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"One of the first people who understood how power could be produced by civil resistance was the great African-American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. In the years of his work before the American Civil War, which was an age of universal, brutalizing racism, even white abolitionists were dismissed as dreamers. But Douglass was no dreamer. He operated with cold, furious logic. The power of oppressors “concedes nothing and it never will,” he said. You can find the “exact measure” of injustice that will be imposed on people, he explained, by measuring how much they will submit to. And the injustice will go on until it is resisted. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” he declared.
Douglass saw that if submission were replaced by civil resistance, the people could pierce the shroud of oppression, shifting power in a way that few in the world would have comprehended. A half-century later, in the course of enjoining Russians to resist military conscription, Leo Tolstoy came to the conclusion that “public opinion” would, in the future, “change the whole structure of life” and make violence “superfluous.” In other words, what people believed and what they did to act on those beliefs could change the conditions they faced, and therefore violent intervention on behalf of change would be unnecessary...
http://www.opendemocracy.net/jack-d...democracy+(openDemocracy)&utm_content=Twitter
Douglass saw that if submission were replaced by civil resistance, the people could pierce the shroud of oppression, shifting power in a way that few in the world would have comprehended. A half-century later, in the course of enjoining Russians to resist military conscription, Leo Tolstoy came to the conclusion that “public opinion” would, in the future, “change the whole structure of life” and make violence “superfluous.” In other words, what people believed and what they did to act on those beliefs could change the conditions they faced, and therefore violent intervention on behalf of change would be unnecessary...
http://www.opendemocracy.net/jack-d...democracy+(openDemocracy)&utm_content=Twitter