helvede.net is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Velkommen til Helvede, fediversets hotteste instance! Vi er en queerfeministisk server, der shitposter i den 9. cirkel. Welcome to Hell, We’re a DK-based queerfeminist server. Read our server rules!

Server stats:

169
active users

#civildisobedience

0 posts0 participants0 posts today

Today in Labor History February 21, 1958: The CND symbol (aka peace symbol) was designed and completed by Gerald Holtom. The Direct Action Committee (DAC) commissioned the project in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. The DAC was a British pacifist organization that did non-violent direct action whose goal was the total renunciation of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. It existed from 1957 to 1961. They organized meetings, marches, vigils, pickets and acts of civil disobedience.

Today in Labor History February 19, 1990: After a 10-month strike, rank-and-file miners at the Pittston Coal Co. ratified a new contract. Ninety-eight miners and a minister occupied a Pittston Coal plant in Carbo, Virginia, inaugurating the year-long strike. While a one-month Soviet coal strike dominated the U.S. media, the year-long Pittston strike received almost no media coverage in the U.S. The wildcat walkouts involved 40,000 miners in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. Over 2,000 people occupied Camp Solidarity. Miners and their families engaged in Civil Disobedience, pickets, work stoppages and sometimes sabotage, vandalism and violence. Over 4,000 were arrested.

Protest and mass mobilization carry risks:

1. Police/military could escalate and crack down.

2. Black bloc might rush into reciprocal violence.

3. Decentralized movements can splinter and lose coherence.

There are resources that can help point the way.

Gene Sharp (RIP): From Dictatorship to Democracy

thenewpress.com/books/from-dic

Also, Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know

global.oup.com/academic/produc

The New PressFrom Dictatorship to DemocracyTwenty-one years ago, at a friend’s request, a Massachusetts professor sketched out a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to repressive regimes.

Today in Labor History January 26. 1682: Benjamin Lay was born in England. Lay emigrated to the Provine of Pennsylvania, in British North America, where he became a radical Quaker activist against slavery, and for the rights of women and animals. He was a prolific writer on abolition and his “All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage” was one of the first abolitionist works published in the 13 Colonies. In an act of protest, he once stood outside a Quaker meeting in the middle of winter, barefoot, and without any coat. When passersby expressed concern for his health, he asked why they were not concerned for the health of the slaves, who were forced to work in the snow dressed as he was. He also once kidnapped the child of slaveholders temporarily to demonstrate to them how it felt when one’s relatives were stolen and sold. In another act of protest, this time in front of his Quaker brethren, he quoted the Bible saying that all men should be equal under God, and then plunged a sword into a Bible containing a bladder of blood-red pokeberry juice, which spattered over those nearby. He refused to consume any products made from slave labor. He was a vegetarian. He was roughly four feet tall, with a hunchback. He referred to himself as “Little Benjamin.” During the 2012 Occupy Movement, the Occupy encampment in Jenkintown, PA, where Lay was buried, activists renamed the town square as “Benjamin Lay Plaza.”