Mahatma Gandhi reading beside his
spinning wheel,
symbolic of India's quest for self-sufficiency. Credit: USIA
Files. (For a larger image -- 18k -- please click on the
thumbnail
image.)
He returned to India in 1915 and, within five years, became head
of the Indian
national movement, leading a successful campaign of nonviolent
resistance to British rule and gaining independence and economic
self-reliance for Indians. In 1948, just a year after realizing
his goal of a self-governing India, Gandhi was assassinated by a
Hindu who opposed Gandhi's program of peace and tolerance for all
creeds and religions.
...Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one
has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to
give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he
does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence. But the
section under which Mr. Banker and I are charged is one under
which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied
some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the
most loved of India's patriots have been convicted under it. I
consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under that
section. I have endeavored to give in their briefest outline the
reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against
any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection
toward the King's person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be
disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done
more harm to India than any previous system. India is less manly
under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding such a
belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the
system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to be able to
write what I have in the various articles tendered in evidence
against me.
In fact, I believe that I have rendered a service to India and
England by showing in non-cooperation the way out of the
unnatural state in which both are living. In my humble opinion,
non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation
with good. But in the past, non-cooperation has been deliberately
expressed in violence to the evil doer. I am endeavoring to show
to my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiplies
evil, and that as evil can only be sustained by violence,
withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from
violence. Nonviolence implies voluntary submission to the penalty
for non-cooperation with evil. I am here, therefore, to invite
and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be
inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what
appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen....
From testimony at hearing at which he pleaded guilty to
charges
of writing seditious articles, March 11, 1922
Reprinted and translated from The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook
of
His Life and Writings, edited by Homer A. Jack. Indiana
University
Press 1956.
Permission granted by Navajivan Trust, Ahmedabad,
India.
Vaclav Havel
Vaclav Havel (1936- ), a native of Prague and a playwright by
profession, in 1977 helped found Charter 77, a human rights
organization in Czechoslovakia. For this he was the subject of
police harassment and spent nearly four years in jail, from 1979
to 1983. When massive anti-government demonstrations erupted in
Prague in November 1989, Havel became a leading figure in the
Civic Forum, a new coalition of non-Communist opposition groups
pressing for democratic reforms. A month later, with the ouster
of the Communist regime, Havel was elected the country's interim
president; he was re-elected to the presidency in July 1990. As
president, Havel has worked to increase basic freedom in the
Czech Republic and introduce an economic system based on free
enterprise.
...We have fallen morally ill because we became used to saying
one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in
anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves.
Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or
forgiveness have lost their depth and dimensions....The previous
regime, armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology, reduced
man to a means of production and nature to a tool of
production....
In the effort to rectify matters of common concern we have
something to build on. The recent past -- and in particular, the
last six weeks of our peaceful revolution -- has shown the
enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential: the civic culture
that has slumbered in our society beneath the mask of apathy.
Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that,
I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and
that it is not wise to trust the face it chooses to show you. I
am happy I was not mistaken. People all around the world wondered
how those meek, humiliated, cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia,
who seemed to believe in nothing, found the strength to cast off
the totalitarian system in several weeks, and do it in a decent
and peaceful manner. And let us ask: Where did young people who
never knew another system get their longing for truth, their love
of free thought, their political imagination, their civic
courage, and their civic prudence? How did their parents --
precisely the generation thought to be lost -- join them? How is
it
possible that so many people immediately grasped what had to be
done, without needing anyone else's advice or instructions?
I think there are two main reasons: First of all, people are
never merely a product of the external world -- they are always
able to respond to something superior, however systematically the
external world tries to snuff out that ability. Second,
humanistic and democratic traditions ... did after all slumber in
the subconscious of our nations and national minorities. These
traditions were inconspicuously passed from one generation to
another, so that each of us could discover them at the right time
and transform them into deeds....
From his New Year's Address, January 1, 1990, to the
people of
Czechoslovakia, three days after being elected president of
Czechoslovakia.
Reprinted and translated by permission of Uncaptive Minds,
the
publication of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern
Europe.
Nelson Mandela
Nwlaon Eoliklalla Mandela (1918- ) was elected president of
South Africa on May 9, 1994, an event that capped a life-long
struggle to achieve a multiracial democracy in his country.
Mandela had begun his political career some 50 years earlier, as
an organizer for the African National Congress (ANC), a group
opposed to white minority rule in South Africa. Beginning in
1952,
as the AMC's deputy president, Mandela traveled throughout the
country organizing reistance to discriminatroy legislation based
on racial classifications. In 1964, he was sentenced to life
imprisonment for sabotage and treason; he spent 27 years in jail.
When he was released in February 1990, he immediately embarked on
a course of dialogue and negotiation that brought democracy and
equality to South Africa. In 1993, Mandela -- along with then-
South African President F.W. de Klerk -- was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
...We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and
peace, violence and nonviolence, racism and human dignity,
oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty
and reedom from want.
We stand here today as nothing more than a representative of the
millions of our people who dared to rise up against a social
system whose very essence is war, violence, racism, oppression,
repression, and the impoverishment of an entire people.
The value of our shared reward will and must be measured by the
joyful peace which will triumph, because the common humanity that
bonds both black and white into one human race will have said to
each one of us that we shall all live like the children of
paradise.
Thus shall we live, because we will have created a soiety which
recognizes that all people are born equal with each entitled in
equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights, and
good governance.
Such a society should never allow again that there should be
prisoners of conscience nor that any person's human rights should
be violated.
Neither should it ever happen that once more the avenues to
peaceful change are blocked by usurpers who seek to take power
away from the people, in pursuit of their own, ignoble
purposes....
Let it never be said by future generations that indifference,
cynicism, or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of
humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates. Let the
striving of us all prove Martin Luther King, Jr., to have been
correct when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically
bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.
Let the efforts of us all prove that he was not a mere dreamer
when he spoke of the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace
being more precious than diamonds or gold.
Let a new age dawn!
From his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, December 10, 1993.
(c)The Nobel Foundation
1993.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), an American humanitarian and
the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was an outspoken
defender of labor and the poor and a champion of education,
health, and other issues affecting children. During World War II,
she traveled extensively on behalf of her husband and an idea to
which he was dedicated: the creation of an effective
international organization to prevent future wars. Following his
death in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed to the U.S.
delegation to the new United Nations and, in early 1946, was
elected the first chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
In that position, she played a pre-eminent role in forging the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She continued to serve the
United Nations until 1952.
...As I look back at the work thus far of our
Human Rights
Commission I realize that its importance is twofold.
In the first place, we have put into words some inherent rights.
Beyond that, we have found that the conditions of our
contemporary world require the enumeration of certain protections
which the individual must have if he is to acquire a sense of
security and dignity in his own person. The effect of this is
frankly educational. Indeed, I like to think that the Declaration
will help forward very largely the education of the peoples of
the world.
It seems to me most important that the Declaration be accepted by
all member nations, not because they will immediately live up to
all of its provisions, but because they ought to support the
standards toward which the nations must henceforward aim. Since
the objectives have been clearly stated, men of good will
everywhere will strive to attain them with more energy and, I
trust, with better hope of success.
As the Convention is adhered to by one country after another, it
will actually bring into being rights which are tangible and can
be invoked before the law of the ratifying countries. Everywhere
many people will feel more secure. And as the Great Powers tie
themselves down by their ratifications, the smaller nations which
fear that the great may abuse their strength will acquire a sense
of greater assurance.
The work of the Commission has been of outstanding value in
setting before men's eyes the ideals which they must strive to
reach. Men cannot live by bread alone.
From her article "The Promise of Human Rights,"
Foreign
Affairs,
April 1948
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs,
April 1948.
Copyright (c)1948 by the Council on Foreign Relations,
Inc.
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov (1921-1989), a successful Soviet
nuclear physicist, became recognized as a champion for democracy
and human rights in 1968 with the publication in the West of his
underground manifesto "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual
Freedom." In 1970, he helped found the Committee for Human Rights
in the Soviet Union. His efforts were recognized with the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1975. Following criticism of the government at the
end of 1979, Sakharov was exiled to the closed city of Gorky. He
was released in 1986 and saw many of the causes for which he had
fought become official government policy. In 1989, he was
elected to the Soviet Union's newly formed legislature, the
Congress of People's Deputies. He died later that year.
...In struggling to protect human rights we must, I am convinced,
first and foremost act as protectors of the innocent victims of
regimes installed in various countries, without demanding the
destruction or total condemnation of these regimes. We need
reform, not revolution. We need a pliant, pluralist, tolerant
community, which selectively and tentatively can bring about a
free, undogmatic use of the experiences of all social systems.
What is détente? What is rapprochement? We are concerned not
with
words, but with a willingness to create a better and more
friendly society, a better world order.
Thousands of years ago tribes of human beings suffered great
privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle, it was
important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to
possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the
knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop
the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today
the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite
space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them
civilizations that are also wiser and more "successful" than
ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the
development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an
infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other
civilizations, including more "successful" ones, should exist an
infinite number of times on the "preceding" and the "following"
pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize
our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint
glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from
the nothingness of dark unconsciousness into material existence.
We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy
of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.
From his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize lecture,
"Peace,
Progress, and
Human Rights"
The Nobel Foundation
1975.
Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1945?) was a diplomat from a neutral
country, Sweden, who came to the aid of Europe's Jews during
World War II.
Raoul Wallenberg, a
Swedish diplomat who labored successfully to save the lives of
countless Jews from the Nazi holocaust. Credit: USIA Files.
(For a larger image -- 9k -- please click on the thumbnail
image.)
The foreign representative of a central European
trading company, Wallenberg in 1944 persuaded the Swedish foreign
ministry to send him to Budapest on a diplomatic passport. There
he sheltered thousands of Jews in "protected houses" flying the
flags of Sweden and other neutral countries. He rescued people
from deportation trains and death marches; to many of those whom
he could not save he gave food and clothing. Wallenberg
disappeared on January 17, 1945. On September 22, 1981, the U.S.
Congress granted Raoul Wallenberg honorary American citizenship
-- only the second individual to be given this distinction.
The need for ration cards, baptismal certificates,
identity
papers; the requirement to wear the Star of David; the curfew for
Jews during most of the day; the strict control of the streets at
night; the lack of cash among Jews; the lukewarm sympathy of the
Christian population; and the open and easily surveyable
topography of the countryside all combine to make it difficult
for the Jews to elude their fate by escaping.
Somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000 to 50,000 Jews are thought to
have been hidden in Budapest by Christian friends. Of those who
remain in the Jewish houses, it is likely that most are children,
women, and old people. The men have been conscripted for work.
During the week ending July 7, a large number of baptisms were
performed by Catholic priests. Greater restrictiveness now
prevails, however, and three months' instruction is now required
for baptism. Many priests have been arrested. By being baptized,
Jews hope to take advantage of the rumored new regulations
exempting those baptized from having to wear the Star of David.
The number of baptized Jews in Hungary is reported not to exceed
70,000.
Some slight possibility exists of acquiring Aryan papers
belonging to people who have either been bombed out or killed.
These command a very high price. I do not know of any cases of
false identity papers, however, and the printing establishments
are under such strict control that it is, at this point,
virtually impossible to escape by this method....
... Relief activity has been initiated on a very limited scale.
Money has been requested -- but not obtained -- from a religious
organization that has been very active in aiding the Jews, as
well as from the newly formed Jewish Council for Christian Jews.
It would obviously be desirable to pursue this avenue further,
whether in the form of support of a camp through the Red Cross,
or in the form of support to individuals, or organizations and
individuals who have proved useful. I can only regret that those
who were most eager to send me here have not seemed to understand
that funds are essential. There is endless suffering to ease in
this place.
From his Letters and Dispatches, 1924-1944
Copyright (c)1987, 1955 by Brigette Wallenberg and
Gustaf
Soderlund. Translation copyright (c)1995 by Arcade Publishing,
Inc.
Reprinted by permission of Arcade Publishing, New York,
New
York.
Wei Jingsheng
Wei Jingsheng (1950- ), an electrician, was raised in Beijing,
the child of two Communist party members. Wei first came to
prominence through articles critical of his government's
modernization program in the late 1970s for focusing on economic
reforms to the exclusion of democratic reforms. A week after
posting his last article on Beijing's Democracy Wall in March
1979, Wei was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison. When
he was freed unexpectedly in September 1993, he immediately took
up his old work. In early 1994, Wei was again detained, and, on
December 13, 1995, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for, as
government charges stated, seeking "to develop a plan of action
that included establishing an organization to raise funds to
support democratic movement activities." Wei was freed on
medical parole in November of 1997 and sent to the United States,
where he has continued to press the cause of democracy for the
Chinese people through writings and speeches.
...What is true democracy? It means the right of the people to
choose their own representatives to work according to their will
and in their interest. Only this can be called democracy.
Furthermore, the people must also have the power to replace their
representatives any time so that these representatives cannot go
on deceiving others in the name of the people....
Will there be great disorder across the land and defiance of laws
human and divine once people enjoy democracy? Do not recent
periodicals show that just because of the absence of democracy,
dictators, big and small, were defying laws human and divine? How
to maintain democratic order is the domestic problem requiring
solution by the people themselves, and there is no need for the
privileged overlords to worry about it. Therefore, judging from
past history, a democratic social system is the major premise or
the prerequisite for all developments -- or modernizations.
Without this major premise or prerequisite, it would be
impossible not only to continue further development but also to
preserve the fruits of the present state of development. The
experiences of our great motherland over the past 30 years have
provided the best evidence.
Why must human history take the road toward prosperity or
modernization? The reason is that human beings need a prosperous
society to produce realistic fruits and to provide them with
maximum opportunity to pursue their first goal of happiness,
namely freedom. Democracy means the maximum attainable freedom
so
far known by human beings. It is quite obvious that democracy has
become the goal in contemporary human struggles....
From his essay "The Fifth Modernization," written during
the
"democracy spring" of 1978-1979
Elie Wiesel
Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel (1928- ), an American author, was born
and spent his early life in a small, Hasidic community in Sighet,
Romania. In 1944, during World War II, Wiesel was sent with his
family and the town's other Jews to the Auschwitz and then
Buchenwald concentration camps. He was a survivor. Following the
end of the war, Wiesel worked in France as a journalist with
French and Israeli newspapers. In 1956, he moved to the United
States, where he has dedicated his life to writing and speaking
on the horrors he witnessed during the Holocaust and to helping
victims of oppression and racism everywhere. In recognition of
his efforts to expose violence and hatred, Wiesel was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
...As you walk through the [U.S. Memorial] Holocaust Museum, as
you look into the eyes of the killers and their victims, ask
yourselves: How could the murderers do what they did and go on
living? Why was Berlin encouraged in its belief that it could
decree with impunity the humiliation, persecution, extermination
of an entire people? Why weren't the railways leading to Birkenau
bombed by Allied planes? Why was there no outcry, no public
indignation?
Another question: Where did the poorly armed fighters in the
ghettos and the forests find the courage to take on the mightiest
legions in Europe?
And the most awesome question of all: Why was man's silence
matched by God's?
The questions, in fact, are endless and will forever remain
unanswered. Indeed, if there is an answer to the Holocaust, it
must -- by definition -- be the wrong answer. Nor is the Museum
an answer; it is but a question mark.
Every event connected with that period defies human
understanding. It is not because I cannot explain that you will
not understand; it is because you will not understand that I
cannot explain.
The essence of this tragedy is that it can never be fully
communicated....
And yet, we are duty-bound to try. Not to do so would mean to
forget. To forget would mean to kill the victims a second time.
We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to
vanish again. Memory is not only a victory over time, it is also
a triumph over injustice.
That is one of the lessons we have learned. There are others. We
have learned that though the Holocaust was principally a Jewish
tragedy, its implications are universal. Though not all victims
were Jewish, all Jews were victims. We have learned that whatever
happens to one community ultimately affects every community....We
have learned that although every human being has the right to be
different, none has the right to be indifferent to
suffering....
From his essay "For the Dead and the Living," The New
Leader, May
1993.
Reprinted with permission from The New
Leader, May
17-31,
1993.
Copyright (c)1993 The American Labor Conference for International
Affairs Inc.
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