Poster: Center for the Study of Political Graphics

One hundred years ago, a mass meeting was convened [7] in Johannesburg, South Africa by Mohandas Gandhi, an Indian lawyer outraged by the government’s proposal that Indians carry registration cards. “The Old Empire Theatre was packed from floor to ceiling,” Gandhi wrote. The group’s most important action was to pass a resolution saying they “solemnly determined not to submit to the Ordinance.” One speaker said that they “must never yield a cowardly submission to such degrading legislation.”

They never did, during a long campaign that Gandhi led, of non-cooperation and civil disobedience. Defying the state, Indians burned their registration cards, marched illegally across borders, and thousands went to jail, Gandhi himself three times. They disrupted the government’s racial laws and drove up the cost of enforcement. In the eighth year of civic resistance, the government withdrew the laws. One piece of one empire’s contempt for people’s rights was pulverized, starting that night at the Empire Theatre. The date was September 11.

Gandhi returned home to India from South Africa and launched a great nonviolent war against British control of his homeland. Millions marched, refused to pay taxes, quit their colonial jobs, spun their own fabric to avoid buying English cloth, and began to realize that to take control of India, they first had to refuse the terms of British control. The scope of resistance sobered the few colonial leaders who understood what was happening. “England can hold India only by consent,” said Sir Charles Innes, a provincial governor. “We can’t rule it by the sword.”

But that consent evaporated. The great political thinker Hannah Arendt defined the process well [8]: “Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use…. The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience — to law, to rulers, to institutions — is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.”

Gandhi’s campaigns in India were the first stories of mass civic resistance to be reported worldwide by broadcast media. Ever since, the rate with which people have applied this new force has accelerated. The Danes obstructed German occupiers in World War II with strikes and work slow-downs. African-Americans defied and dissolved legal segregation. Polish workers refused to leave their shipyards until they’d won the right to a free trade union, from which the ruling party never recovered.

A few years later, civilian Filipinos blocked a dictator’s loyal army units from attacking officers who had switched sides, the military was immobilized, and the regime was toppled. Chilean generals declined to let President Augusto Pinochet steal a plebiscite, enabling his people to push him out. Czechs, East Germans, Mongolians and others living under Soviet client regimes choked the streets of their capitals until their rulers resigned. Black citizens boycotted South African businesses and made the country ungovernable, until a new political order was established.

In every one of these nations, governments based on the people’s consent still rule today. This is not accidental. Civilian-based movements often produce sustainable democracy because ordinary people are the means of change: When you march, strike or sit in, you become a stake-holder in the results of what you achieve — you’ve done it, not a foreign government or a violent vanguard.

Osama bin Laden says that “oppression… cannot be demolished except in a hail of bullets.” Lenin went further, saying that “real, nationwide terror” was needed to “reinvigorate” a country, suggesting violence not only as a means of liberation, but also as a social good. Yet over the last three and a half decades, of 20 transitions from authoritarian rule in which violence was used by political oppositions, only four have resulted in nations where people have political rights today. In contrast, in 31 of the 47 transitions where no opposition violence occurred, political rights are recognized. (See “How Freedom Is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy [9],” Freedom House, 2005.)

Those who have amplified Gandhi’s legacy by consummating nonviolent struggles for democracy and self-rule include Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, Africans, and North Americans. Civic defiance is a global phenomenon, even as its strategies develop in the basements and the barrios of a thousand different villages and cities.

People’s passion to be free and independent should not ever be in doubt. Nor should our willingness to help each other. It is not for any nation to win another its rights. Those rights will be won by people who stand up to domination and learn to liberate themselves. It is only for us to stand with them.