Maybe I should call this series "198 Sundays Redux" since I never made it through all 198 Methods last time, and thus it's not "more"...but whatevs.
Today, I'd like to escalate from last week's Method of public speeches, and consider rejection of authority as a tool in our efforts to effect change. This is a sub-category of political noncooperation (again from Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action):
Political noncooperation is the third subclass of methods on noncooperation [the others being social and economic]; these methods involve refusals to continue the usual forms of political participation under existing conditions. Sometimes they are known as political boycotts. Individuals and small groups may practice methods of this class. Normally, however, political noncooperation involves larger numbers of people in corporate, concerted, usually temporary suspension of normal political obedience, cooperation and behavior.
...
The aim of the political noncooperation may be to achieve a particular limited objective or a change in broader government policies. Or it may be to change the nature or composition of that government, or even to produce its disintegration...
The political significance of these methods increases in proportion to the numbers participating and to the need for their cooperation for the operation of the political system...
Political noncooperation may take an almost infinite variety of expressions, depending on the particular situation. Basically they all stem from a desire not to assist the opponent by performance of certain types of political behavior.
One way to refuse cooperation with a regime is to engage in Method #122 - Literature and speeches advocating resistance:
In many situations, the making of speeches and the publication and distribution of literature which call on people to undertake some form of nonviolent noncooperation or nonviolent intervention themselves become acts of defiance and resistance. This is especially so in those countries where any call for resistance, especially for illegals acts of resistance, is itself illegal or seditious.
Now sedition is a rather subjective thing, and often used too loosely to describe a variety of acts (witness the contrast between treatment of BLM vs 1/6 insurrectionists). I think for our intellectual exercise today we can apply it in a more colloquial sense as "advocating stuff that upsets the status quo."
I can't allow any such discussion take place without bringing up the quintessential practitioner, MK Gandhi. A year before his arrest for sedition, he wrote in Young India on March 30, 1921:
If sedition means disaffection towards the present system of Government, it is a virtue and a duty. But we do not need to preach it...We cannot paint the system blacker than it appears to the average audience today. All we need do is to show the people the way to destroy it. That way is self-purification. We shall put the Government in an uncomfortable corner...
Hitherto the word “revolution” been connected with violence, and has as such been condemned by established authority. But the movement of non-co-operation, if it may be considered a revolution, is not an armed revolt: it is an evolutionary revolution, it is a bloodless revolution. The movement is a revolution of thought, of spirit. Non-co-operation is a process of purification, and, as such, it constitutes a revolution in one’s ideas. Its suppression, therefore, would amount to co-operation by coercion...
Inaction on our part will kill Government madness. For violence flourishes on response, either by submission to the will of the violator, or by counter-violence. My strong advice to every worker is to segregate this evil Government by strict non-co-operation, not even to talk or speak about it, but having recognized the evil, to cease to pay homage to it by co-operation.
I don't know if that specific article was used as part of the basis for the sedition charge, but certainly his writings in Young India in general were. Fans of Attenborough's movie might remember a stirring court scene that encapsulated the trial which ended with this statement (necessarily summarized in the film):
I know that I was playing with fire. I ran the risk, and if I were set free I would still do the same. Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also last article of my creed. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am sorry for it. Their crime consisted in the love of their country.
I am here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest Penalty. In my opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good Nonviolence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-co-operation with evil. I am here to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be the inflected upon me for what in law is a deliberated crime and what appears to me be the highest duty of a citizen.
The only cause open to, judge, is either to resign post and thus dissociate yourself from evil if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is evil and that I am innocent or to inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.
He was sentenced to six years in prison, though was released early because of illness (he was 53 at that point and had ended a fast just prior to his arrest on March 10).
We in the US have a long history of trying to suppress dissent via sedition laws - almost as long as our nation has existed. From the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in during John Adams' tenure in 1798 to the Sedition Act of 1918 under Woodrow Wilson to the Smith Act that was signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt and remains on the books to this day.
Lest you think charges of sedition are in the remote past, this stuff ain't exactly gone away (paging Faulkner). Since 9/11, "terrorism" has become the new sedition, a blunt rhetorical weapon to stifle legitimate protest and other activism.
When I despair I think of something Thomas Jefferson (yeah, that dick) wrote at the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts (with many apologies to my dear friend Hecate and her co-religionists):
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it's true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake.
For now, we on The Right Side of History might have to modestly recalibrate the sedition I've long called for. Its target isn't a specific regime like when I started this project in the Bush Era, but an entire political structure that fosters MAGA refusal to accept election results they do not like, enables our ongoing cold civil war, and threatens all of the gains protecting basic rights and human dignity that we've painstakingly won.
Regardless, keep patiently, passionately preaching revolution, and don't forget to actually participate in it, no matter who is in office. We're still a (fading) empire, exporting death and destruction while exploiting and oppressing "othered" people at home.
I'll keep posting ways to do so and hope you'll join me in some merry sedition in the process...
Covered on previous Sundays: