counter-violence, spurring warfare, repression, and again, subjugation (whether the subjugated become the powerful matters little as the cycle of violence’s continuation is guaranteed). This is repeated perpetually in cycles of conflict between human communities until it is broken by the establishment of a peaceful coexistence that follows the transcendence of the psychological, spiritual, and socio-economic bases of the relationship between the peoples who were in conflict. The transcendence can happen when the critical period of heightened attention caused by a disruption of normality opens the door to new understandings before it is shut again in the closed-minded and hard oppositional environment that accompanies violence and counter-violence’s march to subjugation of one of the parties in the relationship. … we must protect ourselves from violent attack and survive in a physical sense, but we should have faith in the power of our ideas and in our abilities to communicate her ideas without resorting to the mute force of violence to bring our message to people.We should seek to contend, to inform our agitating direct actions with ideas, and to use the effects of this contention to defeat colonialism by convincing people of the need to abandon the cycle of subjugation in conflict enjoying us in a relationship of respect and sharing.

he didn’t want to talk about his own troubles, but about the thousands of captives in that desert hellhole called Bou Arfa. Raoul was one of the most selfless men that Lanny had ever known, and no amount of injustice had ever been enough to make him cynical; he said that the worst shock of his life had been the discovery that the Americans didn’t care enough about their friends here in North Africa to protect them against the scoundrels and traitors who had been shooting at American soldiers less than three months ago. Persons who had risked their lives to help in the landings had been picked up on the streets of Algiers by the pro-Vichy police agents and shipped off to be half baked by day and half frozen by night in the Sahara desert. And not a voice raised in protest, not a chance of any help for such victims!

The McCone Report goes on to mention two other "aggravating events in the twelve months prior to the riot." One was the failure of the poverty program to "live up to [its] press notices," combined with reports of "controversy and bickering" in Los Angeles over administering the program. The second "aggravating event" is summed up by the report in these words: Throughout the nation unpunished violence and disobedience to the law were widely reported, and almost daily there were exhortations, here and elsewhere, to take the most extreme and illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed. It would be hard to frame a more insidiously equivocal statement of the Negro grievance concerning law enforcement during a period that included the release of the suspects in the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the failure to obtain convictions against the suspected murderers of Medgar Evers and Mrs. Violet Liuzzo, the Gilligan incident in New York, the murder of Reverend James Reeb, and the police violence in Selma, Alabama—to mention only a few of the more notorious cases. And surely it would have been more to the point to mention that throughout the nation Negro demonstrations have almost invariably been nonviolent, and that the major influence of the civil rights movement on the Negro community has been the strategy of discipline and dignity. Obsessed by the few prophets of violent resistance, the McCone Commission ignores the fact that never before has an American group sent so many people to jail or been so severely punished for trying to uphold the law of the land.

The usual method for starting a fire in colonial America was to strike flint against steel. the usual way to protest an injustice was to bring a suit to the colonial courts.

So despite all the lovely comforting stuff we are told, senior police understand very well that the primary function of policing is to protect property. Despite all the pretence about serving the people, and some of the genuinely good and difficult work police have to do, such as dealing with rape victims and missing children, the police are primarily enforcers for the state and for the state of things as they are. When this is understood you can make sense of ‘illogical’ police activities like spying on justice campaigners or environmental activists as if they were the Mafia, to the extent of going undercover and marrying members of activist groups. If you delude yourself into thinking the police’s primary function is to serve the people none of this makes any sense . 14 When masses of the public protest government injustice, such as millions protesting against an unjust war, it’s obvious that the police are there to protect the state, not ‘the people’.

is difficult for many white adults to begin to speak about race openly and explicitly. We only learn to do it and get better at it through practice. There’s no way around those awkward, challenging feelings. ​There’s no special age at which point kids are ready to hear and understand the difficult truths about race and racism. They begin to work out their racial concepts and ideas long before they can articulate them. ​We start with our children’s deepest assumptions about the world: a notion of race as visible and normal, an awareness of racial injustice, and a working presumption that people can and do take actions against racism. ​ Young children should be engaged with lots of talk about difference: skin tone and bodies, and the ways different communities of color identify. Making a commitment to normalize talk about difference preempts the pressures kids experience to treat difference as a taboo. ​Be aware that using the language of race—especially with young children—always runs the risk of reducing people to labels or implying everyone who shares that identity label is the same in some significant way (stereotyping). Be specific and nuanced. ​Race-conscious parenting for a healthy white identity development must include teaching about racial injustice and inequity as much as it does racial difference. Consider experiential learning, such as protests, for this.

This was, for me, the crucial lesson of middle school and one for the rest of life: that one can protest, fight, and win against injustice, but that those in power will just change the circumstance rather than concede the argument.

Protest against injustices belongs only to honourable and courageous people!

If not thought carefully, our solidarity for just causes can backfire, especially when we are selective in reacting against injustice.

Stand unbending against inhumanity, without weapons, without violence, only then will your revolution produce a better society.

The Nigerian government is playing with fire over this insecurity issue; they pardoned Boko haram terrorists, bandits, and terror herdsmen, but send a rapid response squad to peaceful protesters who are harmless. This is not a wise move or the right way to maintaining a One Nigeria. People should be able to protest against injustice and other things affecting their way of life as longs as they do it peacefully.

-I've seen children snatched away from their mothers, never to be reunited. I've seen husbands taken from their wives and kids and sent away to prison. I've seen grown men flogged by soldiers in front of their kids. That's how history is made, and it's our job to witness it. - And is it always like this? - No, not always. I've also witnessed ordinary bystanders pull passengers from burning cars, I've seen judges sentence generals and politicians to hard labour, without fear. I've seen students stand up to soldiers and policemen, protesting against injustice. If you're patient, you'll see those moments too, and you'll write about them.

Certainly, not everyone who raises a voice for or against something is suspected of fanaticism, and not everyone who angrily protests an injustice becomes a fanatic by virtue of that protest and anger. Not every person with strong opinions is guilty of fanatic tendencies. Not even when such views or emotions are expressed very loudly. It is not the volume of your voice that defines you as a fanatic, but rather, primarily, your tolerance—or lack thereof—for your opponents’ voices.

There is a theory which has not yet been accurately formulated or given a name, but which is very widely accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary to justify some action which conflicts with the sense of decency of the average human being. It might be called, until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies, tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval. History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad, as the last. One must not protest against purges, deportations, secret police forces and so forth, because these are the price that has to be paid for progress: but on the other hand “human nature” will always see to it that progress is slow or even imperceptible. If you object to dictatorship you are a reactionary, but if you expect dictatorship to produce good results you are a sentimentalist.

Where lay the difference? Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness.

It was necessary for black people to protest against segregation, King argued, to avoid cooperating with an evil system. If one passively accepted injustice, one enabled it to continue.

Black America has watched this pattern of outrage management about Black suffering for years. We’ve seen police plant weapons on their victims, as they did in the case of Walter Scott (cover up). Media outlets tell us drugs were in someone’s system when the police murdered them, as they did with George Floyd (devalue). White people constantly try to reframe police brutality as a problem of “a few bad apples” instead of a systemic problem (reinterpret). When the grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, that became the end of the story for eager racism deniers, though the report also showed racial bias in the conduct of the Ferguson police department (use official channels). And there isn’t room for a full list of the times protesters of these injustices were met in the streets with flash-bang grenades and tanks (intimidate). Oppressors have perfected these tactics so well, they stop revolutions before they start, on a daily basis, without us ever noticing. Rank-and-file white people also try to stamp out Black rage wherever it emerges. They tell us Black anger is destructive and can’t be trusted. The truth is just the opposite. Black rage is trustworthy because it carries an analysis of present injustices. On a physiological level, anger is the body’s way of telling us that a boundary has been violated. It’s the natural emotional response humans have to being wronged, especially if that wrong is recurring and denied by the harmdoers. Therefore, Black rage is a healthy sign that we as a people recognize the crimes that have been, and continue to be, committed against us. Our anger is based in our personal experiences of anti-Black hostility in the white world and backed by our knowledge of our history.

Rather than show contrition and resolve to finally address racism in their ranks, those appointed to serve and protect our communities engaged in further violence against Black Americans over the ensuing months, as well as nightly displays of unapologetic—indeed deliberate, performatively cruel—brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters. Cruelty and injustice are nothing new. It has always been easy to export violence and suffering to the rest of the world when we don’t imagine that the victims are real people leading real lives that matter. Weirdly, the very technologies that made the world a smaller place, that were supposed to create a global village, have only made it easier to dehumanize—to unmatter—poor people in the more remote corners of that village. Soldiers launch drone assassinations halfway around the globe from the comfort and safety of video-game consoles on American military bases.*55 Pixelated videos of innocents blown to bits in mistaken air strikes elicit yawns by those who pull the trigger and tough-minded excuses by the generals who consider such collateral murders necessary sacrifices in the ever-more-nebulous War on Terror. There’s a common theme in all this. The unmattering of Black, or brown, or transgender, or Muslim lives reveals an ever-more-defiant and deliberate refusal to imagine or care. It is a cancerous empathy deficit that could destroy our species if it is not confronted with some antidote, and a vaccine to halt its further spread. This empathy deficit may be as urgent an existential threat as the climate crisis, even if it is harder to perceive and define. I think it is what really lies at the root of that ecological catastrophe. I see the Long Self Revolution as a revolution of imagination and care, of empathy and anti-cruelty. When you directly experience your own self as a vast and sublime and unique four-dimensional formation in the block universe, you realize that every fellow traveler on this planet is similarly vast and sublime and unique—like threads in a tapestry, both irreducibly individual and completely interdependent. Precognitive dreamwork (and lifework) makes it impossible to ignore or deny the worth, value, and real reality of other, embodied lives—including lives very distant and different from ours.*56 Our planet is a splendid, multicolored tapestry woven from the intertwining of Long Selves. (Probably our universe is too, in ways we will discover in a few thousand years.) Caring for the future of the earth first requires imagining that each of its inhabitants has a future. That’s what a Long Self is: someone with a future. Thus the Long Self Revolution is incompatible both with cruelty and with the resentful apocalypticism of those who deny that our planet and our species are going somewhere, and going somewhere better.6 In a way, it recruits the future to save the present.