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Mar 19, 2011 BOOK REVIEW Davids in a world of Goliaths Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and a Bit of Ingenuity Can Change the World by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson Reviewed by Jim Ash The mullahs of Iran have all sorts of power, which they wield in the name of their version of Islam. But one thing they can't do is flag a cab when they need one. According to Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, authors of Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World, taxi drivers in Tehran simply refuse to stop for these bearded men of god. It's a paltry act of defiance, but it became a highly symbolic one due to a 2004 Iranian film called Marmoulak (Lizard). In the movie, a small-time thief - nicknamed Lizard for his ability to scale walls - escapes from prison by impersonating a mullah, only to find that his disguise makes it impossible for him to get a cab. Iranian censors saw the scene as disrespectful of religious authority and banned the film. That decision backfired spectacularly: Marmoulak became a smash hit via pirated DVDs, Iran's guardians of public morality ended up looking ridiculous, and the mullahs still can't get a ride. It's a pattern that's repeated over and over again in the collection of anecdotes that makes up Resistance. An individual or a small group takes a stand against repressive authority - a stand that may or may not be strictly legal, but eschews violence. The rebellion spreads, often in direct response to clumsy official efforts to suppress it. And the government is ultimately humiliated, be it by bad press, a sheepish about-face or - in extreme cases - a popular revolution. What the authors have created is a compendium of people power, based on their experiences on the front lines of the battle for human rights. Crawshaw, a former journalist, is the international advocacy director for Amnesty International. Jackson is a veteran rights campaigner who fought many of his battles in Asia, particularly Myanmar, and now works as vice president of social responsibility for MTV Networks International. Their book brings together dozens of short tales from around the world that illustrate how even the most brutal and repressive authority can be undermined by the simple refusal to accept it. One thing that will strike the reader of Resistance is how inventive some of the more symbolic acts of resistance have been. Take the case of the residents of the Solidarity-era Polish town of Swidnik. They wanted to boycott the official TV news broadcast in a way that couldn't be ignored, so they took to leaving their TV sets in their front window, showing the broadcast, while they went out for a walk. (The hardline communist rulers of Poland responded with a curfew during the broadcast; the Swidnikians simply started giving an earlier news broadcast the same treatment.) We also hear about the Myanmese who hung pictures of Snr-Gen Than Shwe and other senior junta members around the necks of stray dogs during the 2007 demonstrations. Associating someone with a dog is seen as a mortal insult in Burmese culture, and Yangon residents delighted in watching the city's dog catchers scramble to apprehend the canine protesters. While many of the anecdotes in Resistance concern the powerless finding their power, the book does not confine itself to the heroism of the little people. It also offers example of abuses of power being confronted from within. Sometimes this takes the form of triggermen who refuse to play their assigned role, like the Israeli seruvniks (from the Hebrew seruv, meaning refusal). These Israeli Defense Forces members refuse to serve in the occupied territories on the grounds that the Israeli occupation is cruel and illegal. Other times the resistance comes from the top, as in the case of Zhao Ziyang, deposed as Communist Party leader in China because of his outspoken criticism of the Tiananmen crackdown. He had the last laugh with the posthumous release of his memoirs, which contained damaging disclosures about the decision to employ lethal force against the student protestors, and were widely disseminated despite Beijing's efforts to suppress them. Behind all these tales, told in short, rapid-fire bursts, is the book's main theme: that all authority, even the very worst, only exists with the consent of those it commands. The moment the people decide they have had enough - and this applies to the people that enforce the system as well as to those that endure it - the gig is up. It's a truth that is being driven home right now across the Arab world, as one rotten dictatorship after another feels the heat of a populace that refuses to be pushed around any more. And it's a truth that gives the reader of Resistance some hope in a world that has been steadily getting darker since the turn of the millennium. Readers from the affluent West may reach some uncomfortable conclusions after finishing Resistance. Most of the uplifting stories in the book come from places where defying power carries real risks - of imprisonment without trial, of torture, of extra-judicial murder. Those of us who live in the rich democracies of the world can challenge governments we dislike at our ease. Those regimes are forced to tolerate dissent by their constitutions and legal systems, and by the last vestiges of a free press, and they have to secure the continued consent of the people regularly in fair elections. Despite all these advantages, we in the West do little to nothing about the glaring problems in our own countries, and Resistance makes this poignantly clear by showing just how much can be done. We can applaud the stories in the book, just as many of us applaud the way people in the Middle East are fighting the power. Yet despite the rot at the core of our system - led by Washington, with the rest of the rich industrialized countries either actively playing along or coyly looking the other way - we keep electing the same discredited political parties, who serve big money instead of the people. We sit idly by while our leaders wage illegal wars, kidnap our fellow citizens abroad and ship them to offshore torture chambers, and assassinate foreigners with robot drones. And we stay glued to the TV while corporate power continues its program to put us back in the feudal age with one hand, while systematically restricting debate on the subject with the other. Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and a Bit of Ingenuity Can Change the World by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson. Union Square (Sep 15, 2010). ISBN-10: 1402781245. Price US$16, 240 pages. (Steve Crawshaw will be one of the participants in a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondent's Club in Bangkok on March 22. The topic of the discussion is Small Acts of Resistance: Popular Movements and Democratic Change. For more information, click here.) Jim Ash is a Canadian writer and editor. (Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Post message: prole...@egroups.com Subscribe : proletar-subscr...@egroups.com Unsubscribe : proletar-unsubscr...@egroups.com List owner : proletar-ow...@egroups.com Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! 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